Accomplishment! And Loneliness..

Wow, have we had a productive day. Colwyn was really in a mood to do schoolish stuff, so he did about five or six workbook pages. In addition to the usual matching ones and mazes, he also did a few that involved circling the face with the appropriate emotion for a situation pictured, and one where he looked at a picture, then chose between two other pictures which one led to the original picture happening. If that makes sense. So, anyway, instead of the usual fine motor and math skills, he also worked on cause and effect, prediction, and social/emotional skills.

He also asked to play Reader Rabbit.. something I should let him do more often, but neither of us ever really think of it. He has so much fun with that game. Aside from the hand-eye coordination needed for using the mouse, he also worked on matching shapes and letters, and a few other miscellaneous games.

Then we worked on a few projects for Grandma's birthday coming up (sorry, can't mention them until after her birthday!). When the kids woke up from their naps, we took them out to Barnes & Noble, since the library was closed. I found a bunch of great books in the bargain section, including Mo Willem's Leonardo The Terrible Monster. We also picked up one of Laura Numeroff's books, and a dinosaur book from the "Let's Read and Find Out" series. What else.. oh! We got a new Kumon book of mazes and also a book of 1000 French Words or somesuch.

I'm hoping to introduce Colwyn to French sometime in the next few days, depending on when I have time to sit down and concentrate with him. He already knows a good number of signs, so he has the concept of multiple ways to communicate an idea. Hopefully that'll help when we start talking about French.

I know Spanish would be a lot more useful, but I remember quite a lot of French from the 7+ years I took in public school and college. A good part of teaching kids a foreign language is using it with them, and I don't really feel up to learning a new language along with them. At least I know that if I stumble across a word I don't know, I should at least know how to pronounce it.

The downside to today was that I spent a good portion of the kids' naptime looking for prospective homeschooling groups online. It sure is lonely being a mom of a homeschooled preschooler. It seems like either everyone else is sending their kids to preschool, or if they're not, they will be in the future. Those few people who say that they're planning on homeschooling are typically not very committed to it, which means that there really aren't any co-ops for kids Colwyn's age. I'm sure there are preschoolers in families where older children are being homeschooled, but those kids probably just get dragged along to the big kids' stuff, and their parents don't really feel the need for them to have their own activities. Which I totally get, but in the meantime, it sucks for us.

I started researching homeschooling over a year and a half ago, and I've gone through my phases of being overwhelmed and backing out of it. But now I'm pretty damn confident in our decision. While I still get overwhelmed sometimes and wonder how we'll handle some things, I know that it'll work out in the end, and that our family will be better for homeschooling. I guess that's kind of atypical.

Worksheets Galore

Colwyn's been in kind of a worksheet mood lately. I printed off a bunch of things from Enchanted Learning and he did them all really well. These are some that he did a day or two ago. On this one, the only one he needed help with to figure out the pattern was the bottom one. I was really surprised that he did so well on it.



Colwyn counted the bats, then I held his hand so we could form the numbers. This is also how we write his name on the worksheets. He wanted to work from the bottom up on this one, and I thought of how nice it was that nobody was forcing him to go in a set order to follow along with the class.



Ah, don't you just love my artwork? I wanted to see if he knew longer vs. shorter, which he obviously does. They're circled twice because we went back and circled the shorter ones after. Again, it's nice to be able to let him follow his whims.



Colwyn loves mazes. We did about four or five of them in a workbook today because he asked if he could do his "work." Sometimes he purposely goes down the wrong path so he can say, "Oh, no! Look at that! I have to go backwards!"



We did some other worksheets today but I didn't want to bore you with too many pictures.

Today the kids engaged in doll play for a good half hour. Colwyn dressed up in a kangaroo costume that has a little joey in the pouch, so he pretended to be the kangaroo mommy (normally I refer to him as the daddy when he plays with dolls, but obviously, only mommy kangaroos have pouches) and gave his joey milk, baby food, and a binky. Lachlann also played with his dolls quite a bit, it's so cute to see him feeding the babies and smacking his lips. He pushed the stroller around for quite a while (a bit faster than is acceptable with real babies, heh), then put the babies to sleep in his bed. It's interesting to see how differently the boys play with dolls vs. how I remember my sister and I did.. when Colwyn was giving the joey a binky, I asked if the joey was upset. Colwyn sad, "Yes, he's scared that the T. Rex is going to get him!" Any time Colwyn says T. Rex, in any context, it's always in a deep, scary voice. I don't think my sister and I ever mixed dolls and dinosaurs. :)

Oh, and we finally got around to correcting the color of two of the planets on our space display. I told Colwyn how I thought that we painted Mercury and Venus the wrong color, and asked if he would come help me find out what colors they're supposed to be. We sat down at the computer, and he watched me look up the website that I had found explaining the true colors of the planets. I explained how when we don't know something, that we can use a book or the computer to find out what the answer was. We talked about how silly we were to make a mistake, but how we just had to fix it and it would be all better. He got a kick out of the fact that we messed up.

While it's important for me to teach the kids some facts and skills, I think my most important job in homeschooling my kids is to teach them how to learn on their own. I don't want them to be the type of person to say, "Oh, gee, I don't know what such-and-such means, oh well" - I want them to go and find out. So hopefully this whole fixing-the-planets thing is the first of many "lessons" in how to learn.

Life Gets Crazy

Things have been a bit crazy this last week or so.. that's my excuse for not updating, and I'm sticking to it. I do have quite a few things to share, though. We'll start with the boring and work our way to the fun stuff. :)

I know I've said that I'm not into worksheets, and I stick by that. However, Colwyn got a random workbook for his birthday, so occasionally he'll take it out of the craft drawer and want to do some pages in it. Here's what he did today:




We've been steadily working on our dinosaur ABC book, as well. We're up to Iguanadon so far. Colwyn now knows whether the following dinosaurs are meat eaters or plant eaters: apatosaurus, brachiosaurus, corythosaurus, deinonychus, edmontosaurus, fabrosaurus, gigantosaurus, hadrosaurus, and iguanodon. He knows that giganotosaurus was bigger than T. Rex, and that brachiosaurus's nose was on top of its head. :)

Last weekend, we took the kids to the Museum of Science again. This time, they were healthy, rested, and fed, and thankfully the museum was a lot less crowded. Colwyn didn't spend as much time with the dinosaurs as I had been expecting, but he did really like an archaeology exhibit, and enjoyed looking at the model exhibit. We also had some fun with stop animation in the animation exhibit, and he looked at a few random things through a microscope.



The other really cool thing we did was make a volcano out of playdough, a paper cup, baking soda, vinegar, and red food dye. We filled the cup about halfway with baking soda (more would have been fine.. in fact, we refilled it later), then used playdough to turn the cup into a volcano. While the boys and I were doing that, Doug added some red dye to a cup of vinegar. Here's what our volcano looked like:



When we poured the red vinegar into the baking soda, it bubbled over and nearly looked like lava. If you're patient, you can see a video of it here. But I'm warning you, it's quite a big file and will take a minute or two to load even on broadband. The kids seemed impressed, but I think Doug and I actually had the most fun. Oh well. :)