Montessori 3-6 Classroom: Throwback Thursday

I've spent a great part of my computer time this week searching through my execrably organized digital archives for a video that Will asked for, that of her 2011 Spring Ice Show performance. I've often waxed nostalgic about that particular performance--a cheerful number, with the children all dressed in yellow shirts and sunglasses, performing to "Walking on Sunshine"--and how its unanticipated beauty surprised me into tears, so much so that Will, who doesn't remember it, really wants to watch the video. It seems, however, that I neglected to videotape it for her, or that I've somehow accidentally deleted the video since then. Ah, well, these are what memories are for...

In searching for that video, however, I came across some photos from a particularly magical year in the kids' former Montessori school--Will was a kindergartner, and Syd was a youngest grouper, and they were both together in the same afternoon ages 3-6 classroom:

Here is the children's outdoor classroom. I didn't love it, because it wasn't large, and for a large area of it there was a "no fast running" rule, but Syd, at least, pretty much just always hung out in this truly excellent sandbox. I LOVE the tree stumps:

I was recently reminded of this further use of the Montessori map puzzles on Pinterest, and it's something that I'm absolutely going to reincorporate into out studies, because Will clearly loved it, if all the giant, traced maps of Australia that she brought home were any indication. This assistant teacher was another beloved element of the Montessori class--the existence of two assistant teachers brought the student:teacher ration down to 10:1, and since much Montessori work is done independently by the children, the teachers really could focus on whoever needed them:

Will's favorite spot was the classroom library, of COURSE. Naughty children were often asked to go to the library for some quiet, cooling-down time, and I suspect that Will, a VERY independent child whose major motivation when interacting with an authority figure is to specifically not do what that authority figure would like her to do, was egged on into further throes of pig-headedness by the thought that any defiant infraction would result in a stint in--ooh, darn!--the library!

The children all loooooooved the classroom guinea pigs, Cinnamon and Nutmeg, who, yes, were placed into a large bucket when a child wanted to pet them:

Although Will fights SO much with her sister, she's always done really well with kids exactly Syd's age, and I remember that she and this little youngest-grouper had a special connection. Older kids were always encouraged to do activities with the younger children, and here Will and this kid are completing a photo/object matching work. And yes, Will is wearing a velvet top, cargo shorts, green and black striped tights, and purple Dr. Martens:

One thing that I know I should have recreated in our homeschool, but never did, are these types of math sensory works--the pink tower, the red rods, and these graduate cylinders that grow in both height and diameter. Syd loved these works, and I can see now how useful and appealing they would have been to her in her early years homeschooling. She loves repetition, she loves manipulatives, and she requires a concrete grounding in whatever mathematics we're doing:

Here's a fun extension of those red rods that I just mentioned--you create a labyrinth by setting up the rods at right angles, leaving *just* enough room for a young child to walk:

I DID recreate this work at home, collecting enough Base Ten blocks of our own that the kids could concretely visualize big numbers by building them. Those Base Ten blocks may be the most used, and most useful, manipulative in our homeschool:

I've said before, many times, that this year was a sweet spot in the children's development--I loved having them in the same classroom, I loved the Montessori method, I loved having them gone for three hours each day and then having them come back to me. Frankly, if I could still do that--if I could still have my kids in the same classroom, if I could still have them immersed in a rich educational and child-led environment like Montessori, and ESPECIALLY if they could only be there for about three hours and then be free to spend the rest of their days as they pleased, I'd still be there, absolutely.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Spring Cleaning

It's Spring Cleaning Week over at Crafting a Green World, so I celebrated with redos of my favorite recipes:

two-ingredient beeswax wood polish

and homemade laundry soap

Right now, we're in a fortunate cleaning groove here at home--I tidy up everyone's mess once, in our first break from schoolwork, and then for the rest of the day I point out each mess to the person to whom it belongs for tidying. The kids do a full load of dishes, and Matt does another after dinner. The kids also take down the dirty laundry and take out the recycling; I do laundry off and on, and Matt does more on the weekends, and sorts the recycling that the kids have put in the garage. I make most dinners each week, and try to make at least some food for other meals or snacks--baked goods, overnight oatmeal, tofu salad, etc.--and Matt makes maybe one dinner, and some nights we eat sandwiches or frozen pizza.

The key is that all this nonsense has to be done Every. Freakin'. DAY. If I'm busy one day and don't get the house tidied, then I guarantee that the next day, the mess will be too great to tidy in a reasonable amount of time, and the clutter will overpower all humans until the weekend. If I don't remind the kids every single time they've made a mess, they'll never clean it up. If two loads of dishes don't get done every single day, the sink will never be clear of dishes, probably for weeks. If I don't get into the kitchen to cook, we'll blow our budget on take-out pizza. We don't mop enough. We definitely don't clean the bathtub enough. 

And, of course, very, very soon, spring will unfurl and we'll have all-new outdoor chores to add to the daily list, and then nothing will ever be completely cleaned again, for sure.

Potter Badge Activity #1: At the IU Art Museum

Have I mentioned more than a million times yet how much we're all enjoying Girl Scouts? Since their activities are so cross-curricular, and really so embedded in academics, Girls Scouts has really been just a constant source of inspiration for our homeschool this year.

It was Syd's desire to earn her Potter badge that led us to the IU Art Museum on Friday morning, with 30 or so of our homeschooling friends and five docents, for an hour-long tour of the museum's collections. Our group was perfect--three second-grade girls, their parents, and one docent who showed the girls interesting pieces, asked open-ended questions, and took the time to listen to every single thing that every single girl had to say. Syd came away with a thoroughly pleasant impression of the museum, which was exactly what I'd wanted, so yay!

After the tour, my kiddos and I headed back to one particular gallery that had struck Syd's eye during the tour, so that she could complete the first activity for this badge: find a piece of pottery and sketch it:

Here's the piece that she chose:

And here's her sketch!

You can really tell the attention to detail that Syd poured into this sketch, and she's rightfully quite pleased with it.

Will, too, sketched--

--this guy--

--but she left her backpack and sketchbook in the car, I'm not going to go get it, and she, since she's currently running around the house with a friend and a sister, screaming "POW! POW! POW!", and insisting that she has "impervious titanium armor," certainly isn't going to go get it, either, so it will remain undocumented, I suppose.

Next up for the Potter badge are a few of the long-awaited pottery classes, and I'm equally grateful to this badge for being the impetus for me finally providing them for the kids. Here's to a house full of pinch pots, coil vases, and decorated tiles!

Work Plans for the Week of March 3: Latin and Libraries

I'm pretty well over the way that the Box widget that embeds my work plans always insists on scrolling immediately to them when my blog loads, and the way that Box has completely ignored my question about this, so at some point I'm going to have to make the time to research other document embedding systems, sigh. Until then, however...

MONDAY: While the local schoolchildren are suffering through yet another snow day here, it's business as usual for us--it looks like even our local volunteer gig will be open today, so add "De-ice the car" to my to-do list! Syd's working on her factor chart (I got the idea from an old elementary Montessori manual--I'll tell you about it another time, if it turns out well) right now, while Will, who's finished part of her reading work, is heating up some French bread for our breakfast.

We've got chapter 19 of Song School Latin today (more body parts), instrument lessons--and I am REALLY going to have to kick their butts on these, because it's been a while since they've really focused on regular practice--and we'll be able to spend a few weeks doing some regular creative writing, since our local PBS station finally got their butts in gear about the PBS Kids Writers Contest.

TUESDAY: The kids have both Math Mammoth and First Language Lessons today, which I always appreciate during lesson planning since they're so blessedly easy to schedule. A playdate and baking a king cake to celebrate Mardi Gras will use up most of the rest of the day, but we'll also be working on the kids' Girl Scout service project. They need to provide a bookshelf as part of this project, and at first I thought that we might get it donated, but the dimensions required are pretty specific to fit into a limited space, AND Will has expressed so much interest in woodworking lately, that I've finally decided that we'll just make the bookshelf. It's still a little cold for woodwork outdoors, so we may find ourselves with lumber, the portable work bench, and the circular saw in the living room, but I think it's going to be a great beginning woodworking project for the kids, and one that they're guaranteed to see in use every week at our regular volunteer gig.

WEDNESDAY: Will's big Spring Ice Show performance is this night--wish her luck!

THURSDAY: We've still got a couple of chemistry experiments centered on acids and bases to perform, but I didn't get around to getting all the materials for those yet, so I'm moving us on to the paleontology that we'll be studying off and on as we lead up to our dinosaur dig this summer. I imagine that we'll be interspersing this paleontology study with seasonal studies, like botany and animal biology, and kid-led interests, but for now, I'll be grounding the kids' understanding, and sneaking in a little more Latin!

I think the kids are also ready to start interspersing Drawing With Children lessons with other types of hands-on art, so we'll be trying out this copy of The Color Book that I was sent to review (ooh, I just saw that it hasn't been officially released yet--how fun to have it in our paint-covered little hands!)--it's focused on exploring color through a variety of activities, so it should be a fun integration into our week.

FRIDAY: We're soundly into our Indiana study, but I wasn't quite prepared to move into the next chapter of The Story of the World (nor am I quite sure, yet, how I'm going to handle that chapter, since it highlights one of the book's few flaws, Bible stories treated as history--we may end up just listening to the chapter one week and then moving on, but first I need a little more time to decide if there's anything really historically relevant there), so fortunately, there's ALWAYS something more to do with Ancient Egypt!

The kids get in moods in which they seem to forget about formerly favorite pastimes, sometimes, so this week's logic is a board game of each kid's choice, to remind them that they like to play board games! That, combined with a library program, should round out our school week on a VERY fun note.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: We might go to the Indianapolis Museum of Art as a family, or we might send the kids to a pottery class and claim some grown-up time. We might go hiking, if the weather warms, or we might drag the bikes out and get them ready for a season of riding. We *might* order a couple more chicks from a local hatchery, although every time you ask me that one, my answer changes.

Patricia Bath: The Amazing Ophthalmologist Who Invented a Laser that Removes Cataracts

Will wrote just a big ole' research paper last week! She had a choice of five African-American inventors, and she finally settled on Patricia Bath. I was pleased about her choice for two big reasons:

1. Bath is female, and 
2. Bath is still alive.

The second part was especially fortuitous, because Will found, through Discovery Education Streaming, an actual interview with Bath; so cool when history literally comes alive! Will also used the book Women Inventors Who Changed the World, and articles on Grolier and World Book Online (you can check out my Educational Links page for the best scholastic search engines). 

To put together this bigger research paper, I taught Will about outlines, then had her dictate her outline to me while I played scribe. I wanted to model how it *is* possible to handwrite long passages without throwing a fit, and also show her a couple of little tricks for when you inevitably realize that you want to include something else some place in your outline, but you're out of room. The guidelines for the essay contest that prompted this research paper included some topics that each essay should cover, so figuring out to integrate these into the essay made for another excellent lesson (and one that I wish all my former freshman comp students had mastered before they showed up to my classes):

I wrote down Will's words verbatim as she dictated her outline (both children have already learned quite well that one must never simply repeat another author's exact words and phrasing in their own work, so that's never a problem), but I did often, after she had reported a fact, prompt her to now explain the importance or relevance of this fact, or to put it into the context of her overall report. At this point, I'm privileging acquiring that skill OVER acquiring the skill of creating a flow of logic throughout the paper, so it's okay to me that some of her points are off-topic--as long as they're original thoughts about the facts, they're acceptable.

If you've written a great outline, then most of your work for the report is already done--you simply have to write your outline in essay form, creating good connections and filling in any gaps that you now see. I was surprised that Will often wanted to delete most of the interesting aspects of her authorial voice at this time, which would have turned her essay into something very dull and dry; I discouraged her where I could, but since it's her paper, ultimately they were her choices to make, and she did choose to delete some of her witty, humorous observations--ah, well...

After the essay was finished, I let it sit for a day, then printed it and gave it to Will to read and edit. She found a couple of punctuation errors (oops!) that she wanted to correct, so we did so, then printed the essay again and gave it to Will to read and edit. I believe that we did this twice before Will finally had a totally clean copy with nothing further that she wanted to edit. THAT'S the essay that gets read in triumph:

Whew! These are not everyday parts of school, these multi-page research reports, but they're definitely regular parts--by junior high, I want the kid to be so accustomed to writing them that she can just whip them out like a grad schooler, no biggie.

P.S. If you're interested in African-American inventors, here are some other library materials on that topic that we enjoyed:

Work Plans for the Week of February 24, 2014: Workbooks and Water

With two full-day field trips this week, daily Spring Ice Show rehearsals for Will, and several imminent work and academic deadlines looming, I gave the kids responsibility for their own school this week. I told them that I expect them to each put in a full two-hour work period every day, INDEPENDENTLY--asking to play board games with Momma doesn't count!

As a matter of fact, I *really* only had to completely ignore them on Tuesday, when I spent a good ten hours creating Syd's fashion show pants out of prom dresses and stress (Matt made us a celebratory pitcher of frozen margaritas after I was finished and the kids were in bed--those two Game of Thrones episodes that we watched afterwards were totally wasted on me), but to my surprise, the kids have taken off with this responsibility, and have spent the majority of their days in academic pursuits.

Their inspiration? Workbooks, of all things. I have a large collection of workbooks that we don't often use (they're a crutch for weeks like these!), so on Monday night, after our day-long ski trip and Will's evening Ice Show rehearsal, yawn, and before we all crashed out early--seriously, I accidentally fell asleep at 9 pm while Matt was trying to have a conversation with me about what we should eat for dinner--I dragged out all our workbooks of math drills, geography, puzzles, mazes, and cursive, etc., and laid them out on the coffee table. It turns out that the kids were happy to do pages and pages of math drills, as long as they got to choose what math to do; Will loves word problems, and Syd feels like a real ace at multi-digit addition.

Each kid has also been doing a lot of math puzzles--Syd likes this number cross puzzles book, and Will likes this book of easy sudoku, and they both love an old daily calendar of tangrams that I bought them from Goodwill many years ago--and coloring books of things like artworks and tesselations, and Will has spent hours poring over this art history sticker book, but the most fun that they've had has been inspired by a workbook of science experiments that their grandmother once gave them. Matt bought Will a package of gummy bears so that she could follow the workbook's instructions to measure it, immerse it in water, and measure it again later, and their fascination with how the gummy bear expanded in the glass of water reminded me of our collections of super-absorbent polymer--we've got spheres, cubes, and crystal shapes, and the kids were thrilled with them all.

The polymers are easy to dye in colored water, so of course we then had to get out the color-mixing tablets, and one entire day was spent in color mixing and pouring, baths in colored bathwater, growing polymer shapes and dyeing them and mashing them and playing with them:

In the process, Syd made another VERY interesting discovery:

How cool is that?!? Time for a mini-unit on optics!

The Comic Creator, and the PBS Kids Writers Contest Runaround

We've been doing a lot of writing lately, in this late winter season just before we can restart all of our wonderful, hands-on, OUTDOOR learning. Essays and biographies, stories and poems, letters and book reports, and also comics:

This astronaut is enjoying a lovely spacewalk, until his rocket unexpectedly powers up and crashes him onto the moon--yikes!!!

In late winter, I also always seem to arrive at the theory that everything is more trouble than its worth. Case in point: my attempts to enter a story by Syd in the nationwide PBS Kids Writers Contest. Back in early February, I went to the PBS Kids Writers Contest web site, saw that I needed to enter through my local PBS station, WTIU, found the correct contact info and link, and clicked on the link.

Yeah, that's the link for the WTIU home page. No writers contest entry forms there.

So I emailed the contact person, telling her the issue and asking for the correct information.

Crickets.

And thus, for sixteen days, "enter Syd into the PBS Kids Writers Contest" remained on my to-do list. I do NOT like things to live, uncrossed-off, on my to-do list. It's a thing of mine. Everybody gets to have a thing. So sixteen days later, again seeing this darned uncrossed-off chore, I filled out one of those Have a Question? contact forms on the WTIU web site, telling them the issue and asking for the correct information.

Happily, I was emailed within the hour by WTIU's station manager himself! Unhappily, his sentence-long email simply referred me back to the PBS Kids Writers Contest web site. You know, the one that refers me back to WTIU to obtain the entry form?

So I immediately replied to him, telling him the issue with even more specificity and asking for the correct information.

Crickets.

Seriously, am I crazy, or is that legitimately super annoying? Actually, it's fine to tell me that I'm crazy, as long as you also tell me that it's legitimately super annoying.

And maybe it's late winter, when EVERYTHING is super annoying, talking, but this brings me to one of my Homeschooling Pet Peeves:

It is so much more annoying to have to schedule every single thing yourself, and organize every single thing yourself, and figure out every single thing yourself, when you homeschool. If I want a spelling bee, or a pinewood derby, or a field trip to the art museum, or an entry for my kid into a writing contest, I figure it out, organize it, and schedule it myself. Sometimes, as with the field trip to the IU Art Museum that we're taking next week, I find myself dealing with amazingly organized, competent, knowledgeable people. Sometimes, as with the spelling bee, I find myself working with people who may not know any more than I do, but they're willing to work with me and help out. And sometimes, as with this stinkin' writers contest, I find myself working with people who don't have the thing organized, don't seem to know what's going on, and don't actually seem to care.

Okay, ugly rant over. And to be fair, I do have solutions! Matt suggested that I visit another PBS station's site, get the entry form for them, and just overwrite it with the correct information for my PBS station. My own idea is that since the outreach coordinator who's listed as the contact person for this contest has a campus office, and campus is in walking distance for us, we just walk to her office one nice day and ask her in person. And today, actually, is already a very nice day. The sun is shining, the temperature is [barely] above freezing, and right now the children are outside cleaning out the chicken coop and tidying the yard that's finally free of most of its snow. I have the pants for Syd's fashion show garment figured out, and merely have to sew them. The kids have lots of activities in the next three days, giving me plenty of time to myself to get all my work done, stress-free. Matt and I have our weekly ballroom dance class tonight. I really, really, REALLY like the novel that I'm reading right now. I have a new idea for a short story. And I'm going to take a nice, deeeep breath right now... there. Better.

Also, I think I'll go eat breakfast. I find myself much less grumpy after I've eaten. At least everybody has *that* particular thing, right?