What We've Learned - October 30, 2012

High time I popped in here with a learning update, since we have been learning lots behind the scenes even while the blog has been neglected. Sadly no photos..we're getting back into our groove one thing at a time here. =)

Michelle (7)
1. We are doing the letter u sounds in spelling.  Most of them are vowel-consonant-e words.
2. We are doing French in the book and listening to it on a CD.  (We finished the part of The Learnables Level 1 that was on the computer, and have proceeded to the workbook portion.)
3. We finished the cursive book, so now I am writing and doing copywork in cursive.  I am even writing notes in cursive. 
4. In history, I read about Hannibal leading his army from Carthage to Rome.   Only 3 elephants survived in the winter up in the Alps.

James (4)
1. We made the letters into words.*
2. We played the number game.  (Basically like War - the person whose card is "more" takes both cards.)
3. We did something in my math book. (MEP Reception)

*We finished working through all the alphabet sounds, and have starting working on putting together 3 letter, short vowel words.   He's been picking up on this idea really quickly!  You can read about this second stage of Charlotte Mason style reading instruction here or here.

Elizabeth (2.5)
What has she learned?  Michelle says that she loves running to the steps across the street and climbing them, and that she follows.  Yes, running and climbing describe Elizabeth well....when we can corral her, she is very in to cut-and-paste type activities these days.  And reading All About Alfie (by Shirley Hughes)

Mama
With my birthday money, I purchased the CD set of the 2005 Ambleside Online Conference, which has been really fantastic listening.  Definetely worth owning if you are a Charlotte Mason homeschooler!  I'm sure I'll revisit it again and again.  One nugget I really appreciated was the advice to take time to just enjoy my family.  It is easy as homeschooling mothers to be always "doing" and to not spend enough time "being".  But that is where the relationships are built, and ultimately that's what CM education is about - the child's relationship to God, to self, to others, and to ideas.   Also the idea that the little things that we do consistently over time add up and eventually yield a harvest.  Oh, that I could be faithful in the little things!

Fall Nature Study

 

Sorry this place has been so quiet this past month!  We had visitors for two weeks.  Then we were recovering from them, as lovely as they were.  And then we bought plane tickets for moving to Africa in January, so we have entered full-blown transition mode now.  So, please accept my apologies if things are a little neglected around here.  I do have a lot I would like to share in this space...all in good time.

We have, however, had some really wonderful times of fall nature study, despite all the busy-ness.  I am feeling so very blessed that we have be able to enjoy autumn two years in a row before we go back to the tropics.

One thing we did was record the end of our Sunflower project.  We got to observe the seeds down there in the flower head...just like the ones we started with when we planted!  Everything came around full-circle.

Over on the Ambleside Online forum, a group of us has been reading and discussing the Handbook of Nature Study. It has been a wonderfully inspiring discussion.  One of the things we discussed was the balance between freedom and structure in nature study.  When do we let our children run loose and find the things that interest them, and when do we gently nudge them in the right direction?

Not long after this discussion, we decided to pop over to the park in between rain showers.  Inspired by one of the ideas from this month's Handbook of Nature Study Newsletter, we decided to see if we could find leaves in three different shapes and/or three different colors, which we did.   There was the structure.

 I also stopped to take a closer look at an evergreen tree that was covered with some kind of berries.
 

While I was trying to figure it out, Michelle noticed that there were mushrooms growing in the dirt under the tree.  Heaps of them.  Different kinds too. 

 We spent several minutes observing and counting them.  Michelle was absolutely fascinated.  There was our freedom.

We also stomped in the puddles on the way home.  What good is nature study on a wet day without some puddle stomping? =)

Hope you are enjoying the season wherever you are, too.

Family Reading #5

Some of the interesting reads we've discovered around here this week...

Picture Book Highlights
All of our children love the series about Camille the Giraffe by Jacques Duquennoy.  These simple French books are not high quality literature and border on twaddle.   But they are cute, simple, and have been a great way to introduce lots of French vocabulary.   We've been getting them from the library, but I think I may need to purchase a few to take with us when we leave.   All 3 kiddos ask for these regularly.

Michelle's Reading (7 next week!)
Yes, she's going to be 7 next week...that sounds so OLD to me. Sigh.  Anyhow, her favorite read lately has been the first book in the Boxcar Children series.  She has covered reams of paper with drawings of all of their adventures.   When Papa mentioned something at the dinner table the other night about an "orphan sock" in the laundry, Michelle pipes up: "I'm reading a book about orphans.  That means their mother and father have died."  Funny girl.

Featured School Book
We are most of the way through Among the Pond People by Clara Dillingham Pierson.   These cute stories really have a lot of facts about the various pond animals packed into them.  I've learned some interesting things myself!   This volume is part of a series of 5 that also cover the Meadow, Forest, Farm, and Night People.  We're looking forward to enjoying a couple more of them as part of our science and nature studies next year too.

Bedtime Read-Aloud
We finished Charlotte's Web, which was loved by all. Our current read-aloud is A Little Princess which we are enjoying as well.  We also recently ditched the devotional we were using and have gone back to reading from a Bible story book (The Children's Bible in 365 Stories) so as to better engage the two littlest in our "family" Bible time.  So far, so good.

On Mama's Nightstand
Too many!!  All of those books on the sidebar over there...yes I'm slowly reading through them.  Depends on the day and what I'm in the mood for. =)  I have also recently been on a Kindle downloading binge in part due to an Amazon gift card for my birthday and in part due to a huge list of FREE classic missionary biographies that someone posted over on the Ambleside Online forum earlier this week. =)  New to me books = Happy Mama.   Currently from this treasure hoard I am reading Sleeping Coconuts by John and Bonnie Nystrom.   We knew the Nystroms when we worked in Papua New Guinea.  Their story was familiar to me, but I am enjoying reading the backstory and their insights into what God taught them...some have been particularly timely and convicting.   I have also run across many friends, colleagues, and neighbors in the pages of this book...it's a little weird (in a good way!) to read about people I know in real life as book characters.  If you enjoy the missionary biography genre, you'll probably enjoy this book too.

What have you been reading this week?

What We've Learned - September 7, 2012

A few of the highlights of our last learning week (sorry I didn't manage any photos this time):

Michelle, Age 6-1/2
1. We read about the slow mud turtle [in Among the Pond People].  I got to tell 4 things about the story.  My favorite part was when the turtle came home and he wanted his brothers to know he was home, and his brothers thought he wanted them to eat and they told him that they weren't hungry.
2. We read in Aesop's Fables about the Astrologer who tried to read the future in the stars and fell into a hole full of mud!
3. I did Math-U-See on the computer and noticed there were 20 problems in all. [She is referring to the drill program on the Math U See website].
4. We did more cursive - little j and Big H and Big I.

James, Age 4
Unavailable for comment this week. =)  But trust me when I say he is learning far more than even I realize sometime.  He recently wrote his name, with all the letters formed correctly and facing the same direction, even though I had never taught him that.  This boy is like a sponge.

Elizabeth, Age 2-1/2
"I learned to sing to Grandma!"    (She wanted me to put this in, by the way.  So there you go.  She has been singing "Happy Birthday" to grandma ever since we made a birthday video for her several weeks ago.)

Mama, Age ?? ;-)
I have been meaning to eventually get back to my series on Charlotte Mason's writings, and maybe someday I will.  Just this week, however, I was reading in CM's Philosophy of Education about how education should be a lifelong thing, not something that is restricted to the time spent in school.  So I thought that maybe I should weigh in here with something that I have been learning too. (And no, I'll try not to bore you with details of French grammar!) ;-)

So, here is a little nugget I gleaned from my reading in Philosophy of Education this past week:

"As for literature - to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served."
 

One of the main tenets of a Charlotte Mason education is that our minds feed off ideas and not facts alone.  What have you learned more from: a thought-provoking novel or essay, or your ninth grade biology textbook?  This was such a beautiful reminder to me as to why we have chosen to educate our children the way that we do.

Hope you've had a good learning week in your home too!

 

Family Reading #4

A few of the interesting books we've been into at our house lately...

Picture Book Highlights
I've read One Morning in Maine and Burt Dow, Deep Water Man multiple times in recent weeks.  And all the pages have fallen out of our copy of Blueberries for Sal, so I just ordered a new one.  Can't ever go wrong with Robert McCloskey.  Hands down my very favorite children's picture book author.  If you haven't read his books...do it now.  Snuggle up with your little ones and enjoy!

Michelle's Reading (Age 6-1/2)
Michelle has made her first foray into reading real chapter books on her own with the first couple of volumes in The Cobblestreet Cousins series by Cynthia Rylant.  (Shh, don't tell her, but she's getting the rest of the series for her birthday!)

Featured School Book
We've been enjoying James Baldwin's Thirty Famous Stories as an introduction to some of the characters (both true and legendary) in history.  We just finished reading the last of 6 installments of his re-telling of the Greek legend of Ulysses and Penelope....Michelle kept asking what was going to happen next, and was so happy when...oh wait, I won't spoil the ending for you. =)

Bedtime Read-Aloud
We just finished reading The Wizard of Oz, which we all enjoyed.  (I love Michelle's picture below...keep in mind she hasn't seen the movie, either!)  Even Papa kept wanting to listen in to this one!  (Although FYI, it does include magic and such...you may want to skip this book if those are things you prefer not to read about.)   We've now started Charlotte's Web.  I keep finding Michelle trying to read ahead in it when I'm not looking.  I take this as a good sign...

On Mama's Nightstand
I'm continuing to work my way through Le Chateau de Ma Mere by Marcel Pagnol. [ETA: Between writing and posting this post, I finished it!  So exciting to actually be able to read and enjoy a French novel!] And in the rest of my spare time (ha, ha), I really enjoyed reading through The Writer's Jungle recently.  Teaching good writing was something I never felt I got a good grip on in my classroom teaching years, so this is an exciting find for me.  Rather than being a collection of formulaic writing assignments, it's a manual that walks you through each of the stages of learning how to write with suggestions for appropriate activities along the way.  It is in line with many Charlotte Mason principles and designed to help you do writing across the curriculum rather than isolating the subject of writing on its own.

So, what have you been reading lately?

Our Sunflower Project

This summer, thanks to one of Barb's suggestions in the Summer Sizzle Outdoor Hour Challenge Ebook, we decided to plant sunflower seeds in pots on our apartment balcony.   It has been such fun to watch them grow this summer!

We started them from seed on June 26, and have periodically measured and sketched them as they grew.

A couple of Michelle's sketches of the progress of our sunflower plants.

On August 24, our first flower actually blossomed!  So we took some time to observe our flowers carefully using the grid provided in the ebook.

Michelle's Nature Journal Page

 

 We like to take photos of our nature subjects and put them up on the computer screen so we can easily sketch the details.

My Journal Page

 

Our flower is 48 inches tall (measuring up from the dirt, so this doesn't count the height of the pot) and 5 inches across.  It has 40 petals.  Michelle described it this way:

The leaf has yellowish dots on it and the rest is green.  The leaf has a heart shape with a tip on the bottom and going up like the shape of the heart.  It feels fuzzy wuzzy wuzzy.  The flower is a circle that goes around and around and around.  It is a flower family - that means there are a lot of flowers.  Its colors are bright yellow and orange.



Counting petals with James.  You can see the outdoor market in our street way down below. =)

 

That bit about the sunflower being a "flower family" was new to me - an interesting tidbit gleaned from The Handbook of Nature Study (the actual book, not the blog. =))  Sunflowers are composite flowers, meaning that the "flower" is actually made of many small flowers all clustered together.  And sure enough, if you look carefully, the center of the flower is made up of many tiny flowers.  The flowers around the outside edge are waving 'banners' (petals) to attract bees to their nectar and pollen.  Kinda interesting, isn't it?

Yup, the sunflower has outgrown Michelle. 

 This was truly a simple nature project that I think anyone can do...even if you don't consider yourself outdoorsy or happen to live on the 4th floor of an apartment building in the middle of the downtown area of your city.  ;-) Also, the sunflowers grew fast and watching them grow has kept my young children interested all summer - so also a good project for little ones with short attention spans.  I highly recommend it if you are looking for a way to get your feet wet with Nature Study!

What We've Learned - August 28, 2012

Two weeks ago we took the week off - stay tuned for notes on our trip to Lyon!  In the meantime, some highlights of our past learning week:

Michelle, Age 6-1/2
1. Practicing the cursive letters I had trouble with.
2. Changing the cards that have the French words of "yesterday", "today", and "tomorrow" ("hier", "aujourd-hui", and "demain") on our calendar.
3. I read in the Christian Liberty Nature Reader about flies, wasps, and butterflies.
4. We read about Penelope and Ulysses.  Ulysses dressed up like a ragged beggar so that no would know who he was.  But when he shook off the rags, he was in his normal clothes.   (from "Penelope's Web", a re-telling of a Greek legend, from James Baldwin's Thirty Famous Stories.)

Once again, Michelle wanted to show you her cursive paper.  If I didn't know better, I'd say she's kind of proud of having learned cursive. (Sorry about the weird cropping job, by the way.)

 

James, Age 4
1. I did letters with you: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k.....
2. We also did big letters: K and P and A
3. We played a math game with the orange bars and the green bars. (Mama's note: The game came from MEP, but we used the green and orange Math U See bars as our game pieces because that's what we had handy!)
4. We read Le Bateau Arrive!

Favorite French book of the week!

Bonus: Elizabeth, Age 2
In case you ever wondered what she does during school time....

(It was cute until she started cutting up James' alphabet flash cards.  Oops.)

Hope you've had a good start to your learning week too!