Three Plus Two

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...

 

 

Learning with Lego

I've been having a hard time getting enthused about homeschooling lately, so I decided it was time to not worry so much about "making progress" and to do something fun instead.

It's the flag of Denmark!

Cue: this Lego unit/lapbook, which I first learned about on the Aussie Pumpkin Patch blog last fall.  I'd tucked the idea away in the back of my mind, and these dreary, sick January days seemed like a good time to present it to my Lego-obsessed 7 year old.  Farmerboy is not an independent reader so he really couldn't do this unit independently, and he didn't have much interest in making a lapbook, but we had fun watching all the videos and doing the "building challenges".  Gareth and Katydid joined in on occasion, too.

We've only gone through the first 3 days because Pip had to make an unscheduled visit to minor medical on Thursday with an infected finger.  Farmerboy is looking forward to doing more learning with Lego this week... so much so that I'm afraid I'm going to have to come up with my own building challenges for many more days!

Farmerboy's taxi-truck from Day One... we couldn't find the taxi instructions, so Farmerboy made up his own.

The ship from Day 2... It's a speedboat.  His finger is hiding the prop he added to the back.

 
Katydid's mosaic from Day 3... a treasure chest.

We also used the nice spread on Lego manufacture in the book See How It's Made and found a good article about the science of how Lego works (among other things), which I read aloud to everyone.

Farmerboy has now added "Professional Lego Builder" to "Paleontologist" when asked what he wants to be when he grows up.  Next I think he will probably answer, "Nathan Sawaya".

 

 

Not quite back to work

Snow days (a whole 3 or 4 inches!) and the flu are making it hard to get "back to work".  Snow is much prettier than the flu, so here are some idyllic pictures of kids in the snow.  Good thing you can't see the jumble of boxes we had to search through to find boots, gloves, and snowpants.

It was just a matter of time...

before the telescope...

... turned into a snow cannon.

I should have seen that coming, I know.

The swing set was a present from Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas and has seen heavy use.  Also seeing heavy use...

No explanation necessary, I think.

I was going to list all the schooly stuff we *are* easing into, but that will have to wait for another day... a day when the three year old naps, the baby isn't teething, the husband is well, and dinner is delivered in a cardboard box maybe. ;-)

 

Halloween

Hope your Halloween was happy, too!

Trick or Treat!

It was a really miserable night...

... but our intrepid trick or treaters went out anyway.

(I was going to take a picture of the twins with their masks off and caption it, "Attack of the Clones."  But they stuck those masks on and ran outside far too quickly.

Gareth dressed as a ranger from the The Ranger's Apprentice series.

Katydid was Queen Victoria.  Which is how you know that a curriculum works.

The kids were pretty wet when they came home.  So it was all into dry clothes and onto the couch for the traditional macaroni and cheese Halloween dinner and a movie (or a Penguins of Madagascar episode, as the case may be.)

 
Chipmunk stayed home with me and ate Reese's Cups and watched John Deere videos.

I asked him if he was a cutie pie, and he said, "No -- a punkin pie!"

  
 
 

Week 1

Before I forget what we did in week 1 ... here's a run-down, heavy on the little guys.

Also...

• Ice Cube Necklaces

Water and Weather:

Pop went through a phase where he would come in from playing outside every night and ask to check the weather for tomorrow.  The boys also watched a show about the effects of hurricanes: what hurricane force winds would do to a mobile home, how water could push a car off the road and wash it away, etc.  Ever since we watched the NOVA Flood! back in the spring, the twins have been fascinated by floods.  They build floods (using pillows and blankets) and pretend they are "flood monsters" who hatch out of "eggs" (they cover themselves with their pillows.)  So I decided to start out with a relaxed focus on water and weather.

 I made a weather chart for our first week.  Farmerboy enjoyed filling it in, but we forgot about it a few times.  I'll have to make another chart and get going again.

Week 1 was hot, so the boys played in the hose quite a bit.  Playing in the hose involved flooding certain areas of yard and driveway, and doing experiments with matchbox cars and other objects, to see how much water force was needed to push which toys.  I think Farmerboy did a few float-and-sink experiments on his own as well.

And we read a few books:

• Weather Words and What They Mean
• The Storm Book
• The Magic School Bus Inside A Hurricane

Pip and Pop drew pictures of thunderstorms, but for some reason I don't seem to have any photos.  Hmmm.  Could have sworn I took some pictures of their pictures...

Art:

Quite a bit of "random" and not so random art in the house during week 1.  Over the weekend prior to our first day of school, I chanced upon a Jo-Anne's while we were out looking for clothes for Andy.  I rarely get out to actual craft stores, so I jumped at the chance.  Then I remembered why I don't usually go to craft stores; they make small children nuts.  Anyway, I stocked up on a few supplies: clay, stickers, fabric for Katydid, wooden stuff to paint...

Pip loves to paint and will do it for long periods of time.

He's using a foam paint I bought a long, long time ago from Discount School Supply.  I got it out for Chipmunk to smush around with his hands.  The paint itself is like shaving cream. I'm not sure Discount School Supply carries it anymore.

Katydid used tempera paints to paint a crucifix.

It was kind of funny; as soon as I took all of the containers of dead tent caterpillar moths and dirt that once housed earthworms out of our science/nature area and cleaned it up, Pip immediately brought in an orange bucket full of dirt and we needed a place to dry treasure chests and crosses.  Oh well.  It exists to be used, right?

In the category of "themed" art, Katydid drew a Victorian girl to accompany her Sunflower Basket...

And Gareth, inspired by the book Swords: An Artist's Devotion, began a series of pencil sketches of swords, which he continues to work on.  (He's experimenting with shading these days.)

We also got out the new clay.

 

And had baths.

The theme of the day seemed to be "farm animals".  Pip and I made that cow in the center.   Pip gets very frustrated when he can't make his hands and materials cooperate with the vision in his head.  It's my job to provide him with direct instruction on how to use the materials, show him how to use the materials, and to be very, very patient.  He really wanted to make a cow, but he couldn't get the "foot" to stick onto the leg he'd made.  So I showed him how to rough up the clay and use slip to stick the parts together.  Then he was still upset so I had him guide me through the process of making the cow.  After we were done, he happily made a snake on his own, using the techniques I'd shown him to attach a head to a body.

(These are my new shelves, by the way.  I originally wanted them for paint, but they seem to have begun holding in-progress work by default.)

ABCs and 123s?

Well, a bit.  I was going to try to start doing some of Farmerboy's academic work with him in the morning so that the twins could sit in, too.  The problem: keeping the twins involved in the same activity for more than five minutes, and keeping Chipmunk from eating the tips off all the markers.  So Farmerboy is once again doing phonics and math in the afternoon. 

Here are a few of the Montessori-ish activities (homemade) the 3 and 6 year olds did this week:

I made up some pattern/matching cards using stickers. (I originally say this activity a long time ago on one of Katherine's blogs.) The boys did all the fish and butterfly cards --although the twins seem to have trouble with the idea of "matching" when their natural inclination is to make all sorts of interesting sticker pictures instead.  I have to admit that I'd probably rather make sticker pictures, too, but Farmerboy liked making the patterns and whizzed through the harder ones that I'd made for him.

Pop also did a bunch of scissors exercises, and Pip worked hard on coloring ladybugs and bees in the Handwriting Without Tears preschool workbook which I dug out of the basement for him.  They both want to do "math" like the big kids, complete with books, so I will have to see what I can do.

Ice Cube Necklaces

Yesterday was a tough day, and hot.  But there was a bright spot.  A cool spot?  The little boys and I made ice cube necklaces. 

I got the idea from More Mudpies to Magnets: Science for Young Children.  This is a book I have thought about buying for years.  This year I have a bunch (as in 3) experimentally oriented young children, so I bought the book. 

Ice cube necklaces are super simple.  All you need are a couple of ice cube trays, yarn or string, and a collection of smallish objects that will fit in each cube.  I took the boys on a walk around the yard and garden, and they collected flowers, leaves, sticks, rocks, and a small piece of sidewalk chalk.  I held the ice cube trays, and the boys just put their objects in wherever they wanted.  We insured that one row did not hold rocks or other small chokable objects so that Chipmunk could have a necklace, too, and the boys were warned repeatedly that they weren't to eat these ice cubes since we weren't using food to make them.  (Actually we did use some edibles -- dandelion leaves, rose petals, lemon balm -- but exceptions are too complicated.)

After you fill the trays with objects and water, lay strands of yarn or string across each row of cubes, making sure that the yarn dips down into the water in each cube.  Here's what our trays looked like when I put them in the freezer:

As you can see the most difficult part was ensuring that the yarn stay in the water.  It kept bobbing up and needed a little re-arranging.

The twins were not sure what would happen.  Farmerboy knew the cubes would freeze, but he didn't know how long it would take, so he kept checking until the big kids went outside to play in the hose.  It actually took about 4 hours for them to freeze.

The boys melted the ice in their hands, banged it on the deck to chip it into pieces, refroze parts of it, and tried to wear it... but it was too cold!  We talked about solids and liquids and states of matter, and how you could freeze grapes into ice cubes and then you could actually eat your necklace.  Later that night we read What Is the World Made Of? All About Solids, Liquids, and Gases (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science, Stage 2) and looked through more experiment books.

Simple. Fun. Cold. A satisfying bit of summer science. 

Our summer in pictures

Today will be our first day of school (i.e., doing math again).  The kids are ready to start again, I think, although I'm not.  I'm still trying to reorganize books, art supplies, and Montessori materials.  This past week and next week are also supposed to be the warmest of the summer -- highs in the mid-80s, which does get a bit warm when there's no air conditioning.  Anyway, the point is: by now I've learned that nothing will ever be perfect and it's better to be flexible and just start when you can. This is actually  the very first time ever that we've ever started a new school year on the day I planned to start it. As it is, we'll be easing into morning work... and continuing with the daily afternoon hours of playing in the hose.  These warm days won't last long.

I imagine Grandma will want to see some pictures before the maples change entirely.

  

Nature walks around the yard, observing the changes in our "mini pond" beneath the stone where the water gathers and duckweed grows and frogs hide...

Playing "army"...

A little chaos on the soccer sidelines...

Farmerboy played a lot of goal.

Katydid and Farmerboy both caught crayfish from the creek behind the soccer field and brought them home to observe.  Both crayfish molted and were safely returned to the creek at the end of the season, in spite of some accidental habitat spillage in the van on the way there.

Katydid named her crayfish "Bobby". 

Katydid's bantams have been interesting to watch, as they're more like little birds than chickens...

Farmers sometimes work inside, too, "buttering corn for horses".

We strung a tent on the deck.

Gareth and Andy learned how to prepare and cook fish the kids caught. (Gareth earned his Fishing badge.)

We visited Ft. William Henry in Lake George (more on that trip later - I hope!)

The kids built "huts".  (This one is Farmerboy's. I hope to do a longer post about the huts before the weather turns cold.)

Lots of running around with sticks... er, swords... er, guns... um, lasers? (I like this photo because Katydid caught Pop running right out of his boot.  Oh, and the white thing in the grass is a small chicken.)

Boys.

Katydid raised a Mourning Cloak butterfly from a caterpillar and let it go.  This was our first successful attempt at raising a butterfly. (Actually, the little boys raised lots of moths from Eastern Tent Caterpillars this year, too.  Our caterpillars usually don't do anything after we catch them -- except die (cough) -- so this was an interesting year.  I wonder what was different?)

And, of course, we spent a lot of time with the turkeys. A lot of time.

A picnic basket for the little ones

 

I was clearing out some shelves in the laundry room today to make more room for storage.  Some things I cleared off the shelves went straight into the trash, and others went into the garage sale box.  Then I ran into this picnic basket.  My sister -inlaw gave us this basket many years ago.  I have always loved it... but have never used it.  There are only four place settings in the basket, and our family quickly grew beyond the four settings.  But it appeals to the reader in me -- having enjoyed too many scenes in books about picnicing on sandwiches and lemonade beneath shady oaks.

So, as I sat on the floor in the laundry room wondering how I should use it (and feeling guilty that I hadn't used it), the boys came in to see what I was doing.   And I decided that I would take a chance and let them use it, as I had often thought of doing when I saw it sitting up there on the top shelf near the ceiling -- lonely and gathering dust.

I see it as sort of a combination Montessori/Reggio material.  The dishes are real china and must be handled carefully.  The basket has latches that must be twisted to close and open.  The place settings fit into an inner basket that can be lifted out of the larger basket.

One of the features the boys found most appealing is the way the utensils slide into the leather strip on the inside of the lid.  (I removed the forks and knives.  I didn't feel like making any more ER visits this week.)

I folded up a table cloth and laid it in the basket underneath the dish insert.  The boys then filled it with toy food and immediately carted it off to have a picnic in the family room.  I think that it will be a way for them to practice manners and social graces.  It will also be interesting to see what sort of "picnics" they have.  I predict that it will be taken "caving" in the closet at least once.

Fortunately, we have a ready-made place for it, too.  (Which is not always the case when I have a bright idea.) 

 

It fits right here next to the toy kitchen. (And yes, that is a stethoscope from a doctor's kit on the toy stove.  I don't know why.)  The kitchen fits in the space between a sort of free-standing room divider that divides our family room area from our living room area (for lack of a better way to describe it).  On the other side of the toy kitchen is the piano.  (It's not a perfect arrangement, but it's the best we could do.)

The twins have needed some guidance with the dishes, but I remain optimistic.  At the very least it was something interesting to do on a rainy day.

The Ecosystem Game

 

For the past week or so, all of the kids (except Chipmunk) have been caught up in a game they call "Ecosystems."  The idea began with Katydid, because she has been reading about ecosystems in the Harcourt 6th grade science textbook, which we have hanging around the house from when we signed up with Kolbe a few years ago.  It was Katydid's idea to read the text, and she chooses the unit she's working on.  There is a whole section on ecosystems, which she wanted to learn about, so she's been reading and explainin, to us and to her brothers, how ecosystems work.  She wrote, edited, and rewrote a nice report for me.  But she planted the germ of a more useful idea in her brothers.

I think Gareth was the one who actually started the game.  Gareth -- since the age of 7 -- has been deeply interested in paleontology.  His birthday request when he turned 12 was for a book about prehistoric mammals.  The only one I could find that he hadn't read, or that wasn't a slim picture book, was a technical book called After the Dinosaurs.  He's been reading this book all year, along with others, and by now he has a pretty good idea of what an "ecosystem" is and how it works, too.  So one day he gathered up all the Schleich animals in his room and set one up.

Of course Farmerboy -- who is currently fascinated with mammoths and dinosaurs and how paleontologists can know anything about creatures that died so long ago -- thought setting up an ecosystem with Schleich animals sounded like a great idea.  So he and Gareth divided the living room up into habitats.  They said they were living on an island, and they each had their own territory.  (Territory is big around here, I have to tell you.)  They divided up the animals so that each of them had carnivores and herbivores.  Then they spent an hour or so inventing natural disasters, migrations of invasive species, regular climate patterns, etc. so the populations of their animals (each population represented by one toy animal) could rise and fall, and in some cases, go extinct.  Katydid and the twins soon joined the game as well, and now that the weather is nice, they often bring their toys outside to play Ecosystems in the ferns.

When I asked Farmerboy if I could snap this picture, he was explaining to me how his ecosystem worked. There had just been a devestating flood, so the horses were having a hard time finding food.  But the hippos were plentiful, and the smilodons (saber-toothed tigers) had plenty to eat, since they ate hippos.  But the horses, he said, shaking his head, were likely to go extinct.

So what was my role in all of this, if none of this learning was "planned"? 

• I encouraged Katydid to read her science book on a daily basis.  She wanted to, but amid multiple distractions, would sometimes forget. So a reminder or a question from me was welcome.
• I allowed the collection of a number of animal toys ;-), including the new prehistoric mammals purchased at Agway last week.
• The animals are always out where they can be played with.
• I let the kids have time to play their game. If they were involved in play, I was a little looser with times to start chores or seatwork, and the amount of seat work.  I didn't allow seat work to squeeze out the game.
• I asked the kids about their game, listened to their explanations, and through questions, helped clarify their thinking.
• I documented the game (here).  The kids like it when I blog what they're doing, because it shows them that I value their work and their ideas enough to share and display it.
• I'll continue to look for ways I can encourage the game -- maybe by suggesting the creation of props for scenery, or by providing playable plants, trees, etc (artificial flowers, toy trees, and/or sticks, etc from outside), or by reading about ecosystems and habitats.

This is why I like the Reggio approach.  We work in tandem, the kids and I, for deep learning.  I learn as much as the kids do -- about new subjects, sure, but also about the way they learn, about what they think is important, about the enormous creative potential of children.  This kind of learning is what keeps me energized and keeps the kids excited, engaged, and happy.