First Day, Second Time

It was our annual First Day celebration today! Our first official day of semi-structured home learning....sorta-school. You may remember last year, our first big recognition of the occasion.

I want the boys to feel special, for learning to be ardently celebrated and yet to avoid the pale, cheesy, chasing after "normal," pretend about making a xerox-of-a-public-school here in the living room. Walking that line. I was going for warm tradition capped with a little buzz and hoping to avoid wanna-be mimicry. We had warm apple dumplings for breakfast...apples because they are a modern symbol of teaching and dumplings because they are a once a year treat that goes down delightfully sweet and fallish. Each boy came down to a special congratulatory sign on his plate, welcoming him to his new grade level. And then I put a candle in each boy's dumpling and A and I sang to them "Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day, happy first day of schoooool, Happy First Day to you!" So fun to see big sparkling eyes and happy grins, over the top of the flickering flames.

Then we hopped in the van for our 2nd annual drive around the block to the street in front of the neighborhood school where we hooted and hollered and honked the horn and then wheeled back around and took Daddy A to the train station for work. Once we were home we had a big dance party in the kitchen and commenced the formal learnin'.

Mondays we will studying My Place In This World which is a self-composed course about micro-geography. Our street, our neighborhood, our city, and eventually our state and then a sketch of how that connects to the country and the world. Right now we are going to focus small and work from the concrete things they can easily grasp: What is an address? Where are N S E W in relation to my front door? What is a neighborhood? And move outward.

Tuesdays we will be studying Science, right we will be talking about Fungi, Molds and Their Kin. Lots of hikes and experiments in our future. Hopefully a lot of mushroom picking!

Wednesday will be Art day. We'll be mixing together some big art projects (weaving! beading! drawing in perspective!) and sometimes field trips or artist studies with our new basic piano instruction plan. I am not a piano professional but this a bite sized nobler book about beginner theory on reading and counting music and even I can hack it.

Thursday we will have another mama-hatched ideas, a Social Skills class. This will be like a modern manners course mixed with Life Skills for kids: how to make a friend, how to tell a joke smoothly, how to read body language, cultivating empathy, good listening tips, appropriate greetings, how to read expressively etc. Am excited about this concept and about the many field trips required to make sure my boys get a lot of practice building these skills into instincts.

And we 'll round out the week.with History. We are still going to be in the ancient world moving on past the Mesopotamians, Sumerians and Baylonians to Greece, Egypt and Rome. So much good stuff to read, experiment with and go see together! Very exciting.

Reading, writing and math all happen every day in addition to the daily topic.

Here's to the next learning season! Happy First Day, y'all!

School Year Brainstorm

Its school planning time at our house! First Day is fast approaching and although we haven't yet starting thinking about fall, pumpkins or leaf-jumping....I am thinking about study topics, ways to make reading fresh, exciting field trips and anything else that might prime the mental pumps for the boys and I.

I'm a Charlotte Mason/Unschooler. I lean heavily on exciting, well-written books to spring board learning and makes topics come alive....we read-aloud until our eyes fall out. Lots of the time when A is gone we linger at the lunch table, nibbling at our food and reading a few extra chapters of whatever book we are reading at the moment.

We try to spend a lot of time outside and I believe in free-flowing, real-time exploration in the natural world. Skinning knees, digging up beetles and popping seed pods are all legitimate learning activities at our house. Lots of the boys time outdoors is just random and unsupervised, self-directed fooling around that results in lots of interesting questions later on. "Mom...what is that little bug that rolls up when you touch it?" or "Mommy, we were ripping leaves up and saw some of them had white juice inside. Why does it get black on your hands?"

I am doing what I can to include warm familiarity with visual art, this last year we started doing artist study work to learn some of the "greats" and their techniques. I am also really happy to get the paints, yarn or glue out and set the kids to work making something beautiful of their own. I am a little bit of a stickler about "real" crafts and work really hard to make sure that the kids are introduced to the process of making beautiful things that aren't just crappy throw-away Styrofoam stickers and random construction paper cut-outs. A little bit of that kind of thing in a playgroup or Sunday School class doesn't poison the waters but I want to be sure that they really understand and expect to create genuine beauty and utility not just throw-away Oriental Trading Company crafty-garbage.

We are starting to work on useful life-skills....money-education, chore instruction, shopping lessons, navigation, memorization, etc. Lots of excitement ahead in that category this year.

Here's what I am trying to work into my curriculum planning and schedule arranging this year....

20 Homeschooling Brainstorms For 2013

1.  Ru has started learning sleight of hand and wants to perform a magic show for outsiders with rehearsal period, costumes and real admission fees!
2. I want the three big boys to take ice-skating lessons this winter...maybe I'll even join them.
3. We will have a much awaited field trip to The Mashantucket Pequot Museum during October, Native Heritage Month. 
4. We have started a new allowance/chore system and I am planning to do some workshops about budgeting, financial goals and exciting ideas for boy-friendly charity.
5. Ru did the summer reading program at the library and I told him as a reward he could get his own library card and a special appointment with one of the children's librarians to talk about all the rights and privileges thereof.
6. The boys have requested that we go to a real, old-fashioned cider mill where they can watch their cider being pressed before we buy a jug.
7. Ru and now Nib (desperately eager!) will be enrolling in Fall Ball, our local Little League's autumn session.
8. I found and am burning this wonderful collection of classic poems, arranged for children and read aloud by Librivox readers.
9. Dee has started learning to read and this year he'll keep working through 100 Easy Lessons and then tackle real books for the first time.
10. I am magpie-ing the idea of unit themes for each month of the school year.
11. We're going to join our friends in the homeschool group for Field Trip Friday adventures.
12. I am introducing Latin to the house. I have ordered two systems (1 and 2) and we'll try them out and see what works for us.
13. Nib will learn to write his name this year and solidify his alphabet.
14. I'm on the look-out for a Spanish playgroup.
15. I am hunting for music lessons and starting a beginning music theory workbook for the three biggest boys. 

Its gonna be an exciting year! I'm geeked for book buying and activity scheduling.