A Brief and Incomplete Update

El started his new math book, and with that we began keeping a somewhat "interactive" math notebook. He will use this throughout fourth grade.

Em lost another tooth so she is sporting a whole new smile, of which she is very proud:

We discovered that our 15 year old Betty Crocker Essential Cookbook is good for more than just sauce recipes:

Three Cheese Pesto Pita Pizzas, before...

and after.

Yesterday was our last day of school for two weeks. This will be our longest break since Christmas. I am forcing myself to take time off and focus on the house. In fact, I should be cleaning right now so that's where I'm off to. Happy Memorial Day weekend!

Summertime Thoughts

When we made the decision to begin homeschooling, one of the things I was looking forward to was schooling year-round to avoid playing giant catch-up in the fall. Having finished 157 days, we are on target to hit our goal of 180 somewhere in July (assuming a 2 week June break followed by three-day weeks) which is perfect.

There are a couple things I didn't count on, though: 1.) We plowed through nearly everything already. We've been taking it slow in every subject all month, just to draw out what we have left (which has actually been quite nice); 2.)  Given the choice, El would rather do school than just about anything else. I actually told him about his upcoming 2 week break followed by 3-day weeks and he stared at me blankly and said... "Why?!" I told him, "You know, so that you can enjoy the summer." He just said, "Okay," and smiled, "It's just that I really like school." What? Apparently we have done too much of this

Nutty Stuffed Mushrooms- recipe here

and this

Planning his own country, inspired by this book

and this

and not enough cursive. :-p

Really, though, we accomplished a huge amount this third grade year, but the most important thing is that El is excited about learning again (something he had started to lose during his second grade year.) He still hates writing, but I'm not pushing it right now. He has made awesome progress in math, Latin, grammar, reading comprehension, and retention. History is his favorite subject on the history days (thank you Story of the World.) Science is his favorite subject on science days, art & architecture on Fridays, cooking on Tuesdays... There's always a new "favorite." I love to see him so excited about everything we do.

So, what are our summer goals, as far as school goes?

Em:
Math Work through Singapore 1A Intensive Practice. She has completed the regular 1A workbook/textbook but it was a bit of a fight to get through it. I want her to feel really confident about the material in 1A, and I also just want her to do a little math here and there so she doesn't have to go over a lot in the fall. We didn't get much afterschooling done this year, and she will be going into 1B in the fall instead of 2A. I'm not worried about starting out a little behind. She'll get there when she gets there.

Other than that, she's not doing anything she doesn't want to do. She completed her full year at public school and worked very hard. Summer is "deschooling" time for her. Play away, Emmabean!

El:  
Latin Keep pushing through our current program at El's desired pace. I think we have about 30 more lessons, so we will probably be on the same book until the fall, which is preferable since I love it (and also because I haven't yet purchased the new program.)

Math Work on 3B. I'm learning that the Singapore "B" books contain the year's easy, awesome, hands-on stuff, so I'm glad to be on 3B during the summer rather than 3 or 4A.

History Finish up Story of the World: Ancients. I think we only have 4 more chapters, so this will be happening very soon.

Geography Continue with North American waters and the Holling C. Holling books. We have LOVED Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea and Great Lakes study, so I was really excited to see that our library also carried his other books.

Grammar Finish up FLL. I think we have 10 lessons left so this will also be happening very soon. We start Junior Analytical Grammar in the fall, which is pretty intense and short so I'm in no hurry to start this early. Once FLL is done, we will take a couple of months off from formal grammar.

Reading Like I really need to set goals here. If anything, I should be setting limits!

Writing and drawing throughout the week. Nothing formal or new begins until the fall.

Other stuff as requested by kids.

That's pretty much it. It's going to be a light summer, as far as school goes. Now, if only I could find a decent non-toxic bug spray we could do all of our schooling outside by the river!

How I found the Great Books

I love good music. When I was 12, one of my favorite tapes was Les Miserables. I hadn't seen the play or read the book, but I had the 2-cassette audio set of the Broadway show and I listed to it over and over again. At some point, I discovered that the musical was based on a book. And since I couldn't see the musical (yet!), I just had to read the book.

And that is how, at 12 or 13, I discovered French literature. I probably would not have come across it in school or anywhere else. Les Mis lead to Leroux's Phantom of the Opera (also a book! Who knew?) Phantom lead to Camus, La Fontaine, Nin, etc. I never really had anyone to discuss these readings with (though I'm sure I tried!) To my knowledge I never managed to convince my friends to read these amazing (and often scandalous and sometimes totally inappropriate) stories.

High school happened, though I'm not sure I actually learned anything in the typical classroom setting. I did, however, have one totally non-traditional class. My Honors English/Humanities class consisted of one pupil: Me. It was a small school, and only a handful of us qualified for Honors classes. I was the only one who chose Honors English, so I was stuck in the back of a Senior Humanities class by myself and given independent projects. My teacher knew what I was capable of so these were not easy projects.

She demanded more and more of me to the point where I couldn't stand her at all. We fought often and I'm sure I was awful. Looking back, I realize she was probably the best teacher in that school. Sure, she wasn't my favorite at the time, but no one else consistently put challenging work in my hands and then was thoroughly disappointed in me if I didn't pull it off. I was terribly defiant: I listened to no one. I learned from books, so books she gave me... for years.  I was given a book or stack of books, a list of expectations, and left alone (until semester review time came.) Still, I guarantee I learned more in those 5 hours a week than in the rest of the time I was in that building.

When the time came to search for colleges, I fell head over heels in love with Shimer College. It was exactly what I had wanted all along: Read books, then discuss. Period. I visited the campus (this was the old Waukegan campus of the 90's, not the urban Chicago campus of today) and it was a perfect fit for me. Shimer is one of the two main "Great Books" schools, along with St. Johns. There are no lectures, and the classes are based around the "Great Books" & "Great Discussion" and inspired by the work of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in the 1950s.

I applied and was accepted. I was offered a decent financial aid package, but it still didn't work out for me. Life changed a lot between 17 and 18. In the end, I decided to go elsewhere. However, how I viewed education was forever changed. I approached learning differently. I read the books recommended at the end of the college history texts. I read the books mentioned by my freshman biology professor. I took charge of my own education. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But I knew that "lecture-test-forget" had not worked for me.

I want my kids to have the opportunity to have a Great Books education. If it doesn't work, if they don't love it, if they aren't thriving within it as I hoped them to, we will try something else. But it was Shimer and the Great Books that led me to thinking about alternate ways of educating/self-educating which, several years later, led me to Mortimer Adler, Dorothy Sayers's The Lost Tools of Learning, Classical home education, and the many wonderful ways to create a literature based education. This may not be the path on which we complete the journey. However, it was the path which gave us the courage and inspiration to begin.

Other links to helpful sites:
Where We Came From, Where We're Going by Andrew Kern (a good primer on classical education, this piece also discusses the newer "classical Christian education movement." However, it is an informative read for anyone interested in classical education, regardless of religion.)
The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers
For gifted and highly motivated high school students: Shimer College Early Entrant Program
For self-education: The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer and Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book

Parts of Speech board

Oh, Wii. I love you, but your remotes always need batteries. Always!

I could not find any batteries a few days ago so I decided to kinda/sorta clean out the junk drawer in hopes of finding some lost batteries. As usual, this task ended up just being a treasure hunt for the kids. One of the more popular treasures I found was a plastic bag full of poetry word magnets from before the kids were born.

The kids were enjoying making sentences like, "Her elaborate spider makes fancy pie," and I saw in this an educational opportunity for the upcoming week. I divided a dry erase board up into the 8 parts of speech (conjunction, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, noun, verb, interjection) with a corner blocked off for "spies." Spies change names (parts of speech) depending on their environment (use in a sentence.) Tricky ones, those spies.

The next day, I had El grab a word out of the bag and place it where it belonged on the board. If it was a spy, he was supposed to use it at least 2 different ways and tell me what part of speech it was as used in those different ways. It was awesome and fun for about 5 minutes. Then it was complicated and confusing. Apparently the fantastic combo of Mad Libs, FLL3, and Grammarland do not a grammar master make.

Today, I picked 10 words out of the bag that could only go into one of the 8 parts of speech section and a few more that were "spies." I kept these 2 groups divided and told him which group was composed of spies and which group was composed of words that would only fit into one part of speech. This made it a lot easier since he wasn't holding up every word and saying, "is this a spy?" Again, he had to use spies in at least 2 sentences and tell me what part of speech the spy took on in each sentence. How much of this was he able to do on his own? Probably 75%. I definitely think it was a good learning experience.

Overall, the project was a success once we simplified on the second day. I wouldn't use this with Em because she has not yet learned the parts of speech well enough to not be confused by my spy section (and the little section I made for articles within the adjective sections.) However, for a third or fourth grader this was a pretty fun and helpful.

(And we still had to go to CVS for more AA batteries. Of course, the extras were then thrown haphazardly into the junk drawer.)

Update

I have been a bad blogger lately. I haven't been doing weekly updates or even weekly blogs. I have (mostly) kept up on adding to the reading list on the What We're Reading tab, but that's about all I've done. Hopefully I can get back into it eventually.

• First of all, Em decided that (despite having never been taught cursive) she will now write everything in cursive. I didn't quite know what to do with this information. This is a total 180 from El, who moans and groans if I require something to be written in cursive.

Em's new cursive-esque writing

She doesn't want to do any worksheets or practicing, though, and I don't want to make her do them. Remember, she is only 6 and won't be technically homeschooled until this fall (she's my public school kid for another few weeks.) We finally found a way that she would watch and practice without it feeling like "work." The answer was a pan filled with rice. I can show her how the curve traces back over itself easier than I could on a dry erase board. I just left the pan by the kitchen and she practices letters while I cook dinner.

• We finished two read-alouds last week: Book 3 in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series and book 3 in Jeanne Birdsall's Penderwicks series. The kids listened to the first 2 Penderwicks books on CD and I didn't listen with them. The third book was just released last year, though, so it wasn't available as an audiobook yet. I read this one aloud, and I must say: Wow. I was very impressed. We will be re-reading these books in a year or two when the next one is released. These are well-written, funny, heartwarming books that were an absolute joy to read out loud. It is probably written more for girls, but both of my kids loved the series. 

El's drawing of a carpenter ant, from Draw 50 Creepy Crawlies

Ulmus Glabra, watercolor by El

• Today El studied plate tectonics. We began by reading The Island that Moved, which was a nice introduction to the subject. He then watched a free brainpop video on plate tectonics, which was nice & fun, and a bozemanscience video on the subject, which was very helpful as always. He finished up by drawing and labeling 3 types of plate boundaries (convergent, divergent, and tranform) and finding examples of these on the globe. Our Kingfisher and Usborne science encyclopedias didn't have quite what we were looking for on the topic, but the USGS had a very informative page with diagrams.

El's Lego representation of Magellan's fleet at the beginning of his circumnavigation journey

• El wants to recommend two educational games this week: Questionaut and the iPad app Stack the States. 

• We will probably finish Singapore 3A in a couple of weeks. Now that El has conquered long division, it has been smooth sailing through math lately. The exception is the word problems in the Singapore "Challenging Word Problems" book. Wow. Some of those are really hard, but I guess a challenge a day keeps the restlessness away, right? :) Hopefully we can push through 3B this summer and be on grade level next year in fourth grade.

• We have finished 75 of our 89 grammar lessons and I still haven't decided whether or not to continue with the next level of First Language Lessons. It's awesome, it's easy, it gets done... but it is so auditory that it doesn't stick. A very generous homeschooler gave me a set of Junior Analytical Grammar (teacher's manual & workbook) that had been partially used and totally erased. Hopefully that will cover grammar for next year and hopefully that grammar will stick. I honestly don't foresee FLL 4 happening next year.

That's a bit of a wrap-up, eh? I'll try to post more later this week.

Visual-Spatial Learners

While I don't think I would say that El can't learn in other ways, I can easily say that he learns best by seeing. I can tell him something or he can write it down, but half of the time he has no idea what I said or even what he wrote. Give him the book, though, and he's got it. Luckily, I'm not that great at explaining things verbally anyway. ;)

What this means to us during school is that things must be shown whenever possible. He uses "Rainbow Words" to practice difficult spelling words...

And handmade color-coded value discs to learn tricky new math concepts.

Of course this means that art is always a favorite subject...

...as is nature studies.

Welcome Spring

Here's a recipe for disaster*

8 oz. water

1 tsp. dish soap (Ours was pink.)

1 tsp. vinegar

Glitter, if you have it (We didn't.)

*(I don't know. "Tornado in a Cup" just didn't sound quite as thrilling.)

Mix it together quickly, pull out the spoon and you have a mini-tornado in a glass. Enjoy!

We have had beautiful weather during these past two weeks, but Em was down with a bit of stomach bug last week and El has been working at about half-speed due to a combination of allergies, Dimetapp and a cold. Not a great time to start long division, but we did it anyway. Once again, I am extremely thankful for Maria Miller's math teaching videos. Here's a link to her How to Teach Long Division post with video.

We are enjoying reading Grammar-Land as a supplement to FLL, and El is completing these helpful worksheets (by Jessica Cain) as we go through that book. Everything else is business as usual around here (except that we are outside as often as we can be!)

Kids Disc Golfing