Sep
28
Are you watching Survivor this season? If so, you should join me at The Stir, because I’m recapping each episode (here’s a link to last week’s recap). I’m definitely not up to Television Without Pity standards or anything, but I’ve been surprised at how weirdly enjoyable it is to watch the show with a pen gripped in my teeth, ready to jot down every idiotic thing the contestants say. This must be my version of human interaction these days, or something.
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Seattle is experiencing some bizarrely humid weather, and I know it’s like 15392506015 degrees in California and I have no room to complain but I’m going to do it anyway. It feels like a goddamned armpit out here. Like a dog panting all over me all day long. There are approximately ten trillion poisonous-looking mushrooms all over our lawn, and every time I walk outside I step directly into a damp spiderweb. After our “summer”, which was about two and a half whole weeks of sunshine, I’m ready to say fuck it, bring on fall and chilly temperatures and pumpkin-flavored baked goods. Enough with the gross sauna effect, even if it does make for pretty pictures.
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I’m doing some sponsored posts with Pull-Ups on potty training, and you can read them as they’re published here.
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“I don’t need a nap any more, Mom. Big kids don’t take naps. I’m not even tired. I’m not even going to get in bed! I’m just going to play with my—skkkknnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”
Sep
26
We are coming up on our fourth week of homeschooling, and I’m pleased (and maybe a little surprised) to report that things are still going well. Some days are definitely better than others in terms of everyone’s interest level and how much we actually manage to get done, but overall it’s been . . . well, fun. I’m learning what things work well (activities that involve him physically doing something) and what don’t (me blathering about a subject while he sits and fidgets/half-listens), and I’m slowly finding a sort of groove in terms of our daily schedule.
We’re still using weekly themes, but if I run out of related ideas, I don’t sweat it. Last week he picked rain as our learning topic, and by Wednesday everyone was bored of rain-focused activities (“CLOUDS: OUR CUMULUS FRIENDS!”) so we just did other stuff. No big deal.
A few of our recent projects:
Fishing for paper fish, counting his “catch”, sorting by color, practicing addition and subtraction (“A giant shark ate two of your fish, so now how many do you have left?”). Plus, both kids hitting each other with wooden dowels, getting tangled up in string, etc.
Making guesses as to whether an object (toy, Lego, spoon, whatever) would sink or float, then testing it out by dropping it into a tupperware filled with water.
Creating short words with individual letters.
Making patterns, guessing what shape needs to go next, etc.
For dinosaur week, I buried some paper dinosaur bones in a bowl filled with dry beans, which he excavated (“I AM A DINOSAUR SCIENTIST!”), then re-assembled.
Also for dinosaur week, we cut sponges into the shapes of dinosaur feet, stamped them on paper, then he made up a story about the footprints which I wrote on the whiteboard. We decided to make the story into a play and acted it out out for JB, with Riley playing the part of Triceratops. You’ll have to excuse the costume department for the superdorky hat.
The whiteboard’s been really handy for doing all kinds of things. Here we were discussing the relative characteristics of meat eating vs. plant eating dinosaurs. Scientific illustrations courtesy of someone who can’t draw worth a damn so shut up.
A couple of books I’ve been using quite a bit are this one for reading lessons, and this workbook which Riley mostly does on his own. I try and mix in some educational outings here and there, like last week when we talked about rain water in streams and rivers and ended up visiting a salmon hatchery.
Some of you have asked if I plan to homeschool long term, and the answer at the moment is no. Really, we’re only homeschooling because we decided not to start him in kindergarten this year and I didn’t want to just pull him from preschool without having some kind of plan for learning at home. I did a lot of fretting over his age, you know, trying to decide whether to hold him back (he turned 5 on the cutoff date), and I now feel pretty confident that what we’re doing is a fantastic alternative. He gets the extra year to mature a bit emotionally, and in the meantime, we have this opportunity to spend time together and make school into something enjoyable.
I feel so lucky to have the chance to do this. And wow, I just can’t get over how strange it is to say that. Me: homeschooling. Man.
Lastly, for no real reason other than to share a little piece of a child’s pure over-the-top joy with you, here’s a video JB took of he and Riley setting off a rocket together.
Rocket Launch Sept2010 from J_Bravo on Vimeo.
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