Three Plus Two

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. 

Reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day

What I'm Reading: The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir by Katrina Kennison.  Katrina Kennison also wrote Mitten Strings for God.  To be honest, I am enjoying The Gift of an Ordinary Day more, although I don't think that this is the opinion of most of the other homeschooling moms I know.  I had a problem reading Mitten Strings.  Her life seemed so... cozy and peaceful, but in a way that was unobtainable for me, a homeschooling mother of 6 kids, mostly small, mostly male, and mostly very, very active.  At the time, we were not enrolled in very many activities, we were home most of the time, we did not do crazy consumptive birthday parties... and yet I could not imagine being able to sit on the couch and knit with ONE child in the QUIET for HOURS (for example).  The whole book seemed to me like a picture from a picture book.  Of course it was a beautiful picture, the kind of picture in which most of us would like to take up residence.  But I felt as if the advice should be taken with a grain of salt, like the sort of well-meaning advice given to parents of willful, hyperactive, sleepless children by parents whose children would never think of telling them "no" and have slept through the night since they were 6 weeks old. 

Or maybe I am just a grump.

Anyway, everyone is older in The Gift of an Ordinary Day, but that's not what set it apart from Mitten Strings for me.  (Of course I'm only about 120 pages into the book, so I'll give you my final analysis when I'm done.)  Kennison and her family pack up their seemingly perfect life and move to New Hampshire about the same time that her oldest starts high school.  At that point everything starts to seem a little more real.  Their younger son does not want to move.  They have to live with her parents for most of three years.  She succumbs to New England "romance" and they end up with a 200 year old "quaint" New England cottage with sloping floors, rotting wallboards, a crumbling foundation, and bats in the attic. 

This probably sounds like I'm being somewhat vindictive, but no -- what I really appreciate are passages like this one:

    "Heading back over the mountain in the late afternoon, on my way to pick up Jack from school, I am     always content, fulfilled by the day.  And what I begin to think about is something that I've surely         known all along but that somehow, in the midst of our small day-to-day crises and preoccupations of     the last few years, has been all too easy to forget.  Real life isn't out there in the future    somewhere.  Real life is not going to begin when we move into our own house at long last, or when I     figure out what to do with myself, or when we're out of debt, or when our possessions finally come     out of storage and we can sit down around our old kitchen table again.  Real life is now.

    It is the thirteen-year-old son who's at odds with his best friend and takes his frustration out on me.      It is the husband bent over the newspaper, glasses sliding down his nose, the dog with a tick in her     ear, the carpenter calling to say the bathtub doesn't fit.  It is the apple picked from the tree and          eaten by the side of the road, the quiet pond, my own stiff shoulders and aching feet.  It is my            mother and me, side by side, chopping vegetables for chicken potpie, our hips bumping in her         narrow kitchen.  My dad chinking ice into his glass and pouring a drink.  The breeze through the     screened door, the early darkness."

This is what I have always thought myself.  I see so many women trying valiantly never to acknowledge (publicly) the messes of life, never even with a fleeting mention.  But the messes are just as much a part of life as the pretty pictures -- the bathtub that won't fit and the apple.  This doesn't mean that I think we ought to dwell on the messes, the mistakes, or the chaos, or that I think that people who are cheerful and completely optimistic by nature should spend time looking for that the dead bugs under their refrigerators so they can show them to the world.  What I do wonder is whether it's healthy to constantly force ourselves to focus on the beautiful, the cozy, and the ideal when life is handing us a mix.  Shouldn't we feel like it is okay to say, "You know, today did not go well.  The kids were cranky and I was cranky and dinner burned and no one would eat it.  I had to take a few minutes at lunchtime just to watch the snow come down.  I took some pictures of it, but I really hope tomorrow is better."  Or, "We are going through a tough time right now.  I am so worried I can't sleep, but on the upside, I am learning a lot about how houses are built.  I never knew there were so many choices to make!" 

Real life is the toddler who spends all night kicking you in his sleep because he has a cold and his nose is stuffy and his throat hurts.  Real life is the snow swirling through the gray sky like tiny white moths, the ice that makes you slip on the steps, the chicken in the van, the thirteen year old who fixes his little brother's light saber with duct tape when it breaks.  It is the stress of relocation and the excitement of a new adventure, all at the same time.

That's why I am liking this book more than Mitten Strings.  Kennison may be the 50 year old mother of two traditionally schooled teenage boys, but this book speaks to my experience so much more. 

Speaking of Books...

There's a discussion over on the 4real boards about organizing books.  I mentioned our book bin system and there was some interest in seeing what it looked like.  So I took a few pictures.  I've had some technical difficulties with typepad lately, so I'm really hoping this works...

Now, keep in mind that I am pressed for space.  I really need another bookcase.  My books would look much neater if I could expand a bit.  The books are divided (mostly) by subject (science, history), and then subdivided into bins by topic (oceans, Civil War).  The white bins hold science books, the red bins history, the wicker baskets novels, both historical and otherwise.

I first went to this system when I had 5 kids under the age of 10 and nobody seemed to be able to shelve books properly.  The skinny little paperback picture books all got lost.  The hardbacks warped from being shoved in every which way.  Since the twins were young, I did not have time to police the shelves all the time to make sure there were only history books on the history shelves, or that a picture book hadn't been jammed in between them so that its cover was bent and ripped.  I had attempted to identify where books should be returned by labeling them with colored stickers.  But my then toddler ripped all the stickers off the day after I put them on.

The book bins seemed to solve these problems pretty well.  If a child wants a book about insects, I am pretty certain that I can just go to the insect bin and find what I'm looking for, rather than squinting down a row of science books to find the spine of a skinny book about monarchs, which may or may not have been returned to the right place.  I can also take the whole bin out for the child to browse through.  The bins work best for the younger kids if they're not as full.  When they're very full they tend to be heavy, which is a con of this system I am still trying to work out.

These bins really need to be divided and re-sorted.  You can tell what some of our more popular categories are, since subjects like science tend to be interest-driven around here.

I don't have all the books in bins, however.  Historical fiction is mostly in baskets, divided by time period, but when I got all the books for our medieval studies this year, I didn't have a basket I could use.  So these novels are shelved like normal books.  You can see that using a basket to hold the other books expands the available space on the shelf, though.

Baskets and/or bins are also nearly impossible to fit on the squeezy top shelves, so I tend to shelve middle/upper grade fiction and biographies there traditionally.  It's too high for the little ones, and my organizational scheme bears that in mind.  I put books for them down low; books for taller people up higher.  I don't shelve chapter book biographies with their time period... and to be honest, I can't really remember why I decided on this scheme.  I think they just took up too much space in the bin.  Bins really work best for picture books and other thinnish hardbacks.

I find that the bins are much better for keeping the paperback picture books accessible.  This shelf holds some of our big hardback storybooks, but the bin (which I just made up and which isn't labeled, sorry) is for paperback fairy tales, most of them picture books. 

These aren't the only bookshelves for kids' books.  I also have a cheap bookshelf in the entryway which holds history and geography reference books (and is in terrible danger of collapsing, because it was never meant to take the weight of those books); another cheap bookcase in the living room that holds bins of geography books (divided by continent) and baskets of religion books (both of which really need a sort); and a built-in of science reference books, including two baskets of field guides.  Gareth and Katydid both have bookcases in their rooms, and I keep the bulk of the seasonal and fiction picture books in plastic drawers in a closet so I can rotate them.  They were a little overwhelming when they were all out, and then I ran out of space.  

I tried looking for other posts that have to do with the book bins, as I know I've posted a few along the way, but in doing so I've discovered that I am really bad at categorization.  If I actually do manage to find any, I'll come back and add the links for reference. 

Our Year with Books

It's the time of year when everyone seems to enjoy looking back over the year that's been before moving on to the year to come.  I suppose I'm no exception.  Lately I have been thinking a lot about my reading.  I started the year reading David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World and I came to the end of the year with Ten Books that Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker.  So I started thinking, you know, I like reading all these books about the Great Books, maybe I should actually read some of them? Hmmm.  Well, that's for the new year.  As for the old year...

January: In addition to starting Denby's book, I decided that I would give  everyone a virtual tour of our bookshelves.  I got as far as the cookbooks on my kitchen island, which really hasn't been much of a tour.  January also saw Katydid begin a term at Hogwarts, but the boys were much more interested in movies.

February: I was still reading Denby's Great Books in February, along with a bunch of books about homeschooling high school (you can see the whole giant list of books, which I read in February and March, here).  But what I was reading to the kids was The Story of Caves, an old book I found in our library which contained a fair bit of information about our local caves, and sparked a fair amount of interest around here, especially with Farmerboy.  Closet spelunking gave the boys something to do when it was way too February-ish outside.    

March:I made some notes about my reading for the year, which is the only reason I can now remember that I read  Kon-Tiki in March.  Not that Kon-Tiki is forgettable.  On the contrary, it's the kind of book you read when you're in your 30's and wonder why you didn't read it sooner.  And then it sort of passes into your permanent, dateless memory, where all the best books are held.  You know round about when you read it, you can remember snuggling up under the blankets after the toddler is *finally* asleep, you can remember setting it down on your husband's nightstand and telling him it's the kind of book that he would enjoy and also that you are hoping your 12 year old son will read it because -- well, archaeology! adventure! lots of weird fish! -- but as far as summoning "March 2009", your brain is at a loss.  The allure of armchair travel passed a little by the end of March, though; we were preparing for our annual trip to Tennessee and winter was ending.

April: We spent Holy Week and Easter in Tennessee visiting family and friends, and I read He Leadeth Me by Walter Cizsek.  What an excellent (and challenging) book, written by an American priest who spent years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Union.  I also started Fahrenheit 451, and on the long car ride home, I read Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck.  The arrival of spring saw us in the garden and at the library, checking out lots of books about plants, frogs, and dirt.

May: What did I read in May?  May is sort of a blank on my reading radar.  May was all about putting in gardens, getting turkeys and chickens, birdwatching, and being outside.  Oh, and emergency preparedness.  I read Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens, by Kathy Harrison, a  good reference book for the family.  To the kids, I started reading In Search of a Homeland: The Story of the Aeneid, by Penelope Lively, which rounded out a year spent with ancient mythology, epics, and fairy tales.  While reading this retelling of the Aeneid, the boys got interested in volcanoes, and we built a few.  I also contemplated the simple life, and ended up concluding that I don't really have one... but that my kids might. 

June: June was for wrapping up the school year and preparing for the new one.  I read Working in the Reggio Way by Julianne Wurm and Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments by Deb Curtis and Margie Carter, and I posted a few "Reggio reflections" of my own.  Both books were excellent and prompted a lot of thinking about how to handle the projects the boys do.  While I was reading about how to do projects with little people, my big kids were immersed in the Warriors series of cat books... but Katydid did take a break from Warriors to read Black Beauty and In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson.  After she'd finished, she was rather heartbroken to learn that the Dodgers were not in Brooklyn anymore.

July: July was rainy, cold, and asthmatic... 3 things not generally associated with July, I know.  My garden persevered in spite of the weather, and so did the kids.  I read Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and started adding coconut oil to my smoothies (hoping to tame the asthma), a couple of art books, and In a Patch of Fireweed by Bernd Heinrich, which taught me more than I ever thought there was to learn about how insects regulate their temperatures.

August:  August was again focused on homeschooling -- plans, plans, and more plans.  Accordingly, I read a few books: Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker, which kept me up at night so I could finish it, and most of Reading the Rocks: the Autobiography of the Earth by Marcia Bjornerud, which... did not.  I also reread Homeschooling: a Patchwork of Days, edited by Nancy Lande and wrote about our not quite average day.  And after reading Mudpies to Magnets, we made ice cube necklaces.  Gareth was reading Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis, and Katydid read A Little Princess and began Little Women.  All my tomatoes died of late blight.

September: Well, this is what I thought Gareth would be reading. He didn't actually read much of it.  He did actually finish Fellowship of the Ring.  He also spent some quality time with Genetics of the Fowl.  Mostly, though, in September we were sick.  (I would give you a link but which one??)  We had an interesting not back to school day, and I nursed myself through the flu with Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness.    

October: October was a birthday month -- the twins turned 4 and Gareth turned 13 and made his own birthday cake using a 1950 version of the Betty Crocker Cookbook.  I also discovered that I was pregnant with #7.  I read some very good spiritual biographies/autobiographies, including Come Be My Light (Mother Teresa) and In the Shadow of His Wings (Fr. Gereon Goldman).  In fact, October was a very good month for reading.  I read some of the best books of the year in October.   Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird was definitely one of them; the story of a young, widowed Indian bride, it ranks high on my all-time favorite list.  So glad I checked that one out of the library.  Some time in here I finally finished reading The Hobbit to the kids, too.

November: First trimester nausea moved in, and I didn't feel much like reading or doing much of anything else either.  Raymond Arroyo's biography of Mother Angelica, Mother Angelica: The Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles kept me interested, though, and so did my friend Sarah's books, The Magic Thief: Stolen (#1) and The  Magic Thief: Lost (#2).  We took an unexpected day trip to Honesdale, PA, and I had all I could handle keeping up with the little boys.

December: December was a tough month.  The little boys all came down with a bad case of croup.  My nausea started to lift a bit, but none of us read a whole lot.  I finished Ten Books that Screwed Up the World, which was not my favorite but brought me around full circle again to the Great Books, and I also read With God in Russia, Walter Ciszek's memoir of the time he spent in the USSR as a political prisoner (and after, until he was finally able to come back to the US).  Andy read James and the Giant Peach (one of my most favorite books ever, which probably says a lot about me) to the little boys before bed, and we wrapped up the year playing Lego Star Wars and Wii Baseball, watching new Doctor Who episodes on BBCAmerica, and Julie and Julia and Star Trek on DVD.    

And so went our year. :-)    

Seven Quick Takes - 12/11

Gee, where do I start? 

One

I am sipping tea with honey because I seem to have a little tickle in my throat.  I know I am going to pay for this in about fifteen minutes because sweets make me nauseous.  I feel strange talking to people about my particular brand of pregnancy nausea because it isn't stereotypical.  I am not on the couch throwing up for three months.  In fact, I rarely throw up.  (Unless beans are involved.  Can't do beans, thank you very much, or vegetable soup.  Or pineapple really.  And when I was pregnant with Gareth the smell of bread made me feel like I was going to throw up, so grocery shopping was always a little dicey.) What happens is I constantly feel like I must eat, but nearly everything makes me feel sick right after I've eaten it.  After 7 first trimesters, I am now sure that this is a torture invented by the ancient Greeks.  It smacks of Tantalus.

Two

On the other hand, while I am sitting on the couch trying not to move and therefore disturb whatever equilibrium my stomach has gained, I like to watch Food Network.  And I like to read about food.  I just finished my annual re-reading of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. I first discovered Laurie Colwin's books at a library book sale when we lived in St. Louis.  I did not realize she was dead until I had read most of the book and had already decided that I wanted to be Laurie Colwin when I grew up.  When I learned that she had died at the age of 48, leaving behind her young daughter and husband, I burst into tears.  It took me a while before I could pick the book up again to finish it.  Now I re-read this book every year when I get it down to make her gingerbread recipe right after Thanksgiving.  This year I got it down so my mother-in-law and my kids could make her gingerbread recipe.  The book (and the recipe, which I highly recommend) is just as good as ever.

Three

While I sit around and try not to feel guilty because Andy is doing the dishes at night and also dealing with a couple of hyperactive preschoolers, I also think about things like, those people who worry about homeschoolers being unsocialized have it all wrong.  Yeah, I know.  But this is why.  I keep seeing and hearing references women make in blogs, on message boards, and in real life about how they call each other just to talk.  I'm pretty sure this is a normal part of female socialization, and one I seem to have missed out on.  Aside from it being impossible to talk on the phone in my house because of the NOISE and also because seeing Mom on the phone gives certain little people automatic permission (somehow) to do anything they are never, ever allowed to do, I have never figured out how to call somebody on the phone just "to talk".  So apparently 17 years of formal schooling and immersion in peer culture was completely useless from that point of view.  I still have no social skills.

Four

Really, I think I was designed to write letters.  Real letters.  On paper.  In pen.  When I was a teenager, several of my best friends were long-distance (setting up a standard which holds to this day), and we would sit in class and write long, episodic letters to each other, mainly involving our novels, what TV shows we were watching, and how bored we were.  I miss letters.  E-mail was wonderful when people used to use e-mail like letters, but then e-mail took too long, and so people just wrote blogs to keep friends up to date and stayed up all night chatting with Instant Messanger.  But then blogs took too long, and people switched to facebook and twitter.  (Maybe they still IM, I don't know.  I had to give up IM a long time ago because it took too much time.  Which is also why I don't log on to facebook or twitter much anymore either.)  With a pen and paper letter, you could write long, thoughtful responses even if it took you three or four days because paper and pen are so very much more portable than even the most portable computer, and far easier to use to compose long, thoughtful responses than a cell phone.

I'm such a Luddite.

Five

Katydid asked me the other day, "Mommy, is one reason why some women don't like to be pregnant that it makes them look fat?" 

Six

Unrelated to Katydid's comment, which reminded me a little of an innocent comment my husband once made involving shrubberies, a green maternity shirt, and me being 9 months pregnant... I have started trying to exercise in the mornings.  I think it is helping just a bit, although I can barely get through fifteen minutes without someone needing a stinky diaper changed.

Seven

The wind is blowing across the field like a freight train this afternoon, gusts up to 40 mph and a windchill of 5 degrees.  In western NY, the Weather Channel reports "blinding snowfall."  Here it's fairly clear. Puffy purple-gray clouds smear across the sky like healing bruises, that weird, pinkish late afternoon winter light glowing around them.  The trees on top of the hill are a uniform wall of charcoal gray, alleviated here and there by a spike of piney green or a slash of stark birch white. Yellow grass tops bend over a crusty blanket of snow -- about 6 inches now, less than we had on Wednesday because it rained a little Wednesday night.  Every now and then a wind gust whips up a handful of snow and flings it into the sky, but there's little drifting because ice is holding the snow in place. 

The boys keep asking if it's winter now.  Yes, dear, I say.  It's winter.  I make an imperfect attempt to build a fire in the woodstove every day now.  I have finally ordered snow boots for everyone. I would love a big bowl of beef stew, but will settle for the pizza I am going to ask my husband to pick up on his way home.  I am grateful I didn't have to take anyone out today.  Instead, we all hunkered down inside, and listened to the wind blow.  

 

Week 16... I think...

I'm not going to try to catch up on weeks 14 and 15, as mostly we cleaned house, had Thanksgiving, visited with Grandma and Grandpa, and I chewed gum assiduously in an attempt to keep early pregnancy nausea at bay... and alas, I have no pictures from this week because I was too busy participating in whatever activities the boys undertook (cookies, glitter) to wield a camera at the same time... but here are a few notes from this week... whatever number it is.

(Actually, I did take a few pictures this week.  But that was it.)

Read Alouds This Week:

Life of Our Lord for Children

Favorite Celtic Fairy Tales (Dover Children's Thrift Classics)

 Our Island Story

We actually had a couple of other picture books which it wouldn't let me add to the carousel.  The boys enjoyed them, though, so I thought I would mention them, too:

The Christmas Cobwebs, by Odds Bodkin

Gawain and Green Knight

Farmerboy's comment about Gawain... "It's a really strange book, isn't it, Mommy?"

The big kids seem to be slogging through some of their reading right now... Gareth informs me that The Two Towers has hit a "boring" point, and Katydid is determined to finish Little Women, even though, "The ending isn't as interesting as the beginning.  They're all older."

I had to confess to her that I had never finished Little Women either. 

And on the other hand, over the past couple weeks (and honestly, before I really wanted her to), Katydid has been perusing the stack of Advent/Christmas-related books I got for her, including The Anne of Green Gables Christmas Treasury and A Fairy-Tale Christmas: Creating Magical Celebrations Inspired by an Enchanted Castle.  Her favorite is A Fairy-Tale Christmas, I think.  She has loved fairy tales since she was very small.

Other than that...

We made cookies.  Once.  Snowball cookies.

The boys made cardboard spaceships from pizza boxes.  J. covered his in glitter.  Farmerboy got immensely frustrated trying to contrive a way to put landing gear on the bottom of his ship so that they would stay and hold the ship up.  N. cut himself with a pair of safety scissors while I was in the shower and bled much more than I thought possible from a cut given by "safety" scissors. (He's ok.)

Chipmunk lovingly covered many, many sheets of construction paper in lots and lots of glitter.  I am thinking of cutting out ornaments from his glittered paper.  It can't actually matter that any more glitter comes off considering the amount of glitter already swept into the corners of the room. 

Chipmunk really would do well at a Montessori school.  He is in a "washing hands" period right now.  The problem: I can't really stay in the bathroom with him as often as he wants to go in there and wash his hands.  Sometimes this can be disastrous, as today when he got bored with washing his hands and decided to wash a sink full of stuffed animals, dirty socks, Legos, and a walkie-talkie.  Later, he got bored washing his hands and stuffed a foam sword and a bunch of Legos in the toilet.  And no, I do not really let him in there without supervision.  His siblings just need to learn how to close the door.

More on the Chipmunk/Montessori theme... he also likes to watch me cook.  I must supply him with measuring cups and spoons of his own and something to pour and scoop.  Not thinking one night, I supplied him with sugar.  Sugar should not really be used in Montessori pouring and scooping activities.  I mean, if you thought you might try it sometime.

One thing we have not done lately is go outside.  I just haven't had the energy to get everybody bundled up and deal with the mud.  I did stuff everyone in snow clothes to go outside on Tuesday so they could play in what snow there was before it melted, and good grief, it took at least 45 minutes, if not more.  It's no wonder I'm ready to move to Florida by the end of January.

The big kids continue to be dedicated users of the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum, putting in at least an hour a day, and sometimes two or more.  I would like to do a review, but I can't say when that will happen.  I will say that I think, in spite of the price, that it's been worth it.  I don't know that I'd consider it for a child who is a self-starting writer, who will sit and write for hours on his or her own... but for a child who wants to write a book and can't figure out how to start or where to go from the beginning... it's excellent. 

Week 13: A nice November

We're having a relatively warm November, which means that last week we were outside a lot.  The question here is not if it will get cold soon, but which day.  Our forecast doesn't look bad, but usually the snow moves in around Thanksgiving and stays until... oh... April... May... a long time anyway.  So I think we can be forgiven for ditching some academics to take advantage of the occasional warm spell.  It's a really long winter.

Anyway, the little boys spent a lot of time this week digging.

In a Montessori classroom, I guess "digging" would count as practical life.  The boys actually dug their deep holes so they could be "cities".   I have had a hard time making "cities" into a formal project, but I think that's because it's really a game.  They don't really want too much interference from me, because this is a kid universe.  So they dug deep holes and tunnels all week, and built up "volcanoes" and "cliffs", and told each other how people got around their cities, whether they could use cars or not because there were or weren't roads.  

One day I was trying to keep the little boys occupied while we read in the morning and I suggested they might like to draw a picture of their cities.  Somehow this became drawing planets and imaginary solar systems.

N. started it, and soon all the other boys (including Gareth) were doing their own solar system pictures.

 (My camera lens seems to have a tiny scratch on it which sometimes shows up as a smudge.  I dropped the camera a while ago and smashed the viewfinder, too, so I may be in the market for a new camera soon.)

The solar system pictures aren't finished yet, because the boys wanted to add background and didn't have time.  I'm hoping to give them time to finish their pictures this week in the midst of all our Thanksgiving cleaning. Or maybe next week while I cook.  Farmerboy started painting a model solar system, too, but hasn't finished it yet.

When I said we "ditched" academics, I meant that we didn't spend long hours on them.  The big kids did still actually do some academic work.  The One Year Adventure Novel  kit arrived and Gareth and Katydid actually gave up playing outside to go inside and start working on it.  So far, so good.  Gareth also finished his Life of Fred: Fractions book and is preparing to get started on the second half of the pre-algebra sequence, Decimals.  Life of Fred hasn't magically cured his math frustration, but he did like it more than Saxon.  Life of Fred is much less rote learning than Saxon, and much more application.  He covered all the fraction topics included in Saxon's Algebra 1/2 , but in a much more informal, applied way.   My only quibble with the book is that there's not enough practice available on topics that students stumble on (say, unit analysis). 

And Katydid started working on long division.  As with most things mathematical, she is not doing this the traditional way.  Which I suppose only proves the maxim that in order to really understand a concept, you have to teach it.  I'm 37 years old and have gotten through the last 20 years breezing through long division problems with aboslutely no idea why the method works.  Katydid has to know the why's and wherefore's, though, before she gets a concept.  Which means I have had to do a little thinking.  In the future, I'll try and detail our process, just in case anyone else out there needs a non-traditional approach to long division.

Our history reading in the morning continued to go well this week.  We began Beowulf: the Warrior, which is one of the best boy read-alouds ever.  This re-telling is awesome.  It remains faithful to the poetry of the original, and also -- for the boys in your family -- it still retains the scene where Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm.  So there you go.

And just in case you want to envision me and all my kids snuggled on the couch while we read aloud...

 
  You probably shouldn't. (Make sure you look underneath the table.  Also, I am sure that even the kind people who said they didn't notice the clutter in the other photos will notice the clutter in these pictures.  Why does decluttering always make my house look so bad?)

Not enough picture books this week to make a nifty widget, so I'll just have to list them...

• Destination: Space

 Our Solar System (revised edition)

I Can Read About Planets

 Yankee Doodle (illustrated by Steven Kellogg, one of my kids' favorites)

 

 
 

Week 7: Busy Week

9/28 -10/4

Of course, the busy weekend could be coloring my perceptions of the whole week.  Swim lessons began (for Gareth, Katydid, and Farmerboy), violin lessons continued (for Katydid), there was a trip to the library, and the rain held off long enough for our Little Flowers and Blue Knights groups to meet at the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville.

 
The shrine is built on the site of the martyrdom of St. Isaac Jogues and his companions.  Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha was later born here, and baptized just a few miles away.  We had a picnic lunch with one of the priests and the kids played soccer in the field by the gift shop.  

Another important event this week...

The twins turned 4! Four years ago I could not imagine surviving to this point.  And yet -- here we are. :-) 

So those were the special occasions.  The boys had to unwrap presents early on Saturday morning as fast as they could, because Andy had to take Farmerboy to his swim lesson by 8 AM.  I don't think it bothered them much, though. ;-)

Other highlights of week 7...

The boys rediscovered stamping.  Here, Farmerboy is experimenting with thumprints.

 
Inspired by a project in The Usborne Complete Book of Art Ideas, Gareth cut up an eraser to make his own stamps.  He found that stamp ink worked better than the black tempera paint he started out with.

Gareth and Farmerboy also messed around with acrylics a bit...

Gareth's gas giants inside a nebula.  As he was painting, he realized he had very little black paint.  I provided him with a very cool book I bought off a bargain table several years ago, a collection of Hubble photos called The Universe.  Since some regions of space are full of colored dust, Gareth decided that might work for his background.  He tried to fill in some black in the gaps.  This was basically a painting to experiment with the qualities of acrylic.  Since I know very little about painting myself, I will need to do some research and experimentation to figure out how to extend his explorations.  I find that this is the area in which I often fall down.  I do a fair job at introducing the kids to novel materials and projects, but not such a good job at deepening skills.

Farmerboy was inspired by Gareth's painting, so he decided to paint his own planet:

The red circle is the planet, surrounded by purple atmosphere, streaming off into space.

Katydid and I fooled around with oil pastels this week.  I sat down one day when the boys were stamping to experiment with blending oil pastels.

I was just laying down patches of color to figure out how oil pastels work (on black paper).

Katydid drew a landscape instead:

On another day, she copied down this poem she wrote and illustrated it with oil pastels:

She and I also did some sketches for the monthly sketch project, but I'll put those in a separate post.

A Brief Summary of 1st grade academics:

I often forget to mention Farmerboy's academics, which are a little different (obviously) from the big kids'.  This is what we're using:

Modern Curriculum Press Phonics A , spending a longer time working on consonant sounds, as he has some trouble remembering them

Handwriting Without Tears , the 1st grade book

A mish-mash of reading materials, including silly sentences I write for him, word cards I cut out from cardstock he can use to make his own silly sentences (silly is a big draw here), and Sonlight's I Can Read It! series (Book 1).  I find the Sonlight stories a little weird in some places, but it's nice having them all together in a few books.

Mainly Montessori math materials... the 100 chain is what he has been interested in most since we began our school year in August.  He's learned to lay out the tens cards and count the beads one-to-one to 100.  He also counts on the 100 board, counts piano keys, counts lots of stuff spontaneously.  When we first began, he would often skip numbers, had trouble remembering the -9 to -ty (29, 30, etc) transition, but he's got them down now.  Last year I tried to use Singapore's kindergarten workbook with him, which was a disaster.  He learned to write his numbers, but that was about it.  (In my defense, I had to be able to do something with him while also rocking a baby for 2 hours every afternoon.)  This year, since we've switched back to Montessori, is going much, much better.  I've done presentations of the decimal system using base 10 blocks, and he is keen to be able to go on to the 1000 chain now that he can do the 100 chain.

 

A few words about the assortment of books here... on Sept. 29, the Feast of St. Michael and the Archangels, the kids reminisced about the year we made shields.  So Farmerboy got off on a bit of a knight tangent.  He made himself a cardboard and aluminum foil suit of armor, and shields for himself and his little brothers.  The boys then added their own coats of arms.  Why don't I have pictures?  I have no idea.

And then... the duck and chick books.  On and off for months, the twins have made it evident that they are fascinated with eggs.  They pretend to be flood monsters hatching out of their eggs (they lie on their backs and put pillows on their bellies for "eggs").  They pretend to be gigantic plum-plums hatching of their eggs. (Pip's invention.)  They pretend that they are chicks and I am the Mommy and they hatch out of their eggs and then go on the road. ("Chicks on the road!" they call just like we do when the chickens wander into the street.)  Their dearest wish is that we would get a rooster so instead of eating our eggs, we would let some hatch.  And then they became enamored of Daisy.  So I have been canvasing the library shelves for chick/duck/egg picture books.  I think I have found all of them by now, and will probably need to hunt through the rest of the library system.

(Ack!  How could I forget?  We also read Five Little Ducks about a million times this week!)

Read this week

Gareth: Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson; Fellowship of the Ring; St. Dominic and the Rosary (Vision Books); various Dig!, Muse, and Faces issues re: prehistory

Katydid: Little Women; Dealing with Dragons, Patricia Wrede; Louisa May Alcott issues of Cobblestone; Queen Victoria issues of Calliope; Dig! Neandertals

Read-alouds this week: The Hobbit (everyone); Farmerboy (little boys); Once Upon a Time Saints: Around the Year (appropriate pages)

Listened to this week:  Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, CDs 3&4 (mostly)

Watched this week: The Planets: Formation of the Solar System; Ken Burn's National Parks: Episode 3 (I have no idea why #2 was skipped)

 

   

 

Week 6, part 2: Everything Else

Aside from our trips into the woods, this week was another where we were "in recovery" (and more pertinently, I was still "in recovery", or maybe even more pertinently, the house was still "in recovery"), so I didn't have time or energy to plan a lot of interesting stuff.  Anyway, the kids mostly wanted to be outside, so that's what we did.  Unfortunately, when we were inside, the kids still watched quite a bit of TV. (Andy was out of town again, and it's my own fault that I often let them eat in front of the TV when it's just us.)  During our TV watching lulls, I usually try at least to make what they watch count somehow.  Most of the time they're just as happy to watch "educational" TV as anything else, but sometimes I have to admit it's just SpongeBob.  

We did try to get back into a groove with math, Latin, and grammar/language, but only managed three days.  Katydid had an eye appointment (not something I want to repeat, as the twins decided they needed to take over the entire office) and we take Fridays to do weekly chores and whatever we want in the afternoon.  Which happened this week to be banging on rocks with the new rock hammers from Home Science Tools.  Oh, and pulling apart an owl pellet:

Katydid took this picture when she was done.  Note all the gunk on the table.  Also, I believe that everyone has dinosaurs on the brain.

Moving right along...

Read this week:

Gareth: Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve (finished); Fellowship of the Ring; Snowball Earth, Gabrielle Walker; Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson... also caught him browsing an encyclopedia of flags and this morning he asked for Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek!

Katydid: Little Women, Warriors and Seekers books, Birds: Their Lives, Their Ways, Their World

Farmerboy: (listened to) You Wouldn't Want to Be a Roman Gladiator! , The Wright Brothers (a comic book), some Junie B. Jones books on audio, The Mouse and the Motorcycle (on audio, for the 100th time), Farmer Boy (read by Daddy)

 

 

Listened to this week:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (CDs 1 and 2)

Read alouds:

Life of Our Lord for Children, Marigold Hunt , The Hobbit

Watched this Week:

• Ghost in Your Genes (NOVA)
• Ken Burns: The National Parks (episode 1)
• some Military Channel documentary involving airplanes
• Padre Pio: Miracle Man
• Dinosaur Train and Magic School Bus episodes for the 6 and under crowd

(I'm not sure if I'll continue this format or not.  Is it just more work? Is it boring my readers to death?  Is it helpful in any fashion?  I suppose I'll be able to tell whether it's helpful or not when I go to write my quarterly reports in late October...)  

 

Week 5: Dinosaur TV

The cold we caught at the end of week 4 turned out to be a rotten one.  Katydid and Chipmunk both ended up at the doctor for ear infections.  Andy fortunately avoided most of the cold until after he returned from Toronto.  Gareth ended up doing all the chicken and turkey chores while he was gone, since Katydid ran a fever most of that time and couldn't help.  No one did very much math or any Latin, but they did read a lot and watched a lot of science TV.

Read this week:

Gareth: The High King, Lloyd Alexander; Dealing with Dragons, Patricia Wrede; a Warriors book or two; about a quarter to a third of Perelandra, CS Lewis.

Katydid: A few Warriors books; Harriet the Spy; Her Piano Sang: A Story About Clara Schumann

Farmerboy: (listened on audio) Ramona the Pest; Ramona Forever; A Cricket in Times Square; Frog and Toad Treasury; Daddy read: Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas; Troodon

Read to the little boys: a bunch of Curious George books; First, the Egg; Too Many Toys (David Shannon); Mammoths on the Move

(My throat hurt and then I lost my voice, so I couldn't read out loud very much.)

Me: The Day I Became an Autodidact, Kendall Hailey

Also listened to on audio: The Best School Year Ever, Barbara Robinson

Watched this week:

• The Planets: Weird Weather (Science Channel)
• Predator X (History International)
• Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History International)
• Arctic Dinosaurs (NOVA)
• a bunch of Dinosaur Trains (You know, even the ultra cool theme song gets old after a while, though.)

Sometimes I feel guilty for all the TV lately, but then Katydid walks into the kitchen holding a feather and says, "You know, feathers are like those fractals we saw on NOVA.  I looked at a feather under my microscope and it's like the big feather is made up of lots of little feathers that all look the same as the big one."

The theme of the week was paleontology:

As usual, the theme had little to do with me.  All the available viewing options happened to coincide with a renewed interest, and Farmerboy and the twins were happy to play paleontologists as they felt better.  They built their skeletons out of blocks and Duplos.

And tape, of course.  Farmerboy built this one. 

It was interesting because that same day I suggested a Think! challenge to him, but the challenge left him totally frustrated because he couldn't make his building fit the 12 x 12 x 12 parameters.  So he gave up and built a cardboard tent house instead, using as much tape as he wanted. 

This weekend, he decided to replicate the paleontology workroom he saw in one of our library books.

I took the pictures at night after he'd already put some of his stuff away -- most notably the digital clock that plays nature sounds -- but here you can see some of his work.  He studied some of our fossils with the magnifying lens (it used to be a real magnifying glass, but Chipmunk took care of that) and drew what he saw.  (The triangles are pictures of his fossil shark tooth.) 

He also hung up these post-it pad sheets on the bookcase to show all the things he thought were fossilized in one of our big fossils.  The area of New York where we live is famous for its Devonian era fossils.  While we have not found any trilobites or ammonites in the rocks in our yard (all theoretically possible), what we do find sometimes are fossilized slices of the sea floor.  Gareth and Farmerboy found a fantastic rock a couple of weeks ago when they were up in the woods attempting to make stone tools.  They split a rock open and found an enormous amount of small fossils, including what look to be fish bones.  Considering the interest of late, I placed an order with Home Science Tools for some rock picks (and safety goggles). 

Watching a show about the Devonian era while holding Devonian era fossils...

Katydid's watercolor dinosaurs.