September Homeschool Recap

Not quite the end of September, but close enough to offer a summary. The weather here has been uncharacteristically divine. We have been camping and hiking a lot and M finally got back into running after a 6-ish week break due to surgery on his shattered wrist. As for homeschool, we are on track to finish our novel, Bronze and Sunflower, and covered most of the language arts material from the Arrow Guide. We pretty much just read through them and talk about it. The ex-teacher in me wants to come up with lesson hooks and practice exercises...surely they can't learn if you just have a conversation about it (!?)...and yet, they do seem to learn just fine that way. 

Kids are making great progress in Khan Academy...it's way smoother than last year. Everyone can log in on their own and they have finally been convinced that watching the videos before trying the exercises makes it a lot less painful, and dare I say even faster. It helps that Khan awards points just for watching a video and they are highly motivated by the points, even though it leads to nothing other than being able to change your avatar. I find myself doing a lot more clarifying, rather than full on teaching. This is a free program, but I like it so much I sent a donation. 

For science, we've been studying physical matter and changes of state and are starting to get into the periodic table of the elements. We read through a Core Knowledge unit on this topic. It's a grade 5 unit, but the younger kids have no problem following the content. I will give Laurel the chapter test so we have some kind of written work for the portfolio. 

For physical activity, we just added a slack line to our collection of random outdoor equipment (basically just a wide piece of strap you connect between two trees as a tight rope). It's a lot of fun and keeps Marko especially engaged. 

They have been scavenging leaves and nuts and seeds and pods to make crafts and we did some fall garlands with wax resist watercolor leaf rubbings that turned out quite lovely. They found a whole bunch of black walnuts that they will attempt to process and eat. Once October officially arrives, we'll start decorating our house and making Halloween costumes. 

History is unfolding in front of us, so we are doing a lot of constitutional rereading and looking at election law and times in history when voting has been suppressed. Laurel and I talk a lot about state vs. federal rights and responsibilities. 

We are continuing to work on our personal timelines and found a website called TimeToast where you can plug your text and pictures into and it will generate a timeline. It's very cool to see them add things from way in the past and see how their lives are just minuscule blips on the timeline of human history. Then if they delete those and just add a bunch of things that happened in the last year or two, it changes their perspective entirely. This project has definitely turned out to be more about process than final product, although I do hope to have something cool to show for it eventually. We were supposed to wrap this up by the end of this month, but I don't think we'll be done with it for another few weeks.

Our biggest challenge this month is interrupting each other. It's a constant puppy-dog pile of energy swirling around me. Max is the worst offender. I realized the other day that he is almost 5 years old, and while he can is doing some pretty advanced reading and math, he still cannot put on his socks and shoes by himself. He refuses to participate in most chores and spends a lot of time laying down on the floor in protest, or climbing into my lap when I'm with one of the other kids. Last year I started listening to Dr. Ross Greene's podcasts about behaviorally challenging kids and this phrase stuck with me..."Kids do well if they can." He assumes that behavior challenges come from kids not having requisite skills for handling different situations. I have found that to be a very helpful approach. So instead of focusing on not interrupting, I'm working at teaching independence at each of the things they interrupt me for.  

For October: 

Read The Boy Who Saved Baseball

Make Halloween costumes and fall decorations

Incorporate more music (playing, learning)

Bike rides and camping

Conduct a required fire drill and let the kids practice climbing out our bedroom window onto the porch roof.

Continue election study and actually vote, if my ballot comes

Finish-What-You-Start Month - digging out all the old Highlights puzzles and craft kits from the dusty corners of the house and actually finishing them or tossing them out, also applies to miscellaneous home improvement projects

Untangling History

We don't use a history curriculum. There's so much history they leave out! I don't think I can possibly teach my kids everything, but I hope not to overlook whole continents or entire cultures of people, which is definitely a problem in most of the options I've seen. Our problem is that we skip around a lot. Marko is really interested in ancient myths and legends and Laurel likes 18th and 19th century American history, so they tend to read a lot of books featuring those periods. M and I are really interested in the Americas before European contact. We also study the history and geography of settings in our language arts materials. Right now it's Bronze and Sunflower, which takes place in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. A lot of our history content just comes up in the course of us reading what we think is interesting, or from books that people send us. My aunt just sent us a book called The Girl Who Drew Butterflies and this provided some really useful insights into how some people in the 17th century viewed science. 

So, we don't lack content. But "history" does come up in some pretty random and unplanned ways.

My solution to all the jumping around is to keep a globe and a timeline on hand at all times to put things in perspective. We start with our location and then look on the globe to see where the history is happening. Then we look in the timeline book to see what was happening around the world at the same time. We have this Usborne Timeslines of World History book, which does an adequate job of showing what was happening on all the different continents at the same time. Our first writing project of the year is creating a personal timeline of important events and things that led to our existence, to reinforce that history is something you are a part of, influenced by, and can change. And that our interpretation of events is often very different in hindsight than it is when we are in it. (Ahem, 2020. Can't wait to see what we say about you.)

How do I grade history? We don't use grades at all in our homeschool. I record our reading materials, videos, and topics covered on our homeschooling log after we do them and periodically I have the kids write an essay about a topic that is particularly compelling to them and then I save it for their portfolio. I use the What Your Fifth/Second Grader Needs to Know books to get ideas for civilizations and topics that we haven't encountered yet. 

August Homeschool Recap

In spite of a very disruptive few weeks, we were able to get the school year off to a good start. In good news, Laurel found a kitten in our neighbor's garage. This poor thing was crying for days and Laurel finally coaxed her out and gave her some food. She was covered in fleas and only 3 pounds. We combed out all the fleas and took her to the vet to see if she had a chip. Our librarian gathered up all the books on kitten care that she could fine. We could not find an owner, so....we have a cat now. We named her Shadow and she's a very frisky and social 5ish month old kitten now. In less good news, M broke his arm and had to have surgery to repair it. The first few weeks of recovery were kind of rough, as it was his right arm and he basically could not use it at all. He had a lot of appointments at the hospital and could not drive, which in pandemic times involved some childcare gymnastics. Luckily, he did not have any complications and it's healing up really well. 

So how did we manage to start school despite all of this? First we started the year off with a celebratory breakfast on our porch with our neighbor Marlene. We drafted a schedule to give each kid 1:1 time with me on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mondays and Fridays are reserved for outings, which at this point is just visiting relatives or friends, or going to a local park to play or hike. We also do group lessons at 3pm every day. Sometimes this also includes our neighbors. They joined us for a science observation activity. 

Laurel started a fifth grade science unit I downloaded from the Core Knowledge Foundation about matter. She designed a little science experiment with cotton balls that didn't work out how she thought it would, but was a good exercise nonetheless. Everybody started working through Khan Academy for math. Laurel and I are also working through a history course on Khan Academy. This month we learned about primary and secondary sources, and analyzing  context and bias. We listened to Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural speech, and then watched some of Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's speeches from the party conventions that happened in August. We finished listening to the book Wild Robot Escapes by Peter Brown, which is a sequel to Wild Robot. I highly recommend this book, it is a beautifully told story and raises many interesting questions about artificial intelligence and what makes something alive. We used the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer for discussion questions and copywork. Music ended up being mostly about synthesizers and recording layers of sound on Garage Band. We read a variety of articles on civilizations in South and Central America and watched a documentary on Machu Picchu. We learned a little about Hinduism and ordered a version of the Ramayana. We talked about how religion can influence a society and your life, even if you personally don't practice that religion. Laurel took a class on Outschool about the legend and lore of black cats. Marko and I started working through a program called Handwriting Without Tears. M reads stories to the kids at night. Norse Myths are in steady rotation, as is James Herriot's Treasury for Children (and we just found the old BBC series, which is delightfully wholesome television).

What I love about homeschooling is that once you set up a structure and some minimum guidelines for what must be learned or practiced, you can give yourself a lot of room to pursue whatever topic sparks interest. For this reason, I'm never really sure what the kids and I will talking about during their 1:1 time, or what they will pursue during their own time during the day. Marko tends to want to know lots of things about the ancient world, myths and legends. Laurel is more curious about American history from the 1800s and early 1900s. Max is very observant about our neighborhood and home and likes to explore these places in more depth. I check off what they are reading and studying about on our subject/book log so I can see if there are things they "should" be covering that their natural curiosity is not leading them through. Based on that log, we need to add more art and music. My neighbor just happened to send me a link to some fabulous art project ideas, so I think we'll do some porch art classes in September.