Adventures in Mama-Land

Nearly 3 years ago, with great trepidation, I released my first printable that wasn’t free:  a Book of Centuries.  More heavily influenced by Charlotte Mason then than I am now, I wanted my kids to do this instead of a timeline because a) our house is tiny, b) our walls are cluttered, and c) I knew it would take us a looooong time to work on. Have you ever seen what happens to a piece of paper after it’s been clinging to the walls for a matter of years???  In my house, at least, it would be in illegible tatters. Anyway, I found lots of versions around, some free, some paid, but most of them had some sort of religious orientation – which is great; frankly, I wanted a religious orientation.  They just weren’t MY religious orientation.  I wanted a book that would show what Jews were doing around the time that various periods of civilization – the Renaissance, say, or the Industrial Revolution – were taking place.  Oh, yeah, and I wanted, hmm, no, NEEDED to s...

A long, LONG time ago, I posted a link to a printable “summer” reading list I’d made up based on Five in a Row (FIAR), a popular unit-studies curriculum for ages 4-8 based around classic picture books that generally emphasize good stories and wholesome values.  Took us a bit more than a summer to get through the books, but eventually we did it, which felt really good.  I’ve wanted to do the same thing ever since then for the books in FIAR2, the second “level” of the curriculum (there is a little-kids version AND a “beyond” curriculum for older kids that generally covers only 1-2 novels per year instead of 20-some-odd picture books.  And now, at last, it’s done! As much as I like the idea of FIAR, this list is my pragmatic nod to the fact that we have absolutely no time or space in our lives to fit in unit studies, and probably wouldn’t be good at them even if we tried.  However, if you’re inclined in that direction, I have heard from others online that the actual...

While it seems to be a public holiday in some parts, around here, with two MORE field trips this week (sigh), we can’t really spare any time, so we’re hard at work – for a change. These are the kids’ narrations for this painting, Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party .  I typed them, so it went quickly. Gavriel Zev’s (his “sketch” of this painting is at right): In the painting, I saw the sea was a little bit green. Two people were on a boat – just plain people, skinny people. One was a man and one was a woman. There was a baby, too. There was a city in the background and some was trees. I liked the painting because there was a lot of particular things. I didn’t like the people very much – they looked a little bit bad (like they weren’t well drawn). And Naomi Rivka’s – I typed hers, then had her copy out the shortest sentence, in keeping with the Well-Trained Mind approach to easing them into their own creative writing, using short passsages from their own narration (in addition to ...

Blah.  This is for Mary Cassatt’s Children at the Shore: In the back there’s an ocean and in it there are 3 boats. On the shore, there are 2 children who look very fat. After this painting, their parents are going to come in one of the boats and take them for a boat ride. I don’t like this painting because the kind I do like is very, very bright and no dark. On one of the girls, there is a ribbon on her hat; the other girl doesn’t have a hat or a ribbon. In the painting, some of the boats are sailing and some of them are just coasting. The girls are digging with a shovel and buckets. Me, prompting… What kind of person do you think WOULD enjoy this painting, even though you don’t? I think Mary Cassatt would like this painting but I don’t like it – maybe her friends would, too. So much for Mary Cassatt being a good, approachable “first artist” for kids.  :-/ (we have studied her before… but Naomi Rivka’s mostly in a contrary mood at the moment and would say she doesn’t like...

I haven’t posted many of these lately, but we’re still doing them.  Naomi’s illustrations are more of the stick-person variety than the detailed scenarios she was sketching before, but they are still cheerful and fun.  Today, she wanted to write her own narration – I wouldn’t let her for the main narration (you can see my lousy handwriting down below), but she added her own caption on the left-hand side.  (the baby carriage floating over the king’s Torah isn’t really floating – it’s in the background ) She got the thing about needing “three things – a chumash, a gemara and a mishna” is from My First Parsha Reader, which said every Jewish home needs these things as part of the mitzvah of writing a sefer Torah.  And then Naomi started correcting me and said, “Every sentence must begin with a capital letter [I write in all-caps, but make the first letter bigger]… and end with a pyramid .”  She meant period, but I drew a little pyramid over the period after Mish...

“I did a great narration!” And he really did.  For him, after we’ve read the parsha summary (usually, on Fridays, we just read the little ones in My First Parsha Reader), I have him draw his picture while Naomi’s telling me her narration.  Then, he tells me what’s in his picture, and I write the “caption.” Here’s what it says: “He (one of the guys) is walking because his bag is really heavy – he brought lots of stuff!  Enemies will chase people out of their house.  The enemies will only come if the Jewish people don’t keep the Torah.  One enemy is getting closer to the person!  The end.”  (he asked me to write that at the end) Now, I’m not sure I love how simplistic this understanding is – but on the other hand, I suppose the essence of this week’s parsha is the idea of reward and punishment, and I really think he got that much.  He just happens to be a 4-year-old boy (4 for two more weeks) who thinks the punishment is way cooler than the re...

Naomi’s narration: “Looking at this painting... it looks like cheese because it's all yellow, and it's autumn, and some people are having a picnic and there's a town in the background and children playing and someone going fishing.  The people are poor people [peasants] and the people come from Ireland.  Some men are cutting down the wheat and the wheat looks like tents.  I do not like this painting because it's all yellow!  I prefer paintings with bright colours:  pink, purple, green, blue, red, turquoise and orange.” This is not exactly up to our usual standards, but it’s a start.  We’re both t rying to get back into the swing of things, which is surprisingly tough right now considering that, theoretically, we learn all through the summer.  (I have no idea how she decided that the people were Irish, but I suppose peasants look like peasants all the world over…) Here’s how we do picture study narration: After a few minutes of guided picture study,...

This has been an exciting couple of weeks of firsts for Gavriel Zev.  Little things, not anything anyone would notice unless they are with him every day and notice he is changing and growing (inside). I think a big part of it has to do with being outdoors – almost all day, every day.  And the freedom to go outside basically whenever he chooses.  Naomi Rivka is jealous, but she’s out there a lot, and I think being alone and being outside are helping Gavriel Zev immensely. So yes, this is his first copywork of any kind, parsha or otherwise, and I’m rather pleased with how he did.  I told him there were four of each word, but that he only had to do two.  At first, he announced – as he always does – that he was going to do all of them.  But I said he should do two of each and then go back and do more if he wanted to… because I know how that turns out; he bites off more than he can chew and then gets discouraged. Anyway, he did two of each, and even coloure...

“LAEF MINT” = mint leaf… he wrote it all by himself, insisting he did not need help.

So I slipped it into this post a couple of weeks ago but nobody set off fireworks, so here it is again: We finished The Long Winter !!!  It was a very, very, VERY hard book to get through.  The rollicking image of winter fun and snowball fighting on the cover is a LIE, I tell you.  They’re just plain lying if they tell you this book will be any fun at all.  It’s a town of barely 100 people slowly, slowly, painfully starving to death over a vicious prairie winter that lasts from, I believe, early October until May.  In fact, if you’re fascinated by such things, there’s actually an adult nonfiction book, The Long Hard Winter of 1880-81: What was it Really Like? , that sounds like it will happily fill you in on all the gruesome details. The Laura Ingalls Wilder book itself is aimed at kids, so everything comes out fine in the end – nobody starves, and the family eats the very last of the grain basically the minute the five-months-overdue train pulls into the...

I hope the world appreciates my sharing this fun resource out of the depths of the bleary delirious fevery sickness my children seem to have shared wtih me… since it’s too early to go to bed and I have to seem reasonably upright so my family doesn’t fall into chaos, I figure I’ll blog instead of collapsing. Periodically, as we study composers or painters or history, we take a few minutes to add new clip art and dates to our Book of Centuries (I’m using this basic Jewish Student’s Book of the Centuries , which I created and sell right here on my site!).  I am always grateful that I had it printed on slightly heavier-than-usual paper stock (I also had it done at Kinko’s so I could be sure it would come out perfect). By the way, though many people advise AGAINST using a Book of Centuries for younger students, because it’s not as visual as a timeline.  But we really don’t have room on our walls for a timeline, and the BOC seems to be doing extremely well.  I keep it in a ...

Naomi LOVES her little Dollarama notebook!  As usual, when my back is turned, she’s busy learning more than I could possibly teach her. Here’s one for anybody who says that the grammar stage (ie grades 1 - 3 or 4ish) isn’t all about memorizing and mastering facts that would make a grown person’s eyes water for how dry and boring they are.  She was SOooo impressed with her own ability to get from 10 to 0 in only a single page of solid arithmetic! Okay, actually, here’s another for anyone who says they are not filling their “fact bank” at this age with things older, more sophisticated people might consider blisteringly dull, like the landforms of Baja California and Mexico:   This is a little mini geography lesson, including a detailed map – she’s copied the shape and mountain range from an atlas she carries around and reads for fun! – and a compass rose.  The other side shows women in a Mexican marketplace. There are also pages and pages of parsha stories and ...

  Well, it’s a bit late for September, but we’re still on-track with the Ambleside Online composer schedule , and we’ve moving on to our next composer:  Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy .  This is now our FOURTH composer (after Beethoven, Vivaldi, Chopin and Mozart), and unlike previous terms, instead of making up a CD of this term’s music, I’m sticking it all on my MP3 player.  So no photo of the cool CD! For our last two composers, I found a wonderful, simple,old-fashioned living book for kids (by Thomas Tapper), took the public-domain text and formatted it as a nice, printable 14-page booklet, including a notebooking page.   However, there is no Tapper book for Mendelssohn, so I wasn’t sure what to do.  I had already seen the book The World’s Great Men of Music , a public-domain book by Harriette Brower, but the text really didn’t look wonderful to me at first.  However… necessity being the mother of invention, and in the absence of other Mendels...

This is our last “normal” week before the roller-coaster of the chagim (MONTH of Jewish holidays coming up).  I’ve found it’s best to cram a lot in the first couple of days of the week, because after that, things tend to fall apart… like this week, when I worked a full day yesterday outside of the home.  Blah. But here’s what we were up to on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and today… Had an “arty” day with Draw Write Now and Mozart!   Did some kinda teary measurement math with JUMP and Cuisenaire Rods.  Not that we don’t love math!  And hopefully, we will love it even more now that we have started reading “Life of Fred:  Apples,” which just arrived this week.  It’s a very, VERY, very strange book.  Naomi isn’t sure she likes it yet, and at first, based only on the cover, she asked me NOT to read it.  But I think she’ll get into it once we’re on our way. Carrying on through First-Time Analogies (we do it during math time).  We’ve move...