We're Back

Hello! Life has been chaotic in Celosia, so we haven't been doing much school. We have successfully moved countries and are settling into our new house. Thanks to my parents and their church, our home has a fully equipped playroom. There are shelves and workspaces enough to satisfy any Tot School mom, I dare say!

These are the things that I want to focus on for May and June:

Raccoon
1) Books
2) Imaginary Play
3) Outside Time

Robin
1) Belly Time
2) Sitting Time (currently propped up by pillows)
3) Bits (idea from How Smart Is Your Baby)
4) Books (simple pictures with high contrast, like Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear...)
5) Outside Time

 

I opened up the cupboard today and found play-doh supplies galore!

 

 

"Batman" is putting stickers on paper attached to an easel in our new kitchen.

(I now own a child-size easel! I am so excited!!)

 

Raccoon has never liked trains or cars much, but he enjoyed this wooden set.

(This is in our new playroom, there is a whole wall of shelves!)

 

Here's Robin working on some sitting time and playing with her slippers.

 

 

Raccoon is 3.5 years old and Robin is 3 months old.

 

 

 

 

 

iPad Apps

Racoon's iPad has been my new BFF since we bought it last March. Nothing sidetracks a meltdown in the middle quite like the magic words, "I got a new game for you!" Raccoon is not much of a repeat player, he prefers novelty, so I don't like to spend a lot on an app that I'll just be deleting in a day or two. But finding quality apps that are free is time-consuming, so I use www.smartappsforkids.com. They post a free app of the day, and I also get their e-mails to remind me. I'm not affiliated with them, but figured that most moms can use a time-saving tip.

The Object of Education

...is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

- Robert M. Hutchins

Raccoon will be attending preschool twice a week in the fall. I am wondering if I should continue doing Tot School on the other days, although technically he's not a tot anymore. I do plan on as many field trips as we can afford, to the aquarium, the zoo, the children's museums, etc. The quote above really is my goal for this next school year. I want to feed his love of learning so that he seeks out knowledge and wisdom his whole life long, while living a happy life.

"There will never be enough hours in a life to learn all that is available to modern man, nor is it worth the life that would be given in exchange. I need to put the knowledge beast on a diet. Knowledge may be power, but its price is a life well lived." Jen from Laughing at Chaos.


Best Practice

I was reading a fascinating article about how one set of parents chose to educate their precocious child. I love the idea of a multi-grade approach, along with how it taught their son to feel comfortable interacting with people of all ages. Wouldn't it be amazing if each child could be met exactly where they needed to be in school and progress as quickly or as slowly as they needed to? 

"It is easy to label a child a prodigy, but not all prodigies achieve genius. Genius is not related to speed of development. It requires qualities of creative thought and exploration…the ability to break through and make a unique or original contribution." (B. Tao, 1985).

A Little of This and That

What have we been up to lately for Tot School?
Not much, but here are a few of the things that Raccoon has done on his own lately.

 

This was one of the first times that he's asked

me to take a picture of something he's made.

 

 We're still slowly working our way through my mom's alphabet book, making two pages for each letter. We love the dot paints that my mom brought down for Raccoon in February.

 

"Dd is for Door Knock Knock Who's there?

Dd is for Did. Noah did all that God commanded him. Genesis 6:22"

 

"Ee is for Envelope, inside is a note.

Ee is for Everywhere

Jacob ran, but God was there."

 

 

This was supposed to be our "Ff" page, but Raccoon enjoyed making dot patterns so much that we made it into a separate work of art instead.

 

 

"Ff is for Fish

Swimming in the sea.

Ff is for Friends. Friends stick together. Prov 18:24"

 

 

One night Raccoon wanted me to cut out numbers for him to glue on a page. I just did it freestyle which is why they are all different sizes. Then we played "Where is the..."

 

Another night (hmmm, I'm detecting a pattern here), he gathered a bunch of different materials. Then he insisted that he wanted to take a picture of Daddy. He was so excited that he dropped the camera and broke it. After a lot of tears, we found a picture already on the computer and printed it off. I had no idea what Raccoon wanted to make, so I just followed his instructions, helping him cut and glue.

 

He wanted a framed picture of his beloved Daddy up on the wall with our other important pictures.

 

Raccoon has also been "reading" to Robin (2 months old), which she seems to enjoy. She smiles whenever Raccoon is near.

 

For some great ideas, check out:

 

 

 

 

Unschooling

Homeschooling has been on my mind as Raccoon gets closer and closer to 4 years old. I found a series called I can't homeschool because... with a variety of reasons/excuses. My two objections, which weren't on the list, would be:
1) My son will miss the other kids.
2) My son doesn't enjoy following my lead.

For number one, we could probably find enough social activities, one way or another. And for number two... unschooling, or child-led learning. This seems to tend towards unit studies and deep investigation into the child's area(s) of interest. For a really great collection of blog posts about unschooling, go here. My favorite one is Laughing at Chaos' concept of StealthSchooling:

"See, he resists being taught something he thinks he already knows, but if he doesn’t already know what is being taught he thinks it’s too hard and shuts down. If I try to teach him, he is not in charge, and thus also shuts down...

So I find us somewhere between school-at-home homeschooling and full unschooling. I call it StealthSchooling; I wish to hell I could Trademark that. I quietly sneak in information in the form of documentaries, books, games, and iPad apps. Just enough pre-learning that he thinks he knows the topic. Then when he actually gets to the topic, he knows just enough to take off running."

I find unschooling appealing because honestly, I get bored with things too. I found this out while we were doing tot school. Only activities with a certain amount of complexity appeal to me to even try to teach to Raccoon. If he's interested, he just gets things. If not, then there's just no way I've found to turn that light on. When he's ready, he goes by leaps and bounds. He doesn't know the alphabet yet, but he knows the difference between an arachnid, a mammal, and an insect. He knows a bunch of snake names and that venomous and poisonous mean the same thing. When he feels like he needs to know the ABCs, he'll just do it.

This fall I might even have a play/school room in our new house in the States. Gasp! My mind is spinning with possibilities already. Home-un-something schooling, here we come!

Alphabet Book

As I've mentioned before, my mom is a preschool teacher, and an awesome one at that. I don't say this just because she's my mom, I know because I've seen her creativity and dedication firsthand. She is designing her own curriculum for her 3 year old class, part of which is an alphabet book. She's seen my blog (we live far, far away, boo hoo), so she sent me the pages to do with Raccoon.

We did A before Robin came, and since then we have done B, C, and D. This is the extent of our Tot School for now, but it makes us both happy to be doing a little bit. I love it because my mom did all the prep so I just have to pull out whichever page is next and the supplies are all right there. Thanks, Mom!

(Note: We don't always put the pages together with the same materials she's used, her class does a variety of things, we mostly just paint each page.)

 

Aa is for Apple, juicy and sweet.

Aa is for Always, always be kind.

(Look at those curls, sniff sniff.

An unfortunate barber cut them all off when all I wanted was a trim.)

Bb is for Brown Bear, Boots on his feet.

Bb is for Beginning. "In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

 

 

When Raccoon saw his baby pictures after Robin was born, he asked, "Where's my big brother?" I told him that he doesn't have one, so he chose this red dog to be his "big brother."

 

 

Cc is for Cave where I like to hide.

Cc is for Created. God created me.