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