It's so easy to get caught up in other things ...

A brief recap of October and November is in order (and my apologies to friends and family who asked for updates!). Despite my best efforts, I got caught up in election emotions. Every time I started to write here, the entry turned into a rant about something or other that didn't have much to do with our homeschooling experience.

Five In a Row for us has become Five Every Other Day or So Spread Out Over a Couple of Weeks. Or in the case of Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky, it took us a month. The book is narrated by a boy who discovers there are some things too wondrous to be owned, including a person's heart and soul. He and his family are slaves in the pre-Civil War South; it is quite a lesson for him.

The author was a fourteen-year old girl in the '80s. The last line of the book is something to the effect of "My parents would be proud to know that their great-great grandson became governor of this state." It was moving to read this in the context of the presidential election of 2008. TJ and PJ don't really get how wondrous it is that America has elected Barack Obama.

We didn't do a lot of math or science with this book. The girls created a list of their own of "Things too wondrous to be owned," which inspired their own artwork. We also attended a political rally for Obama with 35,000 other people, a crowd that included at least twenty of our local friends. It was a great experience to be in that crowd -- such good will, hope, and energy.

I have to leave this update here for now. The girls are asking to play, and why would I sit at the computer instead of having fun with them?

Making the proverbial lemonade

I misplaced the book. The FIAR book! The book about Mako, the little girl with the red clogs. I've been referencing Mako with some frequency because TJ has been complaining about her purple crocs. "No one else has two straps!" "They are dirty!" "When can I get new ones that fit?"

She might have a point with that last one.

Still, the book has appeared at just the right moment in our lives. All I have to do is say sweetly, "Yes, Mako, maybe I will get you new ones before the next festival day," and TJ stops whining.

And I couldn't find it, just when it was time to read it.

The plan was to read it to them as they ate a Japanese lunch like Mako might have had. It was a stir fry of snow peas and carrots, beef, and udon noodles. TJ discovered a new love for beef, and PJ slurped down the julienned carrots. Instead of enjoying lunch with them, I ran around the house looking through piles of stuff (because that's the way I "organize") not finding A Pair of Red Clogs.

To set a good example and not panic about losing the book, I decided to make the best of it and try something that I've been wanting to do anyway. It's the technique of narration as described by Charlotte Mason; just see how much of the story TJ could recreate, since I COULDN'T FIND THE D**N BOOK. (Is it clear how much I have to censor my internal dialogue, that I practice it in my blog?)

TJ then proceeded to narrate for me, beginning to end, Mako's story of the red clogs with the crack in them. I "scribed," to use the CM terminology, and wrote three and a half pages.
We followed this with the math lesson I had planned for TJ, of circling the multiples of 2 in a Hundreds Chart. Then she wanted to circle the odd numbers on another copy of the chart, and then to put hearts around each individual number.

All's well that ends well. Daddy came home and found the book ... next to the bed.

A Pair of Red Clogs

My favorite part about the FIAR curriculum is the art lesson. It's right in the middle of the week and GREAT for the Wednesday afternoon doldrums.

A Pair of Red Clogs is our story this week. The illustrations are done in colored pencil, "Like Ping was," TJ observed. Also like Ping, the illustrator chose a limited color palette of red, blue, yellow, and black. Our box of pencils has fifty hues! For the last two art lessons, we chose to follow the cues of the illustrators.

If I had proposed that the girls use only four pencils for a picture, I think they would have gotten mad at me. The interesting thing is that I didn't have to suggest it myself. After examining the illustrations carefully, TJ decided on her own that she wanted only those colors to do the assignment. "Assignment" used loosely, of course.

You can see the result from this week. She turned a stick figure (that I provided) into her own illustration of Mako kicking off her red clog. I love it!

We will not be ordering the duck.

Because I just can't let go and embrace unschooling all the way, I am adding the tiniest bit of structure to satisfy the teacher inside me. I have been looking at curricula for almost three years now: Waldorf, Charlotte Mason, the Well Trained Mind topped my favorites.

What they all have in common is gentleness and appreciation of literature -- even children's books as literature. Each of them is too didactic for me to embrace completely. I like pieces of them ... but I had hang ups, too. Especially as applied to TJ's learning style, none of them fit the bill.

Plus, when I notified the county that TJ would be educated at home, I explained that she would be completing a series of "unit studies" designed to meet her interests as she did her three R's. Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic, right? I did not use those words exactly. Can you imagine? The stumper for me: in the big, wide world of education, WHICH units to study? Where to start?

It figures that the last curriculum in my search is the one I like the best. (Sure, sure, the thing you're looking for IS always in the last place you look for it, because then you stop looking.) The idea is to read a picture book every day for five days in a row. Each day you do a different activity afterwards, with a loose structure of Social Studies, Language Arts, Art, Math, and Science tie-ins through the week. Ta-da! Each book is a unit!

Bonus: Little PJ can participate too. And for me, I love to read to my girls, not that I needed another excuse.

We are reading The Story About Ping this week. I'm thinking about doing a lap book like this one to go with it. On the other hand, we haven't finished our first lap books yet ... so maybe we'll go out for Chinese on Friday to celebrate the end of this short "unit." We just won't order any duck.

Hard Lesson

There is one correct answer to the request, "Clean up what you were doing before you start something else."

The answer is not "No!"

If the answer is no, then guess who cleans the stuff up? And guess where it goes? And guess who cries when she sees the scraps of paper that she "worked so hard on" in the recycling bin?

I am not heartless -- they really looked like scraps of paper. She had been making a collage with pictures cut out of a (toy) catalog. Then she disappeared upstairs to sing and dance to her own internal music. Wouldn't you think she was done, too?

Maybe, MAYBE next time TJ will remember that the only answer is, "Yes, Mommy."

School House Rock as an educational tool ... no, really

Sing along with me the School House Rock refrain, "Ha-a-ay, learn about the U S A." Constitution Day passed us by last week (September 17), but we are making up for it by school-house-rocking out the Preamble of the Constitution.

I've got a Five In A Row approach to this topic (FIAR to be explained in another post), yet somehow we're balancing this against our unschool-y tendencies. My goal for TJ is to recite the Preamble, in broad terms to state what the Constitution is, and to name some of the liberties listed in the Bill of Rights. That should be enough for a kindergartner, no?

Monday, TJ and PJ navigated through the School House Rock dvd while I got a break (shower, coffee, sudoku -- small necessities!). The Preamble tune got stuck in our heads.

Tuesday we printed out the text, with "We the People" in that old fashioned, fancy font. It turns out that there are a lot of interesting words in that short segment of the document! So she asked me what promote, tranquility, and posterity mean, and I wrote above the words. She asked about most of the words, in fact.

Wednesday was a bit of review. Mostly we finished listening to the Little House in the Big Woods, but we didn't try to connect it to the Constitution. TJ can tell you that we, as Americans, have the right to say what we want, go to church if we want to (or not go, if we don't want to), and to hang out with our friends.

By the end of the week, I'd like her to create a poster about what the Constitution means to her. We're going to send it off to a contest for next year's campaign to promote Constitution Day. Didn't you know? (I didn't.) The signing was September 17th, 1787.

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

Monkey Bread

I've been on a bread baking kick for a couple of weeks.  The girls love the sandwich bread recipe from America's Test Kitchen Cookbook (my kitchen bible) so much that they eat the crust.  It is cheaper, and more fun, to bake our own, so we've been making lots of bread.

This particular cookbook has lots of pictorial explanation, and the very next recipe after the sandwich bread looked so tempting!  Monkey bread is a variation on the sandwich bread dough that elevates it to dessert heights: seven tablespoons of butter, almost two cups of sugar, lots of cinnamon, and nuts.  (We didn't use nuts because we were going to share this with lots of kids.  But I do want to try this with pecans.)

"Where's the chocolate?" they asked.   

"You are going to like it even though there isn't any chocolate.  Trust me."

We had a great time measuring out the ingredients and talking about yeast.  TJ will tell you that the yeast burps, and that it needs sugar to eat and something to keep it warm.  She knows that the burps make bubbles in the dough, and that the bubbles make the bread rise.

The next step is the most fun: divide the dough into thirty-six pieces and roll them into balls.  I foresee lots of lessons in multiplication and fractions as we make this recipe in the future.  Then dip the balls in butter, roll them in cinnamon sugar, and then fill up a bundt cake pan with these goodies.  

This recipe is awesome.  It even makes its own sauce!  "Drizzle the leftover butter and sugar mixture over the dough balls."  We turned the bread out after baking and caramel dripped out of the pan.

I thought it would be nice to get a picture of this fabulous thing when we got to park day.  I showed up carrying my platter with still warm bread, and suddenly all the kids who had been on the play equipment were in the shelter around the picnic table where I had placed the bread.  I turned around to get my camera out of my bag, turned back ... and it was like locusts had descended.  The whole thing was almost gone!  

Which is fabulous.  We had a blast making the bread, and I can't ask for a better end to one of our kitchen creations.