So how about a MONTHLY update?

Better than nothing, yes? The picture above is from our newly implemented "teatime," an idea gleaned from the Bravewriter website. The idea is that you set the table all fancy like and sit down and have tea and read poetry and other stuff aloud. Only my kids are drinking hot chocolate because they don't like tea. And see those cookies? While I was making the cookies, I noticed that the shortening looked a little funny. And smelled a wee bit funny, too. Usually I use butter, but we didn't have enough. So I made the cookies anyway, then looked up what was going on with my shortening, and did you know that shortening gets rancid? I had no idea. The cookies were fine, though. I think the shortening was only at the beginning stages of rancidity. Who wants to come over for cookies?! Really, everything I read said the cookies might taste funny but would not make anyone sick or dead, so I figured since they didn't taste funny, we were good to go. And about 20 seconds after this picture was taken, Milo dropped his fancy teacup on the floor and spilled hot chocolate everywhere. Despite all of this, though, the kids are super into tea time. This one was last Friday and we also did it Friday before last, and Milo asked when we were going to do it again at least 3 times during the week. I gave them a book of poetry to look through and each pick a poem from for us to read; this week the book was The Earth is Painted Green : A Garden of Poems about our Planet, which, incidentally, I like a lot and which one can buy used on Amazon for a penny.



We read a few poems from the book, then the kids illustrated one of the poems while I read a chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

History: Chugging along in Story of the World. Even Milo is listening in most of the time, which I'm a bit surprised about. Ari would never have sat still for it at that age. We've implemented a "narration jar" that is actually a narration box. It is a perpetual challenge to get Ari to talk about anything he reads because there is not a single right answer, and the boy does not like it when there is not a single right answer (and one he knows absolutely at that). So the narration box gives him a bunch of options for how to talk or write about what he's read, like "draw a picture" or "write three things about what we read" or "put on a play about it." There is also, "write a letter to Nana," and that's what he drew this week. Hmm...this is going to be huge, but here's the letter to Nana. As you can see, only the first part has anything to do with the reading. Then he talks about other stuff we did this week. The whole letter is six pages long, but mostly consists of a bunch of mazes and puzzles for Nana to solve. I'm not sure what all is in it, because I'm only really supposed to read the first page. So everything else I know is what I happened to glimpse when I was scanning the first page. My favorite part is: "Warning: Don't turn the page if you don't like farm animals." I like farm animals! But I'm not allowed to read the rest anyway.



Math: I have this big plan where we do all kinds of superfun math games on Fridays, but then there is Gus. But I did just buy this book:



for Ari. It introduces a concept with a little story and then has 4 different levels of problems (mostly word problems) dealing with the concept. We've only done the first chapter, but so far so good. I think I need to find something fun for memorizing multiplication tables. He's at the point where he has to stop and multiply in his head for a lot of stuff that he wants to do, and it really slows him down. I'm thinking of the Schoolhouse Rock: Multiplication Rock video. I should check United Streaming and see if they have anything, too. Milo is zooming along in his Singapore Earlybird. He just started the 3rd book (out of 4).

Phonics: Speaking of Milo, he's already grown tired of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which seemed so promising at first. Oh well. Guess it's break time again.

Co-op: I'm teaching Ari's group again on Tuesday. I guess I'm going to talk about Marco Polo and compasses. I don't know anything much about Marco Polo. But I'm going to have them all make compasses with corks and needles and then we'll go outside and do an exciting compass activity (with a regular compass, not the cork ones) that, if I remember right, has to do with finding a coin in the grass. Co-op days leave my utterly exhausted--mostly because of art. Teresa, who is the boss of all of us (and officially the boss of art), has the kids do incredibly elaborate projects every week. Which would be really cool if my kids were 4 or 5 years older than they are. But as it is, it means Ari and Milo both need extensive help with the projects, while Gus clings to me and sobs (because art happens, conveniently, at his usual naptime).

Spanish: Spanish is, sadly, already almost over. The homeschool center that jacked their prices up so much this is fall is now abruptly closing, leaving our Spanish tutor (who also taught classes there) in a financial bind. So she's not going to be able to come to my house anymore for lessons. She's hoping to get enough kids together to start teaching classes at her house, which would be lovely. If she can't do that, she has to go back to work full time. I hope we can keep doing classes with her; the kid adore her. Ari won't shut up when she's around, which is unheard of for him. Ari especially is very into Spanish; I really want to keep it up, so if we lose Maestra Lily I guess we'll have to scramble to find someone else.

Co-op begins! and more!

Homeschool co-op started up again this week. There is a very ambitious schedule (that I had nothing to do with picking; I would not have been nearly so ambitious) covering explorers, scientists, and inventions all through history (following the Trisms History Makers schedule), and then also doing art and Spanish. Everyone takes turns teaching the history/science part, with the kids divided into three age groups. Milo's in the 4-5 year old group, and Ari's in the 6-8 year old group. I'm teaching a total of 11 weeks out of thirty. And then the person who was supposed to be mostly doing the Spanish is abruptly moving to DC, so I'm doing that, too, because I'm the only person left who knows any Spanish and can therefore at least pronounce things sort of correctly. The Spanish is La Clase Divertida (the value of which I question), so it's mostly just putting on DVDs. Anyway, I taught the middle kids this week. The idea is they all prepare some kind of little report at home and then at co-op they present those, we put stuff on a timeline, we talk about one of the topics for the week (they cover the rest at home, only my kids really won't so much because we already had other stuff planned when I found out about all the ambition), and then there's an activity having to do with the topic. So we talked about pyramids, and made a little book about pyramid building, and then I had them build a pyramid out of (square brick) legos. I just kind of tossed the legos at them and had them go at it, and then made some suggestions eventually so that they'd come up with something that would actually stand up. There are supposed to be 5 kids in the group, but Ari refused to participate at all and Gabriella got pissed off after a few minutes and stormed off. But 3 out of 5 isn't bad. Here's the finished product and the proud architects:




In Art, they all made a mural with hieroglyphs on it:













We also started Spanish class here--my friend Di linh and I hired a tutor to come once a week for an hour and do a class just for our three older kids (Milo and Ari plus her son Gavin). It started the day after I sprained my ankle, so Dave was home and I was in the other room not really seeing anything that was going on. Dave came in and I asked, "did you tell her Ari's not going to talk at all?" Turns out he WAS talking--repeating everything he was supposed to and offering up unsolicited tidbits like, "some of our crayons have the colors in English AND Spanish." So I think it's going to be a really good thing for everyone.

Everything else is going along pretty well. Dave is teaching Ari piano, which Ari alternately finds really cool and really frustrating. We learned about rocks for science the other day. First I sent Ari and Milo out to look for rocks. I stuck my head out to check on them a few minutes later. "How's it going?" I asked. "Good!" they both answered. " I haven't found any rocks, though," Milo added cheerfully. So I came out to help. Then we took the rocks inside and did a scratch test on them with fingernails and a penny and a drinking glass (and maybe one other thing. I can't remember). Then we took them outside and smashed them with a hammer.

The latest.

Things have been moving along as smoothly as they can when one has a Gus in the house. Today I made brownies and Gus dumped a glass of ice water all over them. But that is not really homeschool-related, I suppose (except that Gus does seem to think of life as a sort of grand experiment. I am not sure how to nurture his curiosity while preventing him from destroying everything we own. Perhaps he's trying to teach me some sort of anti-capitalist lesson. "Property is theft!" insists young August. But, still, I digress.)

Current chapter book for Ari and me is The Castle in the Attic. On his own, he's tearing through the Magic Tree House books. He's almost finished with one about the Vikings, and then he'll have to take a break while we wait for the next one to arrive via paperbackswap.com. Everything that happens to us these days seems to relate back to something Jack and Annie experienced. He also has a "bookstore" set up in the schoolroom, which trades primarily in Magic Tree House books. Milo is by far its best customer. Things go like this: Ari convinces Milo he needs a particular book. Usually it costs $1, which Milo does not have, so Milo comes running in to me to ask for a dollar. Sometimes I give it to him and sometimes I don't, but Ari always seems to turn the book over to him anyway. So now Milo keeps wanting me to read Mummies in the Morning to him, and I kind of hate doing it. I keep cringing over the incomplete sentences. I just don't understand it. Why not use a comma where a comma belongs. Instead of a period? I kind of freak out about Ari reading them, too, since it is firmly cemented in my brain that one learns to write well by reading good writing.

And, speaking of writing, I worry about it. Sometimes. The abysmal writing produced by my freshman comp kids at Brandeis is a lot of what made me start thinking about homeschooling in the first place, so I really want to get it right. And I think that it's a craft, a skill--something you can't learn overnight, which is why the kids at Brandeis sucked at it so much. They were smart kids with great ideas and no clue how to wrestle the ideas into coherent sentences, much less paragraphs and whole essays. They couldn't learn it in one semester, and they shouldn't have needed to try. So I am intrigued by Bravewriter, but also a little wary of paying $90 for a book, however full of amazing ideas it might be. Really, Ari writes well and enjoys writing and reads a lot, which is all I think he needs to be doing at the moment anyway. But still sometimes I worry.

But anyway...some stuff we've been doing:

We read about various stuff that happened a long time ago on the Arabian peninsula and then made an oasis out of candy and brown sugar. As you might imagine, this was a very popular project with the youngsters. I'm a little worried that they now know of the existence of the giant wall of jellybeans at Target. Also, we only got one camel in our box of animal crackers, and it broke, so that's an elephant or something hanging out at the oasis. Tomorrow we move on to China.












We're just finishing up weather in science (though we haven't finished up Weather Detectives. We may or may not keep reading that, depending on time and interest and whatnot). I found "Blizzard in a Bottle" kits at a yard sale last spring, so we whipped those out the week we learned about snow. They entertained the kids for at least 45 minutes, but they didn't really teach them about snow so much as about the technology behind disposable diapers (the kit is basically a baggy full of powder, apparently very similar to the stuff found in Pampers, et. al., that fluffs up into a snow-like substance when water is added to it). It's very messy. It is only appropriate for Gus' naptime.

I forgot to take a picture of the actual thing we made, but here is Ari's drawing of the "tornado tower" we made out of 2 liter bottles. Our two bottles are held together by a film canister (the last one in the house, I think) with the bottom cut off, but my friend Di Linh has a similar contraption at her house and told me they actually sell a little piece of plastic specifically for holding bottles together to make tornado towers. How would you even know to look for one? Anyway, tornado tower was loved by all, and now Ari regularly recites safety rules for what to do in case of a tornado to anyone who'll listen.




And, finally, here is Milo's drawing of The Weather Detectives. I'm not sure how well you can see it--the Weather Detectives themselves are down on the bottom ("oh! I forgot to draw their hats!"), and then there's a tornado on the top left, and then he drew a circle around the whole thing so they'd be in glass. Because they're in a museum. Because they're not real. I don't quite follow the logic, but whatever makes him happy. He is pretty new to the world of representational drawing (until a month ago or so, he mostly just drew big, spirally things and called them all machines), and I'm enjoy his new, spooky-eyed little people. He insists that I write "Milo's drawing" on all of them.

Week(s) in review...

So this is Ari observing our condensation experiment. We put ice water with food coloring in a glass and waited for it to start forming water droplets on the outside. And then a series of leading questions to get the kids to figure out that it was water vapor in the air condensing on the glass and not water FROM the glass (you know, because it wasn't green). I read a bunch of different variations on demonstrating condensation before I settled on this one. A lot of them just involved holding ice water over hot water on the stove. But the green food coloring seemed like a stroke of genius to me. It helped ME grasp the whole water cycle thing better than I ever have before, I think.

We're doing earth science for the first half of the year, then switching over to space science after that. I wrote out plans for the year--the basic idea is that we read about a topic in Usborne's Our World--a glossy two page spread on volcanoes or seasons or ecology or whatever; there are many pictures, so it holds Milo's interest as well, generally. And then we read some other books on the topic, or look at websites, or watch a United Streaming video. Then we do some kind of experiment or demonstration, and Ari writes up how we did it (I'm using this experiment page, at least for the time being). Our World only devotes two pages to weather, but I think it's too exciting for all that, so we're spending a few weeks on it.


Ari and I are reading The Weather Detectives
The kids in it don't really seem much like detectives, though. They just sort of travel around and check out the weather. There don't seem to be any particular mysteries in need of solving.

Ari's been reading a ton over the summer. Before he would always go in spurts; for a week or so he'd read and read and read. Then he'd be all done with it for awhile (I mean, he'd still read, but it'd be a Dr. Seuss book here and there instead of spending an hour at a time with Magic Treehouse books). But so far this summer, he's read the first two Boxcar Children books, a Third Grade Detectives book, The Littles Throw a Party (that's the one he picked out as his prize for finishing the summer reading program at the library), Flat Stanley, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, and the first two Arthur chapter books. In the read-aloud category, we just finished Matilda a bit ago, and then I really, really wanted to read The Hobbit to him, but he protested wildly that it was "boring" (which means, in Arispeak, "too hard to understand") so we're reading The Phantom Tollbooth instead. Maybe next year for The Hobbit.

Milo is flying through the Singapore Earlybird books with Dave. There are 4 books, and he's nearly finished with the first one. I was thinking of going through Phonics Pathways with him, but I don't think he's ready yet. We got to the blending part, and he just doesn't get it yet. So we'll just do lots of "reading readiness" type stuff for now and try again whenever he's interested. Reading is funny. Ari was reading a good bit by Milo's age, but he's always been a very visual learner. So he was sight reading way before he was sounding things out. And then we just sort of went back and put the phonics on top of that, so he'd have the decoding skills. He's very good NOW at sounding out words he doesn't know, but for a long time it was too hard (or, you know, BORING), so he'd guess at words he didn't know. My mother insisted for a long time that he wasn't really reading because he wasn't sounding out the words. But he could pick up a book he'd never seen before and read it because he knew so many words by sight. Anyway, so Milo is not as intensely visual as Ari, I don't think....he knows all of his letter sounds, but he doesn't remember words when he sees them, so I think it's going to be slower for him because he's going to need to really get the sounding out thing before he starts reading much at all. That's my guess, at any rate. Time will tell.

These are the rings I made so we can count off the days until we go to Disneyworld. Very festive! Except if we forget a day and then forget that we forgot, we'll be completely off track. But, at any rate, only 50-something more days until Disney!

Up too late: the year's plans, et. al.

I think I could probably title all my posts "Up too late," actually...

Alrighty--so I'm trying out Blogger because I like how I can put links in the margins and all that (although I haven't looked around enough yet to know exactly how to do it), but I'll x-post all of this w/ livejournal.

We've been trying to "do school" over Dave's break this summer, with some success. We're being kind of haphazard and lazy about it, but some stuff's getting done nonetheless. Dave's taken over math, and we're going to try to keep that up when he starts back to work, too. So, at any rate, we're a few weeks in to the new year, and it's going pretty well. I'm trying not to think about Dave leaving and me trying to get things accomplished with Gus running loose, though.

I need a little sidebar about what stuff we're using! With links! But it's basically more of the same this year, as my kid turns out to be Susan Wise Bauer's dream pupil in many ways...so mostly Well Trained Mind suggestions, with some variations, but not as many as I expected. History is Middle Ages w/ Story of the World. Earth and space science w/ lessons I cobbled together myself. Finishing First Language Lessons...we'll probably be done with the first book (level 1 and 2) by Christmas, and then we'll go on to the third. Singapore for math with some Miquon and lots of games thrown in. And some critical thinking/logic books that I have, plus Poetry Fridays.

We're also doing homeschool co-op on Tuesdays, which will be more science and history (sort of a general overview this year), plus Spanish and art. I'd be just as happy without the science and history, really, since we're doing it on our own (some of the people in the co-op are using it as their only science and history), but I want Ari to do the group thing and maybe even get used to talking in front of people. And I'm glad we'll be doing the art there--the place where he took classes the last 2 years has gotten terribly expensive, so we're not going back this year, which means he's losing the drawing class he loved. My friend Di Linh is planning to hire a Spanish tutor to come to her house and do small group classes, so we'll do that (probably for all three kids) if it materializes. And then more gymnastics for Ari, and I need to get Milo in some sort of sport. I might just wait until spring and do soccer. Or maybe karate. He'd be unbearably cute in a karate uniform. Then there's homeschool park day with the same people as co-op one day a week, and that makes our schedule as full as I can stand it. I want to stay home two days a week, but that never seems to actually happen.

And here I'd like to do a weekly update with pictures of stuff we're doing. But I've said that before, so we'll just see what happens.