I lamented a few months ago about my being a very boring homeschooler. And wondered aloud if I would ever get back to who I was. Well, I haven’t, in most respects. But I looked around the other day and realized our home was adorned with proof that I actually do teach. It’s so much more me than those boring worksheets I talked about not too long ago. I can’t ever stick with anything, y’all know that. I do what works. And then when it doesn’t I’m real good at quitting. Mid-stream.
It’s mid-stream. And it never did really work. Not with TheOldest. I hate teeth-pulling.
We’re doing more combined learning. We’ve been learning the families of musical instruments and then having free play with all our own instruments.
We’ve been reading The Secret Garden and I’ve been having the kids draw a picture for each chapter. Some great stuff with that!
Our family tree that all 3 bigger kids contributed drawings to. We used this to study family relations, spanish words for family members, art work, and handwriting. Look at that paci in TheFinalist’s mouth! And my hair, oh my, that hair. And look at Daddy’s goatee! This tree cracks me up!
And then my marvelous non-homeschooling-for-right-now ;) friend gave me gobs of homeschool stuff. Oh.my.goodness. I was in love.
And then I decided I just had to have a chalkboard wall. (Yes, that post is coming soon. I promise!) So, we’ve been working math problems and diagramming sentences together on the board.
We’ve been looking at Toulouse-Lautrec’s work and finding France on the map and discussing his life. Ties into that family tree lesson, right?! And then we moved onto Rembrandt and discussed differences in their works.
We’ve been watching The Nativity Story again. Wow. It’s like a week long event when we do, but I love it. I pause about every other word and answer the multitude of questions they have. History, Bible, Faith, Oh MY. Wonderful.
Speaking of history, I’ve been reading aloud from some silly Social Studies books. But they are silly. To the point, that TheOldest said today, “That sounds like Junie B. Jones wrote those!” And they aren’t trying to be silly. I just have high standards. Now I know what twaddle is. I’m dreaming of The Mystery of History. Still. Some day. But for now, we get history in everything. Everything has a history to it – you just have to go far enough back, be willing to answer (and look up!) a million and one questions, and explore.
And lapbooks are back! I love lapbooks, have I mentioned that before? ThePrincess is doing insects, TheMiddlest is working on meerkats, and TheOldest chose weather.
We’re doing a human body unit study. These were our people that we made “joints” for. That’s funny to me every time I say it! But just look at these. That’s Leia down there on the end – complete with the hair-do and high heels, of course. Then ThePrincess helped BigMan make a “daddy”. And TheMiddlest said his was him as a teenager – he better have that same smile when he actually gets to be that age. And then look all the way to the left – that would be TheOldest’s Han Solo. With the jacket and gun how could you not tell?!
And we are off and running with a new year and new excitement. I hope your new start to your school year is going just as swimmingly!
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