YMB #29 Building Family Culture: A Conversation with Audrey Wilkerson

Pam: This is Your Morning Basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 29 of the Your Morning Basket Podcast. I’m Pam Barnhill, your host, and I’m so happy that you’re joining me here today. Well, one of the things I absolutely love about Morning Time is that it helps you hit so many of those academic highlights that you need to hit in your school day so easily with a wide range of ages that your children probably are. But the other thing I love about Morning Time is the way it really helps build relationships and bring families together. And we have a wonderful example of how that works for you on the show today. Today I got to talk to Audry Wilkerson who actually has eight kids but believe it or not, just a very short time ago she only had three. Her family exploded a little bit when she adopted three more kids and then actually had two others quickly after that. But she adopted three kids from Africa. She reached out to me because she used Morning Time in order to help integrate these new children into her family and to build this new community of learners together. So it was really a wonderful chat; talking with Audry about how Morning Time was just so helpful to them, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it. Right after this word from our sponsor.

This episode of the Your Morning Basket podcast is brought to you by Maestro Classics. Would you like to bring classical music into your children’s lives? You can add classical music to your Morning Time today with Maestro Classics. These award winning CDs and MP3s feature story tellers Yadu and Jim Weiss, accompanied by the world famous London Philharmonic Orchestra. Choose from a dozen titles including Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker, and one of the Barnhill family favorites The Story of Swan Lake. What makes maestro classics CDs so special is that each CD and MP3 contains a 24 page activity book with illustrations, puzzles, games, and fun facts for kids. You can download free curriculum guides that combine classical music with science, math, geography, and other subjects. All CD and MP3 sets include tracks which explain to your children how music was made, who the composer was, the history and story behind the music, the instruments used by the orchestra, and most importantly how to open your ears and really listen. Listening is a learned art and Maestro Classics guarantees that these recordings will explain and develop listening skills in your children. Visit MaestroClassics.com for free shipping on all CDs and MP3s. They start at just $9.98. As a Your Morning Basket listener, you can receive 17% off your order by using coupon code Pam at checkout. Go to www.MaestroClassics.com, where the best classical music curriculum awaits your homeschool. And now, on with the podcast.
Audry Wilkerson is a mother of eight, including three children adopted from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She blogs at Pursuit of Simplicity where she shares about large family life, homeschooling, adoption, simple living, and more. She writes beautifully about the impact that the practice of Morning Time has had on her family and homeschool, particularly during the transition time when she brought her adopted daughters home. And she joins us on this episode of the podcast to tell us more about that story. Audry, welcome to the show.
Audry: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Pam: Audry, start off by telling me a little bit about your family.
Audry: Alright. As you said, we have eight children, but two years ago we had three children. We had three biological sons within four years of getting married, and then we had seven years of infertility. And in that time we pursued our daughters, our three daughters that were in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it was a very long adoption process. And at the tail-end of that we got pregnant with our first biological daughter and she ended up being six months old when we were finally able to bring our girls home. And when she was about 15 months old we found out we were pregnant again and Charlie is now about 11 weeks old.
Pam: Wow.
Audry: And we moved right before we brought our daughters home and we now live on a family friend’s farm out in the country and it has been a wonderful place to transition to large family living and homeschooling with the addition of our girls. And so here we are today.
Pam: So you were just going along and all of a sudden you had like family explosion all at once?
Audry: Yes. Sometimes I definitely call us an accidental large family. We always wanted a large family but we didn’t anticipate it happening quite this quickly in such a short period of time.
Pam: Wow. Well, have you always had a Morning Time or was Morning Time something new that you added to your homeschool after your daughters came home?
Audry: We’ve had a Morning Time of sorts for several years in the beginning when my boys were younger. It consisted primarily of Bible reading, memory work, maybe a chapter in a multiple of read alouds, and then when the girls came home, we dropped our memory work for awhile and drastically extended our read aloud time. So it definitely changed a lot when the girls came home, but we’ve been doing it for quite a few years now.
Pam: What were some of the challenges that your daughters’ faced educational or otherwise when they arrived, and how did Morning Time help with those challenges?
Audry: When our daughters’ came home they didn’t speak English, so that was certainly number one challenge. In fact, English would be their fourth language that they had to learn in three years, which is a long story, but basically, our plan was for them to learn through exposure and immersion. And by the time they were home for about four months they were pretty much fluent for every day needs and conversation which was amazing. We worked on things like days of the week and months of the year, counting and letters. Our girls were 5, 5, and 7; the younger are twins. And they’d never even held a pencil in their hand so it was very overwhelming. It helped me to see how much I took for granted the amount of information that our children learn that are born in our families from the time that they’re born until they’re 3 or 4 years old. The more and more I saw the gaps that were going to need to be filled to “catch them up” was very overwhelming. I really did not know where to start so Morning Time is basically where I started.
Pam: And you say that at that period you scaled back on the memorization and you added so much more reading aloud. So what was it that was guiding you to add all of this reading aloud to your Morning Time especially for a group of children who were not necessarily understanding every word that you were reading?
Audry: Well, thankfully we live in a community where there are lots and lots of adoptive families, so I was able to speak to a lot of other homeschool families that brought home children that did not speak any English, particularly older children that were school age. And they all said that by about four months they would be fairly fluent in English. And it’s so hard to believe when you’re staring at three little faces who can’t tell you anything. We pretty much worked out of charades for the first month or so. And so, I knew that conversation and stories were going to be the best place to start. We actually read through almost the entire Little House series the first year they were home because it just related so much to our life, it felt like. We read things like Where the Red Fern Grows and Wizard of Oz and some others but I think for them following the Little House series and for them to be able to follow the characters the more and more English they did understand helped them to continue to follow along with the storyline, and being fairly simple stories that helped as well.
Pam: Right. That just brings me back to Andrew Pudewa’s Nurturing Competent Communicators talk that he does where he says that in order to get these more sophisticated linguistic patterns into our children we need to be reading aloud to them hours and hours a day, and that just reinforces that concept with the idea that as children are learning a new language to be read aloud to so much is one of the things that’s going to facilitate them learning that language quickly.
Audry: Yes. Sometimes they would really amaze me with the things that they would say. I had no idea they understood a particular phrase or a vocabulary word that seemed rather challenging for a 5 or 6 year old but I really attribute a lot of that to the vocabulary they were picking up in our read aloud time.
Pam: Wow. So, let’s talk a little bit about what a typical Morning Time looked like during that season of your family life? So, what were you guys doing? You were doing a lot of reading aloud, you were doing less memorization, and were there other things you were doing that were building the relationship of Morning Time?
Audry: Yes. And when I say we dropped most of our memorization I really mean more of our actual memory work. For my elementary age children I use Classical Conversations foundations and we were Cycle One last year and there are some really big words and names and locations in Cycle One and I’d never really realized it until I tried to teach that to non-English speaking children and so I decided to drop that with our Morning Time but we still kept up quite a bit of memorization in other areas, whether it was Bible memory or more educational basics like alphabet things, numbers, and such. But our Morning Time routine from the time that we started school in July, after the girls had come home in March, primarily consisted of Bible reading, poetry or Shakespeare (we would try to rotate those), we did a lot of A Child’s Garden of Verses, sometimes they would go to sleep at night with that playing in their room on the iPad but we would rotate that with the Shakespeare Can Be Fun series. We did Macbeth and A Midsummer’s Night Dream and by that time they understood a lot of English and found that story pretty funny. We did hymn memorization and then an extended period of reading aloud.
Pam: What elements of this routine do you think were most meaningful to your daughters as they were learning to be part of your new family?
Audry: I would say the reading aloud, for sure. And I think also our time of hymn memorization. We go to a liturgical church and so for them to be able to, right from the start, start memorizing our service hymns, catechism, creeds, and other elements of our worship service, I think it meant a lot to them. You could see it on their faces that even though they couldn’t read the liturgy on Sunday morning, they could still participate. And that was very impactful and very helpful to be able to incorporate that into our Morning Time and for them to see the fruit of it immediately on Sunday mornings.
Pam: Yeah, I think so too. Well, what were some of the challenges that your family was facing at this point as you brought your girls home?
Audry: Gosh, probably just not even knowing where to start. We were in survival mode for so much of that first year. Just learning how to be a family together with these three new little people and overcoming our communication barriers that I was really overwhelmed with their lack of understanding and comprehension and even things as simple as fine motor skills. They could barely hold a crayon in their hand when they first came home. And so, the biggest challenges for me were just coming up with a plan that was going to be geared toward them and figuring out what I needed to implement to get that plan in motion. They really could have used my complete undivided attention for the duration of every school day but I also had a 1 year old, and an 8 year old and two middle schoolers. Then when I got pregnant with Charlie in October I was pretty sick for the first trimester and Morning Time became my survival boat- that was the one thing, miraculously, I was not usually the sickest in the morning and that was the one thing that we clung to all school year while I was sick in particular, was Morning Time, and setting that foundation for the rest of our school day. My boys were fairly independent with the rest of the their things like spelling and math and their literature and things like that, but for the girls it was so important for us to have that consistency and I was able to add things to Morning Time during that time while I felt like I was dropping the ball in some other areas in the afternoon when I desperately needed a nap. So those were probably our biggest challenges that first year.
Pam: What kind of things did you add to your Morning Time? I know that there are some moms out there listening who, maybe they don’t have three newly adopted non-English speaking children but they might be in their first trimester with a number of other children at home and they’re struggling, feeling like they’re getting a good consistent school day, so let’s even speak to them, how did you make that Morning Time more robust to compensate for that naptime you needed in the afternoon?
Audry: Well, that’s the beauty of reading aloud is we could cover everything from science, current events, literature, history, Bible, all in Morning Time throughout the week. Sometimes I rotated what subjects we were going to cover, sometimes I’d cover them all. With little ones some days are far more productive than others and so I’d try to take advantage of that but I picked lots of read alouds from living books, of course, that would cover the gamut of the subjects so that on the days when for the season that I felt like we were lacking in other areas Morning Time covered so many things just through reading aloud.
Pam: What was your motivation for setting aside time for Morning Time each day when you were being pulled in so many different directions with your time and your energy during that period?
Audry: Well, because some days Morning Time was the very best I could do with my younger kids I knew that that consistency in routine for my younger ones but particularly for our adopted daughters was going to be vitally instrumental to their adjustment and feelings of security and even for children who aren’t adopted, just having that routine, especially for the younger ones, I knew that that was the cornerstone of our whole school year really, was making sure that that Morning Time stayed that school plan. Because that would seem to be the one thing that really stuck last year was Morning Time, we all enjoyed gathering in the living room for Morning Time.
Pam: So what were some of the things that your daughters’ seemed to respond to most? You mentioned Little House on the Prairie, were there some other things that they really enjoyed?
Audry: Yes, they loved stories of all kinds. They loved singing. They really liked memorization as well because it was something they could pick up on quickly and they could spit it back out for daddy or the grandparents and I could put anything into song or memorization and make progress with them whether it was in the learning of English or another subject. So probably recitation, reading aloud and anything related to song.
Pam: So singing really seemed to cross that language barrier?
Audry: Yes.
Pam: What about language? How did it help with their acquisition of the language skills?
Audry: I think their vocabulary improved dramatically through the literature that we read. It’s funny because so many people ask me, “Well, what is your plan? Are you going to hire a tutor?” And I thought, ‘No, we’re just going to live life.’ And it’s just amazing how quickly those young brains can pick up a language as difficult as English (from what I hear) so quickly and at such a young age and I really attribute it to the stories, the literature, the reading aloud, and hearing stories and the vocabulary, it was all very rich, even the poetry and Shakespeare. I think so many times we discount how much our young children are picking up when we’re reading above their level or things that they’re not completely going to understand but they’re still hearing it and it’s getting into their mind and into their heart and I think it definitely has an impact and it comes out in their vocabulary, in their play, and their imagination.
Pam: Were you able to see the fruits of that in their play? That they were playing some of the things they were reading aloud?
Audry: Yes, definitely. They love Little House and Anne of Green Gables and a lot of times they will take turns being those characters and playing games with those.
Pam: That’s awesome. You mentioned the fact that they were not really able to hold a crayon so these girls were coming from a background where they had done very little formal education at all?
Audry: Right. They had zero academic background, whatsoever, which was probably the most challenging thing to me.
Pam: Do you think that Morning Time really helped pull you guys together as a family?
Audry: Absolutely. I knew going into our new school that our daughters were going to need as much family time as possible and I almost feared the train wreck that would undoubtedly ensue if we ever quit. I knew that the consistency and routine for our adopted daughters, in particular, were going to be so important. Having all of the children, even my two middle school boys together as a family for Morning Time, I think it helped our girls to physically see our family working together as a team and as one family unit, staying together for the first part of each school day. Because they were adopted even though they had a biological family that passed away so they knew what family looked like but for us we knew that it was going to be vitally important for us to show them everyday, or as much as possible, what our new family looked like with them in it. I think Morning Time definitely helped our daughters to see our family together as a unit, as a team, with them included, for the first part of each school day.
Pam: I talk a lot about how one of the four R’s of Morning Time is Relationship and it sounds like that not only were you shooting for a lot of those academic goals that you knew would come out of reading aloud and then teaching everyone together those poems and the liturgical elements from your church and writing those words on their heart but also one of the largest benefits that you were going to get was the relationship that you were building, that shared family culture coming from a situation where there was none at all and everybody was just thrown together.
Audry: Yes, definitely. They moved around from several different orphanages to a children’s home right before they came home to us and I was really skeptical to see how things were going to work when we started our new school year and just training them physically to sit and listen, it actually went better than I anticipated but that was definitely a big part of beginning our new school year and implementing Morning Time.
Pam: So they could see everybody taking part and doing that and probably have a better idea of what was expected of them because of it.
Audry: Yes, definitely. Even in our church we worship together as a family, there’s not a separate children’s church. I was amazed, my husband and I both, from day one… I don’t know if it was just the desire to be with us anyway, I don’t think they would have wanted to be separated from us in the beginning but I think it helped with their ability to be still and participate and listen, even understanding when they needed to be quiet and when they could speak and participate verbally, and it poured over into our school time and our Morning Time as well. I really didn’t struggle a whole lot with talking and a lot of fidgeting or wanting to get up and do other things. They really wanted to be there as a family and so they enjoyed Morning Time because we were all there together. No one was getting up to go do their own thing.
Pam: That’s awesome. I love that. Well, you’ve talked recently on your blog that three of your children are attending school this year and so let’s talk a little bit about what changes you anticipate in your homeschool.
Audry: First, I’ll quickly touch on how we came to the decision to put them into school. I really feel like God orchestrated all the series of events that led up to where we are now; us moving, we moved across the state lines – just 15 minutes but it still put us in a different state, a different school zone, and I have a close friend who adopted a child from Poland a few years ago and she’s deaf, and she went to the school that my daughters are zoned for and she went to a special class and it was very helpful, they had a good experience at the school, and she was sharing some things about that with me over the last year, and that led me to explore some different options. As we got to the end of our school year last year I just was still overwhelmed and rather confused, actually, as to where I should be going next. Things just weren’t working for my adopted daughters like they worked for my biological sons. And I felt like there were things that I was just not doing the best for them. I felt like I had run out of the tools in my toolbox and it was time to call in reinforcements. So we checked into several different public and private schools in our area and ended up deciding on the public school that we’re zoned for. We live out in the country and it’s a very small school and there is a high population of English as a second language students there and so I knew that the teachers were going to have a lot of experience with children like my daughters who were starting from scratch. And so there was some testing and evaluating that went on and now they’ve been in school for three weeks and I’m absolutely amazed at how far they’ve come just in three weeks compared to the things that we struggled with last year. And I do feel like they made leaps and bounds of improvement last year at home and we covered so many vitally important things, like learning the language and learning social skills and how to live as a family, and work as a team, and now they confidently went off to school and are absolutely loving it, and our days have changed, but I think for the better. We still do Morning Time with my boys and my toddler, and our new Morning Time was for children that are being homeschooled now consists of Bible reading, we do cursive as a family now that I have seen some deficits in my boys’ handwriting, we’re still doing hymn memorization, and now we are implementing geography as well. And our girls leave for school at 6:45 in the morning so that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to do a Morning Time with them in the morning so we’ve changed it to Evening Time and after dinner every day we’re definitely on a tighter schedule because they’ve got to be in bed by 8:00pm to get adequate sleep for school the next day. So after dinner we all pile onto the couches in the living room and we have basically we just call it family worship and my husband leads it now and it consists of Bible reading, catechism questions, talking about their day, and also some read aloud time as well. So it’s fun to see how that time has evolved for them now that they’re in school but we’re still able to have that family time together and include those things that are important to us.
Pam: Do you have some advice for families who send some or all of their kids to school about doing a Morning Time?
Audry: Definitely. It certainly doesn’t have to be in the morning. Some children, depending on the grade, go to school when it’s still dark out and others there’s more time for Morning Time in the morning, but it doesn’t have to be in the morning. Like for us now it’s in the evening to include our girls. It’s more the ritual of that scheduled, somewhat structured togetherness that makes it meaningful and impactful. So I would say the most critical part would simply be consistency in whatever you choose. Decide what your priorities are, come up with a plan, and fit it into whatever time of day suits best for your family.
Pam: Oh, I love that, that the focus is on consistency. So choose what it is your priority, what’s important to you and then consistently make it happen every day.
Audry: Yes.
Pam: And that really is probably the number one ingredient of a good Morning Time whether it happens in the morning or at night or any other time of day.
Audry: For me, that’s probably the biggest part of my homeschool journey is consistency.
Pam: Yeah, tell me about it. So, I just love the way you’ve adapted that. But first of all, I love the way you evaluated what was best for your girls even though, obviously your heart is for homeschooling and you’ve been homeschooling your oldest boys for a number of years and you know it’s working well for them but I love the way you evaluated what was working for your girls and what was working and said, “hey, maybe at this season their needs could be better met somewhere else and we’re going to let that happen.” And then I love the way you adapted the Morning Time to work in the family situation that you have going on right now.
Audry: Our girls’ school has been amazing as far as their communication and compassion and understanding and wanting to work with our family. We had no prior experience with public school and so I really had no expectations. I was actually very nervous and slightly fearful, but we prayerfully came to this decision and so we took a leap of faith but they’ve been amazing and they know that our goal is within a year maybe two to bring the girls back home, that we are, at heart, a homeschooling family. And so that is our goal and they are just partnering with us right now to help meet our girls’ educational needs even better than I was at home.
Pam: That’s awesome. I love to hear that kind of story – with people partnering together the school and the family just to meet the needs of the child in the best way possible. That’s great. Well, Audry, thank you so much for joining me here today to talk about how Morning Time helped pull your family together. Tell everyone where they can find you online.
Audry: I am at PursuitofSimplicity.com.
Pam: Alright, thank you so much.
Audry: Thank you, Pam.
Pam: And there you have it. Now, if you would like information about any of the links or resources that Audry and I chatted about today you can find them on the Show Notes for this episode of the podcast. Those are at PamBarnhill.com/YMB29. We’ll have all of those cued up for you right there on that page. Also on that page are instructions on how you can leave a rating or review for the Your Morning Basket podcast on iTunes. Doing that really helps us get the word out about the podcast to new listeners and we very much appreciate you taking the time to do it. I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great Your Morning Basket topic. Until then, keep seeking Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in your homeschool day.