Life is overwhelming.

There is a spider outside of my window and I'm envying its relatively stress-free lifestyle at the moment.  This past week we've been without hot water (our water tank died) and it won't be fixed until tonight.  Add to that my husband trying to figure out his next steps for coursework on the road to ordination, and re-painting the church hall, which is not going to get done in time for Back To Church Sunday, I'll tell you that right now, and Alpha starts up at our church this week and there are nine meals and only three are covered and I'm making the first one so preparing food for twenty people can go on the list.  And, you know, trying to homeschool and all.  Blarg.  I woke up at five this morning, tense as a mouse in a cat fight, and have been trying to relax ever since.  I even did yoga.  Which wasn't a pretty sight.

It just cannot almost be fall.  Nothing is DONE.  I have so much to DO.  And I can't do a thing.  Well, yesterday I especially couldn't do a thing because I had managed to book my first day reading stories at the library with the baby's shots, and neither of those things could be cancelled so David took the doctor's appt. and I took the library.  And then of course the rest of the day we expected Fussy Baby to explode at any moment.  She was decent though, and David remembered to buy food while he was out, so I didn't have to rush home and cook and comfort an infant at the same time.  He's a hero.

Ugh.  I think I just need to write everything down on a list.  And I'm not cooking today because there are lots of random leftovers in the fridge so people can just manage with those.  I'm going to paint the coffee area in the church hall and that is ALL I'm setting up for myself before Sunday.  And I'm going to spend the rest of the day catching up with housework - laundry, floors, LAUNDRY, my heavens...

Calm.  Calm.

Pickles

I adore making preserves - pickles and such.  This past summer I must have made dozens of jars.  But I will admit they aren't necessarily the easiest foods to incorporate into a meal when you're just starting out with them.  Here are my suggestions, or at least what we do.

I often serve a pickle tray at supper, and almost always when we have guests.  A plate with a selection of pickled fruits and vegetables on it to pass around seems weird at first but everyone gets used to it and they can pick and choose what they like to eat with their meats or on their own.  And it also makes guests feel honoured, I find, to be presented with something so clearly homemade.  Generally here's how I organize the plate - I include something everyone will like, bread and butter pickles are a good bet, and then I include a newer food if I've tried a new recipe, and I make sure there are a whole bunch of colours so it looks pretty.  It also helps to add cheese.  You can serve this plate if you're having a meal where they seem to fit naturally (salad, sandwiches, etc.) and also just as an accompaniment to a regular meat and vegetable meal.

There you go, pickles.

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

Twaddle and Classics

If you've spent even a passing amount of time reading literature based homeschool booklists (not a sentence that applies to many of my friends, I imagine) you'll have seen a fairly obvious trend towards the same titles.  Everyone, but everyone, wants to read, say, Paddle To The Sea.  Including us actually; it's on our homeschool list this year.  People love Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and Ferdinand the Bull, and Curious George (I do NOT love Curious George, in case you're curious).  These, and a few dozen others, seem to be the 'good literature' that is practically required for an elementary education.  Far be it from me to disagree on philosophical grounds, or to debate educational merit or what have you - I've been doing this for practically no time compared to the greats.  What do I know?  But I am having trouble abiding by the 'no twaddle' rules when I can't fully see whether what I'm reading is twaddle or not.

And let me assure you - there are lots of opinions about that.  Some people seem to think that unless it was written at least fifty years ago there's no value in reading it to a child.  Some people think that mass produced cartoon comics based on television characters are totally fine.  And there's everyone in between.

This is my first real experience with an aspect of homeschooling I am certain I will come across a lot over the years - people with widely differing opinions on what makes a 'good education'.  Right now we're approaching it cautiously.  The majority of our book list for the next few months is taken right from the pages of the classics-minded.  And then every once in a while, like this week, for instance, I'm throwing in a book I like just because I like it and I want to.

I don't know what it will look like by  the end of the school year.  Maybe I'll have ignored the advice of my betters and started reading Captain Underpants.  I doubt this will happen, but we likely also won't stick to reading off a booklist either.

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 for the end of July

As the first two weeks of July consisted of many days of driving and then camp and visiting and quite a bit more driving, the only thing that David and I managed to get sorted about school for our son was that it was going to happen at home again.  Take two, if you will.  And then of course there was a solid week of getting 'back into the swing of things'.  And so it fell on the final week of July for me to get curriculum organized and such - and I thought I was really ahead of the game, a whole month ahead, and then I saw people starting to 'do school' in August.  So in fact I am not way ahead of the game but sadly behind as usual.

So anyway, this past week I kept a very gentle, brief outline of some learning notes while I puttered on the curriculum for this school year.  Some of the things we did this past week include some math and logic games, discussing how everyone has a job, making paper airplanes, practical life skills (washing coins and filling up the q-tip container) and attending library club.  We read a lot of books aloud as well, some old favourites and a few new titles, some better than others.

And now here it is, Sunday, and I ordered the first batch of 'school stuff' from the library early last week but it hasn't arrived yet.  However, we are going to start school tomorrow regardless.  There you go.  I'm pretty certain that this first week (or month) will consist of just trying to get our feet under us again and figure out the whys and wherefores of what it is we're doing, so I won't share too much about our curriculum quite yet - I don't want to get all depressed if it doesn't go exactly according to plan.  I will say this though:

We're doing a literature-based kindergarten year and our main focal points will be phonics and math skills.  Our day is going to be loosely structured and I'm hoping that will help my desire for order.