Domestic Adventures

a.k.a. reason 553 why we love homeschooling.

… that was the name of our Thanksgiving play at Time Travelers. The direction of this production fell to me though my experience with such things lies somewhere between extremely little and non-existant. Still, when you have such adorable actors and actresses you can hardly go wrong. The kids did a fantastic job and I loved all their costumes.

After the play we enjoyed crafts, games, and a delicious Thanksgiving feast.

A while back, Emmaline and Micah’s outdoor explorations yielded a real treasure: tadpoles! There were dozens of them, more than dozens. They excitedly asked if we could keep them and when I said yes, the kids were over the moon. I love saying yes. We captured about 30 of them with plastic cups and made a pollywog home in a rubbermaid container on the kitchen counter.
How do you take care of tadpoles? I wondered that too, and googled this. Basically, they like clean water and eat cooked lettuce or spinach. They really, really love spinach.
It took about a month and a half from them to grow from little dots with squiggly tails to frog shaped blobs with hind legs. A few grew faster than the others but we only got to see one fully develop useful front and hind limbs. The day before we left for Kansas he suctioned himself to the side of the container fully out of the water declaring himself “frog”. That evening we had a little tadpole releasing ceremony at the lake and bid them all farewell. Even I was a bit sad to see them go, but I promised next time the kids found tadpoles, we could do this all again.

Summer was great and much needed, but I think we’re all pretty happy to have some structure to our days again. We started school on Monday, and the week has been great. After much indecision about curriculum, I finally decided on Adventures in My Father’s World and so far we’re loving it. We also added Spelling by Sound and Structure, and are continuing with Miquon Math. I’m particularly pleased that Adventures focuses on U.S. History and corresponds nicely with what we’re studying in co-op this year.
Micah is joining us at the table this year for Bible and he has his own workbook and activities. After about an hour with Emmie and I, he spends some time on the computer while Emmie and I work on history, reading, and math. We’re only one week in, but so far it’s going beautifully. Even Isaac is cooperating nicely. Of course it helps that I’m not pregnant, and no one’s doing major construction in the kitchen, and it’s not my first year. Perhaps starting that way last year has done a lot to make this beginning feel so smooth and easy.

The school year is drawing to a close and lots of things are wrapping up. Yesterday we had a yearbook party with our history co-op to close out the year.
I am so very grateful for the co-op. In fact, this group was one of the main things God used in leading us to homeschool. I remember the summer before Emmaline started kindergarten at a private school; I had lots of friends who homeschooled and thought it was great, but believed it was something I could never do myself - it just seemed too big, too overwhelming. I overheard plenty of homeschool conversations though, and as I listened to all these co-op moms talk I began to think that maybe, just maybe I could do this. And maybe it would be wonderful. It has been!
We’ve met new friends and gotten to spend lots of time with old friends. The kids have loved all the activities, field trips, and just plain running around with kids time. The teaching topics have inspired me in our curriculum at home. The thing that I’ve loved the most though - needed the most - is the support of other homeschool moms. I think I would constantly be filled with doubt if I didn’t have homeschool friends who have done this all before. I’m always asking for advice and running ideas by them, and I’ve learned so very much and seen what a wide variety of forms homeschooling can take. Truly, I thank God for these things.
This year’s co-op theme has been Renaissance through Explorers. I got to teach about DaVinci, and Shakespeare, and even the littlest kids got a taste of history. For our end of the year festival, each child dressed as an explorer and presented a report. Above, Emmaline is dressed as Christopher Columbus and Micah is sporting his pirate costume. I’m so looking forward to next year when we get to study, indians, cowboys, and early America!

Emmaline is my story girl. She loves making up elaborate stories and her favorite thing in the world is to snuggle up next to Daddy and listen to one of the Narnia books. With her expansive vocabulary and great listening comprehension, I expected her to take to reading quickly, but her distaste for and struggles with reading clued us in that her glasses were just not cutting it for correcting her vision.

So for the past month or so, we’ve been seeing a doctor who specializes in vision therapy. After a thorough 90 minute exam, his theory is that Emmaline’s brain is trying to “turn off” one eye because her eye muscles are unable to accurately and precisely work together to create one image. As he spoke a lot seemed to click into place for me. It’s not just her eye muscles, it’s really a whole body thing which explains why she’s always running into things, dropping things, spilling things. Her movements are very disorganized - in her whole body, and in her eyes. To show us what Emmaline’s vision is like, the doctor showed us two identical transparencies laid on top of one another. He asked me to read it as he shifted the top layer back and forth - possible, but frustrating and tiring. No wonder she struggles!

For four or five weeks now, we’ve been doing a series of daily vision exercises. They aren’t the things you’d expect to help vision, things like skipping, jumping jacks, balance exercises, and playing patty cake. As we practice each day, I can see a difference in how her movements are becoming more organized and controlled, and she’s also been less tired when reading and more willing to read.

Still a long way to go, I think, but I’m encouraged about her progress and hoping that reading will soon the joy it can be rather than an exhausting trial.

Inspired by a co-op session on mapmaking, I ordered this book, Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years by David Sobel. I just love books like this, about how kids’ thinking develops and why teaching certain concepts is important. Unfortunately, I usually get about a third of the way through such books, jump into the application enthusiastically, and more often than not forget to come back to them. Oops. This book I actually read completely - well, all the relevant parts.
The author discusses how children’s maps reflect their view of the world at that time, how mapmaking gives a sense of ownership to a place thereby encouraging good stewardship, and one of my favorite chapters, how books and maps work together to more fully involve the reader in the story. Besides the theory, there are tons of mapmaking projects divided by age.
We started with a model map of our school room. I made a map with cuisenaire rods and had the kids idenitfy the room and the things in it. Then I used stickers on the map to show where I had hidden pennies around the room for them to find. Once Emmie and Micah had found their little treasures, I left the room and they hid the pennies and marked the map with stickers. I was impressed that even Micah could do this very accurately.
Another day I asked Emmie to draw a picture of the neighborhood. The only thing she had to show on the map was our house, beyond that she could show as much or as little as she wanted. I love how her map of our cul-de-sac turned out. In reality, there are five houses on our street, but she only showed the ones that were important to her: our house, our next door neighbors to the south (defined by Emmie as “the people who keep their cars in the garage”) and the neighbor two doors down who have a very friendly dog. The dog even made it onto the map. Across the street was pictured a small tree in a funny little squared off area and defined as “where we like to park our BigWheels”. We don’t go over there all that often and I had no idea she thought the place was special -makes me want to ensure we visit the little tree more often. The other two houses belong to neighbors we don’t have much interaction with and so it was no surprise that they didn’t show up on her map. After creating her map, Emmie was so excited about it, she wanted to go out and walk around the cul-de-sac visiting all the places she had drawn. She had a great time leading us on this little adventure.
Finally, we used mapmaking for her journal one day while we were reading Charlotte’s Web. Again, not the most accurate map, but it definitely showed all the important places including Charlotte’s place in the doorway and Templeton’s home under the feeding trough.
Though I think we’ve wrapped up our little mapmaking unit for now, I love having these ideas on hand to apply here and there for variety and interest. Besides, it’s a fun way to get inside Emmaline’s head and find out what’s important to her.

Our homeschool co-op just finished a unit on Florida history and we topped it all off with a field trip to St.Augustine.
Since I am so not a morning person and did not relish the idea of being two hours from home by nine in the morning, I convinced Trent to come along and we stayed the night before in a hotel. It doesn’t matter where your hotel is or how fancy or not it is, staying in a hotel is a big, big deal to small children. After checking in, we took the five minute drive to the very cold and windy beach, where the kids ran in ecstatic circles as the waves came up and washed over their feet. We stayed until Micah belly flopped into an icy inch of water then drove back to the hotel for warm baths and hot pizza eaten in front of real cable tv - another exciting feature of hotels.
The trip, of course, was really about historic St.Augustine, and we all really enjoyed that part too. It had been a couple of years since we’d been and at the time we wandered around as a family rather than getting in on the groups tours and such. I was really impressed by the different tour guides we encountered. At the Spanish Colonial Quarter we met a colonial housewife preparing the most delicious smelling chicken and rice. We walked through her garden, met her chickens, then were off to the carpenter’s shop where the kids learned about how colonial furniture was built a lot like lincoln logs and tinker toys. He even made lots of “curly whirly” wood shavings for us at the request of all the little girls, then the blacksmith demonstrated how to make nails and chains with his hammer and anvil.
After that we headed to the fort, Castillo de San Marcos. We heard from a Spanish soldier who made wearing eight layers of wool and linen on the Florida coast actually sound reasonable, and explained how a love of garlic saved the Spanish from demise in this swampy state. The kids loved climbing on the canons (which they weren’t really supposed to touch, but how can you not?).
Lots of fun, but by the end of the day we were all feeling about how Micah looks in that last picture.

A while back, a friend gave us a box full of children’s book including several science books. Emmaline immediately gravitated to this book about rocks and minerals. The section on crystals with all its beautiful photographs was the favorite and when Emmie saw a sidebar about growing your own crystals she couldn’t wait to try it out. The only problem was the instructions called for ammonia and laundry blueing and about a dozen other items I didn’t have or didn’t want to deal with. Trent wisely suggested we grow sugar crystals instead. Brilliant!

We followed simple instructions like these and didn’t have to buy a thing. The only thing we did different was to soak our wooden skewers for a few minutes then roll them in sugar to “seed” them. Once the sugar was dried onto them, we put them in the super-saturated sugar solution. Also, because we sometimes have ant problems, we set our jar in a cake pan with water making a shallow moat the ants can’t cross.
It took a couple of weeks, but I was really pleased with the results. Our crystals turned out even more beautiful than I expected and Trent used some pattern blocks to illustrate to Emmaline how crystals grow and why they look so clear. And of course, our crystals made delicious snacks as well!

I have been enjoying Spunky Homeschool’s take on things lately. In light of recent political discussions and their impact on education, I especially liked her definition of a teacher posted here.