Paul learned about Pompeii when he read a Magic Tree House book about it. We extended the learning by making a baking soda/vinegar volcano with a friend, Kaleb.
Then Paul learned even more about Ancient Rome and Pompeii and he gave a report at Co-op.
In January, we moved my desk in to the office with Ryan’s. We also set up a desk for Paul. This was nice because we were all together. But now Caroline is too big for a bouncer. And let’s face it: when Ryan’s working from home, it would be nicer to have more space for everyone! Ryan wanted to go downstairs into the unfinished portion of the basement. I think he loves it so far because he can play his music and all that. Anyway, it seems to be working for us too.
Here’s the school room now.
Mom and Paul do school every morning, starting right after breakfast. First we read two paragraphs in the Gospel Principles manual on my nook and talk about the concepts. Paul loves this. I let him click on the scriptures and we follow footnotes and scripture trails until he gets tired. We do this for about 20-30 minutes most mornings.
Then we go upstairs and do a math page. Sometimes we do a page in Miquon math, which is a mix of conceptually taught math concepts. We learn the concepts behind the operations using manipulatives like C-rods. So far, he’s already been introduced to addition, subtraction, and multiplication. He likes it, but we break it up with Singapore Math, which seems a little easier (he’s at the beginning of the book instead of halfway through it!). We’ll do a little of each each week.
Then we do a few spelling words, where Paul uses a magnetic board and tiles (with the phonograms on them, not just letters) to spell a fw words. We usually do five words. Then, if we have time, Paul gives me a spelling lesson and I do the same with tiles.
Paul and I also are going to learn about American history this year. Last week, it was basic U.S. geographical features (We read about Paul Bunyan and labeled his “formations” on the map) and this week we learned about different Native American houses in different parts of the country. I plan on taking this very easy and just covering what he’s interested in each week, within reason. Next week it’s about the Vikings.
We read The Magic School Bus, we watch science and history videos on Discovery Education every now and then (Thanks, Grandma!), we watch Sid the Science Kid, and we follow Paul’s lead at to what he’s interested in learning (this week he wanted to read about the seasons). He has a lined journal I ask him to write something (anything) in each week, and I plan on having him copy one sentence in to a History journal about American history so he’ll have a record of everything we learned. (For example, this week’s sentence is “Many people lived in America before 1492.”) We’ll see how that goes.
Paul loves to learn. So far, with school being finished by 9 or 9:30 every morning, he’s enjoyed it. There was one day in the seven we’ve had so far when he had a melt-down at 4+4 and he tends to react strongly against practicing his handwriting, but in general I think this year will be an enjoyable time at home! He also has a co-op three Fridays a month (he loved the first day last week!), storytime one day a week, and maybe another group play day on Wednesdays too. We’ll see if that is too much.
Hooray for homeschooling!
Our library’s summer reading program has a theme of “Reading is So Delicious!” Going along with that, we had the chance to check out a carrot named Rooty to take with us on our adventures.
Last week, we took Rooty with us as we went on a “mammal hunt.” Paul has been learning about mammals (versus everything else) so our trip to the Barnyard Zoo and then our Trip to the EIEIO exhibit at the Discovery Center Museum was a fun time to talk practically about which animals were mammals and which were not. We visited the Discovery Center Museum on two different days.
Caroline had fun too. (This is our toy from home.)
Caroline is busy being adorable. Here are some pictures from April 21, 2012, the day before she was two months old.
One of these days I’ll get a good picture of her gorgeous smile. It’s so adorable! I treasure her little coo’s and goo’s!
Paul learned about his birth country, Australia, this month. Here’s the giant Australia cookie we made at the beginning of the project.
Beyond making a giant cookie, we didn’t do much other than reading lots of picture books about Australia. Are we There Yet? by Alison Lester was a child’s perspective of a month-long road trip around Australia. Paul enjoyed learning about the various landmarks and it was fun to show him the family picture in the Victorian mountains and a picture of himself with me by The Twelve Apostles when he was about six months old.
A number of books were about the animals of Australia. Koala Lou by Mem Fox, Wombat Stew by Marcia Vaughan, Snap! by Marcia Vaughan, Possum Magic by Mem Fox, and My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch by Graeme Base. I wanted to do more with the learning about animals, but Paul did not have much interest beyond reading the picture books. We did watch a brief documentary about the Great Barrier Reef and then we enjoyed watching Finding Nemo and making a Finding Nemo game based on the Great Barrier Reef facts he remembered. (He is already forgetting these facts, but it was fun making the game anyway! He will remember what a “predator” is at least.)
I also tried to give him a very basic introduction to Aborigines and culture, but it didn’t go over so well. We liked Big Rain Coming by Katrina Germein, which had Aborigine style artwork. We looked at the boomerangs we purchased when we lived in Australia and we talked about how the art of dots and lines created symbols. He didn’t much care, so we’ll have to return to that sometime! And we read a very silly folktale called Whale’s Canoe (by Joanna Troughton) which is supposedly based on a Dreamtime tradition.
And then he summarized all he learned in this video.
(Yes, Caroline is crying in the background. Ryan was holding her, so it wasn’t like I was just abandoning her. But my, it sounds pretty bad watching the video and hearing her crying!!)
It was fun! He wants to move on to Asia now, although I must admit, I’m not sure which direction to go in first as “Asia” is a huge continent!
Paul and I have not done much “school” since I posted at the beginning of February about our “school at home” progress. Obviously, this was due to the fact that I was in the uncomfortable last stages of pregnancy and then actually having a baby and taking care of a newborn.
Never the less, we have read through a book about the Earth from a fabulous Early Bird Early Learners series by Lerner Publications (this particular book). It’s written for slightly older kids, but by reading together, one chapter at a time, Paul and I enjoyed learning how the Earth’s crust moves, what volcanoes and earthquakes are, and what all of that means for us.
Since neither of us have been in the mood for worksheets lately, I was trying to think of a way to make remembering and reviewing these details fun. We weren’t interested in sitting in the school room, but Paul always wants to play board games with me!
Voila! We turned Earth’s Crust into a game!
I found a mostly blank game board online. Paul found pictures in the book that he liked and I found similar ones online as well as a few clip art images to illustrate the game board. Then we added squares to correlate with the images: each of these squares gives or takes away an earth “token.” So, landing on a volcanic eruption may cost you two tokens, and the squares before and after it are labeled “volcanic ash” and may cost you one token. A “sleeping volcano” gets you a token.
And then we made questions, Paul reading me sentences he liked from the book and me rewording them as a question or as a true/false sentence. When we land on a blank space on the board, we have to answer a question. Right answers get us more tokens. Whoever has the most tokens when we’re done playing the game wins!
Paul and I have played this every day for two weeks now. He loves it! For the first days, he’d have to read the book to find the answer; sometimes I had to help him by finding the page or picture that correlated to the question. But now he knows the answers without having to look for them. How many four-year-olds care about magma (the name of a new imaginary friend, apparently) and lava and the plates of the Earth’s crust, which are moving? It’s quite fun to see him get excited about these things.
Caroline is usually on my team. She usually sleeps through our turn. Sometimes Paul wants her to play by herself. She sleeps through that, too, and Paul takes her turn. He loves to include her, though.
All pictures on this post taken March 8, 2012. Caroline, age 2 weeks, 1 day old.
I’ve been pondering home schooling for about a year now, although Ryan mentioned it to me as a possibility long before that.
“Oh, no. I could never do that!” I argued. I’d be too tired, I don’t know enough, it would be stressful.
Then last summer Paul taught himself to read. He’s probably at a second grade level now, at least if the text is large. (If it’s small text or too much on a page, then he still “can’t” read it.) If it was only reading, I may have let it rest. But that was not all.
Using his fingers, he began to put together the rudiments of addition. And because he has an analog clock in his bedroom, he wanted to learn how to read it. He loves putting coins in his piggy bank, and I found myself explaining how each coin has a different value.
In the fall, he started requesting books on different scientific subjects, firstly the planets. From October through December, he wanted to read everything he could find about the planets.
In about November, he began expressing an interest in the human body, probably because my body has been changing with baby growing. He became fascinated by digestion (pee and poop!) and by the heart (I feel my heart beat! I’m alive!) and his bones, which he can feel through his skin.
Around the same time as these science topics began to fascinate him, he began asking about maps. We printed a map to the church, and he wanted to follow it as we drove; he has always been fascinated to watch the GPS cursor on the map in our car navigation system. We’ve learned about map legends, the four directions of the compass, map scales (this is still a bit confusing to him), and some other things.
Because of his fascination and because he seems so advanced in his interests, I thought I’d experiment a little bit with just how interested he is: what can I manage to do with him as a stay-at-home mom? Could I possibly homeschool him?
I bought a handwriting book about ABCs and Numbers. It has a “Kindergarten” label on the cover, so Paul, being the reader he is, decided he was doing “Kindergarten School at Home.” We decided to collect his worksheets in a binder, and thus began Paul’s homeschooling. Now that we moved my office into the same room as Ryan’s office, we also added a space for Paul to be his “work space” or school desk.
We’ve been through two phases of home school now. The first phase lasted about two months, and it was exhausting. Paul wanted to spend every afternoon doing all the different subjects: ABC worksheets, number worksheets, more advanced math concepts (money or time or something new), science, and maps. Every day he wanted some of everything. It was so much fun! He didn’t want to stop for dinner! Needless to say, this was exhausting. We literally spent three or four hours every afternoon doing more and more worksheets. I couldn’t keep up in finding or creating interesting age-appropriate worksheets.
We’ve moved in to a new stage now. I should clarify that before we began “school at home” and before Paul practiced writing on the ABC worksheets, he found writing itself “too hard.” We set up a desk space for him. The numbers and the ABCs in caps and lowercase are on the bulletin board for him to refer too. Now, he does not mind writing, and in fact likes to spend an hour a day writing his own games and worksheets and activities. Some of these are for me to do, others are just for fun for him. He loves it!
A skeleton worksheet Paul made me: I was to label the body parts/bones!
So the new stage is much more balanced between Mom’s worksheets every now and then and Paul’s imaginative writing and creating. We still do some more “formal” school at home.
He loves finding things on maps, and we have been learning how there are seven continents. This month we have particularly been focusing on Antarctica and penguins for science and geography. (The human body is still on his radar, but he’s a little tired of it at the moment. Every few days he has a question and we find pictures in a body book.) In mathematics, we started learning about adding one to a number, but it hasn’t clicked yet that he doesn’t have to start at the beginning (1, 2, 3,…) to add just one more. (He regularly figures out basic adding on his hands, though.) We’re still practicing patterns, and he often makes up his own, which I hear is good for early math skills. He loves to do mazes. We’re learning about “greater than” and “smaller than” maybe once a week, and we practice reading clocks on the hour and half half hour about as frequently. Sometimes we get out the pretend money and set up a store where things cost pennies, nickles, and dimes.
And I’m trying to introduce him to the concept of “history.”
Although he still is intensely interested in learning, we’ve mellowed out to about 30 minutes or 1 hour a day of “school at home” before he’s ready to do his own writing or learning projects.
That’s just perfect for a four year old. He has preschool twice a week still to keep him social. He has gymnastics and swimming lessons to keep him physical. And he’s hard at work at challenging himself to learn and practice in his own imaginary activities as my teacher.
In the state of Illinois, school is legally required for all children beginning at age 7. Home schooling parents are not required to submit grades to the state, but they need to have records of some kind to show children are learning according to the state standards.
Paul, then, has another two years and eight months before I’m required to officially home school him. At this point, this is my plan: for the next two years, I’ll follow his lead. We’ll (probably) do three-day-a-week preschool again next year. The following year, I’ll either send him to kindergarten for 2 hours a day or I’ll join a co-op where he’ll play with kids his age. (I’m leaning toward the co-op, as I imagine that half-day kindergarten with 2 or 2.5 hours a day will not provide much time for socialization.) When he turns seven, and when kids his age are in first grade, I’ll determine just what kind of “curriculum” he needs and we’ll implement it. I suspect he’ll be far above first grade Illinois state standards come that point, if his present interest in learning about the world continues. And if he does slow down, I suspect we’ll be able to get in to a slightly more formal school routine (especially with co-op friends to support us) without too much trouble.
At any rate, I’m really excited to see where “school at home” takes us in the next two years. There are so many possibilities!