Moving Beyond The Page

Anyone who’s read about our adventures for any length of time knows that we’re quite eclectic homeschoolers, far to the left on the spectrum towards unschooling. Different periods find us using different methods and materials, and sometimes we’re not doing anything at all schooly. We’ve never used anything approaching a comprehensive curriculum before, and I certainly didn’t go looking for one! But Leigh recently swapped a Winter Promise package for a Moving Beyond the Page package (roughly, anyway) and offered to share with me.

I’d never explored MBTP before. It’s a multi-age, multi-level comprehensive program aimed at gifted kids. Each age group (we’re using 6-8) contains four “Concepts,” each Concept has three Units, and each Unit has about three weeks worth of lessons, activities and a final project. Each Concept should take roughly 9 weeks. Because the “year” is broken down this way, the materials for each Concept are completely separate, and so Leigh let me borrow Concept 1: Community while she starts with another Concept.

Yesterday I was paging through the parent’s guide and activity book and JediBoy came up to sit with me and wanted to talk through some of the activities, including “Limited Resources” where he was presented with a situation: you have a new dog and only $15 for supplies, which of these tagged items do you buy? He thought it was fun and the conversation sparked by that one activity was a good one. So I asked if he’d like to do a little of this every day, and he eagerly agreed.

Today we looked at Lesson 1: Exploring a Community. We talked about community buildings and maps and read The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, and discussed the words rural and urban, and he decided he’d rather live in the country because “It’s safer there, and you can smell the beautiful flowers and sit by the rushing stream or maybe go swimming in it in summer, and there would be so much peace and quiet.” He drew a picture of himself in the country and a map of a made-up neighborhood, including a police station marked with “a picture of a robber crossed out.” There are some worksheet-type activities (The library is useful because _______.) but because he’s not a strong writer, I encouraged him to just finish the sentence orally.

I hadn’t planned to find a CURRICULUM, and once Leigh offered me the use of this one, I hadn’t planned to start until July, which is when I’ll officially start homeschooling JediBoy, according to the state. But JediBoy found it interesting, and he’d started to ease off on his interest in a small daily dose of Math U See as we came to the end of Alpha. I like to have something to do with him one-on-one for a little while each day (I think we spent about 45 minutes on this lesson, plus the extra time he took to draw his map). We’ll see where this takes us! In the meantime, if any of you have experience with MBTP, I’d love to hear it!

Unplug Your Kids: Rocks

I have to say, this week’s Unplug Your Kids project ROCKS! (Insert groans here.) Honestly, I’ve always loved rocks - and every time I’m outdoors, I stoop over to pick up a handful, or sit by the stream and pick out the pretties. So I knew that this week’s project would be all fun for me.

On Wednesday we headed out to the park to count birds for Celebrate Urban Birds and to collect some rocks from our favorite local rock-collecting stream. The kids both enjoyed picking rocks…

and BabyGirl even enjoyed licking rocks.

We came home with a nice pan full of rocks, plus an extra stack of biggies on the side.

On Thursday, JediBoy wanted to paint the rocks. I helped him go at it with our washable tempera - a fun idea if your kids are more into process than product, because in a few days you can wash the paint off and use the rocks for something else, or paint them again!

He chose to use red and blue “because the Indian Americans [he means Native Americans] would make these colors from berries.” I have no idea what got his mind chugging down that particular track but I thought it was cool, and as he painted we talked about making our own paints and dyes.

Then we sat down to wash the other rocks. BabyGirl thought this was a magnificent treat, having a pan of rocks and warm water and a toothbrush. That’s a wonderful sensory experience. It did take me quite a while to really convince her not to brush her teeth after she’d brushed a rock!

JediBoy and I had a fabulous time, showing each other the really pretty ones or the funky shapes, and seeing how the water changed the way they looked. We found a few that had fossils, so we talked about that too. JediBoy chose as his special rock a black stone with an orange inclusion in the shape of the letter C.

On Friday morning we mixed up a little plaster and made some rock mosaics. We buy plaster of paris at the local arts & crafts store, in an 8 lb. box for about $5. I used old food containers for measuring and mixing - two parts plaster to one part cold water.

JediBoy liked the texture while he was mixing, and kept mixing for a while just because it was fun. Plaster is fun and easy - the biggest thing to remember is to wash any of your tools that you want to save while the plaster is still wet - and do that outside, not in your sink! We used paper bowls and applesauce cups as our molds.

JediBoy made a smiley face and the sun, and BabyGirl made a little random art. She thought it was terrifically fun to drop pebbles into a bowl of white goo.

I used the smaller applesauce cups for molds and formed my kids’ initials with tiny pebbles. The plaster had mostly hardened after half an hour, but we left them in the bowls until Saturday morning, when they popped out very easily.

Later on Saturday, we talked more about which rocks were our favorites and started to set some aside for our permanent rock collection.

On Sunday, JediBoy and I picked 15 pebbles of roughly the same size from our dwindling pan of rocks. We used nail polish to mark the rocks with three symbols (line, circle or Z) - five rocks with each symbol. Once the nail polish dried, we used these marked rocks to play a few games. We put the rocks in a drawstring bag and took turns pulling them out.

Sometimes we drew to see who could get the first circle, or who could get three of a kind first. We would take turns drawing five rocks to see how many of the same kind we could get (think Yahtzee) or see if we could feel the slightly raised nail polish to guess what symbol we had before we pulled it out. The rocks-and-bag game is very versatile and free-flowing, and led to some basic conversation about probability.

Then we had to paint JediBoy’s toenails.

It was a very fun week, and we still have lots of rocks left for more projects. Everybody needs a rock!

Let Him Eat Cake

Yesterday afternoon was our second celebration for cousin C’s first birthday. We had a fun-filled lunch at the Chinese restaurant and then went back to C’s house for presents, homemade ice cream, and CAKE! All that’s messy about motherhood (the stuff I love) is a little outside of T’s comfort zone… but she stayed calm about her son covering himself with sticky blue frosting!

I think there’s a reason she never asks me to babysit… !

Centipede Stampede

About two hours ago, we found a three-inch long critter crawling on the wall near our front door.  Naturally, we scooped him up into an old baby food jar, took pictures, watched him moving around, and hopped online to identify him.  Naturally!  Isn’t that how we live our lives?

“Alex” - named by JediBoy - is a centipede.  Not a scary-looking house centipede, which would make me think we were in for a pest problem!  Just a regular, garden-variety centipede.

Centipedes have flat bodies; millipedes have cylindrical bodies.  Centipedes have one pair of legs per body segment; millipedes have two.  So our “Alex” is definitely a centipede.

Centipedes are venomous.  Handling some types can cause them to bite, bringing swelling and irritation similar to a bee sting.  They are carnivorous, mainly eating worms and insects.  There are over 3000 species of centipedes in the world, with about 1000 appearing in North America.  The longest centipede is about 18 inches - coincidentally, JediBoy’s arm from his armpit to the tip of his middle finger is 18 inches, so he LOVED that factoid!  Also, some centipedes can live to be about six years old - which is the birthday that JediBoy is approaching.

 Here are some of the sites we used:

 Virginia Cooperative Extension

 Humboldt State University Natural History Museum

 Growing Kids Learn at Global Garden - a free online gardening magazine from Australia

 What’s That Bug? - one of our favorite bug-photo sites

 Enchanted Learning

My next learning experience is figuring out how best to take a picture of a fast-moving tiny critter inside a baby food jar!

Earth Hour

We had a fantastic time celebrating Earth Hour last night. We gathered at Leigh’s for game night, and pepped the kids up with what a cool thing we were going to do: turn the lights off from 8-9 to help SAVE THE WORLD!

We did get the kids each a flashlight so they could run around in the dark (except Anna, who slept through it all). It was an adventure, it was fun, and it was, I hope, an example of how we take action in our world. JediBoy and I talked about how one house turning off the lights wouldn’t save that much electricity, but when people all over the world turned off their lights (and computers, and even the Wii!) for one hour, it made a big difference.

The kids were so excited to turn on their flashlights and wait for the “darkout.” They helped show me where to put candles and they ran around the house turning the lights off. Then they played variations on flashlight tag for a good 40 minutes before starting to ask when the hour would be over. They hid under the table and played with light and made a “campfire” with a flashlight under a red playsilk.

The adults played Mutiny and Pirate’s Cove by candlelight. It added ambiance!

Thanks to everyone out there who participated - and to my dear friends for following my lead and jumping on my personal bandwagon.

Celebrate Urban Birds, in the rain

We’ve had our Celebrate Urban Birds packets for two whole days, and this morning JediBoy was bursting to get out and record some birds “for the scientists.” He loves the idea of participating in real research by doing one of his favorite things - birdwatching.

Although I explained to him that it’s perfectly okay to watch birds in our own yard, he was adamant that our first data come from somewhere else. He chose his favorite park, which has a playground and then a long grassy, lightly-wooded area next to a stream. We hadn’t been there over the winter so he was very excited to get there. It was gray and drizzling during our ten minute watch so we didn’t see any birds in our selected area, but “Zero Means a Lot” - to quote one of the study’s slogans. The researchers are interested both in where the birds are as well as where the birds are not.

We recorded our data - where we were, and when, and what the area was like, as well as our zero bird count. JediBoy drew a fanciful blue bird on his sketch pad. When BabyGirl woke up (she’d been in the sling) we headed creekside to collect some rocks for this week’s Unplug Your Kids project.

Daisy Rock!

A big thank you goes out to Celebrity Baby Blog and Daisy Rock today.  Way back in January, I won a contest for three For The Kids cds and a beautiful butterfly guitar.  When JediBoy saw what we’d won, he immediately thought of giving it to Em, who dreamed deeply of having such a guitar for herself.  There were a few hiccups with shipping, but the guitar arrived safe and sound last week, and today Em gave me a private concert.

She loves it, and we love watching her love it.  Now she can rock like Miley Cyrus!

Book Basket: Inspired by Night at the Museum

Today we watched Night at the Museum, and the movie sparked a lot of conversation about what really goes on at night and what our imaginations can dream up.  Thus inspired, I walked through the nursery to refresh this week’s book basket.  Here’s what I pulled out:

The Night at the Museum by Milan Trenc

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi and Ron Barrett

Pigsty by Mark Teague - This is a wonderful book in which a young boy’s room is so messy, it’s a pigsty… and pigs move in!  They play Monopoly with Wendell and read his comics and make the room more and more of a mess, and the whole time Wendell’s mother doesn’t realize what’s going on.

Ship of Dreams by Dean Morrissey - This book has lush oil illustrations and tells of a little boy who winds up going for a ride on the Sandman’s Ship of Dreams during the night.

Uncle Lester’s Hat by Howie Schneider - A little boy is telling the reader all about his adventurous Uncle Lester and his boring Uncle Wilfred.  The illustrations tell another story, though, as Uncle Wilfred loses Uncle Lester’s hat in a breeze and travels around the world trying to get it back!

Miss Smith’s Incredible Storybook by Michael Garland - Miss Smith has an book that brings the characters to life right inside her classroom.

A Movie and Two Photos

We had a lovely family snuggle this afternoon to watch the movie from JediBoy’s Easter basket: Night at the Museum. It’s a great movie that we’d seen twice in the theater. JediBoy loves the perkiness of Rexy, the T-Rex skeleton that comes to life at night and plays fetch with his own rib bone. JediBoy was thrilled to find the movie in his basket, and we enjoyed spending the afternoon in bed, cuddling and laughing and watching the film.

The afternoon light was nice up there so I pulled out my camera again, and this time I was thrilled to get two pictures I liked of the two kids together! (We had a very tough photo shoot this morning and I was disappointed with every shot except the one of JediBoy by the tree!) I’ve had fun learning how to get the best from my digital SLR these last two months, but it’s been frustrating too. My mother was a great photographer - her specialty was macro photography, mainly of flowers. Taking pictures of flowers gives you less frustration while you’re learning, because at least the flowers aren’t moving while you’re trying to analyze light and shadow, composure and f-stop. I mainly want to take pictures of my kids, who are in constant motion! It doesn’t help that BabyGirl doesn’t like to smile for the camera this weekend.

That’s been my recent Mommy School, to borrow a phrase from Sara. When the kids sit and look at books together, I’m often curled up on the couch with various books on photography, digital SLRs in particular. I try to talk with JediBoy about what I’m thinking about, how I’m analyzing my own photos, and what I hope to get out of this time. He seems to understand that this is something Real, because it’s something I’m passionate about. I hope this turns out to be modeling of the very best kind!

Happy!

Happy Easter, happy spring, happy sunshine, happy toys.

The kids were super-excited this morning to find their presents and eggs.  BabyGirl got not one but FOUR singing toys - a Dora musical book, musical flowers (with soothing classical music), a bilingual singing Lily doll and a talking camera.  You know we’ve moved into the digital age: when you click the button on her new toy camera, the picture on the back changes, so you can “preview” your picture!  She also got new pink shoes, which she insisted on wearing over her footie pajamas, and two great books.  JediBoy found Pokemon in his eggs and loves his new Cars game and matching shoes and awesome box of Playmobil knight’s equipment.

I took the kids out for a photo shoot outside, but BabyGirl was too close to nap time and we didn’t get any smiling shots of the two together!

I hope you’re having a happy spring day too.