Three Plus Two

Week in Review: May 17-23, Stone walls and Birds

Spring has arrived in upstate New York.  Beautiful temperatures and only one day of rain, so we took most of our learning outside.

 

Maybe it doesn't count as "learning", but the little boys are a lot happier that they can spend most of the day outside!

Farmerboy did a lot of practical work this week.  He informed his father that he wanted to practice driving nails, so Andy gave him a hammer and told him to pound all the loose nails popping up in the deck.  (Katydid joined him.)  He also helped Andy weed flower beds and edge one of them with a bunch of big rocks.

Rocks and fossils, in fact, have made a comeback in terms of interest -- largely because Farmerboy decided that he needed a stone wall to hide behind when he and Gareth play war.

 

Katydid was taken with the idea of a stone wall, too, so she helped.

 

They cleaned the rocks out of the asparagus bed.  (Completely off the subject here, but my asparagus is dying and I don't know why.  Even though we are moving away, this bugs me.)

After they got to a certain point on the wall, Katydid decided she wanted to build her own house, so she went up on top of the field and raided the rubble pile the former owners built to block snowmobiles from coming across their (our) land.  This pile is full of bricks, which she used to build the foundation of a little house.  When told of this project, I said, "Oh, like Roxaboxen." 

Then they decided to build a village.

Except that took too long (apparently).  And Farmerboy wasn't satisfied with the state of his stone wall, which wasn't very stable due to the irregularities of the rocks they'd use.  He and Katydid decided to use some more of the bricks they'd found in the woods instead of rocks.

 

 

(The sticks set in the slits in the wall are guns, I think.  This wall is meant to be defensive.)

The current problem (as told me by Farmerboy) is that the wall is too low, so I'm curious to see how much interest Farmerboy will have in working on that problem this week. 

Why do I consider stone wall-building "school" for my 1st grader?  Well... in addition to providing experience in team work, perseverance, problem solving, and spatial skills... I think of something that Maria Montessori said.  I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the quote right in front of me, but the general idea is this: "Why do we call it 'work' when we see a man building a brick wall, but 'play' when it is a little man building a wall with tiny bricks?"

In moving all those rocks, Farmerboy revived his interest in fossils as well.  He got out his rock hammer and safety goggles and spent a few afternoons in the garden, breaking up rocks.

 

We also read a few rock-related picture books:

• The Pebble in my Pocket: A History of Our Earth 
• The Big Rock (Aladdin Picture Books)
• How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World

And we talked about erosion.  Often.  Farmerboy kept encountering odd holes in rocks and making theories about what caused them.  (Maybe water.  Or maybe sea worms.)

I picked up a few stone wall-related books to use next week (mostly on the basis of those Publisher's Weekly blurbs on amazon):

• Stone Wall Secrets
• Matthew Wheelock's Wall
• Talking Walls

But in retrospect, I think that maybe I should have picked up more books on erosion. 

The little boys sometimes helped with the stone wall, but they were mostly more interested in collecting tent caterpillars and stag beetles and observing all the ants underneath the rocks Katydid and Farmerboy flipped over and climbing trees.

 

And also building "huts".

But birds remained somewhat interesting to the rest of the boys, mostly because...

We have baby birds!  The chickadee's eggs hatched.

And the elusive Baltimore Oriole ran Katydid a merry chase trying to get a picture.

She did finally confirm a sighting, though. 

But she forgot the camera (and her binoculars) when she and Andy went on the annual Early Morning Bird Walk at the arboretum.  When they came home, they immediately downloaded iBird, which one of the other birders on the walk had apparently demonstrated.  Katydid has been fooling around with it all weekend. 

Where was Gareth during all of this?

Reading Sword of Clontarf mostly.  But he did spend quite a while with his new Ancient Greek textbooks on Friday afternoon, as soon as they arrived.  He couldn't wait until next school year.

We finished up the week with a May Procession at the Little Sisters of the Poor, where Katydid was made an official Marian Aide volunteer.  I have pictures... I think... but since the camera is still out in the car, it will have to be a separate post.  Katydid was very happy to receive her apron and T-shirt, and the boys were glad to get refreshments.  The nuns forced them to cake, brownies, AND ice cream, so a good time was had by all.

The Complete Home Learning Source Book

This week I had the occasion to dig this book out of the back corner of one of my shelves, where it should not be because it is so useful.  The Complete Home Learning Source Book by Rebecca Rupp is an older book, but fortunately still in print.  How I wish for a revision!  But a revision of this mammoth book would be a mammoth undertaking, I'm sure.

I like this book for many reasons -- and not only for the lists of resources (books, games, science kits) that cover every subject imaginable.  (As the subtitle reads, "every subject from arithmetic to zoology".)  Because the book is now about 12 years old, many of the resources have gone out of print or production.  But the lists are still useful as a place to start, particularly if you're hunting through your library, used book stores, or garage sales.  Each listing is accompanied by a brief review written in Rupp's friendly, enthusiastic, and humorous style.

And that's really what I like most about the book.  I like that it's not just a listing of resources, but a giant book that you can also read cover to cover.  Rebecca Rupp's reviews are funny and helpful, as she has actually used many of the resources with her three boys.  (Another reason to like this book is its boy-friendliness.  Lots of explosive, slimy science kits.  Lots of hands-on suggestions.)  As an introduction to each new subject, she also includes excerpts from her homeschool journals... which, to me, as a beginning homeschooler way back when, were probably even more valuable than the resource listings.  Rupp and her boys (who are now all grown, I'm sure) pursued an interest-led/unit study/project-ish sort of learning in their home, and reading her journal excerpts I always think that I want to be her when I grow up.  I want to make home-made workbooks for projects that involve trying to lift eggshells by heating the air beneath them like the ancient Chinese supposedly did 2000 years ago and use Jello to demonstrate optics principles and rig pulleys from my living room ceiling beams (I don't have any) for physics experiments.  I want to celebrate Tycho Brahe's birthday with aluminum foil noses and sword duels. 

Actually, what I think I want is to have done school at Rebecca Rupp's house.

So this book is somewhat nostalgic for me.  It was one of the very first books I ever read about homeschooling after we pulled Gareth out of preschool, because it sat on the shelf somewhat near The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom, which was the first book about homeschooling that caught my eye, and the book that convinced me that even I (disorganized me) could homeschool my children.  I remember having just been reading some of Rebecca Rupp's journal entries when a neighbor called me to try to convince me that I'd need to buy a packaged curriculum if I was going to homeschool Gareth and that it would be hard work.  Having just been immersed in Rupp's joyful descriptions of her messy, learning-filled days, I answered confidently, "No, I think we are going to do this on our own."

If I had only known where that innocent comment would lead us!

"Homeschooling, as it turns out, is not at all the same as school at home.  Randy, my husband, and I    had envisioned, when we first set out into uncharted educational territory, a learning process not unlike   the one we had both experienced in our many years of public school: a logical and well-rounded             progression from counting games and basal readers to higher mathematics and English literature.  What we got were disorderly obsessions with Baroque music, glassblowing, particle physics, Egyptian archaeology, rocket models, telescopes, submarines, Shakespeare, and ant farms.  One kid refused to learn the multiplication tables.  One balked at geography, another at cursive handwriting.  One spent months reading nothing but The Encyclopedia of Fish.  Our sons, Josh, Ethan, and Caleb, all vociferously opinionated from day one, have always had distinctive educational agendas of their own.  Homeschooling, for all of us, has been a learning process." 

--from The Complete Home Learning Source Book by Rebecca Rupp, p. 2

 

(No, I didn't draw the rainbows.  I think that was Farmerboy, many years ago.)

Paging through the book now -- looking for interesting things to do with physics -- is a bit like excavating our educational past.  We have certainly had our own share of "disorderly obsessions" -- from garbage trucks, clocks and sailing ships to paleontology, birds, science fiction, and medieval history.  I can go to the Botany section and remember all the books about plants that Gareth demanded when he was five years old and how he ran into the plant sale at the botanical gardens with his arms open wide, shouting, "Solidago!" when he saw the goldenrod, and the open mouths of the workers as they watched him.  I can remember the temper tantrum in the art museum because the Impressionist exhibit was closed, and all the glitter glue, and the poems we wrote for the Japanese star festival in July one year, and how we assumed that Katydid was going to be an entomologist when she grew up because she was fascinated with insects for so long, only to watch her switch her passions to birding... which is where she happens to be this morning as I write this, happily attending the local arboretum's annual Early Morning Bird Walk with her father.

It's a messy, not always easy (but always interesting) journey we're on.  It's always nice to find a companion on the way.  That's how I feel about Rebecca Rupp's book.  It's become an old and trusted friend, the repository of many memories. 

Week in Review: May 10-16

It was the sort of week that goes by without being captured on film.  Or pixels.

We started off with a trip to the doctor for Farmerboy, who was diagnosed with a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics.  In the middle of the week, I had a doctor's appointment.  Then on Friday it was back to the pediatrician for Katydid and Pip, after a loooong night of coughing.  More antibiotics.  I was sick -- not too sick, but sick -- for most of the week, too.  But it has meant a lot of draaaaging in the mornings.  And a bit of fretting, since I was just scheduled for my C-section: June 15.   I am only fretting because I have to meet the requirements for New York state's homeschooling laws, which require me to document 180 days/900 hours (990 for Gareth) and turn in quarterly reports on everyone and (because we aren't testing this year) yearly evaluations, too.  I make this all harder on myself by actually providing a narrative.  Quarterly reports are about 2 pages long; yearly evaluations about 3.  I could have given the kids standardized tests this year, but that takes so much time out of our normal routine (going through the test prep book, taking a week out to do the testing...)  that we only do it when we have to.

However, in between and around (and at) doctor's visits, most of us managed to get a few (unphotographed) things done.  We...

• Took a brief walk with Daddy after dinner on the one warm evening of the week, into the field and along the treeline to check on trees downed by the snow this past winter.  We noted that the horsetails seem to be invading the top corner of the field, that the pin cherries were still blooming a little, and that the bee tree was quiet... hopefully because it was dusk.  The kids and Andy did a little running; I just kind of lumbered along behind. (***Note here: if you're curious about finding bee trees, there's an excellent description of "bee lining" in Bernd Heinrich's The Snoring Bird, which is a terrific book for all sorts of reasons... but unfortunately not the sort you'd probably assign your high schooler, due to all the complicated relationships Heinrich's father is constantly getting into.  You can read the description aloud, though, which is what I did as we were driving home from Tennessee this year.  If you'd like a simpler, picture book description of finding bee trees... Patricia Polacco's The Bee Tree is one of our favorites.) 
• Listened to the song of a Baltimore Oriole.  Read an old I Can Read! book about Baltimore Orioles the doctor's office conveniently put in their waiting room for us.
• Tried to watch the History Channel's new series America: The Story of US, which we have DVRed.  The problem is that the episodes the boys are most interested in -- the Civil War episode, for example -- are quite graphic for prime time TV... in my opinion anyway.  It was a good thing we had the episodes DVRed so we could fast forward through the gorier parts, but the younger boys were not happy at having to miss the battle scenes.
• Did a little Montessori.  A very little Montessori.  Chipmunk retrieved the knobbed cylinders from my rotation closet (which also holds sheets) and started working on them again.  He has also been a fiend with a pair of tongs lately, using them to open doors, pinch his brothers, pick up toys, etc.  I tried to channel that energy into a pom-pom and ice cube tray activity, but that only kept him happy for about 5 or 10 minutes.  Then it was back to using the tongs to turn door knobs.  (He also figured out how to open the gate latch on our fenced-in area of the backyard.  Not a good thing.)
•  Sold some eggs.  (Gareth and Katydid's new business.)
• Watched some John Wayne movies.  Does that count as school?
• Did a little math.  Gareth wrestled with functions.  Farmerboy worked on telling time. 
• Used the markers.  Sometimes even on paper!!
• Decided that Gareth will be adding Greek to his schedule next year using the textbook Athenaze.
• Built tractors out of Legos.
• Packed a few boxes.                       

As for me, I dug Women with ADD out of my "to be read" stack and started reading it again.  I had, um, lost it actually (I should probably insert a blush here at the irony)  when I started reading it before we left on our trip to Tennessee.  I had been planning on reading it in the van.  Anyway, it's been sitting on my nightstand for a while, but last week was definitely the time to pick it up again as much of the world which I have responsibility for managing and organizing seemed to be growing ugly people-eating tentacles at an alarming rate.  Anyway, I am finding the book quite helpful and when I finish it I do hope to post a review.  If the tentacles will behave, of course.  

I have more trouble with Typepad

If the layout seems a little more chaotic than usual.... I am trying to fix my sidebars.  But every time I get them set up like I want them and try to save, the sidebars go back to however Typepad wants them.  Typepad's editor does not want them the way I want them.

Still thinking about moving to WordPress or Blogspot.

Thinking.  And thinking...

Week in Review: May 2- May 9, or All About Birds

Bird Week!

The chickadee nest in our bluebird box, with eggs (photo by Katydid)

I had nothing to do with the "theme" of this week.  It was a force of nature.  Farmerboy, Pip, and Pop all suddenly decided that birds were fascinating and wanted to tag along on all Katydid's nature walks, keep their own nature journals, listen to bird call CDs, and color bird notebook pages.

Pip's cardinal page

So of course I was happy to oblige.

A chipping sparrow that the kids saw on one of their walks (photo by Katydid)

The kids also took a "night" nature walk (really, dusk) along the edge of the treeline in the field to listen for night birds.  Pip and Pop started out with Katydid and Farmerboy, but soon decided that it was "too scary" and came home for ice cream.  Katydid and Farmerboy came in later and reported that the only night bird they'd heard was a screech owl, but that was apparently exciting enough.

Other birds Katydid listed as "heard but not seen" this week: ovenbird and American woodcock (very exciting).

One morning a bird hit the dining room window while I was eating breakfast.  This in itself is not an odd occurrence -- even though I put things up in the window to make it look less like a fly-through.  But when I got up to see if the bird was all right, I saw a bird I'd never seen before.

A common yellowthroat.  And for a size comparison:

Yes, that's a Duplo brick someone left outside on the patio.  Tiny, tiny little bird.  The little boys all drew it for their nature journals, then colored a coloring page of the bird. 

The same day we read the section about Baltimore Orioles from The Handbook of Nature Study because...

... the crabapples and wild apple trees are blooming.  (Photo by Katydid)  The orioles always come back when the apple trees bloom.  Katydid informs me that she has heard an oriole, but we haven't seen one yet.

My personal favorite part about the crabapple in bloom (apart from the fragrance, which is phenomenal) is standing beneath it and listening to the steady hum of honeybees working the blossoms overhead.

Wild apple blossoms in the woods (Photo by Katydid)

We did a little math this week, and we read more of Our Island Story, and Gareth continued to read 1066: The Year of the Conquest instead of being interested in birds, and Katydid worked on about three different books that she's writing, and I sorted through all my writing and was pleasantly surprised to find that even though I have produced very little over the past five years, some of it is Not Too Bad, and by the weekend, all the kids had developed another cold with a wicked cough, and Sunday morning we woke up to find a dusting of snow on the ground when we had spent all our time before thinking about birds and eggs and flowers. 

But mostly this week was about spring time.  And our spring time girl...

... turned 11!  Happy Birthday, Katydid!

A Week in the Life: Saturday 5/1

All photos in this post by Katydid.

This Saturday was a little different because Andy was still out of town and didn't get home until late that night.  But on the other hand it was fairly typical in that the line between "school" and "life" gets blurred even on the weekend.

This is my third attempt to write this post (my first two attempts were eaten by Typepad), so it's going to be a little less detailed than some of the other posts.

Basically:

With swim lessons done for the season, our Saturdays are a lot less hectic.  This morning we did our normal chores and then headed outside to enjoy the beautiful WARM weather for a while before we left for Katydid's violin lesson.  We noted that the crabapple trees had burst into bloom overnight:

 

And that the yard was now full of dandelions, which the boys enjoyed decapitating (way too much):

 

Then we brought Katydid to her violin lesson.  She's practicing for her recital at the beginning of June, and has chosen to play two hymns from her traditional Catholic hymnal.  While she is at her lesson, the boys and I run a couple of quick errands and then we go through the McDonald's drive-thru for lunch.

Back home, we pile out of the van and spend a couple more hours outside.  Katydid immediately grabs her nature journal, binoculars, and the camera.  The little boys alternately climb around in the woods looking for fortresses and follow Katydid on her nature observations.

One of the first things she does is to check out the bluebird boxes, because the boys and I discovered nesting materials in both of them the other day.  It turns out that a chickadee is using at least one of them.

(Note: as of a few days later, she counted six tiny eggs in this nest.)

Later on she takes the camera out to the outer garage and manages an extreme close-up of the Eastern Phoebe nest in the rafters:

 

Because the camera was so close, the eggs look more like our bantam chicken eggs, so at first we were all a little confused.  But then Katydid explained how close this shot was, and we realized that the eggs look a lot larger in the photo than they are in real life.

Considering that we started the week off with rain and sleet, we are more than happy to spend as much time outside as we possibly can.  I make an easy puff pancake for a late dinner, and we somehow escape Andy's trip without our own trip to the ER... although the evening did not pass by without a big wagon accident, in which a 13 year old learned that he is capable of pulling a kid's wagon far faster than is probably good for 4 year olds, even if they really like it. 

We finish up the day by all crowding onto the couch to watch Doctor Who, because well -- daleks!  Winston Churchill!  Spitfires attacking space ships! What could be cooler, I ask you?

And now that you know we are a family of TOTAL geeks, our week in the life is done.

A Week in the Life: Friday 4/30

Friday is "extra chore" day.  All I have from our Friday (4/30) is one lone picture:

 

... in which Chipmunk and Pip put pots on their heads and pretend to be daleks.  (We have to be prepared for Saturday night.)

After that the day is much less exciting.

Our usual Friday routine goes like this:

• Breakfast
• Morning prayers (at least a Morning Offering, Our Father, and Hail Mary to start our day. Our Lady of La Salette instructed the children to whom she appeared to pray both morning and night, at least an Our Father and Hail Mary, if they couldn't do more.  So this is what I take for our bare minimum every day.)
• Baltimore Catechism (we're currently working through #2) and read aloud (in today's case, more on William the Conqueror in Our Island Story).  The kids usually draw or color during this time.  This morning I must banish Lego daleks from the table so that certain boys can concentrate on the catechism.
• Kids dress, brush teeth, and start daily chores --  Gareth (collect eggs, empty and load dishwasher, wipe counters, take out recycling); Katydid (feed and water chickens, bring and sort laundry, MTWTH wipe out bathroom sinks); Farmerboy (pick up family room); little boys (brush teeth and put on clothes without driving everyone insane).
• After their daily chores, we move on to extra chores -- Gareth (clean all bathrooms and take out bathroom trash); Katydid (fold one basket of laundry, put it away, pick up the always messy laundry room and vacuum it, help watch little boys; Farmerboy, Pip, and Pop (pick up the hallway that functions as our toy room for Legos, Playmobil, and Star Wars action figures); me and Chipmunk (work on bedrooms, picking up, vacuuming etc.) 
• Lunch time!
• Outside (This Friday happened to be warmer than the previous Thursday, thank goodness, so we spent a while outside.  Considering that we had been mostly stuck inside all week, I chose to let the big kids have more outside time when I took the little boys inside for naps, instead of making them take the usual two hour work period.)
• Work on Fridays generally consists of projects, nature walks, art, maybe a Latin quiz, reading... but no math or grammar or other textbooky things.
• Wii and computer time for all (including me)
• Dinner (frozen pizza tonight, as I am tired and Andy will be out of town until very late Saturday, but we do often have "pizza night" on Fridays)
• After dinner chores --  Gareth (pick up living room and entryway, sweep floors, vacuum rug); Katydid (wipe table, pick up and sweep kitchen and dining room floors); Farmerboy (clear table, pick up family room and vacuum rug), Pip and Pop (assigned each to a big kid as a helper); me and/or Andy (dinner dishes and kitchen duty, laundry).
• The usual stack of books for the little boys and bed... 10:30 at the earliest when Andy is out of town.  I stopped trying to put them to bed earlier, because they went to bed at the same time whether I tried to put them in bed at 8::30 or 10:00.  It's much less of a fight to wait. 

A Week in the Life: Thursday 4/29

Thursday begins about 5:30 AM when Andy leaves for the airport.  I should get up, but I go back to sleep until 6:45.  Around 7, I find that the twins are up and have opened all the drawers to Farmerboy's dresser and are climbing them like a ladder.  This dresser is not attached to the wall.  The boys therefore begin their day with serious discipline.

Then we move on to breakfast.

And Pokemon...

 

The twins are their usual whirlwind in the morning.  After we all do catechism together and I read aloud to the bigger kids, I sit down with them and we do "math" (what they call workbooks).  They like having books like the older kids.  Both of them go through several pages of Modern Curriculum Press Phonics K because circling is a novelty.  Then it's on to Montessori animal puzzles.

We get the Botany puzzles out, too, but they're a little more difficult.  Katydid gives a lesson on parts of the flower.

 

And again, outside after lunch with tulips.

It's about 55 degrees and the wind is blowing 20 or 30 mph.  Cold.  But sunny.  

Gareth tells me the twins are playing in the garden, but a few minutes later they take off up the hill.  Fortunately Katydid follows them (with the camera).

 

Here they are in the woods.  Without telling me where they were going.  Gareth, Farmerboy, and I spend about 30 minutes looking for them.  When they all come out of the woods, they get the "Tell me where you are going first" lecture. 

Then it's time for a nap, and book work for the three older kids.

Then we have pancakes for dinner in front of the TV.

Then I read a bunch of books to the little boys.

Then it's 10:00 and I wrestle them to bed. 

At nearly 11:00, we all are finally asleep.  Just a typical night when Andy is out of town.