What child-led learning looks like at my house

This is Alexis writing at 4.5 years old.
I have never once asked her to write on her own, trace letters on any worksheet, or hold a pencil/pen/crayon/marker correctly.
She has suddenly decided she wants to write, not only that but she is also drawing and coloring.
So now she happily writes on the chalkboard, on paper, on the whiteboard, etc.,
and I am one proud Momma.

Where We Learn

We're getting prepared to start our first official year of homeschooling after Labor Day. We've been working hard to get our house in order, putting everything in its place to help keep us organized throughout the year. We don't have a super awesome amazing school room but we are lucky enough to have several areas in our house that are comfortable for learning, here is where we learn.

The Living Room

Our super comfy couch, perfect for snuggling up to read or watch a movie

Our (not as full as I'd like) bookcases. They're still awaiting our curriculum books

A horrible example of organization, the computer desk...

The Girls' Room

Where we do circle time in the morning

A little nook for doing puzzles, worksheets, etc. 

In the closet, storage for books puzzles, worksheets

The Kitchen

The kitchen table is great for working together. Our art table in the background is a great place for getting messy

Our arts and crafts supply closet, the girls have access to pretty much anything

We can't wait to get our first year underway!! We're so happy we have several places in our house for learning all the time, sometimes together and sometimes alone. We also have a great backyard for laying out a blanket and several parks that are great for bringing books, exploring and exercising.

If you like seeing where we learn and want to see more, check out iHomeschool Network's Not Back-to-School Blog Hop! There are literally hundreds of great, impressive school rooms for your viewing pleasure.

Schedule Spinner

One of my goals for 2012 was to have a daily schedule to keep us on track through the day. That way everyone knows what to expect at a certain time and there aren't any surprises and less meltdowns (in theory). I had written a schedule out on the white board but I kept forgetting to look at it, it was messy and the girls weren't involved with it. 

I knew that if I wanted to accomplish my goal I'd have to create something visual for the girls to be able to read so that they could help keep me on track. I decided to make a spinner. 

I made a list of general daily activities and wrote them down in 30 minute increments. The girls typically wake up at 8:00am and go to bed between 7:30-8:00 pm. When I had everything scheduled I cut out a cardboard circle and divided it into wedges.

I painted each wedge that relates to another the same color, all food wedges are pink, the purple are free time, etc. When the paint was dry, I wrote each activity and the time it's meant to occur.

I cut out an arrow spinner to point to what wedge we're on at the moment. It's attached by a button and some wire.

I hung it up right under our bulletin board, low enough that the girls can spin the arrow to the appropriate wedge. So far it's been going fabulously! Occasionally we've switched time wedges according to moods and time, etc. For example, we've switched "school" time with outdoor time a few times, we've extended art time before. All of the activities are general. "School" to us can mean a trip to the museum or library, free time is anything the girls decide they want to do. Playroom time is time spent in the playroom only. There are books, games, toys in there. The girls love to be in there playing with each other. We've really been enjoying outdoor time lately since it's been so nice out. The past few days have been chilly though, so we've just replaced some outdoor time with more playroom time or more art time.

The spinner has been a very welcome addition to our daily lives, less stress and the girls definitely know what to expect throughout the day and love being able to move the spinner arrow to each wedge.

Nakie Eggs!

This is such a simple experiment the girls and I did recently. I'm quite upset that I didn't know about it when I was a kid. One night the girls and I were watching Jeopardy (one of our faves!) and saw mention of an experiment to dissolve the shell of an egg. I immediately took to the web to learn more. Turns out you can dissolve the shell of an egg with vinegar! Learn more here! All you need is vinegar, eggs and time.

Just place an egg (pretty sure you can do raw or boiled) in a container and cover it with vinegar. After 24 hours dump all the vinegar out and cover it with vinegar again. How long you leave it in the container is up to you. We left ours for 2 days.

Look at the egg! The shell is gone and all that's left is the membrane, so neat! It was soft and squishy, rubbery and bouncy and we could see the yoke inside.

It was fun holding the flashlight up to the egg to see the yoke floating around inside.

We brought it into the kitchen to see if we could crack it open like a regular egg, too rubbery! It wouldn't crack. Then Charlotte decided to hold the egg up high and drop it into a bowl. It burst like a water balloon!!

This was such a neat experiment, we will definitely be revisiting this again and adding other ideas. I've read you can do experiments with osmosis this way.
Be sure to give this simple activity a try with your kids, they'll love it!

ABC World Tour {Australia}

Welcome

to 

Australia!

We kicked off our ABC World Tour with a very long stay in Australia. It took awhile to find a groove for getting everything I wanted to get accomplished in each country. Australia was the perfect guinea pig and since it's a huge country/continent there was plenty to learn about and I don't feel bad at all for staying on the topic for so long. I promise from now on, each country will be only a week and I'll have each post up by Monday the following week.

I'm just going to give a brief summary of all the topics we covered with links and the list of books we read.

Facts

When we first started talking about Australia we covered just the basic information:

*It's in the Southern Hemisphere

*It's a continent and a country

*The capital is Canberra

Charlotte located Australia and Canberra on the map every day

After we talked about flying from NC to Australia 

(which would have cost us $2,000 each!)

I stamped Charlotte's passport

(passport DIY)

we were officially in the country!

Here are a few things we discussed:

   *Language: English

Greeting: G'day  

(We watched this video to learn about the accent)

*Currency: Australian Dollar

Rate: Approx. .97AUD=1.00USD

*Flag

*Weather: Southern Hemisphere weather is opposite Northern Hemisphere

Under the book you can see the travel journal we've been writing in everyday

Lexi colored right alongside Char

While discussing Sydney, we found that you can climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's about 200 steps to the top of one of the pylons so the girls went out front and climbed our stairs 20 times to simulate the experience! When we reached the top we could see the Sydney Opera House! 

Food

Talking about food we found that Australians eat a lot of different things than us!

*Kangaroo

*Crocodile

*Emu

*Vegemite

They also eat yummy treats called Lamingtons

which are sponge cake squares dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut

(we made some!)

Art/Music

We came across a book filled with amazing Aboriginal Dreamtime stories and along with the stories was amazing art.

Aboriginal Dot Painting

They are breathtaking!

So we did our own 

I'm classifying boomerangs as art. 

From shaping them to throwing them is an art form, then they are painted with beautiful designs! 

We made our own boomerang out of cardboard and then practiced throwing it (how to) at our favorite park.

As far as music goes we learned about the digeridoo and watched

this video

and

this video

We also listened to a few Australian folksongs and came across

Slim Dusty's version of Waltzing Matilda (here)

Landmarks

Ayers Rock aka Uluru is a HUGE inselberg (a mountain island) located in Australia's Red Centre. It's sacred to the local people and a huge tourist attraction. I't made out of sandstone and appears to change color at different times of the day and season. It was really neat looking at the different pictures of Uluru, especially the pictures where it appears violet in color.

Animals

I debated putting the Great Barrier Reef under landmarks, but considering it's the largest animal made structure on Earth, I had to put it under animals. The Great Barrier Reef is teeming with life and it's massive!! I never really knew how large it was but when we read that it would stretch from Maine to Florida, it was really put into perspective. I had plans to make different types of coral out of clay but the clay just crumbled on me when it dried. It was sad :( BUT, instead we made these adorable reef fish out of CDs. I also bought the girls a Coral Reef Toob to play with. (Toobs are the most awesome thing in the world)

Here is a great video on the Great Barrier Reef

We read a lot (A LOT!) of books about Australia's unique animals. It is said that the animals are so different due to the prolonged isolation that Australia has experience. Check out this video we watched of a laughing kookaburra, we saw one in person at the national zoo and it was laughing for us, but every time I got out the video camera it stopped, then it would laugh again at me when I put it away. The laugh is quite infectious, kookaburras make me giggle. Of course we talked about platypuses, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, bilbies, echidnas, emus, the list goes on and on! We visited the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane, it was fun seeing all the animals they have and they even have a platypus webcam on their site!

Books/Movies

We watched:

*Crocodile Dundee: as a general about Australia movie

*Finding Nemo: about the Great Barrier Reef

*Australia: We didn't watch this one but I would recommend it, it's about cattle driving in a time before World War II, it's pretty interesting (but looooong)

We read:

*Atlas ~ Malcom Watson

*National Geographic World Atlas for Young Explorers

*Children's Amazing Places Encyclopedia ~ Robert Hamilton

*Australia ~ Ann Heinrichs

*Wild Shores of Australia ~ Ron Fisher

*National Geographic Book of Mammals 

*National Geographic: A Fragile Empire ~ Jennifer S. Holland

*Down Under ~ Tessa Paul

*Rainbow Bird ~ Eric Madden

* Ernie Dances to the Didgeridoo ~ Alison Lester

*Big Rain Coming ~ Katrina Germein

*Waking Up Down Under ~ Carol Votaw

*Stories from the Billabong ~ James Vance Marshall

*Toad Overload ~ Patricia Seibert

* Life in a Coral Reef ~ Wendy Pfeffer

*Coral Reefs ~ Sylvia A. Earle

*Coral Reef: A city that never sleeps ~ M. Cerullo

*Fish ~ Eyewitness Books

*A Wombat's World ~ Caroline Arnold

*Australian and New Zealand Food and Drink ~ Christine Osborne

*Platypus ~ Joan Short

~ A Platypus's World ~ Caroline Arnold

Girls' Pick

Yep, we're still in Australia! And thanks to some supplemental curriculum I stumbled upon we'll be staying for one more week.  Spending three weeks in a continent hardly seems like enough time, Australia has so much to offer! 

Here are the picks for this week:

 Ernie Dances to the Didgeridoo by Alison Lester

This book is amazing! I love it! What a great way to introduce children to Arnhem Land, which is in Northern Australia and is home to many different indigenous tribes and language groups. The book specifically focuses on Gunbalanya where Kunwinjku is the main language that is spoken.

amazon.com

The book is about a boy (Ernie) who is leaving his friends to live in Arnhem Land where is parents are working at a hospital. What makes this book so great is that its written as if Ernie is writing a letter to each of his friends for each of the Arnhem land seasons, there are six seasons! For each season there are different activities that each of Ernie's new friends are doing such as fishing, learning traditional Dreamtime stories, and playing sports.

amazon.com

Another great thing about this book is that there is a short section at the beginning of the book explaining a bit about Arnhem Land, and the pronunciations of the seasons. At the back of the book there is a small glossary with terms that may not be familiar to the reader. It's a very easy read and beautifully illustrated. I can't wait to read more books by Alison Lester!

amazon.com

Waking Up Down Under by Carol Votaw

Another book that I've fallen in love with! This is an adorable book about 12 different Australian animal babies waking up in the morning. When the babies that wake in the morning go to sleep at night the story transitions right into the nocturnal babies waking up. So there are always babies awake in Australia! The sweet rhyming words 

Wake up, little emu, nibble in the sun. Your feathers may not fly, but oh, how you can run!

 and the delightful illustrations of the baby animals by Susan Banta make this book a must read!!!

amazon.com

Girls' Pick

amazon.com

Stories from the Billabong by James Vance Marshall and Francis Firebrace. 

This week we've landed in Australia so we're reading Aboriginal folktales retold from the Yorta-Yorta tribe, one of many Aboriginal tribes in Australia.

amazon.com

All of the illustrations are by Francis Firebrace who is an Aboriginal artist and storyteller.

This book is a wonderful collection of folktales, there are ten stories including stories about creation, why frogs croak, and how the crocodile got its scales.

amazon.com

There is a glossary at the back of the book with the definitions of common Australian words, a page about Aboriginal Australians, and pictures of Aboriginal symbols and what they mean.

This book is a wonderful way to introduce the Aboriginal culture to children. The pictures are vibrant and authentic, and the stories are simply written and easy to understand. We've thoroughly been enjoying reading all about Australia!

Where Have I Been!?

Sorry all for the recent lack of posts lately. I've been focusing all of my energy on trying to get a head start with curriculum this year.
Last year I was always playing catch-up on the weekends and I didn't want to have to do that this year, especially since Lexi isn't an immobile baby anymore. I have to be prepared!
Even though we didn't finish our A-Z units from last year, you can find completed units here, I've decided to scrap those and start fresh with A. This year we're doing an ABC World Tour, I am so excited to tell you about it every week, I will be keeping to the weekly blog schedule, Monday craft, Wednesday food, etc.
I've also been working on a writing center for Charlotte since I really want to encourage her interest of reading and writing, without pushing it.
We will officially be starting "school" after Labor Day, in the mean time enjoy these sneak peeks of what I've been up too!

Jungle Weeks: 2/21-3/4

Welcome to Jungle Week, the longest post in the history of my blog, only because of all the pictures. 

I first must mention that when I say jungle we mostly discussed the rainforest, specifically the Amazon, but note that the word jungle doesn't necessarily mean rainforest, that is just how we decided to define it.  

I have to tell you that jungles are so much fun to talk about because they are so full of mystery and so full of life! There is no possible way you could ever teach everything there is to know about the jungle, you can barely even scratch the surface in 2 weeks! We sure gave it a go and here it is!

I started off by creating our own little jungle canopy out of crepe paper and flowers and leis, just ready to be filled with lots of creatures, big and small! I did this myself while the girls were napping and they were sooooo excited when they woke up and saw it!

The first little guys we made to inhabit our jungle were chameleons and only because we happened to find some stickers in our cabinet and there were chameleon eyes. So we stuck the eyes on the paper and created around them.

Char's chameleon was just a head and also had some very nice ears

Charlotte's Chameleon climbing on a vine

My chameleon hiding 

I drew a diagram of the 4 (or 5 depending on what you read) layers of the jungle. We discussed each one and how they affect each other and what different animals and plants live specifically in each layer.

Drawing trails for the Blue Morpho Butterflies

A view of our jungle with a few more animals

Next we decided our jungle needed some nice broad tropical leaves so we made leaf prints. These leaves happened to be dying ones I trimmed off of our Peace Lily and they made nice tropical prints!

Charlotte is quite obsessed with cutting everything as small as possible

After we cut the leaves out, we taped them all over our jungle

I found a game online (I can't find the link to save my life) where you use lima beans (with a different color on each side) to make "dart frogs" and you shake them in a cup, count how many of each color came out and tally it up. I thought about graphing the results as well but was content with just the tallying. We counted the "frogs" in groups of five and Charlotte recorded the results! It was pretty fun trying to guess which there would be more of each turn, blue or yellow...

Proud of my baby's tally marks!

We just had to incorporate tribal face painting into our jungle theme! I looked at a few pictures online to see what kind of patterns were used most and then came up with my own interpretation. Lexi's of course wasn't as well thought out as Charlotte's, I could only get her to stand still for a second and then she managed to wipe it off from under her nose and on her chin as soon as I was done.

We made snakes with pipe cleaners and cut out pieces of straw. This originally started out as a short/long lesson with short and long pieces of straw but after a few, I realized we could turn this into a pattern lesson and so our last few snakes were pattern snakes.

Here are a few snakes blending in with the vines

Next our jungle needed some big cats, so we needed to make tigers! I thought long and hard about how I wanted to make tigers, I wanted something unique and then it hit me...spin art would make awesome tiger stripes! So I painted some paper plates orange and we proceeded to make stripes...

Putting paint on the (taped down) paper plate in the salad spinner

Add some small details: stamped on nose and eyes, yarn whiskers, ears and you have tigers!

Camouflage tiger

What jungle would be complete without jaguars...I'm gonna have to say, Asian and African jungles...but not ours!

Waiting for ears, eyes and noses to dry

Lazy jaguar, just hanging around

Imagine how happy I was to find out that the new exhibit (The Trail of the Tiger) at our zoo was having a special sneak peek to members only. All of the animals are from the jungle and they are so awesome! I'm not really an ape/monkey fan but I'm sure on my way to being one, they were so fun to watch! Previously we only had squirrel monkeys and some little tiny black things but now we have apes to enjoy as well: orangutans, gibbons, siamangs. The funniest part about the opening of this exhibit is that the tigers actually ended up not being there. The glass to their enclosure was broken so we didn't get to see them, but we were thrilled with what we ended up seeing.

The last thing our jungle needed was some rain, so we made a rain stick following this tutorial over at The Imagination Tree (there's also a post about mini baby rain sticks too) and we really have fun using this stick. Shaking it, turning it fast, turning it slow, rolling it, it has been fascinating to watch the girls  move the stick in different ways to produce different sounds, it sounds like a heavy rainstorm when you turn it normally.

We tried a few types of filling but decided on macaroni because I think the curves hold onto the nails a bit longer

Here's how our jungle looked after adding the cats, the leaves, the snakes and there are also some birds and frogs in there hiding out. 

I really wanted to add a sloth but couldn't decide how to actually make one so we pretended we were sloths by laying on our backs with our arms and legs in the air, the girls took turns laying on my tummy like baby sloths and so I made up a silly song about sloths. I make up a lot of silly songs but this one is blog worthy (even though it's embarrassing)

The Sloth Song

I'm a sloth and I swing in the trees

I have my baby on my belly with me

I go slowly when I move around

and I never ever touch the ground

I drink water in the leaves

and eat flowers from the trees

and I move

slowly

slowly 

slowly

 Finally, like always, there are books, books and more books. I found out that the jungle is a very popular subject to write about but we had our favorites and here they are. (BTW, I always link to Amazon but these new links will tell you prices and add them to your cart automatically)

Rainforest (Biomes of the World)

Jungle Animals (Eye Openers)

(We loved this book the most)

Well, I hope you enjoyed Jungle Week! We're supposed to do 'K' this next week but will be postponing it to do it in a different location than normal. So, I will have a look at my theme list and plan according to that. Keep an eye out!