The First Five Weeks of School

First day of school was August 20th

One of Gilgamesh's new subjects is PIANO

Sir Petrus hatched a personality. He's still a very serious baby, and quiet, but he loves to smile at his family.

Right off the bat we took a vacation and went to a festival! At the festival, our little knights built things at a Home Depot station. Alastor is here with Dad, showing him the goalpost he made.

Gilgamesh's first grade curriculum from Sonlight includes Usborne book, Peoples of the World. Crafts and activity ideas pepper every other page. It's been fun trying some of them out. Like the sarong, turban, Bedouin tents, and coil pots shown here. 

Gilgamesh is getting better and better at riding his bike!

When auntie came to visit, we showed her the Angry Birds game. Lots of fun!

A fun project I'd been meaning to do coincided with a poem in the Sonlight core: The House that Jack Built. We cut out pictures from the poem, like malt and a rat and put them in the finished house.

Nature walks and hikes by the local duck pond are always fun for our family.

Superdad shows Gilgamesh the ropes.

First grader

Preschooler

Here's Petrus, already 3 months old and getting more active.

Superhero costumes ahead of October's Halloween

The spider building an epic spiderweb outside our place just as we finished the year's first readaloud book, Charlotte's Web!

Alastor's three-dimensional rainbow

Gilgamesh's three-dimensional rainbow

Gilgamesh's book of dreams. Can you tell who we support for the presidential race in November?

D is for dirt, part of the Letter of the Week program we're doing for Alastor's preschool. Gilgamesh participates and has a blast doing the more arsty, basic stuff.

D is for dog

Gilgamesh's masterpiece from his first official art class. They're candy apples from a lesson on circles.

We discovered one way to get through those busy Usborne books is to copy the pages and cut and paste the individual pictures and text blocks into staple books. He gets to make a book and focus on one subject at a time. It's great! Only downer is how much ink we use up. But really, who decided children's nonfiction should be so BUSY!? Gilgamesh doesn't know where to look, so he often looks away. In the future I might try the window method I've read about: cut a square in a white piece of paper and show just one part of the page at a time.

A construction paper robot Gilgamesh constructed all by himself after seeing a similar one on Sesame Street. Take inspiration from everywhere and run with it!

To keep hands busy during readaloud time one day, I printed out some templates for tissue paper collages. It was a lot of fun for the boys but nobody heard a word I read, so we'll stick with quiet time and bedtime for readalouds for now.

We have this great Disney Pixar drawing book that shows you step by step how to draw several popular characters. This is Gilgamesh's Wall-e and Eve. I was impressed!

Gilgamesh's planet Earth. Not an assignment, just a self-directed art project. We found a website that showed how to make rectangles for proportions before drawing the basic shapes of the continents, so the U.S. is still pretty boxy. 

Tribal masks for scaring evil spirits, another Usborne-inspired craft.

Alastor loves the dry erase board. It only keeps him busy for twenty minutes without adult guidance, though.

And guess who recently turned three! 

So we've been keeping very busy! Feels like we're always a week behind, but I guess that doesn't matter as long as we're constantly learning something new. So far I love Sonlight's Core B for first grade. The science and social studies are probably the most taxing part because there's so much reading of nonfiction. But when we couple it with youtube or other online resources, we have a blast learning about blue-footed boobies and nocturnal animals and habitats. The other day we spent an hour just looking up different cultural, traditional dances and instruments on youtube. Later, Gilgamesh thrilled to recognized flamenco dancing on Sesame Street because he'd seen it before and knew its name already! It's fun to see my five-year-old beginning to remember things he's learning. Thus begins the Grammar stage of the trivium - memorization and mass learning. It's going to be an adventure.

For Alastor, we need to kick up the preschool a notch, not because he's not learning enough for a three-year-old but because he wants to be more engaged in the school process. Art, math manipulatives on the floor, and anything on youtube are his favorites to be involved with. On days when those things are scarce, he sits around playing idly by himself and then asks for a TV show or something to eat. In short, he's getting bored. So my mission next week and beyond is to keep all my boys engaged as much as possible, while allowing that down time and independent, unstructured play are also healthy, even if they don't always like it. 

This is still a very new adventure for us. How long have you been homeschooling? 

Any tips for newbies?

The plain fact...

This picture caused a bit of feather-ruffling on facebook, so I thought I'd explain why I thought it was worth sharing.

My friend, who is a public school teacher and whom I respect very much, had this to say about it:

I don't completely agree with this. There are some school programs, and certainly school systems in the past, that fit this quote. My experience as a public school educator for the last six years has not been to produce "docile and uninquisitive citizens." There is a lot to say for and against any type of educating system, homeschool included. I think homeschooling fits in this quote as readily as private or public education. Just my unsolicited thoughts.

My response:

I think there are those even today who do have this agenda, but they are not usually teachers. When you think of people in power (which power corrupts), you don't think of teachers as the top tier, do you? I certainly don't. As far as homeschooling being designed to push propaganda, I'd have to say that's a strange idea because homeschoolers are parents. Parents have a God-given mandate to teach their children and pass on their heritage - a stewardship which some choose to lend to outside teachers and tutors. Since children naturally question their parents' ideas, there's less danger of "gulping ideas ready-made."

The truth I see in this quote is that a person who has learned an idea as absolute fact has quenched his curiosity. When theories were being taught as theories, and opinions as opinions, there was plenty of room for curiosity and inquisitive students. Invention and innovation was at its height. But when theories are taught as if a general consensus proves fact (and some shameless teachers and curriculum-writers give opinions in place of knowledge), curiosity is quenched by something false - that is propaganda. Every parent has a responsibility to guard against this, and that's homeschooling, whether you do it in place of school, or after school around the dinner table. 

Being educated is not ultimately bad, but self-education is the best thing of all.

What are your thoughts on H.L. Mencken's quote? 

Preschool for my Troublemaker

For Alastor, almost 3 years old 

He's still a little young to pick up the Sonlight P4/5 curriculum we used with Gilgamesh last year, which was intended for 4- to 5-year-olds. 

At this stage, he needs to be doing something because if we don't include him, he'll be a little terror until he gets attention. Naturally. So we'll be using this:

Letter of the Week Preschool Curriculum by Confessions of a Homeschooler

I'm looking forward to this because there's a ton of pre-writing and very basic math (counting, graphing) that will be good practice for Alastor without overwhelming him with structured learning. It's really a lot of puzzles and play. 

To get us started on the right foot next Monday, we've already put up our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom letter tree:

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom letter tree

We'll be adding each letter as we "study" it. I think I'll make extra copies of the cute animal pictures, too, so we'll put up an ant hill for A, a butterfly for B, a caterpillar for C, and a dinosaur for D, etc. The knights will both love the ceremony of adding a letter to the tree and an animal to the scenery on the door. 

We'll reread this a lot:

On goodreads

FYI, the creator of this curriculum also has a K4 pre-Kindergarten program if you have a four-year-old just on the cusp of being ready for kindergarten. 

Aside from Letter of the Week and reading library books together, Alastor will no doubt hear some of the read-alouds we'll be doing with Gilgamesh, like Homer Price (a personal favorite), Charlotte's Web, and The Little House in the Big Woods. 

In addition, I plan to do a sort of workbox system with Alastor, using pictures of activities he does anyway. My hope is that the action of moving the Velcro picture from his Schedule to his All-Done Envelope on the side of the bookcase will give him a sense of accomplishment and keep him from getting bored with all the toys in the house at once. 

As for the baby? Petrus is still on a cycle of sleep, eat, smile, cry, sleep. I plan on holding him while teaching, but hope to do most of the hands-on stuff during his sleeping times.

It's going to be a challenging year for all of us. I don't think I even know what I'm getting into, homeschooling with three boys five and under. My faith will survive. That much I know! :)

Anybody else homeschooling preschool this year?

First Grade for the First Time

Next week we'll start first grade!

I'm really excited about it, and I'm not the only one. Gilgamesh has been begging to do school since we stopped after his kindergarten graduation. I'm sure if I hadn't pulled together a workbook and daily encyclopedia reading, we'd all have gone completely insane! Especially since we're a little grounded with the new baby and all.

So this is what we're excited about:

Sonlight Core B (1st grade) with Grade 1 Readers: Intro to World History

and this:

Science B: Animals, Astronomy, and Physics

and this:

Singapore Math 1A/1B

and this:

Mathtacular DVD's and manipulatives

and this

DK My Art Book

and this

Bernstein Favorites: Children's Classics

and this

Sequential Spelling, Volume 1

For Gilgamesh, 5 years old:

Sonlight Core B (1st grade) with Grade 1 Readers: Intro to World History; and Science B: Animals, Astronomy, and Physics

Singapore Math 1A/1B

Mathtacular DVD's and manipulatives

Bernstein Favorites: Children's Classics, including Peter and the Wolf, The Carnival of Animals, and A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

Sequential Spelling, Volume 1

DK My Art Book

For Alastor, almost 3 years old (he's still a little young to pick up the curriculum we used with Gilgamesh last year):

Letter of the Week Preschool Curriculum by Confessions of a Homeschooler

Pretty sure this year is going to ROCK!

Here are a few pictures from our Box Day with Sonlight: