How we homeschooled today #90
The joy of geometry, birdwatching, funny faces
Still time to cast your vote in yesterday’s poll of how you’d educate your children if money was no object. Lots of interesting discussion going on in yesterday’s Comments and on
’s Notes.(My children are just 6 and nearly 8.)
We have had a gorgeous day of home education today:
At breakfast, my daughter asked why cartoon characters are often drawn with their eyebrows in the air and I said maybe it made them look more expressive, because eyebrows are a big part of how we express our emotions. We tried looking happy with eyebrows down, and looking scary with eyebrows up. Trying to smile with your eyebrows down makes you look very funny indeed!
We watched the live feed from the Ontario FeederWatch Cam. It was nighttime when we tuned in this morning, but by the afternoon it was snowing and two beautiful blue jays were tucking in. SO exciting. Watch at your own risk—you could easily spend all day watching this thing.
I gave the children fair warning that we’d sit down for some work at 9.30, and they both said they’d rather start straight away. So we sat down for some Beowulf handwriting, Grammar book, and spelling.
Then I asked them what maths they’d like to do today (it’s working really well letting them choose at the moment). My son chose a coin game about giving correct change, and my daughter chose a version of Nim from Family Math. But as we were flicking through the book for the Nim page, we stumbled across the tangram page. We haven’t done tangrams for years and the children had forgotten all about them. We tried different ways to try to make a square, and then I printed off tangram pictures and puzzles to replicate. Then the children got out some geometric shapes (like these) and carried on with the geometry. We talked about lines of symmetry, patterns, different ways to make a hexagon etc. I confidently told them about the three types of triangle on the blackboard, only to open the maths dictionary and find there are four—sorry scalene triangle, you had been forgotten in the 20+ years since I was last in a maths lesson!
All in all we spent nearly 3 hours exploring shapes this morning, with no breaks. I often think that one unavoidable problem with school is the timetable—your lesson will last X minutes, whether you love it or hate it. Of course, often it’s worth working when you don’t feel like it and I encourage the children to do so. But sometimes you didn’t sleep last night, or are ravenously hungry, or just plain old not in the mood. As a home educator, I can choose to leave the maths lesson (or whatever) on those days. And some days you want to carry on for three hours, so engrossed you don’t think of lunch. How maddening to be cut off in your prime because the school bell rang! Maria Montessori was insistent that a focused child should not be interrupted, and it’s such a privilege to be able to follow that advice. (I wrote about this in an earlier post, On Time.)
This afternoon we played Dinosaur Bingo, which would have been better if we owned a dinosaur encyclopedia (how do we not own a dinosaur encyclopedia?), and then I wrote various dinosaur words on the blackboard and we talked about what they mean and their Greek/Latin origins (eg. Raptor, styraco, cephalo etc).
Then a board game from their Lego magazines, and a bit more Bird Cam watching (honestly, it’s taken me longer than usual to write this because I keep flicking over to watch the birds. Also I keep watching really quietly and not touching the iPad, for fear of disturbing the birds… who are on the other side of the Atlantic.). Then we felt inspired to give our own bird feeder a jolly good clean.
By late afternoon the children were getting antsy and much in need of some fresh air (to be expected after 3 straight hours of maths in the morning), and in a moment of inspiration I suggested a torchlit walk at sunset. It was just a short walk round the block but somehow took us 45 minutes, which was a nice way to round off the day and work up a bit of an appetite for tea.
Probably no post tomorrow as we’re planning on spending most of the day out and about with friends. So have a good weekend and see you on Monday!
If you’re not subscribed to How We Homeschool, sign up for free. As well as the daily posts there are guest posts from fellow home educators, longer pieces about specific topics, and lots of booklists. Come and join us!