The Rhythm of Our Days

W: I started with him today. He built with the MUS blocks, we went over site words. We took baby for a nature walk to get him to stop crying (it was one of those mornings….). W colored a map of Canada while I read several chapters of Paddle To the Sea to the kids, the book we’ve started many times but have yet to finish and want to so badly. They love it! He watched a few MUS lessons and headed outside to play Swiss Family Robinson.

Firstborn: read from The Once and Future King, Our Island Story, and This Country of Ours. Tootled around on the internet looking for more stuff on the gold rush. He’s getting very good at “surfing”, reminding me that computer skills are caught very, very quickly and it’s okay to put this off until late, even in our day and time of computerized-everything. He copied a poem in cursive, filled in a map of Canada during the Paddle reading….this was most impressive. The instructions were to just color it in; he went the next lap and took out the Atlas and labeled the whole thing. We went over the provinces of Canada for geography. He did another Latin lesson. Then we worked on math. He wants to do it all mentally, which he’s very good at, but we are working on “showing your work” for test ability. He needs more work on borrowing. He’s very good at pre-algebra “solve for x” kind of stuff. He headed outside to be Fritz in their game of Swiss Family Robinson, coming inside only for a piece of chocolate cake.

Sunshine: started the morning working on the piano. She is only doing it by ear but has learned to pick out some pretty melodies and chords. I’d love to be able to provide her with lessons now that we are about to be debt free!!! She wrote a song about a cell phone and made her own American Girl catalog. She did a map while I read Paddle, watched the MUS lessons with W. She is Bertie in Swiss Family Robinson and she served the boys their cake!

They all have tutoring this afternoon; emphasis on math.

Baking cookies.

Dancing with Strauss:

We had 5-6 inches of snow this weekend and stayed home the whole time because. All of us played in it for hours; we read and watched movies and had steaming cups of hot chocolate. Most significantly, Dad and Mom watched The Secret online and got a new inspiration.

Today I woke up ready to have a really productive day. I planned to get back to a full Monday with formal school stuff and really cross a bunch of stuff of my “list”. But watching the kids for a few minutes made me hold my tongue a moment and then a moment became the day.

Firstborn spent hours creating floor plans and diagrams of rooms and arrangements for future project ideas. He measured walls, mapped out details like doors and windows, and worked on scale.  He read The Once And Future King for a large chunk of the morning and then took it upon himself to “detail clean” the living room, including vacuuming in the cushions and dusting the electronics!

Sunshine made a series of drawings to go with some poems she’s been working on. She put on classical music and dressed up the baby and taught him to dance. She helped W with money and watched a documentary on skeleton systems (endo and exo) with him.

W cut out pictures for collages with me. He gathered eggs and tended the chickens. He worked on a puzzle and watched that documentary.

RK played with dominoes. He danced. He laughed. He played. He watched. He listened.

All of the above was self-directed.  A dictated day from Mom would have thwarted all of it. Sometimes it’s just good to let it be.

Monday we had sick children who wanted to lay around. Tuesday we felt better; made a visit and went to church. Today it was a snow day; the well ones spent most of the day out playing in it and the sick ones stayed in and watched old home movies like Mom and Dad’s wedding and a few old birthday parties. They also watched Babe and Father of the Bride. I was one of the “feeling not so hot” ones so I worked on laundry and baked cookies with the little ones.

The beauty of rhythmic homeschooling: flexibility.

We’ve got a study in contrasts going on: the winter doldrums and a busy schedule. Sickness and icky stomachs/noses abound. School has accomodated.

We’ve made Valentines and today we’ll bake cookies to go with them. They watched a documentary last week on the Hope Diamond. There’s lots of geography and president talk going on, with our new batch of Painless Learning Placemats that came in last week. The cats are in heat and Toms have come a’callin’ leading to many discussions on, let’s call it, “health and biology”. The two olders have their gmail accounts up and running and are composing an email about once a day.

RK has a speech eval. this afternoon. His latest “word” is “Ali”, which means “water”. We’re bird watching and taking a walk nearly every day. Sunshine and W have been writing menus and signs for the play kitchen we have set up in the real kitchen; they have a restaurant they call “Robert’s Kitchen”. Tomorrow we’ll get back to visiting and Akathist.

Tutoring continues twice a week. I borrowed the teacher’s guides for Singapore Math and will hopefully purchase the work books in a week or so. At this rate, we’ll likely have a relaxed pace for the next two weeks and a more intensive one by the end of the month.

But what better way to start a cold school day than with a watching of Pride and Prejudice?!?!? Sunshine had a great idea! They watched one tape of it and then moved onto What Dreams May Come. This is one of my very favorite benefits of homeschooling. They slept in, ate breakfast, cuddled with a movie, came into the kitchen and watercolored, and segued into “learning” at a comfortable pace. It had a very organic feel to it today; much better than rising before the sun to get on a school bus, take a ride around the county picking up kids under rested and under nourished, to sit in a bland room that may or may not engage one’s mind.

Firstborn: More King Arthur stuff in Our Island Story. This Country of Ours led us into the Gold Rush and we’ll take the rest of the week away from presidential progression and focus a bit on this time. We watched two short internet movies on Independence Rock in Wyoming, spent some time with a time line of events, studied some shipping routes and discussed the pro’s and cons of taking the Panama route over the Cape Horn route.

For more cartography work we finished up the different projections and he gathered definitions for circumference, parallel, latitude, longitude, and meridian. Some of these he knew but it was review and more dictionary practice.

It’s been fun going over this with him! I didn’t know much about projections before reading this material together and it’s interesting to see the effects different models can have on how we perceive size. For instance, most of the maps I’ve looked at of North America show Alaska as huge and much, much bigger than Mexico. According to the atlas we are studying with though, Mexico is actually larger than Alaska; it’s due to the use of the Mercator Projection that has more accuracy in the center and less on the edges that leads to the amount of distortion that would indicated otherwise. I hadn’t realized before how manipulative (and manipulatable) maps can be.

He got up and ran from the table after looking up “latitude”: “I’m free from narrow limits Mom! I’ve got latitude!!” Ah…the importance of reading ALL the definitions of a word LOL!

Reading update: as part of our new computer system, he has been reading quite a bit. He finished Captain’s Courageous last week and also The Sword and the Tree. He’s in the midst of Treasure Island and Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire. That he has a reading list still amazes me. Older mothers told me he’d be fine. They said “late to read” just means he’ll pick it up fast when gets it. They said, “better late than early”. Still, it was hard waiting. I’m glad we’re there now!

For science, he read about vision, we used some websites for a labeled description of the human eye and a glossary of terms. He drew and labeled an eye. He wrapped up with a book report of The Sword In the Tree; I was planning to move onto math but at this point in the day he had an ongoing attitude and I chose instead to move onto Sunshine and W and let Firstborn take his attitude elsewhere.

Sunshine: She finished Explode the Code book 6; worked on cursive review of the lessons done so far. She’s fond of the letter “r”; says they are fun to do ;-). She working on linking verbs with dad and wrote them out several times today on her own. She copied a poem called “Cat Kisses” by Bobbi Katz. In tutoring, her teacher is going to be focusing on math so I let that be it for the day.
W: he played with magnets most of the morning, magnetizing spoons and nails and anything else metal he could find. We went over his site words and more 3 letter words; he worked with cuisinaire rods for a bit. He practiced the letters in name. I should have taken the time to read to him a bit from The Boxcar Children but needed to use the rest of RK’s nap for a few minutes to catch my “breath”. Maybe for bedtime.

R.K: sick with a cold. Loves playing with the toy kitchen we brought inside. Mostly he played blocks and trains with a subdued pace, due to not feeling good. He got a new book in the mail today that I plan to read to him while the older ones are at tutoring called, “Tomie’s Little Book of Poems” by Tomie de Paola.

Wednesday’s school never quite got a good momentum. We managed history, poetry and copy work and some ‘Key to’ fraction work. He (firstborn) started Captain’s Courageous and he’s still reading The Goblet of Fire. He wants to wait on Treasure Island until he finishes CC because he likes that one better.

Sunshine is reading My Father’s Dragon and a Magic Treehouse book. She’s working on cursive and quite annoyed with the letter “f”.

I’ve gotten time to work with W and his phonics. Hopefully during naptime I can get some Boxcar Children in with him again. It snowed this morning; they had more time outside first thing. I think the rest of the day will be ice and sleet.

RK’s hearing test went wonderfully and I’m still waiting to hear on two appointments.

In other news, as I mumbled at my too-small washer and my too-old dryer; as I despaired over the construction problem we have in building separate bedrooms for the kids, feeling like we are at the end of the “everyone in one room temporary period” whether the house can sustain the kind of weight new walls would add or not, I realized I’m feeling quite a bit of January-cabin fever. Outings are canceled due to weather and I really needed the time out. I go back and forth between wanting to whine about this and feeling self-loathing for wanting to whine….Such a lot of drama for what should be an “easy” fix: a cup of coffee away from these four walls, with or without other people, but what is currently unattainable. Nothing for it but a quote from Pooh: “oh bother”.

Friday they went to a live performance of Sleeping Beauty at the OakRidge Children’s Playhouse. We also had lunch with friends and then got ice cream from Vladick at The Ice Cream Lab.

We got a light dusting of snow last night that remained this morning. It wasn’t much but it was “just enough” to lure the kids outside, after plates of warm buttermilk waffles, heavily padded with snow gear.

Firstborn: read This Country of Ours, about John Tyler taking over after Harrison’s short term. Rewrote a list of the presidents so far that we’ve gone over.

We used a neat resource Smallworld posted about for Grammar. Will be using this one and others like it often I think! We read a lesson on OWL (Perdue) on articles and he did an exercise on choosing “a” or “an”, he got half of them right. Next we did a Daily Grammar lesson on verbs. Easy stuff that is good review.

Our Island Story was about King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.

He finished Crispin this weekend (2nd book in a month and yes, that’s a record for books of this length!) and today wrote a short book report/narration on it.

Crispin, Cross of Lead, by Avi:

“This book was about a boy trying to gain freedom. My favorite thing was when Crispin rescues Bear. Something dangerous was rescuing Bear. At the end of this book Crispin is given his freedom. I like this book because of it’s danger, it’s excitement, and it’s wonder.”

Well, I’d like to know more myself but it sounds like he got the succint gist!

For geography we read about 3 other projection models and went over the countries of the world again. He read a story about a Mother Partridge in Wild Animals I Have Known and did a watercolor of a partridge.

He began Treasure Island and is also reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Treasure Island he is reading aloud to me.

We started a “Key to” on fractions, doing about 8 pages. He wrapped up with Lesson 12 in his latin book.

Sunshine: did lesson 13 in ETC 6. Almost done with that book! Worked on cursive letter “l” and various words using it.

She read the poem, “There Were Two Ghostesses”, copied it and did a picture narration.

She has zero interest right now in the history readings I was doing with her so I’m skipping them. Today we began Paddle-to-the-Sea. We read chapter one and she colored a map of the Canadian border/Great Lakes area.

We also are stopping The Princess Academy. It’s too hard to go at any decent speed. Switching instead to something else, yet to be decided.

W: free agent today unfortunately. This was definitely a day when there wasn’t enough of me to go around for much individual time.

RK: the coordinator came today to start the process for his speech and development evaluations. So nice that for this and the actual testing they come to the house! She felt sure he’ll qualify based on delay in the event that there is no MDown’s diagnosis, which would mean an automatic qualifying.

That’s the end of school though; a dinner guest is coming tonight with Dad so the rest of the afternoon will go to prep for that.

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.