Seven Quick Takes Friday: The Homeschool Edition

Seven Quick Takes Friday is a format I used to love to do back when the blog got regular use. I'd just take all those little subjects that probably weren't great for a standalone post and corral them into one blog entry. The blog that used to host SQT doesn't exist anymore, so I am free to do something wild like turn it into Five Quick Takes, or Seven Quick Takes But With Kittens.

Or better yet, chickens

Since my children's education takes up a huge portion of my brain cells these days, I thought this post should be all about homeschooling!

#1. Big Kids

It is disconcerting to look back just a few posts and see a tiny Oscar doing early elementary work, when my current reality is that he is now 5'11" and staring down the barrel at high school next year. The kid has a mustache and runs track with the local high school. WHAT.

Still not too big to take a selfie with his ol' mom.

 Allen is eleven, and Cici just turned nine, so we are completely out of the themed activity tray days. What a difference five years makes!

#2. Rick Steves

We are binging the Rick Steves Europe show on Amazon Prime right now. It is such a great way to learn about the culture and geography of Europe! Here's a clip from one of our favorite episodes:

#3. Interest-Led Learning

This school year has been super duper relaxed. Ever since I was a high school freshman reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook, I have always been "unschooling curious". My main goal this academic year was just to survive through it, so I thought this would be a great time to ditch the curriculum and try something far less formal. Funschooling books helped the kids have some structure-- they are basically record/prompt books for interest-led learning. These were a few of the favorites:

 

 

The kids got to deep-dive into some really cool stuff. Allen has been hardcore studying food, not so much the cooking aspect but man's relationship to food. Things like artificial sweeteners, veganism, kosher food law, and high-quality food vs. fast food. He had a lengthy conversation with one of our older relatives at the funeral about aspartame. He was aghast to hear that I use artificial vanilla in my baking, so we're probably going to be making our own vanilla extract soon. He has also been creating 3D animation movies using the ancient Microsoft Movie Maker program, probably working an hour or more every day on his movies since July.

#4. Tiny Baking

Cici was into regular baking at first... until she discovered miniature baking on YouTube. Miniature baking is simply making tiny food with tiny bowls, tiny utensils and tiny ingredients. I thought it was kind of dumb until we got Cici her own tiny baking set, and now I actually think it's an ingenious option for kids who like to bake: they get the hands-on experience using a fraction of the expensive ingredients. There are no tempting piles of baked goods laying around, and the smaller recipes bake up in half the time, freeing up the kitchen that much faster for me to make dinner (that might actually be a downside 😅).

Cici's kit (Rainbow Resource)

#5. Art Class

One thing I have outsourced this year is art. We have a local organization that offers a weekly arts and crafts class, and the kids have been having a ball. Even I get to participate on slow days! I have a spot on the wall to hang up the creations as they come in.

 

#6. Library Love

Boy howdy, do homeschoolers love their local libraries, and we are no exception! In fact, I have a cart at home dedicated solely to storing library books. Does it keep my kids from losing half their books when they are taken upstairs to be read at bedtime? Not a chance. Our library is very cool because you can check out passes for the nearest science museum and the museum of arts and culture, as well as other things like Snap Circuits, a rock tumbler, and several board games. I am very thankful to have moved to the library system we have.

#7. Study Buddies

When reading inside the house just won't cut it.

Thus concludes Seven Quick Takes!

Friday This n' That

The blog has been neglected a bit lately, mostly because my laptop, which has been limping along on life support since the boys spilled a giant bottle of bubble solution on it in July, decided to briefly die for a while last month before resurrecting a couple weeks ago. So I'm back on my preferred instrument for blogging, hooray! Here are some of the things that are going on here:

~This whole getting Montessori elementary under my belt is HARD. I thought two months or so would be enough time to read through the albums and prepare materials, but I was WRONG, So, so, so wrong. I am very much flying by the seat of my pants here and working like a madman to get things together. Most evenings are spent making materials or reading, which is fine; I am quite willing to endure several months of intense work to be set for all six years of elementary for all three kids! We can do this! So for the time being, I'm Montessori-ing math and language and following conventional first-grade scope and sequence for everything else.

~Some materials I have recently made:

1.

Looking at it now, I realize I should arrange the numbers so all the odd numbers are on one side of the page, and the even numbers on the other. Whoops!

2.

3.

4.

1. A bead decanomial! This was a really fun set to put together, and I still have plenty of beads to make chains or cubes. Oscar is currently using the decanomial to help learn multiplication, and Allen is learning to correspond the symbol to the concrete number. Bonus: I enlisted Allen to help me for a little fine motor practice!

2. Geometry square insets. The frame is white foam board, and the pieces are made from 6mm-thick craft foam. Brad fasteners bent close to the tips make excellent little knobs! Oscar and I worked on the concepts of congruency, similarity, and equivalency, which he pretty much has down at this point (equivalency is a little trickier and needs some more work).

3. Hex bolt board! I ordered the materials from Home Deopt's website, taking the free in-store pickup option, and it was SO nice to just walk in and pick up the materials as opposed to scrounging through the aisles myself. One small problem is that I didn't realize the bolts would all have different-sized heads, so it's impractical to add four different nut drivers to screw them in-- it's better to just use fingers. And that's a shame, because Allen is SUPER into using tools right now. So I may have to make another board with just regular old screws.

4. One to a million hierarchy! Starting with the unit made from foam board, all the way up a million made from a bunch of boxes frankensteined together under the wrapping, with numerical cards to match. We had a lot of fun exploring the concepts here, and I never realized how all the tens, hundreds, etc. of any hierarchy take the same shape! Really cool visual.


~Language-wise, Oscar has been working on suffixes this past week. I was driving myself batty trying to assemble the materials myself, so I eventually decided that this time, spending the money for a little piece of mind was the way to go. I bought the suffix packet from Montessori Print Shop, and it was $4 well-spent.


~At the county fair a couple weeks ago, I got to co-superintend the Needlework section this year. It was a blast! I ended up getting like five grand prizes for various things I entered (probably more of a reflection on the low number of entries than on the quality of my work!), but it was nice to have some prize money to put into some nice new yarn! Cici and I are getting new sweaters this fall!

South America Activities and Resources

We're finally done with our South America unit! We spent about four weeks on it, and that felt like a good amount of time for our usual casual pace. I allotted two weeks per continent for the rest of the summer, so I'm hoping that now that we have some momentum going, two weeks will be sufficient. We started Africa this week, so we'll find out if two weeks is indeed enough time.

But back to South America! Here is a list of most of the stuff we did over the course of the study.

Movies set in South America
(Other than the Planet Earth episode, all the other movies are strictly for fun and getting a feel for South American climate and culture-- not any serious education!)

Rio

The Emperor's New Groove
Up (Pixar)
BBC's Planet Earth: Jungle Episode (Allen's favorite part, go figure, was the howler monkeys)


Books


Red-Eyed Tree Frog

The kids loved this book sooooo much. It's full of real-life pictures, simple sentences (perfect for the Pre-K crowd!) and full of drama. The kids have been pretending to eat moths and run away from boa snakes all week.

Our small-town country library is very limited on South American resources, so we didn't do a whole lot of reading in this unit. The tree frog book sparked an interest in amphibians and reptiles, however, so we did read a bunch of books about snakes, the life cycle of frogs, and different lizards from around the world. We loved the Nic Bishop books!

South America Trays

Hole punching/pasting

We punched dots out of the construction paper and then glued them on the frogs to make poison dart frogs!

South America puzzle

In lieu of purchasing a real wooden puzzle, I printed out a map of South America, colored in the countries according to the Montessori puzzle map, laminated the sheet, cut apart all the countries, and provided a control map.

Water transfer

I used food coloring to make the water green, since the Amazon is such a lush, green place (kind of a half-baked idea, I know). Next time, I think I would try to make it pink, since that is the Montessori South America color (as opposed to green, which is Africa)

Child-size Christ the Redeemer statue

I had Oscar lay down on a giant piece of butcher paper with arms outstretched like the statue and traced his outline. Decorate, cut out, and mount over our big mirror.

Pin Map

See the blog post here.

Animal Matching/Classification

I did something that I almost never do-- purchasing a material that didn't have an exact purpose already planned out. In this instance, the item was a Safari Rainforest TOOB, which I got for a few reasons: 1) I thought it would be a great supplemental material, 2) I see TOOBs pop up everywhere on educational blogs and wanted to see if the hype was warranted, and 3) because I still had $10 to go to qualify for free shopping on Amazon, haha.

I am frequently amazed by how organically any given subject matter comes up around here. Almost any area of study that I stress about comes up in my conversations with Oscar without me even trying to broach it. In this case, animal classification! Oscar and I were discussing the other day about how all chickens are birds, but not all birds are chickens, and BOOM! The doorway is open for learning about classification.

For the first few days, we simply worked on identifying and matching the animals to their pictures. I used some tiles from Continent Animals Bingo and made the rest. Oscar and Allen both loved this activity!

After Oscar was naming the animals with ease, we talked about animal classification and made cards together for the extension.

I would definitely say that the TOOB was worth the money!

Paper Snakes

I didn't get a picture of this, but there are plenty to see at Mess for Less, where I got the idea! The kids had lots of fun stringing them up.

Amazon Sensory Bin

I took inspiration from Living Montessori Now's frog life cycle bin and made an Amazon River bin. Water beads in a smaller container for the river, plastic Easter grass, twigs, stones, and leaves scavenged from an artificial plant. I taped a few leaves along the top to make a jungle canopy of sorts. And of course, there are a brightly colored frog and lizard! The TOOB animals also eventually joined the menagerie-- Oscar had the best time reenacting a Youtube video we watched of a jaguar sneaking up on a caiman in the water. I would have liked to add some green water beads to make the river more Amazon-like, but blue was all I had. Oh well!

Making Pao de Quiero

With Oscar as an assistant, I tried my hand at making a Brazilian cheese puff recipe. Nobody really liked them. However, Oscar got some experience at weighing ingredients on a scale, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

This was probably the first unit study I've ever put together in earnest, and we had a blast! I'm excited to keep on moving forward with more world geography!

We're Studying South America!

As we wrap up Oscar's Primary schooling, I'm trying to squeeze in any subject content that we might have missed along the way. One area that we really haven't spent a whole lot of time on is geography, so this summer, we're going to study the continents, one by one. Oscar's pretty solid in his U.S. geography, by nature of having relatives all over the country and having lived on both coasts; and the past couple months, we did some studying of Canada and Mexico here and there. Now we are setting our sights southward for this first half of June!

There really isn't any particular reason why we're starting off with South America, other than I'm really daunted by overviewing the vast assortment of culture and history in continents like Asia and Europe, so I wanted to start somewhere a little less complicated. I'm probably violating some sort of well-thought-out, established order for introducing the continents, but oh well! I have a bunch of activities and ideas for studying South America, and I can't wait to share them when we wrap up next week. Till then!

Five Long Takes Saturday-- The Schoolroom!

This was supposed to be a Seven Quick Takes Friday post, but by the time I finished writing this, it was neither Friday nor a quick post, nor seven. So here we go!


1. I'm a woodworker now! Before starting any actual work on the room, I vacillated a lot between I am way too poor to buy a whole bunch of shelves and I am way too inexperienced to build my own. And then I found Ana White's website, with step-by-step instructions for building shelving that even I could attempt! It took a day of assembly and about four separate trips to Home Depot over two weeks to get materials that I either forgot or got the wrong size of. But eventually, I completed the dang thing, and I am so proud! I even still have all my fingers, which is a huge plus in my book. Check out this beauty:

I had enough wood left over to make a couple simple book ledges, also from Ana White:

I was not paying attention (probably distracted by small children) when joining those together, as evidenced by those back boards.

2. Here's the layout! 

I snapped these pictures our first week in the schoolroom, which is why it looks pretty sparse here, but you can get an idea of the basic layout. You have the book ledges by the window (there is also currently a sand and seashell sensory bin underneath that window), and then the big shelf, and then a giant dresser mirror that I didn't feel like moving out of the room. It has actually proven to be very useful, as one Practical Life activity that Allen has been obsessed with recently is spraying with spray bottles. I used to give him my bottle of rubbing alcohol solution and set him loose in the shower, but now he has moved on to spraying the mirror with a vinegar solution and wiping it dry repeatedly. I guarantee that mirror has never been cleaner!

If you look closely in said mirror, you will see the other half of the room that is still a work in progress. Also missing in this picture is a child-sized picnic table that is now in the middle of the room for the kids to do their work on. That table, which you'll see in subsequent pictures, is a real family heirloom, having belonged to my grandparents. I have lots of memories of sitting at that table with my cousins when I was a tot! The finish was in pretty bad condition when I unearthed it from my parents' basement, so I stripped, sanded, and resealed it before bringing it in the house.

Next to the mirror is a potting container that is now holding mats. There is calendar on the wall, and we have been marking off each day as it comes. I'd kind of like to put either another shelf or some kind of art station on that strip of wall there. We'll see what happens!

3. Oscar. Oscar thinks this new schoolroom is the best new development ever! He is an incredibly industrious kid that never ever gets bored, and he is just so happy to sit down and work intently with the activities, bless his little heart. 

We're still going full steam ahead with reading, and he's learning by leaps and bounds! Here's a picture Adam snapped last week, when I was dying from allergies and taking a breather (strictly figuratively speaking). Oscar, my reading buddy, was reading his new favorite book, Sam and the Firefly. 

3. Allen. Allen, our wild child, is having a bit of a harder time adjusting to life in a schoolroom. The only thing that will grab his attention longer than a few moments is certain Practical Life activities (see above: Mirror Washing), so I have been trying to include a bunch of those with elements for him to pour, scoop, spray, switch, and just do things to. One activity that has been a HUGE hit with both the boys is assembling a flashlight.

I did eventually put this activity in a smaller, taller container
because the components kept rolling around and off the tray!

Here is Allen oh-so-helpfully illuminating Oscar's scissor work (notice the picnic table!):

Here you can see the new container for the flashlight components.

He has also been very interested lately in screwdrivers and other tools. I just ordered a nuts and bolts kit for him, and I am itching for his birthday to roll around next week so we can give it to him! 

It's been fun teaching Allen new skills because he is a lefty, so I have to either demonstrate the activities opposite him, or next to him using my non-dominant hand.

 (One thing I've been working on a lot more with the boys is knife skills. Look at Allen go!)



 4. Cici. Here is our big raison d'etre for even having a designated schoolroom in the first place. Originally, I had a shelf out in our dining room with a few trays for the kids, and it worked great for about a month. And then Cici learned how to crawl and pull herself up to the forbidden trays, and it was game over. We needed a baby-proof space. This is terribly un-Montessori, but she gets the prison treatment if she's awake during school hours.

Enjoying a delicious playpen.

I've been giving her a few baby-appropriate activities in the playpen, like stacking cups, pulling objects out of a wipe container, and putting coins in a bank. All of which she eventually throws out of the playpen, of course! If I have time, I'd really love to make her some sensory cubes like these.

5. Room for improvement. The jury is still out on whether or not having a schoolroom is actually improving the quality of education around here, but one benefit is that the increased organization is casting a spotlight on my pedagogical deficiencies. For instance, I have had to confront the unpleasant truth that I am horrible at planning crafts and art projects for the kids. I am all for learning skills, but the thought of having a house littered even more than it already is with random collages, reams of used paper, and toilet paper tube crafts gives me the hives. I just really need to suck it up and do it for the sake of the kids' fine motor skills-- Oscar is slightly behind in that area, and we have been struggling all year long with getting his fingers strong enough for a good pencil grip. There a couple other areas I'm weak in, and making sure we have a good assortment of trays from a variety of subjects is helping me stay on track.


So there you have it! It probably seems quite odd that we would be starting up the schoolroom at the end of the school year, but I wanted to get some momentum going before starting Oscar in first grade in the fall. So far, I'm mostly pleased with how things are going, and we will just continue to improve. Catch you later!

Oscar's first year schooling, in review

I hesitate to call this our first year schooling, since it has been very informal; but since Oscar is kindergarten age, and I actually did throw a few textbooks in this fall, we'll go with that!

My dearest wish was to put Oscar in a Montessori school, because he has really thrived with that style of learning; however, the nearest Montessori school is forty minutes away, so it's not an option right now. So this year we have been homeschooling. It's highly recommended for first-time homeschoolers to use a pre-planned boxed curriculum the first year to dip their toes in the pool, but having been homeschooled myself, I was born in the water, so to speak. So I was pretty comfortable taking a more eclectic approach. There are three somewhat disparate schooling philosophies I borrow heavily from:


Unschooling. I'm a huge believer in following the interests of the child, because I think people learn best when they are actually interested in the subject at hand, and it's complete drudgery for all parties involved when the child is not interested. I try to teach Oscar on his terms, not on my terms or a curriculum publisher's terms. So I introduce him to lots of ideas and concepts, run full steam with the ones that spark his interest, and back off the ones that don't stick until he's ready for them again.

Montessori. The Montessori method emphasizes learning with all five senses, developing independence and concentration, and learning lots of practical life skills. I also love how works are presented on trays, as well as the excellent math manipulatives like the Bead Stair and the Pink Tower.

Common Core. I haven't yet met a homeschooler that doesn't think Common Core wasn't an invention of Satan himself, so maybe I'm an anomaly here. I do have some serious concerns about how it is implemented and tested in the public schools, but I have no issue with the Common Core as a set of guidelines and a base for a shared body of knowledge among a country's schoolchildren. So I have been trying to touch on all the Common Core kindergarten subject material with Oscar as the year goes on.


Here are some of the materials we have been using this year:



Home Learning, Year by Year by Rebecca Rupp. An excellent guide on ideas and subjects to cover for each year from preschool to twelfth grade. Organized by year, then subject, with lots of book/website recommendations for supplemental material.




What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know, by Ed Hirsch, Jr. Covers all the Common Core subject material, much of it typed out in a story format if you'd rather just read straight from the book to your child. A huge portion of the book is dedicated to nursery rhymes and classic children's literature. I've been marking the different concepts with Post-It tabs and then removing them once we've introduced it.




Modern Curriculum Press Phonics, Level A. This is actually the phonics curriculum I used when I was growing up, and I looooooved it! Favorite subject ever. Unfortunately, Oscar doesn't seem to enjoy it quite as much as I did, so I've only been pulling it out when he hits a sensitive period for language, like he has this past month, and wants to learn how to read/write more effectively.




Singapore Math, Book 1A. This one is actually more of a first-grade level because Oscar's always had a natural aptitude for numbers. Like phonics, this is a stop-and-start kind of book for us. When we were going through subtraction, Oscar was having a hard time grasping the concept, so we just put the book away for several weeks and tried to demonstrate subtraction through hands-on examples until he was comfortable enough to continue in the book.

(The subtraction breakthough, by the way, came the week of Halloween when we sat down with paper and a large pile of candy corn. I'd write something like "10-5", put down ten candy corn pieces, and subtract [eat] five. A bag of candy corn later, and Oscar was a subtracting genius :-D)

In spite of having a textbook, however, the bulk of his math education has actually come in the form of dinner conversation, because Oscar really loves to talk about math at mealtimes for some reason.



Handwriting Without Tears, Kindergarten level. If I could do it over again, I would not have even touched this book until about now in the school year. We struggled and struggled with Oscar's handwriting grip, even though he was interested in learning the material, and we were almost all the way through the uppercase alphabet before I realized that Oscar's fine motor muscles simply weren't strong enough for the task yet. Prior to starting handwriting, he never doodled or sketched or just plain handled any writing implements at all; he was much more interested in building stuff and handling manipulatives. At that point I dropped handwriting like a hot potato and beefed up the fine motor activities, such as working with playdough, tearing paper, and using tweezers and pipettes. Now these past six weeks or so, drawing/writing is all he's been wanting to do from sunup to sundown, so he's catching up now in his own  time. :-)


Adam and I also do a lot of reading aloud to the kids, which needs its own blog post, so I'll talk about that another time.

So in an nutshell, that's what we've been doing so far, and I've been pleasantly surprised with how it's been working out this year. We still have a few months till the typical school year-end, although since we've kept everything quite informal so far, I can't see us actually having an ending to the school year. I'm predicting that we'll just keep up the learning continuum through the summer, but we'll see!

IT'S ALIIIIIIIIIIVE!

As you may have noticed, I have not been blogging for about a month or so. This is how it feels, coming back to the land of the living:

This is also a very close representation of what I go through every morning before I've had my coffee. That being said, I have been reading and somewhat keeping up with my favorite blogs- I just haven't had any creative blogging ideas for a while.

This has been a crazy month! I finally graduated from college a few weeks ago, thank You, Jesus. My parents came down from Washington State, and unfortunately, they were the only ones taking pictures, so it might be a few years before you ever see any graduation photos besides these two:

Yes, I am standing in front of a giant pair of hands. My university is like the Disney World of academia. 

Adam is such a giant compared to my family! I'm thinking my parents agreed to let him marry me because they were afraid he'd beat them up. :-P

Every year, the Music department chooses one instrumentalist and one vocalist from the graduating seniors to do special performances for the hooding ceremony. I was honored to be the chosen vocalist! So on the day of hooding, I got up in front of a packed house in my regalia, and started singing. A few minutes into it, I felt my mortarboard hat s.l.i.p.p.i.n.g. off. And then it just fell off right in the middle of a cadenza! ACK! Everybody laughed, but fortunately, I'm very experienced at humiliating myself in public, so I was unruffled. That's one hooding nobody will ever forget!

Tomorrow will be one week since my last day at the Mexican restaurant. I'd been feeling impressed by God for a while to give my two-week's notice, and one day I finally stopped saying, "God, are You CRAZY?" and handed in the notice. So now, both Adam and I are job-hunting. It's kind of an uncertain time for us, but I'm trusting that God is not playing some sort of April Fool's joke on us, and that He'll provide for us what we need.