Rocket Boy has officially gotten over the "I love homeschooling" phase. This has been building over the last few weeks. He's gone from the enthusiastic learner to the kid who whines when he has to do actual schoolwork. Today he finally voiced it. "I don't want to go to regular school and I don't want to do school here. I just want to stay home with you and Daddy." It's a lovely sentiment and I know that when he's a ten years older I'll be dreaming of the day he said that he just wanted to be with us. But for now I turned a hard heard to it and cracked the whip. Not so hard since the kind words were accompanied with much whining.
Since I am highly unsympathetic to that kind of whine, we went ahead with some phonics and social studies, with a 10 minute nap break for me in between. We went back to the atlas and looked at North America. He's definitely more interested in what the internet links are. We may have to abandon the atlas if that keeps getting in the way. It was still enjoyable and deciphering all the map symbols was good, but I got impatient at parrying all the questions about the links.
Since he was so down on school today, for our reading I decided not to push him too much. Instead I read to him for quite a while, which is fun because I can read a much more complex story from start to finish. When I make him do all the reading, I have a really hard time not getting bored by the latest easy reader. There are so few really good ones.
After a late lunch, I let him watch his chosen TV shows for the day, chatted with my father, who called to find out how to use Facebook (!), and started reading a new book. That's part of my resolution to read in front of Rocket Boy more often. I want to encourage a whole culture of reading in our family, but if the only time I read every day is before bed after he's long asleep, Rocket Boy is just never going to get it that reading is something grown-ups do.
After his TV break, we went back to schoolwork. I have a cooler full of leftover ice from the broken-fridge debacle. There has to be some science we can do with ice, right? We pulled out the experiment books and they all pointed to making ice cream. We talked about heat/cold transfer and we talked about how salt affects temperature. And we made some awesome ice cream using two different methods. #1 involved nesting a cup of our ice cream base (milk, cream, sugar, cocoa powder) within a big bowl if salt and ice with occasional mixing over about an hour. While we waited for ice cream method #1 to work, we did another experiment involving dissolving salt into hot water and into cold water. Then we started ice cream method #2, which was far more fun and quickly effective. We filled a small baggie with our ice cream base (milk, cream, sugar, cocoa powder), ice, salt, milk, and chocolate. We put that baggie into a large baggie filled with ice and salt, put on our mittens, and played catch. 5 minutes later we had real ice cream! Is was especially fun because I could tell he was getting antsy and really wanted to move his body.
It was a long school day with lots of breaks, but it felt really good (to me at least) since I got to intersperse housework with school, instead of saving it till after Rocket Boy is in bed and I'm tired. In the end, even he really enjoyed it, despite his whiny start. Ice cream makes everything better.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Today feels, um, normal for the first time in a long time
So today was packed full of lots of stuff to do. This morning I had to finish clearing out the broken fridge. I had left some items in the freezer since everything in there was keeping itself pretty cold. I also finally got to the scary stuff in the back of the fridge. Please, do yourself a favor, never forget about Pad Thai.
The morning was unusually productive. Rocket Boy and talked all about plants. We took apart a couple of pine cones looking for seeds. We read about how seeds germinate and checked the progress of our seeds. Next we talked about how plants get nutrients. We ran a fun little experiment that involves placing a stalk of celery in a glass of water that has a generous helping of blue food coloring. After about 2 hours the leaves started exhibiting blue areas, much to our excitement. I was actually pretty surprised by it, since there was very little evidence of the blue in the stalk, really it was only in the leaves. We decided to run the experiment on one of the morning glories we've been growing. As of the end of the day there was no blue, but it's a very small plant and I expect it will take a little longer to transpire a visible amount of blue water.
Then the delivery guy came at 11:30. First he took the old fridge away, so I took the opportunity to give the never-seen behind the fridge area a thorough cleaning and I put down anti-roach gel all around. We've been fighting a battle against those buggers for a while, but we live in an old, old house in Brooklyn with lots of cracks and crevices. We usually keep them away for a 2-3 weeks then they start showing up again. Another round of baits and all is quiet for a few more weeks. It has never been very bad, compared to friends I know who turn on the lights in their kitchen to a scene that looks like a concert letting out. We've never had more than a couple at a time and usually in very isolated areas. Still I don't like 'em one bit.
Then we had a nice session of unpacking the cooler into our shiny new fridge. After a lunch inspired by some of our finds, we opened up the National Geographic Kids Atlas and started our new attempts to address social studies and geography. Today's look at the atlas was dealing with the whole world and how it fits together. They have lots of good specialty maps and we worked on making connections between climate and population (why do so few people live in Antartica?) and also talked about how landforms influence where people live. Next we'll start going continent by continent to get a good overview of what our world is like today. Once Rocket Boy has a very basic grasp of continents and regions, we're going to switch gears and talk about ancient civilizations. That should be fun, since it will involve lots and lots of mythology. Rocket Boy loves hearing those stories. I just hope I can find some good material that I can retrofit for a bright 6 year old that looks beyond Greece and Rome. I want to be able to address early civilizations all over the world, but I don't think Rocket Boy is ready to deal with Jared Diamond. I know I'll be looking to Joseph Campbell for some inspiration.
The one annoying thing about the National Geo Kids Atlas, is that it is web-integrated. Now I love the idea of that, it's great for enrichment, but my child obsesses over the computer, so much so that I have exorcised it from any of our curriculum. As we went through the atlas he kept fixating on the links, which are called out with easy to read graphics.
At that point it was only 2:30 and I was seriously sleepy. We tried a rousing game of Dinosaur Go Fish, but I was practically drooling on my triceratops. I gave up and laid down while he watched Between the Lions. 10 minutes later, Rocket Boy's dad came in for his lunch, and was seriously bent out of shape that the boy was watching TV during school time. That little row woke me up plenty. So we went back to looking at plants and the plant books, then finished the day with another 10 pages in his school-issued math workbook. He's whipping through that thing and is more than ready to move on, but for the sake of being a completionist, I'm going to have him finish the book. Besides, it's so easy for him that he happily and confidently does the work. That means he's getting lots of practice holding a pencil. Anything that gets him to practice writing, even if it's just writing his numbers, makes me happy. He doesn't get too upset about writing numbers the way he gets upset about writing letters so I'm hoping that will work as part of the strategy to get him writing more.
Overall the day felt really productive and normal, in a good way. Lately I've been feeling a little out of sync with teaching. It hasn't been bad, it's just been a little unfocused or vague feeling. I don't quite know what made today feel so much more together. We still wandered through our day driven by what RocketBoy found interesting. I'll have to think about it more, because I want more days like today.
The morning was unusually productive. Rocket Boy and talked all about plants. We took apart a couple of pine cones looking for seeds. We read about how seeds germinate and checked the progress of our seeds. Next we talked about how plants get nutrients. We ran a fun little experiment that involves placing a stalk of celery in a glass of water that has a generous helping of blue food coloring. After about 2 hours the leaves started exhibiting blue areas, much to our excitement. I was actually pretty surprised by it, since there was very little evidence of the blue in the stalk, really it was only in the leaves. We decided to run the experiment on one of the morning glories we've been growing. As of the end of the day there was no blue, but it's a very small plant and I expect it will take a little longer to transpire a visible amount of blue water.
Then the delivery guy came at 11:30. First he took the old fridge away, so I took the opportunity to give the never-seen behind the fridge area a thorough cleaning and I put down anti-roach gel all around. We've been fighting a battle against those buggers for a while, but we live in an old, old house in Brooklyn with lots of cracks and crevices. We usually keep them away for a 2-3 weeks then they start showing up again. Another round of baits and all is quiet for a few more weeks. It has never been very bad, compared to friends I know who turn on the lights in their kitchen to a scene that looks like a concert letting out. We've never had more than a couple at a time and usually in very isolated areas. Still I don't like 'em one bit.
Then we had a nice session of unpacking the cooler into our shiny new fridge. After a lunch inspired by some of our finds, we opened up the National Geographic Kids Atlas and started our new attempts to address social studies and geography. Today's look at the atlas was dealing with the whole world and how it fits together. They have lots of good specialty maps and we worked on making connections between climate and population (why do so few people live in Antartica?) and also talked about how landforms influence where people live. Next we'll start going continent by continent to get a good overview of what our world is like today. Once Rocket Boy has a very basic grasp of continents and regions, we're going to switch gears and talk about ancient civilizations. That should be fun, since it will involve lots and lots of mythology. Rocket Boy loves hearing those stories. I just hope I can find some good material that I can retrofit for a bright 6 year old that looks beyond Greece and Rome. I want to be able to address early civilizations all over the world, but I don't think Rocket Boy is ready to deal with Jared Diamond. I know I'll be looking to Joseph Campbell for some inspiration.
The one annoying thing about the National Geo Kids Atlas, is that it is web-integrated. Now I love the idea of that, it's great for enrichment, but my child obsesses over the computer, so much so that I have exorcised it from any of our curriculum. As we went through the atlas he kept fixating on the links, which are called out with easy to read graphics.
At that point it was only 2:30 and I was seriously sleepy. We tried a rousing game of Dinosaur Go Fish, but I was practically drooling on my triceratops. I gave up and laid down while he watched Between the Lions. 10 minutes later, Rocket Boy's dad came in for his lunch, and was seriously bent out of shape that the boy was watching TV during school time. That little row woke me up plenty. So we went back to looking at plants and the plant books, then finished the day with another 10 pages in his school-issued math workbook. He's whipping through that thing and is more than ready to move on, but for the sake of being a completionist, I'm going to have him finish the book. Besides, it's so easy for him that he happily and confidently does the work. That means he's getting lots of practice holding a pencil. Anything that gets him to practice writing, even if it's just writing his numbers, makes me happy. He doesn't get too upset about writing numbers the way he gets upset about writing letters so I'm hoping that will work as part of the strategy to get him writing more.
Overall the day felt really productive and normal, in a good way. Lately I've been feeling a little out of sync with teaching. It hasn't been bad, it's just been a little unfocused or vague feeling. I don't quite know what made today feel so much more together. We still wandered through our day driven by what RocketBoy found interesting. I'll have to think about it more, because I want more days like today.
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