why i love homeschooling,
reason #3,459



because when we get the wiggles
in the middle of our morning,
we can all go outside
and have a leaf fight.

this is brought to you by becky.

hello, becky from here.
i'm here to tell you how much
i love butcher paper homeschool lessons.
i know, i know...enough with the butcher paper already.
well, too bad.
i love me some butcher paper.
and i have lots more projects to share.
(hint: we're doing the nativity next week)



my sis-in-law thinks i need to buy stock in a paper roll company.
and a recycling plant.
today's butcher paper "school" went something like this -
reading
writing
decorate the christmas tree
review numbers 1-10
write numbers 1-10
20 math problems (reference 1-10 review)

my kindergarten teacher friend once told me,
have them read and write every single day -
and throw in some math for them if you can.
so, that has been my priority -
read, write, math.
that's what i use the butcher paper for.
and then cluttered around the edges,
we have piles of art projects
and science experiments and history books.

and by the way,
the current science experiment
of sprouting beans from the pantry
has been such a rip-roaring success,
we decided to sprout a whole forest this time.
i'll post pics later.

kinder math skillz...

well, we're a bunch of oral learners.
we can quiz each other all the day long and be happy as clams.
we can count forwards and backwards (getting there)
and sing about counting by tens,
and twos and fives...
but push comes to shove,
we need to really know what our numbers really look like.



so, when i saw this game on the clearance aisle at target, i had to jump on it.
(normaly $5, which seems pricey for a puzzle game)



first, i had the kids count and piece the two halves of each puzzle together.
they chose to attack this part as a team, each taking a job
which is good for the little one, in that she gets left behind a lot in the flow of a lesson.



and when they were done, i had them put them in order.
i was pleasantly surprised that they pretty much knew all their numbers by sight.
which is a shocker, considering how lazy i've been with them lately.
and luke only forgot "15" twice throughout the whole lesson.
this is good, in that luke and "15" seem to have a weird aversion to each other.

okay, all in all, i can see us using this once a week or so for review
and to encourage teamwork.
would i spend $5 on it?
probably not,
considering you can make this with a stack of index cards and stickers.
but if you ever see it on clearance and you have a some littles of your own to teach,
go ahead and scoop them up.
you'll enjoy it.

well, i should run.
my kids have decided to continue our science experiment this morning and are currently pulling all the condiments out of the fridge and mixing them together in massive bowl of water.
i know, dumb mommy.
but they left me alone for five minutes.
so there!

bye, have a good one.
enjoy what you do for your children,
and be blessed doing it.

Art Class by Becky

Art Lessons with Becky and her Kids and Some Friends:



so, i like art.
love art.
adore art.
and i like art history almost as much.
but the it is a season of holidays,
so instead of preparing a lesson on matisse's penchant for collage self-portraits,
we made collage pumpkins.



first, i scrounged up a bunch of magazines from the front and back bathrooms
(sad, i know...does it make you feel better that we read actual books outside of the commodes?)



and then i dug into my ever present stack of glue and glue sticks
and then found some scissors (though finger tearing makes for much better texture).



and lastly i printed out a silhouette of a pumpkin.
after cutting that out and gluing it onto the orange pieces of construction paper provided,
i started talking about what collage was, what texture was and then i showed them how to rip out all the pages with orange on them.



from there the kids were able to go to town and enjoy themselves.
i try to repeat the "lesson intent" a few times casually throughout the activity
and even pointed out all the different techniques everyone was using.



we are actually going to do the matisse self-portraits next week,
and i ordered some circle "dobber-thingies" for my pointillism lesson.
that one is going to be a favorite i think.
so, stay tuned...

so, on the next art post, would you want a detailed lesson plan
or is it enough to get inspired and do it yourself?
let me know, and i'll write it accordingly.
have a great week homeschooling.
it's worth all your love, attention, effort, patience and self-control.

Socialization--by Becky

the "socialization" debate:
an introductory post



this last Saturday, i hosted a casual little art class party.
we learned about collage and texture and ended up with a variety of little pumpkins.
i had to do my son's for him.
because ten minutes before everyone arrived he asked,
"so, which boys are coming?"
to which i responded,
"um, i don't know. let mommy make some phone calls."
which were in vain and half way through our morning,
he was done, finished, collapsed on the couch in mock exhaustion/exasperation.
he had had enough of the whole girl thing.
because all his friends are girls and all the boys his age go to school.
he just wants a boy to play with.
one stinkin' little boy.
he doesn't have to be bright or strong or even fun to play with.
he's just go to show up, have the right equipment and be willing to throw mud in the backyard.
we're working on it.

anyhoo, the next day my father-in-law made some comments about his ball catching skills,
and proceeded to compare him to his one year older girl cousin
and explained that he was worried that luke wouldn't do thinks like the other kids
and that it would effect his self-esteem.
i'm not that worried.
so what, he doesn't play catch that often.
(he can kick a soccer ball across the lawn and back all day long)
i repeat, i'm not worried.
we're going to sign him up for some sports camps this year,
stick him in a karate class
and will continue to play ball with him and invite his friends over when we can.
but, i won't become fearful for his self-esteem.
i don't think anyone can argue that the social construct of the modern playground
is building up strong, confident children.
especially as bullying hits an all time high, and aggressive physical and sexual acting out become the norm.

does anyone else have thoughts on this?
what are your worries, concerns, thoughts, ideas on the ever present debate about "socialization"?
and how do you respond to all the "non-homeschoolers" when approached with this ever present concern?

Making It Up As We Go by Becky

making it up as we go.

hello, i'm becky from hellofromhades.blogspot.com. don't be scared to head over there - it's not a devil worshiping site or anything - just describing where i live as accurately as possible. anyhoo, here's my latest installment about our first year of homeschool. here we go.

so, around here we've tried the formal regimented way of homeschooling,
the loosey goosey unschooling method,
and now the 15 minute method.
(which is of my own making)

and while i know the future health and development of my kids will require a little bit of all of these, the 15 minute method is what's working for me so far,
in that i have a 3 year old and a five year old.

first, i looked up the state standards for california
what a bunch of high falootin' hooty patootie.
it was a lot of fancy jargon that looks intimidating from a distance,
but up close - not so much.
example:
2.4 Retell familiar stories.
"and then the guy went to his front door and he peed himself and then he rolled around on the grass!"
every single day that story is retold.
every single day.

but there's more,
1. Determine the relative locations of objects using the terms near/far, left/right, and behind/in front.
"but mom, you passed the store. i wanted a chocolate bar. it's back there - behind us. turn around mom - left, left, left! why are you turning right?! i know you're taking us home. our house is in front of us. i see our house! i wanted a chocolate bar! aaaaauuuuuugggghhhh!"

see, a whole bunch of the kindergarten standards are simply a part of every day life. so, it's best to think about your kids, figure out what they do and don't do in their lives and then figure out what you do need to work on.

for us, we need to work on social studies and geography a bit more...though, we'll be passing up the state standards pretty quickly. anyhoo, moving on.

now that i know what i have to teach, i plan my days around that. and the 15 minute method has saved my life. and since applying it, my son's understanding and grasp and application of the material has skyrocketed.

so here's how i do it.

this is my tub-o-wonders
(whatever, mostly flashcards)

(like my toes, we're going to work a pedicure internship into our curriculum. i should get something out of all of this, right?!)
anyhoo, here's what's inside the tub.


this is the "no tears handwriting" kit. a kindergarten teacher loaned me hers and it is amazing - and saved my $40.
it involves an instruction booklet full of lots and lots of teaching methods
and also includes lots of manipulates and a variety of teaching strategies. we like it.
(i have a bottom to top writer)

nature journals.
this is brand new to us and i'm not so pleased with the results.
we'll work on it.
mostly we try to get outside everyday and talk about the weather, clouds, plants, etc.
so nature walks through the neighborhood do the job well.
up until now we've kept weather journals that have lots of prompts and lots of "circle the answer" options.
we might be doing a bit of both in the future.

a pile of books related to one topic we might be interested in.
we've been talking a lot about bear hibernating and are building a diorama this week.
so, bear books.
i never knew there were so many variations of goldilocks and the three bears.
i'm a bit of a classicist now that i've read them all.

these are our tangrams and pattern cards.
mostly we just play with them and talk about shapes but soon we're going to practice our patterns with them.
abbabbabba
abcccabccc
aaaabaaaab
etc.

this is our dry erase board
and our pencil case.
each kid has one of each.
charlie mostly draws monsters and luke mostly practices his sight words.
this seems to be working best for us so far.
i have a writing kit that i'll post about later, which we're going to try to work into the "tub".
but for now, this is meeting our daily writing requirement.

i have to be honest,
math, science, geography, music, art and all of that aside,
my main goal this year is to get luke reading and writing.
so, sight words are huge.
we learn six new words a week.
and review all of the sight words from the weeks before with these six new words.
it's making a huge difference now that we're nailing these down.
out of nowhere he's sounding out everything he can.

we do a little bit of addition and subtraction every day.
we have tons of "counters", but these little red rocks seem to be the most popular.
mostly i pick five or six cards from the stack and we do the fronts and back and move on.

random flashcards.
these change every week.
i'm a flashcard hussy.
love them.
and they help me throw in a little variety every now and then.
these space ones are our faves.
$1 at target and beautifully illustrated and great info on back.

numbers.
one of our big goals is to count to a hundred by christmas.
i've got lots of methods for teaching this, but this is the most important part -
sight recognition of numbers.
and it's helping us understand the counting by tens.

okay, this is what is in the bucket this week.
and our goal is to only spend fifteen minutes, one to two times a day on the bucket.
i know, you're gasping.
that's not enough time! how can her poor demented children learn anything?!
well, this is our starting point.
we do the bucket one or two times
and sometimes the fifteen minutes will spread to thirty or forty-five minutes depending on their interest and attention spans.
and then i work review of taught material into our play for the rest of the day.
or sometime i just hold stuff hostage until someone gives me the review i want.
"if you want your screen time you have to count to forty!"
or
"whoever wants mac and cheese for lunch had better show me how to draw a perfect Q!"

okay, we'll there's loads more to tell you about what we do, how we do it and how we have no clue about what's going to work in the long run or now, but for now this will have to do.
active kids = short lessons and lots of reviews.
and the tub - we'll it's just to keep me focused.

good luck and have a great day.

Kitchen Science by Becky

why i love homeschooling:





i bribed the kids with a promise to make cookies
if they finished both all their lessons and all their carrots at lunch.
i'm a multi-tasking mama that way.
anyhoo, while we were cleaning up we started talking about how sugar dissolves in water
and before you know it,
we were having an impromptu science experiment
where we saw what and how different elements of our cookies dissolved.
and in the process made the kids talk about their "hypothesis" and make "predictions".
from flour to chocolate to oil and sugar, we tried it all,
even talking about how fats dissolve at higher temperatures.
further, luke came up with the bright idea of putting a whole clump of cookie dough in one of the glasses.
that was a fun one, because i was able to talk about how the sugar was dissolving, the chocolates sank to the bottom and the fat floated to the surface.
luke wants to a lot more of this same type of experiment tomorrow
which means i should go google furthers as fast as possible tonight.
and what i've learned about homeschooling,
that no matter where a learning lesson comes from or how unprepared i am,
there's always something to learn off the cuff.

A Day in the Life by Becky

So, I’m at the stage of homeschooling where I can still do whatever I want – in that technically he’s still four (five in June) and I don’t really care to sit down and write his curriculum just yet. So, for now, I allow his whims to guide us. This week, said whims guided us to a 3-D dollar store book on space. In that this fed into his endless fascination with spaceboys and rockets and aliens – I thought this would be a great time to build up some real and actual concepts about the solar system and space travel.

Now, as with all his whims, my main goal is to build a foundation of big concepts – and not to get caught up in the little details and distract him with ephemera. And beyond that, the dollar store book was written by someone with questionable authority in the area of aeronautics and astronomy, nor a great grasp of English – so we just sort of “fake” read the book. I would let him point to pictures and then I would talk.

The foundation points that I wanted to get out of this little unit were these:

1) the earth is made of rock,

2) we revolve around the sun and the moon revolves around us

3) there are bigger planets than us, the sun is a star (this leady to a lengthy debate in which I declared Luke the winner and he was allowed to continue to live in a world where the sun is a really cool planet with cool fire/alien people inhabiting it and someday he would go there and meet them – he’s only four, let him live the dream)

4) Saturn has rings

5) what those rings are made of

6) that a spaceship is called a spaceshuttle

7) that it needs boosters to get through the atmosphere

8) that it can be piloted like a plane to return to earth

9) that russia, china and the united states are the only three countries with the technology to go into space

10) that china and the united states call spaceboys “astronauts” and that Russia calls them “cosmonauts”…and so on and so on.

So, being that I’m such an artsy person, I try to drill a lot of this information into his little head as I keep his hands busy with an art project.


First I pulled out a piece of black paper and a white crayon. I told him to draw the sun at the center and to draw whatever planets he wanted to from there. He chose to draw Saturn (shocker), the earth, it’s moon and one of his alien buddies living on the Sun. from here we chose our paper colors and started to cut them up in little tiny bits to be glued onto their corresponding planets. I then wrote identifying words and he copied them.

As he did this we just ran over the information again and again and again. I will continue to quiz him for the following week whenever the topic comes up or I stumble upon him building a space shuttle or talking to his alien robot friends (made out of cardboard and wrapped in duct tape, there are 5 or 6 of them now). I found that it was the most important for me to continually stress who orbits around who – a core piece of knowledge he needs to get down before we go any further.

Anyhoo, this is how my loosey-goosey brain has decided to approach homeschooling at this age. Oh, and as a side note – why do they insist on making all kids material 3-D when 90% of kids hate the 3-D glasses and refuse to wear them (my kids representing the 90%, of course). I’m beginning to wonder if my kids think their world is just poorly drawn and covered in an angelic fuzzy glow. Go figure.

I also included a pic of what Charlie does 75% of the time we have school - stack tuna cans and ignore us. I don't know what she'll play with if we ever have to eat our food storage.

You can always find Becky over at http://hellofromhades.blogspot.com/

Guest Post by Becky

Making the Decision to Homeschool, Part I:

Just so you know, I’m not afraid of the act of homeschooling. I find most of my trepidation comes from the inherent fear of how the world around me will react to me for choosing a path so different from the one everyone else has chosen. I’ve already dipped my toe in, tested the waters and came back with a few piranha bites. Boy oh boy, do people have opinions about homeschooling! And since you’re here at this site reading this post – I don’t have to defend any of it to you’all.

What I will get on my soapbox and defend is this – I know with every fiber of my being that American schools are systematically stripping children of their love of learning…as they fill in the school year with benchmarks and focused lessons and department (if not state-wide and soon to be nation-wide) testing – and do all of this as they strip the schools of their arts, music and physical education programs. The level of redundancy is ridiculous, the actual time spent learning (average of 10 minutes to every hour) is a staggering waste of time and the narrow focus on scores and rankings is astounding – and defeating.

In addition to this, the social implications of sending your children into the mosh pit/lion’s den that is public education is to send your child into an environment where the greater percentage of kids are exposed prematurely to drugs, sex and rock&roll. Now don’t get me wrong, all of us need a little bit of the sex and rock&roll in our lives (and if ben&jerry’s can be considered a drug, that as well) – but at an appropriate age and within the appropriate constructs of monogamy and whatnot. Listen, I subbed for a number of years and was initially shocked when kindergarten students told me they were tired because they stayed up all night watching horror movies and eating their boy weight in cheetos. But the shock quickly wore off when I realized a majority of my students were living lives with very few boundaries and very little constructive parenting. It sad, but even our kindergartners aren’t safe from the slew of permissive parenting running rampant across the land.

And yes, I recognize that many live in areas where going to public school is like going to private school because of parental demographics and local income levels – but for me, this is not the case. I live in a town where 50% of the population has been and will continue to be below the poverty line. And while I love the diversity and small farming town feel of my little burb…it leaves a lot to be desired…

Sum Total: The public education system and American parents are not producing capable world citizens. It doesn’t mean a few aren’t eeking out, but for the most part the percentages are shifting in favor of my belief…that the current education model paired with permissive parenting is creating entitled ignorant brats who know very little about the world around and feel very little responsibility to better said world.

Next Time…The Things I Want my Kids to Learn and Why I Completely Disregard the Value of the Modern Liberal Arts Education.

Note from me: I actually love public education. I think our country provides some of the best free education available in the world. There are parts of it with which I disagree, but on the whole I am a huge fan and supporter. However, it is fun to see why other people homeschool and share opinions. Expect more from Becky. You can read more about her here. Also, watch for my guest post about public school myths. I'll link it here when it is posted.