Learning notes

Random notes about things we've done in our homeschool over the past two weeks or so.

We made pinhole viewers to observe the eclipse and origami ninja stars.

We watched the first two episodes of Planet Earth II.

We spent a lot of time watching weird math and science YouTube videos.  Especially from Smarter Every Day who did videos about extracting venom from stone fish, the science behind why cats land on their feet and the punching force of the mantis shrimp.  Did you know that the mantis shrimp isn't a shrimp?  Also Ted Ed talks about Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, the Voynich manuscript, the interesting question of the infinity hotel, teleportation and time travel.

We designed a trap, looked at different types of traps and discussed how they work.

The 7yo read a lot of Garfield comics, played with his Pair of Pears game, got people to play chess with him and constructed forts.  The 5yo and 3yo listened to many, many stories and played loud Latin music to choreograph dances to.

We found a whole bunch of interesting caterpillars and researched them.

We learned how the lawnmower works, weeded the garden and had a bonfire, trimmed the hedges, made brownies, washed the dishes, and practiced with the phone.  Life, essentially.

The little girls went to a playgroup with Daddy and did a craft.

Learning Notes Weeks One and Two

It's week three of school already, so I'm behind - good to know some things never change!

My friend Melanie at The Wine-Dark Sea writes a synopsis of her school weeks and I find that idea very appealing, especially in terms of tracking things.  I'm a sucker for lists and I also tend to fall into the pit of self-doubt periodically with regards to school, wondering if we do enough, if we read enough, if everyone is where their peers are...as if any of that really matters to me, which it doesn't.  Most of the time.

Last year I gave learning notes posts a whirl but faltered because we defaulted to curriculum plans so much, which is boring.  Each week all that really changed is whether or not we got our scheduled work done and if we went anywhere.  This year, when I am essentially not using any sort of pre-made curriculum or lesson plans, the notes will be different and fluid, I imagine.

Week One

We started school on August 1st.  The children were complaining of boredom so I decided not to wait for any books to arrive but just use whatever we had lying around.  Which is no small potatoes.  We have a lot of books 'lying around'.

Tuesday

We did a trial run of our Morning Basket.  Stories read: excerpt from A Family Treasury of Little Golden Books, excerpt from the Opie/Wells Mother Goose, The Little Red Hen from Richard Scarry's Animal Nursery Tales
Devotional: Little Visits With God lesson 'Are you glad to go to church?'
Non-fiction reading : Story of the World Volume 1, chapter 7: Hammurabi and the Babylonians

Reading: 7yo read Hardy Boys.  5yo and I did lesson 40 in Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Math: We pulled out a textbook (Journeys in Math 3) to get some conversation ideas and ended up discussing skip counting and odd/even numbers.

Bedtime read aloud - none.  We watched a movie.

Wednesday

Morning Basket: One Morning in Maine by McCloskey
Devotional: lesson was 'Are you growing as a Christian?'

In the afternoon we found a bullfrog and ended up researching it and building a habitat and trying to catch it food before it was released.

Bedtime read aloud - chapter 15 of The Hobbit with the 7yo.  There Is A Bird On My Head with the 5yo.

Thursday

Morning Basket: No fiction read.
Non-fiction: Horrible Histories The Awesome Egyptians Pg 1-11
Devotional: lesson was 'Where is God?'

The 7yo has gotten interested in board games so he had an outing to the library with Daddy in order to laminate some game sheets.

Reading: 7yo read I'll Teach My Dog 100 Words.  5yo did lesson 41 of Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Math: 7yo and I reviewed patterns and simple addition, which we learned last year.

Bedtime Read aloud: 7yo - A comic, 5yo- The Mouses' Terrible Christmas

Friday

Morning Basket: no reading other than devotional.
Devotional: lesson was 'Why not ask?'

Trip to get inoculations and we discussed vaccines.

Reading: 7yo- read a P.aw P.atrol story to 3yo.  5yo - lesson 42 of Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Math: some more reviewing of last year's topics.

7yo helped to stack some brush.  We discussed wet/green versus dry/cured wood, if moss really grows on the North side of the tree, and compass points.

Bedtime read aloud: 5yo Mr. putter and Tabby Walk The Dog.  7yo - Ch. 16 of The Hobbit.

Saturday (I find it easier not to take a weekend and disrupt the routine)

Morning Basket: no reading other than devotional
Devotional: lesson was 'How Strong God Is!'

7yo and I started sorting collectable cards and discussed categories.  Conversation about what a desert is, looked up definition in Oxford English Dictionary and National Geographic Kids' Atlas.  Talked about layers of the Earth, terrain at the bottom of the sea, aquafers, geysers, the Earth's molten core, etc.  7yo decided to build a Lego replica of this.

Reading: I know the 7yo read something, but I don't know what.  5yo and I did lesson 43 of Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Math: nothing specific.

Bedtime Read alouds: 5yo Two by Two.  7yo ch. 17 of The Hobbit.

Sunday

We didn't try and touch on any topics because we take Sunday off for work.  That being said we did a few things today.  We watched an episode of David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities show about nocturnal animals.  The 5 yo learned how to finger knit.

We also read a lot.  Lullaby Berceuse, Doing the Laundry, The Mole Sisters and the Fairy Ring and The Mole Sisters and the Cool Breeze.  The 7yo and I read chapters 18 and 19 to finish the Hobbit.

Monday

Morning Basket: Harold and the Purple Crayon, Make Way for Ducklings, Saint George and the Dragon from The Children's Book of Virtues.
Non-fiction: Story of the World Ch. 8 part 1 The Assyrians: Shamshi-Adad.
Devotional: 'Thou Shalt Not Covet'.

Reading: 7yo read Days With Frog and Toad chapter 1.

Math: reviewed single digit addition.

Bedtime read aloud: 7yo first 2 chapters of Chasing Vermeer.

Tuesday

Morning Basket didn't happen

Math- reviewed changing order of addends does not change sum.  Played Yahtzee and practiced addition including carrying.

Reading: 5yo Lesson 44 of Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  7yo read Little Bear's Birthday Soup.

Watched David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities episode on armoured animals.

Wednesday we spent the day cleaning, and then on Thursday the sink situation happened, so we were fully occupied with repairs for the next three days.  However we did take out he telescope at one point, and we did some star gazing and some cooking and art.

Yesterday started a new week!

Homeschooling - New Thoughts

We seem to have changed from a structured, Classically styled homeschool to a much more fluid, literature based eclectic school style this year.  I don't know that we fit into any molds anymore but in a discussion with a friend the other day we used the term Facilitated Unschooling.  I think that covers it fairly well.

What this means is that we aren't writing schedules, but we are keeping lists of things we've done and read.  We aren't filling out workbooks, unless we feel like it, but sure, if we feel like it then we are.  As usual I am abysmal at crafting and this year we're not going to force it.  There are a lot of guided discussions, carefully chosen videos, suggested books and so forth.

We started school two weeks ago, and the first week was a lot of flailing, followed by a few days of feeling like we had a rhythm, followed by the sink and a sinus cold and a lot of rain, followed by Sunday, when we don't 'do school'.  So tomorrow is a new week and hopefully it flows a bit smoother.

This isn't unschooling by any stretch of the imagination.  It's, well, it's facilitated.  Probably really facilitated.  And it's pretty flexible and changing all the time as I find new books I want to use and we get distracted with sparkly interests for a period of time.

The Great Plumbing Debacle

I hadn't really paid attention to how long it had been since I posted on this blog, which makes sense.  Ever since we started homeschooling in earnest, not to mention the arrival of baby #3, everything other than school and survival sort of took a back seat.

Now, though, the 'baby', despite still being referred to by everyone as such, is three years old.  Not really a baby.  And the homeschooling is on its third year, maybe fourth if you count random stabs at preschool.  The move to the 'new house' is four years past, and nothing about being a minister's wife shocks me anymore.

Today I made a little joke about wanting to resurrect the blog for the sole purpose of chronicling the recent three day crazy train of attempting to fix the parsonage sink.  And then I thought, well, why not?  I don't think I really have much to say on this blog anymore, but I dragged the cobwebby recesses of my mind and remembered how to log in, and here I am.

I make no promises.  But here I am.

So, the plumbing.  Ugh.

Well, we live in the parsonage, or manse, or clergy house.  Whatever your denomination calls it, it's the house owned by the church and lent to the current minister as a 'free' place to live.  I think a lot of churches have done away with their parsonages these days, and instead give their ministers a housing allowance.  But our church hasn't, and so when the husband was hired I knew already where we would live.  Here.

The parsonage is oldish and smallish and maybe a bit out of date, which suits us because we are also oldish, smallish and a little out of date.  Also, we're not picky, which is a good trait to cultivate if you have hopes of entering the ministry.  Just a little free advice from me to you.  But being oldish means everything is a little bit run down and I expect stuff to need a lot of duct tape and prayers.

The day before yesterday the kitchen sink stopped draining.  I did my level best with Drain-o and when that didn't work I decided I was going to plunge it.  With the seven year old holding the stopper in one side of the sink, I plunged with all my might.  When that didn't work I tried the other side, and then pulled over a chair and got up on the counter to use my full weight.  Well, certainly a lot of gunk came up, I'll spare you the details, and all of it had to be scooped into a bucket and dumped into the toilet.  For over two hours we worked on it, and we simply couldn't get the sink to drain.

I looked under the sink and consulted Dr. Google but the two of us, usually such an efficient team, couldn't understand the ancient pipes in my cabinet.  At this point I called it and told my husband he should let the church maintenance guy know that his services were needed at the manse.

Let me take a minute here to pause and sing the praises of Church Maintenance Guys, otherwise known as trustees, wherever they may be.  These fine men (there may very well be Church Maintenance Gals out there, but it's been my experience that the position is almost always something only a middle aged man with paint splattered pants and a squint would want to fill) come out in all weather, at all times, usually with a trunk full of tools so old the children wonder in awe if Noah himself used them.  They climb under your house, up your chimney and through your azaleas.  They pet your cat when you aren't looking, make suggestions as to the best placement of next year's bulbs, have the garbage and recycling ordinances memorized, and unclog your toilet for you.  They have an odd sense of humour and will gently mock you once they know you well enough.  What wonderful people they are, even the crabby ones, to volunteer for such a job.

Our trustee showed up with a chemical in a bottle that he thought might work.  We poured it in, waited the required time, and tried the sink.  It didn't drain.  Not to worry, said the trustee, and produced another bottle, this one very strong and certain to work.  Again we waited ( in between applications we drained the sink via the pipe underneath) and again we flushed the sink and again it did not drain.  Well, now this was exciting, thought the children as they clustered around their bedraggled mother who had been without a sink since just after breakfast.  The pipe underneath was opened again, and we fed our three foot drain snake into the wall.  Cleaned out, we resealed the pipe and tried the sink.  It didn't drain.  Not daunted yet, the trustee went home and got his own five foot snake, came back, opened the pipe, fed in the five foot snake, cleaned it out, resealed the pipe and tried the sink.  It didn't drain.

Under the house he crawled, and went to look at the plumbing.  We conferred and decided that he would return the next day and cut out a section of pipe from the crawlspace and clean from there.  The next day he did just that, using the five foot snake in both directions.  We resealed the pipe and tried the sink.  It didn't drain.  Now well over 24 hours without a sink, he agreed to open the pipe underneath for me to place a bowl so I could clean the sink and counter and possibly do dishes.  And he said he'd come back the next day again.

He did, and somehow he'd convinced his brother to come with him to help, and they cut out all the pipe and replaced it.  They resealed it, we ran the sink, and it drained.  Three days to fix a sink.

I'm so grateful for running water and modern plumbing.

Agricultural Fair Weekend

We found ourselves at the local agricultural fair yesterday; we've gone all three years that we've been here so far.  In fact, I can remember the first time we went, only a few days, maybe a week, after the move - we were still in that first 'everything is new, everything is nerve-wracking and everyone is deeply uncomfortable' stage of moving.  No one could sleep properly because the night noises were different, no one could find anything because the boxes weren't unpacked, and each person who came to the door was a stranger.  I really dislike that stage of moving.  I especially dislike how I can't navigate the world effectively because each task needs to be re-learned to a certain extent - where do I buy milk?  Someone is sick and we don't have a doctor, what next?  Do I have to bring a quarter to the grocery store to get a cart out?

Anyway, that first time, three years ago, the fair was another uncertainty; was it a country fair as in rides, cotton candy, games for children and ponies?  This is sort of what I think of when you say the word 'fair'.  It turned out to be not quite that, but an agricultural fair, which I wasn't as familiar with.  Lots of chickens and rabbits and such, big tables of handwork (quilts, flower arranging, jars of jam, etc.) and vendors selling things that they had made along the lines of knitted dishcloths and mittens.  This sort of fair is much more popular in the rural area I live in and it's what I anticipate now in 'going to the fair'.  We have been to several of them by this point and they have a common gentle entertainment flowing through them.  The children play on a play structure or swings, or perhaps ride a small train in circles; the food available tends to be hotdogs, coffee, cotton candy, and at our fair there is a milk booth that sells nothing but ice cold milk.  You can watch a tractor pull, or working horses, and you can have a glass of milk and go look at what everyone spent the last year crocheting and see whose child won the photography contest and which chicken looks the weirdest.

It is entertainment from a different era, really.  Every year I tell myself that we will enter some of the categories, not because I think my knitting can compete with anyone else's there, or that my jalapeno jelly is the best, but to support this sort of thing, this gentle kind of event that seems to be disappearing.

Our Grade One Curriculum

It's September, and a brand new school year full of things to worry about.  I'm surprisingly calm, actually, about this year's curiculum choices, and so is the boy.

We bought Rod and Staff Grade 1 mathematics, which is supposed to be a solid grounding in early arithmetic (telling time, measurements, money, addition and subtraction, plus the usual early geometry).  Already I can see that we are beyond the scope of this program - my son knows these things.  But I am making us go through the program from the beginning anyway because I'm mean like that.

For Language Arts we're finishing up Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and also starting in on First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, Volume 1.  I was concerned about the transition from the strange phonetic spelling to stardard printing in 100 Easy Lessons, but when we got to the lesson where they show you the *new* way of reading the transition went smoothly.

We are starting at the beginning of Story of the World Volume 1 for history and geography (we started reading it for pleasure last year but stopped), with the difference being that I also bought the activity book to go along with the text.  It guides you through story narrations, questions to assign (we will probably skip these with my pre-writer) maps and other activity sheets, further reading on the topic and finally a hands-on activity.

For 'science', which I'm not really doing in any formal way in grade one, we found a series called The Quark Chronicles that I was fascinated with and decided to buy the first volume.  The story follows four children who are kidnapped by space pirates and have to find their way back to earth using, in each book, a difference branch of science.  In the Botany volume, which I understand is the first book and is the one we're starting with, they begin to experience nutritional deficiencies and have to plant a garden and discover the secrets of botany.  In all honesty it's probably aimed at grades 3-5, but we're happy to putter through it anyway.  I have thoughts of doing experiments as well, from our many, many science experiment books, but who knows if that will really happen.

The whole 'curriculum', if you will, is scattered with a healthy dose of books.  The boy has received multiple interesting reads over the past few months; Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman and Terence Dickinson's two excellent books: Exploring The Night Sky and Exploring The Sky by Day (these, along with a beginner's telescope, were his birthday gift) stand out to me at the moment but there are others.  And of course we're still reading chapter books aloud.

Actually, the chapter books have begun to cause a bit of a fuss - we're running through books at a startling pace.  Last year we read Stuart Little by E.B. White, Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, Gooseberry Park by Cynthia Rylant, and My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett.  Also some of the Thornton Burgess books - I believe we read Bob White, possibly another.  Anyway, over the course of the year we managed those (approximately) five books.  THIS year, however, we've already read three of the Melendy Quartet novel by Elizabeth Enright, Winnie The Pooh by A.A. Milne, and last night finished Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.  I was at the library book sale a few weeks ago and picked up a cheap copy of The Wind In The Willows and we'll start that today, but then I suppose we should try to read The House At Pooh Corner and maybe another Burgess?  Or buy the next Ransome, which is Swallowdale...I don't know.  And I don't know why I didn't plan this a bit better.

So that's grade one over here.

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.