Hi, I'm Heidi and I homeschool my two sweet kids. I want them to know that learning is an exciting lifelong adventure! We love great books, unit studies, notebooking, lapbooking, and hands-on learning.Cold Winter Days Were Made for Reading
The high temperatures in Maine this week have been in the single digits. Brrrrr. We’ve done most of our at-home schoolwork near the gas stove.
Though we don’t love this kind of weather we remembered to be thankful we live in much more comfort than Laura Ingalls did in The Long Winter.
In our homeschool this week…
- We celebrated Marlin Luther King, Jr. using suggestions from Mary at Homegrown Learners. The Netflix documentary was fabulous and I highly recommend it for all ages.
- Both kids were able to complete their full week of individual work for the first time since before Christmas! Between the holidays and then illnesses we’d had such odd schedules. This week the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic) were done and done well each day. That was a good feeling.
The rest of our learning was all about reading aloud. Quality literature is always our base, and subzero temperatures make for perfect reading time.
- We read The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden and enjoyed the lovable characters.
- We’re continuing our historical journey with the audio version of These Happy Golden Years. Oh how I love this series and sharing it with my children.
- We continued our nature study of birds despite the frigid temperatures by reading The Burgess Bird Book for Children and continuing to watch the nest cams I talked about last week. It’s amazing to see how fast the hummingbirds are growing! I was able to talk about the “pin feathers” after reading about them in the Handbook of Nature Study. For fun we read through Feathers: Poems about Birds.
- We continued our study of Mozart with the Tell Me About Wolfang Amadeus Mozart Biography and lots of listening. We were all amazed with how young he was when he began not only performing but composing!
- My daughter finished From The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and loved it. I asked her to notebook it in some way and she asked to do two book reports–one on the storyline and one on the main characters–and a picture collage. (Oh, okay, if you really must!) She is now reading The Secret Garden and loves that, too. Hooray for great books.
- I am still very slowly working through the original Charlotte Mason series. Did you see the six volume collection for Kindle for 99 cents from Amazon? I picked that up and use it with the Kindle app on my android tablet. I had downloaded the series free from Ambleside but the formatting and table of contents are worth the 99 cents. I also borrowed A Charlotte Mason Companion through inter-library loan. I enjoy Ms. Mason’s writings but also like to have a little help applying it to our homeschool now.
Places we went and people we saw…
Though the cold temperatures made me want to hibernate we had a lot of places to go this week.
- Daddy took the kids on a radio station tour that turned out to not be as technical as my kids were hoping for.
- For my daughter’s book club they attended a talk by author Jennifer Richard Jacobson. It was full of great information about being a writer, and how even as a professional author you have to make lots of revisions.
- Our homeschool geography club meeting was about Russia. My son presented on the volcanoes in Russia and its location on The Ring of Fire. My daughter shared about Matryoshka dolls.
- We paid a visit to the orthodontist. Good news–no one needs braces right now! My pocketbook heaved a sigh of relief.
Things I’m working on…
I’m trying to gather and organize everything to send off to my accountant to prepare our personal and business taxes. Anyone else out there buried in paperwork?
Thank you to the wonderful hostesses with link-ups on Fridays. Be sure to join the fun and see what other homeschoolers are up to!
My Interview for the “Who Homeschools?” Feature
Savannah from Hammock Tracks asked me a few questions for her “Who Home Schools?” interview series. I had fun answering the questions about how and why we homeschool and sharing my goals and concerns.
Stop by Hammock Tracks to check out my interview and find out what my favorite…and least favorite…part of homeschooling is.
A Week Filled With Good Things
This week was filled with easing back into our full time schedule and extracurricular activities after the flu. We made time for afternoon rest and early bedtimes, and continued lots of cozy reading aloud. In fact, this week felt very in tune with Charlotte Mason’s philosophies. I am by no means an expert, but our homeschool does feel full of good things when I implement her methods. We enjoyed good books, poetry, nature study, and composer study.
What books are we enjoying right now?
- We flew through Little Town on the Prairie and feel the impending sadness of the time when Laura’s story won’t be part of our days. My daughter has asked if we can just start again at the beginning.
- American History Stories from Heritage History. (That’s a selection from the Early America CD, which you can receive for free if you purchase any other CD and use the discount code SCHOOLRM until January 31st.) This series is giving my kids (and me!) a good overview of the time period we’re studying while allowing us to spend more time on major events.
- The Burgess Bird Book for Children is part of our nature study focus on birds. The stories are fact-filled and the personalities of each bird we meet keep it engaging.
- We just started The Cricket in Times Square for our homeschool book club…it’s also very engaging so far and leads to cries of “You can’t stop there!”
- I shared poems from A Small Child’s Book of Cozy Poems all week.
Nature study goes to the birds
Our nature study is deepening as we become more and more intrigued by birds. There are three reasons for our increased interest: we’re gearing up for the Great Backyard Bird Count in February, we’ve seen new birds at our feeders, and we’ve been watching nest cams! On these down days requiring a little extra rest we’ve watched this hummingbird nest cam in California and this eagle cam in Florida and been fascinated by the lives of these two (very different) bird families.
Obviously in nature study the goal is to be out in nature in direct contact with the items you are studying, but these live streaming videos enable us to watch events that would be impossible otherwise. We’ve watched the baby hummingbirds politely excrete wastes over the edge of the nest, how often the momma has to feed those babies and how she does it. We exclaimed as we watched Daddy eagle drop off a fish for his eaglets and their mom. The interest spurred by watching these bird families led to checking out more books at the library!
I had my children pick their favorite from our backyard birds and create a notebook page this week. I love setting them free to notebook as they choose and watching them make the work their own. You can download a free coloring book from Cornell with great line drawings. I like the images but not the questions, so they colored the image, cut it out, and pasted it onto their notebook page of choice. Then they added the details that interested them.
Composer study and our first try at SQUILT
In Harmony Fine Arts our composer of the month is Mozart. We listen to his music during quiet time each day. I’ve been wanting to try the SQUILT technique from Mary at Homegrown Learners and have them really focus on a piece of music. (This post explains the basics of Super Quiet UnInterrupted Listening Time.) She posted a new SQUILT lesson on Mozart yesterday so it was the perfect time to try it.
SQUILT was a great addition to our fine arts studies using HFA! I plan for SQUILT to become a regular part of our week using one of the songs from our composer of the month. Mary’s downloadable SQUILT form was a perfect fit for my ten year old piano-lesson-loving daughter, but I gave my son a sheet of plain paper to draw on.
Mary’s advice on younger or more wiggly children–to allow them to move around during the music and draw on plain paper–was helpful for my seven year old son. If I said “You must sit still and not move and then write words on this paper in these squares” I would turn his happy, open attitude about our classical music studies into dread.
I did learn one thing with our first go-round: my silly son wanted to make faces (albeit to the tempo) to entertain his sister, so we’ll be facing opposite directions or have our eyes closed next time!
And just for fun…
The week ended with a little fun in the snow. I dare an adult to watch a kid flying down a hill on a saucer sled and not join in. I had to jump on a sled and try it out…I laughed the whole way down but I think I’ll have bruises to show for it!
In case you missed it:
I shared a spur-of-the-moment simple hands-on math activity with odd and even numbers. The concept and vocabulary clicked for my seven year old. (You know, that same little boy that made faces during our classical music selection?) He loves (and needs) hands-on learning and asked to play the same odd-even game several times this week.
Thank you to the wonderful hostesses with fun link-ups on Fridays. Be sure to join the fun and see what other homeschoolers are up to!
Hands-On Math: Even and Odd
My son understands math best when the teaching is hands-on. I was working on math concepts with him today and trying to explain odd and even numbers. I was using a number chart but didn’t see the light bulb going off. The bowl of cough drops on the counter (can you tell a cold and flu have gone through our house?) caught my eye and I grabbed a handful.
“Let’s divide these between us,” I said. And for each word in silly sentences I made up we each took one cough drop and added it to a pile in front of us.
Oh, look! One is left over. We can’t divide it evenly so it’s an odd number!
This time we both get the same amount! It can be divided evenly so it is an even number!
It’s ridiculously simple. I’m noticing that even though I tend to look for more complicated procedures first, many things that work are simple (like how he learned coin recognition). The concept and vocabulary clicked in his head, and he thought it was fun and asked to play again and again. We took turns grabbing handfuls of cough drops and guessing if it would be odd or even.
Have you stumbled upon any simple hands-on math teaching strategies I can use with my first grader?
Homeschooling Through The Flu: Three Things We Do To Cope
Before I forget, be sure to enter my giveaway of a Heritage History CD!
My daughter has been sick with the flu all week. An illness in one of my children does throw a wrench in my homeschool plan, especially since we combine as many subjects as possible. It doesn’t mean I give up on everything, though! We do a whole lot of adjusting and end up learning quite a bit along the way. Here are my three steps for keeping on learning when someone isn’t feeling 100%, and what we were able to accomplish this week.
#1 Set up a comfortable spot
In our house when someone is ill I institute “The Sick Couch.” What is the sick couch, you ask? Well, I cover the couch with blankets and pillows and the sick child is entitled to lounging on it all day and eating their meals on a tray. It has several benefits–it gives them some special perks to enjoy and encourages them to rest, not to mention it does keep at least some of the germs in one area.
For subjects we do together little brother and I met with the feverish big sister near (but not too close!) the sick couch and found we were still able to learn quite a bit. I recommend having supplies in an easy-to-move caddy (ours are from Target’s dollar section) and making sure everyone has a clipboard. These don’t come in handy just when someone is sick–they’re also great for school by the Christmas tree or out in the fresh air or while camping.
#2 Work in spurts
Be flexible and time your studies appropriately. If she was feeling particularly down or in need of more medicine I would just let her rest. Whenever she felt up to it we’d do something that required a little focus, stopping whenever necessary. So instead of working to finish our schoolwork in the early hours of the day we worked in spurts all throughout the day and it really added up.
#3 Be flexible in subject matter and delivery style
This isn’t the time to practice grammar or long division, but there are many subjects and ways to learn that do make sense. Even when one of the kids isn’t feeling well they can listen to a story read aloud. We use good literature as the starting point for all our studies, so we can touch on main subjects easily.
It is a great time to fit in the “extras” you might not have time for in a typical week of reading, writing, arithmetic, and extracurricular activities. Take the time for all the reading aloud you would like to do on more hectic weeks. Fellow fans of Charlotte Mason can spend extra time on artist and composer studies. And the educational games you just don’t feel like tackling after a full school day fit nicely.
Here’s the rundown of what we accomplished during a fever-filled week:
- We enjoyed our current much-loved audio book from the Little House series (Little Town on the Prairie).
- We read American Kids in History: Pioneer Days and learned how to tie a square knot
- We finished up our study of invertebrates. A Christmas gift of the Smithsonian Natural History book (thanks Aunt Alice!) gave us hours of eye candy reviewing all the invertebrate groups we’d studied so far. We spent the extra time to watch YouTube videos of the amazing things an octopus can do. This one really blew our minds and we had to watch it several times and share with Dad:
- We use (and love!) Harmony Fine Arts. Using the ebook on my tablet we could click through and do picture study right from the couch. We also read about our composer of the month in Lives of the Musicians and listened to his music during rest periods.
- Believe it or not we also did nature study from the couch! Our focus area is birds so we read from the Burgess Bird Book and our Birds of Maine Field Guide, watched videos and listened to song clips from All About Birds, and completed a coloring page from Cornell (using it like a notebook page to record what we’d learned) all from a warm and cozy spot by the fire.
- We broke out some of the new games the kids had received for Christmas. (You’ve Been Sentenced and Catan Junior were the favorites.)
- From her “sick couch” my daughter also worked on illustrating her recent Write Shop story and wrote a letter to a friend.
Not only was I happy to be moving forward in our studies, especially since we’d only had two solid days back after a long Christmas break, but I think it kept cabin fever at bay for all of us. Engaging our minds and having something to focus on was actually a blessing throughout a long week inside our own four walls. Now if little brother or I succumb to the flu I may have more opportunities to perfect my “homeschooling while sick” technique!
Thank you to the wonderful hostesses with fun link-ups on Fridays. Be sure to join the fun and see what other homeschoolers are up to!
Heritage History Giveaway!
This giveaway is now closed.
The winner, chosen using RANDOM.ORG, is Sarah.
Congratulations, Sarah!
The kind folks at Heritage History have offered to send one of my readers a free library or curriculum CD. I wrote a full review of Heritage History detailing what you’ll find on a Heritage History CD and how we’re using it in our homeschool. The short description is that you’ll find a CD chock full of old-fashioned living history books formatted for any of today’s e-readers. The curriculum CDs also have maps, timelines, and other items so they can function as a stand-alone curriculum. We’re using (and loving!) the book selections from our Early America library CD on both an iPad and a Kindle.
How to enter
Simply leave a comment on this post to be entered in a drawing to win your choice of CD from Heritage History. U.S. or military addresses only. This giveaway is open until Wednesday, January 16th, 3:00pm EST.
If you don’t win, there’s still some good news. Until January 31st you can use the discount code SCHOOLRM to receive the Early America library CD for free with the purchase of any curriculum CD. Simply place a curriculum CD and the Early America Library in your shopping cart and apply the discount code to deduct the price of the Early America CD.
Linking to Hip Homeschool Moms
Still Learning During Break…and a Little Schedule Adjustment Makes a Big Difference
We had a terrific holiday break, and I hope you all enjoyed some wonderful time with family and friends. If you were smart you didn’t enjoy as much fudge as I did. Luckily we finally got the snow my kids have been wishing for, so I also had to do some shoveling!
More than one snowfall occurred over break and we took full advantage. My opinion is if it’s going to be cold we might as well have snow–it’s pretty and lots of fun for kids (and dogs!).
I put aside our formal curriculum during December to focus on Christmas activities (which still involved lots of learning), with a plan for nothing but friends, family and fun from the week before Christmas up until the new year. The part I love is that we just can’t stop learning!
Nature study has become something that occurs just naturally (pardon the pun) for our family! We found tracks to identify in the fresh snowfall and new-to-us birds to look up in my Christmas gift–the Birds of Maine field guide.
We also met (and fell in love with) my brother-in-law’s Turkish girlfriend and asked her a million questions about her country and culture. Luckily she’s patient and loved us right back so hopefully she didn’t mind. The homeschooler in me chuckled at how much we were learning on our vacation!
On New Year’s Eve I was far too tired to think about staying up until midnight. Here’s a trick I’ve used before: use time zones to cheat. We rang in the New Year with London. At 7:00 pm we toasted while watching the fireworks and listening to Big Ben on the BBC.
We also opened our 2012 time capsule. Last year I typed up a quick questionnaire with things like height and weight, favorite shows and activities, and resolutions for the new year. We rolled them up and put them in a paper towel tube and packed them in with our Christmas decorations (so I wouldn’t forget about them…not that I forget things like that…). We had several giggles reading over them. Oh, and I won the award for most weight gained. I wish I was kidding.
We had a lot of fun over the holidays, and the change was long enough that we were ready to jump back into our regular routine. The break was also a good time for me to evaluate things. One area I wanted to address was our morning start time, which seemed to be later than desirable on too many days.
As I read Charlotte Mason’s writings I was reminded that my habits must be in order if I want to pass on good habits to my children. Some self-reflection helped me notice I sometimes get lost on my computer or throw in a load of laundry or do other things and neglect to get myself ready on time. My daughter also takes longer to “beautify” herself (her word choice!) than when she was younger, so she had to make some adjustments to her morning. She and I brainstormed and came up with a workable plan.
I set a time for myself that I must get in the shower and this begins everyone’s “get ready” routine. Sounds simple, but it was necessary–I had embraced the flexibility of homeschooling a little too much! The other change was that in our previous schedule we had breakfast and watched Student News before heading upstairs to get ready for the day, then met back downstairs for school. With the new plan we’ll be getting ourselves ready earlier and then meeting for breakfast and the news once we’re all dressed. Then it’s easy to hop directly into our work!
We’ve had three mornings to try it out, and I must say the mornings are running more smoothly and we’re starting promptly–which leads to finishing our work and all of us having extra time in the afternoon to pursue our interests. I’ll let you know how I do at sticking to this new routine until it’s a habit!
Thank you to the wonderful hostesses with fun link-ups on Fridays. Be sure to join the fun and see what other homeschoolers are up to!
Hi, I'm Heidi and I homeschool my two sweet kids. I want them to know that learning is an exciting lifelong adventure! We love great books, unit studies, notebooking, lapbooking, and hands-on learning.
