I will have to be honest that the year 2014 homeschooling was full of stops and starts. It felt like more stops than starts, but maybe that's just how it feels to me. We try to take a relaxed approach to homeschooling - following the Thomas Jefferson Leadership Education (Tjed) model. In this model children up to about 8 years old are in a phase called "Core". The primary goal of a child in core is to learn and grow through natural rhythms, play and family time. Natural learning occurs during this time and there is less focus on academic learning, though that certainly can and does occur.
I struggled most this year with keeping a consistent rhythm to our days - to include household and learning time along with days we had to run errands, or I taught piano. I will be honest that this still is being tweaked and I hope to find the balance that fits us this coming year. Even though I could probably do an entire post on what went wrong, I know a lot did go right. If we truly are focusing on a core education for our kids right now, that would include play based learning, life learning, good and bad, true and false, and right and wrong. I think we are slowly achieving that. So I wanted to focus this post on all the times we did it right. Some of the things that worked and some of the fun things we did in a learning environment.
One of the things that we did well, most of the time, was reading. The boys and I love our reading time and while there were times we watched more tv than read, we still have a good love of reading. I am also getting braver at taking the boys with me to library and they are starting to understand what is expected there.
We have introduced lots of games and I can see how their learning is climbing just from a simple game. Sean especially has learn so much math by keeping score, playing number games. It is remarkable what he can do in his head. He is also learning how to share and even lose graciously. Ryan is still working on that, but he is learning to take turns while playing a game and that there are rules to a game. He is learning that if he follows the rules we all can play and have a good time.
One day I was frustrated with the boys behavior so I whipped out some worksheets and made the boys sit down and do them before they could do anything else (we prefer hands on learning and manipulative to worksheet). But I did learn that Ryan is loving the chance to color and follow directions and may even like doing worksheets once in a while. I don't worry too much about him because of his age, but he is showing me how excited he is to learn!
So here in pictures are some of the things we did educationally though out the year. Someday I hope to learn how to collage so I can condense my pictures on the blog.
Earlier in the year Ryan was learning his colors and I pulled out colored construction paper to match up with his cars. It was so much fun that Sean decided to join in.
We joined a homeschool group called Ensign Educators, and had not had much chance to join in their activities. Then they had a field trip to Falcon Field Airport in Mesa. It is a smaller airport. There were people who talked about airplanes and then the boys got to climb in a small airplane. They thought it was great. Even Steve got to go on this field trip with us.
Three random pictures (l to r): Sean overcame his fear of climbing! Ryan loves sensory bin of beans! During our study of some of the US States, Sean built this lego lighthouse during our study of Maine.
We have done a few body study units. One was bones. The boys helped put together their bone man, which was about the size of Ryan. They loved that.
Another body unit study was cells and DNA. We made licorice and marshmallow DNA strands. So yummy!
Sean has been saying for a while that he wants to be an inventor. So we have tried to learn and read about inventors. Recently he has shown interest in all things electronic. So we asked around for people who might have appliances or old DVD players and such that were broken so we could help Sean take them apart and learn about them. He loved taking apart this old Xbox gaming system. We found a video on YouTube and he followed the directions to get it apart without breaking it more. We have several others things to take apart too.
We tried a couple of growing experiments. We started sprouting a sweet potato for a plant and we tried to grow more celery from the base of an old celery stalk. The sweet potato took a while to sprout but is still growing strong (I will try to get a picture of it soon). The celery did not grow more than what you see in the picture above. Maybe another one would do better. But it was fun to try.
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