Field Trip Day

January 6, 2009

Homeschooling Day 2

The everlasting ick that I seem to have caught has morphed again. Over the weekend it was a sore throat and post-nasal drip, Monday digestive nastiness and joint aches later in the evening, and today I woke with my sinuses in misery. I’m not sure what RocketBoy learned yesterday, but I learned that if I could teach through a stomach bug, I could manage through anything.

He woke up at 7:15 filled with “I love you” and “when does school start?” This is a huge contrast to before we took him out of school when the first question out of his mouth was “Is today a school day?” followed by a groan when 5 times out of seven I answered “yes.” I had to remind him of the strict (made up yesterday when I couldn’t get out of bed) rule that school starts at 9 sharp. Not a minute before. Addendum to this rule: before school starts he has to be dressed, breakfast eaten, and teeth brushed. Also, he can watch TV before school as long as everything else gets done. I still shake my head in disbelief that some rules he just accepts as unquestionable and other he pushes till they break. This one he buys. I’ll happily take it.

First, RocketBoy wanted to go through his bag of treasures. We spread newspaper on the table and sorted his finds into groups: Lobster claws, mussels, barnacles, seaweed, rocks, seashells, pine cones, and sea urchin. We talked about each group in more detail and made lots of little observations (you’d think after all the lobster I’ve enjoyed, I would have noticed the hair-like fuzzy bits on the claws). We did not talk about overall beach nature and wave dynamics because RocketBoy was getting antsy. Instead we counted all of the items and RocketBoy carefully recorded them in his notebook. This part was pulling teeth. He really did not want to do it after the first few were done and kept rubbing his eyes. Time for a snack. Even after the snack it was tough to get him to finish, but I persisted and he did. By the end he was really excited again because he counted 64 rocks. He was blown away by the number - nothing else in his collection was past the teens. Since he seemed to like big numbers I decided to add on to the math lesson and we worked on adding up the numbers of all his treasures – 120 total. There went the whole morning – math, science & nature, and writing. We stopped for choose and do time. “Choose and do’s” are what his Syracuse prechool, Jowonio, called free play time. It is a happy association and I think RocketBoy is delighted to have “choose and do” again.

[Side note – Jowonio might just be the most wonderful school in the universe. I still miss it and wish I could find something like it again. There is a charter school in NYC whose founder is an ex-Jowonio teacher and is modeling her elementary after Jowonio, but because of the lottery system and the district preference, we have no hope of ever getting our boy there. If Jowonio existed past pre-k I’d consider moving back to Syracuse. It was that good. Even now, if we have any other children I will regret that they will not get to experience Jowonio. Thank you Ellen, Pam, Jed, Audrey, and all the others that make that place wonderful!]

For choose and do we played a couple of rounds of UNO and RocketBoy asked to chop the carrots to go into the chicken soup I was making (so sad that I had to make my own chicken soup – when you’re sick someone else should do that for you). He asked if we could make cooking part of homeschooling. My answer is a big fat yes!

After that it was field trip time. We went to a hatchery run by the Fish & Wildlife service. Their last visitor had been in October, so they were happy to see us. We were there on an egg day – when the freshly fertilized eggs get transferred into hatching trays. We walked around to all the tanks – each with a larger atlantic salmon. Eggs, egg fry, fry, , smolt, adult. They’re trying to restore what has been badly overfished.

Then home, bath, dinner (the soup was excellent by the way – not bad considering I had no herbs, maybe even better than usual), and an after-dinner giant floor puzzle of the United States.

Now RocketBoy is finally sleeping. Tomorrow we need to get to the beach early, before the snow and ice, and get more reading in.