Plans for the school year

In addition to the activities we do on a daily basis, e.g. reading, games, coloring, cooking together, play-doh, chores, and learning new things as they pop up in our everyday lives, we will also be implementing more structured times.

First of all, we are excited to begin a unit study program called "Five in a Row". A great friend, Nicole, gave us the information on this great "curriculum". Here are some of the details;

"Five in a Row provides students with a unit-study approach to early education based on outstanding children's literature. Together, the three volumes of Five in a Row provide 55 lesson plans covering Social Studies, Language, Art, Applied Math, and Science in a way that causes children to fall in love with learning. You'll teach a different subject each day beginning with social studies on Monday. You'll find history lessons, geography lessons, and discussions on foreign culture taken directly from the story you've just read. On Tuesday you'll examine the author's use of language, learning about punctuation, vocabulary, literary devices, creative writing and more. Wednesday you'll discover a comprehensive art curriculum as you explore the illustrator's techniques, style and use of materials with lots of hands-on art lessons for early learners. Thursday your children will explore applied mathematics as they learn about counting, grouping, measurements, simple geometric shapes, etc. Finally, on Friday you'll explore science together with activities to learn more about weather, astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry and more. Experience tells us that the most important educational lesson we can teach early learners is to fall in love with learning itself. When children discover that learning is a pleasurable experience, both their job and yours becomes immeasurably easier! So gather your young learners around you and begin teaching the way you always hoped it could be; fun, spontaneous and enjoyable for both you and the student. Five in a Row provides a delightful gateway to the extraordinary lifelong adventure of learning." (http://www.fiarhq.com/)

For Savannah, structured time will also include separate penmanship, math concept and mind-puzzle workbooks (since she loves these) and more work on math concepts with manipulatives and money. We will work on money values for her, while working on money names for Liam (dime, penny etc.). Savannah knows her seasons, days of the week, minutes vs. hours, so now we will concentrate on names of the months and reading clocks with hands, not digital numbers.
With Liam we will continue working on ABC and 123 recognition. All of this "work" will look more like "fun" time, and another plus - the kids love one on one time with their parents.

We also are joining a homeschool co-op where we will be getting together with other families one day a week and the kids will take fun "classes" with other homeschool kids. The co-op is still in the works.

When the kids are older, our homeschooling will look more like this. The mom from this blog is one of the people heading up the co-op effort.

Piedmont also has homeschool PE and art classes that we will participate in from time to time.

The main purpose of this blog is to keep those who want to keep up with what the kids are doing posted. Our prayer is that you would celebrate their accomplishments and understand more of the how and why we choose to keep our kids at home.

Side note- the kids enjoyed the rains we had this morning:

We have been talking a lot about evaporation, clouds, rain, liquids, gases, and solids as the kids watch the water dissapear.

Felicity enjoyed it, too :)

Look for updates weekly or bi-weekly!

Our Home"schooling" philosophy....

.... is a little less "schooling" and a little more "living, playing, discovering, and discussing". Especially during the pre-k through elementary years.

Here are a few of the philosophies we adhere to regarding how we teach our children:

Why we regard playtime as essential:

From Publishers Weekly:

" Alarmed by the current trend toward creating baby Einsteins, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff urge parents to step back and practice the "Three R's: Reflect, Resist, and Recenter." "Children learn best through simple playtime, which enhances problem solving skills, attention span, social development and creativity." "Play is to early childhood as gas is to a car," say Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, explaining that reciting and memorizing will produce "trained seals" rather than creative thinkers. Creativity and independent thinking, they argue, are true 21st-century skills; IQ and other test scores provide a narrow view of intelligence."

Book excerpt:

"Play is a central component in children's mental growth. Play helps children make meaning in their world, it helps them learn about themselves, and equally crucially, it helps them to learn how to get along with others. Yet it can be difficult to resist the trends of our achievement-oriented society when we're faced with the choice of allowing our children more downtime or signing them up for the latest class, sport, or activity. Let your child take the lead. Child-directed games will pique interest and learning. When we make play into work by controlling or limiting it, our children lose interest, and we lose opportunities to bond and to imagine with them. We need to strive to find the delicate balance between providing props for play and directing play in our homes and in our classrooms. If we are going to present our children with an art project, we need to make it one where the children determine how the end product looks. We might find that they are capable -- when they are the leaders -- of going well beyond what we thought was possible. A good thing to remember is that it's the process that counts, not the product."

We love the Charlotte Mason philosophy on learning, you can find her bio and her teaching methods here. A quote from her that I love: "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life". How her teaching methods will translate into our homeschooling life- we read, and read, and read and learn about animals, history, other cultures, science, and more. Getting the most out of reading at our children's ages will happen through Five in a Row, unit studies in which I will explain more in our "plans for the school year" post.

We also look to a personal mentor and widowed mother of five who has singlehandedly homeschooled her kids for the past nine years and heads up an awesome homeschool ministry and this website http://www.lodestaronline.com/.

Another aspect of our homeschooling we are passionate about is teaching our children about God, the love he has for them, and all about His word. As scripture says about God's words; "Teach them to your children, and talk about them when you're at home or away, when you lie down or get up." Deuteronomy 11:19. We strongly believe that we are to be the main teachers and ministers to our children, not Sunday school or church. Both of those have a vital role in our children's spiritual development, but God states that we are to be the main teachers of His word to our children, and not to leave the responsibility solely to the church.

These are a few of many of the resources and philosophies we have tapped into during our homeschooling journey thus far.

We love implementing these teaching styles and ideas with our children, and most of the time we don't even notice we're doing it. And the kids definitely don't!!

Summer Happenings...

We have had a great, exciting summer! First of all, we introduced our third little "Kittredge Kind" into the world on May 18th and just like my Grandpa always says about his great grandkids, she is definitely "a dandy"!!

The kids got lots of practice planting seeds indoors in over 60 seed starter cells, and out side in our garden. They also got to learn about pollination and see the pollinators about their work once the flowers were in bloom. We learned about the boy parts of a flower (the anthers with pollen) and the girl parts (the stigma). And THEN they even got to eat the "fruits of their labor". God is truly a master scientist.

The kids also got first hand learning experiences on raising chickens, which was and is truly a lot of fun!

***Notice in this picture Liam has chicken nugget in his little bowl. : ( Poor chickens have a hard life.

Also, we joined the summer reading program and logged over 4 hours of reading (actually, I forgot to log our times a lot so we clocked in more than this, just no one was writing it down). The kids got to "buy" toys with their reading beads at the local library "summer reading program" store.

Savannah practiced her penmanship through the summer, working on lower case mostly now, and we've been reading lots of ABC books for Liam's letter recognition, he's doing great, he just does not like the alphabet song. He doesn't like to sing much, unless it's a song from Air1 FM and he's in the backseat of the van, alone.

We've used pinto beans as mathematical manipulatives and baked many breads, biscuits, cookies and cakes from scratch, which gets the kids used to various kinds of measurements and the physical changes that occur when they add different ingredients to what we are making.

We've also played, quite literally, countless games, including Uno (color and number recognition), Candyland (color recognition and not much else :), Memory Match (cognitive thinking skills, we love these games), Checkers, Bingo, Rumicube (number and order practice), Hullabaloo (color, shape and organizational skills are involved) and the kids have made up numerous games of their own, though most of them involve wrestling and end up with someone hurt and screaming.

We've done numerous other things and the kids have encountered many new learning experiences in which we will not have been aware of. But most of all, they played...

and played...

and played...