We'll drink to that! - Our end-of-year celebration

Deciding on when to end S's first grade year was somewhat arbitrary... Sunday, July 1, seemed like a good date...

The next question, then, was how to celebrate. Here's what we did:

I pulled out the books I'd made with S's work -- his Number Book, his Letter Book, and other written/drawn items. Then, I collected handwork and artwork from the past months. As I was collecting, S drifted by periodically, delighting in looking back over what he had accomplished.

After dinner, I cleared a space on the table, and brought in my collection. The whole family participated in the retrospective. What a lot of ground we covered over the course of "first grade!"

And then, it was time for dessert! Featuring blueberries! From a local pick-your-own farm! We'd gone online to find a suitable recipe, and settled on this simple and delicious Blueberry Smoothie. We added a honey drizzle on top, and then enjoyed -- mmmmm!

Multiples are more fun to learn in the sandbox than with tables

I'm preparing for our County homeschool review, scheduled for later this week. This has me looking over what we've done this semester (and realizing how much I intended to post here but haven't... watch more for catch-up!...)

In early May, I saw how other families had used math boards to work on learning their multiplication tables. How much more fun than sitting there, memorizing facts from tables on a piece of paper!

We have ample scrap wood in the garage, and nails as well. I wondered, however, whether our sandbox might serve us for a temporary "math board" ...

While the boys were playing in the backyard, I found a long twig, and broke it into smaller pieces. I smoothed out an area of sand, and then arranged 10 pieces in a circle. I cut 10 small pieces of paper. Then, I invited S to come over and write the numbers 0 through 9 on the papers. Carefully, we poked a hole into each paper, and stuck it onto a twig piece. We then tied a length of yard to the "0" twig, and let the fun begin!

Counting by 4's created a 5-pointed star!

Here, we switched yarn colors...
Counting by 3's created something that looks more like a sun!

When we wrapped up, we added the twigs and paper slips to the compost pile.

Looking torward the end of our First Grade year

Our second County review for the academic year is just one week from Thursday. That's got me doing a lot of thinking about what we've done together since last summer, what's gone well, what hasn't, what I'd do differently, etc.

One lesson learned is that I didn't do enough to mark the beginning of the "school year". I had it all worked out in my head, but poor S., as it turned out, wasn't reading my mind. :-)

Recalling that experience, I want to be more concrete about wrapping up the year. Ask and ye shall receive! Along come David Darcy's suggestions for Year-End Celebrations.

I've noticed how much S. enjoys looking at and reading through his work. He's gone through his number book many times, for example. Sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get him to put anything down on paper. But, he's so proud of the results afterwards! And, what a great review of concepts he has as he muses over the pages!

So, I'm thinking of inviting over grandparents and perhaps a few other people who'd be pleased to look back over the past months of "school" with us, displaying some writing/art/etc. examples, weaving in a song or two, and enjoying some cake or other goodies together. Maybe we can even do a crafty activity.

Manipulating multiples, or finding math in everyday life

So, somehow I was roped into organizing a large-ish community event. Yes, this is as much of an undertaking as it sounds. Thankfully, it's for an organization our family values highly. I'll leave the back story to the fertile imaginations of you Gentle Readers. Last Thursday's project: publicity.

We had one ream of paper printed up with bookmarks. S and I biked over to pick this up, and then headed over to the organization's building to use their paper cutter. We moved the paper cutter to the floor, talked about how to use it safely (fingers nowhere NEAR the blade!!!), and cut... and cut... and cut... and cut.

While there, we raised a few eyebrows. (Shouldn't you be in school? Um, no, we're homeschooling. Oh.) Little did our questioners know that we had quite a math lesson while seated there on the floor, surrounded by many, many sheets of bright yellow paper.

• The copy center gave us our print job in two boxes (2 x 250 sheets = 500).
• Each sheet had four bookmarks printed on it (4 x 500 = 2000).
• One sheet yielded 4 bookmarks, 2 sheets gave 8, and so on, until we calculated out multiples of up to 4 x 12.
• We experimented with how many sheets we could successfully cut at once. We decided that 6 sheets was the limit on that. In the meanwhile, we covered multiples of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and of course, 6.
• Having settled on cutting sets of 6, we then worked with individual stacks of bookmarks: one cut gave us 6, 2 cuts --> 12, 3 cuts --> 18, and so on. A nearby cart had some puppets on it in preparation for a storytime. While I was cutting, S sampled the wares, settling on a little pig. To liven things up, I suggested that the bookmarks be snacks. So, the piggie was handed a stack of bookmarks after each cut, eagerly "gobbling" it up. I think S decided that 18 bookmarks was the pig's threshold for developing a tummy ache. :-)

Needless to say, we hardly noticed that we were at our work for a good two hours. The math "lesson" should prove to be fairly memorable! And, amazingly, no blood was shed, not even on an ordinary paper cut.

From kings to birds

Reason 127 for why we're thoroughly enjoying homeschooling...

S. and I are continuing to work our way through the alphabet. To work on "K", we read Grimm's Koenig Drosselbart (King Thrushbeard).

In the story, the king's chin looked like a thrush's beak, hence his name. In preparation for drawing his "K" picture, S. wondered what a thrush looked like, so that he could render his king properly.

That led us to look up Drossel,... which in turn,... led us to learning about stones called "Drosselschmiede", which the birds use to break open snail shells.

At the outset, I had no idea that one could learn so many things from studying the letter "K"! :-)

Here's a sampling of how our Number Book turned out

Three people:

The four elements (fire, air, water, earth):

Seven colors of the rainbow:

A spider (8 legs) in her web:

This became an elaborate story! It involved three witches, three princes (each wearing crowns with 3 points) who had money bags each holding 3 coins... So, getting to nine (and we did during the creation of this drawing!) involves using various combinations of multiples of 3...

Here, S. did coin rubbings of 10 pennies, plus a dime,
and then drew the border containing 10 blocks...

Hopping from heading to heading

I suspect that last year S was classified into the percent of Kindergarteners in his class who could read.

The truth is that he does recognize a number of short words, but he's really not out of the nest yet in terms of reading. He is, on the other hand, very, very quick to memorize things. So, the other week, he learned the "Our Father" in no time at all.

Oma and Opa gifted S with a book that explains the prayer one line at a time. We've been working our way through it at bedtime. Tonight, as S looked over my shoulder, his eye caught the page heading, "Geheligt werde Dein Name." Recognizing the line, he quickly flipped ahead... to find that the next heading held the prayer's next line, and the next heading contained the following line... jumping from heading to heading until he reached the end of the book... and the prayer. What a find to make!

As a result of his familiarity with the text, and knowing what the words should be, he was able to make out the headings, some of which included some pretty complicated words. So much for being a not-so-proficient "reader". :-)

What's 5? A dandelion, of course!

We're continuing to work our way through our Qualities of Numbers block. Today we were on the question of "What is 5?"

Of course, I prepared! I came to our session thinking about 5 fingers, 5 toes, 5 senses, 5 points on a star...

S and I talked about these things. As he was considering what he'd draw for "5", he went to the window and looked outside for inspiration. He came back, and said that dandelions had 5, and that's what he'd draw. Dandelions?! Five?!

Why, yes. As he explained it, dandelions have five leaves. (At least the one he carefully drew does!). So do the clovers that he added to the picture, also with five leaves.

And here's what's so fascinating about being able to do this learning at home: Whether or not dandelions, as a rule, have five leaves is almost secondary. As S created his drawing, the very first thing he drew was the long taproot. (To emphasize the little root hairs, he went over them a second time with a darker color.) Where the heck did a taproot enter into this? Very easily. This morning, we volunteered (for a *very* cold hour in the icy wind, I might add) at our CSA. Our work included harvesting celariac. One celariac I pulled out of the ground came with a dandelion. Because the soil was so loose, the dandelion's taproot came out intact, and I pointed this out to S. We then talked a little about taproots. When S and I had our math lesson a few hours later (in the warmth of the sun coming in through the window), he reached back to what he'd seen at the farm, and brought that forward into his study of the number 5.

After his finished his drawing, I observed to S that he'd covered the whole page with his drawing and with color. He gave me a very matter-of-fact look, stopping just short of rolling his eyes. He said that yes, he had, just like I'd encouraged him to do before. It's true -- I had, but not today. :-)

Straight lines

Today we tried some straight lines. Or, as was the case this afternoon, we talked about drawing light sabers (!).

This form was actually surprisingly hard! It was a challenge to not only make the lines the proper length, but to maintain the spacing.

Initially, S threw in the towel after just a few iterations, saying he couldn't do it. But, you should have seen him glow once he figured out the mental geometry to make this form happen successfully.

Here are two of his samples, following some practice:

Number qualities: the power of One

As with form drawing, I was feeling guilty about falling "behind" in math, too. Even though S knows his numbers, I wanted to start him off with a block on the qualities of numbers. I reread Marsha Johnson's helpful article about this, and... off we went!

I wasn't too confident in my storytelling ability, but over dinner, did my best to retell Marsha's tale of embarking on a journey and ending up at the feet of an old woman who asked "What is one?" To my surprise, I had S's full attention -- the story speaks for itself, I guess, even when delivered by a rank novice.

S, never one to want to wait for a surprise, impatiently asked me how the story continued. "You'll find out tomorrow" didn't satisfy him. What finally did the trick was that I told him I needed to find out the answer myself, and that it would be given to my overnight as I slept!

Form drawing: a spoonful of "sugar" helps the medicine go down...

S and I made our first attempt at form drawing about a week ago. We walked the form, traced it in the air, traced it on our board, etc. Our session was nothing remarkable.

Feeling guilty about "falling behind" with the schedule I'd sketched out for our "school year," we capitalized on T's naptime this afternoon to give form drawing another go. I set up our easel, selected a variation of the form we'd done already (two letter "C's" facing each other), and drew this on the board. To make our drawing more special, we took out our blue beeswax crayon!

We began with a (to be very honest) humdrum story to go with the form. And, we traced and drew. Then, another story came to mind, a short one about a bear who'd eaten a lot of ice cream, and therefore had a round tummy. His bear friend was in the same situation.

So, now we were working with two ice-cream-sated bear tummies. What a difference! Suddenly, S had much more interest in drawing the form. The amazing thing was that the form visibly improved over our various iterations of it.

And, once his interest waned with the form I'd presented, he veered off onto his own path, happily creating his own "form" to draw and repeat. Once his board was full of this new form, he then -- on his own accord -- drew a border for it with the side of his chalk.