October Science

Marble physics, making it rain in a jar, and examining leaves is what science looks like in October!

Julia's Art Class #3 - A House

Cuteness

why is everything yellow?!?

sweetness

Poetry by Julia

Julia is one of the students in the poetry class that I am teaching at our cooperative this fall. In a recent session I showed the kids how to create a found poem out of words cut from magazines. 

This is a very fun exercise which can lead to surprising results. It's amazing to see the kids personalities come through in their poetry, even with randomly chosen words! Here is Julia's creation.

Gym Class - Rock Climbing

A new addition to our schedule for this fall - rock climbing!

Two Wheeling!

Benjamin had a big day in October - he mastered his two wheel bike! No more training wheels for him!

Field Trip: ASL at the Zoo

One of our best field trips so far this year was a day at Roger Williams Park Zoo to learn American Sign Language! Our guides/teachers were a deaf ASL instructor who only communicates in ASL and volunteer docents from the zoo who are currently taking an ASL class with him. The docents shared their fantastic behind-the-scenes tales of the zoo animals both in ASL and speaking while the ASL instructor showed us the signs for the animals, their habitats, and other pertinent vocabulary.

We were all having such a good time that our original 2 hour field trip lasted for over 4 hours!

The Wedding

After months of waiting the special day finally arrived - Auntie Merrill's wedding!! The kids were SO excited and SO happy to be there for her and Steve's special day!

all decked out

cousins!

all the dancing went to their heads!

Preparing for Winter (A Step Back in Time)

One of my homeschool goals for this year is to go on more field trips and adventures. To move our learning outside of our house and take advantage of all the great resources that we have near us.

One of those resources is Mystic Seaport, a recreated 19th century fishing village and shipyard. We are taking monthly classes there, each with a different theme. Our first one, in September, focused on how the villagers would prepare for the coming winter. Julia and Benjamin stepped back in time and did the chores that villagers their ages would have been responsible for: grinding cinnamon and nutmeg, preserving eggs in ashes, shelling beans, cleaning silver, and stringing squash and apples for drying. They enjoyed it but I think were happy that they were going home to the current time period of dishwashers, washing machines, grocery stores, and ipads!

shelling beans

polishing silver

stringing squash

We also had a little time to explore the village and seaport a bit. They each took their turn at the helm of a ship, checked out the mates quarters, and found a fun room of dress-up and games.

Our Days: September & October

A friend of mine recently gave me this idea to try and capture what we are learning during our days. While we do a fair amount of book work, we are really trying to build a family culture of lifelong learning. Meaning that learning isn't something that only happens during a set portion of the day; we are learning all the time!

One of the difficulties of this is that sometimes it's difficult to recognize everything that the kids are learning. And sometimes, we also tend to go back to thinking about learning as what we they read about in history or science or what math problems they accomplished or which phonograms they learned. So in an attempt to remind us all of the scope of what we do during a day we have started capturing some of our days on a whiteboard. We just write down snippets of what stuck in the kids heads or what they felt like were interesting points or highlights of the day.

I'm going to try to remember to do this (and share them here) throughout the school year! Here's a sampling from September and early October.

Florida: Summer 2016

Our last summer vacation this year was a trip down to Florida. Our activities consisted of the usual fun rotation of swimming, golf, and beach but here are a few of the highlights:

• Julia and Ben had their first "real" golf lessons. And became true golfers as we were caught in a thunderstorm while out on the range and now they can say that they "play - even in the rain"
• After a couple of storms we found a coconut that had dropped from a tree in a nearby park and took it back and dissected it. We didn't eat it because it looked like it been around a little too long (there may or may not have been mold growing inside - we weren't going to test it!).

• Ben had his first waffle cone of ice cream. Yes, it was as big as his head! And yes, he ate it all!

• Julia had her first cone of Cappuccino Chip. She really enjoyed it at the time. Andrew and I did not appreciate it so much when she couldn't get to sleep that night! It might be awhile before she's allowed to have it again.

• We saw a fantastic art installation at the Botanical Gardens created by Patrick Doherty out of willow branches.