… I picked up this book about a year ago for a couple dollars. I think a good target age group would be 3-5 year olds. It’s set up for independent learning stations in schools, but works great for homeschooling.
I followed their instructions to make folders out of the individual units and we’ve pulled them out occasionally to work on a random topic. They’re all realllly basic, but lead to great conversations. … Read more…
… As I watched them play, I thought this might be a good opportunity to practice some grouping skills with the boys and work in an introduction to graphs. I grabbed some dry-erase markers and drew up simple horizontal and vertical axes on the window, with numbers going up the side and categories of objects going across. (trains, cars, planes, people) N caught on pretty quickly and had fun searching out like objects from the sticker pages, deciding which category they fit into, and stacking them so they lined up with the numbers on the vertical axis. It turned out to be a pretty successful (based on his level of interest) “math lesson” for the day ~ this always makes the ex-math-teacher mama bear happy :). … Read more…
… I suggested he put random letters on the bag or try to write words with the stickers. He wanted to write “N’s amazing rock collection” but settled for “rocks.” This simple activity spurred some great learning moments:
He sounded out the word and decided he needed the letters R O C. I asked what other letter made a “cah” sound and he remembered that K did. We talked about how English is a silly language because people a long time ago made it up by combining a lot of different rules and then they changed most of those rules, so here we are today using two letters that make the same sound to spell a simple word like Rock. He was okay with that.
He knew he needed to add an S but couldn’t explain why, so I reminded him that adding an S makes things plural. I’d never taught him this before, but he learned it somewhere. … Read more…
… When they (I don’t know who) designed it, they accounted for the salmon that needed to travel upstream back to their home to spawn so they built a fish ladder with glass viewing windows for visitors to see the 5 feet (?) fish swimming in large groups upstream against a massive current. It’s amazing to see this, and it’s neat for the boys to get a close up look at life-cycles and the ways that people have worked to maintain species in their natural habitat in spite of industrialization. We’ll try to go back during peak season and get more pictures. There was a great little history museum there describing the process of digging the canals and building the locks, but it was way above the boys’ interest/understanding levels at this point. … Read more…
I had made no plans for the day, but it turned out the day had adventures of its own for us. One of my friends came over in the morning and she played wonderfully with the boys! They loved the attention and she helped them get a lot of wiggles out. The boys danced to their […] Read more…
Our “homeschooling” themes at this point consist of an eclectic mash-up of Mom’s Grand Ideas and the boys’ Exciting Discoveries.
Today, for instance … Read more…
