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