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The Thoughtful Spot
Saturday, October 10, 2009
What have we been up to?
We've
- reminded ourselves what some common math symbols mean.
- followed Christian a little farther on his pilgrimage, and learned that it is easier going out of the way when we are in, than going in when we are out.
- finished one Swedish book and begun another.
- read about Robert the Bruce and added a page to the Books of Time.
- made a couple of cute mini books.
- learned a little bit more about our tree.
- learned a poem and a passage of Scripture, and begun working on others.
- listened to some Mendelssohn and gotten to know a new painting by Cassatt.
- read a few chapters in Charlotte's Web, which we are all enjoying immensely.
- made a couple of pages in Rebecca's ABC book and Annalissa and Katja's Swedish word books.
- talked about shapes and colours.
- learned to be a little more patient and work a little more carefully.
Annalissa has also earned the right to have a hymn book in church by learning to read the hymn "Voici l'enfant nous est né." (The rule in our house is that hymn books are reserved for those who are able to read them.)
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Monday, September 7, 2009
Our First Week of School
The first week of school is already over! We took our time getting into the new school year. I think everyone is glad to be back into a routine, after a very busy summer. We rearranged the entire house, except the kitchen, which got some new coats of paint. The only piece of furniture in the house that didn’t move is the piano! We are still getting our new school nook organised, but everyithing is settling into place. Gabriel used his new toolbox to help fix our whiteboard.
Our little handyman.
I want to empasise notebooks more this year. We will do most of our academics in the morning, and the girls can spend some time working on their notebooks in the afternoon. Especially important, of course, are our Nature Notebooks. I’ve managed to collect a few printable notebook pages, and I purchased a pretty set for copywork from Notebookpages.com. I debated about whether to use pre-printed sheets or just have them draw and make their own, but I finally decided to at least begin this way. I don’t want to get carried away with themed sheets, but I’d like for them to have a neat, organised and atractive way to record information. Eventually, I plan to move away from printed sheets and they will be doing their own notebooks on plain paper.
We started working through “Une méthode de lecture pour tous les enfants”, by Marie-Christine Olivier. For the first term, we are working on French word-building (phonics). We reviewed the pure vowel sounds for a-u-i-o-e and é. It is a good book and very user friendly, although there are a few things I don’t like about it. Silent letters are printed in a different colour, and also, since it is from France, sometimes we don’t pronounce phonemes the same way. That isn’t a big problem; it’s most often just amusing. Katja loves to say “bulles” the French way! They wrote a word or two representing each letter sound and drew a picture in their notebooks, using a page from NotebookingPages.com.
Lissa
Katja
For Nature Study we began a year-Long journal of a tree in our yard. Katja chose the crabapple tree on the front lawn. We took bark rubbings and leaf rubbings, and next week we will look at the fruit and seeds. We will come back to the tree in each season to observe and paint it. Our nature study focus this term is trees and fruit.
Rebecca
And Rebecca, collector of all creepy-crawlers, found a big green caterpillar.
Annalissa has moved up to Form IA (grade 2) and now does mostly the same work as Katja. The first time I took out Pigrim’s Progress, she said, “Oh, I’m not ready for Chrisitan!” She didn’t want to narrate the first couple of readings, but in the end she did fine.
We were all excited to order some books from Sweden this year, and all the children helped to choose. This week, we began reading, translating and narrating the book, “En liten stund” by Anna-Clara Tidholm. It’s a cute book about a “kaninpojken” (boy bunny) who needs someone to come help him eat up all his pancakes. Anything with pancakes is popular with my little boy: his answer to the question, “What should we have for supper?” is always “Pancakes!”
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Tuesday, February 3, 2009
(How to Teach Proper Use of Punctuation!)
An interesting thing has been happening in Katja’s (still verbal) narrations: she has added punctuation. As she is narrating, from time to time she will tell me, “Put two dots (meaning a colon),” or she makes an exclamation mark in the air and expects me to add it to her dictation. She has done this several times over the last few weeks, always using the punctuatuion appropriately and sensitively, although I have never even mentioned so much as a period at the end of a sentence – which is why she doesn’t know what they’re called. When she uses one, I give her the name, but no more. It seemed to me Charlotte Mason wrote that we could expect this, so I looked it up and found this in Volume 1:
“It is well for them not even to learn rules for the placing of full stops and capitals until they notice how these things occur in their books. Our business is to provide children with material in their lessons, and leave the handling of such material to themselves. If we would believe it, composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books. They should narrate in the first place, and they will compose, later readily enough… (p. 247).”
Indeed – very natural, very easy. I am learning there are many things that will take care of themselves, if we will be patient enough to leave the children alone with their books.
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Monday, October 13, 2008
Our Week's Work
Annalissa’s reading lessons went very well this week. We reviewed the words we had already learned in word-building exercises. This week she hunted for words in her books. This seemed to help to get them in her head, and by the end of the week she could read the word lists more fluently.
This week, we started something new with Katja’s reading lessons. We started reading Pollyanna last year, but didn’t have time to finish. Katja is reading the last few chapters on her own. While I am working with Annalissa, she hunts through a couple of pages for any words she doesn’t know. I may add a few if I think she’s missed any difficult ones, or if one lends itself well to word-building exercises for the following day. Then we learn them as before. She seems to enjoy having a part in her own learning, and she enjoys reading Pollyanna.
In math this week, the girls discovered Sudoku. I made a modified game using four numbers instead of the usual nine. This is one example:
We read “The Battle of Stamford Bridge” in Our Island Story this week. It’s a very exciting chapter, and the girls had lots to say about it, besides giving excellent narrations. We have just a few chapters left until the conclusion, and this morning, Katja wondered aloud what would happen between King Harold and his brother, Tostig. I know it has been in her head all weekend!
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Saturday, September 13, 2008
Our Week's Work
This was our first week back at school. Katja is starting her second year and Annalissa her first. She was so excited the first day she could hardly stand still! By the end of the week we felt like we were getting into a routine again. Baby Felicity is very cooperative, and mostly naps or snuggles in the sling nuring school time. Gabriel joins us often at the table to scribble on some paper, or puts puzzles together, and Rebecca spends most of her time playing with her baby.
So far the favourite book is The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. It is really for Katja, and only she narrates, but Annalissa listens in and hears the story, too. I knew Katja would love this book.
Katja has improved her reading skills by leaps and bounds over the summer, reading the Grandma’s Attic books, and anything else she can get her hands on. She complained yesterday that she had nothing new to read, so I gave her Mr. Popper’s Penguins, which she is enjoying . I have her tell me what happens in each chapter, but don’t make her narrate; I let her read it for fun. She is joining in on Annalissa’s reading lessons in French, which went very well this week. For now we’re working on letter sounds and word building.
Katja was very happy to return to Our Island Story, and Annalissa was pleased to finally be reading it with us; Katja gave it such rave reviews last year! Lissa found the narrating a bit overwhelming the first time we read it though. She did very well narrating a story from Parables from Nature, on the very first day of school. It’s interesting to have them narrating a story together:
Annalissa: Two little girls were sitting beside their mamma on the poor little sick-bed. And one of the little girls were not talking.
Katja: The girl leaned her curly hair on the bed; the other one was sitting by their mother and there was a new baby so they didn’t talk much.
Katja: The girl had an empty box and she saw and she tried to get [the dust] and she peeped in the box and there as nothing. And she saw another and she tried to get that one and she said, “Oh him! I must get him!”
And she dashed it into the sunshine again. And her mother smiled.
Annalissa: “Take care of them, take care of them or they’ll all going to go out!”
Katja: She said she would like stars and the sister said, giving the box, “Take care of them, take care of them, or they’ll all go out.
And so her sister gave it to her so she would take it. She though of her sister more than herself. She gave it to Undine.
Annalissa: That’s the best part: “Take care of them, take care of them or they’ll all going to go out!”
Annalissa: She tried to catch the stars, but the infirmière came and …
Undine said, “It’s nothing but dust!
Katja: They danced in the dust, and it brought the nurse and she told them to go out of the room
Annalissa: They were too noisy.
Annalissa: "But Mommy," said Kate, "Why are the dust so like stars?"
" Because they shine in the sun so they look like stars."
Katja: She said, "You look like start to me in my eyes because the sun is shining on you."
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Sense & Sensibility ePatterns