Babylon, Purim, History & Geography!!

I LOVE homeschooling! I guess you figured that out by now. I'm just so excited about what I'm learning! I think every homeschool parent must first be a self directed learner. After all, isn't that what we want in our kids? Then how can we help facilitate something if we aren't doing it? So I find myself doing what I want my kids to be doing, exploring and making connections between the different things we find out.

So this morning, Simonne and I were reading about Ancient Babylon in "A Child's History of the World" and looking at Mesopotamia on the map, locating ancient Babylon, which is now Iraq, and exploring some of their customs. As soon as we said 'Babylon', Simonne's face lit up. Where have we heard of Babylon before? Why, in the story of Daniel, of course! So as we read, we were linking some of the things we knew from the Daniel story to the experiences being described in the book.

Then, later today, I was talking to a wonderful friend, a Jewish woman about Purim, investigating it's origins, and she told me the story of Esther, another familiar one that the children also love. The map of Mesopotamia had also highlighted Persia. So this evening, Simonne and I talked about Purim and Esther and the celebration with hamantaschen, remembering Esther's courage in letting God use her to rescue his people. I was just awed by all the connections between history, geography, bible and life. I wish I had seen them as a child. It would have made so much more sense than a set of discrete facts did.

Simonne decided we needed to watch the Esther story to celebrate Purim (we have it on a Veggie Tales DVD) and to make triangular cookies.....maybe the cookies will come next year! Happy Purim!

Math Bites with Rods

Today we visited with 2 other homeschool families and Simonne showed a bit of what we are exploring with the cuisenaire rods. As we all talked, I realised that I haven't yet found any online resources for using implementing Gattegno's philosophy with rods. I was thinking to do a few posts on how we use Gattegno's method to explore mathematical concepts.

Let's start with getting familiar with the rods through play. I don't think the child needs to start with number symbols for the rods. Knowing that this rod is the 'red' rod, and that is the 'green' is sufficient representation as s/he plays with the rods and gets familiar with the relationships between them. Gattegno really teaches that teaching should be subordinated to learning. What I think that means is really letting the child explore, ask them what they are noticing, and letting the learning be it's own reward, vs celebrations, "good boy!" etc. He encourages us to just let the kids free play with the rods for a while, and in the process discuss the things we notice. Let them build whatever they want, arrange the rods in a variety of ways. All the while, they are internalizing important relationships between the rods.

Some activities to try:

• Make a ladder or stairs with the rods and notice that the size of the step is the size of the white rod. We can make stairs that are a little 'bigger' where the size of the step is the size of the red rod. Although the picture below has number associations for the rods, remember, that really isn't important right now.


• We can make trains of a particular length: e.g. how many trains can we make with length orange rod that only has one or 2 colors?


• We can play guessing games, taking out a white and a red rod, giving it to the child and asking him to close his eyes and give u back a particular one. That way, they become familiar with the rod by feel. You can add in the other rods (green, pink,...), as the child becomes familiar with them.

Have fun! Next time we will talk about exploring simple operations with the rods.

Mommy, where's my book???

Silly Mommy! Can I upload pictures of one child's book and not the other, when 2 books were made that day? Here is Simonne's book on her favorite subject: butterflies. She had me show her images of butterflies on google images so she could choose the butterflies for her book. And I figured out something about uploading pictures!

We started making books!!

I tell you, everything can be found on youtube! One of our goals for this new year was to make books. I found a video on how to make books with children, by Susan Gaylord (note her website: http://www.makingbooks.com/aboutsusan.shtml) and decided to try it with the children. We have sooo much artwork that happens here every day, I have to hide and throw some out! (I'll blog on that at another time). I've been hoping to convince the small people to use them as illustrations in a book. I'll share with you Zachary's first book. He chose all the content himself, wrote and illustrated it! I hope you enjoy it.

More Math with Rods

I've been sooo excited to be exploring math with rods. I'm sure I said it before but I really didn't understand much math through undergrad and grad school! I'm so grateful to be developing a strong core for myself (at 38!) and to be helping my kids at the same time. Take a look at these pictures and see how some simple rods illuminate important math principles.

The picture to the left is a wall exploring the number 20 (5 pink rods). We build as many trains with eh same length as we can and then look at what we can learn from the trains. So the yellow train tells us that 5 yellow rods gives us the same as 4 pink rods. We also learn that 2 dark greens and 4 reds give us 20. So if we convert to numbers, we know that 4 and 4 and 4 and 4 and 4 is 20, which is the same as saying that 5 groups of 4 is 20. I love sliding into multiplication without rote learning! Yippeee!

The picture of the church shows that kids can be pretty creative with the rods, and at the same time, be internalizing principles of symmetry, etc.

Homeschooling and Holiday Traditions

As I think about the 2008 holiday season, I realize that homeschoolling saved my holidays! I have to confess to being apathetic to the holiday season, appreciating the original intent of the holidays, but finding little meaning in the celebrations. Christmas, in particular, was very much an anti-climax. Then there was homeschooling!

Kids love holidays and are motivated to do all kinds of academic stuff disguised in holiday tradition. I needed to find some traditions! Last Christmas, I saw advent calendars and thought that would be a great addition to our holidays. I could create the activities that we would do every day. I also found out about Jessee Trees, a visual representation of Jesus' family tree, almost a biblical timeline of great moments leading up to Jesus' birth. Both these traditions involved several days of doing something leading up to Christmas, and I liked the idea of wallowing in the holiday, of milking it for all it really had. Great ideas, but by the time I got to implementation, Christmas was over!

This year I was ready. We did a combination of advent activities, themed copywork, coloring pages and Jesse Tree craft and discussions for the entire month of December. The kids had a great time leading up to Christmas. I extrapolated meaning for myself from the discussions and activities and felt really good creating these experiences for the kids, and doing 'school' at the same time! So the picture above is of our Jesse tree, symbols drawn and colored by all of us (ignore the date on the camera, please!)

Here are some other things we did:

• We had an actual Christmas tree with lights! And we put gifts under it. Next year it may get some tinsel.


• We put lights on our window and our fence.


• We made Christmas themed soaps for our friends and family as holiday gifts.

So we had a great time creating meaning for ourselves. The kids enjoyed the activities and I have a new set to add, to enrich my traditions in 2009. Like having a Boxing Day box, to collect gifts for the community.....

Play with Math using Rods and Gattegno!!!

Just a quick note about the wonderful method of exploring and internalising Mathematics that we recently found. I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. It was pioneered by Caleb Gattegno and uses Cuisenaire rods. I can't describe the experience, but I have done mathematics to the graduate level and taught it to the college level, and trust me, there is a lot that I do not understand. So much of mathematics seems to be the following of rules that you just don't 'get'. At my ripe old age, I'm just understanding what they meant when i was 'carrying the 1' in subtraction! So, as a homeschooler, I really want my kids to 'get'.

Gattegno's method helps the children to become familiar with mathematics in a very intuitive and visual way. More details on his methods later, maybe, but take a look at Simonne and Zachary exploring concepts that are become second nature (instead of rote learning math facts). So here is Simonne looking at all the ways to make rods of length 11 units. I think she was more excited about building the wall! She then wrote out that O+W = Bl + R and so on, also becoming familiar with algebraic notation.

Here is Zach building a ladder, which is just him becoming familiar with the order of the rods when there is only a difference of one unit. The visual piece is so important and leads to such wonderful realizations later on. They start to 'see' the mathematics.

Of course, we don't only have to build walls and ladders!!!

I'm excited about this because I've found the method to teach Jaedon math, when he is ready for it. I have heard that this works so well with special needs kids, who may not get the 'rules' of mathematics, but just start to 'see it'. Whatever you do, keep looking for methods and approaches that are right for your kids. If they aren't out there, you can create one!

I LOVE markable maps!!!

This picture shows why I love markable maps. Well, first, let me give some background. I hated geography. I just didn't relate. Drawing the shapes of countries and rivers and hearing about their weather and vegetation did not interest me.

This year, I've decided to more fully use the Sonlight curriculum that I have had for some time. I started one of the grade 2 readers with Simonne, Clara and the Bookwagon. The setting is Maryland in the early 1900's. We talk about setting, then follow Sonlight's encouragement to find Maryland on the map. Well, I didn't know, so we found out together. My goodness! A whole new world was opened up. We continued by finding all the states we could recognise, then Simonne found a puzzle of the U.S. that was labeled and she spend a long time using it to identify states on our markable map.

THEN, I decided to continue on this vein, and introduce continents and oceans. Can I tell you that I had no previous idea about any of the oceans before this? Honestly, I remembered the location of the Caribbean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It was really exciting for me to find out where these were and have Simonne eagerly labeling the places. I even offered to write the labels for her and she just point them out, but she wanted to write herself (this is the former reluctant writer!) We have a cute little song about the continents and oceans singing and Zachary is singing along. I love homeschooling!!!

Every day since, in every book we read, we note the places mentioned, and look for them on the map sometime shortly after. What a life!

What happens to seeds when we plant them?

There has been a sudden interest in seeds and plants recently. I think it started with a visit to our friend Carmen's home and her guided exploration of the garden and all that plants need. A few weeks later, we planted our first set of seeds: beans, tomato and green peppers. It may be a little late in the year for peppers and tomatoes, since they aren't thriving like the beans.

I love projects like these that can be used to explore so many things. Take a look at our germination bags (talked about condensation) and out Popsicle sticks for labeling (handwriting), our very well sprouted beans, and less mature mung beans which were added a few weeks later and our window planter that had our transplanted plants (plant care, how delicate young plants are .... since a few of our beans died with the handling). We worked on some sensory issues (chiefly mine) since we had to handle the dirt to transfer the plants to the planter. We also discovered that young plants that have been bent, not broken, can reinforce the bent area and straighten itself.. and that Jaedon
loves to poke dirt and dig out small plants. we just have to help him to

identify which plants are weeds and which plants stay in the dirt!

Homeschooling allows me to learn alongside my children. I realised that children are like plants. They grow in the right environment, they are resilient and can recover from some mishandling (whew!), they grow towards the sunlight (praise and everything positive) and that so much is happening for them, even when I don't see it. I realise that learning is like breathing, it's happening all the time while they are alive.

Soap and Math

I really enjoy the times when learning happens and comes from a genuine desire from the child to really 'get' something. I really think all learning should be that way. Think about it. How many things did you learn because you 'should' and you just forgot afterwards? Even rudimentary things like ABC's and counting were done to music and using stuff we were interested in ("Johnny, do you want one cookie, or 2?")


I encouraged Simonne to start making soap for 2 reasons: so she could make some money to start attacking the list of toys she wants, and to help her make math practical. So here's a pic of the soaps. They are 50 cents each, so people often pay her in quarters. I asked her one night, what's 25 and 25? I was sure she knew, the amount of times we had done this. she said "About...45 cents?" and I figured she had no idea. A little testily, I explained in about 3 different ways, how to add 25 and 25. We used regular sum notation, base 10 blocks and counting by 5's on fingers. I wrote it up on the blackboard side of the easel. Some time later, I saw this on the white board side! She wrote out what I had on the board, expanded on it and added some annotations of her own! She said "Look Mommy, is this math?" I had an enthusiastic affirmative. Of course, I was suspicious. Did she really get it? Was she just copying what I did on the board? A few days later, I found out. We emptied the piggy bank, and started counting the money. She counted 2 quarters with no problem, then we moved on to the problem of 50 cents plus 50 cents. She got it!