It's almost Christmas!

I haven't posted in here in a long time. I haven't given schooling up! We have just been taking the kids' leads for what they would like to learn. Somedays all they want to do is play and so I let them. If they want to do crafts, that is what they do.
Here are some things that we've been doing...
Wood work. We have been doing work with popsicle sticks. The kids love to glue them together and create shapes, then play with them together. I just handed the popsicle sticks and glue to them and said: What do you think you can make? Ben's eyes got so big and he went right to work, and has been working on it for a couple of weeks now. Also, Ben makes shapes for Noah so that he won't be left out. What a nice big brother. We built a snowman and a Christmas tree for the front of our house, the kids helped out with that. They love to help with projects, they can't wait to get their hands dirty.
Sewing. I taught them to use a needle and thread and they love to sew with all the fabric scraps I have laying around the house. They make little bags and big bags and their biggest project was a teddy bear. They have loved it. They want to learn how to embroider now, I'm lucky to have 3 hoops so we will start on that soon!
Friendships. We have been trying to find some friends for Ben. We've met with a couple families who have boys who are his age and it seems to be a good thing for him. He doesn't get to see that many kids his age so we are constantly working on this. We are also meeting at the park for play with different ages, Ben and Hannah are good at finding other kids to play with too.
Karate. Ben loves karate, he practices the moves throughout the day and even as he is falling asleep.
House work. They are learning to fold their own laundry and put it away. This is important because they get some control in where their clothes go, they are helping out with the house work and building on their independence.

Writing. The kids worked on letters to Santa, while practicing their letters and learning how to spell new words.

Library. We go to the library quite frequently to check out books to read. The kids love the storytime too, it allows them to hear stories and songs led by someone other than us.

PE. We've gone walking around the neighborhood, riding their bikes, scooters or big wheels.

I hope to be back in here to write about a lot more of what we've been up to... until then!

Hard week...

This week was a difficult week for schooling the kids. We butted heads a lot and they weren't interested in school, doing games, reading their library books... nothing. So we didn't 'do school'. We did hang out in the backyard or in the house and play together, we watched some TV, did some computer games (actually educational ones, does that count?), did some gardening... Ben went to karate and is doing very well. Hopefully next week will be a lot better!!

More on our apple theme days...

We went on a field trip and apple picking over the weekend. See our main blog for the entry on that.

These pictures are from our graphing activity when comparing the 6 different apples using our senses.

Talking about apples brought up fall/autumn so here the kids are doing some leaf printing with the fall colored leaves that we found on the sidewalk down the street from our house. We are always watching out for the signs of fall these days!

Weekly review...

This seems to work well, a weekly review. So I might do this for a while and see how it goes.

This week was a busy school week. The kids worked on tracing their letters quite a bit. Hannah has been getting tired of this quickly even though she is always excited to start and is the first to come to the table to do it. Ben is learning the correct way to draw the letters. It will be something we will have to keep practicing. We don't want our kids to have doctor's handwriting!

We went to the library on Tuesday. I feel that it is very important for the kids to learn the library, the system, how to choose books, and about the different books they have so we will be going to the library frequently. We found the non-fiction section and sat ourselves in the aisles to find some books. It was hard with Noah running around, then Ben joined him (this is when we left) but Hannah really did well. She found so many books. I tried to show them how to check out a book to see if it is one that they are interested in reading about. It is something that we'll keep working on. She found some on animals and the post office while I found some activity books that we'll work out of. Ben did find a few books on flies that he wanted to read and learn about. Really, house flies!

We started to go on night walks. We handed the kids flashlights and we walked around a couple of blocks while the kids hunted for crickets on the sidewalk. They were really good at spotting them. We had no idea how many crickets are on the sidewalk...until now! They also spotted lots of signs of fall on our walks, with all the yellow and brownish leaves (not many, really) falling on the ground.

They worked on their Alligator Pies a couple of times this week. The first time they used them they made up dialogue to go with the clothespins (alligators). The little apples kept falling off the clothespins so I'll have to buy wooden ones so the glue will stay stuck longer. They really did well with them. They also made up some little games while working on them.

All three kids played with cars and trucks or blocks (amongst other group play time), they practiced sharing with each other. The big lesson is to share so that Noah will learn how to share by observation. They are doing pretty good at that but it is still hard on the bigger kids when Noah decides that all the cars are his, screams and starts hitting them on their heads (usually with a truck in hand). He only acts this way with his brother and sister, with other kids his age he does very well with sharing.

We played together outside and bounced the ball to each other. They did pretty well, again it is a control game where they have to be able to control where the ball goes. I think that with practice, by next year they might be able to get to play 4-square! Another day the kids played soccer with Corey. Ben went to karate three times this week. Ben was rewarded with praise for helping another student with a move he was working on. The Head Instructor recognized it and made a big deal about it. It was nice for him to be noticed in a good light.

We graphed the different types of apples we bought. We had 6 different types of apples and we charted info about each one. We observed the apples from the outside and then we cut into them and observed from the inside. We used almost all of our senses: sight, smell, taste,and touch to record on the graph. Even though they couldn't read all the words on the graph, they knew what we were doing.

We celebrated with some of our homeschooling friends with a "Not back to school" party in the park. It was great fun. They played and then we did some party stuff too. Someone even brought ice cream (raw and vegan) and the kids lined up to get a cup. There was a parachute game and water balloons....and to make it a real party there were party favor bags! That made it official in my kids' minds.

They worked on their computer games for a little bit. We can't get everything in that we want to do during the week, but htere is always next week. And the good thing about this education at home is that they can work on it during the weekend and in the evenings too!

That's all I can think of right now. So until next time!

This week...

It was a crazy & jumbled week, so I'm going to do an entry for the entire week instead of separate days.

We worked on the calendar, month, days and year. We talked about fall and how Friday was the first day of fall-and no longer summer. The weather is going to change and get cooler. I explained that some people like to call fall 'autumn' but that they mean the same thing. Ben said that he likes to use the word 'fall' for this time of year.

We read 2 theme related books: The Life and Times of the Apple by Charles Micucci and Apples by Elaine Landau. We learned more about apples, the apple life cycle, the role of bees in the apple's life, about different types of apples, parts of an apple flower, and how to graft an apple tree. Before reading non-fiction, we always start out by pointing out the cover, checking out the title page, table of contents and then begin reading whatever chapter we're interested in.

Ben went to karate class 3 times this week. He worked on kicks, sparring and with his weapon (chong bong). He is learning to control his movements. His instructor is having him count 2 seconds between moves so that he slows down. He really seems to love his karate class.

We worked on letter formation by tracing letters (Hannah joined us for that). They love doing letters and especially tracing them.

We worked on our little color books and added more words onto the flashcards (seen here). I have the flashcards on a ring so anyone can grab them to read, look at and practice them. We have words that we find in our books: apple, red, stop, orange, goldfish, carrot, yellow...

We worked in the garden (science). We planted some lima bean seeds as well as repotted some snapdragon flowers that Ben has been growing (from seed) & taking care of. They were getting a little big for the pot they were living in so we transferred them to a pot with a little more room. We observed the roots and talked about how they are looking for more space and water so that they can grow their flowers. We also turned the compost piles, we love to see the black compost under all the kitchen scraps and yard waste as we turn it with the pitchfork.

We met with our playgroup on Thursday and the kids got to see some friends and meet new ones. The park we went to is always pretty busy so there are always kids playing.

While I was sick for two days (Monday and Tuesday), the kids worked with Corey on letters, they went to the Museum of Man in Balboa Park and they checked it all out. They even were shown the way to the kids' section...Corey wasn't happy about that because he wanted them to learn about the museum, not to play with legos.

Alligator pie....

Today Ben helped me make "alligator pies". We didn't make it to the directions exactly. The difference is that the clothespins should be painted green and decorated like alligators with teeth and eyes. We don't have alligators. Ours are made with the apples and that will work just fine. It is an activity that he can grab and do on his own. Hannah has her own version.


They practice counting the apples on the pie and matching that number to the clip with that number. I added a feature for Ben because he already knows how to count to 10 and identify most numbers. Ben's has the number written out so that he can become familiar with reading the number too.

Hannah's Ben's

Miserable...

Today was another sick day. Ben has scarlet fever. It's not fun being him these days. Poor little guy.

Sick day...

Today Ben was sick all day. He did a whole lot of nothing on the couch and slept a whole bunch throughout the day. His fever topped out at 102 and he was miserable. No school today :-( Hope he feels better tomorrow!

The beach...

Today we went to the beach to meet an unschooling (about unschooling) group that meets regularly. Everyone was so nice and it was great to speak to other Moms who have made the same types of choices for their children. The great part is that there were many children in my childrens' age range! So Ben and Hannah will have kids to play with who are their age, and even Noah had a few kids that he'd grow up around. This is important to me and to my kids. Finding friends has been hard up until now because we go to many playgroups and most of the little boys (Ben wants 'boy' friends) are several years younger than Ben and he gets bored playing with babies. Not all the time but sometimes he will come to me and say that he has no friends. It breaks my heart. I've been on the hunt for his age and older for many years. He wants friends. So today has given me little hope in that department. It was a little hard to get to know some of them, and introduce my kids because we were at the beach and everyone was everywhere. I think we'll get to know them better as we go more often and as time goes by. We are also going to try out some other homeschooling park days around the city and see which one(s) we fit into.

Because this is Kindergarten, I'm not stressed about 'getting school-work done' during the day. I find that my children are learning all the time and it is hard to confine it into an 8-3 day. Just as it is hard to teach according to the standards. My kids already know a lot of what they should know in 1st grade already so we're not keeping to the standards very well (so far). I also found it hard not to encourage learning over the weekend. They ask so many questions and want to learn and discover...so why not let them?

So today was a good social day. Ben is learning how to play nicely with kids his age (& a bit older) and trying to fit in. It is a hard lesson when all the kids know each other already and have their set games. But he'll be fine.

Both Hannah and Ben learned how important it is to put sunblock on. They didn't want to come and put it on and now they each have a nice little sunburn. Next time, it goes on before we get to the sand. ;-)

Art and a bit more...

Today we didn't do very much with school.

We did start a little book that focuses on colors. I think that Ben thinks it is too easy because he really wasn't into it. He knows all of his colors but the point (for me having him do it) was reading the words when he is done. So we read each sentence and then he colored the pictures. We only got one page done too, so we'll use this over the next few days or weeks until it is done.

2 pages of the book

I expanded the activity and made some 'flashcards' with 3 words from the book: red, apple, stop. I'll put them on a ring and we will add to it as time goes. It will be a vocabulary/spelling/reading type of activity.

The cards

The last thing that we did today was an apple tree. I had these mini die-cut apples so we cut out a trunk and top of the tree and had fun gluing all the little apples on our trees.

Ben and Hannah's apple trees

Not too bad for a day that didn't seem to be much.

Apples...

Our first theme is: Apples. We hope that this unit will last a couple of weeks including a trip to the apple orchard to pick apples (like we did last year), a trip to the grocery store for apples and perhaps a farm stand to pick apples up.

Today I introduced 'circle time' where we are learning about the calendar. We went over the month, day, number of the day and year. We sang some songs and did some fingerplays and dances. I started to read our book: Apples by Gail Gibbons. they already know lots about apples but we are going to expand it to include the colors of apples, into science, math, art, language arts, and other areas of life. After a short time, Ben started to lose interest and Noah was climbing all over me so we decided that it was time to take a break. Hannah loved it.

The next period of time: play time. They experimented with dirt and water, ate snacks, played together as well as individually. They played with blocks, building towers, and

Then we did art: We prepared some watercolored papers for our art project. This will last us a couple of days so be sure to watch the progression of the project. Today was painting with water colors to cover several pages of paper.

Ben painting

Hannah painting

As a conclusion to the day we went over what we did in school. They told me their favorite parts of the day and then we read a little more about apples from our book (above). Ben loved the painting and Hannah loved the circle time.

First day of school!!

Today was Ben's first day of home school. We started the day like any other with the exception that I took roll (something I don't do regularly). We took a field trip to a nearby library and read books and got to know the library for a couple of hours. When we returned we had lunch and a quick rest. Then Ben spent a while working on the computer learning phonics on starfall.com. He loves that site. Although there are some favorite things that he loves to do, there are lots of activities that he can do on there if he gets bored with something.

He played creatively with his sister in various parts of the house. They role-played, switched roles, and pretended a lot.

For PE he is going to his karate class where they are learning with their weapons. In karate they learn how to be in control of their bodies and focus. It has been good for him and he wants to keep going with it. We're thinking of enrolling him in a different kind of PE class thoough too, in addition to the karate, where he will learn how to play (soccer, basketball....) with others and where he can meet other kids his age. This is very important to him right now...making friends his age.

Starting out

Lately I've had sad thoughts about the upcoming first day of school. I have always had visions of my/our kids going off to school with their uniforms on or in their new clothes, sporting new shoes, a lunch box and a backpack. And me waving from nearby as they walk into their classroom with their teacher for the year. This is what I did and what I thought my kids should do too. But over the last couple of years (really, since he was born), Corey and I have been talking about schooling for Ben and trying to find the right fit for him, us, our family, our lifestyle, and our budget.

We checked out several different schools and while they were all wonderful, they weren't the right fit for us. One too strict, one too lenient, one expensive, and another way too expensive. It led us down the path to homeschooling our kids. We have loved the journey to realizing that we can do it. This is right for us. I'm a teacher after all. So we looked into charter schools that cater to homeschoolers and decided that while the classes and extra activities that they offer are great opportunities for some families, we didn't like the testing they do. We didn't want to deal with turning packets in every month just so that they can collect their fees and look accountable to their 'higher-ups'. So we are going to file a private school affidavit (as mentioned here) to open our own private school in October and we're going to teach them at home. We are very happy about the possibility and opportunity to continue to teach our children. We believe that it is the best fit for our family, children, lifestyle and budget!

I am always telling people that it isn't a plan that is set in stone. I would love to teach them until they decide that they (if they decide to) want to go to school. That will be the day that I might shed a few tears watching them go into the classroom with their teacher for the year.

So I'm off to make lesson plans for our first week!