Summer School Week 2

Week 2 Field Notes

A fun idea I'd seen many times on-line before is to use popsicle sticks with the names of all the subjects on them and to let the kids draw one to decide which subject to do.  I forgot to mention we did this after having a trying first day last week.  The rest of the week went much better and they were bringing me the cup of sticks to draw one even when it wasn't school time.

Bird Call:  Chickadee - Played sounds 1-2 times daily for entire week. The bird calls have become Ezra's obsession.  He likes to sit on the AllAboutBirds.com website and say, "Mommy, name that bird!" like a game show host.  Since we just started doing this, I'm not very good at it, but we're motivated to get better.  We sit outside and listen to all the calls and it's driving us crazy to not know the names of the birds making the calls.

Classical Music: Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and The Well Tempered Clavier.  Played each once a day throughout week, reminding the kids of who the composer is and the name of the song.  Also added No. 3 of the Brandenburg Concertos, we should have done that one instead of No. 5 last week.

Picture Study: Rembrandt, "The Night Watch"

Animal:  Rhinoceros.  We read books on rhinos from the library and this from Nat'l Geographic:


Just have to add that, in retrospect, this topic is the least relevant in that they already know what most animals are when they see one.  If anything, this gives us an excuse to dive in and investigate a fun topic, animals of their choice!  It should make our next trip to the zoo that much more meaningful, I hope.

Insect: Cockroaches.   Read a book from the library on this disgusting bug.

Flower: Crocus and Tulip.  Coloring pages to choose from here and here.  We had sickness this week, hence the extra videos scattered about.  Of all of them though, this one was fabulous!  The section on tulips can be found between 31:00 and 55:00 in this two hour special.  Now, everywhere we go, the kids see tulips and point them out.

Tree: Maple Tree.  Sat under our maple tree and used a better guide to figure out it was a Norway Maple, which looks a lot like a Sugar Maple.  It was a little disappointing when we realized it wasn't a Sugar, but that's ok, now no one is asking to tap the tree.
:-)

Fungi: Mushroom Anatomy.  We took a step back this week and went over mushroom parts before we memorized any more mushroom names.  I can't say enough about the wonderful book I found at our library on mushrooms, Katya's Book of Mushrooms!!!  Talk about a living book!  The Russian author, Katya Arnold, puts into pictures and words her passion for mushroom hunting and eating, evidently a Russian family tradition and children are taught when they are young how to hunt for them.  We used her diagrams as our basis for mushroom anatomy.  Then, wait for it...we DRESSED UP like mushrooms (OK, maybe just the cap and gills) and labeled ourselves!  We even threw glitter around to show what spores do.  Too fun!

To cap it off (like my pun?), I just happened upon THIS mushroom farm an hour away!!  We'll be planning a field trip there for sure.  I'd like to get a growing kit too, since I have no idea how to find our own mushrooms.  We may have to ask some of our mushroom hunting friends from church how to get started.  This is quickly becoming MY favorite subject we're studying, and to think, I almost left it off!

Ezra said he's a Fly Agaric mushroom- cute, but poisonous

Rocks: Pumice.  Ordered set of igneous rocks this week, in the meantime used a real life pumice stone from my bathroom and showed them how to use it on their feet. Put it in water to see if it would float.   Here's an Igneous Rock video for kids.  Here's one on Pumice.

Constellation: Orion.  Here's a Dot to Dot of Orion.  Also, I meant to share last time, this is the site I'm basing the choice of constellations on.  Read the history of Orion the Warrior from our constellation book from the library.  We won't be able to see Orion until Winter time.

Dinosaur: Stegosaurus.  Here they are on Dinosaur Train!  Also, we read a library book on them.

American Sign Language: Taught them D,E, and F (Reviewed every few days).  They are eager beavers and have tricked me into going ahead a bit.  We are up to K now and Ezra signs his name by himself proudly.

Sea Life: Salmon.  We found great videos on National Geographic, PBS, found a salmon to color and read a little from our library book on fishes*.  Once a month during our Summer School, I've scheduled for us to cover edible sea life that we'll actually try that week.  We happened to have a side of salmon in the freezer, so we ate it last night.  Turns out Phoebe LOVES salmon!  All the kids do actually.  I recommend my mom's sauce to go on top: 1 part mustard (the more gritty the better) and 1 part plum sauce (mango chutney works great too).  Ben likes to add a splash of soy sauce as well.  Ezra made a salmon sandwich with this sauce and dandelion leaves (he's our gourmet chef).

*Did you know that if you're talking about two salmon you say,  "There's two fish"? But, if you're talking about a salmon and a snapper you'd say, "There's two fishes."  Mommy learned something this week.

Biography: Gandhi.  We found a book at the library and several videos for kids on-line, like this one. or this one!

Fiction Summer Must Reads: Mr. Popper's Penguins - about to finish it, it'll be done before the weekend's over.  They love it!


The honest truth is we only did three days of school this week and I feel like we whizzed through each subject briefly one time.  The consolation is that it seems all of our topics, almost, are practical enough we encounter them somewhere throughout the week outside of school, so it gets reinforced that way.

It won't be until the very end of May before I post more Summer School field notes as we're going to Tennessee to see family for a few weeks.  Have a great May!!

Summer School, Week 1

Week 1 Field Notes

Bird Call: The Red Cardinal - Played sounds 1-2 times daily for entire week. Read two books on them as well.  Made a bird bath in the back yard for them after reading that they like those.  Learned what they like to eat and that they do not migrate!  Had fun observing them at our bird feeders picking out the black sunflower seeds.

Classical Music: Bach, "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" and "Brandenburg Concerto No. 5" Played each once a day throughout week, can find them for free on Spotify or just Google searching, reminding the kids of who the composer is and the name of the song. This is a great rendition of the latter and one of Jesu.

Picture Study: Rembrandt, "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee" We sat and really pored over this picture three times this week.  I asked questions about their observations.   We read the Scripture passage it was based on a few times.  We were surprised when we observed a familiar face in the painting besides Jesus!

Animal: Elephant.We read several books on elephants from library.  Watched YouTube videos of elephants playing.  One book we read from the library was about elephants painting so after reading it, we painted with paintbrushes in our mouths like trunks.  We painted with our hands afterwards to compare the experiences and thanked God for our hands!

Insect: Pill Bug or Roly Poly as we like to call them.  We read a library book on them and played with them outside.  We found some baby ones too!

Flower: Daffodil.  Brought some in from the garden, colored this picture of a daffodil.  We learned that they're inedible, even for deer and will kill any other flower/plant that they are put in a vase with!

Tree: Cherry Tree.  Looked through tree book from library to ID cherry trees.  Talked about bark, leaves and fruit/flowers to stress how we identify trees.  I think I need a better field guide.  Will try other library or order one soon.  Did find this video on identifying cherry trees and think we'll have to watch all four parts at some point.

Fungi: Fly Agaric.  What beautiful pictures come up when you Google this!  We read about them in a library book and drew and colored our own pictures of them.  I remind the kids everyday of the name of this fungi as they're still learning to read.

Rocks: Intro to Igneous Rocks.  With help from a Rock Field Guide from the library we were able to find several Igneous rocks in the gravel in our backyard and reviewed what igneous rocks are.  Mostly played with the rocks and separated them according to clearly sparkly ones (Igneous) and clearly sandstone (Sedimentary) rocks.  We did math with the rocks too.  :-) For the record, we learned this past year how the different types of rocks are formed at our CC Memory Fun time that I do with some of the moms.  Otherwise, I'd have spent today teaching them about how igneous rocks form.

Constellation: The Big and Little Dipper.  Here's a Dot to Dot of the Big Dipper.  We got ladles out and talked about how they looked the same.  Read a kid's library book on constellations so they knew what they were!

Dinosaur: Pterodon.  Read a library book on this and watched a video on Discovery.com about the Triassic Period.  Planning to watch some Dinosaur Train on-line still.

American Sign Language: Taught them A, B, and C (Reviewed every few days)

Sea Life: Crabs.  We read a library book on crustaceans, looked at the different colors of crabs in Google images (there's even purple crabs!!  We couldn't find a color they didn't come in!!) then colored our own crabs thanks to these printables.

Biography: Dr. Seuss, we read the book on his life and read extra Dr. Seuss books this week.

Fiction Summer Must Reads: Mr. Popper's Penguins (we'll read this until we're done - may need more than one week).

Note: I'm collecting pictures from the internet of the front of the books we read, and pasting them in files titled by subject so I have a record of what we've read.

We spent four half days this week covering this material.  We'll spend Monday reviewing and Tuesday we'll dive into week 2 which I got the library books for yesterday.  I envision us becoming more concise in our materials and activities as the Summer progresses.  We were just excited to get started and were a little overly ambitious this first week.  OK, maybe that was just me.

Summer School Intro.

After participating in Classical Conversations (CC) this past year, I had an idea.  First you should know that in CC, we present new info. to the kids each week and review it regularly.  There's three cycles (or three years) worth of info, then we do it all again and it should lodge itself nicely into their long term memories.  In CC, we do very traditional (or at least Classical) academic subjects such as English, Math, Latin, Geography, History, and Science.  Since completing the 24 week CC year, we have 18 weeks before returning to CC in the Fall.

I have always loved the nature based approach of Charlotte Mason (CM) and just for fun thought I could combine the two approaches.  This Summer, instead of just doing reading, writing and arithmetic like normal (we always do year round school), I thought we could do a hybrid of CC and CM where we memorize bird calls, classical music, names of insects, dinosaurs, and so on!  I have always wanted to know the names of trees and flowers when I see them, so I threw that in there too along with lots of other things.  I might have been a bit ambitious.

So, taking all the natural and artistic material that I desired for my kids to learn I made a table of three year's worth of material that we can repeat, just like we do CC material and get into our long term memories.   What I have to make clear for anyone not familiar with the classical theory of education is that for children under 10 years old, they are known to memorize well, but not to reason well yet.  So, tons of topics doesn't mean we exhaust all of them knowing them inside and out.  It means I briefly introduce each and make some sort of fun connection between the two things that I want them to connect, like a bird and it's sound or a piece of artwork and it's name and artist, a rock and it's name and type, etc.  We then just review those things for one week.  Once a week we'll review material from past weeks.  Next year will be all new material, and the next, then we come back to what we did this year in three years.  This is not time to understand the ins and outs of how a rock is made, though there are fun experiments for that.  Going into depth is just bonus if we get to it.  

So, I decided to wait to post the first week's material until after we did it.  I confess, I have never had this many library books out before and am praying we don't lose any, but I think between the library and the Internet, we're going to have almost all of what we need.  I am considering purchasing a set of igneous rocks from Amazon so we can see more than what's in our gravel.  Next year I'll need a set of sedimentary rocks and metamorphic for the third year.  Ooh, I also need a big binder for each child for each year to save all our work.  

I'll be labeling all related posts as "Summer School Cycle A" so I can find what we did again in three years to do it again!  We'll surely be able to go into more depth and do more complicated activities then when they're three years older.  Some subjects we are deciding the week before based on availability of library books.  But here's the basic list of subjects we'll be covering:

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Classical Music or Jazz Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn Mozart, Beethoven Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Strauss Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Copland, Gershwin, Stravinsky Artist Study Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, Cassatt Degas, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso, Warhol Trees Trees of Ohio Foreign Trees Other well known trees Flowers Flowerbed flowers  Wild Flowers  Tropical and Carnivorous Flowers Fungi Mushrooms of Ohio Other Mushrooms  Other important Fungi Geology Igneous Sedimentary Metamorphic Animals Kids pick 12 Kids pick 12 Kids pick 12 Dinosaurs Well known dinosaurs we find books on Insects Chosen based on available books at library Astronomy 10 Major Constellations 6 Sky Wonders like Meteor Showers 8 Planets plus Pluto Bird Sounds 12 Birds of Ohio 12 Tropical Birds 12 Birds of North America Sea Life Types you eat Predators Beautiful sea life Sign Language Alphabet in ASL Basic Conversation in ASL Basic conversation in ASL Biographies Different every year for all 6 years Alternating each week between modern and historic people Fiction Must Reads See on-line lists of must reads for kids

We're doing this for ourselves and don't expect anyone else to join us.  Posting this is just an extra measure of accountability, but also a great way to find all our work again, by week, in three years when we'll want it again.  

Also, for the record, I have only 12 of the 18 weeks scheduled so we have six weeks off whenever we wish.  In British school we only ever had six weeks off in the summer and that's our norm.  I have had a lot of fun putting all this together and am constantly deliberating with myself about whether to add or take away subjects.  There's so many things in the world to learn!!!  Everyone just has to pick what they most want to learn and go with that.  This is what we picked!  We'll also be doing reading, writing (which I found we practice plenty in our other subjects) and arithmetic, CC review and working on learning some Spanish this Summer.  The neat thing is we can do most of our learning outside in the sun like we did today.  Thank you, God, for the sunshine!!!