Nap Magic

We had a lovely Easter weekend, visiting family and hanging out at home. We hung out at the pond again and caught minnows and tadpoles and a frog and a leech and a dragonfly nymph.

We set up a climbing dome earlier this week and the trampoline went up on Saturday. The back yard gets more fun each year.

B7 requested garden seeds when Dad took him shopping and he came home with two blue plants: morning glories and some kind of grass. I managed a long (as in, it went on for multiple hours) nap with G2 on Monday afternoon, and everyone turned in fairly early on Monday night, and I have found myself awake and alone for almost 6 hours now. My introvert heart is bursting with happiness and I feel like I have done the recharging I will need to tackle the post-Easter week.

Serendipity

Nature study is a big part of our science plan. I have struggled to successfully have the kids draw their observations while we're out and so we don't do the follow-up identification. I went out for a walk on my own on Saturday and took some pics in the conservation area so I could ID trees when I came home. Part of the appeal of nature study to me is that it is something that I'm interested in and would want to do even if we weren't home schooling.

I was looking for a plant ID app later on and I came across iNaturalist. At first, I thought it was basically an online/digital nature journal, a way to record and organize your own observations. I added a couple. The next morning, people had added their own IDs and commented. Whaaaat? Apparently, it's a community thing, which is also great. (You can keep things private if you prefer.) So I've gone out in our yard and at my parents' place and taken more pictures and added more "observations" (when you see something, take a pic of it, and upload it with the time and location, that's an observation).

You can also explore observations on the map. Someone added salamanders they saw in a conservation area not far from here. I only learned a few years ago that salamanders live around here and I still haven't seen one in the wild, so I was maybe a little giddy when I saw that.

I'm looking forward to having B9 make an account and I hope that the older kids (who are in public school) will want to as well.

Christmas Book Flood

Christmas and books go together like, well, Christmas and trees, which books kind of are, so it all makes sense. I keep a list of books we've enjoyed that I think would make good gifts and I thought I would share it.

It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Charles Shaw
Color Kittens, Margaret Wise-Brown
Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise-Brown
Not the Hippopotamus, Sandra Boynton
Bruno Munari's ABCs
Grover's Resting Places, Sesame Street
The Monster at the End of This Book, Sesame Street
Aesop's Fables (we like Milo Winter's version)
The Sleep Book, Dr Seuss
Little Bear books, Else Holmelund Minarik
Frog and Toad books, Arnold Lobel
Katy and the Big Snow, Virginia Lee Burton
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Virginia Lee Burton
Rainbow Goblins,  Ul de Rico
A Child's Book of Poems, Gyo Fujikawa (or anything by her)
James Herriot's Treasury of Inspirational Stories for Children 
Everybody Needs a Rock,  Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall
Pagoo, Holling C. Holling
The Animal Family, Randall Jarrell
The Bat-Poet, Randall Jarrell
A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, Jules Feiffer
Madam How and Lady Why, Charles Kingsley
Carry On, Mr Bowditch, Jean Lee Latham
Lost in the Barrens, Farley Mowat
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
1066 & All That, W.C. Sellar

Slowly but Surely

Life keeps crowding out our home school time. I know life and learning are enmeshed and can't be separated, but I like to have dedicated lesson times so that I don't have to multitask. And between sick kids and me being sick and yard work and Hallowe'en prep and birthday prep, life crowded out our school time last week. And it's continuing today, the day after Hallowe'en.

But. B9 did come up to me with his Life of Fred math book this morning after loudly expressing his displeasure at having to do school instead of eat candy and watch movies all day and apologize for his outburst and say he knows learning is important and I'm just trying to help him learn good things and he does actually think learning can be fun so he shouldn't put up such a fuss about it. And then he did the last chapter in that book and moved on to the next one.

Digging In

We're working on habits. I'm terrible with them. We've had a bit more success with getting started, but we don't get to everything I plan for us to do. We've had older kids home sick at various times and younger home schooled kids under the weather over the last week and a half and that hasn't helped either.

I sit down to read our together reading stuff in the morning and T is a distraction and sometimes the older kids just want to keep on doing or playing whatever they were doing before. I'm trying to decide if we should "begin as we mean to go on" and I should require attention at least from 9B and 6B (doing Year 1 of Form I together), or if I should simply for now focus on getting myself into the habit of sitting down and reading and once I'm solid with it, and they know it's not going away, start to work on them listening more.

Usually they do gather around once I start reading but today and yesterday they were just all over the place. I did manage to incorporate the huge bin of blocks they took out to play with into our reading -- we read the story of The Brave Three Hundred (Spartans) and as I read I used the blocks to sketch out a map of what was going on, and it caught a bit of attention. It's a start.

We used the first two lessons of the Hoffman Academy piano lessons yesterday and today and they were a big hit. B6 declared today that we need another piano. The second lesson introduced jazz improvisation. I love it.

We managed a "baby steps" nature walk last week; my mom looked after kids during gymnastics and errands and I took them out around my parents' sugar bush and pond when I came back to pick them up. I gave out ziploc bags and they collected a few things (some red maple leaves, common scouring rush/rough horsetail, and a snail shell) and we spotted water bugs, boatmen, teeny minnows, and raccoon prints in the mud. It was a beautiful day.

So Much for Bribery

Day Two of Power Hour hasn't gone so swimmingly. Breakfast went well but then the boys took out the bin of random small toys and got deep in play. So I got deep in laundry and bedmaking. At five minutes to the hour, I announced the time and the consensus was "Meh. I'm OK waiting an extra day for my book. I'd rather play now."

I have two big kids home sick with colds today. I'm feeling like throwing in the towel already. Maybe some reading and then baking is in order. The weather is supposed to be unseasonably warm today; a great day for a long afternoon outside....

Power Hour

I've decided to go the bribery route with getting my kids to go along with new habits. Our mornings are a mess so I've started there, with the simple things we need to do every day to start our day -- eat breakfast, tidy from breakfast, teeth, dress, tidy bedroom (aka, make beds). This will be our Power Hour. Yes, I've given us a full hour to finish those things. If we can manage to get those things done in an hour from whenever we start, we've successfully completed our Power Hour. 10 days of successful Power Hours (now I'm regretting starting to capitalize that) means a new book for each boy. They've tentatively decided on books 2, 3, and 4 of the Dragonbreath series.

It went well today... until it didn't. The boys were excited at the start but we soon had pushback, mostly from one kid who hadn't really listened to the chores I listed and was indignant when he had to do more than he was expecting. I'm setting the bar pretty low here -- "making the bed" just means no bedding on the floor. We have four of the boys in one room among two bunkbeds. I make the lower two and don't worry about the upper two. And any laundry on the bedroom floor needs to be off the floor. Pretty low standards, so I was surprised to have someone yelling at me and calling it unfair.

We did manage to get it all done, though. We even managed to spend some time reading. We started with scriptures and there was jostling and jockeying for position on Mom's lap and squabbling on the floor in front of me. One kid was expressing his annoyance with another kid by relentlessly sticking his butt in the other kid's face. We moved on to Life of Fred math. That mostly went smoothly -- we had fun with skip counting -- but it ended in tears from a boy who despaired of being asked to draw an equilateral triangle because he couldn't do it perfectly. We wrapped things up with a book that is always a crowd pleaser: Aesop's Fables. One of the fables we read ended with a tortoise being dropped from the sky and "dashed to pieces" on the rocks. R gasped, smiled at me, and said, "That's disgusting!" I think he was pretty surprised that I was reading such a gross book to him.

That was the end of our school-y time. M was home sick with a bad cold and there was some tension and friction and such between M and R. We ended up watching a fair amount of Odd Squad, but I managed to get dinner made early, which is key on gymnastics night. Small victories.

CC Long's Home Geography came in the mail today. I haven't had a chance to take a look at it yet.