Moments from the Week

I was pleasantly surprised when a couple friends told me they enjoyed my recent post on homeschooling and implied they would enjoy reading more about our daily experiences, struggles, and adventures. I haven't blogged much about our educational journey as I don't want to offend anyone (I have lots of friends who don't homeschool and friends who are teachers, and would never want to push our decision on anyone else) nor do I want to open myself up to harsh criticism or scrutiny. But I think I may keep this weekly feature and highlight a few moments or subject from each week and perhaps sprinkle some of our vision and philosophy throughout. We'll see how it goes! It is rather enjoyable to look back over the week. . .

We had a pretty productive week as Briana and Destry logged 29 and 28 hours of instruction respectively. We had a strong focus on literature this week as we completed a unit study on the genre of fantasy and a study of poetry. Briana loves poetry and Destry endures it. They then completed the test over The Two Towers with 95 and 84 percents (Destry missed ten points on the poetry section). They also worked on polishing their essays about leadership prompted by their reading of the adventures of Sam and Frodo in The Two Towers. (Don't you love all the scribbles on her paper?? I just love the revision process!!)
Briana enjoyed this challenge and Destry endured it--rather like you might endure a tooth being pulled due to a life-threatening infection with no pain meds --with much kicking and screaming.

You may be noticing a theme here. . .Destry is a thirteen year old boy and I felt every minute of it this week. I don't know if it is something going on with him hormonally or the fact that we are enough alike that we butt heads with some frequency or what, but some days I retreat to my bedroom and have private parent-teacher conferences.
This week it went something like this:

"That's it, I am just going to send him to public school."
"No, you can't do that, the teacher will call you and complain that he is lazy, disrespectful, and thinks he already knows everything."
"Yeah, then I'll just say 'Yes, I'm well aware of that, why do you think I sent him to YOU?!'"

After emerging from this private conference I was able to calmly remind him of essay-writing techniques and leave him to finish his work. I am actually quite impressed with their essays and am thinking of posting them next week. Anyone want to read a couple essays and give them more suggestions for improvement?

After all these literature assignments were completed, they were rewarded with the opportunity to watch The Two Towers movie with Mom and Dad Friday evening. They both thoroughly enjoyed that!

Another opportunity we had this week was to deliver Meals on Wheels to the elderly. All the kids really enjoy this and I think their young, smiling faces bless those who are receiving the meals. I get lots of comments on all the help I have!
While such service hours are not logged in our school hours, I consider them very important to the kids' education. One of the first books I ever read about homeschooling was The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook by Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore, and I appreciate their philosophy that a child's education should involve work and service in addition to academics. They maintain that "properly done, home education offers low-stress, low-cost, and high achievement and sociability from a balance of study, work, and service" and note the self-confidence, maturity, creativity and selflessness exhibited by children who are raised with this balance. We don't follow their ideas strictly, but there are some good principles we try to implement when we can.
I think it's sweet that some mornings Easton comes bouncing into my room asking if we can "deliver Meals on Wheels today". It's really quite easy to do. We just pick the food up from the Nutrition Site (we don't have to help make it at all) and load the hot and cold containers in the back of the van. As we make each stop, the children hop out to retrieve the proper meal (frequently marked with the name of the recipient due to dietary restrictions) and deliver the meal to the door where they greet the recipient with a smile and some pleasant chitchat. It only takes about an hour out of our day and back to the books we go.Easton and Kiana had a fun week with lots of imaginative play. Some weeks I do more preschool than others, and this week was one in which I didn't have a fun theme or structured preschool time. Easton asked me this week if he could go to preschool "with Adi" (my niece) which made me feel kind of guilty for not giving him more consistent structure. He truly loves to learn and have that special time with Mom. As I look back at pictures I snapped during the week, however, I can see plenty of times they were learning.

For example, they laid a blanket on the living room floor, brought in all their dishes, filled the pitchers with water, and had a tea party.
This involved organization, one-to-one correspondence, and fine motor skills of pouring. Of course, it also required cleaning abilities as they made a delightful mess.
They also love to work puzzles. We had fun this day talking about colors, shapes, instruments, and numbers. Easton recognizes all his numbers, and I did not teach them to him. Destry did. Destry has also taught him left, right, north, south, east and west and the names of any type of construction equipment you can think of. Teaching is something Destry is good at. . .

Kiana is doing puzzles a lot better these days than she used to. Easton has always had a real knack for puzzles and will work diligently on them for quite some time. Kiana gets frustrated when she tries one of the harder ones and tends to leave the pieces scattered all over the floor in a big mess. Fortunately, brother usually bails her out!
Another day I snapped this picture of them at the bookshelves behind the couch. They sat back here surrounded by a pile of books for at least 30 minutes.
Once again, this activity resulted in a mess as they're better at taking books off the shelf than putting them back on. They cleaned up the mess with my direction, but not of their own initiative.
Finally, the older kids are scheduled to have piano lessons the first and third Monday of each month. Since this week was a 'fifth Monday', they asked if they could have an extra lesson. They absolutely love playing the piano, and I am thrilled with their teacher. Destry started lessons in March or April of this year, and Briana started taking lessons in May. Not only have they made amazing progress (in my opinion, anyway) but she has nurtured their love for music and I sometimes literally have to get on their case for practicing too much when there are other things I want them to do. Here are a couple videos of them playing around. They especially enjoy playing duets. What fun memories for them!


You can't miss, of course, my little music lover dancing in the background of the duet!