summary school week #17

I shook up our rhythms a bit starting this week, deciding to focus on just one curriculum story per week in order to feel less rushed now that the kids are involved in more outside pursuits. I'll describe the changes as I go along with this post.

This was the third week of our second math block, and we focused on greater than/less than (J is showing off one of the symbols we made to go with our story work this week), which I blogged about here and here.


Since the kids are each taking multiple classes with our Monday Homeschool Class group, I decided that we didn't need to be trying to squeeze in work with our curriculum that day as well, as the day was full enough. This week, however, was a Monday holiday, and we had a fairly unstructured day in which the kids were able to explore my spinning wheel and the interest in gears that it promoted.



J folded an origami "bomber" and made some bombs, then drew a bomber dropping letters rather than bombs -- note the "creative spelling".

Tuesdays Zoo Boy has formal Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy, and both boys have a very active lunchtime playdate with homeschooling friends, so I felt that doing circle on that day does not make sense. So we are participating in our current Adventure Circle on Wednesdays through Saturdays instead. We do read our Curriculum Story for the week on Tuesday morning, however, so that the kids have a chance to sleep on it before we start working with it on Wednesdays.


The kids have created a game that uses silk scarves to represent various types of Pokemon, and have been having a lot of fun playing this game during their creative playtime this week.


We work with our Math (currently) or Language Arts (next block!) curriculum story on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings. Wednesdays afternoons are for painting or baking, Thursday afternoons are usually museum classes (although this Thursday we got together with a group of homeschoolers at the library), and Friday afternoons are gym classes and playdates. Friday evenings are for reading a Nature Story (Science curriculum), then we work with the Nature Story on Saturday, with artistic digestion in the morning, and a related activity, craft, or field trip in the afternoon. (This week, however, I managed to pick up a stomach virus on Friday night, incapacitating me for the weekend and eliminating science curriculum for this week!)


J shoots a basket in his Friday gym class. This week was, obviously, Basketball.

We do practice work (handwriting -- letter practice sheets -- and reading) Monday through Friday. This week J was reading Mummies in the Morning (a Magic Treehouse Series book by Mary Pope Osborn), and Zoo Boy finished up reading Little Bear and started Father Bear Comes Home (both from the Little Bear Series by Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak).


Storytime stories this week were Snowballs by Lois Ehlert and Winter on the Farm by Laura Ingalls Wilder, illustrated by Jody Wheeler and Renee Graef. We also started reading a new chapter book, The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynne Reid Banks, but we had to abandon it early on, as Zoo Boy found it too frightening. (Something about a small plastic man coming to life and stabbing it's owner with it's knife was scary to him... go figure.... It actually seems to have more to do with the fact that the figure was a birthday present, and his birthday is in just a couple of weeks. He told me that we could read it in a month that none of us has a birthday in, like maybe August.) So we took a break from chapter books for the rest of the week, and will start up with something less threatening this week.

contest for a crown, part two

Here's the second part of our work with greater than and less than. Today we made a chart similar to yesterday's, only this time we randomly filled in numbers in the two columns. We talked about what we did yesterday, using our symbols to show the truth of relationships. Then we discussed that numbers have relationships, too. The boys used the small symbol we made yesterday to show the truth in the relationship between the two numbers on their charts, and then they wrote the symbol in on the chart. Again, neither boy made a mistake with assigning the correct symbol. I just love how they are "getting" this stuff! This first chart is J's.


Zoo Boy's chart. I helped him make his "8" (he still has a lot of problems crossing his midlines), otherwise he did all the writing himself. He wasn't happy with the one greater than symbol between the 10 and 8, so he crossed it out and did another.




Then I spread dot cards (stiff cards with dots on them like dominoes) around the living room in a circle, with space between each card. I handed the kids our large symbol and told them to lay the symbol between any two cards in a way to show the truth about their relationships. Here J indicates that 7 is less than 11.


Zoo Boy counts the dots on the 8 card to confirm how many there are before making his decision of where to place his symbol.







He makes his decision, placing the symbol to show that 11 is greater than 8. Again, the kids didn't make any mistakes and seem to have a pretty solid understanding of the greater than/less than concept. They played several round of the game, then J switched the cards around to create new pairing of relationships, and also combined cards to make new, larger numbers to work with. Zoo Boy enthusiastically claimed "This is FUN!"

Next week: Odd and Even

contest for a crown, part one

It's a contest for the crown

Who's the greatest one around?

-from "Contest for a Crown: Greater and Less Game", Enki Education 1st Grade Academic Activity

We've been working on greater than and less than this week, and I was going to wait until the end of the week to post about it, but at this point I've got a lot of photos to share, so I figured I'd be better off doing two posts rather than one. So here's what we've done to this point.

We read the "Contest for a Crown" story, which very lightly introduces the concept of greater than/less than. This first picture is my drawing from the story after recall the next day. You can see the greater/less than symbol in the drawing, as the "true" (greater) Prince opens the magic chest, and the "false" (lesser) Prince cannot. This was the proof the people in the story needed to know who their true ruler was.

Here's J's drawing. I particularly like the grimace of effort his "false" prince has on his face as he tries to lift the lid of the chest!








Zoo Boy's drawing. He's shown a lot of improvement in drawing the entire picture himself, although he's still asking me to write the title for him. (Although he did agree to write the first letter of the title.)






Today we made two greater than/less than symbols, with a crown on top, to play a few games with the concepts. I cut the symbols out of foam board, the boys colored in the crowns.





I set up a chart with the "greater" prince from our story/drawing on one side and the "lesser"on the other. Then the kids and I discussed all the attributes of a prince. They came up with bravery, being a good hunter, honesty, generosity, loving, rich, and helpful. Then the kids took turns placing our small symbol on the chart for each line, and I wrote in the answer (the symbol) on the chart. These were purposely all positive attributes, so the answer was always the "greater" prince.

Then I said "What would happen if 'mean' was on our chart?" Zoo Boy instantly flipped the symbol over to show that the "lesser" prince was greater in meanness than the "greater" one. He asked if we could make a chart like that, so we did, coming up with other traits the "lesser" prince was actually greater in. Mean, selfish, darkness, horrible, and greedy were on our negative attributes list.

Next, I set up various pairs of things around the living room, and we visited the pairs with our large symbol. The kids took turns placing the symbol in the appropriate direction to tell the "truth" of the relationship. In this photo, J places the symbol to show which block is great in squareness. (Zoo Boy then had a turn, flipping the symbol over the other way to indicated which piece was greater in brownness.)

Zoo Boy places his symbol to indicate that the scooter board on the right in greater in yellowness than the scooter board on the left. Other attributes we looked at in various parings were length, weight, softness, and age. I finished with amounts -- I had two piles of beanbags. The kids didn't make a single mistake with any of the comparisons, and with absolutely no input from me other than to suggest some attributes to look at.

Tomorrow we'll take the concept to actual numbers, and the kids will get to write the symbol themselves on a comparison chart.

holy crow!

J, as I enter the living room this morning: "Mommy can you do this?":

Uh, NO.

what goes around comes around

Hey, look, my spinning wheel! Dug out of the closet we shoved it in five years ago when we started working on Autism remediation for J. Because, you see, things that spin are not your friend if your goal is helping your child to be present with you.

But there was a time I was an avid (perhaps rabid!) spinner/fiber enthusiast. Hence the reason we live on a sheep farm, you see. (These things all do make sense when you get right to the heart of matters.)

In any case, yesterday out came the wheel in preparation for teaching my Sheep to Scarf class about spinning next Monday. Like riding a bicycle, I was right back in the spin of things (pun fully intended) in no time. And lo and behold, I love it every bit as much as I did back "in the day". I've been having trouble resisting the urge to spin all of my students' fiber up (and hence fully defeating the class purpose!).

As my kids watched me spinning this morning, both boys got fascinated by the physical aspects of how the wheel works. I pointed all the pieces of the wheel out, how they are connected, and how it makes the yarn twist. Zoo Boy frowned. "I don't get it," he said, "How does the big wheel make the gear go faster?"


I pulled out my drop spindle to show them how spinning without gears works. It's slow, it's laborious, it's moderately frustrating. (I secretly hate drop spindling, but don't tell my students that, I am about to try to get them all enthusiastic about it! Thankfully kids seem to naturally love spinning with a spindle, because it's cost prohibitive to send them all home with wheels!) My boys observed how the spindle could only spin as fast as I could spin it.

Then we moved back to the wheel, and I let them take turns working the treadle while we saw how much faster the gear turned than the wheel. Zoo Boy had more questions about gears.


So, out came the big box of plastic gears. I knew I'd been saving this for a reason! These items, too, went into hiding the same time we began working on banishing autistic obsessions from our house. But something stopped me from chucking them all together, figuring I might be happy I have this collection of gears at some point down the line. This is that point!

I set up a little demo mat with a large gear and a small gear, and let the kids count the number of times the little gear turned as compared to the number of times the big gear turned. "Oh, I get it!" cried Zoo Boy.


And then they spent hours experimenting with various configurations of gears.







J wants to learn to spin on my wheel, and I've promised to teach him. He's been having fun helping me figure out how to balance the wheel, what needs oil, what needs more tension, etc, so that it doesn't make the variety of noisy-old-wheel noises it was making after sitting in storage for so long. Thanks to our collective ingenuity, it's running pretty smooth now.

Zoo Boy just likes hanging out with the wheel. He likes being able to reach out and touch it, feel the smoothness of the wood, the roughness of the freshly spun yarn. He reads and does his pretend play in close proximity to it, and occasionally stops to get his tactile fill of it. And he loves watching me spin and commenting, "I didn't know you are a spinner, Mommy!"

I had forgotten myself. But I am. A spinner.

done with the sickies!

Ok, I think we finally shook the last of the nasty sick bug away, other than a lingering cough in a few of us that seems to be, for the most part anyway, more of an annoyance than a problem.

In any case, we actually ventured out the end of this week, giving me something to actually blog about! Hooray!!

There's J (in goal in this photo, though he had a chance to play every position) playing Floor Hockey at the local YMCA in a gym class for homeschoolers. I love gym teachers. Who else is insane enough to throw a bunch of 5-8 yr olds in a room together, give them all sticks, and encourage them to swing them around?! They had a blast. Zoo Boy decided to sit out, as all those sticks looked pretty dangerous to him and he was afraid of getting hit by one of them (not an unreasonable fear, if you ask me!). Which brings me to the truly most amazing, wonderful part of homeschooling. The kids can participate in all the same sorts of things that kids at school can participate in, but they don't HAVE to. So if The Boy is afraid of getting his head bashed in by a flying hockey stick, he isn't forced to do something he's not comfortable with that may possibly traumatize him. Yet, if he decides he wants to participate, that's cool too. Next week will be a different sport, he may very well want to participate in. (The first week was Volleyball, which he loved. Last week we missed due to the evil virus, and the class played Dodge Ball. I'm sure they'll get another opportunity to try out my own personal least favorite gym sport, though.)

After gym, we went over to our favorite park, which we haven't been to in months. The education staff was excited to see us and set up a couple of their wonderful programs for us. Maple sugaring in another month -- hooray!



Of course, the kids were thrilled for the opportunity to play in the nature center for awhile. Here J crawls out of the tunnel through the stone wall. He also was excited to check out the new goldfish in the fish tank and visit with the corn snake who was being particularly active and friendly that day. Both boys found and read their favorite nature center books, too. The time passed too quickly and before we knew it, they were closing for the day. But we'll be back soon!

Zoo boy in the tree house at the nature center.

We also went to an impromptu Valentine's Day party on Saturday evening at my parent's house. They had fun playing with their cousins and eating Valentine's Day treats, while most of us adults (Mimi was having too much fun with the kids) played cards. We stayed out way too late, but we all had a great time.

Somewhere along the line these past two weeks, we managed to finish reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl. Here's J's artistic interpretation of Mr. Willy Wonka. The boys just adored the story (although Zoo Boy found the peril some of the children got into mildly intense, he managed to stick with the story, despite hiding under the covers for a couple of paragraphs here and there). I was actually luke warm on the book. It was very moralistic, and that didn't set particularly well with me, especially those Oompa Loompas and their sarcastic, sadistic senses of humor.

Of course, maybe I'm just thinking too much about it. But it's not a book I'm going to go around recommending to anyone else.

valentines