week #17, winter #5, or...

...What We Did Instead of Homeschooling This Week.

This was one of those weeks where the kids were too involved with their own projects and creative play for me to "bother" them with "schoolwork". That's the very BEST part of homeschooling -- you can go with what is actually working for your kids, and avoid having to squash their natural creativity. I had some pretty good stuff planned. But what the kids came up with on their own was better. Like here, where they acted out a scene from an Inuit village on our Nature Table.

And this -- Zoo Boy had brought me a book to read, and just as we were finishing up, J came in and announced "There are six Matryoskas hiding in the kitchen, can you find them all?" And Zoo Boy was off to find them. J's creativity was running high in general this week, and I was happy to be able to give him the space to run with it.


Zoo Boy continued pursuing his interest in cooking by helping out with dinner this week, too. We took advantage of the January thaw by taking some walks to look at winter trees and explore stone walls instead of having adventure circle. We did stick to our general daily rhythms, and we did have our nightly Family Story Time, during which we read The Quilt Story, by Tony Johnston and Tomie dePaola; The Big Snow, by Berta and Elmer Hader; and The Story of the Snow Children by Sibylle von Olfers (which I was extremely impressed with -- not so much the book itself, but in the response of the children to this story. It immediately grabbed their attention and they sat breathless as I read it. Happily, I already have a few other of von Olfers' stories sitting on our bookshelf for future Family Story Times). With my "extra" time this week, I fiddled around a bit more with our daily rhythms, fine-tuning and tweaking the order we do things in to make everything flow just a little smoother. And I started reading a bit of the Enki Education 1st Grade materials, which are even more impressive than the Kindergarten materials (and that's saying quite a bit!).

We also went to the children's museum, where both kids participated in an animal program (here Zoo Boy prepares to pet a chinchilla with his "two petting fingers", while J watches on with a smile), and J took a museum class called "Let's Be Dr. Doolittle" where he learned how animals communicate, and got to "talk" to quite a few of the animals that live at the museum. We topped off the week by having a playdate here with some homeschooling pals, which was a lot of fun for the kids and for us Moms, too.

Here's The Map Man's project for the week -- cutting a new door in the barn. Actually, by the time he's done with the project, the door on the left will no longer exist, and instead of two stalls in our barn, there will be three. Oh, and that paddock we're looking through will have a temporary line of fencing through it (which will become part of the permanent paddock fencing once spring comes and we're able to dig fence post holes again). I'll post some photos of the finished product next week.