Three Plus Two

Spring week in review

It's been a while since I posted a "week in review", but the kids were trolling the blog for pictures the other day and I realized how much everyone enjoys it when I keep track of the weekly doings this way.  I have no idea what week we're in now, technically speaking, but I have almost logged 180 days, which is all I am required to document in New York state.  On the other hand... things seem to be unraveling a shred early this year, probably because of the exceptionally good weather.  Our high temperature on Saturday hit 80 degrees.  Last year at this time, the snow had just melted from an April 15 snow storm.  After a northern winter, it's pretty hard to convince anyone they should take time out to do math.  In combination with the weather, we also had a few doctor's appointments to fit in and a trip to Wal-Mart to pick up someone's glasses, which meant that I didn't even try to convince anyone to do math (or anything else) on Friday.  Instead, we met Daddy for lunch at Pizza Hut.

It's all just as well, I suppose, because it has become clear lately that some things about our routine are just not working.  Once again, I've tried to use a math workbook for Katydid to get her through a place where me sitting down with her and doing hands-on math was pretty difficult, and once again I've realized why I was sitting down and doing hands-on (Montessori) math with her in the first place.  I've also suddenly realized that I am this close to having a sixth grader on my hands, and said sixth grader needs A LOT of help with spelling.  I think I should be expecting more out of him, but how much more?  How much work?  How much time?  The "gifted with learning difficulties" complicates matters a bit here.

To that end, I've been reading The Well-Trained Mind again, which I do every year, and if you read this blog regularly and didn't peg me for the kind of person who reads The Well-Trained Mind at regular intervals, that's probably because I'm somewhat omnivorous when it comes to books and educational philosophies, and mainly I am just looking for stuff that works in my house.  What works in my house often changes with the weather, which is what I think some people may mean by the term "eclectic."

Anyway, I spent a lot of time this week thinking about time management, and schedules, and how to teach spelling to a severely spelling-challenged child, and how to get the laundry done, and whether the garden was dry enough yet to plant anything, and wondering why I never have anything planned for historic events such as the Pope's visit, and being thankful for the Internet in those cases.  (A tip from Joanne led us to this history of Pope Benedict's life, and a heads-up from Dawn sent me scrambling to amazon for this book.  The Dolce del Papa we ate on Sunday night was Andy's inspiration, though, and had nothing to do with me:

It's the Dessert of the Pope! Sold by our local hole in the wall pizza place!

As for what everybody else did this week...

Katydid tried to train her hamster to come when called and also to run through a maze.  I was going to do a post on this endeavor entitled, "Pavlov's Hamster?", but alas, I never found the time. 

We had our first cookout...

No, really, we did.  It's like June here.  (Those weird UFO shaped things are some of our mushrooms, by the way.  They were excellent on the grill.)

And we did start planting.  Well, Andy planted mostly, but the kids did help, and Gareth earned some extra money planting potatoes.  Pictured here are comfrey (a green manure, good feed for chickens, and apparently a valuable herb for humans, too) and cippolini onions.  He also put in peas, chard, spinach, broccoli and/or cabbage (Andy's not sure which), scallions, carrots, kale, and beets.  I transplanted my tomatoes into bigger pots, and Gareth and Katydid put their jar-sprouted pumpkins into pots.  Cowpots, to be exact.  (It probably says something about me that I was excited about finding these at Agway on Saturday.)  Linnea's Windowsill Garden has been a big hit around here lately, and Katydid has been digging up quite a few plants for transplanting into pots on her windowsill or to spots around the yard.  (We may actually be starting our own pine nursery.)   Andy tilled up a plot for a butterfly garden for her, and she planted some nasturtiums and bronze fennel there. 

I'm not sure if spring is Katydid's favorite time of year or not, but she definitely enjoys her daily nature walks.  We have some eastern phoebes nesting in the detached garage.  They sit in the crabapple tree to defend their territory from other phoebes, but Katydid tells me that they don't mind the purple finches that also hang around that tree.  Last year I would have had no idea what birds she was talking about, so it seems that my education is proceeding apace.  Here's a picture of the nest:

At least, we think they're using this nest, as they fly in and out of the garage quite frequently.  (This happens to be a sort of shed built onto the outside which is open on one side.  We store the tiller, garden tools, and firewood here.)  As you probably already guessed, Katydid took both these pictures.

The little guys have mostly been playing outside until they collapse, or pounding on each other with foam swords.  (Or, as Farmerboy says on a daily basis, "Mommy, there's going to be some fierce fighting after dinner.")  Because their big brother got glasses, the little boys wanted some, too.  I obliged with these cool shades:

(Never mind that the tag is still attached.)  This is Pip, who has decided he is really a cow in boy's clothing.  Whenever we're in public, he refuses to talk to people and instead moos.  Loudly.  When we went to pick up Farmerboy's glasses, I'm pretty sure Pip traumatized another two year old boy by MOOing at him while wearing these really cool Hot Wheels shades.  (Actually, I wish I had brought my camera, because the sight of both boys in the cart wearing their sunglasses was really, really funny.  I can't imagine what other shoppers were thinking as I walked through the store pushing a cart full of 3 boys under the age of 3, two of them wearing sunglasses, and one of them mooing and shaking his head like Stevie Wonder, while three more kids trailed behind me.)

And, last but not least, Chipmunk, he of very little sleep, learned to push himself into a sitting position from the floor this week.  Here he is, looking very pleased with himself:

Valentine's Week in Review

This was a slow week, and not entirely because we were starting to prepare for our upcoming trip.  Call it "low tide" or whatever you want, but I think this is our version of a break.  Nothing stops completely, I am still reading to the kids most mornings, Gareth and Katydid continue to do some book work in the afternoons, and Farmerboy continues with his own projects, but nothing involved is attempted and I end up saying, "Just do the next thing," a lot more than usual.  Happily, Gareth and Katydid have seemed to handle "the next thing" rather well lately.  Gareth is on track in Saxon 6/5 with a miniscule amount of help from me -- and he likes it that way.  I have to admit, I am still amazed that Saxon would be the best fit for him, but it is.  This kid needs self-teaching resources, and when provided with the right ones, flies through them.

Because we are in slow mode, and preparing for our trip, Valentine's day was also low-key.  Pip and Pop happily wielded glue and stickers as well.  They might have been constructively occupied for, oh, half an hour.  Then it was back to boring old normal everyday wreaking havoc.  (Pip keeps telling me he's "cwimbing wadders".  Apparently everything in our house looks like a ladder to him, which is why Andy bought Walmart out of anchor brackets yesterday.  We're attaching anything big and heavy to the walls.)

Of course, reading continues apace, even when we are in slow mode.  Gareth is finally finishing Redwall, having been inspired to pick it back up by Sword Bird, which was passed on to him by Katydid (of course.)  Both kids enjoyed Sword Bird a great deal, if the games and stories inspired by it are any indication.  Katydid has been reading quite a bit lately; this week she finished Anne of Avonlea and Plain Girl, and is currently reading (or maybe just finished) The Year of Miss Agnes.  She passed Anne of Avonlea on to me, but I am saving it for our trip.  (Trying to catch up on all the girl books I missed when I was a kid and staunchly refused to read them.)  As for read alouds, we're reading two from Sonlight's Core 4: Gone-Away Lake and A Letter to Mrs. Roosevelt.  Gone-Away Lake is full of gorgeous descriptions -- a book right up my alley.  I am really enjoying reading it to the kids and have dog-eared lots of pages so I can come back to passages I particularly liked.  (Er, and the kids like it, too.)

Last but not least: we have more therapy again.  Chipmunk is the fifth of our children to be born with torticollis, a condition in which the neck muscles are too tight and won't let the baby hold his head straight.  After therapy, by around a year or so (longer for Katydid, whose torticollis was the worst), you can't tell there was ever anything wrong.  Chipmunk has the added bonus of low muscle tone in his trunk, so not only are we doing neck stretches, he's working out for strength, too.  He is accompanied to therapy by Farmerboy, whose issues are fairly mild but echo those that Gareth dealt with at about the age of 4 or 5, as well: flat feet, too-tight hamstrings, poor motor planning, and bilateral difficulties.  (Farmerboy is also a leftie, which adds to the confusion a little.)  While Chipmunk and Farmerboy do their exercises, Pip and Pop tear around the therapy room, attempting to injure themselves and each other on various therapeutic apparatus.  Then we spend more time driving than we do at therapy.  I'm not sure this makes much sense, but it's what we're doing.  And now we have to determine whether or not we'd like to add Gareth to this mix, which would mean 1.5 hours of therapy time between the three of them.

So that was our week in a nutshell.  This weekend we're participating in the Great Backyard Birdcount and hopefully Andy, Gareth, and Katydid will be participating in a "Winter Ecology Walk" at a local arboretum this afternoon... if the winds don't kick up.  Right now it's 15 degrees, but sunny.

You know, walking weather in upstate New York. ;-)

It's a New Year!: Week in Review

This is what we woke up to on New Year's Eve...

And this is what we had on New Year's Day.

A little different than New Year's last year!

The amaryllis bloomed...

... and continuing with our winter botany theme, one of the choices of the week was to observe and draw any (or all) of our forced bulbs.  Gareth drew the amaryllis as it was just pushing its way out of the bud and turning red (the petals are pink at first):

The kids have been using the oil pastels a lot lately.  Their vibrant colors make them attractive, but they have a tendency to smudge.  On the other hand, this tendency to smudge makes them good to blend.  Farmerboy and Katydid have been experimenting with mixing colors.  ("Hey, Mommy!  Blue and red make purple!")

On the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, I set out some coloring pages for the kids to make booklets.  I took the pages from the Eucharistic Adoration Coloring Book, which I am 99.9% positive I discovered on Dawn's blog... I'm just not exactly sure when or where! (ETA: I did make copies of the "IHS" monogram, but I also had pages with other names for Jesus.  Which is what you see here.  We talked about all of them, but the kids chose which pages they wanted to color and to put in their booklet.  Actually, the booklet was a choice on the whiteboard in the first place.)

Fairies have recently become popular around here, at least with Katydid and Farmerboy.  Katydid has been reading from The Complete Book of Flower Fairies and with some of our Christmas money, we added Fairy Houses Everywhere, and checked Fairy Houses (the picture book) out of the library.  She has been making her own book of flower fairies:

Farmerboy has been drawing fairies, too... although his are considerably more, um, male:

Around the beginning of December, we finally got all our puzzle maps from Alison's.  Because December is its own little world, I put off presenting them to the kids (read: Katydid and Farmerboy) until after Christmas.  Katydid really has a hard time with geography, so my goal for the next two months is to focus heavily on geography.  (Around the end of February/beginning of March, we are planning on making a long trip to Tennessee, so at that point the big Montessori activities will have to give way to more mobile homeschooling.)  Happily, Katydid has also been requesting the mapwork, so my goals and her goals synch together nicely.  On Wednesday, she spent a long time working on the US map with a placemat map for reference.  Today I am finally labeling the control maps and realizing that our big atlas is somewhat out of date.

We've also begun to pick up history where we left off before we ventured down the Native American/explorer paths that took up our summer and much of the fall.  When I gave Gareth the book World War I to read on Veteran's Day, I didn't realize that his desire to read it meant that he was ready to move back to the trajectory we'd started last year, delving into the settling of the American West and the Civil War.  The Native American and Explorers trails we explored after we'd worked through the Civil War were just more exploration of the issues which made that particular era in time.  Once we'd gotten through some of the early explorers and uncovered the beginnings of the slave trade, the kids seemed satisifed and a little restless to move on.  I, of course, was a little behind but finally did manage to catch up.  We read The Silver Donkey as a sort of connector during December (and this book is really, really good, too), and now we've started fresh with the world as it leads up to World War I.  We started The Wizard of Menlo Park and Cheaper by the Dozen, and hopefully this coming week I'll actually have some experiments with electricity set up.  I'm also planning on reading (and strewing) books about the Wright Brothers.

Now, if you think this sounds a lot like Sonlight Core 4, you would be correct.  But this is Sonlight Core 4 done our way, which means that we've been reading these books for the past year and a half, supplementing like crazy whenever we find a subject we're interested in.  I do own the Instructor's Guide, but I rarely ever look at it.  The books are great, though, and with the state of our library, it is really, really nice to have the box of Sonlight books to plunder.  I do think we will go on to Core 5... I'm just not sure when.

And finally, wrapping up the week although I have no pictures because I forgot the camera... we met another homeschooling family on Friday afternoon for some welcome socializing, and on Saturday afternoon we drove up to the La Sallette Shrine (dedicated to Our Lady of La Sallette, like the National Shrine in Massachusetts) for our Little Flowers/Blue Knights Meeting.  We went sledding... had a very cozy Epiphany Mass... and talked about chickens with Father.  Because Father has turned his garage into a chicken coop.  It's a fun place to spend a Saturday.  The only mar on the day was Pip slicing open his ear on the corner of the Brother's table.  It did not, thankfully, require stitches.

And what about the twins, you ask? They have been amusing themselves by sneaking out in the mornings to play with Farmerboy's Playmobil guys:

But, shhh, don't tell anyone.

December in Review

What have we been doing this December?

Well...

All I had really planned to do was read a lot of books from the Christmas Mosaic list.  I figured that we'd also focus on baking and practical life activities and winter sports, like sledding.  What evolved out of my vague plans was a series of "focus topics" that I suppose could be loosely tied together as a December "unit" -- if you were an organized sort of person, that is.  If you were me, you'd just have these ideas in the morning when you got up and google them so the kids could follow along.

Actually, the googling has worked fairly well and is a practice I will likely keep up.  This is what I have been doing.  I decide on a focus for the day (or week).  For the second week in December, that focus was "winter holidays" -- Hannukah and Diwali, specifically.  (Diwali is the Hindu Festival of Lights, which actually took place in November this year.)  Hannukah began on December 5th, so on that day -- which is the day I started doing this -- I googled "Hannukah" and found some videos from the History Channel's "History of Holidays".  I was watching them when the kids got up for breakfast, so naturally they watched them with me.  The next day, I googled Diwali and found some interesting videos, which the kids also watched with me.

The next week I formalized this process and made it part of our choice time.  Since we had bought poinsettias at the greenhouse over the weekend, I thought that the kids might be interested in Christmas plants.  I found a number of sites (including The Poinsettia Pages, Wikipedia entries for Christmas plants and Christmas flowers, Howstuffworks: Christmas Trees) and opened windows a few windows.  Then the kids were free to click through the links (I'd checked them out beforehand), and we talked later about what they'd read.  I was hoping that they would also draw all these plants, or at least print out pictures to make a display, but this week we've been too busy cleaning.  Katydid has been writing her own flower poems, though, and all three of the older kids drew poinsettias from life.  (Katydid also photographed hers.)  The kids are also taking care of their own poinsettias, which can live well past the Christmas season.  (It's all fairly relaxed, but good for the holiday season.)  Gareth has now come to expect that there will be something on the computer to read every morning, though, so it looks like I'm going to be forced to do a better job of planning!

So "strewing with Google" was my big discovery this month, but we've been doing other things, too.  The kids learned to play dreidl, we made snowball crescent cookies and visited the Basilica of Guadalupe (virtually, of course) on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and baked St. Lucia buns.  Katydid is learning to sew and weave.  I am attempting to organize the books again, since the kids brought me several enormous stacks in an attempt to clean up their rooms.

A few photos:

Katydid's poinsettia with spontaneous narration...

Gareth's poinsettia drawings... leaf, bract, side, and top views...

I drew Christmas trees for the little boys so they could decorate them.  These are Farmerboy's.  The Christmas lights go around the tree.  The two lines sticking up on the boy's head are supposed to represent Farmerboy's cowlick.  We all thought it was quite a good resemblance.

And we did read a long list of books from Christmas Mosaic.  Overall, it's been one of our most productive Decembers ever (in school terms anyway) -- which is a really pleasant feeling.

Up and Atom! : Weeks 7 and 8

I don't have much time to write up a review tonight today, but I figured I'd better post these pictures before I forgot what we did.  I have a plan for these weekly review posts... I'm going to print them out and include them in our daily log.  It'll be nice to have a few images to go along with all the notes.  I've always meant to put together a scrapbook of our homeschool year.

The First Great Lesson

We began week 7 with Montessori's First Great Lesson, which is entitled "God With No Hands." I really liked this version of the story, because of the way it incorporated both science and religion into the story of the universe's origin.  (Note: We're not creationists, so this story worked well for us.)  I had been putting it off until I had all the charts ready and could start building a volcano, but of course that never happened.  So I decided to just go ahead and tell the story anyway, showing the kids the pictures included as examples, and they loved it!  After reading the story, Katydid gravitated toward astronomy (Okay, I couldn't resist that pun... or the one in the title, for reasons I will explain right now)... and Gareth, whom I expected to go on to the Second Great Lesson, or "The Coming of Life" (a text I like less well), and the Timeline of Life and biological classification, surprised me a bit by getting hooked on chemistry.

Which is how we got the model atoms you see in the picture above.  He made them out of sculpey and florist's wire.  (He made two carbons and an oxygen so he could have carbon dioxide.  "How do atoms connect to become molecules, Mommy?"  Ummm... we're going to have wait on those books from amazon to look that up, dear.  Mommy skipped too many chemistry classes in her youth!)

I'll put up some of the books he's been using in another post, when I have a little more time!

Saints

Katydid chose to do vast amounts of copywork in this two week period, both in her prayer notebook and in this new "saints album".  (I got the idea from a Year with God.)  Here you see her page to St. Therese.  The stickers are of the baby Jesus, because St. Therese's full title is "St. Therese of the Child Jesus."

Farmerboy and Katydid also made lanterns for Martinmas using Dawn's tissue paper/jar idea.  We set them on the china cabinet where we have displayed Our Lady of Grace and a few statues of saints for the month of November.  There's also a saltdough heart that Farmerboy made.

If you're wondering when we did these lanterns... we made them in the morning when all 6 kids were awake.  This is how it worked:  Chipmunk was in a pouch; Gareth wanted to read a book about WWI (for Veteran's Day) instead; I set the twins up with a bowl of Mod Podge (I never spell that right) and some brushes, a piece of cardstock, and tissue paper, which kept them happy; and I painted Farmerboy's whole jar with glue before I gave it to him, so he could just tear and stick.  Katydid did all her work by herself.  It was still fairly chaotic, but we managed.

The Little Ones

 

The little ones are using some of the Montessori materials.  Pip is hammering tees into clay in this picture, and Pop is wiping down a set of tactile boards with a rag.  (Gareth is drawing atoms.  I think.)

You know, sometimes they're cute.  Good thing, too.

Something I don't have a picture of, but I thought I'd mention... I'm trying to help Katydid with her concept of time by using the thousand chain.  I hope to do more with this, get a picture, and post about it!

And as for this coming week...

Well, I straightened up my kitchen island, I'm going to set out some polishing activities for the kids, hopefully we'll read a Thanksgiving book or two, make a couple of "hand turkeys" and maybe a few other easy crafts, and... COOK.

Hope you all have a cozy holiday week!

Weeks 4-6 in review

Gareth's drawing for the Day of the Dead -- prismacolor marker

I've meant to put up my weekly review at the end of each actual week, but for one reason or another (a. new baby; b. wheezing and lack of sleep; c. chasing twins; d. laundry and clutter threatening injury to inhabitants of house; e. all of the above) haven't.  The kids have continued to work through all of that, but I feel as if everything has been somewhat spastic and disorganized.

A Few Themes...

We have had a few themes to keep us going, however.  I read a lot of books to the little people about fall and the harvest. (And tractors and trucks for Pip and Pop.) For the big kids, our major themes have been drawing and the Age of Exploration.  This week we've all come together for Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day/Day of the Dead.  I've been reading to the older kids from Companion to the Calendar, and we've also been using many of the Catholic Mosaic books for October/November.  Katydid has continued to copy prayers into her prayer journal and has begun saying the rosary on her own.

And Montessori materials:

We've started using a few more of our Montessori materials as we settle in to our routine.   Pip and Pop, in particular, love them.  This does not mean that they have actually started putting anything away, of course... au contraire, they are going through a renewed dumping stage right now and you should see my family room.  But they do like to work every morning when we have choice time.  They know it's time to work, and they climb up to the table just like the big kids.  Right now we're using the knobbed cylinders, pink tower, brown stair, the geometric solids, and the sandpaper letters.  Farmerboy is also using the tabletop number rods. Playdough and wooden blocks also get a workout at our house.

Finding out you can't put a sphere on top of a tower...

The daily playdough session

Katydid used the botany cabinet as inspiration for her poem.

A Little Exploring...

We just finished reading Jean Fritz's Around the World in a Hundred Years , and all of us thoroughly enjoyed it.  My four year old has been putting his Playmobil knights in his little wooden boat and calling them "explorers" as he pulls them around.  Of course, it's a Jean Fritz book, so what should I have expected?  (A note to Catholic readers, though: as with most books about this time period, you will probably have to have a few conversations about underlying bias.  Don't avoid the book simply because of this, though; it's an excellent collection of short biographies from the first hundred years of European exploration and whets the appetite for more reading.  Plus, who knew that Portugese kings had such great names?) We've also been plundering the Story of the World, v. 2 activity sheets for coloring sheets and maps.  The great thing about studying this period in history is that pretty much anything else you want to learn about -- art, astronomy, geography, shipbuilding, African dance, growing pumpkins, or chocolate desserts -- can be connected to it in some way.  We're going to use it as sort of a touchstone to the study of geography and culture.  (Hopefully I'll have a more detailed post about our plans coming up!)

A Lot of Drawing...

Considering the explosion of art in our household lately, I invested in some Lyra aquacolor crayons.  These crayons are a lot of fun.  Paint your drawing with water after you're done with it, and you've got instant watercolors.  (It is a bit tricky getting the right amount of water on the brush, though, and if you don't use a light touch, you'll "erase" your crayon.  Experiment a bit before you use it on a masterpiece.)  This has saved me from actually having to get paint out again in the last two weeks.  Farmerboy wanted to paint his salt dough creations from week 3, so I did actually haul out the paint ONCE.  I gave the twins a big glob of red paint on an old clipboard (which actually worked pretty well) and a pint-sized mason jar half-filled with water.  Pop played in the water (you could've predicted that, right?) and Pip cried the entire time because -- well, I don't really know why.  He kept saying something about paint, but he had paint, and -- anyway, it was very stressful and I collapsed as soon as it was over.  And that's why I love Lyra aquacolors.  Because if you're a big kid, you can take your finished drawing in the kitchen, set it on the island, turn on the kitchen sink, and the two year olds have no idea what you're doing.  (Okay, okay, I am not so cruel that I will never let my little ones paint.  But I have to be well-rested!!!)

Here's a picture of Farmerboy's leaves and his "Halloween cake":

And an example of a drawing done with Lyra aquacolor crayons:    

      

Katydid drew these golden eagles using a Draw Write Now book.

I should also note that Gareth actually drew a picture of a person during this period -- a knight.  I don't have a picture of it because it is in a sketchbook that is currently squirreled away in his room, but I did want to mention it, because Gareth doesn't draw people. Monsters, aliens, insects, dinosaurs -- all of the above -- but people, no.  He's never drawn very many people.  This may or may not be a part of his "special needs" package... he has a real problem with reading faces and body language (he still can't tell which twin is which) and may or may not have a nonverbal learning disability.  So the fact that he drew a person was a big deal to me! 

Here's Farmerboy's knight, with "dents" in his shield the way his big brother drew:

Some Science:

Not very much science, really, but I did want to mention that we have finally gotten around to learning about the system of biological classification!  I wanted to do this last year but didn't get around to it.  Gareth was browsing through our Guide to Microlife and started asking questions about genus and species.  I saw my chance and went for it!  And if you think that everything in your homeschool has to be carefully prepared, here's a picture of my "carefully prepared" chart of animal classification:

Yep, done in colored pencil on the side of one of his math papers.  (We actually were looking at a Harcourt science text which we got from Kolbe last year; we never used it when I was actually trying to "do" Kolbe, though... somewhat ironic, eh?  The text gave the step-by-step classification of a cat, and I was kind of expanding on that.)

And Katydid continues her birdwatching.

Grace and Courtesy:

Only the queen can wear her napkin as a crown.  Read Table Manners to find out more.

And a bit of Practical Life:

Making apple butter muffins...

Gareth has been (carefully) learning to split wood using a boy's axe.

Sprinkle in some workbook learning for math, language mechanics, and cursive... and that's what we've been doing!

The Work: Week 3, Part 2

Last week was a short work week, but here's a peek at some of the things we did:

Picture Books

(I think a few may have slid in from Week 2.)  Farmerboy's favorites? Pumpkin Moonshine and Johnny Appleseed.  I read a picture book (or two) at least once (often twice) at breakfast time.  Usually Katydid and Gareth listen in, but I mainly choose the picture books for Farmerboy's listening pleasure, and I usually give him a choice between two or three books.  Our lives are heavily influenced by nature and the changing seasons, so that's usually the thread I use to loosely organize our preschool reading in the morning.  In addition, Farmerboy is Farmerboy, and he loves anything to do with planting, working, and harvesting.  One thing that has really deepened his experience of many of our autumn books, however, is his experience this year with starting his own seeds and planting and harvesting his own garden.  In fact, he grew our biggest pumpkin this year from a seed he started in a wet paper towel on the window sill... and many of our other pumpkins, too.  When we read books about planting, growing, harvesting, and carving pumpkins... this is not theoretical for him.  Experiencing the pumpkin cycle with Farmerboy this year has been a memory we will all treasure for many years to come.

Choice Time

During Week 3, we settled a little more firmly into our "read at breakfast time, choice time, outside, lunch" routine for the morning, with some independent workbook work in the afternoon when it's quiet.  My older kids are operating more within the spirit of Montessori learning, rather than using a lot of Montessori materials (or, to be honest, a carefully prepared environment.  I don't have much time to work on our shelves with Chipmunk, and Pip and Pop are going through a renewed phase of mass destruction.)  I think I've said before that I write down a list of choices for them on the whiteboard, but this week they've been flexing their choosing muscles a little.  Both Gareth and Katydid have been engaged in some serious art, which has taken up a lot of their time... and for some reason, the Harcourt science texts we got from Kolbe last winter have suddenly become attractive.   

Since they wanted to start using the texts, some of the work I okayed on the whiteboard was to read the first chapter (about cells) and copy a picture of a cell into their (newly created) science notebooks.

Katydid drew an animal cell:

And Gareth drew a plant cell:

(Labels are a major accomplishment around here, too!)

Art

Both Gareth and Katydid spend lots and lots of time drawing and are becoming adept at independently using art books to advance their technique.  Gareth got a book on drawing dragons for his birthday, which both he and Katydid immediately put to good use.

One of Gareth's dragons:

One of Katydid's dragons:

(Saboo is a planet she invented that figures prominently in imaginative play at our house.)

Katydid also used Drawing With Children for much of her work.  Here are two of her bird drawings:

(This one is straight from the book.  She's also started dating all her drawings.  I noticed that many of them are inching into the 10:30 PM range...)

And this is a picture of two bluebirds at sunset.  You'll notice that the male bluebird has orange tail feathers.  (I hope I got that right.)  Katydid is a stickler for detail.  Filling in the background is a big leap for her, though... neither she nor Gareth are often patient enough to complete an entire drawing.  And this is one of the reasons that I think art is WONDERFUL for kids with attentional difficulties. 

Mud, Kites, and Birthdays: Week 3, part 1

Week 3 got a little chaotic.  As you can probably see.

On Wednesday, we spent most of the day at the doctor's office.  Gareth was having headaches related to sinus problems.  We spent most of the rest of the day in the mud.  Like this:

And this:

That's what happens when you're a twin and you start playing in a mudhole and not only do you get yourself muddy, but your brother is also available to pour mud in your hair.

(These are the cute pictures, by the way.  I have no pictures of what happened about two minutes later when they threw a couple of cups in the mud and then snuck around behind me to infiltrate the house.  No, no pictures of what the bathtub looked like when they got in with their clothes and shoes on, and no pictures of what I looked like as I tried to clean the tub with newborn in tow before I could even give them a bath.)

And then on Friday, we took the day off to clean the house for Grandma and Grandpa G. (I don't know why it needed it.  Ahem.)  Andy took the day off, too.  He and Farmerboy made apple butter:

(That's Chipmunk hiding in that pouch he's wearing.  And, yes, I do think it is quite manly for a husband to wear a baby while making apple butter with his four and two year olds.) 

Grandma and Grandpa arrived on Saturday, which also happened to be Gareth's eleventh birthday.  (I am trying not to think about that number -- eleven.  It sounds so... almost a teenager.)  He received more Harry Potter books and a bunch of Legos:

   

And chose tortellini and a triple chocolate cake for dinner:

(And yes, we did forget to buy birthday candles.  I get the Worst Mother of the Year Award. Fortunately, Gareth didn't seem to mind, and it was his choice to buy a cake rather than make one.  Probably because he'd seen that triple chocolate cake at the store already!)

Gareth's birthday was a little windy, so Grandpa took everybody outside to fly kites:

Katydid took the kite pictures.  See that dot in the sky up there?  Katydid really wanted a picture of the kite.

I'm really enjoying doing these weekly review posts, but it looks like I'd better split this post in two.  Stay tuned for the review of week 3's actual work!

Week 2 in Review: Feast Days and Apples

I'm a bit late with the review this week, but better late than never, right?  Last week was another busy one.  We were enjoying our last breath of summerish air, and Pip and Pop were enjoying their last days of being able to come in and out of the back screen door at will and with bare feet.  Now that the weather has turned chilly and rainy (I think I heard someone on the Weather Channel talking about snow in the higher elevations of the Adirondacks???), they have become quite unhappy about that door being closed all the time.  And I have discovered that I can only find three tennis shoes.

I don't have as many photos of this week's work because Gareth is still working on finishing a few of his projects.  (And because when I was taking pictures he didn't want to go get his notebook.)  I also didn't manage a group shot of our picture books this week, but you can read my more detailed notes here and here and some questions I'm trying to work through on scheduling here.  Also, some of the photos Katydid has been taking on her daily nature walks are posted here.

I should also mention that all the notebooks the kids are using these days for various writing and drawing projects are actually Waldorf main lesson books from Paper, Scissors, Stone.  Over the summer I had been looking high and low for books which could be used as "history journals" or "science journals", as mentioned in various Montessori literature.  These main lesson books work fairly well for that purpose.  They're slim volumes, so they're not intimidating, and you can have a number of them going at one time.  I know that this may not be their strictly intended use, but... this is the way we're using them.  I may actually do a whole post on this.

Some Workbooks:

Katydid and Gareth are both using texts for math, language, and handwriting right now.  Katydid worked in the Miquon Red book every day, reviewing addition and subtraction, and Gareth worked through the first 11 lessons in the Saxon 6/5 book.  They're both using Handwriting Without Tears for cursive; Katydid is in the third grade book and Gareth in the fourth grade book.  They generally do two pages a day.  I broke down and ordered Abeka Language books for both of them as well; Katydid is in Language 3 and Gareth in Language A.  I'm just using these to try and give them both a grounding in language mechanics (punctuation, capitalization, etc.), though.  Those things were not being picked up by osmosis.  They did one or two pages a day in their language books, liberally tweaking the writing assignments for Gareth.

Feast Days:

I tried to keep up with all the feast days last week, but most of my ideas fell flat for one reason or another.  Katydid made this chaplet of "sacrifice beads" on the Feast of St. Therese, but I couldn't get the boys interested.  (Gareth did work with beads, but he made a bracelet -- as did Katydid after she was done with this chaplet.)

On the Feast of Guardian Angels (Oct. 2), I wanted to have angel food cake, but forgot to put it on the grocery list.  Katydid copied the prayer "Angel of God" into a prayer journal she started, but she didn't decorate it, and the "Hail Mary" page we did take a picture of turned out to be missing an "l" in one of the blesseds.  (I think it's more important to simply know that while copying the Angel of God was an idea I had that she chose from a list, she decided to copy out Glory Be and Hail Mary on her own, and she wrote down some quotes from Mother Teresa that she found in the Demi book, and I certainly didn't ask her to do any of that.  She also drew some lovely pictures of the Blessed Mother on the front of the notebook, and when she's finished with the cover, I'll take a picture of it and post it here.)

October 4th was the Feast of Francis, which I thought Katydid would enjoy.  But aside from gathering a few pinecones, we never got going on a project.

We did, however, note each day and talk about the saints and angels.  And on the Feast of St. Francis, we all said the Prayer of St. Francis.  I think the talking was probably more important than the crafts.  (At least I hope it was!!)

Writing:

Gareth did quite a bit of writing during week 2, as he continued to work on his imaginary island and a story of his own involving alien robots.  (Because life without alien robots is not a life at all if you're Gareth.)  I am very happy with the amount of writing he's been doing, especially considering the fact that asking him to write even one sentence used to cause a meltdown.  And I'm also happy that I never pushed writing on him, because he really enjoys it now.  If I had made writing a bigger deal and had, perhaps, tried to force him into writing stories or poems as a third or fourth grader, I doubt that he would be writing these stories now.  (Which does make me wonder about math...)

Arts and Crafts:

The bulk of the kids' choice time (which has now stretched to about two hours most days) is filled with art.  My older kids seem to have a real need to do art every day, and so I have relaxed about doing it in the morning during what to most homeschoolers are prime working hours.  The fact is, it's really LOUD in the morning around here, and kids who need to really work to keep their attention on, say, math do it better when they are in their own rooms for afternoon quiet time.

Here is a sampling of some of Katydid's projects...

And here are a few pictures of our Salt Dough Day, which was a great success and kept at least one two year old busy for nearly an hour.  In addition, Gareth and Farmerboy both worked on making salt dough -- a great practical life activity.

Then on Saturday, we went apple picking!

Apple Picking:

The view on our way there...

Pop among the pumpkins, also sold by the orchard... (We grew quite enough pumpkins for our own use this year, though -- happily!)

Farmerboy and Pip picking apples...

Taking a rest in the shade (it was quite warm, and I thought Chipmunk and I were going to sweat to death since I was using the pouch)...

Pip obviously enjoyed our trip...

   

Still on the slate for Week 3: apple pies and apple butter!

Week 1 in Review

Some classical homeschoolers are posting weekly reports (HT: Willa), many of which contain fancy photobucket slide shows. I don't have time to learn how to make a fancy slideshow right now, but I like the whole "week in review" concept.  (I like the fancy slideshows, too, so if I have time this week, maybe I will learn how to make one.)

I keep our daily learning notes on my other blog, Show Your Work, but I also like the idea of doing a bit of postgame analysis out here on the big blog where there's more opportunity for conversation.  (And I imagine Grandma will like seeing pictures of the kid's work, too.)  Overall, our first week turned out well and gave me a lot of food for thought as we forge ahead.  I have a couple of goals this year for myself.  The first is to relax -- and by that I mean to stop worrying so much about how I think I'm supposed to do things and focus more on being open-minded as to what really works.  That may mean that my ultra-relaxed way of presenting Montessori materials is actually okay for us -- or at least it's what I am capable of at this point in time.  It also means that using workbooks for grammar and math is okay, too.  (The kids do these independently at quiet time in the afternoon.)

Aother goal that I have this year is to have fun.  I want to work with the the kids' strengths instead of focusing on their weaknesses.  (And hopefully in the process we'll be able to cover the weaknesses in a less painful way.)  What this means in my house is that if an activity (especially for Gareth) can be made more imaginative and creative, it probably ought to be.

Anyway, here are some photos of what we did this week:

Picture Books of the week

Montessori

These were Farmerboy's tools last week.  He started pouring his own juice and learned to use the crinkle cutter to slice cheese.  He also worked with a hammering activity and listened to Usborne Farmyard Tales read over and over again.

Imaginary Islands

Here's where that strength/weakness thing comes in.  Gareth is quite good at geography; it comes naturally to him.  He was the four year old who used to sit and watch the Weather Channel with a big laminated map of the US in his lap so he could follow along.  Katydid, however, is a different story.  Our informal approach to geography just doesn't work for her, and we'd like her eventually to get the difference between a city and a state and a continent and a country.  So I decided to introduce a study of geography with a little bit of imagination, by having them invent their own islands.  (I think that this is a Montessori activity but that it usually doesn't begin the study of geography.)  It was written on the whiteboard as an option for choice time, but the kids both jumped at it.

Some additional skills this activity promoted:

• attention (I had to encourage them to color the ocean surrounding the island, in order to finish the map.)
• spelling
• math (in Gareth's case, since we discussed scale)
• study skills (I had them look in the book Geography from A-Z to add specific features to their islands and to find out how to spell them.)

Hopefully this week we'll get to salt-dough land forms.  We'll also (I hope) continue to work with the invented islands, deciding on climates and habitats and populating them with animals and cultures.

Gareth's map:

Katydid's map:

Feast of St. Michael and the Archangels

For our "Friday Fun Day", we made shields in honor of St. Michael.  (I know others were making angels, but have I mentioned that I have a lot of boys??)  The shields are just sheets of cardboard covered in aluminum foil.  The kids drew emblems on cardstock, then cut them out and taped them to the front of the shield.  (Katydid's is The Sacred Heart of Jesus from A Catholic How to Draw.)  Katydid and Gareth both used cardboard book envelopes with built-in handles, but I had to poke a hole through the middle of Farmerboy's and thread in a fabric handle.

And here is what happened right after they finished the shields:

You could probably have seen that coming, couldn't you?