Bounce! Climb! Slide!

On Monday morning, we joined half a dozen other homeschool families at a local attraction: a spectacularly massive version of your typical fast food playspace along with several bounce house structure inside a warehouse-sized building. All three girls sustained minor injuries, but had a fantastic time and completely wore themselves out after running around with their friends for two straight hours. The moms meanwhile chatted in a side room with a comfy couches just off the main play area. It's kind of a pricey activity, but it was fun to have the whole place to ourselves now that most of the population is back in school!

Library Day

Another quiet day at the library. We came home with these books:

Zin! Zin! Zin!

Mommy's Little Monster

Leo the Late Bloomer

I'm a Baby. You're a Baby

Running Shoes

(Apparently, the girls were in the mood for the familiar: All of the above books are ones we've checked out on multiple occasions.)

Dream Dog (This was a new book for us, but the girls recognized the illustrator from one of their favorite books at home.)

Bug Patrol

There's No Such Thing as a Dragon

The Orange Book

Daddy Has a Pair of Striped Shorts

The Caged Birds of Phnom Penh

The Giving Tree (The girls picked out all the books this week, and I was curious to get their reaction to this one in particular. It's a highly acclaimed Shel Silverstein title that I've heard people gush over on several occasions, but this book always bothered me even as a kid. My daughters had the same reaction of shock and dismay that I did, summarized by Bug: "How could the boy be so mean to his favorite tree?! He destroyed it!")
 

Viking Music

We continued making our way through the Norse mythology book, and this week we made a particular study of Viking music. I found a good website that talked about the wide variety of Viking instruments, including pictures of archaeologist’s reproductions of the instruments, and even included sound samples and a few snippets of songs to listen to. The girls pulled out a few whistles and recorders from their instrument bin that resembled the Viking versions and we made our own Viking style lyre out of a piece of cardboard and rubberbands. The lyre from our Ancient Greece studies was still floating around the playroom, so we did a bit of a comparative study and noted all the differences in construction.

The Three Rs

For reading lessons, Monkey read Max & Milo Go to Sleep, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, and Rosie's Walk. I also overheard her reading I'm a Baby. You're a Baby to Goose. Bug read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Where's Spot?, and Inside, Outside, Upside Down.

For math lessons, they worked their way through whatever math worksheets I happened to have lying around (mostly addition and fractions with a little telling time thrown in). This week I was really focused on getting some things organized and work folders put together (see Planning Tea below).

For writing this week, the girls did several worksheets--fill in the blank and unscramble the sentence activities--and wrote sentences inspired by silly drawings of things like flamingos wearing ice skates. Bug also completed a work folder from church--extra activities the kids could do based on their Kids Club lessons about Exodus and Deuteronomy. She turned in the completed folder this week, and on Sunday she'll receive a prize and get to add her name to a poster recognizing her hard work.

I think Goose completed several dozen worksheets this week--counting, shapes, sequencing, pencil control, etc. She's been very cheerfully busy!

Planning Tea

The tradition continues: Every 6 months or so the girls and I regroup for homeschooling by baking a treat, making tea, and sitting down to talk about what we've been doing and what we're going to do. For Goose, I had a stack of new workbooks to present (thank you, Target bargain bins!). After exclaiming over the new books, she scarfed her brownie and headed back to the playroom, while her big sisters and I continued.
 

They're in first grade now, and we talked about how that means they have a little more and more difficult work to do, so one of the things they'll be learning this year is how to focus and get their work done more efficiently. We did a test run of a timer method one day this week: I set a timer for 15 minutes. If they work steadily, they can have a 15 minute brain break when the timer goes off regardless of whether or not they're finished. If they finish before the timer goes off, the extra time is all theirs to do with as they wish. It worked beautifully (math problems they would have agonized over for 30 minutes were miraculously done in less than 10), and they're excited about continuing it all the time starting next week. We also discussed things we might do during those brain breaks: getting extra toys temporarily out of the storage bins (we rotate toys in and out of the playroom), learning yoga with some kids YouTube videos I found, go for a short walk, etc.

Then we tackled the actual subjects. For reading, we discussed our plan to step up to intentionally more challenging books than the ones they've mastered lately. For math, I made each of them a work folder with enough worksheets for about 3 weeks. Every day we do lessons, they must complete any two of the sheets, but are welcome to do more. Bug in particular is likely to do this as driven as she is to complete projects; she was excited about being able to move completed pages into the other pocket of the folder, so she could easily see how much she had finished. Monkey's excited about this new method, because she now has much more freedom to choose what she does each day. I also purchased some flashcards, so we can start drilling their math facts. The new piece to their writing lessons is the addition of spelling tests. (Bug has been complaining for a while that she wished could write more things all by herself.) We're going to be working our way through Fry's Word List (the 1,000 most common English words). We're starting off with just 6 words at a time, but I'm sure we'll up that number eventually. As usual they're most excited about history, and I had a fun project for us to do for this part of our tea (now that we'd actually finished our snack). We relocated to the playroom and created a timeline using a set of history cards I made up for the units we've studied so far or will be studying in the coming months. Each card shows the name and years of the time period, a world map indicating where it took place, and a collection of iconic images from the era. We used red string to indicate periods that lasted for longer lengths of time (for example, Ancient Greece and Imperial China each represent several thousand years). The time periods they got to preview: Ancient Egypt (to coincide with their Bible quizzing studies of Exodus) and Colonial America (because I decided they're old enough to be familiar with the events of early American history). I was pleased that they actually do have a pretty good grasp of when eras fall in relation to each other.

 I Think He Feels Enlightened Now

We know so many homeschoolers here in California that sometimes I forget some people still have misconceptions about what homeschooling is really like. Apparently inspired by something from the sermon on Sunday, an older gentleman approached me after church and the following conversation happened:
Gentleman: You homeschool, right?
Me: Yes--two first graders and a preschooler.
Gentleman: So, don't you think homeschooling keeps your kids in a box?
Me [slightly puzzled look on my face]: No, actually I think sending them to school is more of a box. I mean, schooled kids basically sit in the same room all day.
Gentleman: But do your girls have opportunity to be with other 5 year olds?
Me [glances across courtyard where my 3 are galavanting around with half a dozen other 4-6 year olds--all homeschooled]: All the time! Almost all the kids here are homeschooled, and we get together a lot at playgrounds, the beach, church activities, the aquarium. We do storytime at the library, and my girls take swimming lessons and jujitsu lessons . . . Plus, as homeschoolers they get to interact with kids of all ages--not just 5 year olds--I think it's actually better for them to get to play with kids older and younger than they are too.
Gentleman: Hmmm....but don't you think it'd be good for them to get to see what the real world is like?
Me [I think I may actually have laughed]: Well, they're not sitting in a classroom all day; they're actually in the real world. Academic lessons at home don't take very long with just three, and they come with me on whatever errands I have to run--to the grocery store, the bank, getting the oil changed, Target, whatever. They help with chores at home and see all the jobs I do. They get to see and participate in what people really do all day long.
Gentleman: Oh . . . huh . . . I guess I never thought about that.
[Mildly injured daughter screams in the background. Conversation ends.]