All on their own

I've been such a bad home schooling Mom lately. We've had sicknesses, birthday parties, a root canal for me (and a couple days of Codeine Mommy afterwards; she was fun), and of course the Thanksgiving holidays, and I feel like we haven't had our act together for weeks! "Having our act together" being relative, of course. For us that means we: get moving relatively quickly in the morning and get out of the house to do something (even if it's just playing in the yard), watch little television, and I make myself extra-available as a resource for the kids' learning play. Life has gotten a little bit in the way of those humble goals lately. And yet, I find that I still have many things to report.

Tex's reading gets better and better. Don't tell him I told you, because he hates reading and is determined that he's horrible at it, but he's really not half bad. The other night he and DaddyO read Pepito the Brave together as part of Tex's Wolf Scout requirements, and Tex needed very little help in sounding out the words he didn't recognize on sight. He still seems to think that reading should be effortless and is discouraged when he has to work at it, but I hope that as he practices more and more in his head he'll gain confidence and realize that reading is manageable.

Still, if he doesn't have room for reading in his brain, it's because it's so full of science! I was just now looking at a little science/transportation book we got from Sonic with our lunches the other day, and the first page was about airplanes. I started to read one of the little blurbs, regarding the forces that must be equalized, when Tex piped in with "I know this! The engines create thrust, which pushes against the drag, and then the wind creates lift, which pushes against gravity. That's from Newton." Well. Alrighty then, let's just keep reading, shall we? Here's a nice page explaining an experiment you can do yourself with a straw and a small paper ball, where you keep the ball floating in the air stream and observe what happens when you tilt the straw as you blow. Once again, Tex is ahead of the game: "that's just like at the Space & Rocket Center, where they have a beach ball and a vent, and did you know that the air isn't pushing on the bottom of the ball, it's actually splitting and going around it! And when it goes around [the ball] perfectly evenly, with gravity pushing down, there's nowhere for the ball to go. You have to tilt it SO far before gravity pushes the ball a lot, and makes the wind on the bottom thinner, and then the ball can break through the wind." And there you have Bernoulli's Principle as explained by a 7 1/2 year old. And I had to look it up in the Sonic science book to make sure I had the name right. (sigh)

What else has been doing around here, lately? Well, Noodle has moved on from creating zoos in Zoo Tycoon to creating whole cities in DaddyO's Sim City computer program. It's mostly an excuse to "drive" trains and plot the destruction of whole towns with robots and metal dinosaurs, but in the process he has to do little things like set up power plants or alternative energy sources (he likes the windmills), lay roads and train tracks, build businesses and homes, and other matters of city planning.

And oh, goodness, Noodle is starting to read, too!! He was looking at our coupons box the other day, and he all of the sudden stuck out his finger and started to read: "c-ah-up-onz. Mommy, does this say 'cop-ons'?" You could have knocked me down with a feather!! Of course I played it cool and let him know that in this case the "ou" makes the "ooooo" sound, so he wouldn't sense my excitement and immediately decide to stop reading altogether, but inside I was jumping up and down! And tonight when I made the boys a sign of what they needed to do before bed, he read "teeth" right away. The Noodle is on his way to reading, big time!

Both boys are also still interested in film-making (that sounds so much better than "they both still love abusing the camera"). Tex had asked me how filmmakers get things to move in movies without touching them, which led to a discussion of wires and fishing line, and Tex wondered if we could tie some fishing line to something an move it around. For instance, hmmm, oh hey, Mom, how about this thing I've been carrying around and pretending is a laser blaster gun, will that work? Sure! So we tied some fishing line to his blaster and I showed him how he could pull it without anyone seeing how. Well, Tex found that he could not waste such a wonderful opportunity, so he turned into Director Tex and got us all to play our parts: Tex as a Star Wars baddie, Noodle as Obi Wan Kenobi (the Ewan McGregor version, not Alec Guinness) injured and unable to reach his weapon, myself as the special effects coordinator (I pulled the string), and DaddyO as the cameraman. Tex put us all on our marks and we did at least three takes; it was a grueling 10-minute shoot. But I think that what they came away with was pretty darn cute.

Finally I should mention all the work Tex has been doing for his Wolf badge in Cub Scouts. He's so excited about all of this scouting stuff, and thank goodness he has DaddyO, Grandaddy, Papa, and even a Great Uncle who are all so generous with their time and experience to help him accomplish his tasks. This weekend he did some woodworking and used some basic tools to create a doorstop and cut a notch out of a plank of wood. He even got to use the circular saw under close supervision. There is no doubt about it, that boy is growing up. I hope he's more ready for it than I am. ;-)

That was a good day.

Yesterday should not have been such a good day. It started off with the decision to stay home since Tex and I were both sporting runny, drippy noses, because I knew that if we went anywhere not only would we be leaving behind copious germs, but we'd also get so worn out so fast that it wouldn't be any fun. The drawback is that most days we are "stuck" at home turn out to be tortuously long and full of arguments between playmates.
Not this time! We started off with an episode of The Amazing Race. We've been Netflix-ing the DVDs of Season 1 and watching them with Tex as a fun way to talk geography and dialogue on concepts like sportsmanship, honor, fairness, etc. In this episode we found France and Tunisia, and talked about how two teams working together, even though they're in competition, can actually help both teams do better; and also about how one team that can't communicate will have trouble getting anywhere.
We finished our third hydraulics machine, the scissor lift. Only one machine left to go. Tex and Noodle did weight-testing to see what objects the scissor lift could hold up, and which were heavy enough to actually push the fluid around themselves and lower the lift.
The most fun I think we had all day was graphing the Halloween candy. We made plates for "chocolate", "fruity candy", "gum", "snacks", and "lollipops", and the boys each separated their candy into those groups, counted each group, and then made a bar graph showing how they compared to each other. Then they selected their favorites to keep, and the rest went to "DaddyO Tax". They had so much fun, I imagine we might be doing this again with any candy in their Christmas stockings, or maybe at Easter! :-)
Oh, and Noodles has discovered Zoo Tycoon!! This is a PC game that allows one to build their own zoo (with regular, endangered, marine, and even prehistoric animals), design the exhibits, hire staff, provide for the guests' needs, and maintain the animals' happiness. I credit this game with getting Tex started reading last year, because he had to learn to identify words in order to play it without a grown-up around to help. Noodle isn't quite there yet, being as he's just about to turn 5 and Tex was a new 6-year-old when he got started, but he's fascinated about each animal and how their environments differ from others, why you have to have boy and girl animals in order to have babies, and especially why some animals have a LOT of babies very fast while others take a long time to grow their population. Last year Tex learned about the food chain by putting penguins into the sea lion exhibit and watching the resultant scuffle, then putting the sea lion in the polar bear exhibit and seeing how the predator became the prey. I find it amusing that the game designers created this function, and the "scuffles" complete with swirling lines and stars. LOL
In any case it was a good day. Now send me prayers that today should be as fun, because we've added a sick Monkey to the bunch, so we're staying home again. Noodle may just go crazy.

The blog is slacking, but the school isn't!

Now that it's Fall Break for city schools and we have a week off of our organized activities, maybe I can get some blogging in. And can I just stop for a moment and tell you how much I love Unschooling??? It never ceases to amaze me, although it darn well probably should by now, how much these kids learn whether we're "teaching" at them or not. There's big stuff going on in those little noggins.

Tex and Noodle have discovered a new online game at PBSkidsGO.org, part of the show Design Squad, whereby they have to use various shaped widgits to get a certain number of Tribble-like Fidgits to fall out of their tube and into a little box. So they have to use geometry to figure how to bounce the Fidgits in such a way that they head towards the box, they have to consider the physics of the materials used and how much energy each absorbs (each widgit can be made of rubber, wood, or concrete), and there is definitely a certain amount of creativity and trial & error involved in getting it to work. I especially appreciate this aspect as Tex is a perfectionist, my typical first child who only looks up to adults and thinks he should be as skilled as us with much less practice. It's nice to have a game where, first thing, you HAVE to fail. You HAVE to let those Fidgits drop out of the tube and just let them land wherever they may, and not get into the box at all. Then you have to try out a solution, but it's probably going to fail, too, and that's good because it gives you more information. And so on and so on until finally you tweak your design just right, and those little squeaky, beepy Fidgits finally get in the dang box and shut the heck up. I love this game.

And Noodle, oh Noodle, my little electro-nut. Last week Noodle and I put together Tex's Electronics Lab because he just could NOT wait any more! It had wires! It had springs! It has transformers (NOT actually robots in disguise, though you would have thought so by how excited he was) and capacitors and did I mention WIRES?!?!?! Oh, the joy on his face when he completed a circuit and that little red LED lit up, it was priceless. I must admit I was pretty tickled, too, having never really known before how any of this stuff went together; it was a flashback to the old HeathKit television my dad built when I was about 7 years old. And two days later Noodle and I went right to the library to try to find some books on robots again (they said they'd order more for us) and left with a grade-school book titled Artificial Intelligence and three books about Star Wars (because Star Wars has... you guessed it... robots!). Strike what I said a few posts back about Tex building the spaceship and Noodle being the unwitting test pilot; I'm now quite convinced that they will be full partners in their plot to launch themselves out of the garage. For my part, I just don't know what I'm going to do when they get to more complex physics issues; that is not a class I took and I was quite happy about it. Perhaps they have a kindly grandfather or uncle who will help them experiment safely... or just enable their craziness, you never can tell in this family.

We've started reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud, and so far Tex is thoroughly enjoying it. Only the second night, but when I finished Chapter Two tonight he very sweetly said "please don't stop", and who am I to deny this kid a good story?? Frankly, at this point anything that isn't a dinosaur book is a-okay with me! Truly, though, he still insists that he dislikes reading as an activity AND a school subject (even though he's getting better at it all the time), so anything that gets him excited about reading is something I want to encourage. He even wanted me to follow along with my finger so that he could tell where I was on the page, which is something he usually finds distracting. I do so hope that at some point he's going to find the book or topic that makes him want to read things on his own, so that he can get in some more frequent practice and start to reap the rewards. Of course, I should also remind myself that just because being "a reader" is important to ME does not mean that it will or should be so for him. DaddyO is not ravenous about books the way I am by any means. In fact I can only think of a few in which he was so engrossed that he didn't want to put them down to eat, work, or sleep, while I could probably say that about a few dozen books at least. There's almost nothing I like more. On the down side, we're running out of shelf space.

So there you have it, in a week filled with paper-making, computer and board games, The Magician's Nephew, and lots of outdoor and gym play, we have all grown leaps and bounds. I can't wait to see what happens next!

Harvest Day!

I've been staring out the boys' window at our raised tomato garden bed, and looking at the dozen or so ripe Roma tomatoes waiting to be picked, so when Tex and Noodle were willing to help me pick them today we headed right out to do it! We got a bunch of tomatoes, a load of basil, one tiny pepper that Noodle spotted, a bunch of lavender (the boys want to make "dream pillows" like the one I made Daddy-O years ago), parsley, and a peck of bugs to go with it all! As we speak there is an inchworm on a basil leaf, and another leaf with some sort of larva or chrysalis webbed onto the back (haven't figured that one out, yet), resting in our "bug keeper" cage. We even got to check out blooming flowers on the basil, then some spent flowers with the seeds visible, and we discussed how the positioning of the seeds (on the underside of the seed pod) allows them to simply fall down to the soil and grow new basil plants whether we like it or not (we do!). The boys then helped me to "process" the basil, picking off the good leaves and rinsing them for me to make pesto later.

Tex and I (ok, mostly me) have slacked off terribly lately on his building projects. I keep leaving it up to him for us to make a trip out to buy materials, but I've come to the conclusion that like most kids he just wants to do it when he wants to do it, and I'm going to need to gather some materials to have on hand for him to explore building. I need some strong wire to be the skeleton for his dinosaur sculptures, several decks of cards for building houses of cards, and maybe even some bamboo for outdoor structures. We agreed to spend some time tomorrow making a big list of projects to go on the wall where we'll be reminded of them often, and so that I can be picking up materials as we have the money.

Tex and Daddy-O are scoping out Cub Scout troops in the next couple of weeks. Given Tex's intense interest in wilderness survival skills we're hoping that Scouting will be a good fit. Tex has been watching Daddy-O go to his old Boy Scout troop's meetings as an adult leader for the last few years, and he's thoroughly enjoyed the times he's joined Daddy-O for activities with the troop. The challenge will be finding a good fit. They went to their first meeting tonight with the goal of "being good scientists and observing", which they will do at a couple more meetings with other troops over the next few weeks before making their choice.

And I have a book recommendation!! Tex and I actually read it last week but I forgot to mention... Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland. The story concerns a young squire named Radius, son of Sir Cumference and his wife, Lady Di of Ameter, and his quest to become a knight. In this "math adventure" you find an exciting story that introduces the concepts of angles and degrees and incorporates them into the narrative with lovely little memory tricks that I can tell will help them stick better than the rote memorization I always depended on in school. I originally saw these in a learning catalog, but then ended up finding them on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. I may just have to buy one every time I get a B&N coupon. :-)

Happy learning!

Active week

The boys have really been into physical play this week. There's a new indoor playspace in town with a big wooden "pirate ship", moon bounce, and a bunch of other ways for the kids to stay active and have some imaginary play time. There's even a special area for Monkey to stay if she wants to be away from the big kids, although most of the time she just does her best to keep up. We spent at least 4 hours there this week. We also got Tex signed up for Homeschool P.E. class at the local YMCA and he had his first class this week; came out red-faced and sweating after playing soccer and loved it! :-) He was actually interested in moving his conflicting gymnastics class so that he could attend the Y's class twice weekly instead of once. Noodle is simply excited that we're going to start going swimming during Tex's class time, and I'm betting Monkey will be thrilled, too.

The boys have also enjoyed a lot of game playing this week. Computer games, Battleship, board games. And I've noticed that Tex has particularly delighted lately in being the teacher. He doesn't know it, but I love this b/c it helps me to know what lessons he's really absorbed. This week Tex taught Monkey about why clouds rain, he taught Noodle about the different environments that animals live in as they were building a Zoo Tycoon zoo together, and I remember hearing quite a few things I didn't know before, but apparently I need to work on MY listening skills because now I cannot recall a one! Perhaps he'll be good enough to repeat himself this week if I promise to wear my listening ears?

Today we had a field trip to a local hydroponic farm with a group of homeschool friends. The kids got to see the benefits of their vertical planting system which needs one acre for every 18 a traditional farm would use, and uses 2,600 gallons of water daily compared to the 50,000 gallons a traditional farm growing the same number of plants would need. (See, today I had my listening ears on!) We also saw a wicked huge grasshopper, ladybugs and their larvae, stink bugs, squash bugs, learned the difference between beneficial and harmful insects, between male and female squash flowers, and supported a local farm all in one fell swoop!

Back in the saddle

Last week was just crazy and we barely got any homeschooling done each day. Of course the kids are always learning no matter what I do to/with them, but it's nice that this week we're able to get back into focusing on learning.

Big plans are afoot in the Berry Patch. The boys are planning some backyard camping trips and, if all goes well, possibly one at an actual campground. Noodle is absolutely over the moon about being able to camp outside; I've decided not to mention the ratio of bugs-to-Noodle in the great outdoors and just dip him in DEET before they go out. ;-) Tex was really hoping for a "Man vs. Wild" style drop-off and survival marathon, but as Mommy doesn't have access to a helicopter or parachute, we had to put the kibosh on that one.

For Table Time today Tex decided he wanted to play Battleship for math practice. Can't wait to get that kid into doing graphs and such, he already loves grids and code-breaking and all that sort of stuff. And he cheated, but he didn't win even then, so I'm hoping he'll get the idea that cheating sours the game without any guarantee that it will pay off. Teaching ethics is tricky to a kid who cares more about winning than about being fair! But I'll keep at it with the attitude that I still love him even though he's a big fat cheater ;-P, and that it's only going to hurt him in the long run anyway.

Oh, and Tex is also designing a "blaster" to go with his Megatron costume. He drew up a couple of designs, drew each design from 3 different angles (!) so I could see which I thought might be easier, and now he's planning to start small-scale mock-ups with toilet paper or paper towel rolls before we move on to the full-size model using a mailing tube. Y'all watch out, if this is where we're at at age 7, I don't even want to think about what he'll be building at 16! I might go out in the garage one day and it will be like a scene from The Explorers (y'all remember that one, with River Phoenix and the singing alien?). Twenty bucks says Noodle's the test pilot...

Even in the midst of chaos...

We've had a death in the family this week (DaddyO's grandma, God rest her soul) and a memorial for my grandfather who died back in June, but the learning just keeps on happening! We enjoyed a trip to SciQuest this morning where the boys spent most of their time concocting a "recipe for disaster" in the kitchen portion of the model home. Then Tex went to the gift shop and spent his allowance on a Life-Size dinosaur book (very cool!) and a stick of rock candy, which was a nice way to practice his money skills.

Oh, and that darn celery experiment is giving us SO many opportunities to learn!! Grrr! The blue food coloring hardly showed up at all even though the celery