Ancient Greece I Day 5

The end of our first full week of homeschool - yay!  I'll admit that it is rather exhausting to homeschool on top of my normal household chores, errands, and house remodeling.  I'll adapt and it will get easier, but this week was hard!

This morning we did our Daily Grammar and then a speed sheet from the Making Math Meaningful website.  Then we talked about the Minoans and what we know about them, plus what we thought they might have done with their boats.  Instead of creating a summary for the boys to write I assigned copy work in their penmanship notebooks (from Paper Scissors Stone).  I love these little notebooks and have used them for a few years now.  I had noticed T-Guy floating his letters in his main lesson book and wanted him to work on writing them on the baseline, and I also noticed some numeral reversals in J-Baby's work (still, even though he doesn't have any signs of a learning disability) so I assigned writing numerals to him.

J-Baby worked on finishing some math work from earlier in the week and both boys did their spelling.  It was an easy morning but in general we do keep Fridays easier and lighter.  It used to be our free day but now I find that I can't get in all the main lesson blocks if I don't plan lessons on Friday as well.

J-Baby had piano and I tutored my friend's daughter. Then we headed to the park for our weekly gathering with homeschool friends.  The weather was nice, warm but not unbearably hot.

I didn't take a picture today!  Instead I offer this (un-retouched) photo of the Greek food we were able to find at Trader Joe's on Wednesday.  I'm sure they had baklava as well, but as it isn't gluten free we didn't buy any.

We had some of the olives and cheese last night with dinner.  Yum!

Ancient Greece I Day 4

Last night I had a kind of ugh moment.  As in, ugh, why did I plan for us to do a lesson from Live Education that involves painting ceramic bowls?  I don't have the supplies, don't want to go out to get them, and if I had been thinking about it would have realized that the project more properly belongs in the afternoon lessons will be having during our second Ancient Greece block, where we'll be studying the arts and crafts of Ancient Greece.

Moving the lesson made the most sense, so I was left trying to figure out what to teach this morning. Should I start Friday's lesson early, giving us more time for the planned drawing?  Could I find a program on Ancient Greece to stream?  I puzzled over it for awhile.

My boys already have a pretty deep knowledge of the myths and history/culture of Ancient Greece.  I knew this going into the block and still chose to go with it because most of what they know is head knowledge.  This week they've drawn an olive tree, created a labyrinth on paper, and jumped over an ottoman bull; these are the things I want them to do to bring the knowledge into understanding.  It can be very hard to create a sense of us (versus other), but that is the goal. The ancient Greeks aren't just a people who lived a long time ago; they are humans, they are US. Their stories and history are ours.

Thinking about this I ditched the idea of streaming a program on Ancient Greece for the boys; it isn't Waldorf and more head knowledge isn't what they need. I decided that we would move forward with the next lesson in Live Education.  After grammar and math we did some writing and we learned about Minoan sailing vessels.

T-Guy doesn't particularly like to draw, but he made a good effort.  Neither boy is fully back into drawing Waldorf-style, hence the hanging suns vs. diffuse light.

J-Baby does like to draw, but he was not in the mood to give me good work today.  He clearly enjoyed drawing the rigging, however, and tried to be very accurate.

Because I like to keep it real I'll point out that we had some resistance, once again, to the idea of doing one's best work.  J-Baby's letters float, they change size, and he has a hard time remembering to space the words.  It isn't a case of not being able to; he just wants to rush through and be done. He can write very neatly, in straight lines with nice spaces, when he wants to.

Sometimes I feel like he is doing this to spite me, to show me how unimportant he thinks it is. It is writing that I assign, not writing that he chooses. I don't really know what to do other than to persevere, to keep the expectations high, and to help him understand why. I'm also going to bring in form drawing again on a weekly basis during practice time. I love that forms need to be done a certain way and look wrong if we don't do our best work. They teach discipline.

Some might advise shifting more toward unschooling, but it isn't right for these children. While they do well with filling the abundant free time that they do have they need lessons to anchor their day. When we don't honor the rhythm and their need for structure things tend to fall apart. Summer break can be rough for us and I need to make sure that we don't fall into unstructured days.  It has always been this was for J-Baby; I have written about it before and even tried creating structure without it involving lesson work.  But T-Guy loves lesson work; he has a lot of his mama in him.

I split the lesson; tomorrow we'll talk about why the Minoans might have wanted to sail, but it will still leave the morning a little light since they did their drawing today. We can use the time; I'll give a longer writing assignment (they will help me with the summary) and we need to finish up a little earlier on Fridays anyway since J-Baby has piano lessons and I do tutoring with a friend's daughter.

Thursday afternoons are scheduled as "make-up" time to give the boys a chance to finish any drawings or writing that they didn't have time for during the week. We were mostly caught up, however, so we ended a little early in the morning and used the afternoon hour for spelling and other learning games. J-Baby also decorated his writing pages which he often attempts to skip (simple borders and coloring the background).

It was a lower key day overall; Papa had asked me last night how I was going to top jumping over furniture in the front yard. The truth is that not every day can be as exciting as that, but it's okay.  Lower key, meat-and-potatoes learning days are just fine.

Speaking of meat and potatoes, we had a semi-Greek meal for dinner.  Braised leg of lamb, potatoes, Kalamata olives, and Greek feta.  We should have had a vegetable but what I encountered in the produce bin wasn't lovely.  The potatoes are New World and not something that would have been eaten in Ancient Greece, but in this house lamb and potatoes go together, lol.

Ancient Greece I Day 3

Oh my, was today fun!

Our morning began, as usual, with grammar and math.  T-Guy was struggling with the concept of combining sentences and using prepositional phrases but then it clicked and he got it.  Knowing that I had planned some writing for later in the morning we did the grammar lessons orally; I find that it works just as well and allows us to do more examples.  Math was more practice on long division and long multiplication.

As we've been settling into our morning routine I hadn't asked the boys to do any writing Monday or Tuesday, so today they wrote simple summaries in their main lesson books. I told them that since they are both now middle schoolers that I expect more writing from them. There was some complaining, but I expected and ignored it.  The writing was far from perfect but this is only day 4 of our homeschool year.

We started the main lesson by talking about frescoes (which they already knew all about) and looking at one specific fresco, The Toreador, which is a Minoan work from 1550 -1450 BCE.  It depicts bull jumping, which is believed to have been a sport or religious ritual from the ancient Minoan culture.  That led us to the real fun of the day: bull jumping.  Okay, ottoman jumping, but it is really fun when Mama lets you carry the ottoman outside and jump over it.  We had:

 Leapfrogging

 Missed take offs

 Bad landings

 Cartwheels

Somersaults

... and several other attempts to leap the bull, all of which were very fun.  The boys spent at least 20 minutes on this activity and returned to the house huffing and puffing, but very happy.  We were able to talk about modern gymnastics and how the vault is similar to bull jumping (minus the live, moving bull, of course).

We finished out the morning with Spelling City on the big computer and multiplication fact drills on the iPad (a sneaky way to get in extra math practice).  This afternoon the boys have their PE class; this session is flag football which has been fun so far.

Blogging Begets Blogging

I've been busy on my homeschooling blog Bright Minds ... Loving Hearts ... Capable Hands and I find that getting back into the routine of blogging puts me into a blogging frame of mind.  I looked outside this evening, saw the remains of the sunset, and thought of this space, so often neglected.

So much is going on in my life.  There are good changes within the house, and I see the wisdom in some of our choices and I feel the rightness of it.  The spaces are beginning to feel as they should.  The formal dining room is finally gone, replaced with what is our learning space but what also functions as a wonderful family space once the homeschool books and projects are cleared away.

Here it is before:

It looked lovely, but from day one the dining chairs were uncomfortable and the height of the table was wrong.  It was never a place we wanted to be.  I'm a little ashamed to say that we kept it that way for nearly 11 years before doing something about it.  Houses are living entities and this was a dead room for us, a museum to something we thought we wanted or at least thought we had to have because our house is vintage.

Here it is today:

We bought a second hand table and chairs for a song, moved the Persian rug into the living room, got rid of the china cabinet, moved in a pine armoire to hold the computer, and set up the "dining" room as a learning/family space.  It's working out wonderfully.

I'll have more to share in the upcoming weeks ...

Ancient Greece I Day 2

This morning we started with grammar and then some math review.  My boys seemed to have lost some of their long division skills over the summer and T-Guy asked for multiplication review as well.  Perhaps we will resume Life of Fred math next week.  I also want to take a look at our Making Math Meaningful curriculum and bring that into our lessons.  But today was simply worksheets.

When I planned our block I almost skipped the Live Education lesson for today; the boys know the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur inside out and backwards.  I think we borrowed The Hero and the Minotaur from the library 25 or more times over several years; it was one of J-Baby's absolute favorites.  However, the activity of drawing a labyrinth looked so fun that I decided we would do it.  The boys worked on drawing labyrinths while I read them the version of the myth from Gods and Heroes, the book recommended by Live Ed.

Tuesday is going to be our literature day (afternoon lesson) but I've decided to read our books based on the month, not the block schedule.  I'm working with my own boys for the next few months as a trial for teaching a literature class to other home-schooled children.  So instead of literature we had a long play date with good friends.

The picture gives a glimpse into our new homeschool space; I'll plan a full tour for another post.  It's working out really well for us, even better than I imagined.  We're still working on making sure it is neat and tidy after lessons, but we'll get there.

Ancient Greece I Day 1

We began the morning with grammar and math; I realized right off why public schools always start the year with math review because clearly we need some review on math facts and the four processes.  Our grammar unit is on prepositional phrases, which I have always found easy so I hope it goes well for my boys.

Our main lesson assignment was to draw a map of ancient Greece. I knew that wasn't going to go over well this early in the year so we compromised and I printed a nice map for them to color (which they haven't yet).  We moved on to learning about olive trees and the importance of olives in ancient Greece.  The boys drew olive trees in the main lesson books.

J-Baby put some care into his drawing but still really doesn't buy into the idea of doing his best work in his main lesson book, at least not when it comes to writing.  One of my goals this year is too significantly improve the boys penmanship through daily practice as well as higher expectations on my part.  It is no longer enough for me to know that they are at least trying to write; now that I know they can we have to work on making it neater and straighter.

Our "afternoon" lesson for this block is cooking/eating the foods of ancient Greece.  Having not gotten to the store we couldn't actually cook anything, but we used olive oil at lunch and had Kalamata olives at dinner.  Later this week we'll buy some Greek yogurt, some honey, some feta cheese, and the like.

And we're off ...

Forgive me for not getting these posts up earlier.  I have a bad habit of starting posts, getting busy with something else, and leaving the posts to languish as drafts for weeks or even months.

Friday was our first day of homeschool and it went really well.  We didn't walk, say a verse, or have circle, but that is okay.  These are big kids we are talking about, middle schoolers, and they are transitioning past some of these things.  Not the walk, of course, but that is always going to be catch as catch can.

We oriented ourselves to the homeschool area, learning where the lesson books and art supplies are, etc., talked about our plans and goals for the year, and then we got to baking.  Yes, our first lesson of the new homeschool year was baking fruit crisps for our afternoon autumnal equinox celebration at the park.  A friend took a photo of how they turned out, which was just beautiful.  There were delicious too.

Photo Courtesy of D. Joseph

We reviewed kitchen hygiene, preparing our space and ingredients, working the steps in order, and patience (waiting for the crisps to bake).  But we also learned about the satisfaction of hard work and the joy that comes from giving of ourselves to our friends.  By including the morning's baking work in our homeschooling I was also able to model time management and I reduced my stress significantly as I wasn't trying to do two things at once.

Our celebration was wonderful; the weather was warm but not stifling and the trees in the park were starting to turn color.  We enjoyed eating good food and spending time with good friends as we reflected on the unity of the equinox and the turning of the season.