The Rhythm of Our Days

Queen of the Hill hath produced one of my favorite posts, and one of the most creative ways to talk about homeschooling, ever.

It’s right up there with the sturdy plastic game boxes that can be bought now, replacing the cheap cardboard ones games come in that fall apart so quickly.

posters with puzzles! This way the edge pieces can be sorted, the inner pieces can be sorted, the boxes can be used, and the puzzle image hung or set nearby to check for placement! Cool idea!

First born:

Reading a totally cheesy horror-book called The Rage, found in a free bin at the used book store, about a dog with rabies.

Also reading:

We love this book; it’s a prequel to peter pan and hilarious thanks to co-author Dave Barry. I’m also reading this out loud to W right now.

Sunshine:

We are working through this fabulously fun book:

It has a book list, that we read together, and then do the math activities that come after. It’s a lot of critical thinking and brings out the math skills mentioned in the story. She’s getting reading, time with mom, and math, and it’s FUN. This is a good for the Living Math list!
And speaking of the books on the list….today she read Frog and Toad together, a good one for practicing her oral speed. I tootled around on amazon.com today for the titles listed in the front of the book that we don’t already have and found most of them for less than a dollar. I did have to pay shipping on them but without a good library close by or hours to search the used book store until later in the summer, this was a pretty good plan B!

W: as mentioned, I’m reading peter and the starcatchers to him. He is also reading through the McGuffey first reader with dad in the evenings and is about ready to start reading short books on his own. I wish I’d been this relaxed watching Firstborn learn to read; we immerse them in language and books and it’s delightful (at times LOL) to see how individual the rate of learning can be, and how natural a process it should be.

Books for R.K, who loves to be read to:

Yesterday we visited and went to church. The kids had tutoring with a new emphasis on math per my request.
Today started with retribution. The kids are getting into nightly games of hide and seek and flashlight tag and I guess last night W kept turning on the light during “hide and seek in the dark”, which frustrated Firstborn and Sunshine. So while he was sleeping they covered his face in red ink hearts.

Some people would find a prank like that funny. W would not. So the first order of the day was sentences:

“I will never do anything to disrespectful to someone’s face. And if something isn’t funny to everyone, it’s not funny.”

Onward.

Firstborn: wrote the above 15 times. We read about Harrison’s short presidency in This Country of Ours and the arrival of Arthur in Our Island Story. The artist we covered was Jan Vermeer. We looked at several of his paintings and talked about elements in them all; also read a short bio. Firstborn then painted a watercolor that was supposed to incorporate elements Vermeer used. The end result was “not so much” but I did like his use of perspective.

bad blur on photo is due to sticky stuff on the lens.

He worked on another Singapore placement test and I think we determined which level I need to get for him. Maybe. He’s not testing well. He understands concepts but not terms well and so he struggles to understand what the test is asking. Once explained, he often can solve the problem correctly. And we really need to get into fractions more.

A chapter in Crispin.

Sunshine: read a chapter in the Magic Treehouse book she’s been working on. A long hour was spent on a painful math placement test. Yikes. I know exactly how she feels and I’m without ideas on how to best help her.
W: read a chapter of The Boxcar Children with him.
RK: watercolored and made hand prints with Sunshine. We read several books this morning and after a recommendation on the Trisomy 21 board where I’ve been doing a little reading about how to help with speech delays, I ordered a DVD of Signing Time. I think all of the kids are going to find it interesting and hopefully it will help with the frustrations he has over not being able to communicate well. I’ve tried a few books on signing and we’ve had very limited success with them.

“Strewing” is something I’m stepping up a notch too. My very favorite items for strewing are Painless Learning Placemats. We have them on the table where we eat breakfast and do school and the kids love them. I’m glad there is such a large variety of them; I ordered a few more of them today and they still have some we can go onto next. They are good for rotating as well.

Yesterday I got National Geographic flashcards on state trivia, presidents, and spanish vocabulary. Every few days we’ll rotate them in a bowl I set in the middle of the table, letting them free-grab and explore as they want to. They usually do it the most when they are bored or when they notice something new is in there.

Accidental versus Learning on Purpose (or something like that) at The Lilting House.

The other killer of the ability to marvel is the bored adult who’s lost that ability himself. Cynical teachers who hate what they do and treat children like inmates; uncultured parents who haven’t picked up a book in years; Pharisaic parents who forget that the purpose of rules is to serve charity and who sap the joy out of a child’s life with their drive for power, inane rules, and lack of humor; older teenagers around them who do nothing but express angst — if this is what your child sees, this is what he will model himself after.

If you don’t: read, draw, paint, play a musical instrument, embroider, knit, purl, tat, whittle, carve wood, dance, make furniture, build model airplanes, birdwatch, brew beer, ferment wine, stargaze, or make mosaics or learn foreign languages or shoot guns or camp or do archery garden, bake, work on cars, write stories, model in clay, fly kites, develop screenplays, play sports, collect something, walk in the woods, write poetry, learn about astronomy, etc. — I think you get my point — then turn off the T.V., pick something, and begin now. If you’ve lost your child-like love of learning and sense of wonder, pray to regain it!

from fisheaters.com

This is why we do what we do.

Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants

Beautiful thought.

Blog surfin’ today led me to this, Abusrd Math, which Firstborn had a lot of fun with this afternoon.

One of evils there in the game is Level -3. I found them to be a bit profound:

Laws of Level -3
1. MATH CREATES ANARCHY
2. MATHEMATICS IS FORBIDDEN
3. NO ONE SHALL KNOW MATH
4. YOU ARE POWERLESS
5. WE CONTROL THE MATH
6. WE CONTROL YOU
7. QUESTION NOTHING
8. KEEP A CLOSED MIND
9. WORK DON’T THINK
10. NOT THINKING IS THE NORM
11. BE IN THE NORM
12. MINDLESS DOING BRINGS PEACE

Julie’s Bravewriter Lifestyle post was worth a read and then a re-read and then maybe a re-re-read today.