We're On Fire (not literally, this time)!

Burning For Knowledge

Today, we went on a field-trip to a local glass company. Part of their business is to melt down recycled glass, gathered within the community, and reshape it into beautiful works of art for sale. We were able to see the furnace that burns all day and all night. We saw several old crucibles, where the molten glass is held. But the best part was watching a worker scoop out the molten glass and form it into a block. 

It was great that this field-trip tied into our discussions of stained glass and the historic period, Middle Ages, many of us are currently studying. Even better, learning about another business that is right here in our own community.

The Glass is Full

Full of Experiences

I continue to love how what we do is connected to past experiences. Today, the kids created their own stained glass pieces. They drew inspiration and knowledge from previous days. During Gargoyle Day, they talked about rose windows and briefly discussed the usage of stained glass windows. When picking colors, the kids remembered the color wheel introduced on Color Day.

The day began with an informational and historical discussion. The adults were prepared to extend class over two days so the kids would not feel rushed and would have plenty of time to complete their masterpieces. Impressively, the kids were focused and everyone finished their brainstorming, line sketch, and finished stained glass piece.

All that is left? Waiting for them to dry!


P.S. They're dry now!

It Takes a Community

The Village

Tie Dye * Dairy Palooza * Geography

This fall, four families, including ours, have decided to join together for group activities. Each mom takes a turn leading a project or learning session. So far we've each had a chance to lead a session and experience three other mom's leading. While planning my own session to lead has been a little stressful (Always wanting to please kids of a vast age range and their parents!), the month has been great. I have thoroughly enjoyed going to someone else's group to relax while someone else takes the helm!

Colors

Money Saving Tip

Or Money Boxes?

So far ever fall, before we begin our studies, we seem to do a big art projects. The first year was our classroom mural. The second year was another wall mural. Well, we ran out of walls to paint. So, our painting project was much smaller this year.

This fall, we decided to paint money jars. The kids get an allowance each month. They will separate their money into the three jars. One to save. We make periodic trips to the bank to deposit their money into their savings accounts. Two to pay taxes. Tax money will be paid back to us parents who are doling out the allowance. This is new. I have, in the past, just taken this money out before I pay them. I have put that money into their savings area and it has become what goes into their savings accounts. This may change, but for now, they will need to save money on their own and the taxes will come back to us, so that they can see how "getting paid" works for working folks. I think it's going to be a bit of a shock to their wallets. And finally, three to spend. This money is theirs to do with whatever they want (and we parents try to grin and bare it when they buy cheap toys and candy.)

Playing with Pastels

Chalky Experiences

I love art, and wish I could create it all. I wish I were better at more mediums. I've been wanting to work with pastels lately, so today was the day.

For now, we just played with blending options and the difference of a white background and a black background.

I asked the kids to draw something that had to do with the ocean, river, water, etc. as we have been studying those ecosystems. My daughter created a sea urchin with a cannon and my son created a Minecraft dirt block.

I'm just happy we all created art with the pastels.

Doing It Myself

I am trying something new this year, doing it with my kids. That may sound funny, because, of course I'm homeschooling with my kids. What I mean is, really doing the assignments with the kids.

For example, instead of asking them to write for 5 minutes while I go check my emails, I am writing for 5 minutes with them, with pencil and paper. I am finding that the kids are more receptive (duh) when I'm working along side them and actively participating. Instead of asking them to read a book, I read it out loud. My son (7) is a reluctant reader. He can read very well, but he's not interested in sitting still to read a novel. But if the whole family sits together to read a book out loud, he's willing to snuggle under a blanket and listen for a long time.

This year, I've also begun reading poetry to the kids. We have started with Shel Silverstein. The greatest thing has happened. While I read, the kids are jumping in to read the poems too. They take turns with me, reading different poems throughout the book. My son's body squirms with delight as he reads a poem out loud. My daughter (10), who can read a novel or two a day, is forced to slow down while she reads out loud. I've read that reading out loud can help a fast reader slow down and absorb more of the grammar and spelling (of course, this may not help as we're reading poems that defy grammar and traditional spellings!) I'm still excited, as the two of them look forward to reading time now that it is often a group effort.

Somewhere else I am trying to actively participate is when we do anything artsy. I often have a specific idea in my head that I want the kids to create.  Just as often, they have their own artistic voice they want to explore. When my idea doesn't match their idea, I go nuts. I am the mom who says, "but wouldn't it be better if the sky were blue?" or, "what if you tried coloring inside the lines next time?" I hate it as I do it, but I can't sem to stop myself.

The solution has been so simple, I'm bummed I didn't make the realization sooner. Now, when I have an idea, I complete that idea alongside my kids, while they do their own thing. This way, I get to see my idea through to fruition and my kids are allowed to do whatever their creative minds want to do without my nagging voice. I do hope that I never give the message that my art is "better" or "right" but that it's just another interpretation of the task at hand.

My daughter's representation of how many connections neurons can make:

And my son's representation. He is definitely the generation of initialisms and emoticons LOL :)

Another Mural

Last year we began with a mural. This year we are beginning with a mural. This time, not our classroom, but my daughter's room. We found a street seen of Venice, Italy and traced it onto her wall. We used glaze paint (a first for me) and painted in the lines. Somewhere in all of this, we snuck in some organizing, donating and updating from both kids' rooms. My daughter is happy with the results of her newly updated room (it was girlie pink and lavender before) and I am happy to begin our new year slowly. 

Journey North

I had read about Journey North's Mystery Class, Tracking Sunlight to Solve a Mystery but didn't think I would try it. But then my sister-in-law said she was going to do it, so I thought, with her as a support system, I would give it a go.

Turns out, this project was bigger than I anticipated. There is a lot of charting to do and I was anal about it. Therefore, I did a lot of the charting. While the kids were able to look up the information to report, and get started, I really wanted the charts to be "exact", so I ended up finishing up the shading of the charts. I guess, if you had a large class and could divide the kids into groups, and each group was in charge of one chart, then the work doesn't seem to daunting. But for two kids and one adult, it was a lot of work. There were a lot of sighs and grumbles when I'd get the charts out.

However, in the end, the charts were beautiful and really did show the kids a clear visual of what the sunlight was doing in different parts of the world, which I thought was worth all our hard work. Next year, perhaps we'll do fewer weeks, try it digitally in a spreadsheet, try glue and strips of paper, or figure out another way to do this so it's not so much precise coloring!


As we were reading the city clues and seeing if we could figure out what the 10 mystery cities were, we found ourselves glued to our globe. This was great in helping me incorporate geography and cultural studies without me having to do a lot of the research or planning. It just happened as we explored the globe or ran to the internet to see what else we might be able to find that would fit the clues

Some of the cities were very tricky and took a lot of time to figure out. Others were more easily discovered. In the end, I felt a bit of disappointment as we didn't correctly guess all 10 cities. Old feelings of school and failure came back to me. Wanting to do well and be the best. Yet feeling conflict, as this is not my area of interest and I did not want to spend any more time to get an accurate answer. After a few weeks, I went back to look and we actually got more right than I originally thought. For example, on one, we named the region instead of the city name, so, as the teacher, I granted our team a few points for that!

For me, this project was a challenge. Geography is not my strongest subject, so it was a stretch for me to display energy throughout the whole process. However, I do think it was worth it. The graphing of sunlight visually showed what they learned about the earth's rotation, tilt, etc. from studying the solar system earlier in the year. I love how the two different units tied into each other. And again, I love that we were able to huddle around the globe each week.

Playing Games

My son has been interested in board games lately, so I decided to do a unit on them. We began our unit as I usually do, with a trip to the library.

We read lots of books on the history of board games, dating back to before Ancient Egyptian times. This was one of the first units we did where I could clearly see history becoming a part of our unit. We did talk briefly about ancient astronomy, but I felt the history in this one more personally as we discussed the first games people played. Where they might have found "playing pieces" and how did the "rules" get passed along?

Finishing off this unit, we made two different games. The first game we constructed was an ancient marble game.







After that, I had each kid think of their own board game and create it. We talked about how many players could play, what the board might look like, will it use dice, what is the object of the game...? I had meant to have the kids write up the instructions, but we never did get around to that. We celebrated their games by playing several rounds of each!

Here, my daughter made a game where you need to build a smoothie by the time your player gets to the middle. She included cards to draw, pieces to represent the smoothie ingredients and a foldable game board.









Here, my son make an ice cream cone shaped game board. Players roll the die and follow a snake-like pattern up the board. Some squares help you move forward, others make you move backwards.

Plants and Beyond

Learning all about plants:

We just completed our latest unit on plants. After reading and researching about photosynthesis, chlorophyl, and root systems, we dived into a few projects. We tried to germinate an avocado pit (once with a conventional pit and once with an organic pit, both faile

d) as well as a potato (failing now). I'm not sure why they aren't working, other than I do *not* have a green thumb. We followed directions, but for whatever reason (maybe it's winter and we don't have enough sunlight) they did not sprout.

We did get to explore a local store (3 miles from home) that we've never been to before and found it to be a fabulous, locally owned store. There, we purchased seeds and grew some wheat grass and cress (pictured in a heart formation) which worked great in less than a week. We had fun sketching them each day as there was a lot of rapid growth to keep us interested.

At the end of our unit, we made Japanese gardens and wrote Haikus to display with them.

Daughter's garden and haiku (could not convince her it was not a zen garden):

"A Zen Garden"

Here's a zen garden

Zen gardens are beautiful

I made mine today

Son's garden and haiku

"My Seeds"

Seed grow in the soil

They need water and sunlight

They become flowers

Dioramas

Animal Habitats

The kids wanted to study animals. So I gave them both the assignment of

1.Checking out 2-3 books on their chosen animal from the library

2. Researching on the internet (at least once source)

3. Writing a report of what they learned (include habitat, are they endangered, if so why?, what they eat, where they live, basic characteristics...)

4. Create a diorama of the animal's habitat

5. Completing a resource page (daughter only)

Scaffolding: My son (6) chose the house cat. This diorama shows the different rooms where a cat might go during the day (master bed, computer desk, tv room, kitchen). He learned about the many ways a cat communicates through various meows. When we came back from a short trip, he cried when our own cat meowed as he interpreted her saying, "I missed you."

I helped a lot with this project, reading the materials to him (even though he can read), helping him with the questions, and mostly, helping create the diorama. They were all this thoughts, ideas and creativity, but he needed help in the execution of it all.

My daughter (9) picked the leopard, a big cat. She did the entire assignment on her own, from finding all her books at the library, to her diorama. I could not convince her to take notes, she stated she had all the facts in her head. She only had to look up one or two facts, so I wasn't able to argue the benefits of note taking on this project. We'll work on that later!

I did get upset at one point, when I noticed an entire sticky notepad used up. I couldn't understand where all the pages went. Then my daughter showed me how she crumpled up the pages, leaving the sticky part to allow her to stick it to her "tree" without using glue. How could I be angry after seeing how genius the method was!

Making the Fold

Visiting Teacher

I have read that many homsechooling families find a resource within their circle of friends. However, it can be intimidating to ask a friend for their time. Lucky for us, a friend of ours, who teaches Japanese at a local high school, offered to teach the kids Origami and share her secret (a great website, Origami Club, that has step by step instructions). What a great opportunity for our kids to work with a familiar adult who isn't mom or dad! The kids had a great time folding snakes, samurai hats, pianos and more. Next time, our friend promises to show them how to make sushi!

Passion Versus OCD

Following Their Passions

Following your child's passion is a perk of homsechooling. Yes, all parents can support their child's interests (soccer, drama, piano, dance, etc.) but with more time available to us now, I feel it's even more important to pour energy into areas for which they are enthusiastic. Both kids are into Minecraft, a sandbox computer construction game. It is a great arena for creativity and teamwork, but also a time suck. So if you don't want to lose your children to this game, don't investigate. However, if your child is already into computers and these kinds of games, it's actually a really cool one.

So, in trying to support their interests, we decided to make our own Monopoly board game for Minecraft. Sounds more like fun than school work, right? To make this game, the kids had to research of both games, write a lot of descriptions for card and come up with creative ideas for the instructional cards. It turned out to be a lot of work, but we also had a lot of fun! We looked into making Shrinky Dinks with plastic #6, but found that clear plastic #6 is harder to find than we thought. So we went to the local toy store and purchased blank Shrinky Dink sheets to make our moveable game pieces.

Who's doing the project anyway?

Well, I really tried to allow the kids to do as much of the project as possible. But my control issues got in the way. I wanted the game board to be flat, no bubbles under the plastic protection sheets. I wanted everything to be typed neatly, not written. I wanted the cards to be cut in straight lines. The list goes on. So, I did end up doing a lot of the execution. In the end, I'm trying to see this as a lesson for *me* to remember that I need to step back and allow the kids to do more of the work. This is not a forum for me to show off my ow artistic skills. I am finding that I am continually figuring out where my influence needs to end and my kids involvement begins. When to push, when to help and when to back off completely.

Thematic Units

What is the Thematic Unit?

I took this definition off of the "interdisciplinary teaching" wiki page: "The most common method of implementing integrated, interdisciplinary instruction is the thematic unit, in which a common theme is studied in more than one content area (Barton & Smith, 2000)."

Why did I choose Thematic Units?

I really like the idea of studying one subject from multiple angles to reach a more in depth understanding of that subject. I also think this type of teaching will allow me to scale the work for two individual levels, while teaching the same concepts to both of my kids.

Our first unit:

We started with the Solar System. We had fun learning about the planets, the sun, comets, moon cycles, and more. Here you can see one of the art projects (a hanging mobile) we did at the end of the unit.

First Project

How to Begin? As for our first task as homeschoolers, we decided to paint a mural on one of the walls of the room we would be using as our classroom. The kids traced themselves onto paper, cut them out and then taped them to the wall. After tracing their bodies on the wall, they painted in their shapely shadows. Three days later, we completed the mural and our first project was under our belts. The best part of this project, was going to the paint store during "regular school hours" and answering our first set of "why aren't you in school?" questions!