 |
| The Eiffel Tower in our basement! After this, Elise saw Eiffel Towers all over town, especially when any radio towers were in the vicinity. Also, one of the good things about homeschooling is that you can do it in your swimsuit or your nightgown. |
This is not us.
Others think they would spend the entire day trying to force spelling and subtraction on their kids and generally making the whole house miserable.
This is also not us (most of the time).
Still others can't imagine spending that much time with their kiddos, and their kids spending that much time with their siblings, and believe that everyone in the house would suffer if such a thing occurred.
This is definitely not us.
Homeschooling, for us, is a grand combination of spending lots of time together, doing cool projects and activities, studying what we want (sometimes) and, oh yes, worksheets. We also enjoy sleeping in when we need to (those of us who are allowed to, anyway), participating in extra extra-curriculers since we're not too overbooked, and visiting the library several times a week, it seems.
Many people ask how its going, so here goes:
 |
| Kalina's first day of Kindergarten, which soon became Kindergarten/1st grade. |
We began the day the neighbor kids went back to school, because the kids were officially bored and squirrely from summer break. It was clearly time to do something. On our first day, I had all kinds of wonderful systems in place: systems for helping the girls keep track of the schoolwork and house work (even for Elise--we didn't want her to feel left out when it came to cleaning the sink!), systems for helping me keep track of assignments, systems for storing the stacks of books. I spent a lot of time managing the systems, a lot of time explaining to Kalina why we were doing what we were doing, and the rest of the time leading Kalina and sometimes Elise through various activities. We'd started with fun stuff: studying the book Madeline with help from a simple curriculum perfect for the girls' ages.
We learned about France, health, number pairs, art and much more. We read a lot of fun books while the baby napped. Yay, homeschooling! Look, I'm doing it! By the second week, we introduced some regular math activities, and began Language Arts. It got less fun.
 |
| Elise's first day of actual preschool (not homeschool). |
My nicely set up systems started to fall into "occasional" use, as they were hard to stick to (babies tend to throw a wrench in well-laid plans) and were not always convenient enough. I was disappointed, but not surprised: I am less organized than I look. I was glad I had purchased the system supplies from a dollar bin.
We took our first field trip to the St. Louis Arch and its pioneer museum after constructing a covered wagon out of a baby gate and loading it with supplies we would bring. Having forgotten to pack medical supplies and any food other than brownies and ice cream, the girls wouldn't have made it past the neighborhood.
Look, I'm homeschooling! And we're going to learn! I became a bit overzealous, and tried to teach a million things at once. I began to discover that there's a limit to the learning even a bright 6-year-old can do, and tried my best to back off. But it's all so exciting! We covered weather this month, and managed to track daily weather patterns for almost two weeks, including during a tornado warning. We tried to add plenty of activities to our worksheets, as although Kalina learns well from books, she is only 6, and her sister is newly 4. The girls therefore twirled around the family room like tornadoes to music that sounded like rain and thunder.
 |
| We happen to have a large, famous structure near us: the Arch! We visited it instead of the actual Eiffel Tower. |
October.
By October, we had found some homeschool friends to meet up with somewhat regularly, plus Kalina had joined American Heritage Girls. Preschool activities were in full swing, and Naomi was still perfectly happy taking two naps a day. We learned about Carnival of the Animals (even Naomi pretended to be a lion!) and then attended a Symphony performance, and did a mini-unit on instruments and sound. We learned about maps, and studied trees for a week (who doesn't study trees in October?) before getting a jump start American history to correspond with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, because there's a lot of American history before the pilgrims even at the kindergarten/first grade level. We also made it to several homeschool library programs that were enjoyed by all.
 |
| Kalina learning with a number balance. She learns differently than many people. |
We all loved studying pilgrims (and Native Americans, and Christopher Columbus), thanks especially to the help of a couple books Kalina latched onto, plus a certain "pocket" book of folded construction paper that simply made everything more fun. Add to it the Magic Treehouse book about the era, the corresponding children's museum exhibit, and the national holiday, and we enjoyed the month quite a bit
I also realized that some tweaking was in order. The comprehensive Language Arts curriculum that I was so excited about ("I won't even have to think about it, I'll just open the book!") was a bit too comprehensive, such that Kalina was ahead in reading and comprehension, but needed a better introduction to spelling and handwriting (it's a second-grade-feels-like-first-grade course). And our math program, which I was trying to do cheaply without the teacher's guide, was boring and repetitive (probably more my fault than anything else--but we clearly needed something different). We tweaked, and things improved until we got to double-digit subtraction, which is a different story.
 |
| A cold, windy, fun trip to Cahokia Mounds to learn about a really fascinating Native American culture. |
I asked Kalina what she wanted to study leading up to Christmas, thinking we'd keep it simple. She chose Jesus, which I altered a bit into an over-arching study of the Bible, because I can't actually keep anything simple. Plus, if you type in "homeschool" and "Bible," you can find thousands of really cool crafts and activities to teach even about even the minor prophets, and it's all free out of the goodness of peoples' hearts. A song sung by chipmunks helped the girls memorize the books of the New Testament, and they had fun stumbling over the minor prophets in the Old Testament. A little too much fun--Habbakuk became Huckabadoxin, for example. We also visited the nature center to learn about winter animals and about woodpeckers, both of which we really enjoyed.
It was a mostly lovely month, but got a bit busy toward the end, as it did for the entire Christian world. Even the fact that another homeschool family had admitted, "We basically take the month of December off" barely kept me from dragging Kalina to the bus stop a couple days before our Christmas break was planned to start. Instead, we saved the rest of our Jesus materials for Easter and limped through math and language arts.
 |
| Our Russia work, including an original Kandinsky imitation by Kalina, and some Faberge imitation originals, too. And a snowman Elise made. |
By now, we have curriculum and routines that work for us (although no magical systems), good friends we see regularly, a homeschool gymnastics class that doesn't mess too much with Naomi's nap to look forward to, and enough other programs and activities and such that I can't picture us getting bored anytime soon. Because two weeks off over Christmas were hard to come back from, we spent the first two weeks in January studying Russia and playing with my Russian souvenirs. Next, we'll be embarking on a study of the human body, complete with tons of activities, hardly any worksheets and some life-size human body cutouts--perfect.
Our current system of learning is to practice math, handwriting and language arts daily, and study one other subject for anywhere from a week to a month at a time. It works really well, as we all love diving into a "fun" subject, which is usually motivation enough for Kalina to stay on task with her drudge work (that isn't always drudgery, but often seems like it compared to determining how much oxygen one's lungs can hold). We make regular attempts at art, music (piano lessons help), character development and PE, and make chores, socialization, crafts and playtime priorities as well. And it works!
Elise, by the way, has learned how to either just rest patiently, join in a bit, or do her own thing while we homeschool. These are all important lessons, plus the amount of actual instruction is probably less than 45 minutes throughout the day (the rest is activities that Elise enjoys, or crafts and worksheets that need about 1 minute of explanation). She has become, of her own acclaim, "Supergirl," and "Crafter girl," and in this way has discovered superpowers in self-entertainment and gluing things onto paper. I am also learning to incorporate preschool learning, which Kalina also enjoys.
Amazingly (to me, but probably not to anyone else), Elise is actually getting excited about learning, and has been practicing writing all the letters of the alphabet, plus she practices reading whenever I ask her to and even sometimes requests more reading practice. She's quite good at reading, and was the only one in her preschool class who could read the words I spelled out using alphabet Cheez-Its the other day.
 |
| Babies love sunglasses! |
 |
| I didn't want to get too close lest I spoil the moment, but Naomi, wearing a toy chef's hat, is learning how to slice wooden food. |
Naomi also continues to learn words, especially from her big sisters. "Who wants graham crackers for a snack?" I ask. "Me!" says Elise. "Me!" says Kalina. "Me!" says Naomi. She can also say, in baby language, things like raisin, bird, water, bubble, balloon and bath, including sometimes putting two thoughts together, such as when she says "rai," which means raisin, and points to her tray: "Raisin here, now." She meows, woofs and roars very well now. As I mentioned before, Naomi adores books and being read to, even consenting to listen to the entirety of some of her board books in one sitting. She loves finding the animals and making their corresponding noises. I think we could do that all day long, if it weren't for the pesky big sisters getting in the way (Naomi's thoughts, not mine! :) ).
For the sake of posterity, I should also note that Naomi recently had to relearn how to sleep through the night, preferring instead to wake up in the middle, call Matt or I in, and slowly, slowly fall back to sleep with us beside her, preferably standing. Now, she only requires us once, in the 5:00 hour to tell her it's not yet morning. She also likes the door left open, and possibly a nightlight. Whatever it takes, right? I guess Mommy and Daddy still have a lot of learning to do, too.
