This is Just to Say...

I had one of those unforgettable moments recently when I felt the real, pure joy of homeschooling and witnessing my Mane's unfolding thought processes...

Many of you are familiar with the poem by William Carlos Williams that goes like this:

This is just to say

I have eaten 
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Well, Mane learned this poem last year, and we read it again this year in A Family of Poems collected by Caroline Kennedy. It's one of my favorites, and, since it's one of my favorites, we spent some time talking about it. Mane memorized it. We repeat it often.

So, several nights ago, Mane finished the container of peanut butter. Mango came out in the kitchen in search of a snack and couldn't find any peanut butter. Mane launched into a parody of the poem by William Carlos Williams. We were all laughing so hysterically that she decided it was worth writing down. Here are the results:

NOT back to school

We officially started our school year (without GOing back to school, thank you very much)! This is the end of week 4. We did 3 weeks of relatively "academic" work, and week 4 was a camping trip!

We're using Sonlight this year, though I've made up my own hybrid version. The only things I actually bought from Sonlight were the Instructor Guide and the reading schedule. I have the Instructor Guide for core B/C, which is the World History core. Next year I hope to do core D/E, which is the American History core. I bought many of the readers & read-alouds at thrift stores and garage sales. The rest we're checking out from the library. We're using Saxon math 54, which was given to us. For now, I'm going to keep teaching Language Arts  & handwriting without a curriculum, and I'm working out a science schedule with Mango. 

It's been good so far...very good. The Instructor Guide includes Bible reading and memorization, a schedule for reading the world history books and the read-alouds, discussion questions, suggested poetry reading, and a schedule for reading Aesop's Fables. I love having a schedule mostly worked out for me!

(And did you know you can read Aesop's Fables on-line? They're kind of weird, though. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

And did you know that homeschool means we never stay home? In our first months of school we went to the Peace Games:

We spent some time at Silverwood Park in NE Minneapolis:

We went to birthday parties, parks, libraries, coffee shops, and to DULUTH (where Mane danced at the amphitheater in Leif Erikson Park with her little friend):

So, we're back to school, though not AT school because we homeschool, and not at home because we're almost never home. Peace!

Science Class...Technology Day

We here at Peregrin House made batteries today! Mango taught the 5th in a series of 6 homeschool science classes to Mane and a group of friends. They all tested out something different about the battery-making process. Some changed amounts of chemical. Others changed which chemicals they were using. They all got some practice recording independent and dependent variables, and they'll be graphing their results!

Jr. Park Naturalist

When we went camping in June, Mane picked up her first Jr. Park Naturalist book. (I would link to the program, but the government is currently shut down, and that means the state park website is also shut down!! Here's a link to another website about the program: Craft Fairs and Shows.)

We went camping again this past weekend, and she spent some time working through the book, drawing and writing about plants and animals, habitats and conservation.


Once again, she had a little shadow...

Mango teaches a summer science class...

So, I met this awesome group of women (and children) at a folk dancing class for homeschoolers this past spring, and a few short months later my husband is teaching a science class for all our children! It's been a totally new and energizing experience for him, and the kiddos are all having fun with science!

Looking at real elements and finding them on the periodic table chart on the wall...




Get a whiff of that sulpher...


Class meets on the back porch...

Neighbors

A large part of the reason I've been too busy to post this school year is that one of my dear, dear friends moved in two houses down from me in September. She and her husband were searching for a house in Minneapolis, and, so, they've been renting on my block. They found a house, and now they're renovating. In a few weeks they'll be moving away (still within biking distance, though). So, this blog has suffered while we've had morning coffee/tea together and while I've been taking care of her daughter so that she can house hunt, and then paint, and then tile.

...and having my friend's little daughter around has provided an experience for both girls (Mane and my friend's daughter) that I hope will solidify their relationship for life. It's been an experience for Mane...learning to share space and toys and time with someone who's small and doesn't know how to share space or toys or time, to take care of another person, to know what it is to be followed around and admired and to get totally worn out with that. It's been a time for her to grow in her understanding of people and the world and how we all work together to make things "work." Mane has grown a tremendous amount in her ability to be responsible for people and things, though it's sometimes been a painful sort of growth. A few weeks ago she invited our friends to come have lunch with us after Bible Study. I approved the invitation, having no idea what I'd be making for lunch. And, then, a wonderful thing happened! MANE made lunch! Yep. She did.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. We took care of our little friend all day and I sat back and smiled...

 

Flat Stanley

We began "rowing" Flat Stanley this week. Aurora made her own "flat" people:





We're going to use the flat people as we study more geography and family history. You see our geography wizardry book in the photo, along without our newest homeschooling gadget, the Samsung Galaxy Tablet!

Mane is a strong auditory & kinesthetic learner. This is, in part, because she struggles with reading. I, in turn, have been struggling with homeschooling her because it's very time-intensive to have to read everything to her. SO, the tablet is part of the answer to easier homeschooling for us. We have Story of the World on audio. We downloaded a FREE audio Bible from Faith Comes by Hearing. And we received, as a gift, some of the Your Story Hour Bible Story CDs.

We use Math U See for our math curriculum, and we ordered the song CD that goes along with the curriculum. We didn't use it for adding and subtracting, but we are using it a LOT for multiplication. Mane can learn almost anything that's set to music!

For English grammer, Mane has been listening to The Case of the Missing Parts of Speech, which is a musical I was in as a child and is the reason I know all my parts of speech!

We check audio books out from the library all.the.time.

We use Hooked on Phonics (HOP) for a reading curriculum. This year's HOP has a CD-ROM, and Mane both hears and sees her reading lessons and activities.

All of these things have helped take some pressure off me and moved Mane toward greater independence with her learning. Except for the Hooked on Phonics, all of these things can be uploaded to the tablet, and Mane can use them independently. As she becomes more of a reader, we'll also be using the tablet's Kindle application for e-reading.

Backwards Alphabet

Contrary to what this blog might lead you to believe, we've been busy here at Peregrin House. Of note, we began using some new reading strategies to help Mane with her reading struggles! Among the exercise: Learning the alphabet backwards:



Mane made the alphabet backwards and forwards out of clay, upper and lower case, and she practiced saying the alphabet backwards for 3 days until she had it! This is to help her stop singing the alphabet and think of each letter as in individual entity. It is also to give her hands-on interaction with letters, something Mane has always needed as a kinesthetic learner.

After playing with clay for several days, Mane decided that reading lessons are a whole lot of fun! I'm hoping that decreasing the pressure surrounding reading and giving her some new "hooks to hang things on" will free her to read more easily.

Next step: Spell-Reading. Mane will be spelling words before she reads them, also in an effort to help her see letters individually and to slow down when she doesn't know a word.

I'll keep ya'll posted!

Book Review - Schooled

Recently, I visited the library with a friend, who was looking for good books for her nephew. The children's librarian recommended several books, and I ended up picking up two of them for myself! This was one of them:

Schooled by Gordon Korman

I enjoyed this book a great deal, though, at first, I was resistant to the stereotyped weirdo homeschooler idea. The public schooled kids were also pretty heavily stereotyped, and, in the end, I decided that the stereotyping is what makes this book so humorous and so powerful at the same time. It exaggerates to make a point.

Capricorn (Cap) is the new kid in the 8th grade because his grandmother, the only person he's ever really known in his life, breaks her hip and needs to recover in the hospital for several weeks. Because the 8th graders are in the habit of electing the the least "cool" or popular student in the school to be their class president, Cap becomes class president. The "cool" kids are ready to make fun of him all year, but they discover that it's pretty difficult to make fun of someone who doesn't understand the social rules and has been heavily indoctrinated with "hippy" values.

Book Review - Eleven

Recently, I visited the library with a friend, who was looking for good books for her nephew. The children's librarian recommended several books, and I ended up picking up two of them for myself! This was one of them:

Eleven by Patricia Reilly Giff
 
A fascinating idea but not a particularly believable outcome. Sam turns eleven and discovers a newspaper clipping in the attic that seems to indicate that he's been missing, which could mean that he's somehow living with the wrong people and that his family is not really his family. Sam's endeavor to find out the truth about himself is hampered by the fact that he struggles with reading. Sam enlists the help of a new girl at school, who seems to have her nose in a book constantly. This book is the story of the friendship that develops between them as they sort out the truth about Sam. There were some very sweet and beautiful things about the story, but, on the whole, I didn't find the ending believable, and Sam seems much younger than 11 (though he has some extraordinary wood-working skills).