Outdoor homeschooling and a surprise

Okay, let me start this post by saying that Ny checked out this book from the library a few days ago.  Black Beauty's Family i's 574 pages long!!! (Six books in one).  You go girl.  Have fun, and take it easy.

Today for American HIstory, we went outside to make our gold nuggets.  (Tomorrow we're going to finish up our lesson by panning for gold like the 49'ers).  First step was to fill out a worksheet on the westward expansion on the U.S. purchase of Mexico.

The girls gathered some rocks to be used for our "gold"

They wash the rocks and clean them up, then paint them gold:

We came back in for a little tot school- puzzles and shapes:

Then my dad called and announced that he had surprised us with:

The girls LOVE their bird house!

Building cabins for history

Overall, it's been a fun week.  Last week NyGirl attended her monthly Science lab offered by her homeschool "cover school", and if I remember correctly I posted pics of those also.

Today she'll be attending her Geography lab, and I'll post updates on that.

In History we've been studying the expansion westard (arly 1800's).  Because NyGirl is such a "do-it-in-order" kind of girl, she's been attempting to find all the Dear America book series from the 1800's before we move on to 1900's...which won't be for a while, I keep reassuring her.

Anyhow, I really enjoy our BJU materials, and we finally got a timeline for our wall so she can follow along with dates. 

The projects have been loads of fun too.  We didn't get around to making a covered wagon, but here is the beginnings of the cabin she built (without the roof):

Toddlers growing up, and a bit of American history

It is becoming SO much easier to accomplish school tasks around and other things around the house now that BabyZ is finally growing up.

It's bitter sweet-- she is no longer small enough for me to zip her around in my sling, but also no longer crying all day long, can communicate (she talks up a storm!), and is now interested in her own little things - like drawing with crayons and markers.

So-- *sigh* (of both a bit of sadness for seeing most of babyhood beginning to disappear and also of relief as I embrace this new stage!)...it is liberating.

Although I cannot make any claims to our home school being toddler-interruption-free (is there any such thing?), I can definitely say we've come a long way.

Sitting at our kitchen table sometimes for school now-- WOW.  That is all I can say.  We couldn't do this for nearly two years.  Any kind of resemblance of formal schooling (chalk/marker boards, sitting at tables), all went out the window shortly after BabyZ was born.  Now, we are finally able to find ourselves doing these things...these small, simple things...and we are amazed.  Funny how you miss the simple things of life when they are difficult to access for a while.  When you are finally able to do them again, it almost becomes fun in a strange kind of way.

We still don't prefer all the formalities so often, (I'd much rather the kids get out and learn), but we do like a healthy balance of seatwork and outside activity.  So we did all of our "seatwork" early this morning and had a blast learning about Congress.

Yeah...Congress. And the House of Representatives, and Senate, and the three branches of government (things I haven't studies since high school!) I really like the way our curriculum brings it out:

We are only on lesson 3, but so far enjoying it.  I will have to sit down soon and write up a curriculum review for it, after a few more lessons.

Here is an example of a letter writing activity where the lesson suggested that my daughter pretend she were one of the delegates at the meeting (Articles of Confederation), and write a letter to his 4 year old daughter describing what happened at the meeting.


Considering we were having a hard time with creative writing up until now, I would say these types of writing exercises have been helping her.  We went from a typical two sentence answer to a whole page!  Whoo-hoo!!  I like that the curriculum has a writing exercise like this for most of the lessons I have seen so far.  I have to double check to be sure they are included all the way through.

So, in Lesson 3, we also photocopied the song "America The Beautiful".

Nice.

Slideshow of our American Girls lapbooking

Last week NyGirl and I worked diligently at beginning a lapbook for American Girls, the Kaya series.

To be truthful, I haven't been much of a project-oriented, lapbooking kind of homeschool mama.  I have been in LOVE with workbooks and notebooking since Day 1, and we used the classical approach last year.  I totally dug the Well Trained Mind books and forums.  Perhaps it's because I'm attracted to that method of learning, because I learned best that way.  But I've quickly discovered that my children learn in ways that I haven't been adept at teaching...

Which served as a nice wake up call.

I can't say I have since ditched workbooks, because I haven't.  I still use them regularly for math (a combo of Saxon and AO Lifepacs) and Language Arts.  But I am using more hands-on methods to teach now so my kids can pick up and feel objects (our math programs always had great manipulatives, but adding more projects to other subjects like history help my daughter cement the lessons in her mind).

I really like what Mary Pride talks about in her book, when she says to "cut the twaddle". A lot of what we parent teachers/teachers in general do is simply assign busy-work. When I had an infant/ young toddler these past 2 years, I had to learn to readjust my teaching methods for my then 1st grader to meet her needs and still be able to stay sane!  That meant (for me) assigning lots more coloring and workbook pages than I would normally have liked.  And that was okay for then.

I guess I'd like to experience doing more projects with NyGirl this year.  She is a hands-on kind of girl, but is also a great auditory and visual learner too, so I really have a lot of choice I think with presentation.

It's not that I need to "make learning fun" for her.  She already enjoys learning.  But for my kids, I want them to appreciate the journey of exploring ideas, and coming to valid conclusions, with limited help.  Maybe this is more of a Montessori method...I'm not even sure what to call it.  And one thing I know will help aid in this process is all of the online helps and technology available to us today.

So...NyGirl really enjoyed putting together her American Girl lapbook pieces...and we'll have to do more of this I see.

I also enjoyed creating this slideshow using Slide.com.  Lots of fun!!!!

History and math fun

Last week we did a brief history/geography lesson on the Makings of America. Here's NyGirl (age 5) with the globe as she learns to locate the United States on a globe and atlas:



We learned about the American flag and its significance (our freedom from Great Britain and the waving of the flag on the battleground). We also discussed our National Anthem and sung it a bit (and played it on the piano) as part of our music.

The weekend passed by rather quickly and I'm getting ready for the next telechat series at another of my websites-Christian Ladies Connect, so I've spent some time preparing for that. Meanwhile, I've been kind of harried about Nyomi's science lessons for the month.

I've got some objectives in place for her this year for science and I want to cover a segment of these before the end of September-- so I'm doing some spur of the moment search for cool projects to integrate into our objectives and we'll be set. Math-U-See program is EXCELLENT!  We've gone through 12 lessons (although they're set to be paced one lesson per week and we've only been in school for 3 weeks) but she loves the program and I do too. Which says ALOT for this particular program since I'm sooo picky. Currently she's on the concepts of adding numbers together using manipulatives and I'm seeing where she's able to recognize a set of 3 1's within the a "6" block. She will split the block mentally in half and say "I see 3 units on this side and 3 units on the other side, so this is a 6 block". Then we take the 6 block and, say, another 3 block and "smoosh" them together to make "6 + 3 = 9" or "6 + 3 is the same length as 9". The program is quite comprehensive I think...with the exception of money (which we'll work on with time- recognizing pennies, dimes, nickles, and quarters and assigning value to them). I've been meaning to find a good pretend cash register for those upcoming lessons/games.

Well I guess that's all for now... We'll need to do a new podcast episode soon.