Category: Rethinking the 3 R’s

August 21, 2011 Five in a Row, Our Homeschool, Rethinking the 3 R's 4 Comments

Semester Book Plan

I did it. Last night I spent a few hours working out our semester long plan for Five in a Row. I have a hard time doing this. I have a hard time picking a book for one week, let alone several months. I want everything to be perfect. And then I get into this idea that everything we do that week has to tie into the book and that I need to tie it into the various Holy Days and Feast Days that are happening and I get overwhelmed and decide since it can’t be perfect I’m not doing it at all. I push past that feeling and then comes the feeling that the whole exercise is futile because my kids aren’t going to be interested in doing any of this anyway. And then I push past that feeling and try to clarify why it is I’m doing Five in a Row at all.

This is what I’ve come up with. I’m doing Five in a Row because I want some starting point for sharing the things I want to share with my children. I want something to motivate me to get off my butt and interact with my kids. Maybe it’s the leftover “schooling” in me, but, what can I say, I loved school. I was a student for the first 25 years of my life and then I was a teacher. I have school in my blood. So, for better or worse, I haven’t been completely deschooled and I feel I need some sort of something to organize stuff around. At least for now.

One of the tenets of unschooling is to introduce children to a wide variety of topics so that they can discover their own personal interests and passions. Five in a Row gives me a gentle but systematic way of doing this. It was through a Five in a Row study last year that I learned how fascinated I am by the history of flight. I’m hoping we’ll discover more new interests and passions this year.

So here’s my plan for the first part of the year. I’m putting this up here in case someone reading this wants to play along with us either on a regular basis or just occasionally. I plan to do a field trip on Thursdays that ties in with the book/unit for the week. It’d be fun to have other families join us who were working on the same thing.

We’re starting the last week of August, the 29th, with Andy and the Lion. We’ll also read St. Jerome and the Lion. After that:

September

  1. Mary the Mother of Jesus by Tomie dePaola. The Feast of the Nativity of Mary is on the 8th so we’ll be taking a quick break from Five in a Row. However, it will still feel very FIAR as Tomie de Paola writes amazing children’s literature.
  2. Down Down the Mountain
  3. Papa Piccolo
  4. Lentil
October
  1. Henry the Castaway
  2. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (with a field trip Monday to see the CSO perform a musical version of the story!)
  3. Madeline
  4. Halloween (That’s not a book title, it’s a holiday. And it’s a big one around here, so we’ll just read our favorite Halloween titles.)
November
  1. The Giraffe that Walked to Paris. This might get pre-empted as Halloween happens on Monday of this week and All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are big around here as well. We may just give into the festivities.
  2. Another Celebrated Dancing Bear
  3. Babar to Duet or not to Duet. We’ll be attending a special field trip this week to see a symphony. It’s on a Tuesday. I’m trying to get our enrichment program to do it as a field trip since it’s on our enrichment program day. But if not, we’ll skip school and go anyway.
  4. Cranberry Thanksgiving
December
For December/Advent, we’ll be doing Elizabeth Foss‘s Advent and Christmas with Tomie de Paola unit study. I’m very excited about this. The books we’ll read will be:
  1. Merry Christmas Strega Nona
  2. Country Angel Christmas
  3. The Lady of Guadalupe
  4. The Legend of the Poinsettia
  5. The Clown of God
  6. Jingle the Christmas Clown
  7. The Story of the Three Wise Kings
  8. The Legend of Old Befana
January
So that I wouldn’t lose steam after the holidays, I went ahead and planned through January. After we finish up the Epiphany celebrations (which around here includes making tamales, so Tomie dePaola will fit right in!), we’ll continue as follows:
  1. Katy and the Big Snow
  2. Amber of the Mountain
  3. Salamander Room
So there you have it. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to pick out a few books, but it always exhausts me. It’s hard to know what the kids will find appealing. I’m hoping these titles work out well for us. If not, we’ll just drop them and try again the following week!
August 6, 2011 Rethinking the 3 R's, Writing 2 Comments

How my son became a writer

When Henry started kindergarten last year, he showed absolutely no interest in handwriting. None. He failed every fine motor screening at his well child checks from the time he was two. At 5, as far as I knew, as far as he would demonstrate to me, he could not even draw a straight, vertical line.

I alternated between freaking out and searching for occupational therapists that accept our insurance, and telling myself it would come in time. I considered not only purchasing Handwriting Without Tears, but taking the full training so I would really know how to implement it. I used all of the tricks in my bag to entice him to develop his writing skills. I listened to advice from people who know less than I do on the matter. I listened hard to the tiny little voice in me that said, “he’s fine. He just needs time.”

On his first day of classes at his homeschool enrichment program, he came home with a paper that he’d written his name on. Not a scribble. Much more than a straight, vertical line. Five letters, that I could read: H-E-N-R-Y. Huh. Little stinker. Apparently he was capable of much more than I even knew.

That fact tormented me for a while. What else does he know that I don’t know he knows? Is he not showing his skills because he’s a perfectionist? Is he bored? And, of course, what have I done wrong? Why will he write for these strangers at school and not for me?

But again, I managed to hear the tiny little voice that said, “he’s fine. You’re fine. Everything will be fine.”

When I asked Henry who had written his name, he said, “I did.” I asked him, “who taught you how to write your name?”He answered, “you did.” Really? Huh.

So although it had been established that he could, in fact, write actual letters on paper, Henry was still loathe to put pen – or crayon, or pen, or paintbrush, or even a finger loaded with paint – to paper. I didn’t push it. I just made materials available and left it be.

Throughout the year he experimented more and more, but it never became his favorite thing to do. And then, one day, it happened. We had a Very Bad Day. It was the kind of day that makes you hang your head as a mother and wonder 1) how could I have produced such a rotten kid and 2) how can I look at these events and bring some growth out of them.

I’ll spare you the details of his transgressions. What’s important to this story is that on this Very Bad Day, Henry had to give up his TV time to write three apology letters.

It was brutal. It was excruciating. It took him a whole hour to write three letters that averaged about 10 words each. And they were pretty much illegible. I was embarrassed as we presented these tortured writings to their recipients. I feared the judgment of my failure as a homeschooling mom to teach my son to write.

I was still in a funk from the events of the Very Bad Day when my husband returned from work. He cheerfully asked Henry, “how was your day?” Henry’s response? “Great! I learned how to write all by myself!”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

From that time, Henry has become quite the writer. He makes signs, labels pictures, and writes letters. He’s also started drawing pictures, which he’d never really done before.

So there you have it. While no expert I know would ever recommend that the way to encourage a reluctant writer is to force him to write letters of apology, that is, in fact, what worked in our family. Your mileage may vary.

October 8, 2010 Five in a Row, Rethinking the 3 R's Post a Comment

Five in a Row: Very Last First Time

Last week we “rowed” Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews and Ian Wallace. This is a really beautiful book about an Inuit girl, Eva, who walks under the ice at low tide to collect mussels. This is a rite of passage for Eva who will be making this journey alone for the first time – her very last first time. It’s a very suspenseful story. Eva gets lost under the ice and her candle goes out as she can hear the tide coming in. There is just enough suspense to take a child to the edge of what they can handle without going too far.

The illustrations in this book are incredible – full of interesting details that provide a ton of information about Inuit culture. We learned a lot through this book and had a really great week.

Language Arts
Henry decided, on his own, to right a sea themed version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? It was entitled Blue Crab, Blue Crab, What Do You See? Henry isn’t one for drawing, but I was proud that he did color the pictures he chose from the internet. He was pretty proud of himself too.

Helen was also pretty proud of her crab picture.

Social Studies/Geography/Art
We attempted to build an igloo out of ice cubes on a sheet of ice, but we couldn’t get the ice to stick together. The interwebs assured me that I could sprinkle salt on the ice to temporarily melt them enough to stick together, but the interwebs lied.

So the project morphed into chipping an ice hole and coloring the ice with Crayola markers in blues and purples. Our art topic from the book was warm versus cool colors, and so we used blues and purples to emphasize the coldness of the ice and to make it look like the illustrations in the book. The kids also added some of their plastic sea creatures to the scene. And note Henry’s “annuraaq.”

Math and Science
I sent Henry out to collect “mussels” from the yard to use in a demonstration of the tides. We got side tracked with counting and grouping the rocks.

Then we moved onto a demonstration of how when the tides go out, tide pools and dry land are left. He used a Star Wars figure to collect mussels on the bottom of the sea.

Science/Culture


We made a trip to the grocery store and purchased some mussels which Ryan ate for dinner. But first we dissected them. Henry used a butter knife (aka lever – we’ve been studying simple machines) to pry one open. And we looked up a few diagrams and videos online to figure out what we were looking at.

Music


I went looking online for some traditional Inuit music to play with dinner last night. I didn’t come across any Inuit folk streaming radio, but I did discover that “throat singing” is a traditional form of Inuit music. There’s a passage in the book where Eva hums  “far back in her throat to make the echoes rumble.” If we hadn’t been studying this book so deeply I never would have known that this was a reference to traditional Inuit music! Helen really enjoyed watching throat singers on YouTube. Here’s a brief demonstration:

September 17, 2010 Five in a Row, Rethinking the 3 R's Post a Comment

More of The Glorious Flight

As promised, here are some of Henry’s pictures from his experiments with perspective:

From the ground, looking up.

Sideways

Extreme close up

Self Portrait

He also decided to get creative all on his own today with flight based arts and crafts. For those of you who happen to know him, you know that this is extremely out of character. We created an art gallery to show daddy when he got home.

Here’s a self portrait of him watching an orange glider and a purple helicopter fly through the sky. He signed his name in blue.

This one is of a spaceship blasting around the earth.

I love this three dimensional airplane he created with scissors glue and tape. Completely on his own. The piece on the bottom keeps the airplane flying straight.

Finally, this picture has nothing to do with The Glorious Flight or flying, but it sparked a funny story.

I was pointing out to him how the colors and subject matter of his family portrait are similar to those of Michelangelo’s Holy Family (which was hanging in the hallway nearby). See the similarities? (Play along with me here. . .)

I went on to tell him that Michelangelo is a famous painter who has made many beautiful paintings and is one of my personal favorite artists. Henry responded with, “I think I may be an even better painter than he is!”
Nothing wrong with that boy’s self esteem.
September 15, 2010 Five in a Row, Rethinking the 3 R's Post a Comment

“Rowing”

We have officially started our Five in a Row (FIAR) curriculum this week with the book The Glorious Flight by Alice and Martin Provensen.

For those unfamiliar with FIAR, it is a storybook/unit based curriculum designed for use with 4 to 8 year olds. You read each book every day for five days and each day do a subject related lesson. For example, on Mondays you might do social studies, Tuesdays art, etc. The suggested lessons are simple and sweet, and the potential for expanding the curriculum is limitless.

So as I said, we started with The Glorious Flight. This is the story of Louis Bleriot, an early French aviator who designed, built, and flew his own planes.  After 8 years, 11 planes, and many mishaps, Bleriot became the first pilot to cross the English Channel from France to England in a glorious (and dangerous!) 37 minute flight.

The first time we read this story, neither Henry nor I were terribly thrilled by it. I thought it would be like pulling teeth to get him to sit through it even one more time. Today we read it for the third time, and something amazing has happened. We’ve been able to see and appreciate the richness of the story, language, and art of the book. Now, those who have been “rowing” for awhile will silently chuckle I’m sure. For that is the point of FIAR – delving deeply into one book to truly mine its riches.

We have come to love the unflappable Papa Bleriot and his family, and we have found much to treasure in this beautiful book.

Here are some of the things we’ve done and learned with this book. I’ll try to break it out by subject.

Math and Science
We’ve spent a lot of time flying different kinds of paper airplanes, discussing which ones go the furthest and why. We’ve seen what shapes make better flyers, which glide best, which go the fastest, etc. These experiments led to a discussion of angles as I instructed Henry to launch a plane at a 45 degree angle and he asked what an angle is. So we got out paper and pencil, learned what an angle is, how a triangle has three angles, a square has four, etc. We learned about right angles, 180 degree angles, and 45 degree angles. Not too bad for not having a math curriculum!

We will supplement the science with The Way Things Work video on flight. As soon as I can get it from the library.

History and Social Studies
In addition to Louis Bleriot, we’ve learned about the Wright Brothers, Ruth Law, and Lt. Gail Halvorsen a.k.a. the Chocolate Pilot. We still have books to read about Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and some other early pilots.

Through these books we’ve learned some geography. Henry now knows where France and England are on the map and that they are separated by the English Channel.  He’s learned that people in France speak French. He knows where to find Chicago and New York City on the map and that Chicago and NYC are cities in the states of Illinois and New York.

We’ve learned lessons of perseverance and the importance of making reparations. We’ve learned how much can be learned from making mistakes.

Language
One of the most “schooly” things I do with Henry is our “word of the day.” This is simply a word, chosen from the book and usually a verb, that I write on our chalk board. The first time I did this I was amazed at how much he learned from this simple lesson. I never say a word about it. I wait for him to notice it. He’ll either sound it out or ask me to read it for him. Then he’ll point out what he notices about it. This week we’ve discussed the “silent e” that makes the “i” say it’s name in the word glide. We reviewed the rule “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking” with sail. And we learned that “y” is sometimes a vowel with the word fly.

We learned about onomatopia and will review the concept with tomorrow’s word of the day, CRASH!

My favorite language activity involved using the Lord Alfred Tennyson Poem, The Eagle. Henry loves it and I hope we’ll both have it memorized by the end of the week. Here’s the excerpt.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
Ringed with the azure world, he stands. 
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 
He watches from his mountain walls, 
And like a thunderbolt he falls. 
I looked for a good read aloud poem at the Institute for Excellence in Writing. I was simply looking for something that somehow related to flight in some way. I chose this poem before I had even read The Glorious Flight. So I was thrilled when I came across this passage in the book describing the first flight of Bleriot II:

“Like a great swan, the beautiful glider rises into the air . . .  . . . and shoots down into the river with a splash that frightens the fishes.” 

We discussed how the images were similar and different and compared the language used by each author.

Art
One of the lessons suggested in FIAR is a discussion on perspective. We talked about how some of the pictures are drawn looking up into the sky and others are drawn looking from the sky down on the village and people. I then gave Henry a camera and let him take some pictures from different perspectives. I’ll get those up ASAP. Henry’s favorite perspective was the “extreme close up!”
Religion
We haven’t gotten to this lesson this week (though the discussion reparations would certainly fall here too). I looked up the patron saint of pilots and discovered St. Joseph of Cupertino, a.k.a. the Flying Friar.  We have The Reluctant Saint coming from Netflix so we can learn more about this fascinating man of God during family movie night. I’m hoping the story will be compelling enough that Henry will ignore the fact that it’s in black and white. Otherwise, Ryan and I will watch it together and share the story with the kids afterward.
Overall, I have been pleasantly surprised by how much this curriculum has had to offer us – especially since it wasn’t a book I was really looking forward to! Next week we’ll “row” How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. I’m expecting that one to be even more fun!
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