Three Plus Two

A Day in Our New Year

Some of the books we used on the day I'm blogging about.

 I've wanted to talk about our new year for a while now.  I keep track of school years from July 1-June 30.  That was the way Missouri (where we began homeschooling) defined a school year for documentation purposes, and I have just never changed how I think about it.  This year I am trying to recover from a very chaotic year in which I suffered a lot of burnout.  I'm trying to go back to the roots of how we used to do things, which means lots of books and unschooliness.  In a book on homeschool transcripts I browsed through recently there was a chapter for "Unschoolers and the Chronically Relaxed."  I thought, "Hey, that's us -- chronically relaxed!" But I have to tell you, being chronically relaxed is very hard work!  When there aren't as many divisions between learning and life, there isn't ever a time when you're really "done with school."  Paradoxically, though, when we work this way I feel much less uptight.  If the boys don't work in a phonics workbook before lunch, it's ok; they can read to me before they go to bed.  If the big kids become absorbed in writing their novels and ignore reading history or science or whatever, it's more than ok; I'm overjoyed.  Let them write; they'll pick up the reading later.  I just put some newspaper articles on the couch where my 14 year old likes to read; I know he'll read them and we'll talk about them after dinner.  Maybe we'll watch some science tonight, who knows.

It's been a rocky process, coming back to this.  I've been working on a post for a couple of weeks in which I try to talk about this process of figuring out that while I have a few guideposts, I can't really divide up our year or our lives in the traditional way.  But I haven't been satisfied with that post, and I thought, well, maybe I could just show you a day in this new year.  I don't know if anyone really enjoys reading about my days, but I do enjoy writing them. 

 Wednesday, August 3

6:30 AM: My day starts a little later than it did yesterday, when I was awakened at 4:30 AM by Pip crying that his leg hurt.  Assuming that he was merely feeling the pins and needles of his leg falling asleep, I packed him off to the bathroom and then back to bed.  By dinnertime, it had become completely clear that not only was it not pins and needles, it was something that needed medical expertise.  So we spent part of our evening at urgent care discovering that apparently Pip had dislocated his knee somehow (not playing scooter demolition derby, of course) and although it had popped back into place on its own, the joint remained swollen and painful.  I was worried that he wouldn't be able to sleep, and therefore -- considering that Andy was out of town -- I would be up with him all night, but no, it was the baby who was up every hour instead.  I nurse the baby now and put him back down, hoping he'll go back to sleep so I can have a couple of minutes to myself before the little boys get up.

6:50 AM: No chance. Someone has left a Duplo train right outside my door, which makes a really loud noise when I step on it.  The little boys are instantly awake.  The good news is that Pip's knee isn't quite as bad this morning.  He manages to limp out to the kitchen on his own. The other boys head upstairs to build Legos, so I carry Pip up there with them.

(The upstairs room is a disaster, but I am willfully ignoring it for the time being.  A) It's 7 AM; B)I have not yet had any coffee and C)I'm trying to recover from a year of burnout.  Things are not efficient around here and I am ok with that right now. We will do a better job in time.)

While they're playing with Legos and the baby is miraculously still sleeping, I write in the spiral notebook that serves as our homeschool log, catching up on the past two days.

And I make coffee.

9:30 AM-ish: Everyone (even the teenagers) is up now, has eaten, and the little boys have also played outside and watched a Magic School Bus episode (on flight).  I've managed a shower and Katydid has fed and watered the chickens and ducks. We say our prayers, adding the prayer to St. Michael, which we're memorizing, and ending up -- from a question Farmerboy asks about St. Sebastian -- in an interesting theological discussion about martyrdom, Islam, terrorism, the persecution of Christians, and just wars.

10:15 AM: Ok, chore time. I've been trying to read from The Golden Children's Bible after prayers, but we had a good discussion and the little ones are antsy, so it's chore time.  And Leo (the baby) is cranky, so I sit down to nurse him and to read through this list of basic science fiction books. Gareth spends most of the day reading.  I'd become concerned that he only spent a minimum of time reading and working on what I thought he ought to be working on, only to escape upstairs to the books and work (his writing) that he really wanted to be doing.  So, ok, we're making a list of classic SFF novels and I'm giving him a reading journal.  I have to sort through the list, though, because obviously not all of them are appropriate for 14 year olds!

11:00 AM: Math with Farmerboy, with Pip contributing from the couch, and Pop listening in.  I'm trialing Saxon 3, with modifications.  I have him do one of the worksheets, which counts as a little bit of language arts, too -- writing dates and days of the week.  I think we'll be skipping some of these lessons, though.  We didn't do a lot of math last year, and I thought Saxon might give us the structure to fill in the gaps along with some living math books and our Montessori activities, and I thought FB would enjoy the "meeting" aspect. FB runs outside to check the temperature for our chart; it's 96 degrees already.   He wants to keep counting by 10's; he made it to 1000 yesterday, but today we have to do a little review of place value to write 1010.  I make a place value chart for him since our base 10 blocks aren't handy, and in the process I draw a thousand cube.  FB is fascinated by the way it looks 3-D and demands to know how I did it.  So instead of doing the graph Saxon says we ought to be doing for this lesson, we draw cubes and cones and prisms, and try to fiure out how to make an S look 3-D.

11:30 ish: The boys want to read Pagoo, which we started because we've been thinking about taking a Gulf of Mexico vacation.  While I read on the couch, the twins and Chipmunk sit at the table and draw ocean pictures.  Pop is concerned to get the correct number of legs on his lobster, so I give him The Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia: The Natural World and he finds a picture to draw from.  FB says, "I love barnacles." 

12:00 or so: Break to clear the table and make lunch. The little boys start playing a game of "lobsters attack the hermit crab" using laundry baskets.

  
You'll note the hand poking out of the laundry basket?

I check in with the big kids about their mornings.  Gareth has spent the entire morning working on the novel he's writing as his One Year Adventure Novel (which is actually taking a lot longer than a year, but who's counting).  Katydid did some Rosetta Stone French, but mostly she, too, has been working on her novel.  They both tell me the same thing: "How do people write 30 page first chapters?  How do they write enough pages to make a novel?"  I just laugh. One page at a time, kiddos.

A couple of books arrive via UPS at lunch time:The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan (for me and anyone else who's interested) and Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (for Andy and anyone else who's interested.) I try to steal a few minutes book browsing and checking my email.

1:30 PM: Time to gather in the little boys to read before quiet time.  Katydid has been singing in her room.  Gareth has been reading... something. The Goose Girl , I think.   Nobody wants to go outside today, which is good for Pip, who can't in any case.  FB informs me that it is 100 degrees.  He's been upstairs building with Legos and listening to a Hank the Cowdogbook on audio.

I read one chapter from This Country of Ours.  We're reading about Columbus.  And this is August 3, the anniversary of the day that Columbus set out from Spain! Excitement!  FB says we should have a party.  With cake.  I'm not sure I can pull off cake today. But it's a good idea.

2:00 PM: It takes a while to get Leo and Chipmunk to actually take a nap. Actually, only Chipmunk really takes a nap.  Leo just keeps popping up, so I'm not able to do much with the big kids and I can't settle into a book while I'm rocking him either, which is frustrating, but I'm not sure it has entirely to do with Leo.  Katydid works on her math (Life of Fred: Fractions) and Lingua Mater, reads Bernd Heinrich's  Summer World (I am a Bernd Heinrich fan) and also Fellowship of the Ring. Then she works on marine biology using the weekly plans from Fieldwork, Theresa's marine biology blog.  This looks pretty schooly, but most of it she chose. I made some "weekly guideline" charts this year, but I am trying hard not to think of them as hard and fast requirements.  They're mainly to provide the structure that is sometimes necessary to remember that you really wanted to learn French, for instance, and that you probably need to do that every day.

Gareth spends a long time doing Geometry (Jacobs), then sits on the couch reading The Andromeda Strain.  He didn't make it all the way through Algebra last year, but by the end of the year I was concerned that what he was learning most was how to hate math.  So we stopped and I poked around the Living Math site and we decided that it was probably okay to take a break from algebra and work on geometry instead, and here we are.

At this point, however, I am a tad frustrated with the way naptime has gone and unfortunately this frustration comes out as an "Is that all you're going to do today?" lecture because I have forgotten that I am relaxing.  It would have been so much more productive to have a discussion about The Andromeda Strain, but this doesn't hit me until later. 

It also happens to be 104 degrees.  I check the thermometer when I give up trying to get the baby back to sleep and take him out to get the mail.  Katydid, however, has been taking pictures outside.

All the birds are panting it's so hot, says Katydid.

And somewhere in there the little boys watch some episodes from Jonathan Bird's Blue World, upon which they are hooked.

5:00 PM Time to make dinner.  I pick up where I left off yesterday before we went to urgent care -- making zucchini bread.  Chipmunk helps.

 

It's grain-free.  I make it from a recipe in The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook. We have chicken sausages for dinner, and the kids get to eat in front of the TV.  (Because I'm tired. They watch a DVRed episode of Iron Chef: "Battle Cucumber!")  Then we do after dinner chores, and the kids all mess around for a while, and Gareth and Katydid pick up the articles from the weekend Wall Street Journal that I left on the couch (about "unwriting" and why fantasy fiction deserves more respect, and whether or not the Easter Islanders really committed "ecocide") and we have some discussion about that.

8:00 PM: It's 99 degrees.  Andy texts me that he's in Atlanta.  Almost home.

8:30 PM: We're getting ready for bed.  FB and the twins choose readers to read to me. FB reads part of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  His reading is improving, just slowly.  I found Writing Road to Reading in a box I was unpacking in the spring, and so we're using the word lists and reviewing the phonograms.  Andy usually gets the phonogram flashcards out at bedtime every night, and before he reads their bedtime story, he calls out phonograms and the boys fire back words that start with them.  This sounds like a classroom, except that the boys are all in bed (or in their sleeping bags) and they think it's a lot of fun.  I don't do this tonight, though.  Tonight the boys read to me on the couch in their pajamas, and then Katydid reads The Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor to them while I put on my pajamas, and then we pray and have a little theological discussion about whether saints help you themselves or if they have to go get Jesus so He can help, and after that I am required to sing "Away in a Manger".

9:30 PM: The house is finally quiet and I am nursing Leo to sleep.  The big kids are still up, of course, reading, taking showers, etc.  I read my Bible, and then I work on this post a while before Andy gets home around 11. 

So that's how our year is starting out.  Some of it's planned and a lot of it isn't, but it seems to be shaping up okay.

 

 

 

 

 

Blog and No Blog

So I promised a new blog.  But in fooling around with it, I am having trouble adding images where I want them.  And then here there is the sidebar problem.  And I got up early this morning, a little before 6:30, anticipating a few minutes of alone time, only to have a little person join me for my morning orange juice about 2 seconds later.

Can they hear me breathe when I'm asleep? Down the hall?

Sometimes things are just not to be.

Apparently things are mostly not to be when I announce them on my blog.

For the time being, I guess I'll be posting here.  I mean, when I can.  Maybe when the "Man-Eating Fish" opera being sung in the other room opens later than 7 AM. 

Or maybe I can just get a really big fan and stick it in there.  Think it will drown out the sound of my waking-up-early thoughts?

No, I don't either.

K-2 Year in Review: Everything Else

Well, as promised, here is the rest of my K-2 review.  Do you remember the first part?  It's only been a month in between!

I've been in a bit of a tizzy lately as I try to finish out the unpacking and setting up so that one day, we don't feel as if we are moving in anymore.  I'm not sure when that day will come, but I know the little boys are getting a little bit frustrated with the lack of structure.  Now that I don't have to report to the school district at the end of the year, here is my plan.

1. Blog year-end reviews here on typepad.

2. Print out my Learning in Review category and put it in a binder.  Let the kids look through it.  Look through it myself.  Remember that we actually did something in 2010-11.

3. Put the binder on a shelf.  Label it with a label maker so I know what it is. (Er... probably I should label it before I put it on the shelf.)  One day before I am done homeschooling (good thing I have at least 17 more years) collect all my other homeschool journal/(b)logs and put them on the same shelf.  A good thing about having to root through everything you own is that you find little gems here and there that at one time seemed to be rough stones but interesting enough to keep.  My homeschool journals are like that. In every single one I find myself questioning whether the effort is worth it.  In a word -- yes.  The effort is so completely worth it, but sometimes that's not evident until years later when you are trying to figure out what to do with the new kindergartener, or trying to escape the tangle of educational philosophies in which you suddenly find yourself wrapped. 

Now, onward.  The Review -- math, science, history, geography, nature study.  Did we do art last year?  Well, not formally.  There were many dinosaur pictures drawn, and I did discover Farmerboy's depiction of himself as a paleontologist wielding some ground-penetrating radar. 

What, ground-penetrating radar isn't in your art curriculum?

Anyway, really now -- onward.

Math

Next year (which for us begins in early July) I want to do more living math, with more allowance for projects like this:

It's a pattern picture, by Pop.  (And it's art, too!)  These pictures developed spontaneously from some art the younger boys were doing at the breakfast table.

(We also do science at the breakfast table.  Exhibit 1A.

Farmerboy's catapults.  But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.)

Mostly I either wasn't organized enough or available enough to do much "living math" this year, so we used workbooks in a fairly relaxed manner.  Pop is extremely fond of math (my only one, really, although his twin brother likes math pretty well, too) and ran through the arithmetic part of MCP Math K fairly quickly.  Not the writing numbers part.  Writing numbers is part of math but it is not really math; it is more about fine motor skills, and both twins have trouble with fine motor skills.  My biggest beef with early math curricula is that they are mostly about writing numbers, which is frustrating as heck to a kid who can use patterns to add three numbers in his head but can't figure out how to hold a pencil so that he can draw a straight line.  That's why, in the early years, I only use math workbooks in a voluntary fashion.  I much prefer a Montessori approach to math, but most of my Montessori materials are still out in the garage, in boxes. 

In any case, both twins were happy to use MCP Math K and some of the Kumon workbooks on their own terms.  They also pounced on the Flashmaster.  We used Usborne First Numbers and a 100 chart occasionally, and every once in a while checked out a math-related title from the library. (Mummy Math: An Adventure in Geometry was a big hit.)  I am not sure this was enough math for Pop, but I hope to do a better job next year.

Farmerboy, in Grade 2, used Seton's Mathematics 2 for Young Catholics, which is a heck of a lot of drill if you use all of it, but we didn't.  Since we were really focusing on reading with him this year, and since it was a year full of a fair amount of chaos, math sort of slipped through the cracks at times.  I am not terribly worried about it, because in my experience it's relatively simple to catch up by using Saxon 5/4 in 4th grade. 

Science

(See Exhibit 1A above.)

My mom is an engineer.  Every year she participates in a program designed by the schools to foster an interest in science and math in middle school girls.  Every year she builds something with the girls, and my kids benefit from the leftovers.  This year they built spoon catapults.  Spoon catapults are the sort of things that fire the imaginations of technically-inclined 7 year old boys.  Farmerboy has built a number of spoon catapults on his own using various materials.  The one you see above was constructed using a collage tray, a plastic spoon, a screw, a Playmobil basket, a wooden bead, and generous amounts of masking tape.  It will fling various small objects a surprising distance at high velocities. 

The other catapult on the table in the picture is his birthday present, also from my mom.  It will also hurl small projectiles with surprising force.  And she gave him the K'nex Bridges kit.

Do you sense a theme here?

Science is Farmerboy's "thing".  In addition to building catapults and really intricate bomb release mechanisms on Lego starships of his own design, Farmerboy also worked independently on experiments from the Thames & Kosmos Little Labs Stepping into Science kit and the Thames and Kosmos Little Labs Intro To Engineering set. These kits are mostly very good for the age range suggested (5-7), with a couple of caveats.  Kids (ok, boys) tend to be very excited about doing the activities and when they see pictures of scissors on cardboard figures (such as space shuttles), they will assume they know what to cut.  But they might be wrong.  Before you start on the kits, it is probably a good idea to enforce a rule about reading the directions first.  Otherwise, you may end up with an unusable space shuttle.  Our engineering kit was also missing a crucial piece for the crane, but that turned out to be a problem-solving opportunity in disguise; I can't remember what Farmerboy ended up using to replace it, but it was pretty creative and worked well, too.

Five year olds will need more supervision than a seven year old. 

We also took some field trips with Farmerboy in mind.  Farmerboy loves earth science.  In late April we drove out to Coon Creek Science Center, about 2 1/2 hours away from us in rural west Tennessee, for their annual member's day.  The really cool thing about the Coon Creek site is that all the "fossils" at the site are not really fossilized; that is, the shells were never replaced by minerals (in other words, rock).  The shells, therefore, are still shell, just 70 million years old.  The museum staff digs some test pits and makes the clumps of mud available to members who attend.  It's up to you to excavate the fossils from the clumps of mud.  You get to keep whatever you find.  It's a devilishly hard thing to keep the shells from breaking, but we did end up with some nice specimens that now grace the windowsills in our dining/school area.

And, of course, there was Meteorite Men.  Farmerboy's Christmas present?  A metal detector.

Nature Study

(He's looking at turtles.)

Katydid would tell you that nature study is science, and of course she would be right, but I'm following the homeschool mom convention here and separating the two areas.  Nature study at our house tends to be informal, but also an integral part of our daily lives.  To my children, nature study is a lot like eating.  It's something you do every day, and you would never capitalize it and compartmentalize it, as in, "For our Eating Curriculum this year, we had Pizza, Eggplant Parmesan, and Snickerdoodles."  On the other hand, sometimes I do have Ideas, and I try them out on my kids.  This year one of my Ideas was to use One Small Square books in a relaxed way to investigate our new yard.  We went through One Small Square: Backyard and One Small Square: Woods. That was about the extent of formal nature study.  Informally, the subject of the year was ANTS ... because we have A LOT of them.

The twins also discovered Nature.  Their favorite episodes have been Bears of the Last Frontier, all about bears in Alaska.

Geography

I had a really nice geography curriculum all charted out last summer before we moved, but with all the chaos of C-section complications and moving two months early, it proved to be somewhat ambitious.  I had thought that we could at least read some books about each of the states that we drove through from New York to Mississippi, but I didn't have the money to buy the books at the time and getting anything from our local library in New York proved impossible in the month before our move.  So we read just a few books from the titles I had written down, mainly focusing on Tennessee and Mississippi: Minn of the Mississippi (still need to finish this one); The Buffalo Knife ;  1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi: A Mississippi Numbers Book ; and M Is For Magnolia: A Mississippi Alphabet Book .  The kids also enjoyed The Scrambled States of America Talent Show, which we checked out of our library here in Mississippi in book-plus-CD format.

And then we had MAPS -- a lot of them -- when I unconvered the map container out in the garage. (It was just like Christmas.)  Recently I was reorganizing our school area... er, kitchen... and I took a couple of pictures.  In this one, you can see our large container of maps where it sits on top of the Montessori puzzle map cabinet.  (I hadn't straightened the bottom shelf when I took the picture, but it holds a markable map and some children's atlases most of the time.)  Most of the maps are from Highlights Which Way USA, which we subscribed to when Gareth and Katydid were little, but we also throw real maps from our travels in there.  This spring when the Mississippi suffered its historic flooding, we drove over the bridge to Arkansas to see it  (My camera wasn't working at the time, but I think you would have to have known what it looked like before it was underwater in order to appreciate the vast extent of the flooding.)  This fired the boys' imagination, especially about Arkansas, so we had a run on Arkansas maps for a while. 

History

The boys seemed to be more interested in geography this year, so mostly history came from the You Wouldn't Want to Be series.  (What can I say, I have boys.)  These are not the greatest books in the world, but they are very boy friendly.   

Faith

Mostly, we just tried to live our faith this year (with varying levels of success.) Books I did use -- Manner's in God's House and True Stories for First Communicants.

 

 

 

 

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

One

After a lot of back and forth debating, I've finally decided to switch to blogger. I started working on the new blog this week and will hopefully have it ready soon.  I realized recently how much I missed blogging.  I'm trying to find that balance in my day that will allow me to have the laundry at a manageable level and a couple of minutes available for not working, too.

Two

What reminded me that I like to blog?  Elizabeth's knitting posts.  I have been sort of casually dipping in and out of them for a while, but this week it really hit me: it sounds like she's having fun.  Fun knitting and fun blogging about it.  I like learning about new things (like marine biology and physical geography and quantum physics) so I can give my kids some structure for the things they want to learn about, but I really, firmly believe that one of the most important roles of a teacher (especially a mother-teacher) is to model what it means to be an active learner.  Kids want to see their mothers learning interesting stuff.  Too often I think that having all the work done and keeping everyone on a perfect schedule means that I am being a good mother.  But what good is having all the work done if my patience is short, and I don't have time to do the things that will nurture our souls?     

Three

The work isn't done, by the way.  In case you were wondering.

Four

I keep meaning to update my Grocery Project.  When I started keeping track of my grocery expenses, I was amazed at how much we were really paying for food, household items, and common over the counter medicines and vitamins -- even as I was trying to cut costs.  And then food prices started going up, and I wasn't sure how much I ought to be paying for food.  What I ended up doing was taking a portion of our medical budget (medicine and supplements) and attaching it to our grocery budget (food and household products) to account for the stuff I was buying at the store.  It took too much time to separate that stuff out, and I had started using this nifty savings tracker from The Coupon Project and wanted to track those savings, too.   I've been able to cut $100 to $200 a month off what we were actually paying to eat a grain-reduced, organic, real food diet when buying primarily from stores. (This masks the fact that I'm also getting more food for my money, which is important when all your boys suddenly hit a growth spurt!!) Now that I have some experience with the stores here and with coupons, I could cut more by eliminating some of the organic processed and convenience products that we buy (almond milk, Stoneyfield whole milk yogurt, Larabars, and the gluten-free chicken sausages at Costco, for example), but a) my husband likes to try new things; b)he travels a lot and sending him with a grain-free packaged bar like Larabar keeps him from eating junk on the road; and c)I have four kids playing baseball right now.  Paying a little more for good-for-you convenience saves us from paying a lot more for not-so-good-for-you fast food.

Five

We haven't totally eliminated fast food from our diet either.

Six

The grain-free experiment is going well.  Since mid-January I've lost 30 pounds.  My husband has lost about 20.  (I'm still nursing, which he thinks is an unfair advantage.)  I feel a lot better.  All the candida related problems which were so bad after a year of inhaled steroids for asthma and 30 days or more of antibiotics at #7's birth have improved quite a bit.  I also made a huge discovery: my depression is diet related.  After cutting out grains, sugar, and starchy vegetables, I am sometimes discouraged but I do not get really depressed.  I have much more energy.  My face does not break out (which has been an ongoing problem with me since I was 10).  And some of the real evidence of the benefits our new diet came recently when Andy had his physical for Scout leadership: his blood pressure, which had been high, dropped 15 points into normal bounds.  Part of the reason for his success is exercise, but diet seems to count for a lot.  In particular, he gave up the large amounts of soda he was drinking; large amounts of high fructose corn syrup in the diet have been linked to hypertension. 

Seven

I'm sitting next to a 10.9 lb. cabbage here at the breakfast table this morning.  It came from my garden, which makes it doubly amazing. It's about 14 inches in diameter, and I had to hack off the root with a butcher knife like a machete.  I wish I could take a picture, but we've lost the battery charger and are awaiting a new one in the mail.  (I miss my old camera with its old-fashioned batteries.)  The coolest thing about this cabbage is that it came from a plant my neighbor gave me, and she got it for free from a program an Alabama plant farm sets up for 3rd graders to grow giant cabbages.  I didn't have a 3rd grader this year, so this plant is technically an "extra".  Maybe next year we'll participate in the competition.  This year, it's just going to make a lot of lacto-fermented sauerkraut (or cortido or kim chi).    

 

K-2 Year in Review: Language Arts

Note: I apologize for the state of my sidebar! The typepad design editor has not been working for me very often.  Sometimes my content disappears, sometimes it turns up again, and it never really goes where I put it.  

I don't have to turn in any end-of-the-year paperwork to the state this year, but I thought I would like a wrap-up anyway.  Nothing we did was revolutionary -- mostly it was just trying to hang on -- but maybe somebody needs to see what it means to just hang on in the early years.  Lately it seems that I have heard many newish homeschoolers with young kids really stressing out about first and second grade (or kindergarten) curricula and I always want to tell them to relax. 

So, anyway, this is a review of what I can remember that we did.  I'm combining my 7 and 5 year olds because they mostly did things together.  Technically my five year olds were not in kindergarten because their birthdays come in October, but it didn't seem to make a difference to them.   I decided to declare our year over about a week ago, and we'll start back up in July when it gets hot.  Although we did about as well as we could this year, considering, I am hoping that next year is better, and really thinking hard about homeschooling styles, balance, and this marathon that is raising (and homeschooling) a large family.

Phonics

Somehow my five year old twins (and my three year old, too) learned all their letters and letter sounds this year.  The twins and I occasionally sat down with  Phonics Pathways  (known in our house as The Big Book of Letters) for formal reading lessons, but mostly -- I am somewhat embarassed to say -- they learned these things from Starfall.  I felt a little guilty about this for a while, and then I thought, why not just be happy it was so painless.  The twins are blending, doing a little reading in McGuffey and Bob books, and Chipmunk is spelling STOP signs.  Pop is upset that he cannot yet read Star Wars chapter books.  They seem to get that words in books can actually be read, and that they ought to be able to apply the skills they're learning to books they want to read, or coupons, or whatever.  My second grader, on the other hand, is still convinced that letters are meaningless squiggles only designed to give him a hard time. We made it through long vowel sounds this year, and we have been using Phonics Pathways (and Modern Curriculum Press Phonics A ) methodically. In fact, I think a little too methodically; in April I became concerned that "reading" had seemed only to become a school subject for him, so I ditched the texts and just asked him to read to me from our large collection of early readers (Gareth was eight and a half when reading finally clicked for him, so I have amassed quite a few).  He chose to read from our sets of Brand New Readers, which are not strictly phonetic little books, but the stories are funny and Katydid loved them, too.  They're short enough and repetitive enough to give him a sense of accomplishment, which he needs at this point.

Handwriting

Pip and Pop used Handwriting Without Tears.  Sort of.  Both have problems with fine motor skills, and neither has the concept of "just do one page".  Or "wait and let's use this neat little chalkboard".  This was not something I required, just something I had on the shelf for them to do when they wanted.

Farmerboy (grade 2) has beautiful handwriting, especially for a leftie, and completed Copybook I from Memoria Press.  When I say "completed", I mean he did all the writing.  This child does not like to illustrate his work, so we just left all the "draw a picture here" pages blank.

Narration

I'm including this as a topic because I know people are interested in it, and I tried to do it more formally this year with Farmerboy.  I have to tell you, narration in my house is a little exhausting.  As soon as it becomes a formal process, no one wants to tell me anything.  If I am sneaky - or if we have a genuine discussion - my kids demonstrate excellent comprehension. (Educationese for: they like to talk about books.)  If I ask directly for someone to narrate or retell immediately after we read, I am usually met with rolling eyes.  I understand that doing formal narration eases kids into writing later on, but the energy required to sustain the process is often something I just don't have.  On the other hand, I know my kids pick things up just from listening to books and talking about them; the other day I sat down with Pip to read Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms and after I had read the first page, he said, "But what's the problem?  Books usually have a problem."

Yep, kiddo, a story without conflict would be boring.  (And Fletcher does actually run into a "problem", but not on the first page.)

Fairy Tales and Folk Stories

I stuck with something simple this year, and that was a good thing.  For some reason I had a really hard time keeping a regular read-aloud time, even for the little ones.  I did not write this plan down; I did not decide ahead of time which stories or books I would read; I just decided that this year I would try to read the younger kids more fairy tales.  There are many, many lovely picture books illustrating single fairy and folk tales, many of which we own, but we stuck primarily to collections this year. (The boys loved the Tiger and Rabbit stories in this collection.)

(Tried to narrate from this one.)

(Lots of short stories, with wonderful illustrations.)

(Farmerboy retold these tales for days afterward.  I began to think that Paul Bunyan was a relative.)

 

There were more read-alouds and books on audio -- including marathons of Redwall books -- but nothing terribly organized.  In fact, I think Ill remember this year primarily as "The Year of Biggles, Redwall, and Harry Potter."

I meant to do the whole year in review all at once, but at this rate its going to take me until 2012! Sheesh!  Cross your fingers and maybe I'll get to Science, Math, and History before the next presidential election!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Learning

March is nearly over, and I'm not done writing my math post yet.  I started it... and then I spent a day throwing up.  Which is how one of my children feels about math, actually.  I recently found an old homeschool journal in which I wrote about this child: "I just want him to learn to like to read, to think math isn't "boring", and to write using real letters instead of made up ones." 

"I guess we got 2 out of 3," I told him.

"No, I still write using made up letters," he said.

Inspired by Tolkein, he invents alphabets these days.  I'm pretty sure most of the story he's writing is in English, though.

I was going to call this an "in review" post, but then I wasn't sure if you could call what we've been doing "school"... maybe a lot of unschool.  Except not totally unschool either, because there was math and it was "boring". So there was learning, but only a fraction was orchestrated by me.

Maybe that's as it should be.  Because it's nice to see that some of your ideas -- written many years ago by a much less experienced you -- have borne fruit, and your kids really do like to read, and to learn, and can even write using real letters when they need to.

I still don't know how to make math not boring, but I'm working on it.  Maybe next year.  Anyway, one thing I've learned since I wrote that old journal is that not all learning has to be exciting.

So, some March highlights.

Katydid has had the camera out quite a bit lately, documenting spring.  Coming up on her agenda: an "azaela festival", in our shady backyard area the kids have dubbed Azaela Garden.

Some other photos I found on the camera:

Carolina chickadee, taking off...

Moonrise.

Of course, then I also find pictures like this:

I'm not sure who took this photo.  I think it was from the day I was sick.

(Don't worry.  No preschoolers were harmed in the making of this photo.  They have been warned not to do it again, though.)

Katydid is looking forward to the new photography series on the Weather Channel featuring photographer Peter Lik.  Over the weekend we watched a recorded NOVA about E.O. Wilson called Lord of the Ants, which she also enjoyed, particularly (I think) the sections about Wilson as a boy naturalist.  I think that Andy and I enjoyed it even more, though, because, as the parents of children who spend a lot of time mucking around in the woods and yard with ants and other creatures, it was nice to see the where that sort of learning can end up, and not, you know, as a deadbeat living in your parents' basement.

Hmmm.

Anyway, lots of ants and insects around here lately (and by lots of ants, I mean, really, billions) and the little boys have had a good time catching them using nearly every single one of my Mason jars. Farmerboy has enjoyed setting up food experiments for his ants.  I'm hoping to get a decent schedule going for the first time all year (in spite of stomach viruses and baseball season) and am trying to read to the younger boys while they eat their breakfast.  We've just started Insect Life from the Eyes and No Eyes series and Among the Meadow People.  

In addition to insects, there are still dinosaurs.  Andy and I have been putting up some new Ikea bookcases in the hopes of finally unpacking the garage, and in one of the boxes I found an old dinosaur skull kit that Gareth had built a few years ago but forgotten or gotten frustrated with.  He popped the rest of it together and Farmerboy spent a couple of afternoons applying clay:

 

He even added taste buds to the tongue with a clay tool.

Farmerboy's favorite TV show these days is Meteorite Men, so in addition to his dinosaur construction, he has also been throwing rocks in the front yard to test various theories about craters, strewn fields, etc.  So now we have a rule: Before any meteorite experiment, you have to yell "CLEAR!"

This isn't all we've been up to -- the little boys have become addicted to starfall (which now has a sister site with math, some of which you can only access with a subscription), Farmerboy is still struggling slowly through reading, and Gareth has begun working with his Greek tutor -- but it's where I'm going to have to stop.  Something I'm learning -- how to feed everyone around all the baseball practices!

 

 

 

 

We've Been Busy

So, the past few weeks there has been a lot going on!  And poor Amy who asked me about Life of Fred I have left hanging all this time.  (Sorry, Amy!) As it happens, I have spent much of the last few weeks going cross-eyed over math curricula so hopefully I will soon be able to do a giant middle school-ish math post wherein I provide you with every single one of my "expert" opinions (hah) about math. 

In addition to thinking about math (or trying to avoid thinking about math, which also happens at our house), we also made a short trip to my mom and dad's for my mom's birthday, had a lovely visit with a good friend, rode around in my dad's 1931 Oldsmobile (pictured above), came home and spent a week visiting Memphis' Pink Palace Museum and Brooks Art Museum, attended a giant homeschool convention (where Jim Weiss and Susan Wise Bauer were speakers)... and contracted a nasty stomach virus which has occupied most of the past week.  

Next week... baseball!

(4 kids, 3 teams.  Even bilocation wouldn't help me much.)

Anyway, back to the pictures. 

My dad's car does actually run -- remarkably well for a 1931.  Andy got to drive it around the neighborhood, and we all took turns as passenger.  "No seatbelts, no handles, no air bags," as Farmerboy told us, and a big cloud of smoke following behind.

As we've been home the past three weeks or so (and Andy has been traveling a lot), we've also been working hard on our garden.

Well, Andy has been working hard.  I hang out with the baby.

Here's how the garden looked when we started.

It's a lot greener now.  The lettuce we overwintered has really taken off.  And we now have hedges of young berry bushes, plus a fencerow of muscadines and a couple of fig trees. 

(For the curious, we're building a simple maze design. I tried to find a quick link but am holding a 9 month old octopus.  Potager post also forthcoming, I hope.)

And of course there is the normal craziness...

 

 

February in Mississippi

February in the South is a different animal than February in the North.  For years I have hated February and have spent long hours figuring out how to wage war on it.  In upstate New York February is midwinter.  The snow is not going to melt until April, so you had better figure out how to deal with it.

In Mississippi...

New York kids expect snow and ice in February...

(maybe it looks a little odd on the magnolias)

(Or hanging from the crepe myrtles)

But what they don't expect is...

SPRING!!!

Everybody keeps telling us that this streak of good weather is probably going to end and then the weather will turn bad (rainy) and cold (chilly) again, but, I'm sorry, everybody, YOU HAVE NO IDEA.  71 degrees?  That's like, what, JUNE in upstate New York???  Do you know how LONG it takes 4 feet of snow to melt???

So what if it turns into 50 degrees again!

I may even have to negotiate a ceasefire with February.

Week(s) in Review: 8th/9th grade

I have really fallen off the wagon as far as recordkeeping is concerned.  December and January passed by in a blur of colds and teething baby.  February promises more of the same, I'm afraid, but I'm hoping to get my act together somewhat.  As with our learning life this year, I'm not looking for perfect, just "good enough".

Gareth: 8th/9th grade

Faith

Gareth's been using Seton's Confirmation Prep, in addition to our family time with the Baltimore Catechism (No. 2) and the CCC. 

Math

We had been stuck in chapter 4 of Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra for almost two months.  (The holidays didn't help.)  Chapter 4 is one giant word problem.  It is really, really, really hard.  It is a whole chapter full of the kind of problems that Jacobs in Elementary Algebra gives as "Set IV" (meaning: if you're a math whiz, you might want to try this, but otherwise don't worry about it) and divides into two or more chapters.  We battled to the end with me wondering how the heck I was going to give him a grade for something I suspected was far more difficult than your average algebra book, and then I pulled out Jacobs.  My suspicions were confirmed, as Gareth is whizzing through Jacobs chapter 5 with very little help.  So now my problem is: do we continue to try to struggle through Fred, going to Jacobs for explanation and review, and in essence, completing two algebra textbooks for Algebra I?  Or do we just switch back to Jacobs?  The cartoons may be funny, but Gareth's right; the problems are much more interesting in Fred.  They're just exponentially harder.

On the bright side, I think Gareth will have a much better understanding of algebra when he's done than I ever did, and I took honors classes.  (As a bonus, I know that I will also understand algebra much better, too!)

Languages

Still using First Form Latin.  But we've also managed to find a tutor to help Gareth with ancient Greek.  Andy sent an email to the classics department at the local liberal arts college, and the end result will be that beginning next week, Gareth will meet with a junior once a week at Andy's office.   

Language Arts

I'm trying to give Gareth a writing topic or two a week, and it seems to be working fairly well.  These writing assignments usually have to do with his reading in science and history, and I generally let him choose from a list.  So far he's done short papers on plate tectonics, the president's State of the Union address, and the Mongol invasion, and some creative writing about the Crusades.  That's in addition to his writing on his novel.  

He's also working in Grammar of Poetry (his choice), slogging through diagramming with Our Mother Tongue, and we have fallen off the wagon with Spelling Wisdom. 

Earth Science/Physical Science:

Gareth finished up Rocket Boys , Homer Hickam's memoir which inspired the excellent movie October Sky (which we also watched -- or tried to watch anyway, as the DVR cut off the end.)  In discussions we focused more on the science of building rockets than on literary themes... but really, I think this was just a good read.  

After he finished Rocket Boys, he picked up Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and started reading again where he'd left off.

He's also read many magazine articles over the past few weeks dealing with science -- from National Geographic, Smithsonian, Astronomy, and Natural History (which I would link you to except that my mouse has gone haywire) -- not assigned, just strewn.  And, as ever, television series remain a pillar of science learning around here: currently, Mutant Planet, How the Earth Was Made, The Universe, and NOVA and NOVA Science: Now! .   (Farmerboy and Katydid also like Meteorite Men, but Gareth thinks it's boring.)

Oh, and a couple of weeks ago he earned the Boy Scount Engineering merit badge.

History

Not too much reading here, as science has been more of a focus.  He's meandering through medieval Japan and China right now, The Story of Ancient China and China's Later Dynasties, as well as The 47 Ronin Story (Tuttle Classics) (I think).  He has a few books about Japan and the samurai in his basket, but I think he's been more focused on China lately.   

Art

We're not pursing art in a terribly organized fashion, but Gareth has been messing around with Artistic Pursuits (High School) and a "how to draw manga" book we picked up at Hobby Lobby the other day.  He just has to visit an art museum to get his Art merit badge.

  

Today

Today started out in my "office", where I worked with my super-organized daily planning system...

...otherwise known as "post-its on the refrigerator".

And then there was...

Graphing of Legos...

... requiring lots of concentration.

There was bouncing...

... and reading before quiet time...

Afternoon work...

And snow in the evening.

Tuesdays are halfway decent around here, usually.  How was your day?