science center, yet again

We had another fun afternoon at the CT Science Center yesterday, enjoy some photos from our visit:

musical mix masters

creating craters

testing safety helmets, overlooking the CT River

DJ Zoo Boy

racing cars

sailing boats

launching helicopters

creating light via dance

the Hartford skyline on our way out

nature center

We visited a new nature center yesterday, because my friend T convinced me to sign J up for a Geology class with her daughter D. So we showed up a couple of hours early the first day so the boys could get their fill of exploring the center before J had to settled down into the class. (Zoo Boy brought along a workbook to keep himself occupied while J was in class.)


This is a very, VERY cool nature center! There is lots of amazing habitat dioramas and props, plenty of taxidermy animal specimens, and interspersed throughout the exhibits, many tanks of smaller native wildlife. It was a real treat to explore the center and settle ourselves in for an afternoon.








The boys under the roots of a large dead tree. (There were even animals in there!) They had a great time with imaginary play in there.








And in here as well -- a recreated Long House (a local Native American lodge).








J checks out the deer skins that line the benches of the Long House, as well as the various artifacts inside.








Zoo Boy enjoyed the interactive games which worked on identifying wildlife signs and sounds.

Cool place to hang out, we'll be back as J has class for 4 weeks. My guess is we'll sign him up for more classes here in the future as well -- the class size was amazing (only 3 kids, all of them homeschooled), the naturalist knowledgeable and engaging, and the topic right up J's alley.

the "ail" family

The first half of this week we worked with another word family, the "ail/ale" family. After telling the story on Tuesday, we recalled the story (filling in the "ail/ale" words on our town board) the following day, and the boys did a free drawing from the story. Zoo Boy in particular was excited when we got to the part in the story where they "ails" visited the town of Conso Nant!


Here's J's drawing, of Auntie's great blue whale that finally led them home. (I love how the whole family is sitting on the whale's back!)









Zoo Boy's drawing, again of the town, but this time adapted for the "ail" family. You can see Grandma's sail, Mom's rail, Big Sister's nails, water at Papa's feet that he needs to bail, Baby's pail, and at the top, Auntie's whale, and the paper on which Uncle wrote down the whole tale.

During practice time the boys had writing assignments (which you'll see below).


Today we read the limerick together, filling in the other "ail/ale" words on the board.

Above is J's writing from the past two days. I'm finding that he has an easier time staying on task if I'm doing handwork nearby. Otherwise his mind tends to drift and he gets easily distracted. But in general he's really building his writing stamina, it took him far less time today than it did last week to complete the 2 stanzas of verse.

I've taken a bit of a new approach with Zoo Boy, since he's showing that he's willing to work on his writing now, but is still only using capital letters when he does. So I made up these handwriting sheets for him (with simple symbols showing how to form the letters). Yesterday his instruction was to write 5 "ail" words from the limerick, today's instruction was to write 5 "ale" words. He was a little alarmed yesterday when he asked if he could write in capitals and I shook my head. But once he got going and realized he could do it, he was quite pleased with his work.

share day

Monday was the final day of our Monday Homeschool Classes semester, and it was designated as a "Share Day", where the classes could share what they worked on this term. Unfortunately I did a really lousy job of taking pictures (I was having too much fun to even think about it!), but there were class displays and organized events. The Colonial Days class (my class) started the day by sharing some of the games they learned during our class. Then the Spanish class (pictured) ran a pretend Spanish Restaurant, where the waiters (the kids in the class) only spoke Spanish and had to communicate with their customers (very few of who speak Spanish). It was a lot of fun, and J (in the middle of this controlled chaos) had a blast being the "messero", while Zoo Boy and I had fun being customers. (Zoo Boy did a GREAT job of placing his order for "leche" and "hamburguesa" in Spanish, and telling our "messero" that he needed a "tenedor" -- fork.)

The chorus then rehearsed (while the rest of the kids played, as Zoo Boy can be seen doing here with a couple of friends), then performed a concert for us. J did not sing with the homeschool chorus this term, as the timing conflicted with his Spanish class. (He is singing again with the Windham Youth Chorus, their winter concert will be in December.) The kids and I enjoyed attending the concert and cheering for our singing friends.

It was a gorgeous day, and the kids spent a lot of time playing outside. Someone brought a parachute, here's Zoo Boy and some pals playing with it.

I'm going to be running several craft workshops during the intersession before the holidays (rug braiding, felted soaps, and candle dipping), then our regular classes will start up again in January.

Oh, J also took his Spanish test again, and this time he passed and earned his yellow band, which he proudly shows off in this photo! He's very much looking forward to continuing his Spanish lessons next semester (as are Zoo Boy and I!).

word families

We began our new Language Arts block this past month, which focuses on the Word Families. The boys and I painted the town of Conso Nant, which is featured in all the stories we'll be reading this block. We started with a story about The Family of "Eep". As we recalled the story the following day, I inserted "eep" and "eap" cards in the various consonant's houses to make the "eep" words we were saying during the retelling of the story.


The boys and I working on our big town board project, which took the first couple days of the week. We used acrylic paints on a foam-core presentation board.



A word to other Enki families: since both of the boys are already reading fluently, we may not be approaching this material in the same way we would if this was new material to them, or if they were early-readers. However, I knew that this work would really appeal to them, so I decided to include it in our year despite the fact that they don't need the "help" in regards to learning to read.




After our recall, the boys did free drawings (whatever they wanted to draw) from the story. I actually left the room and let them work on their drawings, so I was delightedly surprised to see what they came up with. J chose to draw the "eep" family climbing up the steep mountain in the first part of the story. I am thrilled to see how much of the drawing technique I've introduced to them seems to have taken root even in his free drawings.

Zoo Boy decided to draw the town of Conso Nant (which made me smile, because it says right in the Enki teaching guides that most kids draw the town board during the first story cycle!). He drew each of the houses that the "eep" family members slept in (L, Cr, W, J, and Sl), he drew each family member in front of their respective houses, and he drew a symbol to indicate the resulting word (leap for little sister, creep for baby, weep for big brother, the jeep for Papa Eep, and Mama Eep snoring "zzzzzzz"). And instead of simply writing his title as "The Eep Family", he cleverly (and correctly by this time in the story!) called it "The Leap Creep Weep Jeep Sleep Family".

The following day, as we read the "eep" family limerick, the kids took turns inserting the family cards in the house slots.

This story cycle has really resonated with the boys -- they've loved everything about it, and after just reading the story the first day, they were already writing out eep/eap words. It's even inspired Zoo Boy, my reluctant writer, to want to write more than he ever has (see below)!

J's writing from this story cycle is above. The Enki guides suggest not doing much writing during this block, as the word family work is really about reading skills. But for my kids, it makes sense to focus on writing instead, since I'm just connecting them with the content rather than presenting it as something new. So, I had J write the entire "eep" family limerick over the course of two days. (Two 5-line stanzas each day.) The length of the material was intimidating to him visually, but he displayed his sense of humor despite the challenge to his writing skills -- between the first two stanzas he drew a long frown face in the empty space. At the end of the 2nd stanza (the end of his work the first writing day) he wrote "(phew)". And at the end of the entire poem he wrote "(P.S. Do you like it?) That kid cracks me up....and yes, I DO like it. Very much.

Zoo Boy's writing. This is HUGE for him. I told him that he could write as much or as little as he liked, but that I would like him to write at least once sentence each day. The first day I suggested writing the first line, and that is what he wrote. The 2nd day I suggested the last line. Instead, he decided to write the entire last stanza (about 5 times as much writing as he's ever done at one sitting). Not surprisingly, he got tired after about 3 lines, and we were running late for his music class. So I suggested that he could stop for now, and finish it later. Sure enough, he sat down this morning (without my knowledge of it, I only discovered this when I went to photograph the page!) and finished the verse. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow.

I'm looking forward to working with more Word Families in the coming weeks!

what were you doing Saturday night?

Couldn't have been as much fun as what I was doing:

Helping my friend Carolyn bring these sweet little Border Collie puppies into the world. Was a late night, but well worth it! Go see more pictures of the puppies on her blog. (They're all spoken for already, so don't worry about getting too attached!)

things we were doing rather than staying home on the computer blogging about them

So, other than taking a class with the Enki Education folks and working on a multitude of secret holiday gift projects (shhh...), what have we been up to that has effectively kept me away from my blog?

Chores on cold, gray, windy November days, for one thing. Walks on those same cold, gray, windy November days, for another.

Dipping candles, which we did in my Colonial Days class on Monday. J was REALLY into it.

Proudly displaying his finished candles.

Taking a Spanish test. The kids can take tests for various band colors (akin to karate belt colors) when they feel ready. All the students start out at white band. Here, J is testing for his yellow band, which is designed to be taken at the end of one academic year of classes. J, being the motivated learner he is, decided to take the test after 6 weeks of classes. He didn't pass, but just narrowly so (he couldn't name a language learning strategy, and he was confused when he was asked a question he'd only just heard for the first time that day). He can take it again this coming week, and my guess is he's going to pass it this time.

Also on Monday, J finished up a 2-part museum class on Nutrition and started a new dog training class with our Collie, Cheer. In addition to the candle dipping, the Spanish test, and a drama rehearsal. It was quite a day!

Hanging out at the CT Science Center. We spent the day there on Tuesday. J had the 2nd in his series of homeschool group classes on Properties of Matter. And then the kids spent the rest of the day exploring the exhibits, while I followed them around grabbing a bench wherever one was available to work on the above-mentioned secret holiday gifts.

Zoo Boy got the chance to work on some circuits while we were there, which totally made his day. He would have happily spent his entire visit monopolizing both the snap circuit set and the Scientist that runs the activity, but we had tickets to the 3-D Sun movie (which was FABULOUS!), so I herded him away from his circuit board in just enough time to make our seating.

We actually spent the day at home on Wednesday (gasp!), but were back on the road on Thursday, hooking up with our friends T and D at the Children's Museum for some turtle time (here's D and Zoo Boy hanging out inside some enormous shells!) and exhibit-hopping and visiting.

J has a conversation with a tortoise. (At least, that's what he told me he was doing. What exactly DO you say to a tortoise? And, more importantly, what might it say back to you??)

Later that day, J had a class about Colonial Games (at yet another children's museum -- it's been a big museum week...), where he made this groovy mini-checkerboard. (And no, I wasn't teaching that one, I was busy trying to keep Zoo Boy occupied because this class was taught by the teacher that The Boy doesn't care for.)

We wrapped up the week today with J's sports class, which has finally (thankfully!) moved indoors for the winter. Not that I mind the kids playing sports outside in colder weather, nor do I personally mind being outdoors now, so long as I'm doing something. But sitting around watching kids play sports outside in this weather....um, no thanks. Today's topic was Basketball, which was just fine by J. (Of course, ANYTHING is just fine by J, so long as he's running around a gym with a bunch of other kids.)

And finally, we spent the first half of the week working on a big art project, which we used during our lessons in the second half of our week. But you're going to just have to stay tuned and wait for my next blog post to find out what that actually was! (So there!!)