So… we officially started homeschooling on Monday. I thought I’d do a first week wrap-up.
In all honesty, the only real difference (so far) between this week and last week is that we are recording what we do each day. I had originally planned to be the sole recorder but Leo received a journal with space for pictures as part of a “welcome to homeschooling” basket and he turned it into his own personal homeschool journal, so we are both recording!
In no particular order, I present to you our homeschool highlights from our very first week:
- We attended a presentation on bats where we learned all about various types of bats, bat behavior, and echolocation. After the presentation, we made bat shirts!
| Leo’s bat shirt |
| Bats eat insects. Vampire bats drink blood. |
- We attended a robotics presentation and got to test drive some of them!
| Croc crashin’ |
| Today we went to robotics. Some robots decide what to do. Others are controlled by people. |
- After one of our presentations this week, we watched horses. The kids asked the riders questions and learned quite a bit about horses and horseback riding. T so badly wants to try this out!
| T’s highlight of the week |
| I’ll call this photo Longing. T wants that horse. |
- Leo participated in a morning art camp that focused on kinetic sculptures. He made several really cool pieces, including:
| This one is a large wind chime for our backyard mountain fort. |
| Building upon the previous day’s robotics lecture, Leo made a robot mobile. |
- We played games, including the game Countdown!, which was gifted to us earlier in the week. Leo loved this game! It focuses on building computation skills. When Leo was tested in the spring, he was able to understand and solve higher-level math problems but he lacks rote computation skills as he has yet to have any traditional mathematics instruction.
| He loved this game so much that I found him teaching it to T the next morning, and then to Seuss. |
- We made fairy houses! The kids are obsessed with this book about fairy houses. My friend Bethany made some with her kids and we’ve been wanting to make some, too. Then, we were leaving art class the other morning and we saw some really cool ones that my friend, Anna, made with her class. We tried to copy her motif. T has already decided she’s taking Miss Anna’s class next summer!
| Leo’s fairy houses |
| Today I made a fairy house with cement. It was fun. |
- And, of course, there were trips to the library. And oodles of reading.
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| We leave with four of these. |
- Other things that we did included: EPGY on the days we remembered, Bedtime Math each evening, we observed how a contractor takes measurements for an addition to a home, T and Seuss enjoyed a week of a pirate-themed Adventure Camp (right up their imaginative alleys!), Leo accompanied me to the supermarket where he was asked to find every item independently, Leo and T wrote to a couple pen pals and mailed their respective letters at the post office, there was lots of time spent drawing, loads of Lego and magnatile construction, plant care-taking (blueberry bushes, tomato plants, and Leo’s venus flytraps), plenty of imaginative play, instruments played, songs sung (“Let it go! Let it gooooooo!”), trips to our local farm, and tons of outdoor time.
It was a successful and fun first week.
(There was a lot of sediment in the tub this week, folks!)
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The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense … School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning.
~John Holt, American Educator, How Children Learn
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