Three Plus Two

Month in Review: August into September

What we did was mostly move 1000 miles. 

In a van that looked like this.

From this place...

To this place...

(Some of us are getting back to normal.  As you can see.)

Unpacking has taken up the bulk of the past few weeks.  But we've also been painting...

(When I say "we", I mean Andy, Katydid, Gareth, and Grandma.  My only contribution was to make friends at the Sherwin Williams store.)

Katydid also painted two small bookcases, all by herself.  One of them moved into the bay window in the dining area, otherwise known as "where we do school".  (Since we also eat there AND since it's part  of the kitchen, it really can't be called a school room.)

Here's a before picture:

(No Photoshop on this computer and the powercord to my laptop remains MIA, so I have to apologize for the lack of editing here.)

This space is considerably fuller now, but still not organized enough to merit an "after" picture.  More like a "middle" picture.  We've had to rethink our plans for several of the spaces in the house, actually.  First there was the problem of where to put everybody to sleep.  (Thought we had that one solved, but one of the kids who was upstairs has migrated downstairs again and is sleeping on a sleeping bag.)  Then we had to figure out what to do with the giant room upstairs in the finished attic.  Should we make it a school room or a play room?  Since it was off the beaten path and the twins need somewhere to run and around like lunatics roughly thirty seconds after they open their eyes in the morning, we opted for play room.  Thus, the school/dining area you see in the "before" picture.

Really, what I had wanted to do was make our front room (the room being painted yellow in the picture toward the top) into a school room.  But several people gave me odd looks when I voiced this opinion, as it is supposed to be our living room.  But then we discovered that we couldn't hook up satellite to a TV downstairs because whoever the drunk insane handy person was who designed my kitchen also put all the wires upstairs underneath the floor, so the old cable wires (of which we must 500, considering the number of cable outlets in EVERY SINGLE ROOM) could not be changed for new ones without tearing up the floor.  Therefore, the TV went upstairs in the playroom, and the front room was (or is being) turned into a "library".

This still leaves me with the problem that all the Legos are upstairs to get them away from the baby, but now so is the TV, so where do we put the Legos? 

(If you have many boys, you will recognize this as a SERIOUS problem.)

Anyway, it looks like a box factory exploded downstairs and I still haven't figured out my email address or memorized my phone number, but we have started school again after a fashion (mostly in self-defense, as the twins were driving me nutty), and I will be doing a wrap-up of our first two weeks the next time I am allowed 15 minutes on the computer.  For now I just want to post some of Katydid's bird pictures, as figuring out our bird population was a major part of our first weeks here.

We had a pair of Mississippi kites, but I think they have migrated away now.

We have had many hummingbirds migrate through, too, including one Katydid couldn't identify.  But I don't think I've downloaded that picture yet.

And we had a pair of bluebirds nesting in our mailbox.  Their three babies have fledged now.

(We couldn't get a good picture of the babies because we didn't want to scare them with the flash.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bits and Pieces

What we're up to:

Watching the Olympics -- trying to deduce the rules of curling without looking anything up.  Wondering why it looks like they're using shower scrub brushes, and why brushing the ice in front of the stone makes it go where you want it to.  Realizing that we have lived in upstate New York for 5 years now (almost) and have never been skiing or snowboarding. Wondering when hockey is on??? Working on a 2010 Winter Olympics unit study  (Katydid) and remembering how very, very tall the ski jumps in Lake Placid are.

 

And also swimming and Marian Aides with the Little Sisters of the Poor (Katydid) and Farmerboy listening to The Goblet of Fire on CD over and over again (minus the last three discs, which are being held hostage by Gareth because he says they are too scary) and watching the snow blow out of our yard and into the road and wondering if the sun is ever going to come out again and knowing it will take a few months and building rock forts inside since the rocks outside won't be available until April and anyway, all the little boys have a cold and must stay inside out of the snow and wind.  And building Sculpey creations to go in the rock forts, too.

 

 

And reading Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Medieval World and Sons of Charlemagne and, if you're Gareth, a bunch of old Anglo-Saxon poems, just for fun.  And also if you're Gareth, you are beginning to think about Scout Camp and wonder if you might be able to work on the Sailing merit badge, because like the rest of us, you can't help dreaming of spring.

And me? I'm learning to soak grains and make old-fashioned oatmeal (soaked in buttermilk overnight) and getting in over my head because now the boys want "porridge" every morning, probably so they can pretend to be pioneers, and I do not have enough good glass or ceramic bowls to soak all the flour I need to keep everyone supplied with muffins and bread, and my counter space is really shrinking, but you know what?  Oatmeal tastes better this way.

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 12: Life with little ones

November 1-8

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...

 
 

 
 
 

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.

Reggio Reflections

Gae left me a thoughtful comment with lots of good questions the other day regarding my Designs for Living and Learning post, and I tried to provide a briefish answer in the combox with the promise of more in a post, but... none of my comments showed up.  So I thought I would just dispense with the briefish answer and go on to the more complicated one.

Here is what Gae wrote:

This looks like a really interesting book.
Did you find that it actually was a lot different from what you have already implemented with your young ones.
Have you read the Reggio books ( all th ones in your side bar)that seem to be going around?
I am not so sure this is any different from what I already do.
Any insight on this in your own family, please?

(And if you haven't checked out Gae's blog, Cherished Hearts at Home, please do.  It's a good one.)

I'm going to jump to the easy question first. :-)  Yes, I have read all of the Reggio books I have in my sidebar, if not in their entirety at least partially.  I will probably be adding a couple more after I finish them.  I do try to make it a point never to put anything in my sidebar that I haven't read or that my kids haven't read or at least that I don't plan on using.  So if you see a book in my sidebar, you can be pretty sure I've at least read part of it and liked it enough to put it up there. 

I do know that most of these books are difficult to impossible to get in Australia.  In the US they all seem to be expensive and many libraries do not have them.  I have been ordering my books over a period of two or three years, many of them used.  If I could get my hands on only two books, I would recommend Authentic Childhood: Experiencing Reggio Emilia in the Classroom and Working in the Reggio Way: A Beginner's Guide for American Teachers (which isn't up on my sidebar because I only just received it about a week ago.  But I think it's a far better introduction to the Reggio approach than some of the other books in my sidebar.)  Authentic Childhood is a good (and thorough) general introduction, including the educational philosophy that underlies the approach taken by the Reggio schools.  Working in the Reggio Way is a more practical book, including questions to ask about your "practice" (I have to put that in quotes because it seems silly to talk in those terms about learning at home).  Both books are written in a much more down to earth manner than the typical theory-laden Reggio book.  (Sometimes I wonder if they would be easier to read in Italian!) Anyway, I think that Working in the Reggio Way is worth having just for the chapter on projects.  No other book that I've read has explained the Reggio approach to projects quite as well. (And Working... is a lot cheaper.)

The best Internet resource is, of course, Camp Creek.  There's a wealth of information there for homeschoolers, it's all free, and Lori is super helpful if you have any questions.  (She usually has an open thread for questions every weekend.)  So, if you can't find the books, or you don't have money to buy them and your library doesn't have them, it may be just as fruitful to hang out at Camp Creek for a while reading through all the archives.   Sarah at Amongst Lovely Things is also posting all her reading notes.

So that's the easy question.  Now onto the harder question, did you find it was a lot different than what you had already implemented with your young ones?

Hmmm.  Not exactly.  But that is one of the reasons I have found reading about Reggio to be especially fruitful -- because I recognized so much of how my kids actually learn there. 

When I started reading about Reggio, I was trying to jam my family into a Montessori model.  (I wrote about some of my frustrations here.) It wasn't that Montessori was completely at odds with the personalities and learning styles of my children (and me).  I had been led to Montessori in the first place based on the need to allow my children freedom while providing structure, giving them hands on work (especially in reading and math), hoping to improve some attention spans, and encouraging independence.  When Montessori popped up in my radar, I was nearly 20 weeks pregnant with twins.  My other kids were 8, 6, and 2 at the time.  Independence -- skills like pouring, making your own breakfast, vacuuming a carpet with a stick vacuum -- was high on my priority list.  Kids like to be independent, and some of the most valuable lessons I learned from Montessori were about how to encourage independence in daily life with children.

But many of the standard Montessori exercises and materials were not working with my family.  They either didn't hold the kids' interest or I couldn't maintain that kind of environment with that many kids under the age of 3... especially since two of them have affectionately been refered to as "Stuntman" and "Crash."

Anyway, what I was trying to do with my little ones (and to a certain extent, my big ones, too) wasn't working.  So I took stock of what did work and I went looking for some other model to help me gather all the various threads of our learning into a cohesive tapestry.  I could have just decided to focus on what worked without reading anythng, but unfortunately, I tend to be the kind of person who needs to read. In my first stage of learning, I gather up lots of data -- as much as I can -- then I push all the books aside and let the data stew a while.  Then I write about it and try out anything that strikes me as being useful.

So.  Here's what does work around here (in general terms):

• Nature
• Books
• Art
• Pretend play
• Following/developing interests as they arise

My first stop was Waldorf, but I ended up deciding that Waldorf is too scripted for us.  I had seen a brief mention of Reggio Emilia in an online article comparing "alternative" forms of education, so I went there next.

Reading about Reggio was a pleasant surprise because I recognized so much of what actually worked in our house in the pages of the books I read.  So in that sense, no, it is not so different than what I do instinctively with my kids, and what my kids do instinctively.  On the other hand, that's exactly what makes learning about the approach so valuable to me.  Instead of having to alter our personalities to fit the program, I can accept our personalities (including my own) as they are and find suggestions about how to build on that and make our natural learning environment fuller and richer -- not just for the little ones, but for the older kids, too.  Part of what I have gotten from reading about Reggio is just feeling a little more comfortable in my own skin. 

I don't like everything I read about the Reggio approach.  For instance, the literature is avowedly secular, and there is a strain of "all knowledge is subjective, there is no objective knowledge" running through it.  But I guess it's like anything else: I take what I can use and leave the rest.

I'm battling with finishing up here at this vague point just because I'm not sure I will ever get this post published otherwise, and with taking longer by giving you an example of how my reading has helped build upon what I would normally do.

An easy example is our art cabinet.  Art shelves have been a fixture in our house since Gareth was very small.  Even before I read a single piece of educational philosophy -- before homeschooling even crossed our minds --  we instinctively, as parents, supported Gareth's interests by giving him opportunities to play with them (toy garbage trucks, laundry baskets -- as trash cans -- , and a bunch of "stuff" to take to the "dump" in his case as a two and three year old) and provided tools for him to use to express himself -- crayons, markers, paint, glitter glue, collage materials.  Organizing all the "stuff", however, has been a constant learning process, especially as we have added more children.  I would notice that various materials were not being used because either I would forget about them, or the children would forget about them, or maybe they were just buried at the bottom of a bin and hard to get to.  

Reggio schools are known for their ateliers, or studios, in which a huge amount of art supplies are made accesible to children and teachers by storing them in transparent containers arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.  It's not a new concept in the art world, but it isn't something you see in children's environments all that often.  After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I could use my stock of mason jars to make our materials visible, usable... and also to keep the small stuff away from the baby.  I reorganized our art shelves last November and just did my annual summer clearing out to tidy them up (the batteries in my camera are dead, so I can't take a picture right now), and have in general been very pleased with the results. A bonus has been that the art supplies also become like decorations, enhancing the beauty of the room.  They're much easier to keep neat, too, even with a toddler who has never met a chair he can't use to get what he wants.  The under 3 set seem to recognize that the art supplies are tools, which does not apply to the Montessori materials which often become missiles.  So while we do our share of washing crayon and colored pencil off walls and floors, I do not continually have to pick up an entire shelf of pencils that have been tossed all over the floor and used as bombs.  What I am running into now is that we don't have enough shelf space, so I'm looking at all our walls with a critical eye.

That's just a small example, but it has made a difference in our learning.  Another example: I've been encouraged to keep a learning journal, not exactly along the lines of the project journals Lori describes on Camp Creek, but sort of.  So, for instance, I have an entry on 12/15 that goes like this:

After the boys washed the floor, walls, coffee table, and benches this morning (J&N always on the edge of silliness), E took the canister I was saving for the baby and wanted to make a shaker using buttons, pasta shapes, and tape.  I rescued the tin by providing water bottles, lentils, black-eyed peas + glue and tissue paper.  K, E, J, and N each made a shaker -- much more absorbing and calming than washing the floor... Shakers were interesting, though, and maybe part of E constructing an "alphabet of materials" -- in this case, recycled materials, which has been a theme with E for a long time.  It's often buildings out of cardboard... but I suppose the larger theme is toys.  He usually builds things to play with.  Then the other kids then follow along w/his creativity.

"An alphabet of material -- In the Spirit of the Studio, 'From the Beginning of the Atelier to Materials as Languages', p. 13 - an interview with Giovanni Piazza... "It is through interactions between a child and a material that an alphabet can develop.  As the children use paper, clay, wire, and so on, different alphabets will develop from different materials.  As children use their minds and hands to act on a material using gestures and tools and begin to acquire skills, experience, strategies, and rules, structures are developed within the child that can be considered a sort of alphabet or grammar."

You can see the results of this day's work here if you scroll down through the Christmas stuff.  It's hard to say what I would have done if I hadn't been doing so much reading.  Would I have suggested making the shakers? Maybe.  Would I have connected making shakers to the larger processes of building skill and knowledge Farmerboy (he's E) was working on at the time? Probably not.  In this case, I had also noticed that the kids were doing sort of the same thing when they worked with clay.  They weren't interested in making finished products so much as they were interested in learning how clay worked.  The products they made to express themselves with the clay were only vehicles for the larger process of simply learning how they could express themselves.  

Whew.  You may now be sorry you asked! But I think your questions were important.  It's so easy as a homeschooling mom to be drawn into "what's going around" just because "everybody else is doing it" -- at least it is for me.  So I think it's right to have a healthy skepticism.  And I also think that if you're happy with how the learning is going -- if it works for you and your kids-- then you should do what works and don't worry about the "stuff" that's floating around.

But, if you're curious, I do think it's worthwhile to investigate the Reggio approach.  It isn't anything that you have to adopt wholesale, but the ideas are fertile ones which can be applied in a variety of situations.  And they may make you feel better if you find yourself unable to make your kids stick to plans for long periods of time. ;-)  

  

Designs for Living and Learning

"Children are miracles.  Believing that every child is a miracle can transform the way we design for children's care.  When we invite a miracle into our lives, we prepare ourselves and the environment around us.  We may set out flowers or special offerings.  We may cleanse ourselves, the space, or our thoughts of everything but the love inside us. We make it our job to create, with reverence and gratitude, a space that is worthy of a miracle! Action follows thought.  We can choose to change.  We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums."  ~ Anita Rui Olds

My copy of Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments came yesterday, and after flipping through it expectantly, I settled into the rocking chair with Chipmunk and began to read.  The Anita Rui Olds quote prefaces the entire book.  "Wow," I thought. "'We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums.'" 

Olds was talking about institutional childcare environments. But how often does this apply to my home?

The first chapter of the book contains a helpful assessment for current environments to help teachers decide what is working and what they want to change about their space.  Some of the questions they list don't apply to the home environment (one of my strongest first impressions is that the authors continually exhort teachers to make their environments more "homelike", which made me think, hmmm), but others do. 

The first thing they suggest is that you draw a floorplan of your learning space and ask a set of questions about each area.  Since the book is directed at early education environments (and since that is what I'm focused on, too), the questions are asked from the point of view of a 3-6 year old. 

1. I can see who I am and what I like to do here...
2. The natural world can be found here (such as objects from nature, animals, living specimens.)
3. There is something sparkly, shadowy, or wondrous and magical here.
4. My teacher leaves a special object out here every day so I can keep trying to figure out more about its properties and how it works.
5. There are materials here that I can use to make representations from what I understand or imagine.
6. I can feel powerful and be physically active here.
7. I can learn things from different perspectives here, literally and through assuming roles in dramatic play.

Lots of full-color photographs pepper the text for inspiration.

I'm very happy that I finally ordered this book after months of looking at it on Amazon. It's meeting me right where I am, clearing out, organizing, and rethinking our home for the new year.

 

 

Winter term, Week 8: More glitter

 

Mardi Gras masks!

You'll have to pardon this post, because I am ending up the week with a cold and three sick little boys. (The littlest boy was sick over the course of the week, but was he sick with what we've all come down with today or with the last mild cold that passed through our ranks?) I did want to post about last week while it was still relatively fresh, but I'm afraid that my commentary might be a bit on the brief and unenlightening side. I am very bad at just vegging out, though, and I have spent all day investigating correspondence and umbrella schools and tutorial services. I doubt that we will ever sign anyone up for a full program, but using bits and pieces... that's something we do around here.

But without further ado, a brief glimpse at Week 8. Week 8 was...

...the beginning of Lent, when I brought all the kids to Mass on Ash Wednesday by myself and had to drag 4 small children - 2 of whom were screaming that they didn't want to go -- into the cry room during the homily. The cry room was inexplicably full of grown-ups. But this was still a better experience than last year, which you really don't want to know about. And then we went to vision therapy.

... also Mardi Gras, which involved mask making and listening to Cajun music.

We had cleared off the china cabinet and set it up for Lent, but unfortunately there was nowhere else to dry the Mardi Gras masks. But we can lay both sorrows and joys at the foot of the cross.

 

   Lots of glitter -- Pop's, of course.

 

Gareth's cat mask.

I tried setting up a few activities for Chipmunk on the train table while I read aloud. The plastic jug is probably his most beloved "toy"; he loves taking the top off and putting it back on again. The oatmeal containers have various sized balls in them for pouring out and putting back in:

 

The oatmeal containers are also well-loved. This set up kept Chipmunk occupied for about fifteen minutes, after which he did this:

 

I have no idea where he found that purple marker, or why he loves biting off the tips.

 

Pip practiced his scissors skills by cutting yarn. And those boxes...

 

... became a tank. Built by Farmerboy, of course.

 

Soon turned into a fleet, so everyone could play.

As for the big kids, when they are not battling prepositional phrases or grappling with the mysteries of percentages or multiplication, they have been doing a lot of this:

A little more art and some learning spaces

Thanksgiving wasn't all we worked on last week... although because Thanksgiving is coming up, I did have more of a reason to get going on the shelves in the dining room.  I used to call the dining room "the learning room", but I don't anymore.  It really isn't the only place where we work, and we do eat there 3 (or 4 or 5) times a day.  I've started thinking of it more in line with what seems to be housed there: the art cabinet, nature area, and the china cabinet, which serves as a sort of home altar.

Since I was cleaning the room, I took a few pictures.  But you must realize the room does NOT always look like this.  In fact, right after I finished cleaning it, the kids came home and the chairs wre immediately pushed out from the table in all directions, there were blocks scattered on the floor, and not one of those lovely plastic metal insets was where it was supposed to be.

Just so you know.  Now I'll show you the pictures.

This is the view of the dining room from the entryway, which doesn't show you everything in the room but gives you an idea.  The nature area is on the cabinet by the window.  I use the cabinet itself for storing Montessori materials.  (It has locks on the doors, although not on the drawers.)  The tall cabinet is our art cabinet.  Previously I had most of the material in boxes or plastic containers.  I took everything off the shelves and separated out as much as I could into mason jars and recycled food cans.  (I have a can opener that doesn't leave sharp edges.)  I am not happy with the bottom shelf, but that's the stuff the little ones can reach (i.e., stickers, Do a Dot markers, playdough, stamps, Sculpey.)  It looks too cluttered to me, but until we put some shelves on the wall...

 

Here's a close-up, and I'm not sure why it turned out so fuzzy.  I have to say that I really like the effect of the mason jars -- especially the pipe cleaner (excuse me: chenille stem) jar up there on the top shelf.  (Andy remarked that he thought they looked nice, too, so I was pleased.)  What I find best about this arrengement is that now the collage materials (on the top shelf) and the colored pencils are actually being used.

 

Katydid drawing in the living room with A Catholic How to Draw...

 

The finished product.

   A page Katydid made in her "Birds of the World" notebook with colored pencil and dyed feathers...

The tape on the top shelf is specifically for Farmerboy, who uses a lot of tape.

Here he and Gareth are building ships out of recyclables.  Farmerboy initiated the project, which lasted for a week or so and resulted in many, many carton pirate ships currently sitting on my kitchen island.  (None of them are painted because the boys didn't want to wait that long to play with them.)  Another problem I'm trying to solve is one of display.  Where to put all the artwork?

I moved the art books which used to be shelved in the art cabinet to another bookcase in the room, which used to have puzzles on the bottom shelves.  But the puzzles always ended up scattered all over the floor... not so much because they were being used, if you know what I mean.

 

Also in this corner, the map cabinet -- which has to be behind a gate to keep all the pieces together, dressing frames (used occasionally), and cardboard portfolios for storing main lesson books (which we use as sketchbooks and project notebooks) and oversized art projects.  On top of the map cabinet is a basket of sea shells, which must be kept away from Chipmunk.  There should be a globe up there, but the twins broke our globe a year ago and I haven't replaced it yet.  The map cabinet is sitting on our extra large hearth, in case you're trying to figure out why we have a stone platform in our dining room.

In the skinny bookcase: microscope (Melissa asked what kind we have: it's the Home Microscope from Home Science Tools,  which is plenty for our needs right now)  and supplies, air dry clay, oil pastels and watercolor crayons, Montessori color boxes 2 and 3, transportation and fish counters for sorting and patterning (in reach of the little boys), and our arts and crafts books.  I'm not crazy about the organization here either, but it's a start. 

Facing the map cabinet is this wall, where I've put the "metal" insets:

 

(And you can see that one of the insets was lost in our move a few years ago. I can't find it anywhere.)  The sandpaper letters are also here... and the fraction skittles.  This is a really insane place to put fraction skittles, by the way, and I'm not really sure why I even bought them.  I could blame it on the haze that affects your brain when you have three month old twins (which I did when I acquired the skittles).  But the kids have used them off and on over the years, and Chipmunk was actually working with them to some extent when I got them back out.  Now he's just throwing them all over the floor and none of the older kids are using them, so they need to be moved.  I also want to use that wall space above the light switch -- a future shelving project.

 

Our rather lonely looking bulletin board hangs on the door to the left of that sidelight in the inset picture.  I see that Farmerboy has tried to liven things up by adding a "smile", which is an interesting way to store push pins...

 

And coming around to the other side of that door is the china cabinet, with a box for holy cards and religious stickers, the Advent candles Katydid and I discovered at the farm store on Saturday, a jar of coins for the Little Sisters of the Poor, and a tray of rosaries and crosses for the twins when they want to play priests.  Of course this display will change very soon with the beginning of Advent.  Inside the cabinet on the right I have the pink tower and brown stair, and inside the middle drawer are a few other Montessori materials suitable for toddlers.  I am thinking about taking out the pink tower and brown stair and moving them into the living room where the rest of the blocks are, and putting some different activities for Chipmunk in this cabinet instead.   There's only one of him so I ought to be able to keep up with more easily than I did (do) the twins, but it still seems to be tough to anticipate his needs.

Well, that's the tour.  I'm sitting here now at the dining room table counting birds at the feeders outside the window, and Chipmunk is sleeping on my shoulder.  Later on I'll be working on the living room... maybe I'll take some pictures there, too, just to prove that it once was clean!

Week 8: Working on our learning spaces

(You know, I have to first apologize if I came off a little whiny in my weekly review two weeks ago; when I said I'd decided to keep writing these reviews "even if nobody reads them", I wasn't fishing for comments, honest! LOL And I'm sorry if I sounded a bit cranky.  I am very grateful for everyone who reads this blog, and for all the comments you leave.  Sometimes I just have to justify the way I spend my time to myself, if you know what I mean.)

As I attempt to get the house cleaned up in preparation for Thanksgiving, I'm also working on our learning spaces.  We don't have an entire room dedicated to school; instead we use parts of the dining room, family room, and living room.  This presents some challenges, especially in the dining room which also houses the wood stove and is where we eat at least twice a day. 

Our nature area, which I've designated the top of a sideboard in the dining room, had collected some clutter and the display was a little out of date.  I cleared it all off Monday night, and Tuesday morning I started adding things back.  Katydid and Gareth got into the act and brought out a few pieces of their personal collections for us to display.  This was nice because it meant I didn't have to twist anybody's arm.  One of the problems I am attempting to solve is one of effective display: the artwork gets buried in my files and nobody ever sees it; the rocks and feathers and bones all get secreted away in the bedrooms, never to be seen again. 

So far, the new and improved nature area has been the cause of much excitement.  I'm pleased, because so many of my ideas fall completely flat.  (That book display in the Halloween post, for instance?  I originally got it to go in the boys' room, because they were demolishing their books.  But after I got totally fed up and removed every single book from their room instead, I decided to put it in the family room.  As soon as I got it where I wanted it, Chipmunk walked up, studied it a moment, then proceeded to climb it like stairs.  My husband then had the audacity to laugh.)

A few photos of the new nature area:

 

From left to right:

• Chipmunk, about to throw a whole bunch of puzzle pieces on the floor
• rocks and fossils tray
• 30x portable microscope
• tufted titmouse nest, turkey feather, and ruffed grouse feather
• leaf basket (parts of a leaf cards, parts of a plant cards, rubbing plates, leaves)
• botany puzzles
• drawings of leaves by Pip and Pop
• basket of pine cones, bark, seed pods
• amaryllis and sumac in pots
• clay statues by Farmerboy
• wooly bears in plastic container "habitats"

Since I took the picture I've added a jar of Lyra skin-tone pencils for drawing November-ish landscapes and a bowl of Plastilina for making molds of shells, etc. to simulate fossils.  On another shelf (because it wouldn't fit here) is a leaf tray:

 

... which is very popular with Pip. 

 

... who started working as soon as he woke up many days this week.

  

Here is a collection of the work he was doing at around 7:30 AM one morning: using the Lyra pencils to draw leaves, doing the earth element puzzle, observing his wooly bear caterpillar with a magnifying glass.

Most of the kids seemed most interested in the rocks and fossils tray, however, and once I brought it out, it trumped everything else in the display.  Actually, I started out with one rock, then mentioned to Katydid that I was changing the display and asked her if I could put out one of the really amazing fossils she has, and the tray grew from there.

 

The small wooden box (mostly) holds those sorts of things which often become fossils: seashells, snail shells, shark teeth, a bone (discovered in our garden).  The two big rocks are the best fossils; Gareth and Katydid found these at the farmhouse we rented when we first moved here.  They are like chunks of the sea floor and contain probably hundreds of small fossils.  A while back Katydid rediscovered hers underneath her bed (don't ask) and brought it out to see if I knew how old it was.  After a little research, we discovered that the rocks in our area are from the Devonian period -- the Age of Fish -- when New York was covered by sea.  We spent most of Gareth's second grade year and Katydid's kindergarten year studying dinosaurs -- dinosaurs were sort of like a freight train in our house -- but considering the fact that Katydid is now 9, she thought she might want to learn more about rocks and fossils.  I got some books around that time, but they seemed to fall flat.  Since I put together the tray, however, the interest has bloomed afresh.  She and Farmerboy spent a fair amount of time this week looking at all the rocks with microscope and magnifying glass, pressing various materials into Plastilina to make casts and molds, and digging around for more fossils out in the garden.  Gareth, who is reading about prehistoric mammals right now, joined them for some model fossil making and some fossil hunting, but mostly he's been reading.

 

I think I will probably take down the leaf basket and the botany puzzles, because no one seems very interested in them, and make more room for rock-related work.  Gareth and Katydid set up some notebooks for their various projects -- Birds of the World, Missionary Orders, and Rocks and Fossils for Katydid, and Prehistoric Mammals for Gareth.  (I'll try and put our rock/paleontology books in the sidebar some time this week.)

The little boys also worked with some Montessori materials this week.  Pip, Pop, and Katydid made some insets:

 

 By Pop

 

By Katydid.

And Farmerboy was intrigued by the hundred chain when I got out the short bead chains and squares to help Katydid with squares and square roots.  Katydid regaled him with tales of the thousand chain, and so then he wanted to get that out, and we did, and he was properly impressed.  He and Katydid counted it by tens.  The fraction skittles have also had a bit of a workout -- or at least they seem to be moved every time I walk by.  I also put out the Geoboard for Farmerboy to build on his marshmellow work (ahhh... no pun intended...), but he left it out on the table and it seems as if every time I walk by that it has a new design on it done by one of the big kids.

And we have also been reading a lot of Thanksgiving books.  Which I will hopefully add to my sidebar before Thanksgiving as well.