Mar. 12, 2007
Sobriety test
The other night Clementine asked, “Is my sobriety test on Monday?”
At first I was surprised that she knew the words sobriety then I wanted to laugh and I did. I told her a sobriety test was something you took when you had too much moonshine and she would be taking a standardized test on Monday.
We began the standardized test today and it goes through Wednesday. This morning she was nervous but when I saw her at the first break she had relaxed considerably. She said the test was, “easy and fun”. I’m not sure easy and fun will translate to high scores, but at least she isn’t worried and stressed.
We are still waiting to hear news about my mother and I am still waiting on things to happen with me. So thank you so much, you who have never even met me and those of you who have, for lifting me up in your prayers. It means so much to me.
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Jun. 20, 2006
Chasing fireflies
This evening, when the day finally cooled down, we went nature hunting. Im reading A Pocketful of Pinecones and, while Im not ready to recommend it as a good read, it has given me a few ideas. I gave the girls pencil and paper and we walked around under the trees looking.
I told them to look for something interesting to draw for their nature notebooks. They surprised me with their looking. Right away they were bent over a trail of ants, even Milo, looking just as hard as the girls were. The ants were carrying eggs and seemed to be making a new home. They found an empty cocoon, a mushroom and some black-eyed susans.
The end of the walk was most productive. Near the edge of the woods fireflies blinked and were easily caught. We put them in a plastic bag and I bet they caught 20 of them.
Once home, I showed them pictures of ants and fireflies so they could see how their body parts were drawn. They drew pictures and colored them and we identified the black-eyed susans and pasted everything on a notebook page complete with illustrations.
We frequently go on walks around the yard but I dont often have them looking, hunting for interesting things. This evening they poked sticks in holes, noticed animal tracks and asked about the oak tree roots they saw above the ground. Milo seemed to know exactly what we were doing and he made me laugh poking his own stick at things on the ground and bending over to take a closer look whenever the girls did.
I think theres something to teaching them to take a closer look and listen. I know this is something we will be doing a lot more often.
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Jun. 12, 2006
Homeschooling expectations
My expectations for homeschooling weren't much to begin with. I actually considered the first year a test to see if I was capable of educating my child. Now, looking back, I find it so strange that I ever thought a public school teacher could teach my child better than I could. Did they know my child better than I did? Did they care about my child more than I did? Did they have more individual time and attention to give to my child than I did?
Yet, at first, I didnt consider any of those questions. Instead my question was: Will I be able to teach her everything they say she needs to know?
I didnt always plan to homeschool, however, I feel that God began to work on my heart long before I began to think seriously about homeschooling. By the time my daughter was school age, the only thing I was sure about was that I didnt want to send her away from me all day.
Four years later, I have learned so much more about homeschooling, although our experiences really havent changed that much. We still read together, study nature together and the rest of the stuff just changes as the children are capable of doing more.
Homeschooling has more than met my expectations, but not how I expected. When we first began I imagined the learning would take place in a specific place at a specific time with the right materials. Now I see that it is so much more than just educating my child. It is about building relationships, spending time with my kids every day, all day and doing fun things together. I cant see ever wanting to change this way of life for our family.
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Jun. 1, 2006
It's a luna moth!
Exciting things are happening here today. When we got up this morning one of our caterpillars, which had made a cocoon about two weeks ago, had emerged a beautiful, luna moth! I think I was more excited than the kids.
We have managed to raise a caterpillar from an egg, fed it as it grew as a caterpillar, patiently waited on the cocoon and now we were rewarded with the moth.
We decided to set it free. Emeline let it go this morning.
Some history: A while ago, a luna moth was flying around. We caught it and put it in a bug box for a while. When we let it go we discovered it had laid eggs. We kept them and they hatched into the smallest green caterpillars we had ever seen. We read on the internet what to feed them and watched them grow.
This is one of the first photos of the caterpillar.It is not the black one but the small, green one on the leaf at the bottom left of the photo.
Here they are a few leaves later. They liked sweetgum tree leaves. They grew pretty big.
And today. Now the girls are putting together a book of drawings and writings about our experiences with the moth and caterpilars. It was so much fun and rewarding.
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Apr. 23, 2006
Mommy Tells a Story
My kids usually beg me to tell them a story at bedtime, especially if I don't read to them that night. Sometimes I can pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with a pretty good, "When I was a little girl..." story.
But sometimes I tell this story, "Once there was a mommy who was very tired and so she fell asleep. The End."
I get a lot of "aw, mom's" for that one. But it really worked to my advantage the other day when we were learning about writing narratives.
Now writing a narrative is one of the best types of writing there is because it is simply telling a story. So in illustrating the parts of a good story like setting, characters, plot... and so on I took them back to my very bad bedtime story.
"Why do you hate for me to tell you the story about the very tired mommy?"
"Because nothing happens." they say.
"That's right. But if I added some stuff to that story it could be a good story. Let me show you. Do you know what the setting is? That's describing what's around you, where you are, what you see or smell or hear. What if we put the mommy in a castle. It's a very dark and huge castle and when she talks it echos so she whispers all the time. The castle is so big that she is always losing her family and having to walk through many rooms looking for them."
They are looking at me with interest, suddenly this story has new life. We work together and add some details and eventually another character and a plot develops.
This is the way I taught my daughters about writing narratives. And immediately when we finished developing the story outloud they wanted to try one. I have to write Emeline's stories for her now, but she likes dreaming them up. Clementine likes to write her narratives then add illustrations.
Writing isn't all about the 3 point essay. Make it fun and write some narratives.
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Apr. 5, 2006
The How's and Where's of Homeschooling
Gena asked us to describe how we homeschool. This is a question I actually asked someone before I decided to homeschool. I knew a family who homeschooled and I asked them the seemingly dumb question, "How do you homeschool?"
Knowing what I know now, in some ways, it does seem like a stupid question. Rather, the better question might be, "How do you not homeschool?" But, in another sense I am still asking people, "How do you homeschool?" Discovering new techniques and finding out about new ideas is always exciting.
Sharing how I homeschool is also fun for me. The first book on homeschooling I read was For the Childrens Sake by Susan Schaeffer McCaulay. The second book was The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Both of these books strongly influenced how I began homeschooling.
I bought Phonics Pathways and began teaching my daughter to read on the couch. At this point we didnt even need storage space. We read a few verses from Genesis each day and she drew pictures. Later, I added handwriting and dictation. We did all this at our small breakfast table.
Now that same daughter is beginning third grade work and we have introduced quite a few more resources since then. We use Math-U-See, Veritas Press history, Exploring Creation with Astronomy, Italic Handwriting Series, Shurley English, MCP Spelling Workout and we have recently added Latin. We still use the Bible for our bible study and sprinkle in a generous helping of library books.
Now we homeschool all over the place but we have one central location for all the stuff, our dining room.
This large table and hutch and new shelves work out well for work and storage. We also have our Veritas Press history cards attached to the wall with velcro so we can see our time line. We have a solar system hanging in one corner and art work all around.
I have also added more children to our homeschool, another daughter and a son.
My second daughter began Phonics Pathways last year and now we are beginning to add more to her curriculum, following the same path I took with my first daughter, with a few changes. That's the beauty of homeschooling, being able to adapt to any situation, whether it's a different learning style or family changes.
Right now, my son keeps us from getting too serious. When we are reading aloud or working through a math problem, he likes to break the silence by throwing all the pencils to the floor or getting fed up with his wooden blocks and dumping them all out with a crashing thud.
The most fun learning times happen when we can all work on something together through projects or reading books.
A couple of years ago a large garden spider built a web on our front porch. This sparked an interest in spiders. We searched websites to find out what kind it was. We got books from the library and read about spiders. The girls drew pictures.
We read The Twelve Labors of Hercules by James Riordan and the pictures in the book made my artsy daughter want to paint. She painted a picture of each of the twelve labors and we made a book out of it.
Often our curriculum suggests a neat project like making a volcano, building a salt clay model of Roman ruins or creating a model of the Solar System and I'm forced to do hands-on activities with them. They love this part and I do too once I dig in and get going on it.
Its exciting to see all the wonderful curriculum out there. There is so much to choose from now and so many different ways to educate your children. Knowing that when something isnt working I can change it, and when we are having a bad day we can go outside and start again tomorrow, are some of the how's of homeschooling I had never even considered when I first asked the question, "How do you homeschool," until I began doing it myself. Now I can't imagine doing it any other way.
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