Tag Archives: homeschooling

March 12, 2013 · 6:50 pm

The Twenty-Second Week

The blog hosting switcheroo is complete so I can finally post my update for last week!

Lillia’s Adventures

This week we finally finished up our study of Ancient Egypt and we’re looking forward to moving on to the Far East! Lillia had a good week. Because I’m already living in the next week, I’m not going to give details of what we did, but I do want to share some beautiful artwork made by our very own resident artist, Lillia.

A self-portait using pastels.

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An interesting study in pattern-making using watercolors.

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And, my favorite, a beautiful self-portrait using acrylics.

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I hung them up on a big, blank wall in the kitchen and they really brightened up the space.

Zane’s Adventures

Last week Zane was also very involved in artistic pursuits. He made all sorts of interesting sculptures from random household objects. For example, he built this interesting tower using the leftover breakfast dishes. The radio was also involved — maybe it was some sort of art installation.

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And, this is a lovely creation made of objects he scavenged from the refrigerator.

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This week Zane developed a real love of green smoothies. I can’t say I’m disappointed.

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He played in his room quite a bit. We recently moved this shelf in there, and now he has lots of books and toys at his disposal (and out of my living room). He most often wants company. He even pats his little hand on the floor to show us where to sit.

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And, lastly, he sang constantly — in the shower, while he was playing — and it was always “Jingle Bells.”

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February 23, 2013 · 3:34 pm

Creativity & Education

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, especially in an educational context. Today, while I was sitting in my car waiting for Lillia to come out of ballet class, I happened to catch part of NPR’s TED Radio Hour. This week’s episode, called “Building a Better Classroom,” featured Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned author and speaker who focuses on education, creativity, and innovation. Although his talks are several years old, I had never heard them before, and I was profoundly moved by some of the things he said about our public education system and its relationship to individual creativity and intelligence.

Despite my overall confidence in the success of our homeschooling experience, I do occasionally question my decision to reject the current educational paradigm, in favor of something different and unknown. Hearing Ken Robinson’s criticisms of a system that I feel is more harmful than beneficial to my child was both reassuring and enlightening. I will not go into all of the details of his talks (there are links to both of them at the end of this post), but I will highlight some of the points that really struck me as important to remember.

In his first TED Talk, in 2006, Ken Robinson discussed our educational system’s obsession with always having the right answer. This is clearly visible in the high value we place on test scores, from the standardized tests our children take in elementary school, to the SAT’s they take to get into college. The focus on always being “right,” to the exclusion of all other possibilities, leaves no room for experimentation and innovation. By the time our children are teenagers the creativity has been thoroughly taught out of them. But, there is much to gain from being wrong, or at least from being willing to be wrong. Ken Robinson says,

What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original…And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this — he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

I see this in myself, as I am certainly a product of this broken educational system. And, it always becomes a matter of self-blame because our culture won’t admit that the formula is wrong. Maybe instead of failing miserably at Algebra, I could have been pursuing things that really interested me, like literature, history, music, and art. Our educational system is based on the assumption that everyone will go to college, and that we need to standardize everyone’s education to fit that ultimate goal. There is little to be gained by this method, and it mostly results in a lot of square pegs in round holes. Instead of creating an atmosphere where individuals can follow their own passions, desires, and talents — their own “paths” — we try to force everyone to travel the same road. It’s really no mystery why there are so many unhappy and unfulfilled adults. In order to change this, Ken Robinson says, we have to shift away from an educational model based on mechanization, and focus on educating our children as individual human beings. He says,

So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

In closing, I want to share a poem by W.B. Yeats, which Ken Robinson quoted at the end of his second TED Talk:

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Let us always remember, as educators and parents, to tread softly on the dreams that are spread out before us.

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February 22, 2013 · 3:11 pm

The Twenty-First Week

This week was vacation week in our district, but we chose to homeschool because I didn’t feel we really needed a break right now, and Lillia had things she wanted to do…

Lillia’s Adventures

ancient egypt unearthed coverAlthough this was supposed to be our last week studying Ancient Egypt, Lillia has requested an additional week in order to finish up Gods and Pharaohs. I also found a really great DVD set at the library that she seems to really enjoy. In fact, she always wants to watch extra episodes. It’s called “Ancient Egypt Unearthed,” featuring Dr. Zahi Hawass, and you can buy it on Amazon for only $11.98. I think that’s a spectacularly good deal for the vast amount of information it contains (you can also rent it from Netflix). Dr. Hawass may be a controversial character, but he has accomplished quite a lot in his career and has done much for the study of Egyptology. Here is a list of episodes included on the discs, in case anyone is curious or wants to know for planning purposes:
Disc One
Episode 1, “Chaos and Kings”
Episode 2, “Pyramid: The Resurrection Machine”
Episode 3, “Age of Gold”
Episode 4, “Deities and Demons”
Episode 5, “Mummies: Into the Afterlife”
Disc Two
Episode 6, “Egypt’s Ten Greatest Discoveries”
Episode 7, “Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen”
Episode 8, “Why Ancient Egypt Fell”
Episode 9, “Women Pharaohs”

I haven’t written much about our cursive handwriting program in weeks, mostly because Lillia has just been plugging away at it and there hasn’t been much drama. But, I just have to share her work from this past week. When she wants to, she can write beautifully. I know I say this a lot, but I am so proud of her. (The doodles are a bonus!)

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We received Life of Fred: Farming and have made our way through chapter four already. As Fred‘s author announced in the second chapter, we are now officially done “learning” addition. There will still be lots of addition practice, but there will be no more direct lessons about it. This seems like a milestone of some kind and I am so excited to see what is coming next! In the meantime, I gathered some skip counting “songs” from several sources so that Lillia and I can start working on the multiplication tables. I think that skip counting will help her to understand the larger theory behind multiplication (and give her a mnemonic device to use if she forgets the answer). She already knows the 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s, so we’ll be starting with the 3’s (click here for a PDF of all the songs I plan to use):

Counting by 3’s
(Sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques”)
3, 6, 9, 12
3, 6, 9, 12
15, 18,
15, 18,
21 and 24,
27, 30
33,
36

We’re going to the library this afternoon because Lillia is dying to read the last book in the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. Lillia reads way above grade level so it can be difficult to find books that are challenging to read but still appropriate, content-wise. She also just finished up the Kane Chronicles, a series built around Egyptian mythology by the same author. If you have an above-grade level reader, I highly recommend any of Rick Riordan’s books for young adults.

Zane’s Adventures

Because he’s so interested in cooking I’ve been teaching Zane how to make breakfast. Here he is stirring his oatmeal.

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And, making my coffee 🙂

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He even helped Lillia make scrambled eggs!

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Mama’s Adventures

I thought it might be nice to include my own experiences as an educator in my weekly update. After all, I’m learning, too!

When I met with the homeschooling moms last week I expressed to them how difficult the first half of the year had been for us. With a gentle, yet knowing, smile one of them said to me, “Well, you needed to decompress.” Ah ha! So there is a word for the hell (pardon my language) that was our first semester! Though I try to refrain from preaching on this blog, I’m going to pass on some words of advice that I wish I had gotten back in the summer when I was up to my ears in curriculum materials and trying to plan out the most perfect homeschool year ever — if you are a new homeschooler coming from a formal school setting, you need to set aside at least a couple of months to “decompress.”

You won’t know what I’m talking about until it happens. You can plan things but you need to know that most of what you plan won’t happen, and you need to be okay with that. You can ignore this advice and plow ahead, and you will find that it will be an uphill battle all the way. But, if you take the opportunity to slow down and just be with your child, you will be sparing yourself a lot of frustration, heartache, and doubt. One day you will discover that your child, who couldn’t get through 10 minutes of homeschooling at first, will be sailing through her work like an old pro. For us this day has finally come, and I am so, so proud of Lillia. I give this advice from the very bottom of my heart, and I hope that my words will be meaningful and helpful to someone else.

I hope you all had a good week, whether you were educating or vacationing…or both 🙂

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February 8, 2013 · 8:00 am

The Eighteenth & Nineteenth Weeks

Here I am again with a two-week combo post. Ideally, I would really like to get back to my weekly updating schedule, but I am also in school (as of last month) and I find that most of my free time is being co-opted by schoolwork, mostly reading. So, I can’t promise that I will always be on time, but I am going to try and post every week, even if it’s just a short summary. Without further ado…

Lillia’s Adventures

pyramid by david macaulayFor the past two weeks we have been working our way through David Macaulay’s book, Pyramid. Macaulay, an illustrator and professor of art at the Rhode Island School of Design, traveled to Egypt to study the landscape and the pyramids in preparation for the writing of his wonderful book. Pyramid is a fictional story based on the real-life construction of a large pyramid on the Giza plateau. It was so fascinating to learn how the Ancient Egyptians were able to plan and carry out building on such a large scale. Their innovation and creativity in solving some difficult problems (such as how to move very, very heavy blocks of stone) is truly inspiring. The dedication of the workers to their task is also quite remarkable. We also watched an old PBS documentary about the pyramids, hosted by Macaulay himself, which you can watch for free on YouTube.

Last week, in Jacob’s Ladder, we read “The Dog and His Reflection,” and then discussed the consequences and implications of his actions. We talked about the “price” that the dog paid for his greed, and made a chart of the different qualities that the dog possessed, attributing both positive and negative aspects to each one. This week we read “The Fisherman and His Wife” and then discussed the consequences of both the wife’s demands and the husband’s willingness to act on them.

Lillia also started to work on a new “book,” based on the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. She’s been diligently typing away during her free time. I highly recommend allowing children to use the computer or a word processor for writing exercises or creative writing, especially if they are resistant writers. We created this work space for Lillia in her closet (which I blogged about elsewhere). Now she has a designated area to do independent work, and some privacy from grabbing hands (little brothers).

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This week we finished Life of Fred: Edgewood, and I am scrambling to order the next book for the coming week. Thankfully, the supplier ships very promptly. This wasn’t my favorite book in the Life of Fred series. The educational content was superb but I felt that the plot of the story was a bit contrived and rambling. This is not a huge criticism, but just something I noticed. Lillia can now add five digit numbers together, and she really enjoys it. When asked to add 83,640 to 47,257, she exclaimed, “I love extreme math problems!” Edgewood also dealt extensively with percent and averages. I feel that the exercises are getting more difficult, and I often have to talk Lillia through them. But, I have no complaints since that is why we are using this curriculum!

There is a new homeschooling group in Walpole, which meets at the library on Thursdays. I’m interested in going, but also hesitant. We’re kind of a self-contained unit, and I’m a major introvert (it takes a chisel to get me out of the house). Also, Lillia gets plenty of socialization going to the school twice a week, dance classes twice a week, and playdates at least once a week. Still, maybe it would be nice to network a bit. Do any of you take part in homeschooling groups or co-ops? Do your kids enjoy it, or is it more for you (the educator)? I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Zane’s Adventures

Last week Zane was really interested in cleaning…

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…everything.

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And, he got a haircut!

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This week Zane has been building forts,

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assisting with closet renovations,

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and, nurturing this little baby doll (these “Magic Nursery” dolls were mine as a kid, so they’re at least 20 years old but in remarkably good shape for their age).

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January 25, 2013 · 12:52 pm

The Sixteenth & Seventeenth Weeks

I feel a bit sheepish today, as I just realized I never finished my post for last week! I got so caught up in things that I never managed to get it done. So, this week will be a combination of the past two weeks. I’m going to try to include info about both kids each week. I know Zane is not doing any formal “schooling,” but his learning is important, too, and I want to share it. But, first…

Lillia’s Adventures

secrets of the sphinx coverOur unit on Egypt is coming along nicely. In the past couple of weeks we’ve read about the discovery of metal and the implications of that discovery for tool-making, the building of temples and pyramids, and Egyptian shipbuilding. I was able to find some great books at the library to supplement the history spine we are using. Last week we read Secrets of the Sphinx, by James Cross Giblin, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Although it is a picture book, it includes a great deal of information about the building of the sphinx, including the controversy surrounding the nature of its construction (due to the uneven weathering of the body). In my opinion, the author should have spent less time discussing Edgar Cayce and his theory that the survivors of Atlantis built the sphinx and the pyramids. The author does eventually discount this theory, but at points he seems to be trying to make it sound plausible. Other than that, I think this is a wonderful, information-rich book about the sphinx and the pyramids at Giza. One thing I was surprised to discover is that the sphinx was once brightly painted in shades of blue, yellow, and red! It must have been strikingly beautiful when it was new.

pharaohsBoatLgThis week we read Pharaoh’s Boat, by David Weitzman. This picture book tells the story of the discovery of Cheops’s funerary boat buried next to his pyramid in a limestone pit. The disassembled cedar wood boat was in near-perfect condition, despite being placed in the ground almost 5,000 years ago! It took ten years to complete the reconstruction, but the boat is now fully restored and on display at Giza. A second boat has been discovered at Giza, though it is not as well-preserved as the first. As of 2011, the dig to recover the pieces was underway. My favorite part of this story was actually the biographical information about the restorer, Ahmed Youseff Moustafa. Though well educated, he was not taken seriously when he first approached the Egyptian Antiquities Service looking for work as a restorer. He pestered his superiors endlessly, and finally someone gave in and gave him basically a pile of tiny bits of pottery and ivory to reassemble. Imagine their surprise when he returned with a beautiful little box, which is now known as “The Akhenaten Box” and is on display in the Cairo Museum!

We’re still making progress in our other subjects. Lillia has now made it to the letter “O” in cursive. She had a pretty big meltdown earlier this week when she had to write the word “and” in cursive for one of her exercises. But, I patiently talked her through it, and she was eventually able to do it correctly. This is part of the work that we are doing, and we are fortunate to have the time and space to do it.

In Life of Fred: Edgewood, we are learning about percents and bar graphs. We are also doing word problems. Here is an example (Lillia was able to solve this problem by counting by 5’s):

If Fred can jog at the rate of 5 miles per hour, how long would it take for him to jog 40 miles?

Next week I’m hoping to introduce some supplemental multiplication materials. Homeschooling presents an interesting paradox: we have a great deal of flexibility regarding the what/when/how of teaching, which means we don’t have to “teach to the test” like they do in public school – HOWEVER – we are required to show progress at the end of the year, and one way to do that is to have her take the test! So, we are benefiting greatly in some ways by eschewing the need to teach concepts just to pass the test…but we are also expected to pass it. I find myself trying to keep pace with the public school curriculum, despite my general abhorrence of it. I have no doubt that Life of Fred will present multiplication in a beautiful, organic way, but I’m afraid we won’t get there in time for this spring’s test, and I’m sure there will be multiplication questions on it. If anyone has any advice about this, I’d love to hear it. Or, if you want to tell me to chill out and not lose sight of the reasons that brought us to homeschooling in the first place, that would be good, too 🙂

Zane’s Adventures

Zane has been really interested in this baby doll lately.

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He kept gently placing her in front of the refrigerator and then talking to her at length about the button on the door handle. The button doesn’t do anything, but it obviously means something to him!

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He also got a chance to see the inside of Damian’s computer, thanks to a technical difficulty.

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And, let’s not forget the face cream sensory extravaganza! (Not really part of the curriculum, but…)

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January 17, 2013 · 3:52 pm

Personality Type & Homeschooling

I just spent a great deal of time learning more about my personality and temperament, using a variety of sorters and tests. I also had Lillia take a version of the MBTI test for kids because I thought it might be useful when planning curriculum and the structure of our day. It turns out that she is an ENFP.

Well, what does that mean?

ENFP stands for Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving. This type of person likes to be with others, is energetic, individualistic, and impulsive. They are also caring and empathetic. A short list of characteristics for an ENFP child might look like this:

– Oblivious or forgetful of rules.
– Working on many projects at once, but not necessarily completing any of them.
– Messy and unconcerned with cleaning up.
– Loud (without realizing it)!
– Indecisive.
– Often unaware or unconcerned about time and schedules.
– Rebellious, especially if they are asked to do something.

Lillia’s personality type is difficult to “teach,” because they are so easily distracted and they resist being asked to perform tasks, especially repetitive ones (like exercises, rote memorization, etc). I, on the other hand, am an INFJ. I like to learn things in an orderly fashion, and I will avoid conflict at all costs so I am much more likely to comply with demands. I am, in many ways, the opposite of Lillia. This makes it particularly challenging to create a learning environment that will fit both of our needs.

While I don’t have any particularly inspired ideas for dealing with our personality differences, in terms of the educational environment, it does help me to better understand (and appreciate) some of my daughter’s more challenging traits. As my husband says, our strengths work in tandem with our weaknesses — in fact, they are often one and the same.

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January 11, 2013 · 3:00 pm

The Fifteenth Week

We’re fully back in the swing of things this week, equipped with my newly developed zen attitude toward homeschooling.

We finally started our unit on Egypt! We’re using Chapter 3 of Roy Burrell’s Oxford First Ancient History as our history spine*, supplemented with lots of books we checked out from the library.61NJ9FMZF9L._SS500_This week we read selections from Gods and Pharaohs by Geraldine Harris. This book, beautifully illustrated by David O’Connor, provides a very good overview of Egyptian mythology. There are stories about the various gods and goddesses included, and I really like how Harris interjects occasionally to note that many of the myths we have come to see as “complete” are actually cobbled together from many different sources. For example, when she discusses the creation myths of ancient Egypt, she includes many different versions of the story, each with a slightly different twist. I saw this book on Amazon some time ago, but I wasn’t sure it was worth purchasing. After reviewing the library copy, I think it would be a wonderful addition to our collection.

In Life of Fred: Edgewood, the title’s hero, Fred Gauss, has been forced to go on a vacation of sorts to the remote town of Edgewood, Kentucky. On the bus ride to Edgewood he is teaching us about many things, including this week’s lessons on double-digit addition. Lillia already learned this skill last year in second grade, but it is good to have the review. And, there is so much learning going on within each lesson that it doesn’t feel repetitive. For example, Lillia learned to solve the following equation this week: x + 8 = 13. She, correctly, determined that x = 5. It may not seem difficult to us adults, but the fact that Fred’s author, Stanley Schmidt, is already including simple algebra in his elementary curriculum means that when Lillia encounters algebra later in her education it won’t seem so foreign. As always, I am enormously pleased with the Life of Fred books.

We did another lesson from the Mensa for Kids website. This time we learned about the different levels of classification (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species). We learned a couple of useful rhymes to help us remember the them in order. My favorite is:

Keep Ponds Clean Or frogs Get Sick.

As always the kids keep me (and each other) active! Today they had a blast playing in the tunnel we bought Zane for Christmas. It so interesting to see how very differently they play with any given toy. While Zane is still figuring out how to get his body through the tunnel,

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Lillia is pretending to be a wolf in a cave!

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The most fun they had with it was being in there together 🙂

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For those who might question the legitimacy of taking time to crawl through a tunnel during “school” hours, some studies have shown a correlation between crawling and cognitive development and improved academic outcomes later in a child’s life. Crawling helps to develop balance, proprioception, and even binocular vision. Here is a nice article about crawling by two of my former instructors in early childhood education, Susan Weber and Jane Swain. And, some other great ideas to get your kids crawling, from pediatric occupational therapist Loren Shlaes.

I hope you all had a great week!

*As of today (1/11/13) there is a “very good” used copy of this book selling for about $30 on Amazon! This book can be quite expensive to buy, as it is out of print, and is very popular with Charlotte Mason homeschoolers. I paid $37 from Alibris back in July and thought that was a good deal.

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January 4, 2013 · 1:00 am

The Fourteenth (and a half) Week

I’m just going to call this the 14th and a half week, because it was only three days long. We took a couple of weeks off at the holidays to recuperate and enjoy each other’s company. I wasn’t sure how best to begin after such a long break, but I decided to ease us back into school with a trip to the public library to pick up books for our next unit.

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This week we learned about median averages in Life of Fred: Edgewood. We also finished up our unit on Mesopotamia with a video about the three main cultures: The Sumerians, The Assyrians, and The Babylonians. We are going to be starting our unit on Ancient Egypt next week, and we are both really excited. Lillia has been waiting all year for Egypt.

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We are moving along nicely in our handwriting workbook, and this week’s letters were K, L, and M. L was Lillia’s favorite so far (for obvious reasons!). She has been doing all of her work lately without a single complaint. Part of that is because I have been giving her a lot of time to relax in the morning. We don’t usually start our school work until about 10am. I know that’s pretty late for some people, but it works really well for us. I have time to get everything ready, and she has time to ease into the day.

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With the start of the second half of the school year upon me, I find myself reflecting on the first half. I have learned so much: about myself; about my daughter; about what learning actually looks like; about what helps people and what hinders them. I wouldn’t call what we do “unschooling” because there is certainly an underlying structure to it all. But, I would never apply the words “rigid” or “strict” to our homeschooling experience. It’s not that the work is easy or pointless, it’s just that I have learned to be more fluid, flexible, and organic. Over the past few months I made a real mental shift, and adopted a new paradigm by which I evaluate the effectiveness of what we are doing. If an outsider were to compare our day to the day of Lillia’s peers in public school, it might look like we weren’t accomplishing nearly as much as they are. But, if one were to drop down and look at the things that we are doing, a beautiful and meaningful picture emerges:

Every day Lillia plays with her little brother. She gets to read and draw whenever she wants. She can listen to music. She plays outside when it suits her. She eats when she’s hungry, and sleeps in when she’s tired. She has lots of free time to discover and develop new hobbies. When we go out to the stores, she holds the door for people and says “you’re welcome” when they thank her, and she means it. She seems so happy, and her anxiety and tantrums have virtually disappeared. I never thought that was possible, and just putting it in writing makes me very emotional. Of course there is no way to put a value on these intangible benefits, but sometimes the things that are worth the most can’t be quantified.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season, and I’m looking forward to sharing the second half of the school year with all of you!

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December 30, 2012 · 11:48 am

Field Trip // Prehistory

Today we took a field trip to the Boston Museum of Science to visit the Mammoths & Mastodons exhibit, as part of our studies in Prehistory.

From a press release by the Boston Museum of Science:

BOSTON, October 3, 2012—On Sunday, October 7, 2012, at the New England premiere of Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age at the Museum of Science, Boston visitors will be able to journey back 20,000 years when ice sheets covered large land masses and giant, woolly beasts roamed the frozen north. The 7,500-square-foot traveling exhibit brings to life how these colossal creatures lived and interacted with one another and with early humans.

On exhibit through January 13, 2013, Mammoths and Mastodons offers visitors the opportunity to examine full-scale replicas of massive, long-haired Ice Age mammals and stand face-to-face with skeletons of these great beasts that they can touch and examine up close. The exhibit features some of the oldest art in existence, huge skulls and tusks, weird and wonderful mammoth relatives, and mastodon bones collected by William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) for President Thomas Jefferson’s own collection.

Featured in the exhibit is a replica of Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah), a 40,000-year-old, intact baby mammoth specimen that a Siberian reindeer herder and two of his sons discovered in 2007. According to The Field Museum, who developed the exhibit, Lyuba is, by far, the bestpreserved specimen of her kind and provides researchers with rare insights into the lives and habits of her species. The exhibit includes not only a replica cast of Lyuba’s body, but also CT scans and other scientific evidence that confirm existing theories about her species, as well as new insights.

Mammoths and Mastodons illustrates how despite the creatures’ great size – weighing as much as eight tons with tusks up to 16 feet long – and their ability to adapt, these species still went extinct.

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December 14, 2012 · 12:03 pm

The Fourteenth Week

This is going to be a brief post, as there is a lot going on right now. There’s all the usual holiday stuff plus Lillia is performing in “The Nutcracker” this weekend, so I have been pretty busy washing leotards, putting hair in buns, and driving her back and forth to rehearsals. I’m pretty tired.

But, it’s definitely worth it.

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This week, in Life of Fred: Edgewood, we learned about parallel lines, trapezoids, and rhombuses, and we reviewed sets and functions. We read some stories about Abraham in Stories from the Bible. Lillia was surprised that a woman could have a baby in her nineties. Language arts went well, and Lillia is really starting to put in some effort. It’s amazing what a difference the new books have made. Today (Friday) we had to play catch up since we missed some work earlier in the week due to rehearsal.

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Zane is learning, too! He is really enjoying “drawing” lately. He’s in the “exploratory stage,” so his work is mostly scribbles. If anyone is interested, here is a PDF that describes the various developmental stages of children’s drawings.

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