Learning Notes - A Look At March 11-15

Monday

It's the first day of March Break for the public school kids and I didn't want my children to feel completely left out of the 'fun', even though they are not getting a 'break'.

We drove into a the city as a family (I read two chapters of A Child's History of the World aloud in the car) and saw the movie The Grinch, put out in 2018 I believe.  It was a good film and had different depths from previous grinch movies where the green guy is just crabby and then gets less crabby.  Then we all crowded in a photo booth for a crazy family picture, had lunch at a taco chain restaurant, tried all the free teas at a tea store, checked out (and did not buy) anything at the chain bookstore, and sprayed air fresheners all over a Bath and Body Works.  We also saw someone feeding masses and MASSES of ducks in the parking lot.  Maybe a hundred?  Crazy.

After this we went to the big public library in town, each kid got a free book at the library book store and we played mini-putt.  They read their books in the car home.  This is what the 8yo picked:

I love it!  It's so...odd!  Essentially arithmetic but with weird drawings of monsters or something and visual 'math webs'...it's hard to explain and I can't find a picture of the inside.  I think it just has to be a book your visual math kid loves, or doesn't.  We came home and finished the family puzzle we had started Sunday night.

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Tuesday

Started the day with math and spelling.  The 8yo finished 1/2 a math review lesson and almost all of a spelling lesson.  The 6yo finished two math lessons and 1 spelling lesson and then finished reading this:

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Everyone has been fascinated with Google Earth these days, especially since the oldest recently discovered that you can look into space, including the International Space Station.  When I managed to get them away from looking around the world on the computer we discussed what we're going to do for our upcoming science fair projects and started going through books bookmarking relevant passages.  We discussed our Lenten projects on the Fruit of the Spirit.

I had to go to the church so took the 8yo with me and he practiced the piano for 30 minutes.

Then all three went to the library with their father and checked out books, including this series which the librarian special ordered for them:

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When I got home from the church I took everyone on a nature walk to enjoy the sunshine and pick up as much flotsam as we could find to glue on our new diy birdhouse that I'm trying to get outside before the birds all decide where this year's nests are going to be.  We saw deer and rabbit tracks, I explained how hip joints work with a ball and socket design, we experimented to see what would happen to a snowball that is dropped in a puddle and there was a discussion as to why pine needles turn brown.  The 6yo informed me that the route we walked was a lowercase 'a', which prompted the 4yo to hand me a stick she found "shaped like an 'L'"!

We had a 15 minute quiet time once we got home.  The girls read books and the boy did puzzles until it was time to go to our neighbour's for supper.  I read the children a chapter of The Moffats before bed.

Wednesday

We woke up to a sleety day and worked on our new puzzle and read and looked at Google Earth.  Then we went out to breakfast at the diner and then walked up to the grocery store so it was almost 10am by the time we got home.  I pulled out some books on weather and we read about sleet and rain and then looked at snowflakes and discussed symmetry.  Here are the books we used:

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The girls decided to make houses out of cards while the boy set the stove timer and did his 30 minutes of silent reading.  Then the 6 yo did her silent reading.  Finally I sent them with their math, spelling and the Planet Earth dvds over to the church where their father was working so I could have the house to myself for a bit.  While they were there the 8yo finished the math and spelling lessons he had partially completed yesterday, and also started reading the bookmarked sections in his science research books re: his science project.  The 6yo did a full math and a full spelling lesson.  They all watched Planet Earth Ep. 1 - From Pole to Pole and then Ep. 11 - Ocean Deep.

After lunch we listened to Mozart's Magic Fantasy (sort of a children's retelling of Mozart's Magic Flute), worked on our next puzzle and then went for a walk.  We managed to pick up enough leaves and pinecones and such to be able to finish our birdhouse.

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 We finished our puzzle in the afternoon.  At supper the discussion was the whale sharks and vampire squid they saw in the Ocean Deep episode - apparently vampire squid have their bio luminescence located on areas that can withstand a bite by a predator.  Huh.  Who knew?  Before bed I read a chapter of The Moffats.

Thursday

Everyone wanted to play games on the computer this morning.  They used the website tvokids.com and took turns doing that for an hour or so.  It was raining fairly heavily off and on all day but that didn't stop them from rushing through breakfast and heading outside to burn off energy.

I hadn't slept well the previous night so I was dragging myself through the day.  In fact as the day progressed I just got floppier and tireder and was eventually just sitting in a chair waving my hands at the children.  Fortunately they all deal with instructions pretty well.  The 4yo coloured and practiced writing letters, the 8yo did a spelling lesson and then they both pulled out all the Lego and built stuff with it together.  The 6yo did two spelling lessons and finished Spelling Workout A.

And then they all went outside again and played for hours in the wet snow.

It wasn't an impressive, exciting or even particularly productive school day, but these sorts of days are one of the reasons I work on school year round, up to six days a week.  Because not all of those days do we manage to accomplish much.  It's important to remember that 1) Life is school, too and 2) We're playing the long game, here.

I read a chapter of The Moffats aloud before bed.

Friday

Usually Friday morning is the time I take the 4yo to a play group but today my husband had a meeting and then a doctor's appointment and wasn't going to get home until lunchtime.

Instead we made churros and then I took all three children up to the library where there was a children's St. Patrick's Day party going on.

After this we had errands to run all afternoon and into the evening.  I read a chapter of A Child's History of The World in the car while we were stopped at a store for my husband to run in.  We're up to Alexander the Great.

Saturday

The 6yo decided to sew this morning and made a little blanket for a doll's house bed on the sewing machine, which she is learning how to use this year.  The 8yo went to the church to practice the piano.  Then all three children went outside to work on their latest fort.  When they came in it was lunchtime.

After lunch we buckled down a bit more.  The 6yo played Uno with the 4yo to practice her colours and numbers.  She's got these down well, but constant repetition is key.  The 8yo did his math, which today involved adding the eleven times tables to his graph book.  This turned into a discussion about perfect squares, which turned into watching a Doodling In Math Class video about the Pythagorean Theorem.  Before we ran down too many rabbit trails I put him on a video call with a friend of mine who teaches high school math - she had agreed to explain the concept of area for him better than I could.  Both older children set the stove timer and did their 30 minutes of silent reading.

The 4yo's reading lessons had fallen by the wayside quite a bit this week, but when we sat down today to look them over she had remembered all of her sounds (s, t, m, a, e, r) and we did a lesson and a half in our reading book.

Then I heard the book narration from the 8yo about the book he got from the library on Tuesday.  He is on chapter 11 so far.

We had a family game night today with Skip-bo (I wanted to see how that number review had worked out earlier for the youngest), and then I read two chapters of The Moffats before bed.

Learning Notes for the end of April

Here's what we're doing in school right now...

In phonics we're reading through Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons - we're on lesson 37 now and the boy is reading short, very phonetically based paragraphs.  We've also finally reached the point where we can start on early readers and we're using box 1 of the Bob Books.  TYCTRI100EL (that is not an easy acronym) also has a handwriting practice session at the end of each lesson, so we are doing letter practice.

Further to handwriting the boy has been writing a letter to his 'pen pal' and friend down south.  David took dictation for what the letter should say, and now he is carefully copying David's words in his own hand, crossing them off as he works down the sheet.

For read alouds we're enjoying The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, Every Living Thing by James Herriott, and Storyland of Stars by Mara Louise Pratt-Chadwick.  We're also reading Story of the World as a history/geography study, looking up countries and such as we go.  I never bothered to buy the activity guide that goes with the book because I know myself and I am not a 'craft person', so it seemed pointless.  Now I hear that it has other non-craft activities like map work in it and perhaps we will try it for the next SOTW volume we read.

For 'science', which is not actually a subject we're actively studying, just more of an examination through living, we are doing a lot of looking through the telescope, naming birds as they return to us in the spring, answering questions about whatever interests us (yesterday's 'I wonder' was whether coniferous trees sleep in the winter the same way as deciduous trees do, since they don't lose their needles) and looking at non-fiction books that interest us.  The latest additions to the children's non-fiction bookshelf are Exploring The Sky By Day and Exploring The Night Sky, both by Terence Dickinson.

This past week we've gone to a cooking class together, which sparked an interest in 'making dinner himself', which turned into jambalaya produced by a six year old, so that's a big interest at the moment.  The 'creating' urge doesn't stop there - we've been gifted a whole bunch of wood scraps and I've been informed we are building a feeding platform for the birds out of them, so that will involve looking up patterns or designing one with the materials we have, measuring, using tools, etc.

For math we're using MEP Year One and we're on lesson 9.  We were fine learning the greater than sign, the less than sign and the equal sign, but when it came to the greater than or equal sign and the less than or equal sign, we hit a little bump.  We've used Khan Academy as reinforcement, but we're still not completely certain about it, so we might move on and cycle back again later.

And that's school right now!  We don't have any plans to change the phonics/math/history spines we're using, but we're always on the look out for new and interesting skill reinforcement and books and activities, so undoubtedly those will continue to evolve in the weeks to come.

Learning Notes - Looking Back On August

We've finished our first month of school, more or less, and we've done some wonderful and fun work that we're all happy with and also identified some gaps that need to be considered in the future.  Here's a little re-cap.

We've mostly focused our academic thoughts on phonics and introducing reading into our lives even more than it already is.  To that end David and I bought a lot of interesting books at the store for the children to flip through in an attempt to start 'strewing'.  I reorganized the playroom to facilitate ease of play and also did a massive purging of the children's books - getting rid of anything that didn't look like it was going to physically last much longer or that really wasn't in keeping with what we wanted the children to reach for.  Pretty much all the tv show type tie-in books went, and the Disney-fied versions of classic fairy tales - that sort of thing.

For phonics I've been introducing letter sounds and blending with Abeka's Handbook for Reading and set one of the Bob Books.  Because of the latter, the boy could say he'd read his first book this past month! That boost in confidence was amazing.  We're taking it slowly and as always our goal is mastery of a skill.

Since the last few weeks have had such wonderful weather, and because fall is closing in on us, we've spent the majority of our time out-of-doors.  We've gone to beaches and parks and friends' houses as often as we can, and I organized an 'I'm Not Going Back To School' party at a local beach/playground on an island nearby and invited local homeschooling families to join us for a picnic and swimming.

We also set up a homeschooling cupboard in the house as a central place to put all of our educational games and activities, our resource books, etc.  It's been a huge success because now the children can go to one central place and choose an activity from a large selection.  It's cut down on 'I'm bored' and 'Can I watch a cartoon' requests quite a bit and a lot of our bits and pieces are getting used more often, especially puzzles and board games.

As usual, this is all interspersed with a liberal amount of free play.  The children love to dress up and imagine, to make pretend food in their pretend kitchen, to play in the sandbox and with water outside, etc.  They help around the house with gathering laundry and putting dishes in the sink and spraying water and vinegar on windows and wiping it off...this is all play to them and a good way to introduce skills.

What were reading right now:

The Mouse And The Motorcycle.

Mildred And Sam

The Complete Frog and Toad Stories

Learning Notes - Homeschool Week One

We did it; we survived the first week.

So I chose to start our year with a weekly book study and the first story we read was Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCluskey.  We started our day getting into a morning routine - dressing, eating breakfast, etc. which is a bit of a change for us, and were ready at 8am to start.  First we prayed for a successful school day and then we had a short circle time with songs.  I asked the children to bring me whatever stories they'd like to listen to and we sat and read for a while.  At the end I brought out the book we were looking at that day and we read the story.  I asked the boy to try a narration, telling the story back to me, and he did fairly well with that.

After our story time we played a scavenger hunt game, looking for 'blueberries' ourselves - in this case blue circles with the alphabet on them, and we put them in order.  All of that took quite some time.  Finally, after our game, we made blueberry muffins for a snack and school was done.  I wrote a detailed post on how our first day went here.

On Tuesday we got a lot distracted by grocery shopping followed by library club for the boy.  By the time we got home we really hadn't *done* school very much at all.  At bedtime we read a whole bunch of storybooks and the first two chapters of our new read aloud - The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

On Wednesday the children kept talking about the blueberry alphabet scavenger hunt - so they played it again by themselves.  Then we read Blueberries for Sal again.  After our story I brought out a quart of blueberries and we sorted them into piles according to size and made alphabet shapes with them...and then ate them for snack.  We looked up blueberry bushes in our beginners field guide and learned that wild bushes can grow one to three feet high - and we measured that with a measuring tape.  For lunch the children made blueberry snack by spreading blueberry jam on crackers and topping with a slice of salami.

In the afternoon the children did a maze I had drawn to bring Little Sal to the blueberry patch and home again.  They loved watching me draw it and we ended up drawing a lot of mazes together.

On Thursday we read our book and then we played for an hour or so with a fantastic homemade blueberry scented playdough.  Then we made jam just like Sal and her mother, and then the boy went to the library for day camp.

While he was doing that the girls and I took out some more books from the library for read-alouds.

On Friday I had big plans all week to do a game with blue water balloons but I couldn't get to the store.  Soooo...we read the book again and played with our blueberry playdough again and read some more.

I feel pretty good about the week.  After the first day we stopped with circle time and didn't quite manage to pick it back up again, and we also only did that one narration.  I thought that re-reading the book multiple times throughout the week would end up being boring for the children but they actually really seemed to like it - go figure.  The baby was furious with me every time I picked up the book to read because I wasn't paying attention to her, but I think that will just fade away eventually.  And cutting out the other read-alouds before our focus book was a good idea; everyone seemed much more fresh.

I'm glad we are only spending one week on each book because by Thursday, I will admit, I was tired of Blueberries for Sal.  Haha.

Next week we're reading Mrs. McNosh Hangs Up Her Wash by Sarah Weeks.

First Day Of School

We did it - the first day of school - and we survived.

I really need to tweak the system I tried today - the routine is definitely in need of adjustment.  But, in hindsight, I mean, every routine needs some adjustment.  Anyway, here's what we did today:

Woke up and started the day by getting ready immediately.  We were dressed and fed and beds stripped and little girl hair brushed and everything by 8am.  This seems early, but we didn't wake up any earlier than we usually do, we just got our act together a bit better.  I liked this part and how it set the tone for the day, but looking back I think we need to have clothes laid out the night before to avoid issues, and also I need to plan a bigger breakfast to see everyone through the morning.

We started school with a circle time which is an idea I really like but needed to plan out better.  We prayed for our school day, and then did some exercises and songs.  Again, really like the idea but need to implement it better.

Then we moved on to read-aloud time.  I had a specific book I was going to read to them but I thought they could choose some stories to have me read aloud first.  Not the best idea, maybe, since they were pretty tired of sitting by the end of it.  So tomorrow we'll just read the book I choose and maybe try a second story time later in the day if I can handle it.

We read our book, and then I asked the boy to tell me aloud what the story had been about - he did really well with this!  I need to read more about doing narration with small children but I was impressed.

Then we moved on to our activity - since the book we read was Blueberries for Sal I made letter circles and hid them around the house to find.  Then we laid all the letters of the alphabet out in order and again I was really impressed by how well this was done.

Finally we made blueberry muffins for our snack.  Sigh.  Cooking with small children.  Anyway.

So that was our first day of school.  It was about 2 hours long, which is more than I planned for but the game and muffins went on much longer than I thought.

Learning Notes

Sunday, Sept. 21st - 

We spent the day in church.  It was my first morning teaching the adult Sunday School class so I was running around scattering Bibles and pens and bit of paper and trying to debate how to explain the Apocrypha to an unknown number of adults with unknown Christian education backgrounds.  The children sat through most of the service and then afterwards sat in the hall, colouring Bible pictures.  After church there was nap, during which I listened to the eldest playing 'church' in his room.  His theology is coming along pretty well, and all of a sudden he'll launch out into something totally heretical and hilarious.  We followed David to the nursing home service and played at the park and talked about wild mushrooms and whether there are trolls living under bridges. 

Monday, Sept. 22nd - 

S went on errands with David and on their walk they discussed numbers and what plumbers do.  Once he got home we tried more numbers again - there seems to be some difficulty with his understanding of the difference between a number and a letter.  I'd ask him to draw an animal with a certain number of legs and we'd count them (an octopus with 8, etc.)  Then he practiced drawing shapes.  

After table work we sat and read a book about dragons and then the two oldest went outside and built a huge fort in the backyard while I tried to figure out what we were doing about S's physical activity for the fall.  We did soccer this summer, but I was disappointed in it.  Swimming was on the schedule for the fall but now that may not happen, and regardless of whether it does or not I still need to figure out what we're doing over the winter so now I'm calling arenas and community centres and hoping that somehow something will fit into our schedule.

There is nap time for C, and quiet time for S, who plays with Lego in his room and, when asked, tells me that he is making Batman tools .  David pops in to tell me that the Operation Christmas Child kick-off is this Saturday at the same time as the church-wide auction, which reminds me that I'm supposed to be baking for this auction.  He also tells me that the congregation members who are moving auction items from our garage are arriving TWICE on Wed., not once, so I need to be here, with occupied children, for the entire afternoon.  And then he goes outside to pack away the barbecue and throw out the tent the children have destroyed over the summer.

In the afternoon we work around the house and watch Victorian Farm.

Tuesday, Sept. 23rd -

I had to funnel prayer requests to prayer chains this morning, so the children were all ignored and given large amounts of dip to consume on the upholstered furniture.  Super fun for all.  They watched educational cartoons - The Cat In The Hat episode about pandas and a math show.  Then David took them to the library for story time and a craft, which turned out not to be going on so he took them to the grocery store instead.  The rest of the day sort of disintegrated in terms of education.

Wednesday, Sept. 24th - 

The children watched a Cat In The Hat show about hibernation and then played outside in the morning; S came in to show me how spruce branches are prickly if you stroke them one way and smooth another, so we had a discussion about angles.  Then everyone trooped in to work on a puzzle about fish, which was interrupted by a trip to the grocery store - we also started practicing tying our shoes today.

I hoped to talk about numbers and colours at the store but the kids were waaay too crazy.  After the groceries David had the morning Bible study group at the church, which we joined him for - S did a match-up alphabet game and coloured pictures.  After lunch everyone rested, somehow...kind of.  I had a number tracing page for S to work on ready to go if the noise level got too much in his room and I did some curriculum planning work.  I went to get a book on spruce out of the big box of homeschool non-fiction (to follow up with the conversation we had had in the morning), but ended up finding a nature book that got Sl interested in fossils and sea cucumbers - so we got to talk about how fossils are made.  And then he found a book on making castles.  That was pretty much the end of anything schoolish.

Thursday, Sept. 25th

The children watched a National Geographic kids show on Australia while I tried to wrap my head around the day, but they didn't like it and refused to sit for it so instead I gave C a chore and S sat down with his workbook  for about an hour - he did a lot of work on numbers, colours and shapes and then started alphabet work.  I was amazed by how great he was at his first lesson on left and right, but he had a lot of trouble understanding simple patterns so we skipped that and will revisit it sometime later.

I was gone for the rest of the morning and exhausted and working on housework for the afternoon, but knowing how much book work we'd done made me feel okay about not doing a lot of other school today.

Friday, Sept. 26th

We did nothing today.  Really.  I was overwhelmed with church things.

Saturday, Sept. 27th

Today was the big auction, and I had a lot to do so S was  on his own for a lot of school stuff.  I had him come with me to the grocery store and on the way we played a 'matching colours' game he made up, and we talked about how God created people and looked at footprints and revisited the idea of rocks eroding after contact with water.