as cozy as spring

October

This page has been open for some time but I ran out of time to write anything at all.  Because it's October.  We seize not just the day, but the entire month.  I'll try to pop back in in the morning.  Happy Tuesday night, friends.  I've got to go put my babies to bed (and hopefully watch a bit of the game - go Rangers!)

Friday Morning Book Post

  

I am now the very happy owner of a Kindle!  My husband won it for me in a raffle last week.  I scoffed at e-readers for a long time (I don't like change), but now that I have one... I would almost say it is a must-have for homeschooling families.  Here's why:

• All the free books!  I had no idea.  We read mostly older books and I would estimate that about half our library I could have gotten for free on Kindle.  
• No lost books!  Having only two tiny bookshelves, we frequently lose books, but that won't happen with the Kindle.  Though I will probably manage to lose that at some point.
• Along with that point, I don't have to think of a place to keep the books.
• Immediacy.  There are some times we get really into a subject and I'll go ahead and order some books about it to supplement, but we have to wait a week or so for them to arrive.  I can hear about a book and have it downloaded in seconds.  I'm all for nurturing impatience.
• My Kindle came with two preloaded dictionaries.  My daughter, who loathes dictionaries because she inherited her father's inability to find anything ever, sat down with A Short History of Nearly Everything last night and the Kindle and began searching for all the words she didn't completely understand. !!!! Though in the photo above I think she's searching for 'fondue' which I don't understand but find rather charming.
• It's so neat and compact.  The pages are easy and pleasant to read.  I still prefer my paper books but it's not at all off putting to read on the Kindle.
• The free sample sections are a great way to try out the book before purchasing.

I don't like it better than my regular books, but I spend, unapologetically, a fair percentage of discretionary income on books and well...  Just think of all of that money going towards yarn now!  Or college savings.  One of those two things. ;)

On to the books themselves!

Read aloud to my 11 yo: A Little Princess.  I saw that Karen was reading it to her daughter and I put it on our list.   I hesistated at first, because I truly and strangely disliked The Secret Garden, but A Little Princess is a joy to read.  I'm only 4 chapters in, but we love it. 

Picture book with my son: The Journey: Stories of Migration. I think this is a lovely book.  It is pleasant to read and beautifully illustrated.  My only question is that the book states, several times, that monarchs overwinter on the California evergreens.  Is that so?  I thought it was more exclusively Mexico.  It just struck me as odd.  

OK, I have to wrap this up because the children are up now and making a great deal of noise and my brain cannot form sentences when they do that.  They're not even saying actual words.  Just noise.

Happy reading, friends!

Autumn Morning

This is our "school room" yesterday morning, totally unstaged (you can tell because I would have wiped up the breakfast crumbs).  Clearly, I'm very focused on my children's education. 

I have a bad case of startitis.  I thought I was immune.  I normally knit one project at a time. I finish it.  I move on.  But yesterday I felt an irresistible urge to cast on for socks, an autumn vest, and the sweetest shawl pattern.  Fortunately, the yarn is all in the stash - one skein in particular, my treasured Crookshanks, is years old.  I haven't enjoyed knitting this much in months.  

Unrelated: I think I actually have too many books now.  It's gotten to the point where I am finding wonderful books I forgot we had and losing books that we really need (like Tomie de Paola's Francis:The Poor Man of Assissi which I had put aside for today).  I just can't keep up with them anymore.  Either we need fewer books or a better organizational system.  The latter is more likely to happen.  

Simplified

There seemed to be some interest in our new homeschooling schedule so here are my thoughts.

We've had a fairly smooth year, but it's be hectic and I didn't much care for the pace (which, btw, has more to do with family life and extracurricular activities than schoolwork).  I felt like I was always on the children about completing this task and this task and this task....  It was exhausting for all of us and I think the children were starting to cringe when they saw me.  I completely understood.

To simplify things for all of us, I assigned only one subject of table work per day.  For example: The five pages of grammar that had been spread out over the entire week are now completed after math time on Monday.  The advantages of this are many.  I'm not nagging all day to check ____ off the list.  It's much easier to plan.  The children are more absorbed in their one subject for that given day.  It's more efficient because there's less time spent moving from book to book.  It helps me focus.  I'm able to look over the week and more easily gather supplemental materials for each subject.  By simplifying our table work time, we have much more time to spend on our afternoons on history and science reading and other projects.  We're still doing the same amount of work, it's just far, far simpler.

Overall, it's gone well. I do think it's a better schedule for an older child.  My son still gets more daily repetition of some subjects because I think he needs it at his age.

This is all very fluid at this point and rather hard to describe.  Our afternoons aren't spend idly after our table work is done.  And saying we do science on Wednesday doesn't mean we don't also cover it every other afternoon as well.  We just cover it in a different way.