December 1st is the day that we traditionally begin to celebrate the red & green season of Christmas. Here are a few things we did today:
The kids started opening their Advent calendars. This year, JediBoy has the hard-to-find Lego Castle Advent Calendar, which started with a smirking knight, and BabyGirl has a wooden open-the-door variety with a Hershey kiss in each cubby.
This weekend, I wrapped 24 picture books about Christmas from our collection, and the kids will open one each day. It’s a $2.99 roll of wrapping paper that makes the holiday books seem exciting and new!
This morning, since today is also Jan Brett’s birthday, the holiday book was the fantastic Jan Brett’s Christmas Treasury. We adore this collection of seven great picture books, including The Mitten, The Wild Christmas Reindeer, The Trouble with Trolls, The Christmas Trolls, The Hat, The Twelve Days of Christmas and […]
Original post by piseco
A week of “vacation” around here… which, as most of you homeschooling families know, does not mean there was no learning taking place. I just decided not to pull out anything formally academic and instead revel in the social opportunities this week.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
Again, we failed to have a typical week! What are those, anyway? Monday we were away from home, Tuesday and Wednesday I was grumpy and doing the minimum, Thursday was pretty normal and then Friday was wiped out by a stomach bug. We did manage to sneak in some fun things anyway!
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
Thanks to supportive comments, a good night’s sleep, and a happy, sunny Thursday, we’re all doing a lot better here today. I had to laugh, though, when I came into the living room this morning and saw a mound of books. While I had been coping with my negative emotions, JediBoy was coping in his own way. With “fluff.”
The mound contained 21 Sesame Street picture books, 15 Curious George picture books, 26 Berenstain Bears books, 12 Clifford books, 7 Dora and Diego books, 16 Magic School Bus books, 5 Little Critter books, 3 by Robert Munsch, 3 by Ezra Jack Keats, 8 by Frank Asch, 4 by Kevin Henkes, 27 other miscellaneous picture books (mostly 8×8 paperbacks), and a handful of chapter books (Magic Tree House, Arthur, and Pokemon) - more than 150 books in all, almost entirely fluff! Twaddle! Drivel! And exactly what JediBoy needed to get through the […]
Original post by piseco
As the door banged behind PisecoDad on his way out to work, JediBoy roused from his cozy sleep. His head poked out from the covers. He squinted in the bright, sun-on-snow morning, and he peered around the room to take stock of the situation. Two quietly mumbled words escaped his lips… Buenos dias! …and he promptly fell back asleep.
More Muzzy in action?
Original post by piseco
We’ve just finished week 20, which seems like a lot, doesn’t it? We had a nice week that was a little mixed up, with PisecoDad home on Tuesday, appointments and sports and other interruptions, but we had lots of learning fun as we went.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
The kids love to paint. Today they are using shiny paint - half glue and half tempera paint on aluminum foil. BabyGirl likes to refill her paintbrush often and glop and sloosh the paint onto the foil. JediBoy experiments with designs.
Three or four paintings in, things start to get silly.
Really silly.
I am finally forced to capture the silly monkeys behind bars.
DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. THEY EAT ENOUGH ALREADY.
Original post by piseco
Our second-hand copy of the Spanish Muzzy has only been in our home since last week.
Yesterday, JediBoy was turning on his Nintendo in the van on the way to the doctor for his flu shot (yes, that was one of several bribes to get him to cooperate with the dreaded shot) when I popped the audio cd of Muzzy into the stereo for BabyGirl to hear.
JediBoy turned off his Nintendo to listen to Muzzy.
Original post by piseco
Can I help it if two of the kids’ activities I like to participate in overlapped this week?
Muffin Tin Monday was a themed lunch: exploring your family, your heritage, your ancestry through food.
The Unplug Your Kids challenge word was kitchen.
So we had to have an Unplugged Muffin Tin!
In order to prepare for today’s lunch, JediBoy and I were working even before breakfast. We decided to make homemade Polish egg noodles, or kluski. These were the best part of my Buszi’s homemade chicken noodle soup. One year when I was in college, my mother and I visited my grandmother and I watched her make pie crusts and placek and kluski - and wrote down what she was doing. Before that, I only knew how to help. Now I have my own recipe to follow.
We made the dough before breakfast - two eggs, two cups of flour, […]
Original post by piseco
I feel like our learning times are in a time of transition this month. This week, we finished something major (a math level) and found a new, fun workbook to replace his beloved Classic Stories book. We also picked up a used copy of the BBC’s Spanish course, Muzzy, and started watching that.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
(You have to say the title of this post with a vaguely French faux accent in the dulcet tones of a six-year-old, as in: Mish-i-ohn complet-eh, since that is JediBoy’s current favorite phrase.)
JediBoy wrapped up his studies in Math-U-See Beta today. Gamma is out on the table, patiently waiting for Monday.
Overall, we continue to enjoy this math curriculum. It provides me with a step-by-step structure, so that I don’t worry I’ve forgotten or glossed-over anything vital. Like me, JediBoy seems to have a fairly good intuitive number sense, and he enjoys playing with numbers and puzzling things out.
Of course we have Those Days. You know Those Days. As cool as math can be, there are days when I’m tired, or he’s tired, or BabyGirl is coveting my attention, and I just want him to do the problem already.
That’s not easy. When I push him, […]
Original post by piseco
We had a late start today after staying up to watch and celebrate the election results. I spent the morning singing Si, Se Puede and then Everybody Rejoice (thanks to PisecoSis - this is the one that is now lodged firmly in my brain!). I’m tingly with hope.
Things felt smooth and happy - coincidence, or because of my good mood? Whatever the reason, we found a good balance today between together and alone, noisy and quiet, clean and messy, studious and fluff.
We danced to Laurie Berkner songs on BabyGirl’s new rough-and-tumble cd player. We finished the last lesson of Math U See Beta. We read a pile of books, some aloud, some silently, in a tangle on the floor. We sorted through boxes my Dad brought last weekend, including trying to put together a dozen wooden dinosaur models. We did some worksheets from […]
Original post by piseco
…and now we’re waiting on the edges of our seats.
JediBoy was thrilled to help me vote and high-fived me after I made my official selection for president. BabyGirl just liked being inside the curtain and playing in the main part of the library afterwards.
We watched this:
var flashObject = new FlashObject(”http://www.youtube.com/v/FaPlIcQw_dg”,”fm_FaPlIcQw_dg”,”425″,”350″,”6″,”",”",”",”",”");
flashObject.write(”fo_targ_FaPlIcQw_dg1897292532″);
and several others on our Schoolhouse Rock dvd, and the free Brain Pop movie here.
We read some books: So You Want to be President?, Grace for President, Duck for President and Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. (We found Duck for President in our cereal box this morning. Love that!)
Now I’m finding it hard to sit still. Hey, I really thought Gore was going to win when I went to sleep in November 2000. I don’t think I can sleep tonight until all the results are in. Are you waiting too?
Original post by piseco
JediBoy could just as easily be called KnightBoy because he continues to be fascinated with knights and castles. Do you remember his bliss in July, when we got to see a reenactor speak at our library? Last night we went out to see the same knight speak again.
William the Defender spoke with the same depth of information and humor as he did the last time we saw him. I won’t repeat it here, but if you’re interested, I tried to cover at least a little of what we learned in my post from July. PisecoDad was seeing him for the first time, and especially liked his dry wit and breadth of knowledge.
JediBoy loved seeing the weapons, and the armor, and trying on the helmets. BabyGirl enjoyed people watching and playing with the boy about her age three seats down. The presentation lasted for two hours, and […]
Original post by piseco
This week was a jumble of life-learning and holiday experiences. I didn’t keep notes as we went, so this is terribly rough, but some idea of what we did.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
Yet another week was interrupted by illness here! This time it was a sinus infection for JediBoy that threw us for a loop. He started to feel bad after lunch on Tuesday and didn’t really recover until after lunch on Thursday. All of Wednesday he spent in bed, napping and watching PBS. We missed the field trip to a dairy goat farm, something we’d really been looking forward to, and several of our usual fun projects (Unplug Your Kids, THINK!, etc.) also fell by the wayside.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
I don’t know where he gets it, really!
This afternoon, JediBoy and BabyGirl were cuddling on the couch. He loves to build forts, or caves, or hideouts from couch cushions and pillows and draw her into them. Today, he was using our big pillows as a blanket and cuddling up with her.
Then he said, “Aren’t we cute?” And when I agreed, he followed that with, “Why don’t you get your camera?”
After I’d taken a picture or two, he proclaimed, “You can put this on your blog, and everyone can see.”
So here they are.
(Nancy H, recognize the little pillow? It’s their favorite and they both fight over who gets it! You can see it has been well, well loved.)
In addition to sitting around exuding cuteness, JediBoy has whipped through a few math lessons, read a huge pile of books, made purple dye from cabbage (not Phoenician snails, […]
Original post by piseco
Oh goodness. This week really slipped away from us. I was recovering from my terrible cold at the beginning of the week, just as JediBoy was coming down with it. Not only that, but we spent Sunday and Monday rearranging furniture and wound up unplugging the computer that has the functional printer. As a result, I didn’t have my daily checklists this week, so even after JediBoy was feeling more himself on Thursday or Friday, we didn’t get into our groove.
This is the first week I’ve had a hard time putting something together for our learning notes (because I didn’t have anything written down), but you can see what I managed, behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
Is it really Sunday? The end of this week has been very surreal for me. I’ve been fighting a chest cold and terrible sore throat since after the fire station field trip on Wednesday. I’m finally starting to feel a tiny bit better, but because I’ve missed large chunks of the past four days and because PisecoDad has tomorrow off, I’m not quite certain that it’s Sunday and time for a weekly wrap-up. But I’ll try!
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
We had a lovely, informative, organized-by-someone-else homeschool field trip today, and I was thrilled! About 140 homeschoolers (including younger siblings and parents) gathered at the fire station for a series of activities.
JediBoy liked examining all the equipment close-up.
BabyGirl was thrilled to have inherited her brother’s fleece fireman’s hat!
The firefighters taught the kids about fire safety and equipment. The K-1st group had a little lesson and then took turns “sleeping” on a cot, hearing the smoke detector, crawling to the door, feeling the knob, opening the door and crawling to safety. The 2nd-4th group went on a fire scavenger hunt in three different rooms, and the 5th-and-up group had a lesson on the history of firefighting and equipment. The kids were given a pizza lunch and a chance to explore the trucks, and the firefighters even demonstrated their jaws of life and popped the roof off a […]
Original post by piseco
After the Great Chipmunk Adventure, I have apparently become that friend who collects roadkill. I had a message on the phone yesterday from Paula telling me she’d found a dead squirrel in great condition and had it in her trunk for me!
This is not to mention PisecoSis, who is in the process of preserving a bat hide for me and has a swallow in her freezer.
But of course - I’m thrilled. We don’t have a borrowed collection to rival Theresa’s, but we are slowly amassing our own nature study collection!
To preserve the stomach of anyone who may be coming across this post while munching on a midnight snack… I’m putting our pictures behind the cut.
WARNING! THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH!
Original post by piseco
It’s time for another Think! Challenge. You can check out the solution post for other creative ideas.
This week, our instructions were to:
Put the following out on a table: 2 cups, 2 spoons (plastic or real), 6 sticks of spaghetti, 15 inches of tape, two 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, a measuring tape and lots of quarters or pennies (the measuring tape and quarters/pennies cannot be used in the solution). Using the cups as the ends, tell your students to build a bridge that spans 9 inches and will hold as much weight as possible. When the bridge is complete, measure its strength by placing quarters/pennies on it (or anything else you want). Count how many quarters the bridge holds.
JediBoy was excited to build a bridge. First, he carefully lined up the six pieces of spaghetti between the two cups, and they held about 6 quarters before rolling […]
Original post by piseco
The weekly theme at Unplug Your Kids was white, and like several other families, we used this as an opportunity to make something white and spooky for Halloween.
My kids love to paint with their feet, but now that it’s chilly outside we aren’t doing the big foot-painting parties in the driveway every week. So I put out this favorite white paint and black paper to make this favorite decoration.
It’s super-simple: step in the white paint, make a white footprint on black paper. For toddlers or other kids who would think running around the house in painted feet would be fun, have them sit in a chair during this process!
You can make several footprints on each page. We used black cardstock so the ghosts would be a little sturdier, and we fit 5 of BabyGirl’s size 6 feet or 3 of JediBoy’s size 13 feet on each page.
When […]
Original post by piseco
We’re wrapping up a week that was full of good times with friends, saying “so long” to Leigh’s family as they leave for six months, starting karate, going to a birthday party and all kinds of other adventures. Lots was learned, in lots of ways. I’ve decided to try and start posting these on Sunday evening (when I’m usually typing up my notes) since I seem to find so much else to blog about on Mondays.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut.
Original post by piseco
We’re jumping on board a new challenge over at Think! This is their fifth week of challenges, and you can head over here to see other kids’ solutions.
This week, the challenge is to
Place the following materials on the table:
1 bag of marshmallows
2 paper cups
10 paperclips
5 sticks of spaghetti
1 inch of tape
10 inches of string
“Suspend” as many marshmallows as possible at least 1 inch above the table.
JediBoy was eager to try the challenge today. Here is his first try, with six marshmallows:
He wanted to stack more in a similar way, but they wouldn’t stay put and he started to get frustrated. I suggested he stack them a different way, so he tried stacking them vertically:
This was even more frustrating, and he asked me why I wasn’t trying anything! So I played around a bit and came up with a “bridge” that used his first idea but […]
Original post by piseco
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