Butterflies!

We live in town, but have land out in the country, so for the sake of Nature Study (and Mama's sanity...which I'll admit is very closely tied to nature study), our school curriculum is arranged so that every Wednesday morning, we pack up kids, dog, breakfast, rubber boots and nature journals...

...and leave the rest at home. 

Today, the world was FULL of butterflies! The kids and I had a great time. :) After trying to sketch a moving target, we decided it was better at least for now to use the camera, and then paint from the photo.

Do you see the real butterfly? It came to see if the cover picture was real or not!

 There is a lot I like about this picture. I may not be overly artistic, but my God is, so there. :)

 I'm rather low-tech in general, but I'm SO thrilled at what cameras can capture!

This is blurry...but it was a victory in that it was the ONLY shot we could get of the undersides of this one. This is the SAME butterfly as the blue beauty featured next! Our favorite of the day!

 This is our first year to work with watercolor. It was fun...I am NOT good at it yet, but I have learned to appreciate the value of truly seeing something in an effort to draw it. My daughter and I were talking about it today, and I realized something. Those of us who use a Charlotte Mason approach to schooling are familiar with the value of retelling to make an idea your own. That being said, if creation is the story we're reading from,  the nature journal is the re-tell; just the act of drawing something, with attention to detail, REGARDLESS of how "artistic" the end result seems, has value. 

(as a side note, we are using these half size notebooks for Nature Journals...I find it comforting to be able to put the page on the table or a little clip board until I'm done with it, and then clip it in my book. This is good, especially if you have brothers that spill things down the length of the table. ;) It has also seemed to help with getting over the fear of trying something new that if you ruin a drawing, you can just take it out. Also, if you want a page with lines, it's easy to add it where you want it. Anyway, we've liked the system so far and are already excited about next Wild Things Wednesday! 

A thought for my little lady...

My ten year old daughter is rather out numbered at our place; she was blessed to be the oldest child in a string of five - and the only girl. As I was planning out school for this term, and was thinking about some of the "home-ec." type things I wanted to make sure she mastered, we came upon this plan. (This is mostly meant as a place for me to get all the specifics written down before I forget and/or lose them...sorry if it's boring for any of you reading out there. :)  She and I will begin by having a biweekly "'Lady in Training' Tea", where we will talk about being a young lady and plan/talk about that month's project, which when completed to satisfaction will earn her a badge to be sewed onto her Lady in Training shawl.

There will be 10 badges:

Cleanliness (particularly learning how to clean a house)

Baking

Planning (such as a daily or weekly meal plan, or creating a weekly schedule)

Child Care 

Personal Care (both neatness in personal space and poise/hygiene) Might include for example, learning to braid her own hair.

Sewing

Nature's Care (which includes plant and/or animal care, whether for pleasure or profit)

Gracefulness

Strength

Generosity

Each Badge will have 3 levels, the first level of every badge having to be complete before going on to earn Level 2 Badges.  Our goal is that she will be able to complete all of the Level 1 ("Lassie") Badges this year. Next year she would again work on earning a badge in each category, only at a more involved, ("Maiden") level. The third and final year, we would work on completing the last ("Young Lady") level of each badge, and then when all were finished she would graduate with some kind of a fun celebration and earn the cumulative, "Virtuous Young Woman " badge. (fittingly, it is badge number 31. :)

Learning how to read the Charlotte Mason way...

Me, that is!....the kids have been reading small portions of good books, and then stopping to reflect and retell what they remember or thought was interesting ever since I started reading about Charlotte Mason's homeschooling methods several years ago.

When we weren't consistent, it was primarily because it was such an odd shift in how I was accustomed to reading.

 Here I must confess that I am a recovering book "gulper" who went through life LOVING books, but going about them in a very wasteful way. If they were fiction, I read them so fast, that within 12 hours, all I was left with was a pleasant warm feeling (and a pile of undone responsibilities. :) If it was for school, I sufficiently memorized what I needed to to make an excellent grade on the upcoming exam and then effectively cleared my short term memory to "make room" for the next term's reading.

My husband was the one who first encouraged me to "savour" a book, mostly because he enjoyed talking through a book we were reading. My self-control in that area was so bad, that really the only way we could discuss a book as we went through it was if I read it aloud to him. Left to my own devises, I could skim the whole thing in two days; but we would miss out on getting to think it through.

Now as a homeschool mama, I am trying to practice what I preach...and you'll NEVER guess what I found out! It's actually FUN to let a book's words soak in slow, to think about an idea, or a word picture, until you've weighed it, and lived it out in your mind!  (This sounds obvious, if not simply sarcastic now, but I remember in the beginning, I was NOT convinced that it could be as enjoyable to read this way.)

Besides still being enjoyable, I also found out that I am now able to make connections and contrasts between things that I am reading. See my post here to listen in on what Charlotte Mason and Tedd Tripp taught me one evening. :)

I still get lazy and read without thinking sometimes, usually when I am reading as a time-wasting activity instead of reading intentionally.  I still don't always make time to sit down and discuss what I've read, (either in person or print). But I'm learning. I'm learning that this way of getting living ideas from a printed page is really important; not only for my kids, but for their mama, too.

Ferns, Fiddleheads, and other Fun. :)

Being from the DRY part of Texas, ferns were not part of the natural world I learned about as a kid.

(Mesquite blossoms or cactus wrens, yes. Ferns, not so much. :)

That makes it all the more fun that our kitchen window looks like this:

Our nature "walk" this time looked more like a nature scavenger hunt. After we talked about ferns just enough to be able to find them, the kids went off to count how many, and of how many different kinds they could find in our yard. They came up with I think 23 plants, of 3 distinct varieties! Along side the tally lists of ferns they found, several of of sketched for a while in the Nature Notebooks. Incidentally, I have really enjoyed having my own book to sketch in. It is really the only time I sit down and try to draw.

They also counted the new, uncurling fronds, commonly called fiddleheads, and examined the undersides of leaves to see which had fruit dots for spores to come out. We found one frond that looked like we could collect spores from, so we set it on a white sheet of paper for a few days; it was pretty fascinating to see the print the fallen spores left. :)

This study made for an easy introduction of where leaves are attached to a stem. (Coming off in pairs, or alternating). It was also good to stop and count just how many separate "unfoldings" the frond had to go through before it was all the way opened.

This term we have been trying to do nature study every Wednesday. Sometimes it is a large part of the morning; most times it is just a chance to get outside together. Last time we just went for a walk I asked the kids to try to notice one thing growing, one thing moving, and one thing they had never noticed before. It's not always some amazing learning experience, but it IS time scheduled in to stop and smell the roses. (or pond scum, or what have you.) We've enjoyed having it every Wednesday for a couple of reasons. First, I have found that when I didn't pick a specific day of the week, I would inevitably push it off to the infamous "manana" which never actually comes.

Second, Wild Things Wednesday is just fun to say. :)

Nature Notebooking

Watching the kids swim with their friends, I was enjoying the various styles of getting wet. (Some people dive in and get it over with. Others creep in deeper, inch by agonizing inch, letting the cold wick up their t-shirt.) Today, however, I saw a new method. As one young lady was hesitating, trying out the t-shirt-wicking method, her friend splashed up and gave her a sloppy hug. :)  THAT, I believe, is very similar to how we came to be using (for the most part) Ambleside Online as our curriculum. *See! This did have something to do with CM and Nature Notebooks after all! Thank you for your patience. ;)* Just by general bent, we have always had a Charlotte Mason flavor, and in recent years I have dabbled around on the AO website, using it mostly as a resource for finding quality Kindle books. However, after some blog following (Thanks, amy-in-peru!), I must say, Ok, Ok!! I'm in! :)

We just finished our first term - and although our Nature Study was more sporadic than I want it to be, it was still one of our favorite parts, I think. 

We learned a bit about how drawing helps you to really notice an object as we made portraits of our parakeet. My Teacher/Mama heart was warmed to hear Dan, my five year old, upon being asked if his bird was green, describing it as, "blue on his tail. His tummy is green and he's green on his wings. Yellow on his forehead, and his beak is skin color - a little bit darker than our skin color". (Probably more info than the 'is it blue or green' question required, but lovely as spontanious retelling/ proof we actually LEARNED something. ;) 

Here is Glory's parakeet pic.
We did start by looking at a black and white outline to observe shape
 instead of just looking at the live bird.
 We found it useful in that it didn't move around so much. :)

...and here is Levi's. He added the leaf rubbing to it the next week to make it "prettier".

Our other favorite project was leaf rubbings of tree leaves we could find in our side yard. This was good on several levels. First, I have a couple kids who are still a bit intimidated to draw something they are looking at. They have been less tense about the whole Nature Notebook concept. They have since mixed more written descriptions in, too, which I'm glad of. My prime bug-gatherer sees the real value in his notebook as this: "if I draw it, it will be there, and after it's dead, I can still see what it looked like". 

Plotting and Planning

The time has come again...time to plan out the next section of our school year! I try to plan out our school schedule in 3 month segments. I find that I have NO idea what our life will look like farther in advance than that. :) Actually, we "ran out of school" several weeks ago, and have been continuing on by the seat of our pants, so to speak. We had assumed to be in TX visiting family this month. God in His sovereignty (by the hand of the interminably slow visa processing office) decided to delay our vacation. And...it has been good - I'm glad we've been here this month. (Just like God knows better than me how to arrange my life, huh. :P) Yet, in hopes to go about school with a bit more direction and purpose, I am back at the plotting and planning. :) Yeah! Once I make myself sit down and do it, I really like this part. :)

Hurray for internet!

What a crazy month! We are moved, unpacked and online. :) Here is a family blog update:

http://thetaylorites.blogspot.com/2012/06/were-back-on-line.html

Because of His mercy, 

 - Alesha<><

Nature...in the midst of concrete

Moss we scraped off the building and an airplane plant baby

 Until a few months ago, we lived on four acres of fairly wild West Texas. Our closest neighbors were my parents with their livestock almost a mile down the road. "Nature study" came almost as easy as breathing. We currently find ourselves living in a second floor apartment in Quito, and car-less; from a language learning and ministry viewpoint, we are extremely glad we are here...from a Nature Study perspective...well, I'm learning to be "content with such things as I have". We've also realized that there IS creation to be observed, even here... it just is taking more creativity to make it available for viewing. :)

Journaling the carrot seeds Glory planted :)

We also found that the sparrows would come to our balcony if we payed them in oatmeal. :) It has been really fun to observe something living (besides brothers, of course...though they are interesting :).

Foreign Language

Our "foreign language" has been a pretty different this year, since in March we moved to Ecuador. This being the case, a lot of our kids' Spanish curriculum is supplied for free by the neighbor kids who ring the doorbell at least three times a day to see if our kids are done with school YET (or nap, or supper, or you-name-it) and can come downstairs and play soccer. :P However, we have still tried to do a little on-purpose Spanish in "school time. Note, that if you know me at all, you know I keep a pretty loose line between "school" and the rest of life, but even so, at least most of the time we know the difference. :)

Recently our Spanish learning has been broken into 3 categories:

-Hymn / Verse Memory

-Lunch table commands

-Bible Story read-aloud

We have been SLOWLY learning a Spanish hymn. At first we picked the first verse apart, talking about main words (nouns and verbs), so that we understood at least for the most part what we were saying. We have been singing all three verses even though we have not yet picked them apart for understanding. I have not yet decided if this is a good thing or not...if you have a thought, feel free to leave me a comment! :) Verses are learned similarly. The whole family works on the same verse, spending the first few days understanding the words. We have been working on verses after supper, so they are not officially part of "school" per say for us.

We found that at least for us, it was more doable to have a "confined" area that was predominately Spanish-speaking. For us, the lunch table works well. The we say what we're putting on their plate in Spanish, and they ask for more in Spanish. If they don't remember what it is called, they know to ask, "que es esto?" (what is this) and point. At first they only used the few standard phrases they had learned, but as they learn more words and hear us string familiar words together in different ways, they are beginning to branch out.

We are really enjoying Historias Favoritas de la Biblia by Ura Miller. (You can purchase it from Amazon here.) There are several things that I really like about using this book. First of all, each Bible account is only one page long. This seems to be plenty for my crew to focus on and keeps us on track. The opposite page has three questions about the reading. (It's been very helpful for me to have the questions supplied in simple but correct Spanish.) I also absolutely LOVE the illustrations in this book! They are clear and well done, and my favorite, the Lord looks very much like his followers; Hebrew, not stained-glass European. :D My little boys don't attempt to answer the questions, though they do sit with us during the reading just to get an "ear" for it. After my daughter answers her questions, the boys tell me things they see in the picture. Example: I might ask them in Spanish what is blue in the picture? What is green? What else they see in this picture. My three year old does a lot of pointing and a few one word answers, but is five year old brother is starting to use more words.

I realize our case is not standard, (in that we have the choice to immerse our kids in the language they are learning), but I hope some of the in-the-house activities might still prove worth pondering.

Hello!

For several years when I was growing up, my siblings and I had the opportunity to be educated at home. For much of that time, we didn't have a school room per say. We always, however, had a school shelf. This was where textbooks, library books and unfinished projects were stored when they weren't in use. Now I am the Mama and our children are beginning their formal education in earnest. I have found the need of a shelf - a place to organize my thoughts and resources for our home school. However, unlike my mother's shelf, my shelf is web-based. :) All this is to say, I am putting this together primarily for myself; if you find usefulness out of the links and resources we enjoy, that is an added blessing. :D