It's winter as usual around our place (drawing towards the end of winter with today's little taste of sunshine), and that means we've been filling our homeschooling days with lots of indoor activities, and getting outside whenever we can to get our gardens ready.
A sampling of what we've been up to:
Asa has been learning how to milk goats from the folks that we buy our goats milk from. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they also have seven new puppies on their farm, so every Saturday has been a combined goat milk/puppy petting extravaganza. Who can resist brand new puppies!
Mackenzie loves to hang out by the library bookshelf in our living room. But the problem around here is that with four cats, whenever you lie down with a good book, you become a convenient pillow for a feline.
We took a tour of the library with our homeschooling group and got to watch the robotic book sorter in action. We found out that on average, our main library receives about 6,500 books turned in each day. For a town of 130,000 people, that's impressive! I think we probably are single-handedly responsible for about 1,000 of those books. As homeschoolers, I can't think of any resource more valuable to us than our wonderful public library.
Whenever the weather breaks for a little bit, we head out to the enormous leaf pile for more raking. We're trying to get a good thick layer of leaves covering the area that we're going to use next year to expand our vegetable garden.
Mackenzie has asked me to teach him algebra. I think that's a blog post in and of itself - me, sitting at the kitchen table, teaching the kids stuff out of a textbook, just like real homeschoolers do!
We have our karate test coming up this Friday. The kids are testing for their next rank of orange belt. I'm testing for my (ulp!) brown belt!
And most excitingly, my brother-in-law Nickrooz and sister Marisa (known to all of us in the family as Meese, my name for her when I was three) are coming down from Seattle this weekend. Nickrooz is going to do a presentation for some of the families from our homeschool group about his native country Iran. We're going to do a potluck with Persian dishes, and he and Marisa have some slides from their last two trips to Iran. With Iran being constantly in the news, I think many people don't know much about the Iranian people and the country itself, beyond a few sound bites about nuclear weapons or Islamic extremism. Iran is a country with a culture that goes back millenia and I am so glad to have Nick as my brother-in-law, I have learned so much about his homeland! I'm excited to share that with other homeschoolers and also of course to have Nick and Marisa here and to celebrate her birthday.
1 comment:
I can't wait for Saturday! And I hope you don't mind if I pick your brain with un-schooling questions.
I think I have, with your help from the postings last month about unschooling vs. neglect, discovered that I unfortunately do tend toward the neglect. Meaning I just let him do his thing while I do my own thing.
I understand that is not unschooling now. Though his interests are not very interesting to me, I have to say. And frankly, when he is gaming on WoW or playing an xbox game, I just leave the room. I can't stand the violence. The sound of bodies crunching is disgusting and I just can't be around it. So I leave the room.
And then, like his dad, he can spend HOURS on it if I don't intercede.
Sigh. I get so exhausted trying to figure it all out.
And then my husband, well ... recently the most positive statement he's said about home/unschooling was at Robert's roller skating class. He said, "Wow. All these kids are homeschooled?" (snort) And the class only had, like, 22 kids in it.
I said, "Yeah. We're not the minority you think we are."
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