Happy Three Kings' Day!

        This was my first year ever of celebrating 3 Kings Day. (Unless you count the time I was on a peace walk in Beit Sahour, Palestine on the feast of the epiphany.)
         The older kids and I had been building it up Seneca in the time right after Christmas. Then, on January 5, my back problems returned and I was confined to bed for most of the day.  I was afraid that there would be no 3 Kings Day on January 6th for us.  I contemplated moving it back a few days.  Since no one else in the family would be celebrating it, I figured Seneca wouldn't even notice.  The good news is that I recovered quickly and was able to get the few gifts under the Christmas tree.  The presents weren't wrapped but simply put into a small box which had recently arrived with my school books in them. I gave each of the older kids their gifts, again small trinket gifts, nothing fancy.
      Telling a 6 year old that the 3 Kings visited in the night got her up and out of bed in no time.  She got her gifts and then mama went to make cinnamon rolls.  Mama cheated big time on this one.  I bought the ready made dough, so that all I had to do was put the dough on the cookie sheet and bake.  Even with that simplicity, I still managed to burn the bottoms. DOH! Oh well, icing topped with red and green sugar - as well as scraping bottom of rolls - cured that little mini-disaster.  Just to clarify, they weren't burnt to a crisp on the bottom, but rather just a little more done than needed to be.
       Seneca and I drew the 3 Kings on our chalkboard along with the Star of Bethlehem and a couple of camels.  We watched Dora Celebrates 3 Kings Day.  A couple of days before, I read the book The Fourth Wiseman to her.     Seni and I also spent two hours at the park.  Going to the park had nothing to do with 3 Kings' Day.
     As you can tell, our celebration was small.  We had no fancy crafts, but I am sure we can expand things in the future.  Again, we were the only ones in our family celebrating, so it was bound to be a small event.  To be honest, small is fine with me.  

just a ditty on CM Method.

          For my seventh grade son, I spent time researching curriculum options and ideas on simplycharlottemason.com.  I found this site to be very helpful and their free curriculum guide on the site is terrific.  The Charlotte Mason Method focuses on living books. The goal is to have the child read well written books on a subject or a person instead of text books or abstracts.
     I have ordered the books, but now I just need to work with him on focusing and on documenting his work.  I also need to work on documentation myself.

Returning to Homeschooling

   Wow, I have really neglected this blog.   At the start of this school year, all three children were back in school, as in public school.  The older kids were at a charter school.  Well, the two older ones decided to return to homeschooling, so we did.
    Yasmeen is in 9th grade and Liam is in 7th grade.  The youngest started kindergarten this year and she will  continue in public school at least until the end of her kindergarten year.
    I've been searching the web to decide how I best wanted to go about homeschooling the older two.  One option was an online school called Florida Virtual School. I'm sure it is a wonderful option for many families, but just not for ours.  One of Yasmeen's friends from school asked how she was being homeschooled if she wasn't doing it online.  I loved her response of, "My mom's really good at this sort of thing."  (Thank you sweetie!)
    In my homeschool research, I decided to read more about the Charlotte Mason Method.  Initially, I had been turned off by all of the mentions of Christianity.  This method does seem to be one of the darlings of he Conservative Christian homeschool world. However, after researching Waldorf and being encouraged to keep an open mind, I resolved to reconsider Charlotte Mason Method and see it through my humanist, liberal lenses.  Once I did that, I fell in love!  This does seem to be a nice middle ground between Waldorf and Classical.  In fact it was so similiar to Waldorf in many ways, that I began to wonder if others combined the two and yes many do!  I found some beautiful blogs by mothers who combine these methods.  My two favorites are serendipity.com and irienarrowpath.com
 I will admit that serendipity.com is very, very Catholic and not my type of Catholic.  My mother is very liberal in her politics and is a Mass going Catholic.  So I was raised with a progressive interpretation of the Catholic faith.  I left the faith as a child.  It wasn't logical.  However, I have lately enjoyed going to Mass with my oldest daughter, the atheist.  She says she enjoys Mass too.  We missed it this week though.
     

The Six Swans

Picture from storynory.com inspired  by  The Six Swans

This week we have been working on the fairy tale, The Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm.  On Monday I told her the story. On Tuesday, I re-told her the story and then we listened to it on story nory.  Storynory.com is a website of free stories to listen to.  On Wednesday, Seneca told me the story of The Six Swans and I wrote down her narration in her lesson book.  A few times, I would prompt her with questions to help her remember the story, but all in all she did quite well.  I was going to have her practice writing some  s words, but she became so frustrated and angry when she felt her writing wasn't good enough.  I tried to re-assure her that she was doing a good job. In truth, she really was doing a good job.  She has perfectionist tendencies at time.  As a mom, those can get to be annoying.  I don't tell her that though.  She did calm down and took to cutting out construction paper to make shapes and forms.  Cutting is such an important fine motor skill and one that leads to developing writing skills.
     She has been digging in her grandma's side yard today and yesterday. She collected and washed off some rocks to share with me today.  I hope that can counter some of her time spent on tv, though I do try to be sure that she is watching PBS Kids if she is watching tv.

     We continue to play mini math games with mancala pieces. We call the pieces fairy or gnome jewels.  We did a pattern sequence together on Wednesday using the different colored pieces.  She did well with continuing the pattern.  She also drew some patterns of her own.

The Road to Seneca Falls

This is the book that I mentioned earlier under the post about Seneca's name.  I had met the author of this book by coincidence.  Of course, I told her that my daughter was named Seneca after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.  The next time that she was in Florida, she brought this book as a gift for my daughter. There is even a signed inscription to my Seneca.

       I had recently been trying to get some information on the role of Quakerism in social reform movements as well as some history of Quakerism.  There is vast information on the internet, but I was having trouble finding what I was specifically looking for.  Then, along came this book with an entire chapter on Quakerism within the families of many of the reformers.  There was even a brief mention of Unitarian Universalists, which is what we are.  

      It is so interesting to read the sections of family raising within a liberal context.  I think about the families that I know, mostly through the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and I see the similarities between us and the families in this book.  We are trying to give our kids a holistic upbringing that values human dignity and respect for our planet.  That is being very simplistic of course, and the exact issues are very different from 150 years ago, but the essence is the same.  

     I am very interested in visiting the Friends Meeting House again soon. I also need to get back to the UU Church as well.  (I've been out of the loop on many things dealing with a bad leg.)  Quakerism and UUism are often considered to be very complimentary to each other.  It is quite likely for one to meet a UU Quaker.  

       I will post some more thoughts on my readings of The Road To Seneca Falls as they come to me.

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Seneca-Falls-Elizabeth-Convention/dp/0252071735/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342716299&sr=1-1&keywords=the+road+to+seneca+falls

Journal

July 11, 2012

            Seneca wanted me to re-tell the story of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm.  As I did, she acted it out.  This version is more detailed than the Disney one.  The wicked queen makes two attempts against Snow White before using the poisoned apple.  Seneca seemed to like all the times that she got to pretend to faint.

            Seneca is becoming a bit grumpy when it comes to lesson time.  She had lots of fun with acting out her story, but she hasn’t wanted to do her form drawing lately.  She did some forms today, but I wanted her to calm down and focus on just one form.  I gave up on that fairly quickly though.  I had hoped that we would do some phonics words today, but she wasn’t having it.  We did however play more make believe and she played with a mancala board and pieces.  

            Seneca heard me speaking to her brother about nocturnal animals and she piped in that she remembered that Jaguars were nocturnal.  She said that she remembered learning that from her library book.

            I’m struggling at times between wanting to introduce new concepts and lessons to her, but at the same time making sure that we have time to review lessons that we have already done.  I know that she gets more out of repetition at this time.  However, as she gets closer to potentially entering kindergarten, I want to be sure that has progressed along as well.

            I’m thinking about only adding on a few more fairy tales to the ones that I tell her.  My curriculum book for her is full of many fairy tales, but I am leaning toward telling less and then repeating them throughout the year. 

Plugged In Summer

  So, I've had to take a grand plunge into the world of what many may call mainstream parenting.  I have a pinched nerve in my back which is affecting my right leg.  I hobble around and can't stand for very long.  I have a chair in the shower.  I can't stand up long enough to cook anything, so this means that the kids and I have to live on take out. 
      As most everyone knows though, take out does not equate healthy.  It definitely equals expensive though, except for McDonald's.  So, I suck it up and we eat a lot of McDonald's.  Granted, we also try to get salads from McDonald's.  I have had friends go shopping for me and pick up things like yogurts, ready to eat fruits, hummus and pita bread. 
       Another foray away from my ideals is the amount of tv the kids have been watching.  I had all of these glorious plans for our summer.  I have tickets for Sunken Gardens in St. Pete as well the The Florida Aquarium.  They are just sitting in the limbo of the computer just waiting for me to print them out.  I also had plans to go to the beach and to the parks in the evenings just to get the kids unplugged.  Well, if I can't drive and can barely walk, those things have proven to be impossible. So, Dora the Explorer to the rescue in our house these days.  Oh well, at least this situation is only temporary.  
            In the meantime, I do try to encourage non media activities as much as possible.  The older kids are working on their summer reading for school.  A lot of the shows that Liam watches are educational. He was just watching the civil war era movie, Gods and Generals, and he was looking at one of his civil war books. 
        Seneca worked on writing some of her phonics words yesterday. She also spends a good amount of time somersaulting and running through my mother's house.  She'll get to go to a mall in Tampa tonight with her awesome sitter.  I know, I'm raising a mall-chick, what can I say?  Well, we hardly ever go to the mall, even when my leg is good, so again, choose my battles.
    And she has spent many a time with me in my bed reading her phonics books, telling stories, playing I Spy, cutting and gluing at her table, coloring, and more.  So, she is not a drone all day long.
       Just before class started the other night, one of the young ladies was talking about how her friend has a 3 year old daughter and the little girl has these neat games on ipad to play.  I thought about how glad I am that my child will not have an ipad until she is much older.  Even, my teenage kids don't have an ipad.  So, while my five year old will be watching more cartoons than I would like, she still is free from the ipad craze. 
     The thing is, I know we will come out the other end of our plugged in summer just fine.