I was composing an email to an old friend this evening, and realized it also seemed appropriate to post on here, as it fits the description of my blog pretty well... tidbits from my life! Here goes:
"You asked about Homeschooling, so here goes! Well, as I said before, I'm only getting my feet wet so far! I hung a world map up on the wall and Simeon LOVES it. We look at it every day and he often asks questions pertaining to it. Or if we get talking about some place in the world, I can just go and show him where it is. The COOLEST part though is that I get to learn a lot myself. I'm sure its all stuff that I was "supposed" to have learned back in school, but of course I've forgotten. Today, for example, I set out to show Simeon where Scotland was (because we were reading a book about the Grand Canyon and it mentioned a Scotsman named James Hutton who wrote a pretty influential book about the history of the earth...) and anyhow, it wasn't on the map. In fact there wasn't even a Scottish flag in the national flags section! Well that really threw me for a loop because I had no idea what Scotland WAS if it wasn't a country. Anyhow, after checking on Wikipedia I now know that Scotland is the northern part of the United Kingdom which IS, of course, on my map. So anyhow, I am learning right along with the kids!
I have also started teaching Simeon to read. He knows pretty much all the letter sounds, and so we started in with a Phonics book, about ten minutes a day a few days a week, and he can read (though he sounds out each letter very slowly) many three-letter words. It's been really exciting! So far we have only done short-vowel "a" words (cat, rat, hat) but will be moving on to the next vowel soon! I wish we could do it every day but things often come up and so we only read a few days a week.
We have also been casually learning a small amount of Spanish and Sign Language. On Monday mornings we get together with three other families in the neighborhood for about an hour and have a really fun time learning these two topics. The kids get a new Proverb in Sign Language each week. (Which reminds me that we have not practiced this weeks yet and its Friday already!) Ah well... my goal is mearly to introduce him to a lot of this stuff and we get delve deeper into it when he is older:-) We also do a program called "Learning Spanish Like Crazy" once or twice a week with another friend. It is a half-hour spoken spanish course which I purchased as an audiobook on itunes. You listen to the speaker and repeat stuff. I really like it and am doing THIS program more for my sake than the childrens. It is geared for adults.
We've been doing a bit of ice skating this winter (sort of, anyway.) Our friends two doors down built an awesome ice rink in their side yard, so I bought the kids double-runner ice skates (two blades for easier balance rather than one) and we've gone down there a bit. Chara clops around for five minutes and has had enough. Simeon enjoys it and will stay out there a while, but does more walking than skating... though today was the first day I actually saw him glide a bit. I get excited pretty easily and was delighted with this accomplishment!
I love showing the children how things grow, and so they helped me plant a lot of seeds for our new garden boxes last spring. We're gearing up to get started with that again this year. (Actually, I planted a bunch of flower seeds already after they were in bed one night this week, and many have sprouted already!) They LOVE to help, but certain things get crazy messy, and I was really not feeling in the mood to have dirt flying all over the kitchen on this occasion;-) But there will be others for them to help with as I haven't done any of the vegetable seeds yet. In the next couple weeks we'll also be starting our second year of maple sugaring right here in the city! Last year I tapped about ten maple trees in the neighborhood (most people have at least one maple in their yard) and simmered out all the water in open roaster ovens in my garage. It was a lot of fun, and we ended up with many quarts of syrup! The children, of course, love helping with this as well.
It is fun showing them things, but can be sort of stressful at times, too! They require a HUGE amount of patience and there seems to be constant noise and things happening that need my attention. I feel like Simeon is constantly following me around asking me questions sometimes, and Chara is very, very busy... always into something! I don't even know where to begin with her! She is SO cute and precious and joyful-- just very energetic and busy and has an extremely short attention span. She doesn't even like videos all that much because she can't sit still to watch them. Ah well, I suppose that is the nature of being 2! I hope you'll get to meet them some day."
Love, Leigh
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