M. Family Homeschool

Osiris and Set Narration

2009-06-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

by Isabel, age five

(A summary of the myth of Osiris and Set can be seen here. We read a kid-friendly version.)

"Egyptians believed in lots of Gods, not just one. Miley Cyrus was the in-charge god. Miley Cyrus's brother was Set Up, like Scar in the Lion King. Set Up gave Miley Cyrus a coffin box as a trick, and Miley Cyrus drownded in the Nile. Miley Cyrus's wife, Ice, cried a lot. Then Miley Cyrus came back to life and went back to the prideland. The pharoah was a god, too, and sang very pretty with Joseph."

Say what?

2009-06-10T21:07:00.001-07:00

Photograph by Matthew Rolston

So, yeah, yeah, I haven't updated in ages. First Isabel was sick, then I was sick, then Aidan was sick, blah, blah, blah. And I am apparently watching far too much television these days, judging by back-to-back opinions on reality TV stars. But I just can't not say something about this Adam Lambert business.

Isn't Adam Lambert being gay, like, the biggest NON-news story ever?

This was a "secret" like the owner of the deli where I worked as a teenager having an affair with his manager was a secret ("Uh, sorry! I can't see anything, I just need to refill the pickle jar!" [As did she. ba dum bum.]). Like Kathie Lee Gifford having a bizarre fixation on Cody, or how most moms co-sleep with their babies at some point. Like Citizen Kane not actually being a very interesting movie, or how diet Dr. Pepper actually does not taste like regular Dr. Pepper at all. These are things that aren't always talked about, but are generally known.

So, please, allow me to say... Yoo-hoo! Rolling Stone? EVERYBODY ALREADY KNEW ADAM LAMBERT WAS GAY.

I'm now off to work on the breaking news story that I'm certain will launch my reporting career: Andy Rooney Has Nightmare-Inducing Eyebrows.

I'm a guest blogger!

2009-05-29T18:48:00.000-07:00

A friend, Tracy, owner of the wildly successful I Hate My Message Board weblog, has a piece of mine up as a guest post! To read my thoughts on the recent Jon and Kate Plus Eight controversies, follow this link:

http://ihatemymessageboard.com/2009/05/29/paying-the-piper/#more-1345

Stupid Nature (a/k/a Close Encounters of the Wormed Kind)

2009-05-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

This week we're learning about early Egypt: The Nile, Nile Delta, Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, King Narmer, etc. Cue immediate confusion, as the map shows that "Upper Egypt" is, in fact, lower, and "Lower Egypt" is upper - a baffling conundrum to a 5 year old. After much poring over maps and talking about mountains vs. valleys, I decided that the thing to do was to make a model of the Nile. So we halted all further discussions about Egypt in order to construct the Nile in our dining room.

An old metal painting pan made the perfect container - it even had the built-in slope to represent Upper Egypt's mountains. I drilled a few holes in the deepest part, to allow water from our Nile to drain into the Mediterranean - otherwise known as a round cake tin - and set Isabel up with tin foil to line the pan and mold mountains. While she did that and Aidan napped, I jogged out to the farthest corner of the backyard, where we've been tearing out grass to construct a play area. This portion of the yard has dark, rich soil and since my initial, ambitious imaginings of the model included grass seeds, I thought it would be perfect. Working fast, lest Senor Crankypants wake from his nap earlier than expected, I filled a large mixing bowl with dirt and ran back in.

Referencing Isabel's map of the Nile, we got the model oriented in the right direction and dumped in the dirt. With spoons and fingers we smoothed the valley, mounded the mountains and dug out the Nile, its offshoots in the delta, and the sea. The dirt was imperfect, filled with grass clippings. That's the reason I didn't notice them sooner - they blended in with the grass clippings.

"Them" being the worms.

No, let me rephrase. Not just "the worms," but THE MOTHERF***ING WORMS! Scores of them. Thready white nasty little buggers, undulating and burrowing all through our model of the Nile. I think they might have been these, and am hoping like hell they weren't these.

Me: Oh my Gaaaawwwd!

Not out loud, though. I managed to keep a calm demeanor. But make no mistake - in my head, I was jumping around and screaming like a maniac as those horrid little things wriggled around on my dining table. Oh, Lord, on my table. Very, very calmly, I scooped them out, one at a time, and re-deposited them in my mixing bowl (which is now slated for destruction, as I will never ever evereverever eat anything that comes out of it again). One by one, until there was a nice, thick pile of those squirmy sonsabitches. I flushed them down the toilet, with much malice in my heart.

We filled our pitcher (the one we made in our recycling/gardening tool project a couple weeks ago) with water and rained down on the mountains. It worked! The water flowed through the mountains, into the Nile, through the delta and into the sea. It flooded and drained, just as it was supposed to. And as it drained, dozens more worms popped up out of the dirt and made a mad dash for higher ground. Popped their slimy white heads out of my Nile Delta and looked at me, I swear to God, they looked at me with evil in their microscopic eyes, or whatever equivalent to eyes worms have.

Unfortunately for me, Isabel was very taken with her Nile model and wanted to keep playing with it for a while. So I isolated the damned thing the best I could, with tin foil and a tray, and let her flood it a bit longer while I got to the urgent business of cleaning all the spilled dirt off of my table, chairs and floor. Because you know what was in my mind... bitty worms and worm eggs laying around, just waiting to be eaten by some unwitting child or house pet. Or, maybe, just maybe, lurking and waiting for the right moment to burrow into the bottom of my foot and lay eggs in my brain or some such fodder for a blockbuster horror film. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it couldn't - someone has to be the first. It would be just my luck to be the first human invaded by some body-snatching alien worm creature from the Nile.

So I cleaned. And cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. I knew it was overboard even while I was doing it, but considering that what I really wanted to do was (1) blow the house up or (2) power-wash the entire dining room with undiluted bleach, I figured I was doing okay by settling for some obsessive-compulsive scrubbing with vinegar solution. I also enforced rigorous hand-washing by all Nile-flooding participants, but did it without screeching about intestinal parasites so, again, bring on the congratulatory self-back-pats. I invited Isabel to help with the cleaning but she was suddenly and tragically struck blind, as evidenced by her dark-tinted princess glasses. Remarkably coincidental, how she is always unexpectedly overcome by such afflictions just when I need her help with tidying up.

I managed to hold on until Nick got home. Isabel flooded the Nile for him and he was appropriately impressed. And then I smiled, pulled him to the side, and hissed, "There are worms in the model and you must get it out. of. my. house. NOW."

Which he did. Husbands are awesome.

Isabel had a blast, and she did eventually understand why Upper Egypt is Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt is Lower Egypt. So it was worth it in the end.

Naturally, there are pictures.

Isabel's map of the Nile.

Putting dirt in the model. Sweet, innocent times, before we'd looked closely at the soil.

Aidan's contribution. I'm not joking, either - this is the very best contribution he could have given us. I love it when he sleeps through the big projects!

Worm pie. Er... I mean, the Nile. It's partially flooded here.

Aidan woke up.

Isabel. She was blind here. As you can tell by the glasses. Her sight was miraculously restored when all the cleaning was done.

Know, Google Ads, Since Thou Art So Weird...

2009-05-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

That I shall now commence to mock thee.

In the sidebar of my search results for "homeschool news":

Online Homeschooling
Fast & Easy. All info about online Homeschooling.
www.essayedge.com

It just so happens that I used to have a contract with the other half of the company that operates EssayEdge. So I know firsthand that EssayEdge is an essay writing service. Not a tutoring service, an essay writing service. They're not lying - it truly is fast and easy homeschooling when you hire someone else to do your schoolwork for you.

A less-than-stellar Mommy moment

2009-05-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

8:00 am
Eating homemade waffles
Isabel: I wish we could have oatmeal for breakfast.
Me: We had oatmeal yesterday. Waffles today. They're good!
Isabel: Yeah. But I wish we could have oatmeal instead.
Me: I know you do. We'll have oatmeal tomorrow.

10:00 am
Doing schoolwork
Isabel: I wish I had my own computer.
Me: What would you do with your own computer?
Isabel: I could look up my own schoolwork by myself and it would be better.
Me: Okay. Well, how about if we look some things up on the computer in a little bit?
Isabel: But that's not my own computer. I wish I had my own computer.
Me: I understand you do. But we all share a computer for now.

12:00 pm
Eating lunch at the beach
Isabel: I wish we had McDonald's for lunch.
Me: Sorry, babe, I made you a turkey taco. You like them.
Isabel: Uh-huh. I still wish I had McDonald's.
Me: Sorry, Belle. No McDonald's today.
Isabel: *big sigh*

3:00 pm
Heading home from the beach
Isabel: I wish we had a van.
Me: Me, too.
Isabel: Then I could sit up high and see everything.
Me: Me, too.
Isabel: I really wish we had a van.
Me: *big sigh* Me, too.

4:00
Going upstairs to work
Isabel: I wish you didn't have to work.
Me: But I like to work.
Isabel: I wish you were a mommy who didn't work, though.
Me: Well, I do.

8:00 pm
Bedtime
Isabel: I wish I could stay up late. I wish I had a house with NO bedtime.
Me: Yes, Isabel, I hear you. I understand that you wish for many things and that our lives are lacking in every conceivable way. I apologize for falling short of your expectations on a regular basis and for delivering a socioeconomic experience that is less than you would hope. I promise to try harder to create a lifestyle more to your liking. How does that sound?
Isabel: .................
Me: *raises eyebrows*
Isabel: Never mind.

What we're doing this week, and some cave paintings

2009-05-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

This week's material rundown:

Mathematics
Review numbers 1-100 with number chart
Review shapes
Horizons review worksheets: 6-10, 1-10, 10-19, 20-29
Horizons fill-in-the-number worksheets: 16-69, 30-100
Miquon Orange Book worksheets (with Cuisenaire rods): addition to 4, 5, 8 and 9

Spelling
Spelling Workout A, Lessons 3 and 4: Beginning letters and sounds

Grammar
First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, Lessons 3 and 4: Common nouns, introduction to proper nouns, ongoing review/memorization of poem "The Caterpillar"

Reading
The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading: Consonant blends and digraphs
Readers of choice

Writing
Family History project *tie-in to History (interviewing family members and copying answers)
Create a plant diary *tie-in to Science (journaling garden progress)
Copywork: "The Caterpillar" *tie-in to Grammar

Oral Reading
McGuffey's Eclectic Reader 1, Lessons 1 and 2

History and Geography
The Story of the World, Chapter 1: The First Nomads, and, The First Nomads Become Farmers
Fertile Crescent map
Coloring page: Farmer with Shaduf
Activities: Cave painting, build a hut, *maybe* make a game bag

Science
Flower dissection
Create an indoor garden and greenhouse
Seeds in a bag
Journal opening of dandelions in plant diary

Music Appreciation
Mozart

Art Appreciation
The Children's Book of Art

Activities
Irish dancing (x2)
Homeschool group (x2)
General playing with kids in the neighborhood in the evenings

I'm in a quandary regarding our reading work. We've been making our way through Charlotte's Web but, frankly, Isabel hates it. It's just not holding her attention. So as much as I hate to do it, I think we're going to stop. She's not getting anything out of it and I don't want to turn her off of reading. I picked up a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit a while ago, and we might try that instead. We'll see.

We read through the first part of this week's history lesson today and learned about the earliest nomads. Isabel was fascinated and disgusted to learn that they ate lizards and snakes. I must try to find a book that talks more about what early peoples ate.

After all our other schoolwork was done for the day, and everyone had been lunched and played with, I fashioned a cave out of brown paper beneath our dining table. I stripped Aidan down, put out some paints, and the kids made cave paintings. This was a fun project!

Painting in the "cave."

Isabel hard at work.

Aidan a mess, as usual!

The finished product. The bottom right is Aidan's contribution. The rest is Isabel's... she has a pretty elaborate story of what's going on, too. It's people (nomads) dancing underneath the sun and then moving somewhere new to follow the animals.

So, my kid was eating dog food, and...

2009-05-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

I was all like, "Oh crap, this backfired. Now what?"

I'm not entirely certain when the puppy game became such a ubiquitous part of our household. I know it started with our homeschool group; for a while, the kids would spend hours engrossed in a game they called "Baby Dog," in which they pretended to be... wait for it, there's a twist... baby dogs. (I lied about the twist. Guess there's no real way to dress up kids pretending to be dogs.)

At some point, Aidan started pretending to be a puppy. And, come on, we all know that a wee little guy crawling about, licking things and barking, is pretty darned cute. So Aidan would be on the floor, yipping at everyone's heels, and said everyone would lean over and say things like, "Oh, look! Isn't that adorable? He's pretending to be a puppy! C'mere puppy, I'll pet you!"

Cue older sibling envy.

Something else we all know is that an almost-six year old crawling around, licking things and barking, is not so much of the cute. But almost-six year old girls (especially those in the process of weaning off of their anticonvulsant medication) are also emotionally volatile and vulnerable creatures. We want to be careful about their feeeeelinnnnngs and self-esteem and ego or some such new-agey twaddle. So Nick and I have been going with the puppy thing, calling her over, petting her and otherwise acting like buffoons and hoping it would just be a quick phase, like wearing flip-flops or the day she liked broccoli.

Several weeks later, we're still dealing with the puppy (whose name, by the way, is Lilly). After Nick got stuck bringing Lilly the puppy with him to the store this afternoon, I decided to enthusiastically embrace Isabel's puppyhood. I like dogs, after all. We have a dog already, what's one more?

While Lilly the puppy romped at my feet, I retrieved dishes, filled one with water, and placed them both on the floor. Now, I'll be honest and say that I wasn't going to go totally method with this thing. My plan was to put chicken nuggets in the food dish. But Lilly - who, it should be noted, can talk (a la PBS's Martha Speaks) - insisted upon dog food. I started to protest and then thought, why? This will surely burn her out!

I poured the food.

She took a bite.

And another bite.

And another.

"How's your food, Lilly?" I asked.

"Ruff! Yum-my! Arf arf arf!" Chew, chew, chew. Another bite. Chew, chew, chew. "Yip! Mm-mm-good! Ruff!"

So there I was. On Mother's Day. Standing in the kitchen while my five year old crouched at my feet and ate a bowl of dog food off the floor. Yay me.

Chicken nuggets didn't change her mind. Being shut in the kitchen while Nick, Aidan and I ate at the table didn't change her mind. The prospect of sleeping on the floor didn't change her mind.

Aidan toddled over to the gate at one point, and Lilly growled rather convincingly at him. She barked and rolled. And I watched all of this, mentally writing the acceptance speech for my Worst Mother Of The Year award and wondering if blogging about it would result in CPS banging down my door. (I really freaking hope not.)

Dessert. Dessert is what did the child in. A big bag of candy mints, not suitable for doggie consumption. "Oh, I'm not a puppy anymore," she said matter-of-factly, like we were the ones who had strange ideas.

I'm so glad we had those mints in the house. I really didn't want to have to take her outside to go pee.

Seriously, CNN? SERIOUSLY?

2009-05-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of CNN, 7 low-cost gifts to keep Mom healthy on Mother's Day.

Give your mom something she really needs -- the gift of good health.

Aw. That's kinda sweet. Second sentence and I'm interested.

I'll admit, though, my eyebrow is slightly raised at "low-cost." In my experience, "low-cost" gift lists are either (1) dollar store crap awkwardly arranged into something we're all supposed to pretend is creative and thoughtful, or (2) come from the Oprah school of affordable, which means that you'd better hope you get tickets for her Favorite Things show or else you'll never, ever, ever be able to afford that cool thing, you middle-class sucker.

Anyway. Moving on.

No, you don't have to buy her a treadmill.

Okay, that answers that. We're on the dollar-store list. Good news in terms of my shopping. Bad news in terms of my receiving. And yes, I'm all about my receiving, thankyouverymuch.

1. Give the gift of (your) time and support at the doctor's office.

"Offer to be your mom's health buddy."... "Promise to be there for any and all doctor's visits whether a mammogram or routine appointment."

Um. Okay? That's a little weird. I don't really feel the need to hold my Mom's hand while she has her blood pressure checked and gets a pap but hey, maybe I'll ask her if that's what she wants.

2. Give the gift of healthy eating.

Rather than an expensive, artery-clogging brunch, you can spring for a visit with the nutritionist and follow it with a healthy meal.

If my husband is reading this - I want the damned brunch. Just to be clear.

Also for the record, giving me the gift of a nutritionist kinda makes for a sucky Mother's Day. That's the sort of thing that needs to be finessed... I wouldn't turn it away if it was proposed in one of the not-uncommon discussions we have about exercise and eating and weight. Tie a string to your finger and when your Mom (or wife) says, "Oh, I'm really trying to lose weight..." then go ahead and say, "You know, I heard of this nutritionist, blah, blah, let me send you!"

But for Mother's Day? No. What do you even write in that card? "Happy Mother's Day, fatass!" Egads.

3. Give the gift of organization.

Instead of making a photo album of family snapshots (although that's nice too), make your mom a folder containing all of her medical records.

Uhhh... huh. Is Mom mentally retarded? Does she have advanced dementia? Please, please don't come to my house and put my medical papers in a folder for me. Please.

4. Give the gift of a good night's sleep.

"Buy your mom satin sheets, a new mattress, a mattress cover, or a luxurious pillow to encourage better sleep," Savard said. "We know that restorative sleep is critical to our immune system and heart health." For new mothers, offer to watch the baby while she takes a nap. This will also allow you to spend quality time with the kids, so "it's a win-win."

This is a good one! I like this one! *yawn* (Except for the satin sheets. Like trying to sleep on a slip-and-slide, satin sheets. A good, high thread count cotton works for me.)

5. Give the gift of healthful goodies.

Instead of a gourmet gift basket filled with cheese and crackers or sweets, make your own healthy gift basket for your mom, suggests Savard. Not sure what to put in it? Start with a multivitamin, calcium supplements, and vitamin D supplements. "If you know your mom is trying to get more fiber, put some fiber supplements in the basket too," she says. "A pedometer, some arm weights, and maybe a tape measure can also be part of this gift," Savard says. A tape measure can help mom measure her waist size.

OH. HELL. NO.

I do not hesitate when I say this: If you give me a belly-fat measuring device of any kind as a Mother's Day gift, I will lose my shit. Lose it. First I will cry. Then I'll excuse myself to cry harder. Then I will remove the children to a safe location. And then YOU - and everything else within a twenty foot radius, most likely - will promptly be destroyed as I, and all my belly fat, have a Mommy meltdown of epic proportions.

Do not give me fiber for Mother's Day. Do not give me weights for Mother's Day. And for the love of all that is holy and any small measure of respect you can drum up for the fact that I gestated your children for TEN months (wherever that "nine month" bullshit came from, I will never know) and then actually made (with my belly fat-riddled body) food - FOOD! I produced FOOD! - that continued to nourish them for years thereafter, do NOT, under any circumstances, give me a tape measure with which to measure my girth.

This is the worst gift suggestion EVER. EVER! I'm rolling my eyes and wagging my finger at you, CNN. You report the news! Don't you read the stuff you print? You're treading in penis-lopping-off territory here.

6. Give the gift that keeps on giving.

Accessory and gift companies such as Presents for Purpose allow you to pay it forward this Mother's Day by picking gifts in which 10 percent of the proceeds benefit a charity of your choice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. I've no complaints about this one, but I'll be damned if I'm giving any props to this stupid list now.

7. Give the gift of chocolate -- if you must.

Oh, you must. Trust me. You must.

And I mean you, CNN. You owe every freaking mother in the world chocolate now. Lots of chocolate. And flowers. And brunch, too.

(PS - And, uh... yeah. I'm not really going to offer to go with my mom to her GYN appointments. Thanks but no thanks.)

My children are monsters.

2009-05-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

It's a double-edged sword, this homeschooling. On the up side, I get to be with my kids pretty much all the time. On the down side, I have to be with my kids pretty much all the time. And as I mentioned above, my children are monsters.

Not the "Can you believe that bratty kid?" sort of monsters that invariably block the aisles at Wal-Mart. No, my children have actual super powers. If they used them for the forces of good, I'd say they're super heroes. As it is, they use their powers for nefarious, anti-Mommy purposes and I am left to rant peevishly about it on my weblog.

Never are their abilities more potent than on a rainy, stuck-in-the-house day on which I had already yelled three times before 10 am. In desperation, wanting to put an end to the madness, I thought, "Food!" Snacks, of course! They'll be contained at the table, their mouths will be busy, all will be quiet and calm! I even had an excellent snack just for myself in the kitchen, perfect for regrouping.

I sounded the call. "Who wants a snack?"

"Me, me, me! I do, I do!" Ooh, good going, Mama. This was a great idea! In that euphoric moment, I extended an irresistible offer: "What do you want?"

Their eyes lit up, Two mouths formed little o's of happiness. Pick our own? Really? No carrots? No apples? Whatever we want?

Yep. Whatever you want.

The kitchen was a flurry of activity. Child A wanted leftover pizza. "And... chocolate?" It was a hesitant question.

"Chocolate? Sure! Pizza and chocolate it is!"

They squealed. They jumped. They skipped to the table. Child B wanted yogurt. And chocolate. "Yogurt and chocolate coming up!" I trilled.

Food was served, chocolate distributed. There was much joyous wiggling and hooray-for-mom impromptu singing.

It was working! No running, no screaming, no thumping. Blessed calm and quiet. Smiling to myself, I fixed the ultimate snack to soothe my foodie heart - a couple wedges of perfect, crusty-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside French bread, a delicate fan of cheddar cheese slices, a lacy pile of curling, just-spicy-enough turkey pepperoni. My mouth watered as I carried the arrangement to the table.

I sat. And that is when it happened. The change.

In the tradition of all metamorph greats - Dr. Jekyll, Bruce Banner, Teen Wolf - it was an on-the-spot change. No tedious running off to phone booths here; my kids are no amateurs. Also following tradition, even though I should have seen it coming, I was caught entirely off guard.

Within seconds of my plate touching down on the wood tabletop, my previously happy, healthy children disappeared. In their place sat two of the most down-and-out, pathetic, groveling, Dickensian street urchins one could imagine. Their round, robust little bodies gave way to emaciated, stoop-shouldered forms. Out of nowhere, dark circles appeared beneath their eyes, now looming darkly from pale, drawn faces. Youthful exuberance was gone, replaced by deep longing. Pizza and yogurt and chocolate lay, forgotten, rejected, scattered in front of these sad beasts of wanting, like stripped-down bones on display for disinterested vultures.

"Can I have some?"
"Have some?"

When the change happens, the fixation is so complete that the two often echo one another in identical desire.

I looked at my plate. The bread, the cheese, the pepperoni. How naive I'd been. My choices held little appeal: Deny them my food and endure the requisite whining, staring, and tantruming, or sacrifice my much-anticipated snack in the name of winning 10 more minutes of quietude.

I chose quiet. As they devoured my food, the monsters gradually gave way to my familiar children.

And in my hard-earned 10 minutes of silence, I, undetected, crammed a few bite-sized Milky Way candy bars in my mouth while stepping out for the mail.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

2009-05-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a mess. Aidan loves watermelon. I love that Aidan loves watermelon. I do not love that he wants me to hold him while he eats watermelon. I think this shirt is ruined.

Lots of pics... It was a good day. I was worried that Isabel would object to the increased schoolwork load but so far she's thriving on it. I think she might have been bored before.

To start, one of my favorite things about homeschooling: No rushing around in the mornings!

Aidan came into our bed at some point last night (Nick got him so I don't actually know when) and Isabel woke up at about 6:30 and padded into our room, where she also climbed into bed and went back to sleep.

They woke at the same time and the day began! French toast for breakfast, then baths, followed by half an hour or so of play. Isabel actually asked to begin schoolwork.

We started with Math. It makes Aidan feel very important to sit next to his sister and "do school" so I give him extra worksheets to color on. Isabel's first grade math curriculum begins with reviewing the basics, so she's completing worksheets for the numbers one through twenty. She took a break from her own sheet to try to teach Aidan numbers one through five:

Aidan also decided he'd like to use the abacus. He counts as he slides the beads from one side to the other. Today, each bead was "tenty-fee."

We got through our spelling, phonics, grammar and handwriting throughout the rest of the morning and early afternoon (with lots of breaks for play) before finally moving on to the highlight of the day - starting our unit on the plant kingdom!

For the last week or so, we've been gathering recycled materials for our plants. On Sunday we went to the nursery and selected tomato and green pepper seedlings. Ultimately, we'll have a variety of indoor and outdoor plants to care for. We're trying to grow the tomatoes and green peppers in those Topsy Turvey planters that promise you can have year-round vegetables grown inside your own house. We have high hopes - we drop a bucket load of cash on tomatoes and green peppers and growing our own would be fabulous!

Before we got the plants, though, we used our recycled materials to create gardening tools. We cut take-out coffee cups and an old bread crumb tub down to size, and Isabel colored them with markers on the outside. We'll use these for the leftover green pepper seedlings (we have six plants and will only put three in the Topsy Turvey) and other plants that we'll grow from seeds.

We used an old gallon milk jug to create a storage bin for gardening supplies. Empty soda bottles were cut into shovels, and the bottoms set aside to be used as still more planters for seeds (these are neat, as you can see through them - I have to figure out a way toplant the seeds so that we can watch the root systems grow). A half-gallon orange juice jug, with the aid of a hole-puncher, became a watering can. It was a really fun project and Isabel is so proud of her gardening supplies.

Empty gardening tote:

And filled with supplies:

Shovels (these are hard to see - the bottle top is the handle):

Watering can (we later had to revise the shape and give it a more triangular opening at the top... after some trial and error, now it waters beautifully!):

Seedling pots:

I somehow managed not to get a picture of Isabel doing any planting (which is weird, because she did a lot of it!), but the three of us got the tomatoes in the Topsy Turvey planter. The green peppers will have to wait until we pick up more soil (those planters use a lot of dirt!).

Aidan brandishing a homemade shovel:

And putting soil in the planter (yes, that's dirt on his face):

First Grade

2009-05-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

We started our first grade curriculum today. It went well.

This week we're covering:

Mathematics: Horizons Math review sheets 1 - 12; 1 - 100 review with number chart

Spelling: Spelling Workout A, Lessons 1 and 2
Grammar: First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, Lessons 1 and 2
Reading: Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading, consonant blends; ongoing Charlotte's Web reading and narration
Writing: Handwriting Without Tears (we're nearly done with this book); copywork from Charlotte's Web and First Language Lessons
Oral Reading: Lesson 1, McGuffey Reader

History: The Story of the World, Introduction: What is History?; Family tree project

Science: Green Thumbs, Introduction to Plants; recycling project to make gardening tote, watering can and seedling pots; planting projects to include tomatoes, green peppers and raspberry bush

Activities this week:

Science Museum Group - Dinosaurs!
Irish dancing
Homeschool co-op
Library

Plus a birthday party this weekend and general play with neighborhood friends as weather permits. We were supposed to go on a nature walk with our homeschool group today but had to back out due to yicky coughs (swine swine swine swine... well, not really, but I figured now's probably a good time to be conservative about going out with coughs and runny noses).

No, Gus, No!

2009-02-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, these brackets held horizontal blinds. Currently, the blinds are in a million pieces and the brackets are lonely:

What you can barely see in this pic is that these windows used to be entirely covered in plastic:

Big dog meets flimsy shoe shelves. Winner: dog.

Poor Barbie didn't stand a chance:

Neither did the Disney Princesses. No prince saved this day:

Aidan's favorite Care Bear. There are great battles fought here over this Care Bear:

The offender, looking snazzy in his new coat:

Why I'm a hypocrite

2009-02-23T18:17:00.000-08:00

I'm fickle and have arbitrary standards. Evidence:

Things you will not see in our house:

* Bratz dolls
* Play weapons
* Video games of any variety
* SpongeBob Squarepants anything
* Pants with writing on the butt, mini-skirts, anything with "bling"
* Childrens' programming on any channel other than PBS
* Movies that depict graphic violence, or anything more intense than a first kiss

Things you will see in our house:

* The Les Miserables sountrack, to which Isabel knows all the words (including "Master of the House")
* A recording of Pink's "Dear Mr. President," to which Isabel knows most of the words
* Soundtracks for Rent and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, both of which I try not to play around the kids but sometimes I can't help myself
* Several books of art, including full nudes
* Political propaganda on the bumper of the car, in the front yard, on the cork board
* A copy of The Princess Bride, which we watch in full - death, violence, kissing included
* Jonas Brothers CDs. They're so stinking cute and wholesome and what-not.

A late-winter walk.

2009-02-15T21:04:00.001-08:00

Cold. It is still cold. But the sun shone today and we've been sorely lacking in sunshine. So out we went, with the kids and our new dog Angus.

This is why we can never find our shoes. Aidan and the cat door. It's also the reason Nick and I are damned lucky to be alive, as there's no light at the top of the basement stairs.

It was brisk but lovely outside. It won't last long - more snow is slated for Wednesday.

Isabel and Gus, checking out the street before crossing. Well, Belle was checking the street. Gus was checking out the neighbor's dog.

I love this photo. Great light and shadows.

Isabel. When did she get so grown up?

An open letter to TLC

2009-02-07T17:13:00.001-08:00

Re: Commercial for the newest episode of "Jon & Kate Plus 8"

Dear TLC:

Dude.

"Dads" is the plural form of "dad." As in, "Dads don't watch TLC!" See? If you're counting on your fingie-wingies, it's more than one little piggy.

"Dads" is plural and plural only. If you want a shorthand way to say "Dad is," what you're looking for is not plural, but what's known as a contraction: "Dad's." As in, "Dad's in charge."

NOT, "Dads in charge." Unless there's suddenly more than one Dad on "Jon & Kate Plus 8." Which I'm assuming there's not, because all of America has seen what a pain in the ass Kate would be to live with, thanks to your show.

You're The Learning Channel. The Learning Channel.

For fuck's sake.

First grade curriculum. And stuff.

2009-02-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

I'm antsy. Three posts in one day. I finished one work project tonight (take my word for it, flash drives are just about the most boring thing ever to write about... although, to be fair, not quite as boring as keyboards) and am not ready to continue with my next project until tomorrow (even though this is one of the ones that makes business writing drudgery worth it - scripting an internal commercial). Too jittery to sleep, too cold out to go for a walk.

Anyway.

I bought our first grade books today. Signed up for the three-month trial of Amazon Prime and got free two-day shipping. Now, I'll be honest, I don't even know what Amazon Prime is. Sounds like a Transformer native to South American tree canopies. I do know that I can opt out before they charge me $79, and I know that signing up got me free two-day shipping. I remember, back in college, leaving the campus bookstore with my bag bursting at the seams, filled with straws. Why straws? Because they were FREE. Tell me it's free and I'll sign up. Thank you very much.

So, by Tuesday we should have received, and paid NO (happy dance here) shipping for:

That Usborne World History Encyclopedia makes me a bit nervous. Isabel's a sensitive kid and I suspect she's going to think that picture is scary. And the trouble with scary covers is that, unlike scary pictures inside the book, it can't just be paperclipped to another page. I may have to break out a paper grocery bag and fashion an old-school cover for that one. (I have a nostalgic urge to write "NKOTB 4eva!" on it.)

Cool site for classical music

2009-02-06T18:37:00.000-08:00

ClassicCat

It's free. Yeah, baby. Free.

Thank you, ClassicCat, for saving me a small fortune. At a rate of one composer per week (this week was Bela Bartok, by the way), I figure ClassicCat is saving us a few hundred dollars a year. When something really catches our fancy, I buy it from iTunes (hello, Nutcracker!). Otherwise, I save the freebie link on my handy-dandy bookmarks page and we're good to go!

Better?

2009-02-06T14:13:00.001-08:00

I think so. Yes?

Refresh. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Okay. Not perfect, but good enough for me.

I've got to do something about the photos, though. Holy huge pictures.

Why my weblog looks like crap

2009-02-04T20:35:00.001-08:00

Because I don't know how to work the damned templates. In real life, I'm busting out every variation of the "f" word you can imagine, and some that even sailors and truck drivers haven't thought up yet. Here, I'm being reserved and will instead say that I am most perturbed. MOST PERTURBED.

I hear that typepad is good blogging software...

Chinese New Year

2009-02-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

This past week at co-op, we celebrated Chinese New Year. It was a great time - we ordered Chinese food and ate it off of authentic Chinese bowls, with chopsticks. Thanks to one mom whose brother lived in New York City's Chinatown years ago, we had many other authentic items as well - a child-sized kimono, a parasol, a tea set... There was an activity table with coloring pages and other games, and a display of the different animals used in Chinese years, with personality traits said to be associated with people born during each year. We made Chinese lanterns, read books and, finally, held a parade (several parades, actually, so that the kids could take turns with the different parade costumes).

There are, of course, pictures:

Farts are science.

2009-01-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

No, really.

This week's science themes: reversible/irreversible change, and states of matter (gas/liquid/solid). We'll be finishing up tomorrow - we have a hunk of ice in the freezer that Isabel wants to put on the stove. This same water has been frozen and unfrozen, ad nauseam, this week, in order to discover whether the resulting changes were reversible or irreversible. We explored water as a solid and a liquid, leaving great, soggy messes in the dining room and requiring multiple wardrobe changes. We boiled water and watched the steam, and compared it to smoke from a flame. And it was during this conversation that Isabel shared her illuminating observation:

Me: Do you remember what makes steam?

I: Hot water turns into steam.

Me: That's right. When water gets hot enough, it becomes a gas.

I: Yeah. Like a fart!

Me: *chokes a little* Like a what?

I: Like a fart is gas!

Me: Er... yes, that's right.

I: And you can't see it and you can't touch it, but you sure can smell it and you sure can feel it, so you know it's there even if it's indvinzible!

2009

2009-01-24T20:00:00.000-08:00

Resolution... update blog more often...

Outlook for the first half of 2009: transition to first grade curriculum sometime in the spring or, maybe, early summer. Depends on reading fluency.

In preparation for this transition, with the new year I've implemented a new, more in-depth and structured, homeschool routine. It looks like this:

Monday
Mathematics
Spelling
Grammar
Reading
Writing
History/Geography
Music Appreciation

Tuesday
Mathematics
Spelling
Reading
Writing
Science

Wednesday
Mathematics
Spelling
Grammar
Reading
Writing
History/Geography

Thursday
Mathematics
Spelling
Reading
Writing
Science

Friday
Spelling
Grammar
Reading
Oral Reading
History/Geography
Art Appreciation

Some of these subjects are still a bit nebulous, as we aren't actually working through our formal first grade material right now... History/Geography and Science, in particular, are currently offshoots of other material (as an example, this week's Geography lessons consisted of finding Russia and Pennsylvania on a map, related to Tchaikovsky and Cassatt, this week's composer and artist). Spelling is still very much a part of Reading and Writing, and Oral Reading is also part of Reading (like most beginning Readers, Isabel reads everything aloud).

So far the new routine is working well for us, though.

For winter/spring, we also have a host of activities:

Monday
Homeschool group
Irish Dancing

Wednesday
Homeschool group
First Communion class

Thursday
Science Museum group

Friday
Gymnastics

Sunday
Irish Dancing

Add to this impromptu get-togethers with friends, and probably guitar lessons. Isabel wants to take up the violin as well, which we're considering.

I've been lazy!

2008-11-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

And now there's so much to catch up that I'm not sure where to begin!

Everything is going swimmingly. I'm particularly pleased lately to see that reading has begun to really "click" for Isabel - she's had the basics down and was doing well, but it was a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sort of process in terms of her motivation and desire. The main obstacle was one of blending phonemes - Belle tended to over-enunciate each sound and create sound patterns with them, rather than blending to create words. I kept the pressure off, stopping all phonics work and just asking her to do a small amount of reading a couple times a week. Sure enough, Belle started picking up books on her own again after a short time and the blending has started happening all on its own. There's still a good amount of sounding-out, but she's now going through her early readers with something approaching fluency.

I also finally figured out the trick to telling 'b' from 'd'! Isabel has a small freckle on her right hand that we're now calling her "bee sting mark" - her right hand is her "bee sting hand" and her left hand is her "d" hand. I told her, the line of the letter is pointing to your belly button. Now look to see what side the loop is on. If it's on the side of the bee sting hand, it's a b. And vice versa. Yay! So glad to have figured out a way to cope with those tricky lowercase letters!

The week of the election we did a lot of neat election activities. We talked a lot about government. Isabel did a very cute thing where she listed the issues she feels are most important for the government to deal with. She wrote things like "rabbits", "kites" and "water". They seem nonsensical at first, but when you ask her about them, she explains that "rabbits" refers to protecting farmers' vegetables from rabbits and other animals, "kites" is removing kites and other "stuff" from trees and wires, and "water" is making sure everyone has enough clean water to drink. Pretty good issues, if you ask me.

We're having loads of fun with the abacus. Each row of beads counts to ten. It's simple but brilliant, as I can see Isabel really "getting" the relationship between numbers. A few days ago she said to me, in wonderment, "You know, Mom, no matter how many beads are on this side and how many beads are on that side, it's always TEN! There can be more there or more there and even some in the middle, but it's always TEN!" She was equally enthralled with the discovery that the sum of two numbers is always a bigger number.

Handwriting is coming along beautifully.

We started a new music class this week, which Belle loves. Denise is another homeschooling mom who teaches private music lessons. There's about a half-dozen kids in the class and it's a fabulous program.

I'm in the process of trying to get better organized. I have decided that the key to my organizational success is a PDA - I like the Palm TX (expensive, though!). I've started tracking everything on a calendar on the computer and, boy, are we busy. I only get overwhelmed when I stop to think about it!

A ridiculous number of Halloween pictures

2008-10-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

We painted pumpkins:

And ourselves:

And sometimes threw things on the floor:

Before trying to escape:

Isabel says green macaroni and cheese does NOT taste the same:

But Aidan didn't seem to mind:

Kiki and a hockey player, ready to trick-or-treat:

And don't forget about Jiji the cat:

"Mom, I have the perfect costume for you!" she says:

Happy Halloween.

"Mom, I'm really worried."

2008-10-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

So says Isabel. She's worried because if "Garack Obama" wins the Presidency, then John McCain will be sad. One of those moments when my child inspires me to be more forgiving than I would be if left to my own devices.

We've been talking a lot about the election this week - what the President does, what a government is, how elections work. We've compared governing a country and "governing" a family (ahem, Mommy would win if we held an election for President of our family) and created mock platforms for pretend elections. We've been tracking CNN's Poll of Polls map and seeing how the votes are predicted to fall. We explored the two-party system (no sense introducing unnecessary confusion, so I refrained from talking about how nice it would be to have more than two major parties...) and the basic differences between liberal and conservative political philosophies, in terms of taxes and government programs. War is not something with which the children are familiar and I plan to keep it that way for a good, long while, so for now that's it.

In our discussion of differing philosophies I emphasized the importance of tolerance and understanding and teamwork. Isabel, no real surprise, appears to be a liberal. It is possible that the Obama sign in our yard, Obama sticker on our car, Obama pin on my purse and recent political discussions have influenced her. I expect that when she hits a rebellious phase she'll declare herself a conservative and hole up in her bedroom with a pinup of Dick Cheney.

We hit two homeschool co-ops this week, one on Monday and one of Wednesday. The one Monday was really more of a simple get-together playtime. Wednesday was an art and music program, which both kids loved. Isabel liked the singing and even Aidan got in on it, doing some of the motions. Aidan also threw a dozen animal crackers in the garbage before I realized that he was not, in fact, eating them that quickly. At these co-ops, I get a huge kick out of watching the big kids interact with the little kids. They are consistently kind, gentle and patient with the littles. I've often heard it said that a benefit of homeschooling is that the children learn to interact with people of all ages, not only with same-age peers. I definitely see this to be true in our homeschool association. Even when the teenagers are being, well, teenagerey, they're still genuinely good kids who have awesome relationships with their parents and a real respect for the people around them.

Monday was also Irish dancing. The kids had a Halloween party in class. Aidan wants to Irish dance. When he turns 3, we'll have to get him in. He puts his hands behind his back and prances around. It's very cute.

Tonight we went on a tour of a local apple farm with the Girl Scouts. Isabel had a great time. She didn't look at us once the whole time - she was having too much fun with her friends to see what Mom and Dad and Aidan were up to. Since the tour was only an hour and it's 20 minutes from home, we stuck around while they had Scout-y fun. Bought apples and candy. Aidan LOVES apples. Loves them. I bought a bushel and reserved one, washed it in the bathroom, and gave it to him to eat. He ran around with it for 20 minutes and then tripped tragically, the apple rolling from his hands and across the filthy farm floor. He watched it go with huge, mournful eyes and immediately began to wail. When I tossed it out (too dirty to wash off!), he marched his self right back into the store and to the apple table, where he pointed at the apples and signed "more". Still crying. In case anyone is wondering, a single apple costs 23 cents. And if you buy your child that single apple, he will have approximately two bites before he decides he's "Ah Dah" (all done) with a casual shrug, as though he doesn't understand why you bothered buying it in the first place.

More reading and writing and math here. Isabel wants to do "hard math" now. Funny, because she doesn't seem to want to learn the "easy math".

Now, a couple photos:

Aidan doing the motions to a song.

I have some cute photos of Isabel singing and doing the motions as well, but they also prominently show the other kids. I'm not sure if that's okay or not, posting full face shots of other peoples' kids online. Oh well.

One last one of Aidan, when it was time to leave.

Stuff we've done

2008-10-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

Music has been a primary focus of the last few days. I've been talking to Isabel about storytelling through music, using a (greatly abridged) ad hoc adaptation of Les Miserables. We listen for different instruments, keep the beat and listen to how the music enhances the story by repeating musical themes and using happy and sad songs. Isabel is very distressed that people were mean to Cosette and made her clean. I am so glad I didn't tell her that half the cast dies. They all just "go away" mysteriously. We've also been playing with our piano, guitars and harmonica (that one's for Aidan), playing notes and hearing how they sound the same and different on a guitar and piano, even though they're both string instruments.

More about reptiles and amphibians, too. Isabel has suddenly gotten interested in what different animals and bugs eat, and reproduction. So we've been doing a lot of research online and in our books, learning what clams, worms, spiders, snakes and other creatures eat. We looked up how ants and crabs reproduce, both of which gave me the opportunity to talk about metamorphosis, tying in very nicely with the trip to the pet store I have planned in a couple days to look at tadpoles and frogs, and a metamorphosis project.

Reading. Isabel has read two early readers to me over the last two days. Heaven help me, these books are boring. She's getting it, though. I'm surprised by the ease with which she remembers phonics rules. Exclamation points are surprisingly difficult, though. Isabel thinks they click. Why, I have no idea.

We covered three Spanish lessons this week, too. I really need to get us into a Spanish class. There's one available, I just don't know that we have the time. My Spanish is painfully rusty. So far, all the simple things Hooked on Spanish covers, I know.

With the upcoming election, we've been discussing government in very simplistic terms, relating government rule to Mommy and Daddy rule in our house. (Confession: Isabel knows the Presidential candidates as "Garack Obama" and "That Man Mommy Says Shouldn't Smile Any More".) I think we're going to hold mock elections sometime in the next couple of weeks, most likely with dolls.

Tomorrow is homeschool co-op day. That will be fun.

Reptiles, amphibians, a nature walk and other stuff, too.

2008-10-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

Let's see. We've covered quite a lot so far this week.

Monday we did an "All About Me" project. Isabel drew a picture of herself and wrote her name, age and what she likes to do on the bottom. In all honesty, she lost interest in that project pretty fast. She also gave herself red hair because she wishes she had red hair like the little mermaid.

Yesterday was more fun - we're learning about retiles and amphibians. We read a few of the poems out of Eric Carle's "Animals Animals" (the ones having to do with reptiles and amphibians) and then looked at pictures of real reptiles and amphibians. We talked about how they are the same and how they are different, and how to tell the difference between them. Then I printed a bunch of pictures of various reptiles and amphibians, and Isabel cut them out and glued them onto a page divided in half - one side for reptiles and the other for amphibians. Isabel loves cutting and gluing, so that was a good time.

Today, we met up with the homeschool co-op at a local park and took a nature walk. That was really fun! Isabel collected leaves that I'm going to iron between wax paper later, and we watched squirrels, birds and chipmunks. After the nature walk, the kids all played while the moms visited.

Now, pics:

It's Fire Safety Month

2008-10-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

I dubbed yesterday, "Safety Thursday!" Yes, the exclamation point is necessary. We took the day off from reading and writing and the abacus, and spent our time talking about fire safety and how to respond to other emergencies. It was all very exciting.

Isabel army-crawled through the house, slid down the stairs on her bottom, tore her quilt from her bed to jam against the base of her door, learned how to climb over the gate that blocks the kitchen, got to open the front and side doors by herself and run to our "meeting spot!", and practiced calling 9-1-1 (on the dead phone). Oh, and she learned to bring Rosie into the playroom and shut the door as she's speaking to the 9-1-1 operator, so that first responders will actually come into the house. Something about some people being intimidated by a pit bull, blah, blah, blah.

We also learned all about fire; that fire needs oxygen and how depriving it of oxygen makes it go out. We lit candles and put them out, and observed to learn which way smoke travels. Isabel spent all last night and most of today excitedly talking about her newfound emergency knowledge and said to me, at one point this afternoon, "Thanks for teaching me what to do in a 'mergency, Mom!" You're welcome, dear.

Nick worked Sunday, so today was actually our sixth day this week and we didn't do much in the way of schoolwork. While Aidan napped and I cooked noodles for lunch, Isabel came into the kitchen with her princess notepad and a pen, and practiced sounding out and writing words. And she graffitied her name all over my dry erase board, again. Our last name is fairly long, so she's pretty proud to know her whole name. I do wish she'd stop writing it all over my dry erase board, though.

Today was mostly a play day. The kids have been having a lot of fun with the dress up box lately. Rather, Isabel has been having fun dressing up Aidan lately. So, pictures of dress up fun...

Butterfly wings are fun. Isabel flutters her arms and flits about in her wings. Aidan puts his arms out in front of him like Superman and makes airplane noises while he flies:

And, sometimes, dressing up is just learning that you can put your brother in one of your outgrown leotards and knot a ribbon belt around his waist:

"Two Wimmins"

2008-10-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

Since Blogger is kind enough to date my posts for me, I've decided it's redundant for me to continue titleing with dates.

Today we met up with the homeschool co-op. Someone scored a huge load of unpainted ceramics off of Freecycle, so everyone brought supplies and the kids painted ceramics. Fun, fun, fun. Isabel did bookends of children in old-fashioned bonnets ("two wimmins," she calls them, not unlike the way my grandpa would say it) and some sort of little planter. She's not so much for the arts, so all three items are a solid, muddy red-brown. She loves them, though, and that's what counts. Or something like that.

Aidan had a blast. He thinks he's a big boy, and so trailed after the real big boys (the young-teen big boys) the entire time. They were playing ping-pong and gave Aidan his own ball and paddle to play with. He felt pretty important, outfitted to play, and made the rounds with his ball and paddle, showing off.

Isabel also played ping-pong and pool and, when the painting was done, most of the families stuck around at the playground outside. Only when it started to rain did we leave, having spent the better part of the day out.

When we got home, we did two worksheets and a new game we're playing - I spell words and Isabel writes down the letters and then sounds them out. D's and B's are a little tricky - I have to help with those sometimes.

It was a good day.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

2008-10-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

Reading and writing and math... oh, my!

Things are going quite well here. Isabel is not reading fluently yet, but is getting proficient with phonics. So three-letter words, look out! Belle can decode you all.

Handwriting is coming along very well, too, although I've noticed that Isabel has some trouble forming certain aspects of letters - specifically, upper-right to bottom-left diagonals. It's extremely subtle, so subtle that if I weren't right with her, watching her actually work the pencil on paper as she tried to form the letters, I probably wouldn't have noticed the pattern. So I've been leading some painting and follow-the-leader activities that simulate this same upper-right to bottom-left diagonal motion and, sure enough, it's a gross motor issue as well as fine motor. If we had the child in activities that used her arms as well as her legs, we probably would have noticed it sooner. Well, not true - it hasn't proven to be an issue in gymnastics, and they do use their arms in gymnastics. She's the T-Rex of athletes, what with her main outlets being the arm-less soccer and Irish dancing, though, so it's easy to miss arm issues. But, I digress.

Now, when Belle was a baby, she had arm tremors and generalized weakness until she was about 8 months old. It was the only holdover from her brain hemmorhage. Those issues seemingly resolved, but now I'm noticing this difficulty with the diagonals. I think it's most likely related. We have a neurology follow up in the next few weeks and I'm going to bring it up to Dr. K- and request a developmental evaluation. I don't think this is a major issue, but I want to work on it. We should probably also check to see if she has adequate arm strength, too, since that was a problem in her infancy. Still, not too shabby for a kid who's missing nearly half of her frontal lobe.

Math has been fun here lately. We bought an abacus and are working sums like crazy. The abacus seems to 'click' for Isabel in a way that the Cuisenaire Rods haven't. We still use the rods and like them, and they're really useful for demonstrating concepts, but Isabel likes the abacus more.

We've also been doing reviews of basic concepts - shapes, colors, tracing, cutting and pasting, etc. Blah. It's boring, but necessary. Belle doesn't find it boring, so that's good.

Our other maqjor topic right now is reptiles/lizards. This month's science group was on frogs, and that was very fun. The kids loved watching the frog eat. I'll be hitting the zoo and science museum with the kids in the next couple of weeks, to learn more about reptiles and lizards.

Friday, September Whatever-It-Was, 2008

2008-09-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday. We looked at a pinecone and discovered how it spreads seeds to make new trees. We reviewed the usual stuff.

I was up until 3:30 am writing the last chapter of a 72,000+-word novel, so forgive my brevity here. I'm tapped out.

Thursday, September 3, 2008 - Urban Nature Sanctuary

2008-09-04T16:20:00.001-07:00

The science museum owns a nature preserve, and that's where Isabel's science program - a hands-on program for kids aged 5-7 - met today. We went for a walk through the preserve (which they call an "urban nature sanctuary" - I don't know why, but that strikes me as funny) and were able to see and touch all kinds of plantlife, and some animals and bugs, too!

Tifft (the preserve) is wonderful. It's right in the city, but when you get in on the trails, it feels like you're a million miles away. We saw a family of egrets in one of the small lakes that dot the preserve, on our way out. Isabel loved watching them - we saw one fly away, and the others were fishing.

The paths go through forest and wetlands. In the wetlands area, a system of raised platforms allow visitors to walk over the water - we looked over the railings and watched frogs and turtles in the water. The frogs blend so perfectly with the surrounding water plants that staring right at one, you would be lucky to see it. We found several bullfrogs submerged, just their eyes peering up over the surface of the water. Dragonflies were everywhere. And the cattails grow so tall, they're all you can see in every direction.

The class instructor, Miss Meghan (who is just fantastic - we love her), pulled a cattail flower and let all the children rub it, to feel how fuzzy it is. Then she opened it up and showed us the seeds inside, which look very much like dandelion seeds. This fit very well with the seed project Isabel and I worked on yesterday. She showed us how the wind carries the seeds, and the seeds will land and sprout new cattails.

We also found a very neat nest of tent caterpillars. There were dozens - maybe even hundreds - of caterpillars wriggling around in the nest.

Evidence of beavers was everywhere, too. We saw a dam, some trees that have been downed by beavers, and a beaver lodge.

It was a fun time. We all went, so it was a nice family outing, as well. We plan to go again.

And now, we must examine ourselves for ticks before turning in for the night.

Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008

2008-09-03T21:32:00.000-07:00

Today was not nearly as busy as yesterday... we started with a walk outside, where we found some maple seeds (helicopters!) and leaves, and some fluffy and yellow dandelions.

Back home, we went over our address and phone number, and Isabel practiced writing her name. Then handwriting - we're on Starting Corner capitals right now (from Handwriting Without Tears) and worked primarily on "L", though we also reviewed several of the Frog Jump capitals. Isabel's handwriting is really coming along nicely.

We went back to vowel sound practice today, because the short vowel sound of "I" is still really tricky for her (odd, because it starts her name...). I think she's getting it now, though. We read a few practice sentences and I notice that the phonemic blending is beginning to take off as well. The issue we battle right now is Isabel's tendency to insert additional sounds, like sounding out i-s, and ending up with "its" instead of "is". In the process of blending her sounds, she often adds stops that are unecessary and lead her to add new phonemes to the word. This is a problem with "R" words, too, as another example - "red" becomes "ered".

I wanted to save the seeds for last, but Isabel was itching to get on them, so we moved on to our seed project. I wanted to just make a poster, but she decided she wanted to make a BOOK. We compromised on making several posters to cover different stages of the plant life cycle, which we'll then bind into a book. For today, we made a poster about seeds. Isabel sounded out and wrote "SEEDS", and drew a picture of seeds in the ground. She correctly identified the three things seeds need to grow (soil, water, sun) and we discovered how seeds are spread by examining the dandelion and maple seeds, and blowing them with our mouths and a hairdryer (um, they go really far this way). We discovered how the two seeds, even though they look very different, share the same structures. Isabel taped the seeds to the poster, along with what they will grow into (we used a leaf for the maple, no room to tape a tree to the page).

We ended our schoolwork today with two math worksheets from the Miquon orange book. Numbers are starting to make more sense to Isabel now, something I'm pleased to see. One of the worksheets had four rows, each with four boxes. Each box had ten shapes. In some of the boxes, a certain number of the shapes would be colored in - in that case, Isabel had to write that number (say, 7) in the box. In other cases, the number would be written, and Isabel would have to color in the appropriate number of shapes. But yet, in OTHER cases, the box would be blank, with no shapes colored in. And Isabel would have to predict what number SHOULD be in that box, based on the numbers elsewhere in the row. I thought this concept would be too advanced for her, but she actually got it. She further surprised me by correctly grasping that "0" meant coloring in NO shapes. She did very well. Then she built a fort with the Cuisenaire Rods. I guess that's what "fun with math" means.

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008 (We're back!)

2008-09-02T14:31:00.000-07:00

So, I got lazy over the summer. With the blog, that is. We were actually so busy I'm amazed I remembered to breathe, much less feed and clothe myself and two children. And although we kept up a basic level of schoolwork over the past few months, I didn't impose any sort of structured routine. When all the summer activities finished up, we earmarked today as the day to get back into a routine and kick off a new year.

Prep work for Kindergarten is pretty minimal, really. I printed off my list of NYS learning standards for K, and was pleasantly surprised to find that we covered most of them last year. This is good, as I was hoping to really focus on literacy and numeracy this year. Isabel is enrolled in a program at the local science museum, to augment our science studies, and I'm using those classes as a guide to other science activities at home. And so, it was with this guidance that we launched a unit on plants today.

We spent the morning and early afternoon at the Botanical Garden. We had an absolute blast. And we learned stuff, too. Isabel completed a scavenger hunt, finding flowers, plants and other items from throughout the gardens. We also reviewed the five senses and figured out which senses we could use in a plant/flower investigation; then, as we proceeded through various garden rooms, Isabel selected a plant or flower and used her senses to investigate it. We decided that taste probably wasn't a good sense to use for investigation plants and flowers, and I was ready to dismiss hearing, too, but Isabel thought we should use it. So in each space, we touched, smelled, looked and listened to the plants she selected. The palm tree was "REALLY huge!" and rough, and the magnolia smelled sweet. We watched koi in the koi pond and found a bunch of dinosaur topiaries - this was fun because we did a lot of reading about dinosaurs last month. Isabel was nervous in the cactus room when I explained that we can't touch the plants, but we rubbed the dirt in which the cactuses grow.

Once we'd made our way through the gardens, we headed outside to the childrens' garden. Both Isabel and Aidan had a great time playing. Isabel loved the water pumps, and Aidan enjoyed the sand pit. We looked at the flowers and other plants growing outside, as well. When we left, the children were wet and filthy, but happy.

Back home, we practiced writing Isabel's name, reviewed letter sounds and completed two worksheets (one on shape matching and another maze-type sheet for motor skills).

Some more pictures of our time at the Botanical Garden:

June 12, 2008

2008-06-12T20:42:00.001-07:00

Blah.

That's right. BLAH.

Three days of silence, and all I have is "blah"? Yes, that's right. Want to know why? Because our home was infiltrated this week by the sick. The pukey, high fever, whining, miserable sick.

Needless to say, there has been no animal-book-making happening here this week.

Today, both kids were starting to perk up a bit. No vomit, no temperatures. Just some over the top hysterics at the drop of a hat, I think because the sick has left the children a little tired. But by this afternoon, we were pretty much back to normal. With cautious optimism, I even packed up the wee ones and took Isabel to her first soccer practice this afternoon. She desperately needed to be OUT after being cooped up all week, and she did great.

This afternoon, discussion of the sick led us to look up the digestive system. As soon as I got around to mentioning that unused food is passed from our bodies as poop, Isabel was hooked. Yay, poop! We looked as illustrations of the digestive system, talked about how nutrients are converted to energy by our bodies and, of course, all about poop.

We also talked about that some creatures have more than one stomach. Apparently, this was a fascinating revelation and we discussed cows and bees, which then further continued into a discussion about how honey is made. Did you know that bees chew nectar in order to make it into thick, sticky honey? I didn't. Bees tongues are also hollow, like straws, and that's how they suck up nectar from flowers.

Isabel's most urgent inquiry was whether bees collect nectar from dandelions. I would have thought no, but it turns out that they do.

Back from vacation

2008-06-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

It was a long week, but FUN. We spent all day Monday at the Toronto Zoo, which was fabulous. I can't say enough about that zoo. It's amazing.

Tuesday and Wednesday, we spent at the Americana waterpark resort in Niagara Falls, Canada. It was fun, but mostly just because Nick and I had a quiet moment not long after we arrived in which we murmured to one another that we were going to make the best of it and enjoy ourselves, period. It was an okay place, but not impressive. Our biggest complaint was that the cleaning service was poor. At best. In the end, I hunkered down with baby wipes and soap on a washcloth, and washed down the bathroom as best I could, myself. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for housekeeping staff at hotels - I think human beings, in general, can be fairly disgusting animals and people who are in the professions that clean up after people are like really badly paid zookeepers. But even my sympathy has limits, and clumps of hair on the floor in the bathroom are way, way, waaaaaaay beyond those limits.

The waterpark itself was also a lot smaller than we'd thought it would be, and the majority of the features were closed at any given time. I was actually fine with that, thinking that if the options were to have everything open but overextended lifeguarding staff, or adequate lifeguards covering fewer features, I'd opt to have things closed. BUT the lifeguard staff was pretty lazy. Or so I learned when the one at the top of the waterslide waved people through even while saying he was supposed to have them wait eight seconds but "who cares," and then allowed me to go down the slide situated backwards on the tube (something I figured out a quarter of the way down, when I almost toppled back on my head and spent the rest of the slide in a state of pacnicked struggle, trying not to knock myself out).

Don't get me wrong - we still had fun. A LOT of fun. The kids had a blast and we laughed and smiled all day long, both days. But we will not go back again.

We got a ton of pictures at the zoo, and next week, in addition to starting up our consonant review, we are going to get prints made of the various animals and use the Toronto Zoo map as a guide to look up each animal, write down facts about that and glue in the pictures to make an animal book. Isabel's favorite thing by far (mine, too!) was the stingrays. We'll spend a lot of time on them, I expect.

For now, a few pictures from our trip (animal pictures to follow next week, as we look things up):

Thursday, May 29, 2008

2008-05-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

Once again, it is unspeakably late. One day I'll go through and edit all these nonsensical, jumbled, poorly-written late-night entries.

Good day today. Everyone was in a great mood and we got a lot done. The morning was hard because Aidan was exhausted and cranky but refused to nap. Isabel decided to play gymnastics while I dealt with him - she misses her gymnastics classes. We're currently in a 6-ish-week lull between Spring and Summer programs, and she's getting a bit stir-crazy. Everything starts back up at the end of June and beginning of July. For now, though, we have a pink plastic balance beam and a very dedicated little gymnast hard at work in the living room.

Aidan finally fell asleep around lunchtime, so I whipped up some food and Isabel and I got to spend some time sitting together, eating and talking. When we finished with that, we moved on to some schoolwork.

We finished our vowels! It feels like we've been covering vowels forever. We will continue to do brief vowel reviews regularly, but we are done learning our vowel poem and working intensively on short-vowel sounds. Tomorrow we move on to consonants. It's possible I'll put aside our letter/phoneme work until after next week's vacation. It may be best to periodically call out to Isabel, "Hey, what's the short-vowel sound of A?" over the next week or so, for review, then start fresh with consonants when we get back.

We've also been working on Frog Jump Capitals in Handwriting Without Tears. We reviewed letters we've covered so far, then played a game in which Isabel had to begin writing a letter by making her line and frog-jumping back up, then I'd call out what letter to write. It reinforces the correct way to form the letters and Isabel thought it was great - she was giggling so much that her pencil was shaking. We also did some copywork

A friend of mine sent a lovely package to us with some gorgeous shirts her daughter has outgrown, a package of Brain Quest cards and a neat little workbook dealing with story sequencing, something I've spoken with my friend about Isabel having some trouble with. Isabel adores workbooks of all kinds and was chomping at the bit to begin a new one. She likes workbooks the way most kids like coloring books. This workbook is wonderful because it involves cutting out the various sentences from the story and then gluing them on the page in order. Anything that requires cutting and gluing makes Isabel very happy. We completed one story and I promised Isabel we'll do the next tomorrow.

The Brain Quest cards were something new for me - I've seen them in stores but never looked at them carefully. So after I read Isabel a story, we sat with the cards to see what they're all about.

They. Are. Awesome.

Isabel LOVES them. I'm going to have to go buy her more, as many as I can find. This packet had 300 questions in it - we promptly went through 150 of those questions and only stopped because I said we should save the rest for later. Isabel would have happily plowed through the other 150 right then if I'd let her. The cards have all kinds of questions - pictures with items missing that need to be identified, sequencing (yay!), number recognition, counting, shape recognition, letter recognition, rhyming, and so many others. We had a lot of fun with them.

We rounded out the day by watching Annie and then, when Nick got home, he and Isabel played a game they made up that involves trying to knock one another's blocks down by rolling a ball. I'm not sure I fully understand it, but they love it.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

2008-05-28T21:01:00.000-07:00

Heh - It's actually the 29th already. Working late. But I didn't want to go to bed without journaling the day.

We accomplished quite a lot today, actually. We made up some of our desk work, going over letter review and making slow but steady process memorizing a short vowel sound poem. Isabel illustrated another page in The Five Vowels, the primer that she's making. When we finished our letter work, she asked for some index cards and my marker, and she made some letter cards of her own to teach to her imaginary friend, Richie. (Richie has been a staple in our family for close to two years now. Luckily, he is very small - he stands in the palm of Isabel's hand - and so it's not a real hardship to accommodate him.) She taught him P, M, N and a few others that I don't remember offhand. When she bored of teaching Richie, I brought out some handwriting paper and set Isabel up with copywork while I prepared lunch. I was still in the kitchen when she finished and so she decided to teach herself to write the number five. Which she did. One less thing I need to work on with her, I suppose.

After lunch, we made our way to the library. Isabel asked to search the computer and wanted to look up the keyword "kids." After the results (most definitely not the kids' books Isabel had expected!) came up, we brought our bag over to the childrens' section and Isabel selected her books. Since we're going to be out of town for most of next week, and we still have a few previously-borrowed straggler books at home that Isabel hasn't wanted to return yet, she only picked out three titles today. I had hoped to find a few specific books, but Isabel was anxious to go and was - loudly - practicing her Irish dancing in the middle of the library, so I plucked a couple selections out of my favorite sections and we got out of there.

From there, it wasn't far to go a local park and meet up with a playgroup we sometimes do things with. I didn't know the mothers there very well, but they were pleasant and the children all played nicely. Aidan finds the park frustrating because he wants to GO and DO but he is still too small and can't walk. I was able to occupy him with my keys and the baby swings for a while. Isabel is learning how to pump her legs on the swings. She's not quite getting it yet but I remember being six or so before I figured it out (I still remember the day I finally did it). We spent an hour playing and then it was time to go.

Leaving the park did not go well. Isabel did not want to leave. It wasn't pretty. Mommy moments like that are hard, especially when you have an audience. But we did ultimately get back to our car and then promptly returned home - do not stop for ice cream, do not pass GO.

There were time outs and tears and two long discussions (one that resulted in another time out, and then the discussion that finally cleared the air). Once we got through that, Isabel sat with her library books and flipped through them for a few minutes before we picked up Nick from work. From there, we all went out to see him play soccer. Isabel and Aidan and I were a small but eager cheering section. We clapped for goals, and for almost-goals, and for trying-real-hard. Aidan ate dandelions. Lots of dandelions, actually. Isabel counted airplanes coming from the nearby airport, and we discussed in great detail the various rules of soccer, as she will begin playing in a few weeks herself.

Hard stops

2008-05-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

I swear, that last post has them. They are formatted in. They simply do not show. I have edited a dozen times. What the hell?

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

2008-05-27T20:20:00.000-07:00

It's the 27th, right? I lost track of the days over the long weekend.

Phew. It was lovely to have a long weekend, but recovering from those days off is always hard. I find that the first day of the week always gimps along awkwardly - it's not until day #2 that we really hit our stride. That goes double for the first day back after a holiday weekend.

We had a pretty good weekend here. The weather was gorgeous. I was, unfortunately, holed up working for quite a bit of it but we still managed to find time as a family to purchase and assemble all the basics of our square foot garden. It's pretty impressive, really. Our square foot garden measures 4- by 3-feet, with space allocated for a surprising number of vegetable plants (I kill flowers). It is not fancy or pretty, but it gets the job done. It's fun for Isabel to help with the garden and she's especially happy to add the green bean plant that she sprouted herself, as a project for the Wee Explorers preschool program she attends at the science museum. This week we'll put all our plants in.

We also cut Isabel's hair over the weekend. It was an accident, actually, and we had to make an emergency run to Nick's cousin to have the cut evened up. Isabel has been asking for short hair but I had resisted because I like the convenience of being able to easily pull long hair back into a ponytail. I agreed only to a little trim. Sadly, just as I was about to *snip* with the scissors, the child moved. And *chop*. I was left with a handful of long, blonde hair. All's well that ends well, though. She is happy and it's really cute on her, as evidenced in the attached photos. (Also notice the new sneakers that she ties all by herself.) We told her that the cut makes her look older. The next day, to her grandmother, she reported, "My Mom and Dad say my new hair makes me look like an old lady."

Today all desk work was set aside when three huge trucks marked Schneck's Tree Removal pulled up out front. Our stump! Before the fall, our property was the home to an enormous, ancient death trap of a tree that dropped log-like branches on whatever unfortunate vehicle, toy or person happened to be beneath it at that moment. After extensive complaints by ourselves and our neighbors and, finally, calls to our representative, the city removed the tree (it was a street-adjacent tree, the city's responsibility). The stump remained. Until today.

Isabel and I parked ourselves in the front window, gawking shamelessly, while the stump was ground down, shoveled into a huge pile and scooped into the bed of a dump truck. Then new dirt was brought out, shoveled into the hole, patted down, and sprinkled with grass seed. After they left, we marched outside to see what the grass seeds look like and compare the size of the area ground up to what we remembered the circumference of the stump to be (and talked about root systems while doing so).

This afternoon was Irish dancing, and then the kids and I made our way to Wegmans to grocery shop for the week. I find grocery shopping to be a trip that is full of opportunities for kids to explore and learn. Plus, Isabel just plain old enjoys the grocery store. She asked for some paper and a pen, which she drew and wrote on as we meandered through the store. The produce section is a lot of fun for her - her "special job" is to remember the produce codes as we take our selections to the scale. I punch in the code and then Isabel takes the sticker and puts it on our item. Throughout the rest of the store, she reads prices for me and we compare items to figure out which is bigger or smaller, heavier or lighter.

In the middle of choosing canned tomatoes, Aidan put both of his fat little hands on my cheeks and very deliberately pulled my face down to his (he was riding in the sling, so only about a foot removed from my head) and kissed me. It was a wet baby kiss, very slobbery and goofy, but very sweet. Then he clapped for himself and said, "Ay!" (which is "yay" without the first "y"). Too cute.

Isabel helped at the checkout line as well. When we left the store, she proudly showed me her paper, on which she had been carefully writing her name. She sometimes forgets the "b", but her letters really are formed well.

Tomorrow: Library. It was closed yesterday. I had thought we'd do some work on arachnids this week, but I still have a bad case of the heebie-jeebies from a horrible Oh, what's this tickle behind my ear? I'll scratch it - aahh ahhhh AHHH AHHHHHHHH SPIDER! experience on Saturday. So arachnids will wait until the memory of pulling a gigantic wolf spider out of my ear has faded a bit. Since we're going to the Toronto Zoo next week (vacation!), I think maybe we'll do some more animals. Or trucks, maybe - Isabel liked the trucks today. I'll ask her what she wants to read about. Such is the beauty of homeschooling.

Friday, May 23, 2008

2008-05-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

By 4:30 pm on Friday, I find myself being less likely to respond to questions and play suggestions with enthusiasm, and far more likely to slip into half-hearted "Yeah"s and "Sure"s. As such, on Fridays I strive for us to have either a family field trip or a lazy at-home day when I can slip in a movie by 5. Since Nick worked an early shift this week on Wednesday and that day ended up being less than ambitious, I decided today would be a good day to go out somewhere. The weather was good and we had to renew our membership anyway, so we headed to the zoo.

What I learned at the zoo: Isabel remembers a lot more about mammals than I'd expected. She also asked a lot of really interesting questions about the animals, most of which (luckily) were quickly and easily answered by the signage on each display. Her most consistent questions were about what each animal ate, but she also wanted to know what the rhino's (well, she calls it the hippopotamus) horn is made of, if the giraffe's skin has spots like its fur, if Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep can jump, if sea lions are mammals or fish and if bears can climb, among other things. Which reminds me, I told her we'd research whether or not the sheep can jump when we got home and then we forgot - something for over the weekend, I suppose. I was particularly surprised when, in the giraffe house, Isabel told me, "You know, Mom, it's good that giraffes have those long necks because then they can see if the lions or tigers try to come eat them!" She then described, in great detail, how the long necks help giraffes to eat the leaves in the treetops, "and those are their favorites!"

We spent the most time with the gorillas and sea lions. Isabel was less interested in the tiger, which was unfortunate because he was very close to the glass and roaring quite dramatically. We did stop and watch him for a while, but only because I wanted to.

We stopped at the playground for a bit and Isabel played with a very nice little boy. It was short-lived, however, because the zoo playground has a very large, very ominous-looking snake slide that, every year, it takes Isabel several visits to get re-adjusted to. This is the first spring in a few years that Isabel isn't attending the zoo's weekly preschool program (she aged out this year), so we haven't been there as often as usual. I can hardly blame her for being nervous around that slide - it is intimidating. So we got ice cream instead. Aidan had dry cereal, which sounds boring but he's quite happy with it.

Back in the car, I gave Isabel the zoo magazine that came with our membership information and she sounded out the words "zoo" and "log." She also practiced spelling "fox" - she started spelling it a few days ago and says she sounded it out, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she picked it up when she was up late earlier this week and watched American Idol for 45 minutes or so. In any case, she can spell fox.

I decided to go out for dinner, frankly because I was too tired and lazy to cook anything. We went to Denny's because it's fast, convenient and relatively tasty, if not necessarily good for us. While we were getting our food, Isabel told the waitress that she has "beautiful!" fingernails (they were purple). The waitress was appropriately flattered.

Aidan says "Dah-dee" now. In the past four days he's picked up three new words. "Uh-oh," he uses in context (namely, when he drops something or gets himself stuck somewhere); "wow," he seems to just be having fun with as a random sound. It remains to be seen if "Dah-dee" has any context for him. So far he seems to be using it specifically for Nick, but it's too early to tell. He's also starting to sign more often. I'm sort of in awe of all the things he's doing.

I'll be working most of this weekend, hoping to finish my project before we all go on vacation June 1. There won't be any dedicated homeschool work for the next three days, though I'm sure Isabel will strong-arm us into teaching her something during this time - she has more curiosity than a dozen adults.

One final, fun note for today - I sat with Isabel this morning to read through her monthly issue of Your Big Backyard magazine and we found a spread inside about two kids who live in Tanzania with their wildlife conservator father... and they're homeschooled! Isabel was thrilled. She was especially pleased to see that they also sit at their table to do homeschool work.

Thursday, May 22, 2008 - alternatively titled, In Which I Realize That Posting Photos Here Makes Obvious Just How Often She Wears That Tank Top

2008-05-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

More mammals today, this time water mammals. Isabel wanted to know about dorsal fins and Nick, from work, emailed her a dorsal fin wiki page. We looked it over and then searched for more dorsal fin information, using the internet and the two mammal books we borrowed from the library. We talked about both classes of water mammals, Sirenians and Cetaceans, but it was quickly obvious that Isabel's interest was reserved for dolphins and whales, so we narrowed our focus to Cetaceans. At first her questions were all over the place - What do whales eat? How do they breathe? Will they die if they come out of water? How do they dive? How fast do they go? - but eventually her focus returned to dorsal fins. What do they do? Do some whales not have them? How big are they? Do they help the whales to breathe?

One of our mammal books was particularly informative but while reading through it, an idea planted itself in my brain and I decided dorsal fins were a great topic for an experiment. Isabel, always up for a project, was game, and we managed to find all the supplies we needed in the house: empty soda bottles, a triangular bit of plastic (the cover to my pie cutter!), duct tape, a balloon. Imagine, if you will, that the empty bottles are whales. We will call them Diet Pepsi and Aquafina.

Isabel selected a sheet of blue construction paper (blue because water is blue) and wrote - 100% on her own (I did tell her what letters to write) - DORSAL FIN on the top. We talked about what animals have dorsal fins and that they are sea mammals; I wrote her narration on the page. Isabel drew a rather interesting-looking dolphin and we labeled its parts - head, eyes, blowhole, tail and dorsal fin. Then we began our experiment.

First, we used a balloon to visualize what lungs look like and what they do. We blew up and deflated the balloon to simulate breathing. Then I blew up the balloon and, holding it closed in such a way that created a long "stem," we poured a bit of water in the top to see how a whale's blowhole, the pathway to its lungs, would fill with water. When I stopped pinching the balloon, water blew everywhere (and it really went everywhere!), just the way a whale blows water out its blowhole. Isabel thought this was fabulous and we repeated the balloon/blowhole thing quite a few times (her construction paper got pretty wet, but it dried well).

We placed the slightly-inflated, knotted balloon inside our Diet Pepsi dolphin, to represent its lungs. We put a little water in both bottles to add weight (if I were to do this experiment again, I'd tape washers to each bottle to weight them, instead of using water - it created uneven weight) and sealed them up. Aquafina, we then left alone. To Diet Pepsi, we attached our pie-cutter-cover-dorsal fin with a fair amount of duct tape. Then we all crowded into the bathroom, where we filled the bathtub and experimented to see how the dorsal fin affected our dolphin's ability to "swim." It wasn't perfect but we were able to demonstrate that the fin made it easier to turn our dolphin, and prevented the dolphin from log-rolling in the water. Aidan fancied himself a helper and Isabel let him throw the dolphins in the water a few times to create big splashes. After a bit, Isabel asked to wear her bathing suit and swim with the dolphins, which I said sounded like a great idea. She threw the dolphins around in the water and pretended to feed them fish, which led to a discussion about toothed vs. baleen whales.

Our dorsal fin project took a long time. After it was done, we all dried off and ran out to register Isabel for summer soccer. I had to get cash from the bank to pay for soccer, and also took out a bit extra so that we could talk about coin and paper money back home (I've been wanting to discuss money with Isabel but, even though we always have a boatload of coins, we never have bills around). We reviewed the names of everything - bills were easy, since they're just numbers. Coins are a different story. Isabel calls them (in order from smallest denomination to largest): pickle, pickle, diamond, square. After playing with money for a while, we did our vowel review for the day.

When Nick got home from work, Isabel could barely contain herself, she was so excited to replicate the dolphin experiment for him.

Aidan continues to show us our noses. I'm starting to teach him "mouth" now, since he seems to have "nose" down. Whenever he drops something, he says "uh-oh!" This afternoon he heard me say "Wow!" to Isabel and repeated it beautifully; since then he's been crawling around, carefully enunciating "Wah-owwwww" every time he comes across a toy.

Some notes on what we're covering and why

2008-05-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the emails, those who have sent them! I'm glad people seem to be enjoying this format so much. Some of the questions and comments that have been sent my way have inspired me to write up a little (or a big, knowing my tendency to wordiness) something about what material we're covering, why, how, etc.

Right now, at the preschool level, we're following a decidedly low-key learning strategy. At four years old, my child is so full of wonder and curiosity about her world that it would, it seems to me, take enormous effort NOT to follow her lead into a myriad of daily learning experiences. I'm inclined to believe that all neurotypical preschoolers are this way, though I recognize that my expertise is limited to my child. Even today, during lunch, we explored spiders in great detail as a result of Isabel's undying desire to know. Her simple observation of a spider outside our dining room window led to a series of questions: How does a spider spin a web? What is the web made of? What does the web do? Does the spider have a house or nest? How many legs does a spider have? What do spiders eat? How do they catch their food? Do spiders have teeth?

To resist the questions of a precocious four-year-old would require greater effort - and would surely be a lot more dull - than to simply answer what I can and for the rest say, How about we look that up on the computer? or, I think there's a section on spiders in your Berenstain Bears science book - want to go see? It is not a difficult thing to sit with children on the floor as they "play" their toy pianos and say, "Hey, do want to learn what a scale is?" Or to respond to the restless child waiting for lunch, "Sure, come help me make the sandwiches. While we're doing that, do you want to know what peanut butter is made of?" All of these relatively small efforts, just part of daily life, are learning. Even though I didn't begin self-identifying as a homeschooler until this last year (when people out and about started asking Isabel if she goes to school), our homeschooling work began years ago, when we'd spend an hour looking at and talking about lions at the zoo, or researching the water cycle when she asked where rain comes from.

This is how the great majority of our learning happens. The subject matter we pursue, presently, is driven by Isabel's interests. If her curiosity about spiders persists at all past today's lunchtime discussion, next week we will most likely study arachnids, possibly in conjunction with insects. This week's work on mammals was driven by Isabel's questions regarding two topics - Do all animals feed babies from their breasts (as Aidan is fed)?, and an overwhelming desire to learn everything she possibly could about her new hamster (aptly named Tracy Turnblad - who knew a hamster could be so loud?).

I do enforce a short duration of desk work each day - currently I aim for 20 - 30 minutes. This is primarily because the number one goal of our schooling, right now, is to get Isabel reading fluently. She is developmentally ready for it and wants to learn. Reading is, above all else, The Most Important Thing. Children (and adults) who cannot read fluently cannot succeed to their potential - not in any other subject, not in college, not in careers. In my opinion, of course. Not only does an inability to read well rob them of the truly wonderful pastime of reading, of thinking, of being part of The Great Conversation that engages minds and hearts from the duration of modern history through today, it also steals their ability to DO. To do what? Well, to do whatever. Whatever one might want or dream to do. Anything, everything, nothing. It doesn't matter what. What matters is that an inability to read puts an end to the question before it can even be asked.

Reading is where it's at. And that is what our desk work focuses on. In addition to using deskwork to achieve reading fluency (and I should mention here that nothing - not even the ever-important reading - is pushed in this house prior to full developmental readiness), the minimum 20 daily minutes of desk time we log now is part of a gradual introduction to the 60-90 minutes of desk time that will be necessary to cover the material in a specific curriculum come grade 1.

Because of her own aptitudes, interests and abilities, we also work on handwriting and basic numeracy as time allows and Isabel desires. Once phonics basics are more firmly in place and don't need to be as much of a daily focus, handwriting will become a higher priority and will be part of daily schoolwork. Around that same time, maths will also become a daily activity.

When Isabel turns 6 - approximately grade 1 - we will begin filing legal paperwork and reporting to the state. This is also the age at which we will begin a more structured, formalized curriculum.

The educational philosophy that resonates most with me, and that I plan to use with my children, is the classical approach dictated by the trivium. The trivium is a three-stage approach to education that covers material following a chronological, historical timeline of four years. These four years are repeated three times throughout the child's academic career. In short, the same material will be covered, in varying degrees of detail and complexity, three times between first and twelfth grades. Grages 1-4 focus on learning and memorizing (when necessary) information, grades 5-8 emphasize learing to recognize patterns, relationships and the overall framework within which all knowledge resides, and grades 9-12 involve learning to critically analyze information, develop informed opinions and express oneself clearly and with originality, feeling and beauty (referring to communication style). This is a Christian website - and I would not categorize us as Christian homeschoolers (though we are Christian, and are homeschoolers) - but has a nice summary of what the trivium is.

Even though Isabel is not yet 6, I still consider her to be part of the Grammar stage, as outlined in the trivium. This means that our current approach to educating her is to simply provide her with information - as much information as she wants, on whatever she wants to know, without requiring her to process, analyze or compare. Processing, analyzing and comparing will come later in her education, at a time when she is more developmentally prepared for them. Right now, she is simply learning. And no, she may not retain everything she learns now. She very likely won't remember that egg-laying mammals are called monotremes. But she will cover this information at least twice more (actually, in this case, three times more, since we haven't even embarked on a structured curriculum yet) in her schooling. Even if she doesn't remember, exposure to this information, introduction to the concepts that animals are organized into classifications and those classifications have names, will serve as the foundation upon which she will build greater, more detailed knowledge regarding biology and the animal kingdom.

I enjoy talking about why and how we homeschool, so please don't hesitate to ask questions by email or via the comments interface here on the weblog. :)

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

2008-05-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

Today was not a great day.

Aidan is teething and not sleeping well. Isabel fell out of her bed in the middle of the night last night and then re-woke about 90 minutes later to go to the bathroom and generally putz around in middle-of-the-night misery. I am not sleeping because Aidan is not sleeping. We all had a bad case of the crankies. I am glad to see this day end.

We did a very small amount of desk work today, working on letters A and E. I'd thought about doing some handwriting practice but given the universal foul moods in the house, decided we'd be better served by something using more modes of learning, so as to be more all-around interesting. So instead, we recited the first two verses of a short-vowel sound poem, sang our Old MacDonald vowel song, and started working on a self-made primer Isabel titled "The Five Vowels." The first two pages are narration pages - Isabel recited the vowels for me and I wrote them as she said them, and then (on the second page) she explained - correctly! - what makes vowels special and different from other letters. The next two sections are for vowels A and E - we wrote the poem we're learning, thought up short-vowel sound words for each letter and then Isabel drew pictures for each ("Oh no!" she howled while drawing her A page. "I counted wrong and my alligator has EIGHT legs!" I assured her that it was fine.).

After some lunch and general down/play-time, we sat on the floor and looked at a book about mammals. Aidan thinks he's very clever - he sits on the book and we have to slide it out from under him. We talked about the different classifications of mammals, including monotremes (mammals that lay eggs), a group of mammals I'd been neglecting until now because Isabel was really struggling with the whole mammals with fur/birds with feathers issue. I didn't want to introduce egg-laying mammals until she had grasped more fully that birds are not mammals. I'd been avoiding bats (wings are something she associates with birds) for the same reason - we did cover them today. Luckily, the birds/mammals confusion seems largely resolved and after a host of questions about mammals laying eggs, she accepted monotremes and we moved on. We learned that mammals have lower jaws that are one bone (something I hadn't known, either), and we felt each others' jaws to figure out what that bone must look like ("kind of like a 'c', but longer," she said). Isabel is particularly intrigued by marsupials and asked to go to the zoo to see kangaroos soon.

Aidan's big achievement was that he learned where Mama's nose is. He is very proud and expects lots of cheering whenever he shows me.

Today was Irish dancing class as well. The children in this class all seem very nice and Isabel enjoys it.

At dinnertime Isabel thought of some more short vowel E words to add to her book, which I did promptly. We looked at one of her mammal books (in addition to fun reading) before bed and then I left it in the pile of books in her room (she is allowed to look at books in bed at night if she's not tired yet). About 10 minutes later she got out of bed to bring the mammal book downstairs - she was looking at the Orca and wanted to know what the big, top fin is called. Nick told her it's the dorsal fin and she immediately wanted to know what it does. We will look it up in the morning - Isabel had us put the book next to the computer so we don't forget.

Monday, May 19, 2008

2008-05-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

I had about two pounds of strawberries in the refrigerator that needed to be used up today. So was the launching pad for today's main unit: strawberries (and other berries, by virtue of endless questions and tangents). We're doing vowel review now, so we did our "A" work, had lunch, and headed out for our weekly library trip, with strawberries in mind.

At the library, Isabel is learning how to use the computer search system. She scrambled up into the chair immediately when we arrived, wanting to search for "strawberries." "S", she got on her own - I helped with the other letters, but Isabel hen-pecked them out on her own, typing "strawberries" into the search system and leading us to the gardening section. (Aidan was quite happy with himself this whole time, smiling and waving to passers by from the sling.) We found a lovely (though, it turns out, not too interesting) berry book with a large section of photographs in the middle. Then we hit the childrens' section and some various adult sections, filling our bag as we went (we have the clown car of shopping bags). I made sure to grab some books on mammals, which we'll continue discussing this week. As usual, Isabel left with some interesting selections, courtesy of her slap-happy, random this-and-that approach to choosing books - I will say, though, that she grabs books I'd never think to and some of them are really wonderful.

When we got home, after Aidan had a snack and was napping soundly, we set up in the kitchen with our newly-borrowed berry book, a big pile of strawberries, and a cutting board and knife. First we discussed our senses - do we taste strawberries? smell them (see pic at right)? hear them (see pic above)? etc. - and examined the strawberries carefully. With the help of our berry book, we identified all the different parts of the strawberry and talked about how strawberries grow and how strawberries are different from other berries (seeds on the outside!). Washing the strawberries led to a lengthy discussion about pesticides, the importance of insects to the planet and conventional versus organic farming (which Isabel calls "morganic" for some reason that eludes me). We cut the strawberries and examined their insides... and then tasted some (strictly for educational purposes, naturally).

Once I cut up enough strawberries, we set them aside, gathered ingredients and set about making strawberry-almond muffins. Isabel enjoys baking very much and is getting quite good at some of the fine motor tasks in the kitchen: cracking eggs, sifting flour, mixing, filling muffin cups. We measured the ingredients and discussed what the fractions mean, using a quartered strawberry for reference. Counted the spaces in the muffin pan and figured out how many paper cups we'd need (twelve), then put the whole thing into the oven.

While the muffins baked, we read through one of the books Isabel selected at the library, then sat at the table and drew strawberry pictures. Isabel picked one and we labeled the different parts of the strawberry - I'll save this in our binder. Then the oven dinged and the muffins were done! They turned out really good - Isabel and I split one. While we were eating, Isabel declared, "Sharing is the best thing ever!" I told her I couldn't agree more, even though I sort of wished I had that muffin to myself!

Saturday, May 17, 2008

2008-05-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

Big news today: Isabel is now the proud of owner of sneakers with laces that she can tie all by herself. (Also big news: sneakers with laces are expensive! Hopefully her feet don't grow for a while.)

Our biggest, current learning goal is to get Isabel reading fluently. She's progressing well - knows her letters and letter sounds ("phonemes," which is a fun word to say) and is starting on basic blending. Drilling basic phonics facts is pretty much a daily occurrence now, but today stands out as the day that Isabel mastered vowels. It helps that there's as many vowels (we're not tackling the "sometimes-y" conundrum yet) as there are fingers on a hand, and that has proven to be an excellent reference point. It also helps that we are a family of silly-song singers and the "e-i-e-i-o" verse of Old MacDonald is an easy way to memorize vowels: Old MacDonald had a vowel, AEIOU... And one of those vowels started a word, AEIOU...

One of Isabel's favorite activities is to think of words that start with short-vowel sounds, for the "here and there and everywhere" parts of the song. Pet peeve, though - ABC book writers and illustrators who do not stop to consider that small children will forever associate their books' pictures with specific letters. Grr. Somebody talk to these people. No matter how many times I correct and remind her, Isabel still knee-jerk calls out "Crocodile!" as a short-vowel A word. At this point she does catch and correct herself ("Oh, wait - that's C!"), so it's fine. But when there are so many non-confusing a-words to be had, why must one choose "alligator," so easily confused with "crocodile"? Vent over.

We AEIOU'd apples, alligators, elephants, Elmo, Isabel, igloos, octopuses (octopi? has that plurality question ever been resolved?), and umbrellas, among others. By the end of the day, Isabel was reciting her vowels without the need to sing them. We also discussed what makes vowels different from consonants (they are voiced phonemes that aren't formed by blocking or stopping air flow), experimented with holding our mouths in different ways while pronouncing short-vowel sounds and figured out different ways to make phonemes (hissing through teeth, tongue on the roof of the mouth, teeth on lips, plosives, etc). As usual with these sorts of exercises, it all ended up rather loud and silly. Reviewing this evening, however, Isabel easily recalled what makes vowels different from consonants.

Mammals were also a discussion point today - how to determine if an animal is a mammal (hair/fur, live birth, milk), different animals that are and are not mammals (birds proved to be tricky, leading to a comparison of hair, fur and feathers), defining herbivores, carnivores and omnivores and then a very interesting discussion about how people are and are not like animals, spurred by Isabel's adamant belief that people are NOT animals ("But Mom, people are just different!"). Later in the day, I think intrigued by our earlier discussion of whether or not ostriches are mammals, Isabel asked where ostriches live. Nick figured that they must live in Africa, because they appear in The Lion King (the logic is flawed but he was right!) . I wondered if they might also be in Asia, so we looked it up when we got home (ostriches are native to Africa, but also once-upon-a-time inhabited the Middle East and are domesticated worldwide).

Our last look-up of the day was Isabel's out-of-the-blue question about what the "line" above her upper lip is called, why it's there and what it does (philtrum, it is formed during fetal development and it allows for greater movement of the upper lip). Our related discussion also covered the importance of the lower jaw, during which Isabel surprised me by correctly figuring out that if our lower jaws did not move, we would be unable to speak or eat.

In addition to fun reading, we also read through Bruce McMillan's Sense Suspense and talked about our five senses and what senses we'd use for each item pictured. I suggested licking the palm tree, which was met with giggles. Mommy is silly.

As for Aidan - well, he's easy. Isabel is helping me show him the parts of his face and body, and she's so chatty that between the two of us, he's getting ample exposure to language. I suspect he will be an early talker, as his sister was, based on the number of early words he has. He had a lot of fun today with a game that consisted of handing me one of three items - I'd lay them out in front of him, carefully repeating the name of each three times, then ask him to give me one. He got it right about half of the time, and he absolutely loved the clapping and "yay!" he got from Isabel and me when he'd hand over the right object. After a couple rounds, he lost interest and we simply clapped and cheered with him for a bit. Babies are so delightful.

Why a weblog?

2008-05-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

Good question.

Why, thank you, self!

You're welcome, self.

1. Journaling, I have decided, is going to be an integral component of my homeschooling experience. "My" experience being that of parent/educator. Not only will this provide an outlet to review our activities, it's also a great opportunity to note what works, what doesn't work, what I like, what I hate, for reference when I tread the same path with subsequent children. Additionally, journaling our progress will be useful - and possibly (despite my fervent hopes otherwise), one day, necessary - for reporting purposes. My entries here will be printed and filed in a three-ring binder for computer-free reference. The online version offers a central, accessible-from-anywhere way to document... well, to document whatever I feel like documenting, really.

2. I have noticed that people - from family and friends to store cashiers and complete strangers - are interested in what we're doing. Very interested. Some, I blow off. Others - those whose curiosity is genuine, those who are seeking information and not ammunition - will more fully have their interest assuaged with this format, than whatever off-the-cuff, 30-second talking point I might try to provide. The truth is, what we do cannot be easily, simply or quickly described. It's not particularly advanced or complex, but is extensive and sufficiently outside the (traditional schooling) box to escape common definition.

That's it.