Our Homeschool | Inspired Homeschooling

September 4, 2011 Education Theory, Our Homeschool, Rethinking the 3 R's, Writing 1 Comment

Learning to Write: Zone of Proximal Development Part 2

In my last post I explained a bit about what the ZPD and scaffolding are and what scaffolding looks like when “teaching” babies how to roll over. In this post, I’ll provide a couple of examples of scaffolding the writing process.

I’d like to start by pointing out that writing is not a single skill, but rather a number of skills that come together into a finished product. In order to write, say, a thank you note that you would like your friend to read, you must 1) conceive of the idea of writing the note, 2) choose the words you need to express your gratitude, 3) decide which letters are in the words you want to write, 4) form the letters on the page, 5) plan ahead so you don’t run out of room and 6) put the words in order. I’m sure I could think of more skills involved, but we’ll leave it at that.

So that’s at least 6 things your child is doing if he’s trying to write something on a piece of paper. It’s a big task.

The first trick to scaffolding is identifying when your child is on the verge of moving up the skill ladder and determining what kind of support he needs to make that step. The next trick to scaffolding is recognizing when your child needs to just hang out and get comfortable on the rung he’s on before trying to make the next step.

For example, my son has recently learned to write. If you check the list above, he’s pretty good at steps 1 through 4. Steps 5 and 6 are still a struggle for him. Frequently throughout our day he will bring me something he has written and ask me to read it. He still writes pretty big. He hasn’t developed the fine motor skills he needs to neatly form tiny letters on the page. So he can fit two, maybe three words neatly on a page before he runs out of room. At this point, he just starts putting the letters for the words anywhere they might fit on the page. The result is something like this:

Which is fine if you have some context (that’s a drawing of Abraham Lincoln), and there’s only one word climbing up the page. But when the message is longer, it becomes a huge mess:

I have no idea what those say, though I do spot the word “the” in the second picture.

One day, feeling a bit frustrated, I told him that you have to write from top to bottom and left to right or people can’t read it and it doesn’t make sense. I wanted to show him. I wanted to have him rewrite what he’d written. He wanted to punch me in the nose.

I really should have kept my mouth shut in that situation. I wasn’t scaffolding, I was pushing. He’s not ready to move to the next step. He’s still getting comfortable with steps 1 through 4. The effect of my “help” was to make him feel incompetent and angry. I shut down all learning opportunities at that moment and replaced them with a flood of frustrated tears.

So there’s a great example of what not to do. But every once in a while my instincts are better.

My little girl is also learning to write. She’s not really “writing” as defined in the 6 step process above; she’s pretty much just forming letters on the page. Her fine motor skills are more mature than her brother’s and she is able to form letters quite small and neatly. She doesn’t know all of her letters, but she is very interested in writing her name and has picked up that “H” is the first letter of her name.

Helen had been writing “her name” for several weeks. Here’s an example:

Note that I am aware that you do not spell “Helen” HOI. But I hadn’t said anything to her about it. She’d tells me she’d written her name and I’d say, “wonderful!”

She kept practicing and made the following progression:

Note that she is practicing. She’s doing the same thing over and over. Not because I told her to. Not because she has a worksheet to complete. She’s doing it because writing her name is important to her right now. Also note that up to this point, I hadn’t given her any instruction on writing her name. We’d talked about how Henry and Helen both start with H. We’d pointed out H’s. Everything else she’d picked up just from living our daily lives.

Then one day she was no longer satisfied with the progress she was making on her own. We were at the library and while I was showing Henry how to find books using the computer, Helen requested her own scrap of paper and teeny golf pencil from the basket by the computer. She then pouted, “I don’t know how to write my name.” I asked, “Do you want me to show you?” She nodded. So I wrote her name on the piece of paper and she copied it. She has been practicing her name, again without prompting, for several days now and it now looks like this:

So in this case, the scaffolding I provided was a model for her to copy. Note that it still isn’t quite right. But it’s a lot closer than HOI. The letters aren’t in the right order, the “L” is backwards, and there’s no “N” at all (probably because she doesn’t feel up for tackling that diagonal line), but the model I gave her bumped her up to a new level of competence. My job now is to stand back and let her get comfortable at this level until she’s ready for my help to move up the next rung of the ladder.

How will I know she’s ready? More than likely it will be because she asks me. If I felt I just couldn’t hold back, I could ask her if she wants to learn to draw an “N.” Because I know she’s capable of tracing small letters on a page, I could print a handwriting worksheet for her and show her how to do it. But if I did that, I would be careful to present in a pretty nonchalant way. “Hey Helen! I put a worksheet on your writing table that shows you how to write the letter ‘N.'” And leave it at that. If she asked for help with it I would help her. If she ignored it, I wouldn’t bring it up again. I’d just leave it there.

The essence of scaffolding is waiting until a child is super ready to take the next step and offering just enough assistance to get him there. It’s holding a child’s hand as she jumps across a little stream. As opposed to pushing her across a river in a canoe. Either way she’ll reach the other side, but if she makes the leap herself, the experience will be much more rewarding.

September 3, 2011 Education Theory, Our Homeschool, Rethinking the 3 R's, Writing 1 Comment

When to Push, When to Hold Back: An Introduction to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development Theory

Recently in my homeschool circles, there has been much discussion of when it might be appropriate to push/encourage/nudge our children. How can we discern whether a little encouragement or guidance from us will help them jump to the next level of competence, or push them over the edge of frustration?

Lev Vygotsky, the great educational theorist, posited that there exists what he called the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD in the educational jargon. Vygotsky believed that the ZPD is where the greatest learning occurrs. The ZPD is that area of competence just beyond a person’s current level of achievement – a level that one can reach with just a bit of the right help. He called this help “scaffolding.”

Scaffolding is something we all do more or less naturally with babies. Imagine playing on the floor with a baby who is lying on his back and rolling to his side. He’s just about to roll over. He’s almost got it. He just needs a liiiitle encouragement. You hold out a favorite toy just beyond his reach. He reeeeaches for the toy and – woop!- he rolls over. Yay! You’ve just scaffolded rolling over for the baby.

Now notice, if that baby was not yet reaching for toys, or was not yet capable of getting most of the way over on his own, or wasn’t interested in rolling or reaching at that moment, your efforts would have been fruitless.

Parents naturally scaffold new walkers. photo credit: sean dreilinger via photo pin cc/caption]

Again, this comes naturally for most of us when we’re working with babies. But it is much less intuitive when we’re working with older children. With older children who have more or less mastered the art of walking and talking, we tend to push a little harder. If a 5 year old can’t write his name, we may feel compelled to put a pen in his hand and use our hand over his hand to walk him through the steps. This isn’t scaffolding. I’m not sure what I would call it, but it isn’t scaffolding.

Our tendency to want to push to this extent comes in large part from a system of schooling that has tricked us into thinking that all kids need to learn the same skills at the same time and at the same rate in order to be at “grade level.” If a 5 year old can’t write his name, he is “behind” and we must push him to “catch up.”

Nah. The problem with this kind of pushing is that it makes learning harder than it has to be. I could start coaching a baby on rolling over from the day he comes home from the hospital, but he’s probably not going to roll over any sooner than if I’d just waited until he was ready. But in the mean time, I may make him think that this rolling over business is a lot of stupid hard work that he’s not really interested in doing.

Okay. So what does scaffolding look like beyond the babyhood? A big question that keeps popping up in my circles, and one I’ve written about before, is teaching writing. I’m not sure why we’re so preoccupied with writing, but it seems that we are. So in my next post I will look at what scaffolding looks like when teaching a kid to write.

August 24, 2011 History, Our Homeschool 2 Comments

Dreaming of Timelines

One of the biggest “gaps” in my own education is in my understanding of history. It was never presented to me in a way that I could wrap my brain around. I still struggle with seeing the big picture. So I’ve become obsessed with creating a big picture of history. Literally. I want to make a wall timeline.

At first I envisioned something like this:

Isn’t that cool? I’ve been racking my brain for where in the world to put something like this in my house. I even found a lovely free printable timeline at a fellow homeschooler’s site, GuestHollow.com. Just the A.D. part of it is 70 pages. I did the math. I would need about 50 linear feet of wall space. I don’t have that.

The Guest Hollow timeline is meant to be put in a notebook. It’s awesome for that. Notebook timelines are great, but my brain needs to see the big picture. The whole picture. All at once.

So then I came across this:

It goes up one side for the years before Christ, and then comes back down the other side for the years Anno Domini. The one pictured above came from this squidoo page. It’s published by Konos and comes with the printed pictures.

This is perfect. This gives the big picture. Of course, I’m not willing to shell out the cash for the premade timeline. And I’m not terribly interested in what someone else thinks I should put on the timeline. So I’m going to make my own. Other people have done it.

Here’s one from Kindred Blessings.

Here’s one from Homeschool in the Woods:

Here’s a pretty amazing one from Peace Creek on the Prairie.

And a really neat one from Higher Up and Further In.

And here’s a really great how to with specifics for spacing and such.

Lots of ideas. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how we’ll do ours.

But I do know where we’ll put it. The only wall in the house that can accommodate such a monstrosity is in our dining room. The wall has been blank for the two years since we moved into the house because I’ve been waiting to discover the perfect display for it. I was thinking of a brightly colored still life. A giant cluttered timeline wasn’t really what I had in mind.

Which brings me to a whole new issue. When you put one of these bad boys in your home you are declaring, loud and proud, we are homeschooling geeks. Our house is for living and learning. It will never ever be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. I’m okay with that. Mostly. I can almost guarantee that through the years this timeline will provide much more fodder for dinner conversation than a depiction of flowers in a vase. No matter how lovely those flowers might be. But a fairly large part of me longs for a tastefully decorated house.

But, I think I’m willing to sacrifice that for what I think a timeline like this can do for our family. Living with this timeline will give my children the opportunity to document what they learn through the years. It will help them revisit what they’ve learned each time they add to the timeline, and see how things all fit together. They’ll be able to see that while the United States was busy fighting the Civil War, Franz Shubert was premiering a new symphony.

They’ll be able to see how the Saints and the history of the Church fit into the rest of world history. Their knowledge of history will build on itself and will be constantly reviewed so that they will really know history. It’s something I’ve always wanted for myself. So this ugly timeline will be a gift to me and to my children.

I’ll post pictures when I get it up.

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

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.
Down Down the Mountain
Papa Piccolo
Lentil

October

Henry the Castaway
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (with a field trip Monday to see the CSO perform a musical version of the story!)
Madeline
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

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.
Another Celebrated Dancing Bear
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.
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:

Merry Christmas Strega Nona
Country Angel Christmas
The Lady of Guadalupe
The Legend of the Poinsettia
The Clown of God
Jingle the Christmas Clown
The Story of the Three Wise Kings
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:

Katy and the Big Snow
Amber of the Mountain
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 9, 2011 Our Homeschool 4 Comments

“Back to School” Anxiety

Not sure if it’s the slight cooling of the days, the garden harvest, the back to school sales everywhere or the fact that Henry returns to his enrichment program in a couple of weeks, but I’m starting to feel some anxiety about this coming homeschool year.

I’m sure we’ll find our rhythm. I know I will continue to see my children learn and grow. But I am at a point, once again, where I feel like I should be taking a more active role in the process. Part of this is because I want to. But then I start thinking of all of the cool things we could be doing and know that we can never do it all and then feel overwhelmed by everything and then I’m frozen by my anxiety and I just do nothing. It’s such a lovely cycle.

So I’ve worked out a weekly routine. And I’ve set an intention of doing math and phonics every day. I am really resisting using the curriculum we have for these areas of learning, but I’m going to try to do it consistently for a month and see how it works for us. I resist “drill and kill” or any sort of scope and sequence type learning, but then I use the analogy of a musician practicing scales and it starts to make more sense to me. I think Henry needs the repeated practice provided by things like phonics flash cards to build his fluency for reading. Or maybe he doesn’t, but I’ll admit I’m uneasy waiting until he’s 10 to see if he just becomes a good reader on his own.

Well, I allotted the kids one episode of Hello Kitty and that is over, so my time for thinking and writing is also over.

What anxieties, if any, are you facing as the rest of the world heads back to school?

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.

April 15, 2011 Homeschool Science, Our Homeschool 2 Comments

Citizen Science Opportunities

I was reading my new issue of Kiwi Magazine this morning and they have a fantastic article on citizen science opportunities. Whether you homeschool or not, these opportunities are a really neat way for your family to participate in the collection of valuable scientific data on subjects ranging from climatology to ornithology to astronomy.

Check out Science for Citizens to find an opportunity that’s right for your family. Some of my favorites:

Mastodon Matrix Project
It doesn’t get any cooler than this. They ship you a sample of mastodon fossil matrix (the stuff the fossil is found in) and you sort through it to find ancient bones, plants, and rocks from the time the mastodon lived. This would be a perfect project for a science club.

Physics Songs
Maybe your kid isn’t a science lover but rather a budding musician? Encourage an interest in science by suggesting he write a song about a physics concept to add to this database devoted to collecting and organizing all songs about physics.

Project Squirrel
I could spend hours (in fact, I have!) watching the squirrels in my back yard chase each other up and down our trees and in and out of our compost heap. I was intrigued one afternoon to watch a squirrel trying to bury a corncob in our lawn. With Project Squirrel you can report your squirrel sightings to help scientists learn more about the charming neighborhood animals.

Monarch Waystation Program
According to the program’s web site,

Widespread adoption of herbicide-resistant corn and soybeans has resulted in the loss of more than 80 million acres of monarch habitat in recent years. The planting of these crops genetically modified to resist the non-selective systemic herbicide glyphosate (Roundup®) allows growers to spray fields with this herbicide instead of tilling to control weeds. Milkweeds survive tilling but not the repeated use of glyphosate. This habitat loss is significant since these croplands represent more than 30% of the summer breeding area for monarchs.

Help save the magnificent Monarch Butterfly by creating a Monarch Waystation in your backyard! Find out how at the program’s web site (linked above).

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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