If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you've probably noticed that my kids like earth science. This year Gareth has decided to make high school level earth science his focus, and as is often the case when one child becomes interested in a thing, the interest spills over into the rest of the family. A couple of weeks ago, his reading about plate tectonics (the theory of continental drift) sort of collided with the boys' love of shovels and their collective invented universe (I'm sure I have pictures on the blog of the "cities" they built in New York, but I can't find it now) and Minn of the Mississippi, and this is what happened:
The kids found a good place to dig in the backyard and dug a river system. Then they added mountains, mesas, and plateaus. They discussed and defined all the terms. Gareth explained continental uplift to the 7 and 5 year olds. The 3 year old was identified as the primary cause of erosion; one of the twins earned the nickname "Earthquake". Of course, forts were constructed, too, for empires that rose and fell.
In the midst of all the digging, Katydid decided to also dig a model Mississippi, using the maps in Minn of the Mississippi as a guide. It's still under construction.
My role in all of this?
I let Gareth read a book he wanted to read instead of one I planned for him to read.
I chose Minn of the Mississippi as a school book for the little boys and I read it to anyone who would listen.
This week was a "hither and thither" sort of week... heavy on the "thithering". Andy took off on All Saints Day so we could run moving-related errands; Katydid had her once a month choir practice for her once a month choir (which, unfortunately, she will not be able to attend because so many of us are sick); we spent Thursday visiting gyms to find a good preschool gymnastics program; and the little boys, pumped up on Halloween candy and irritated by a virus most of the week, did their share of "thithering", too. In other words -- it was a light week academically.
While we were driving around we listened to Hotel for Dogs, by Lois Duncan. We haven't seen the movie, but the book is good. I did my fair share of indentifying with Andi Walker, the 10 year old main character.
Because I apparently have SO MUCH to talk about for a "light week" (ahem), I'm going to break my usual weekly review post into two. This one will focus on Farmerboy and the twins, who are roughly 2nd grade and kindergartenish, respectively.
Art and Nature Study:
I forgot to mention last week that we started a family nature journal. It's not an original idea, but I can't remember where I first heard about it. Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to encourage the little boys in some nature drawing and possibly to encourage my 14 year old as well. (Katydid has her own nature journal in which she draws frequently.) Our first project was leaf rubbings:
(Sorry about the glare from the page protector.)
We're just using a 3-ring binder. Katydid and Farmerboy made a cover for it and then led all the little boys on a nature walk around the yard. They drew what they found and filed the pictures in the binder.
This week's "excursion" (hands-on science in the yard, basically) was a dig initiated by Farmerboy, who wanted to see if any rocks could be found at all. When it was so dry, the dirt was as hard as rock, but with our rain this week, it softened enough to take a shovel. Unfortunately, no rocks were discovered, but a long, rotting board was, and also signs that a raccoon has taken up residence in the barn. The raccoon will have to be evicted somehow; one of our jobs this winter is to convert one of the big stalls on the outside of the barn into a chicken coop. Raccoons are bad for chickens.
By Sunday afternoon, the trench had become an entire river system, complete with tributaries, mountains, volcanoes, bluffs, forts, and civilizations. Chipmunk and Pop had apparently been assigned the titles of "Erosion."
Pip worked hard coloring some bird notebooking pages. He has become very meticulous about his nature coloring pages, prefering to work from actual photos in order to get the colors right. In order to color his blue hen chicken (the state bird of Delaware), we had to round up Storey's Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds, which has excellent color photos of all the breeds it references. (And, really, if you are at all interested in raising poultry, you need this book. Read it alongside the poultry catalogs, which is what we're doing right now.)
Math
Farmerboy and the twins have also been learning to tell time for a while now. Farmerboy started out last spring with a few pages in Seton's Math 1 for Young Catholics, but math workbooks usually give telling time and the concepts behind it short shrift. Time (like most mathematical concepts) is a concept best dealt with in a practical, hands-on manner anyway, but the kids do like practicing their time-telling skills on paper. This is where typical math workbooks can become frustrating, because once you've done a page or two of clockfaces, you've exhausted the workbook's fund of time-telling practice. So this is what we do:
Montessori clock cards : These are not the same cards I have, I don't think, because I printed mine from somewhere I can't remember back when Katydid was learning to tell time. But Lori's materials are top-notch, and I'm fairly certain this set is more comprehensive than the one I have been using. The twins are working on telling time to the hour; Farmerboy is struggling a little bit remembering :15 and :45, but he's getting there.
Judy Clock: Again, the teaching clock(s) I actually own are not the same. I bought them (I bought two of them, one for Gareth and one for Katydid, back when there were only two kids to buy for) at an amazing teacher supply/educational bookstore we used to frequent when we lived in the St. Louis area. (The best thing about the store was that it had a large play area in the back.) Our clocks are not as fancy, but I actually like them better because they have the corresponding minutes printed beside the big numbers to help kids learn to tell time in 5 minute intervals. The boys use these a lot, for fun. They sit on the couch turning the hands and say, "It's 7 o'clock! It's 3 o'clock in the morning! It's 12 o'clock now!"
Clock Stamps: The boys are not as keen on these as Katydid was, but they do use them occasionally.
Books: Well, you knew there had to be books, right? Two of our favorites: Telling Time with Big Mama Cat and Little Rabbits' First Time Book (Little Rabbit Books). Mama Cat has been read with so much enthusiasm over the years that the hands on the clock were torn off, so it is in need of being replaced. Little Rabbits is one of Chipmunk's favorite books at the moment. A book I found at the library this week that shows some promise is All in One Hour. It's illustrated with colorful cut-paper collages and digital clocks timing a chain of events set off by a cat chasing a mouse in the early morning. (Another book of which I have fond memories is Gail Gibbons' Clocks and how they go, which I read over and over and over and OVER to Gareth when he was about 4 years old.)
Another opportunity for time-telling practice is letting me know when it's 4:00 and time for computer/Wii time. ;-)
Farmerboy is also working on adding and subtracting two digit numbers in Seton's Math 2 for Catholics. This is work he enjoys doing, but he gets horribly frustrated if anyone talks while he's doing it. Finding him quiet corners in which to work has been a challenge. Also, this is another instance where kids really need some concrete, hands-on work, but our base 10 blocks were all packed up. I finally managed to unpack them this weekend and am hoping to introduce Farmerboy to "trading up" (and hopefully the snake game, too).
And the twins spent a few hours on Sunday morning before Mass inventing their own games using Rummy Roots card decks and other board games.
Reading
Because Farmerboy was sick much of the week (including a three day headache), he didn't do too much reading, which is more difficult for him than math. But he did read most of a picture book to me, Drat That Fat Cat!, which I found at the library. This is a really excellent book for young readers -- SO much more intelligent and funny than most phonetic readers, and with a vocabulary mostly based on short vowel words. I had to interject some help here and there (eg. as with "This is an outrage!"), but Farmerboy could read a lot of it on his own. I think that struggling readers often think they are doomed to read short, meaningless books about "nags", "cats", and "hams" for a long time, so I was happy to be able to provide Farmerboy with something different. Glasses certainly improved his reading, but we are still going slowly. This week has been the first I have heard him try to read words in the books HE likes to look at, or on the closed captioning on the TV.
Pip and Pop are anxious to try out their fledgeling reading skills, too, and are just at the "starting to blend" stage. Pip in particular demands long lessons using Phonics Pathways, and this week I helped him along through his first book: a short K-4 phonetic text from Abeka I have had sitting in our container of readers (I keep sets of early phonics readers each to their own ziploc bag in a tall Rubbermaid container) for... a really long time. Gareth and Katydid never picked them up, but they seem to be just right for the twins at this stage.
Spring has arrived in upstate New York. Beautiful temperatures and only one day of rain, so we took most of our learning outside.
Maybe it doesn't count as "learning", but the little boys are a lot happier that they can spend most of the day outside!
Farmerboy did a lot of practical work this week. He informed his father that he wanted to practice driving nails, so Andy gave him a hammer and told him to pound all the loose nails popping up in the deck. (Katydid joined him.) He also helped Andy weed flower beds and edge one of them with a bunch of big rocks.
Rocks and fossils, in fact, have made a comeback in terms of interest -- largely because Farmerboy decided that he needed a stone wall to hide behind when he and Gareth play war.
Katydid was taken with the idea of a stone wall, too, so she helped.
They cleaned the rocks out of the asparagus bed. (Completely off the subject here, but my asparagus is dying and I don't know why. Even though we are moving away, this bugs me.)
After they got to a certain point on the wall, Katydid decided she wanted to build her own house, so she went up on top of the field and raided the rubble pile the former owners built to block snowmobiles from coming across their (our) land. This pile is full of bricks, which she used to build the foundation of a little house. When told of this project, I said, "Oh, like Roxaboxen."
Then they decided to build a village.
Except that took too long (apparently). And Farmerboy wasn't satisfied with the state of his stone wall, which wasn't very stable due to the irregularities of the rocks they'd use. He and Katydid decided to use some more of the bricks they'd found in the woods instead of rocks.
(The sticks set in the slits in the wall are guns, I think. This wall is meant to be defensive.)
The current problem (as told me by Farmerboy) is that the wall is too low, so I'm curious to see how much interest Farmerboy will have in working on that problem this week.
Why do I consider stone wall-building "school" for my 1st grader? Well... in addition to providing experience in team work, perseverance, problem solving, and spatial skills... I think of something that Maria Montessori said. I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the quote right in front of me, but the general idea is this: "Why do we call it 'work' when we see a man building a brick wall, but 'play' when it is a little man building a wall with tiny bricks?"
In moving all those rocks, Farmerboy revived his interest in fossils as well. He got out his rock hammer and safety goggles and spent a few afternoons in the garden, breaking up rocks.
And we talked about erosion. Often. Farmerboy kept encountering odd holes in rocks and making theories about what caused them. (Maybe water. Or maybe sea worms.)
I picked up a few stone wall-related books to use next week (mostly on the basis of those Publisher's Weekly blurbs on amazon):
But in retrospect, I think that maybe I should have picked up more books on erosion.
The little boys sometimes helped with the stone wall, but they were mostly more interested in collecting tent caterpillars and stag beetles and observing all the ants underneath the rocks Katydid and Farmerboy flipped over and climbing trees.
And also building "huts".
But birds remained somewhat interesting to the rest of the boys, mostly because...
We have baby birds! The chickadee's eggs hatched.
And the elusive Baltimore Oriole ran Katydid a merry chase trying to get a picture.
She did finally confirm a sighting, though.
But she forgot the camera (and her binoculars) when she and Andy went on the annual Early Morning Bird Walk at the arboretum. When they came home, they immediately downloaded iBird, which one of the other birders on the walk had apparently demonstrated. Katydid has been fooling around with it all weekend.
Where was Gareth during all of this?
Reading Sword of Clontarf mostly. But he did spend quite a while with his new Ancient Greek textbooks on Friday afternoon, as soon as they arrived. He couldn't wait until next school year.
We finished up the week with a May Procession at the Little Sisters of the Poor, where Katydid was made an official Marian Aide volunteer. I have pictures... I think... but since the camera is still out in the car, it will have to be a separate post. Katydid was very happy to receive her apron and T-shirt, and the boys were glad to get refreshments. The nuns forced them to cake, brownies, AND ice cream, so a good time was had by all.
It was the sort of week that goes by without being captured on film. Or pixels.
We started off with a trip to the doctor for Farmerboy, who was diagnosed with a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics. In the middle of the week, I had a doctor's appointment. Then on Friday it was back to the pediatrician for Katydid and Pip, after a loooong night of coughing. More antibiotics. I was sick -- not too sick, but sick -- for most of the week, too. But it has meant a lot of draaaaging in the mornings. And a bit of fretting, since I was just scheduled for my C-section: June 15. I am only fretting because I have to meet the requirements for New York state's homeschooling laws, which require me to document 180 days/900 hours (990 for Gareth) and turn in quarterly reports on everyone and (because we aren't testing this year) yearly evaluations, too. I make this all harder on myself by actually providing a narrative. Quarterly reports are about 2 pages long; yearly evaluations about 3. I could have given the kids standardized tests this year, but that takes so much time out of our normal routine (going through the test prep book, taking a week out to do the testing...) that we only do it when we have to.
However, in between and around (and at) doctor's visits, most of us managed to get a few (unphotographed) things done. We...
Took a brief walk with Daddy after dinner on the one warm evening of the week, into the field and along the treeline to check on trees downed by the snow this past winter. We noted that the horsetails seem to be invading the top corner of the field, that the pin cherries were still blooming a little, and that the bee tree was quiet... hopefully because it was dusk. The kids and Andy did a little running; I just kind of lumbered along behind. (***Note here: if you're curious about finding bee trees, there's an excellent description of "bee lining" in Bernd Heinrich's The Snoring Bird, which is a terrific book for all sorts of reasons... but unfortunately not the sort you'd probably assign your high schooler, due to all the complicated relationships Heinrich's father is constantly getting into. You can read the description aloud, though, which is what I did as we were driving home from Tennessee this year. If you'd like a simpler, picture book description of finding bee trees... Patricia Polacco's The Bee Tree is one of our favorites.)
Listened to the song of a Baltimore Oriole. Read an old I Can Read! book about Baltimore Orioles the doctor's office conveniently put in their waiting room for us.
Tried to watch the History Channel's new series America: The Story of US, which we have DVRed. The problem is that the episodes the boys are most interested in -- the Civil War episode, for example -- are quite graphic for prime time TV... in my opinion anyway. It was a good thing we had the episodes DVRed so we could fast forward through the gorier parts, but the younger boys were not happy at having to miss the battle scenes.
Did a little Montessori. A very little Montessori. Chipmunk retrieved the knobbed cylinders from my rotation closet (which also holds sheets) and started working on them again. He has also been a fiend with a pair of tongs lately, using them to open doors, pinch his brothers, pick up toys, etc. I tried to channel that energy into a pom-pom and ice cube tray activity, but that only kept him happy for about 5 or 10 minutes. Then it was back to using the tongs to turn door knobs. (He also figured out how to open the gate latch on our fenced-in area of the backyard. Not a good thing.)
Sold some eggs. (Gareth and Katydid's new business.)
Watched some John Wayne movies. Does that count as school?
Did a little math. Gareth wrestled with functions. Farmerboy worked on telling time.
Used the markers. Sometimes even on paper!!
Decided that Gareth will be adding Greek to his schedule next year using the textbook Athenaze.
Built tractors out of Legos.
Packed a few boxes.
As for me, I dug Women with ADD out of my "to be read" stack and started reading it again. I had, um, lost it actually (I should probably insert a blush here at the irony) when I started reading it before we left on our trip to Tennessee. I had been planning on reading it in the van. Anyway, it's been sitting on my nightstand for a while, but last week was definitely the time to pick it up again as much of the world which I have responsibility for managing and organizing seemed to be growing ugly people-eating tentacles at an alarming rate. Anyway, I am finding the book quite helpful and when I finish it I do hope to post a review. If the tentacles will behave, of course.
The chickadee nest in our bluebird box, with eggs (photo by Katydid)
I had nothing to do with the "theme" of this week. It was a force of nature. Farmerboy, Pip, and Pop all suddenly decided that birds were fascinating and wanted to tag along on all Katydid's nature walks, keep their own nature journals, listen to bird call CDs, and color bird notebook pages.
Pip's cardinal page
So of course I was happy to oblige.
A chipping sparrow that the kids saw on one of their walks (photo by Katydid)
The kids also took a "night" nature walk (really, dusk) along the edge of the treeline in the field to listen for night birds. Pip and Pop started out with Katydid and Farmerboy, but soon decided that it was "too scary" and came home for ice cream. Katydid and Farmerboy came in later and reported that the only night bird they'd heard was a screech owl, but that was apparently exciting enough.
Other birds Katydid listed as "heard but not seen" this week: ovenbird and American woodcock (very exciting).
One morning a bird hit the dining room window while I was eating breakfast. This in itself is not an odd occurrence -- even though I put things up in the window to make it look less like a fly-through. But when I got up to see if the bird was all right, I saw a bird I'd never seen before.
Yes, that's a Duplo brick someone left outside on the patio. Tiny, tiny little bird. The little boys all drew it for their nature journals, then colored a coloring page of the bird.
The same day we read the section about Baltimore Orioles from The Handbook of Nature Study because...
... the crabapples and wild apple trees are blooming. (Photo by Katydid) The orioles always come back when the apple trees bloom. Katydid informs me that she has heard an oriole, but we haven't seen one yet.
My personal favorite part about the crabapple in bloom (apart from the fragrance, which is phenomenal) is standing beneath it and listening to the steady hum of honeybees working the blossoms overhead.
Wild apple blossoms in the woods (Photo by Katydid)
We did a little math this week, and we read more of Our Island Story, and Gareth continued to read 1066: The Year of the Conquest instead of being interested in birds, and Katydid worked on about three different books that she's writing, and I sorted through all my writing and was pleasantly surprised to find that even though I have produced very little over the past five years, some of it is Not Too Bad, and by the weekend, all the kids had developed another cold with a wicked cough, and Sunday morning we woke up to find a dusting of snow on the ground when we had spent all our time before thinking about birds and eggs and flowers.
But mostly this week was about spring time. And our spring time girl...
This Saturday was a little different because Andy was still out of town and didn't get home until late that night. But on the other hand it was fairly typical in that the line between "school" and "life" gets blurred even on the weekend.
This is my third attempt to write this post (my first two attempts were eaten by Typepad), so it's going to be a little less detailed than some of the other posts.
Basically:
With swim lessons done for the season, our Saturdays are a lot less hectic. This morning we did our normal chores and then headed outside to enjoy the beautiful WARM weather for a while before we left for Katydid's violin lesson. We noted that the crabapple trees had burst into bloom overnight:
And that the yard was now full of dandelions, which the boys enjoyed decapitating (way too much):
Then we brought Katydid to her violin lesson. She's practicing for her recital at the beginning of June, and has chosen to play two hymns from her traditional Catholic hymnal. While she is at her lesson, the boys and I run a couple of quick errands and then we go through the McDonald's drive-thru for lunch.
Back home, we pile out of the van and spend a couple more hours outside. Katydid immediately grabs her nature journal, binoculars, and the camera. The little boys alternately climb around in the woods looking for fortresses and follow Katydid on her nature observations.
One of the first things she does is to check out the bluebird boxes, because the boys and I discovered nesting materials in both of them the other day. It turns out that a chickadee is using at least one of them.
(Note: as of a few days later, she counted six tiny eggs in this nest.)
Later on she takes the camera out to the outer garage and manages an extreme close-up of the Eastern Phoebe nest in the rafters:
Because the camera was so close, the eggs look more like our bantam chicken eggs, so at first we were all a little confused. But then Katydid explained how close this shot was, and we realized that the eggs look a lot larger in the photo than they are in real life.
Considering that we started the week off with rain and sleet, we are more than happy to spend as much time outside as we possibly can. I make an easy puff pancake for a late dinner, and we somehow escape Andy's trip without our own trip to the ER... although the evening did not pass by without a big wagon accident, in which a 13 year old learned that he is capable of pulling a kid's wagon far faster than is probably good for 4 year olds, even if they really like it.
We finish up the day by all crowding onto the couch to watch Doctor Who, because well -- daleks! Winston Churchill! Spitfires attacking space ships! What could be cooler, I ask you?
And now that you know we are a family of TOTAL geeks, our week in the life is done.
My editor is loading correctly today, so I figured I had better hurry up and post some pictures while I had the chance. These pictures are from a nature walk Katydid and Farmerboy took back in January.
Rabbit tracks...
Squirrel nest? Or an old bird nest? Topped with a dollop of snow like whipped cream.
Old woodpecker holes...
New woodpecker holes... created by pilleated woodpeckers. (We've sighted at least 3.)
Proof that the holes were quite new.
Deer damage or porcupine damage? It looks a bit too serious for deer to me.
I can't tell if this is a mouse hole in the snow or a place where rabbits have been digging for food.
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...
Katydid and Gareth were sick for at least part of week 12. When Katydid first came down with whatever it was, it sure seemed like it was flu because it had all the classic "flu" symptoms: chills, sudden onset, fever, sore throat, upset stomach, body aches. But it didn't spread to any of the little boys, really (although Farmerboy took a nap every afternoon that week.). So I have no idea what it was. The big kids all had their seasonal flu shots and the little boys didn't, so it seems odd that the kids who got flu shots would come down with a flu and and the kids who got no shots would avoid it. H1N1 was aboslutely rampant in our area that week, bad enough that several schools were closed, but... who knows. It was a mystery virus.
Anyway, because the big kids were sick, the week was mainly focused on little kids. We did manage to finally finish The Hobbit, and to start reading Our Island Story and The Story of Europe, both by H.E. Marshall. It felt good to get back to some history again. We're continuing to read A Life of Our Lord for Children by Marigold Hunt. This is the third book we've read by this author (The First Christians: The Acts of the Apostles for Children and St. Patrick's Summer: A Children's Adventure Catechism are the others) and the kids have enjoyed them all. More than that, they retain a lot from those books, some pretty deep concepts.
I'm afraid that we haven't done much that's special to mark any feast days lately, though... We make a point of praying for the Poor Souls every day, which I hope is enough.
Monday
The twins did a lot of "matching cards". I actually had to invent some on the spur of the moment, because they would go through a set and demand more. This is a Bug Bingo game. Technically, it's supposed to be played like bingo, but for our purposes, I gave them the boards and let them match the cards to the pictures on the boards.
Chipmunk liked searching for O's in the Alphabet Zoop cards. (He'd also already drawn on himself that morning, as you can see by the green on his cheek.)
In the afternoon we headed outside to play on the logs:
Which are useful as forts, ships, and also sometimes nature study...
Tuesday:
Tuesday morning was devoted to all things dinosaur. I got down a puzzle and the boys argued cooperated to put it together. I also printed out some matching cards and coloring sheets from this Homeschool Share dinosaur unit.
In the afternoon, the boys shifted gears and concentrated on coloring King Arthur paper dolls from Paper Dali. (HT: Jessica, who shared the Paper Dali link in her Google Shared Items.)
Farmerboy has been on a King Arthur kick lately, thanks to Jim Weiss, and was excited when we encountered Merlin, Uther Pendragon, and Arthur in Our Island Story (in Week 13).
Katydid colored many saint paper dolls, but she immediately whisked them off to her room so I don't have any pictures.
Tuesday also happened to be Daddy's birthday, which he celebrated by making a business day trip and getting home late to eat cheesecake.
Wednesday:
Daddy celebrated the day after his birthday by making a trip to Boston. The boys demanded American Revolution paper dolls. They also complained that they couldn't build really good castles because there weren't enough wall blocks for all 4 of them to use at the same time. I took a deep breath and offered to go down to the basement and bring up all the blocks I had taken away a few months ago because they were not being picked up in a -- shall we say -- timely and cheerful fashion. We spent the morning sorting and building with the "new" blocks:
That's what it looked like on Wednesday of last week. By Friday night, all the "new" blocks had been put up in a closet out of reach again, because that was the deal: If I bring these blocks out, you have to pick them up when you're told to, or I will have to put them away again. Oh, yes, Mommy, we'll pick them up, can we pleeeeese play with the blocks? Unfortunately, there was a breach of contract, proving yet again that home is not like school. Many of the Reggio books you read have fantastic block creations and/or block areas, or at the very least inform you that you are to include lots of different kinds of blocks and other materials for children to build and dramatize with. Personally, I agree. It is hard to build big castles if someone has used all the wall blocks. But at home with a large family, reality must be negotiated. I don't have time to pick up millions of blocks every day, and I shouldn't have to. (The two year old is actually far better at picking up than his brothers.) So at some point the environment must be used to teach responsibility, respect, and obedience instead of science, math, or anything else. In my experience anyway.
I do hope I can try again with the blocks, though, because I really like some of them, and so do the boys.
Thursday
Thursday we went outside. We had been stuck inside for two days, which is not good for active young boys. (Can you hear my fear of winter?) Anyway, it was a bit chilly -- temperatures down around 40 -- so we put on our bigger coats and headed outside while the nearly-recovered big kids stayed inside where it was warm and read books.
Did you notice N's new glasses in the block picture? It turns out his eyesight is really bad, and that's the reason he has always seemed so clumsy (which is why we took him to our developmental optometrist at just barely 4 years old.) Now, his brother, J., has never seemed to trip as much or run into things as much, so I didn't schedule a screening for him. When N. got his glasses, J. was most upset. He therefore decided that he would wear his sunglasses just like N. wore his real glasses. So he put them on in the morning and took them off at night. I tried to comfort him by telling him that he does have an eye appointment scheduled in January, but of course that might as well be twenty years from now if you're 4.
(And, yes, we do still think they're identical. How identical is identical often depends on conditions for each in the womb, and N had to deal with an improperly implanted cord while J did not.)
Anyway, while we were out, we decided to take a short nature walk in the field, which was cut short by J being accidentally hit in the eye by Farmerboy. On our way back we stopped near the house to investigate the milkweed seeds by the deck. (J was feeling better by then.)
The boys called the seeds "parachute guys" and brought some inside to play with.
Friday
Friday is extra chore day, so mostly we clean. But in the morning, the boys set up some domino rallies...
That's N, who should have his glasses on. Confusing, I know. And actually, Friday morning went kind of like this:
8:30 AM -- the little boys have already watched Curious George, a Dinosaur Train episode about poop, been banned from playing monkeys (an old rule) and orangutans (a new rule), searched through a stack of old copies of Ranger Rick and Your Big Backyard to find animals they are allowed to play ("We could play worms, Mommy!"), requested a stack of books about "jungles", moved on to dinosaur books, asked if I could go downstairs to find the dominoes and what about "that number matching game?" (Triominos), set up domino rallies, argued about who has more dominoes, and received instruction in both counting and social skills. Can I take my shower now, please?
I was going to do a 7 Quick Takes post, but never got the chance.
So that was our week, with the exception of the picture books, of course...
, which has excellent color photos of all the breeds it references. (And, really, if you are at all interested in raising poultry, you need this book. Read it alongside the poultry catalogs, which is what we're doing right now.)
: Again, the teaching clock(s) I actually own are not the same. I bought them (I bought two of them, one for Gareth and one for Katydid, back when there were only two kids to buy for) at an 
and 
. Mama Cat has been read with so much enthusiasm over the years that the hands on the clock were torn off, so it is in need of being replaced. Little Rabbits is one of Chipmunk's favorite books at the moment. A book I found at the library this week that shows some promise is 
. It's illustrated with colorful cut-paper collages and digital clocks timing a chain of events set off by a cat chasing a mouse in the early morning. (Another book of which I have fond memories is Gail Gibbons' 
, which I read over and over and over and OVER to Gareth when he was about 4 years old.)
, which I found at the library. This is a really excellent book for young readers -- SO much more intelligent and funny than most phonetic readers, and with a vocabulary mostly based on short vowel words. I had to interject some help here and there (eg. as with "This is an outrage!"), but Farmerboy could read a lot of it on his own. I think that struggling readers often think they are doomed to read short, meaningless books about "nags", "cats", and "hams" for a long time, so I was happy to be able to provide Farmerboy with something different. Glasses certainly improved his reading, but we are still going slowly. This week has been the first I have heard him try to read words in the books HE likes to look at, or on the closed captioning on the TV.
." 
mostly. But he did spend quite a while with his new Ancient Greek textbooks on Friday afternoon, as soon as they arrived. He couldn't wait until next school year.
(illustrated by Steven Kellogg, one of my kids' favorites)
by Marigold Hunt. This is the third book we've read by this author (
and 
are the others) and the kids have enjoyed them all. More than that, they retain a lot from those books, some pretty deep concepts.