Trying something new here, I have written many posts on random homeschooling topics but I would like to start writing more regularly on just our everyday homeschool life.
As I sit here typing this I have the baby (well, 1 year old, I can still say baby, right?) asleep attached to me in a wrap, my oldest daughter (13) sitting about 6 feet away reading, and the rest of the kids downstairs doing what they call “Summer’s School”; where my 10 year old, Summer, puts together a lesson and craft for the others, ages 9, 8, 6, and 5. This little routine has become sort of an afternoon quiet time lately, doesn't happen everyday, but when it does I enjoy it!
Part of my vision for homeschooling is just doing fun things with the kids where they are learning without even realizing it, I love the unschooled approach where learning is based off the interests of the children, and I especially love then I can get ALL the kids together as a group learning things, working together, sharing ideas with each other…that makes a large family mama happy! Too bad half the time things end in fights and them yelling at each other! But I will take that other half of the time when they do get along as a win!
Last week we visited a little local farm down the street, we have been there a lot of times but not yet this year. We had a great time exploring the grounds, seeing the animals (and trying to coax them closer), and really just enjoying the beautiful day. Everyone had their own favorite parts so to extend on it I asked them to put together something to share with each other. My oldest helped my five year old look up some facts on turtles and wrote sentences for her (and 6 yr old) to copy. My 10 year old wrote a little paper on horses after pulling out several of our horse books and finding interesting facts. My 9 year old spotted a cool bird while we there and found it in our bird book so she drew it and memorized some of the facts to share. My 9 year drew a detailed picture including all his favorite things from the day. The next day they all went around a circle sharing what they had come up with and a few of them then wrote a couple sentences about what they learned from someone else. THIS example is one of my favorite things about homeschooling, especially homeschooling lots of kids! It is NOT easy to homeschool several children, but things like this make it fun and worth the effort and reminds me of some of my reasons why I homeschool.
Today we did something similar, this time we went to a local Fossil Park, again somewhere that we have been several times but not this year. Before we went my 10 year old found one of our fossil books to bring with us in the van. We pulled out shovels, buckets, magnifying glasses, rulers, etc. We love going there, it is basically just a BIG hill covered in rocks and fossils (and casts as we learned). They think its awesome getting to hike up and down it with their buckets finding “treasures” to bring down to the bottom to share with each other. They measured and compared a bunch their and then each selected a small one to bring home to study more (we will bring them back next time we go;) At home they got a closer look, wrote a bit about it, my 13 year old looked up facts in a science book to share, and each selected a few “Rocks & Minerals” cards that we will look at/read tomorrow when they get out their rock collections as we expand the study, hey maybe we will even bring some math into it using all those rocks! Sounds like a success right? I won't mention the moments when one person is yelling over another, kids fighting over who does what first, and baby trying to get into everything!
We had an “ART” day last week when everyone got a canvas or canvas paper to paint on and some of them looked through art books for inspiration. We pulled out the big easel, covered the school table with paints, brushes, and sponges, then they all painted whatever they wanted. I even got to work on a painting, which makes me very happy! (I love to paint but don’t take the time to it nearly as much as I would like!)
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| Fossil Park |
The kids also just made slime, which was just another simple, fun thing they all worked together to do (found recipe, gather supplies, measured, mixed, etc.) with no help from me! :) That’s always nice! Actually they made slime twice in the past two days, the first time was a bit of a fail since they didn't use a recipe and just started combining different things they (mostly my oldest) thought would work, haha.
Ok, enough for now, time to make dinner before 3 of them go to soccer!
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| "Parky's Farm" |
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| The slime |
