Positive Identification

In my previous post I talked about our trip to the local farmers market, and how we brought home a critter that was inadvertently put on the grill during a cooking demonstration.

This is the little guy we brought home.

It didn't take Sean very long to identify it using our Mac's Field Guide.

It's a Mossy Chiton.

We really enjoy that field guide because it's a single card laminated with really nice, detailed illustrations.

I'm not getting paid by Mac's Field Guide to say any of this, we really do like it.

I've decided to step back and look at what we're doing for homeschool and what is and isn't working, so we're taking a little break. I'm not going to ask him to "work" for a couple of weeks and see what happens.

At breakfast he did some math. He frequently asks me what does ___ plus___ equal, and I always have him work it on his own using whatever he needs to do so. I offer material suggestions while acting very interested in what the answer could be.

He read a book to me at lunch, and then we ran some errands before I had to take off to a meeting.  

After lunch he went outside and found these guys on a toy truck.

Charlotte was here!

Not trying to creep anyone out here, but it was an interesting find. Interesting too that they almost exactly match the yellow on the truck.

In case you can't tell, we do live among the fir trees and pastures, and frequently have visitors such as these at our house. Sean was concerned about them and went out to check on them several times before we left the house. He noticed they would huddle together, then if he touched the web they would scatter.

A couple of years ago he found a garter snake in the yard. He wanted one last year but never found any, and is already talking about finding one this summer.

What we do in the 6-9 plane

Our school year has been one of ups and downs, twists and turns. The public system here doesn't dismiss for summer until June 18, I think. We don't follow that, and plan to just keep doing what we do year-round.

This is going to be a year-in-review type post with information on the materials I bought, downloaded, cut, colored or otherwise made; what we used and didn't use and why, and a very honest and revealing look at our homeschool journey. This is in no way a comprehensive day-to-day breakdown, and includes a fraction of the things Sean worked with and things we did together. It's an overview of sorts, and I probably have left out some of the materials, though to me it looks like a ton of stuff.

The list of things I bought or made with a mark beside to indicate * we used this or ^ we didn't use it:

folders*(one for his completed written type work, tons for me)

Notebooks* (for me)

Colored pencils * (gone through probably at least 3 packs of them now)

tracing paper*

watercolor paper*

watercolor paints* (a birthday gift)

Wood geometric solids (not Montessori, but from Learning Resources) *

Simple sentence tabletop pocket chart ^

Stamp game *

Newcomb curriculum^

Timeline of man *

Box of beads *

Lisa Nolan Curriculum * to some extent, abandoned after about first month or so

small wooden number cards 1-9000 * (Adena)

teen boards * (only for the first couple of months)

Time box (puzzle and clock stamp for learning clock time)^ Learned to tell time just before it arrived.

moteaco albums downloaded * to some extent

Control continent maps * (Adena)

maps of the world (downloaded onto cardstock)*

grammar symbols (wood)* (Adena)

cursive sandpaper letters (lower case)*

Solar System floor puzzle* (Borders Books)

movable alphabet (downloaded onto cardstock)^ 

beginning sounds cards*

Homeschool folder on my desktop-I used some of this, but I collect this stuff for later also

All angles sort

Antonyms

Capitalization command cards

Comma activity

Continents nomenclature

decimal fraction board

crafts projects folder

fraction charts

fraction division tickets

geography 6-9

geometry stick box contents

Homeschool RCW 

India nomenclature cards

Mr. Q Life Science

making simple sentences

Math 1 album

Math 2 album

Medgar Evars bio

MLK Day poem

moon phases

Oceania map

Oceans booklet

Oceans control chart

Oceans nomenclature

parts of leaf

parts of sailboat

passage to abstraction document

phases of moon chart

plant cell booklet upper el

plant cell structure upper el

poetry basket poems

polygons

presentation of 6-9 program

punctuation

punctuation command cards

resources for new homeschoolers

science scope and sequence

sightword list

skip counting

South American animals

spelling cards

spiders lesson

Teacher Book Bag Animal Classification Kit

Three period lesson

Timeline humans

timeline of scripts

triangle sort

unit division board

verb advanced

volcano booklet

Whitney Young bio

Work cycle

World biomes

writing paper Canada elem

written question game

zoology animal stories

ABC shoebox science songs

art resources and web sites

daily workplan

elementary student spelling

great musical lessons

higher order thinking chart

interdisciplinary conference

Laws Made map

shoebox science lima bean trials

upper elementary needs 2

upper elementary needs

weekly schedule

cursive tracing letters

THREE PART CARDS (all either downloaded or given to us)

Solar System *

Parts of the earth*

Land Forms *

Water Forms *

Artists *

Geometry - line, solid, point, plane *

triangle, pentagon, hexagon, etc. *

Types of triangles *

Pumpkin life cycle* (first month or two)

Calendar* (used for first three months or so)

compound words ^

abbreviations^

verb tense exercise (from Montessori for Everyone)^haven't used it yet

ODDS AND ENDS

A trip across Canada ^ Haven't used it yet, maybe next year. It isn't Montessori, I got it from another blogger.

postcards from around the world and the U.S. (we will continue to use these for years)*

Farm (Fisher Price barn and animals w/ some other animals and parts of other farms)*

Mac's Field Guide to Northwest Coastal Invertebrates * (got this free at a livable fair last year)

Continent cards, includes people, music, food, animals* (only used these a little bit, wasn't interested) bought one set from ebay, downloaded the others.

Music from the library to go along with continent studies*

We play lots of games in the car, usually rhyming games, grammar games (can you give me a noun that rhymes with the word....) Sometimes math games, multiplying, adding and subtracting.

I have many folders filled with printouts for me to reference, including the state standards for our state and some homeschooling articles.

Michael Olaff's Introduction to the Elementary Class Years

Moteaco History 6-9

Moteaco Math

Moteaco Language

Moteaco geometry

Moteaco biology plant

moteaco biology animal

SCIENCE

We did science experiments to go along with the 5 great lessons on liquid and solid.

We tested how long it would take a plastic object to sink in water, oil and syrup.

We made a volcano with baking soda

We've searched for snakes and grasshoppers in the yard, done some bird watching and have had a number of "pet" spiders. 

COOKING

Cakes, cookies, brownies and breakfast, we did a lot of cooking

LAUNDRY

He now pulls his sheets off each Monday and knows how to start the washing machine and the dryer.

PLAY

We've had lots of opportunities to play outside and at the park, took trips to the zoo and over to friends' homes, and spent time in the cherry tree in the back yard.

FIELD TRIPS

We visited the Reptile Zoo, the Children's Museum and the zoo and made many visits to our local beach.

We also saw the play, "Peter Pan" in Seattle at the Children's Theatre and saw the Puget Sound Revels at Christmas.

The Nitty Gritty of Homeschool

I use a lot of combinations of real life experiences with moteaco albums and just following my child to know what he has already mastered and what the next step is. We don't follow any curriculum in particular, and I know that doesn't help very much, especially when you're looking for a curriculum to follow and need advice from someone who's been there. 

I was completely lost at first because I felt like I was one of the few out here doing elementary Montessori at home. There isn't anyone in our community following Montessori at all, so we are the odd ones in our homeschool group. I wanted a curriculum that would tell me exactly what to do and then what to do after that was finished, something to guide me through. I realized I didn't need it. With the Elizabeth Hainstock book on the elementary years I was able to move through it, and the most helpful thing has been my son. He knows what he knows and what he doesn't, and he knows what he's ready to work with and what he isn't.

For me the challenge is math, because I'm not good at math. I'm already starting to have a semi panic about the higher level math, but maybe I'll actually learn math along with my child and "get it" this time around. 

At the beginning of this year we started with the five great lessons and worked our way through them for about the first two months or so. It helped us focus and get our footing. Unfortunately, I work from home and can't always do "school," every day. I feel guilty a LOT. I sometimes wonder if I should just send him to school because in my head I think school is supposed to be an all-day thing.

But when I start to get serious about that plan, I read an email or hear some comment in passing that illustrates the ridiculousness of the public system. And my heart knows that learning is continuous, and he demonstrates that he is learning and doing fine. It's really just my insecurities boiling up to the surface.

I am a natural worrier, so I worry that emotionally I'm not doing him the greatest good. I spend a lot of time working, and we do school hit and miss. There isn't a lot of routine, except that every day he gets up, does his make-the-bed, get-clothes-on, eat-breakfast routine and when he begins to work he tells me what the date is. We talk a little bit about the month and what is happening in our lives in relation to the date. That's about it, then he's free to choose a work.  A lot of days I suggest two choices he could choose, and usually he chooses something totally different.

I admit that I get frustrated because he seems to need a lot of direction. It isn't something I expected when we embarked on this journey. I thought if I had a beautiful shelf filled with interesting and pretty materials he would choose one, work on it for an hour or so, methodically replace it on the shelf and choose another.

If you have a child that works like that on his/her own with no one else in the room consider yourself more than blessed. I constantly have to check to be sure he is actually working. Most days he isn't. Yet he is learning and he's smart and loves to learn new things. 

He loves to get books from the library and compare things in each book, the way the information is presented, and whether the information is helpful to him. He admitted yesterday that he likes to look for information on the Internet, but it is sometimes not correct. He gave an example of the banded sea crate, and online it was called the banded snake.

Most of what we do is research. He chooses a subject and we go to the library. Yesterday we went to the beach and found many types of shells. Then we went to the library to find books to identify shells and we will spend this week identifying those. We'll also use our Mac's Field Guide for that research.

Today we went to our local farmers market and watched a chef doing a cooking demonstration. The chef was putting oysters on the grill, and in the process of cooking them he found some other small sea creature attached to one of the oysters. Sean helped him do a little bit of cooking and we brought the critter home to see if we can identify it through one of those books we got at the library about sea creatures, or the Mac's guide.

The Stuff

We have colored pencils (came in handy when he was not in the mood to write anything and I would say, "What's your favorite color of the day? That's the color you can choose to write with today.") 

Some of the materials I purchased were not used very much, but I was glad to have them. Things like the teens board gave me a solid indication of where he was in his understanding and we were able to use it for a while and then move on.

I bought the box of beads, and he used those for a good while, then tapered off on the math. He recently picked it back up again, but I can see he is ready for abstract. He doesn't really want to use the beads now (thank goodness I got them at a great price and didn't put a lot of time or money into making them.) He is loving the stamp game right now, but I have to quickly figure out how to use it beyond addition because he's not going to hang out with that for much longer. 

(He wants to try to do math in his head instead of using the materials. We are on our way to another level with math. I have to bone up on it quickly. That is one of the challenges with homeschooling. This child is so interested in everything that I have a difficult time keeping up with him. We use our library regularly and he LOVES it. His favorite thing is books. )

We have the control maps from Adena, because I figured those would serve just fine and if he wanted to we could make cutouts of each continent and country to match to those. It saved a bundle, and they have served the purpose. We have flags for each country that I downloaded online.

I recently purchased the cursive sandpaper letters- lower case. We just started on those, so it's slow. He likes to practice cursive with the Jan Brett cursive printouts. They have a dotted line to follow the formation of the letter and he enjoys them because we have quite a few of the Jan Brett books. I don't think I'll buy the uppercase sandpaper letters, and maybe we'll just use a sand tray to practice the upper case based on the Jan Brett prinouts.

I just bought some things from a school that is closing. They are things I couldn't afford this year, but wanted to have for the shelf. Geometry cabinet, trinomial cube, and a few other things. He moves so fast I might have just wasted my money. If so, I'll post them for sale.

This is a lot of what we do. For some this is way too lax and unstructured. Right now it is the only thing that works for us.

We will continue through the summer, and he is signed up for several educational summer camps. We'll have several breaks for vacations, etc.

Here's what we've been doing lately.

We took some pictures of an inchworm that hopped a ride on my shirt while I was working in the yard.

We took a road trip on Mother's Day to a reptile zoo.

Pythons.

The Alligator Snapping Turtle.

A very cute tortoise.

Another one.

Emerald Tree Boa, I think.

The very friendly and mischievous albino corn snake. It eventually slithered into Sean's sleeve and wouldn't come out. When we would finally get it's upper body out, it would try to get into his pants pocket.

We also took a trip to our local zoo recently with another homeschool family. We've been to the library stocking up on his latest interest--ships. Last week we worked quite a bit with the stamp game, and he has been doing great with his new watch. He's always done things in his own time (no pun intended there) and the whole clock concept finally clicked. He likes looking at his watch to tell me what time it is. He works on cursive letters and we've made it to D so far. 

Today we signed up for some great summer camps at his old Montessori school and we both are excited about that.

birds, solar system and Europe

One of Sean's Easter gifts was "Birds of Washington Field Guide," by Stan Tekiela.
This book is the perfect size. It's filled with beautiful pictures of birds, both male and female, and it is organized by color of the birds so it's easy to find what you're looking for when you see a bird and want to identify it.
Sean loves this book. Absolutely loves it.
We also have a map for bird watching in Washington.
Today I set out some geography and solar system work, but Sean wanted to study birds first. So we got out the map and he had his book. I suggested that I look for a bird pictured on the map, and he could look in the book to find a real photograph.
This work required him to locate the index, find the entry in alphabetical order, and then find the corresponding page. He did this over and over.
I got interrupted, which meant he got interrupted. When I looked up again I saw he was pulling out the huge puzzle of the solar system. While he has already studied this for three years, it doesn't hurt to keep going with it. It's a cool floor puzzle, and he enjoyed it. I found it on sale at Border's.
I had some three part cards of the solar system and he put those in order, then we moved on to some geography work. We have a really big control map for Europe, so he matched flags with the countries of Europe.
Tomorrow I'll show him some pictures a friend took on her trip to Moldova, her home country.
He also worked on music today. He tried to replicate a drum riff from one of his favorite songs while I made lunch.
For bed we read a Langston Hughes poetry book, then he wanted to look at the bird book again. We noticed there are other books like this one by the same author on reptiles and amphibians, trees, wildflowers, and mammals.
We'll probably be looking for the reptile book very soon.
I've started to wonder about spelling. I don't really believe in tests, but wondered how to be sure he's learning to spell words correctly. He seems good at memorizing things quickly. I hate to admit it, but I think Google has helped with spelling, LOL! He types in something to search, and if he spells it wrong it comes up with the suggested spelling. It's how he has learned to spell some of the words for things he is so interested in researching.
He has been drawn back to writing through our interstate postcard project, though he doesn't like to write more than one or two postcards at a time. (We're very slow on this project, so if you're reading this and are expecting a postcard from us, please be patient. This is a child led project for us.)
For a long time he wouldn't write at all. I encouraged, but tried not to push, and some days just didn't ask him to write anything at all. But on any piece of paper that he draws or does any work I have him write the date and his name at the top.
His handwriting was not good. Inside I worried, thinking I should do something to help his penmanship. Instead I waited.
His letters aren't always perfectly straight, but they are much better than before. It is proof for me that Maria Montessori was right about sensitive periods and trusting the child to learn.
Imagine what kind of world we would live in if everyone were allowed to become the person they were intended to become, free to learn at their own pace, rewarded by the feeling of accomplishment, of learning to do things on their own, instead of some outside, artificial token, trophy, or authoritative praise. Imagine what kind of world we would live in if we focused out, on the big picture, then incrementally focused smaller so that we had a better understanding of the whole universe first, then our own tiny world, country, state.

Schoolhouse Rock

I used to look forward to the Schoolhouse Rock episodes on Saturday mornings. I loved those songs and I really did learn a lot from the episodes. I recently rented Schoolhouse Rock from Netflix in preparation for some language work for Sean this week. He liked it, but not as much as I did. Too old school, I guess.
Today I presented some simple sentences and asked Sean to identify the noun and verb. We have been working on those off and on all school year. We used the grammar symbols and he placed those above the words.
Then I introduced the article symbol and explained what an article is.
He is very curious about the other symbols, but I'm going slow with it. I gave him the names for each of the symbols, but didn't want to introduce more than one today. The verb was a review for him, and the article was brand new.
I noticed he isn't wanting to write lately. When I pulled out the material to present it, he said, "I don't want to write." He was relieved when I said this work didn't require writing.
I expect he'll come around to another writing phase later on.

Play and Learn

Yesterday Sean had a free pass from "school" work. We had someone here working on our porch, replacing rails, etc. and he wanted to watch to learn about how to do those kinds of things. I completely agreed. There was measuring, sawing, drilling, and a lot of conversation. Sean is a talker.
After public school kids got home, his friend came over to play. They are getting to that wonderful little boy stage where they want to "talk." I call it the tree house/boy's club stage. They are only a few months apart in age.
In our neighborhood it's really only the two of them because the rest are teenagers, or babies.
After a while of playing in the front yard, running around, they moved into the back yard.
I worked and watched out the window as they climbed the Cherry tree in our back yard. Sean likes to climb very high into it, but his friend is afraid of heights. They climbed down a time or two, then back up and sat on the limbs talking. They were still in the tree when I called Sean in for dinner.

Reconnecting with sounds

I am inspired by many things, and often by reading other homeschooling mommas' blogs. One of them I read said everything that I have been struggling with so far. My son and the 3-hour work period.
I've tried letting it go, and I've tried being a stickler for it, neither of which work out very well. The goal is to get the child to a point that they are so engrossed and focused on their work that they work for that time with the materials, and want to work longer. I see traces of that concentration as he works on certain materials, but not for three hours.
Neither of us enjoy my constantly saying, "You need to choose a work." I think I will stop saying it.
So today I decided we would both benefit from a totally different school environment. It was a beautiful day. The sun was out, the temperature was mild, and we went for a nature walk.
I suggested, before we headed out the door, that we listen carefully once we got outside. We weren't even out of our driveway and we both were so connected to the sounds around us. It was incredible. (It rains here a lot, so some days we just can't motivate ourselves to go out in it.)
We heard birds, then we listened closer to try to discern how many different birds we could hear. Sean decided it must be about 12. He could be right, I just know there were a lot, including a woodpecker.
We heard voices, a lawn mower, a dog barking, and traffic on the road that leads to our neighborhood.
He collected some really large fir cones and a leaf, found a spider and watched some tiny birds at a bird feeder. We also saw a bee along the way.
Then we walked to Grandma's house and watched a humming bird come to the feeder hanging outside her living room window.
We came home, ate lunch and watched a movie Sean has been wanting to share with me all week.
It was a grand day, and not once did I say, "You need to choose a work."