Trust

(the photo above has nothing really to do with this post... I just feel all posts should have a photo)

That's my word for 2009 for our homeschooling journey.... TRUST. This all has to do with the epiphany I alluded to in an earlier post.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and here's where I'm at right now...

I need to TRUST my children more on this journey.

I need to TRUST that when they balk at certain things and struggle with others, it is not (always) because they're being difficult and don't want to work that day... but because whatever we were doing doesn't work for them. It doesn't fit their interests, their learning style or the pace they need to work at. I have been extremely guilty of trying to cram Clara into Alex's mold and getting frustrated when it doesn't work. I need to see that it is not always defiance at work, but her need for something different.

I need to TRUST that left to their own devices at times they actually come up better "educational experiences" than I could have ever have thought up for them. Plus there's the added bonus of their enthusiasm for those projects they devise themselves.

I need to rethink my TRUST in "curriculum". Okay... that sounds odd... I'm not saying that I don't trust curriculum.... but I'm talking more about my thinking that somewhere out there is the perfect curriculum that will solve ALL of my homeschooling problems.

I need to TRUST myself in my thought that the way I learned in school is not the only way to learn. There is no one right way to learn, different things work for different people.

I need to TRUST myself as the facilitator of my children's educations. Notice that I did not say "teacher".... I am the facilitator. We will learn together, I will provide educational opportunities, I will gather materials, I will say "oh, I didn't know that... tell me more".... my job is not really to teach them anything, but to help them learn.

I may have more to add to this but at least I've got the start of it written down.

Funny thing is... this whole thing came from a freak out I had about spelling. I kept looking for that one "perfect" curriculum that would magically teach my children to spell. Then I thought about school spelling programs a moment.... they don't exactly teach a child to spell (stay with me here)... they give them word lists, spelling rules, some worksheets and tests... just like almost every curriculum I had looked at and/or purchased (I have quite a collection). Where the child truly learns to spell is outside of this curriculum either through activities created by the teacher or at home with their parents... through a myriad of ways... drills, flashcards, writing out the words, spelling games, computer games, etc. The list goes on and on... but it all comes down to what works best for that particular child. I needed to stop looking for a curriculum to solve my problem for me, I need to trust my children when things didn't work and I needed to trust that I could come up with ways that would help facilitate the learning to spell process.

So, here we are at the beginning of 2009 with a fresh outlook on our homeschooling journey... let's see where it leads.

extra credit?

It's funny.... since we've adopted a new attitude in regards to school lately, "school" never seems to stop. It just becomes part of our lives.... a part that isn't packed up and put away for the weekend and after 3:00 on weekdays. It's amazing to witness.

So, back this past summer, I was telling a friend of mine that we were going to be working our way through The Story of the World Volume 1this year. Knowing Alex the way she does, she suggested that we get this book she had seen on Amazon....

The Art of the Catapult: Build Greek Ballistae, Roman Onagers, English Trebuchets, and More Ancient Artillery

It was a very good call! Alex loves this book! He has studied it over and over and has picked a project to start on with his dad. They went to the hardware store last weekend to get their supplies (Jeff said that they got some strange looks from the staff as they kept consulting the book as they selected their supplies). That was another thing that excited me about this book. I do so much of the school work with the kids and this was a cool way to get Jeff involved with what we're up to.

Anyway... while waiting for time to start the construction on their catapult.... Alex decided the he would attempt building a trebuchet out of Legos.

He had been working on it alone for a few days... constantly peppering us with questions about its construction. Finally on Sunday, he had the basic structure done and from there it became a several hour family project. It was so much fun lying in the floor together... testing, analyzing, rethinking, retesting, etc.

Here's Jeff getting ready to fire the trebuchet...
(yes, the ammo is an "enemy head" as Alex had read in the book... sigh)

Making some modifications...
Ready.... aim....
FIRE.....
Here are a couple of (poorly shot) videos of a couple of firing attempts...

one not so successful one...

and one successful one...


Please ignore the various color casts of the photos... I have color cast issues :-) And, I was also having video issues this morning so one video was uploaded via blogger and another via photobucket... let's hope they work!

Thank you!

I just wanted to write a quick note of thanks to those of you who have commented on my blog posts recently! I rarely EVER get comments so this past week has been quite a treat!

I know to some, three comments is no big deal but for me it's HUGE.... so thank you Audrey, Alycia and Jules!

You all made my day! :-)

diagramming sentences = fun?

I never thought so... and quite frankly, neither did Alex. That is, until yesterday.

I typed a bunch of sentences out and printed them. I then handed him scissors and hand drawn sentence diagrams for him to use.

He then went to town cutting up his sentences and diagramming them...
It was pretty cool to watch. He actually got really into it! He kept yelling out all kinds of revelations he was having as he diagrammed. He actually could see relationships and really "get" the concepts when the grudge work of actually writing everything out was removed. I'm not saying that he's never going to have to write things out again.... but removing that element, especially when learning new concepts really helps with Alex.

I'm not sure why I couldn't see this before. I think it is possibly because I get caught up in the way I learned in school.... so many work sheets and so much writing.... all individual work with little interaction with the teacher (or the actual material for that matter). This all goes along with my homeschooling epiphany I referenced the other day.... I must get around to writing that post.

experimenting...

Our homeschool is an ever evolving beast. :-)

I had a homeschooling epiphany the other day (which I'll expand on later) so we're trying some new stuff this week.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.... I struggle with language arts (LA). It was never my strength growing up.... I was more into math and science. Anyway, because of this I have been all over the board with language arts... I have completely ignored it (not the best solution), bought workbooks and curriculum to do it for me and now I'm finally trying a mix - using curriculum in our own way. We're taking the books and going off road. :-)

So, Clara has really been struggling with LA because she struggles with handwriting. She also isn't particularly the sit at the table and do a workbook type (well, at least not for too long). So, I decided over the weekend that I would try typing up and printing out some of the exercises from their LA books. I decided to try this because I really felt that she did get more of the concepts than it appeared when she had to write things out.

So, here's day one...
I decided to use the grade 2 Rod and Staff grammar book I had bought for Alex last year. To start I just typed out some sentences from the book, cut the words apart and let her arrange them back into sentences.... looking for clues to help (capital letters and punctuation). She really enjoyed that. The next section was about sentences versus phrases.... so I typed up their list of each along with the headings "sentence" and "phrase", cut them out and let her put them in the proper columns. Again... fun and quick. Finally, so she can keep working on her handwriting, I typed out a few of the sentences in StartWrite for her to trace and then copy.

Here's Alex's...
He's working in book 3. We haven't gotten very far into it. We stopped for a while when he got into his daily paragraph editing work sheets. Thankfully though, we had stopped right before a review section.

Here he is sorting sentences into columns of "commanding", "telling" and "asking" sentences...
Now, he's cutting up those same sentences in order to separate them into columns of "subjects" and "predicates"....
He had always tolerated his Rod and Staff grammar (once we stopped writing everything out)... but this was the first time that he really got into it and seemed to enjoy it. Figuring he could always use some extra handwriting practice... I did the same for him as I had done for Clara.

After our LA work, it was time for a spelling game...

Snap It Up! Phonics and Reading Card Game, Word Families

I was the referee and the official middle card turner over person. It was a good learning game for Clara and a good review game for Alex. They enjoyed it enough that they think we should get the Snap It Up gamesin all varieties. :-)

I also wanted to show off this little beauty...

My very own Automatic Playing Card Shuffler!! I'm terrible at shuffling cards and so many of the kids' games involve shuffling cards.... I actually used to avoid playing card games with them... but NO MORE!!! :-)

After the traditional round of Snap It Up, we split the ending cards between the two of them and also split the beginning cards.... they then tried to be the first one done with forming words with all of their endings...
It was a good experiment!! However, since it's a little more labor intensive for me, I'm hoping I can keep at it.

let the games begin!

One of my goals for the new year is to get back to playing more games for school. I used to be so good about this with Alex, but I fell off the wagon a bit when it came to Clara.

Since Clara can always use some extra help with spelling, we got out this game yesterday....

What's Gnu?

It was fun.... but I learned quickly that we couldn't play it the traditional way (2 player).... Alex was just too fast. So for the second round, Clara went alone...
and she got different points for her words depending on the level of help she needed. Alex kept track of it all on the easel. We had a really good time playing together and I look forward to making games a bigger part of our school.

mummies

Yesterday was SO MUCH FUN!!! I love it when a project becomes something that we're really into instead of "just school".... if you know what I mean. The kids were into this project anyway... but given that they had been reading some ancient Egypt books on their own, they had their own ideas on how we should do things.

The Story of the World activity book has you mummifying a chicken... I just couldn't do that... it just icks me out just thinking about it. So I went searching around the web looking for alternatives. I found these instructions on the Tweaked Academy blog. They were just what I was looking for!

In the meantime... the kids had been reading these two books....

You Wouldn't Want to Be an Egyptian Mummy!

Ancient Egyptians (History Dudes)
(thanks for letting us borrow this Jennifer, Alex loves it!)

... and had some ideas of their own.

Namely, the addition of Anubis...

Or the priest who acted as the chief embalmer who wore the mask of Anubis (god of embalming). I didn't know about this because I was so focused on the actual embalming that I didn't pay much attention to the ritual of embalming. The kids rushed down to Alex's room to make him an Anubis mask which we then taped to his ski mask.

The chief embalmer marks the line on the left side of the bodies for the "slicer" to cut along...
Here is a shot of our dearly departed royal family and the elements needed for their proper burial...
I got to be the "slicer".... which had the added bonus of being chased from the room and having "stones" thrown at you by the other embalmers since "his bloody work insults the gods". I had them make paper stones so I got to run from kitchen (I did put the knife down first) while being pelted with paper wads! Good times! Honestly... the kids LOVED it!

Here they are removing the "organs"...
and anointing the bodies with wine (rubbing alcohol and red food coloring in a Dr. Pepper bottle...lol... how's that for fancy?)....
The little packets above are the "organs", we're embalming them too.

Then we mixed up our "natron"... and started covering the bodies...
I think I ended up using three and a half boxes of baking soda and two and a half canisters of salt. I just mixed it up in equal proportions until the bodies were covered. I have some extra so I can replace the natron when needed.

Oh... and last night the kids used the hieroglyph stamps from their kit to make name labels for the mummies. On Monday we had watched a special about the Screaming Man on the National Geographic Channel and they kept stressing how important it was for mummies to be buried with their names.... a nameless mummy could not get into the afterlife. So, they had to have names... however, for now they are mom, dad and Tut. :-)

So... that was our day yesterday! Hopefully today will be as fun but without the mess! lol!