Posts tagged as:

homeschooling

Flinch!

September 12, 2009

Rio starts kindergarten on Monday. I’ve already told the story of our decision to send her to school here and on Babble. I’ve been alternately praised for listening to my daughter and castigated for my failures as a mom. Today I want to talk about what happened during that now-famous conversation when she asked me [...]

Tagged as: education, homeschooling, kindergarten, rio

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Fall leaves?

August 24, 2009

Every week, I do a nature walk with my preschool kids. We stroll around the block in as much silence as a group of 2-5 years olds can muster while awake, and pay attention with our eyes and our ears and our noses and our skin to what’s happening in nature.
The highlight of the walk [...]

Tagged as: homeschooling, nature

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Strawberry Jam!

June 17, 2009

The kids and I made half our haul of strawberries into a tasty jam this afternoon. Rio and Serena were both great helpers, as was the morning preschool gang. They washed the berries, cut the tops off them with a safety knife, and put them into bowls for mashing. Rio even helped stir the sugar [...]

Tagged as: food, homeschooling

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Strawberry Picking!

June 16, 2009

Today the girls and I went to Red Fire Farm, the organic farm that provides our vegetable CSA. The bulk of the CSA comes to us in the form of a weekly drop-off at the Growing Center, but we also have an open invitation to go pick some crops at the farm. It’s a long [...]

Tagged as: food, green, homeschooling

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Kindergarten, here we come

June 8, 2009

Sitting at the table one day, about ten days ago, Rio and I were doing a math project. She seemed to have come to the end of her interest in it. It was a simple game with paper, pen and a box of smooth round stones.
(In spite of everything I am about to say, I [...]

Tagged as: education, eliot-pearson, homeschooling, rio, school, tufts

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Is this a clock?

May 21, 2009

IMG_3894.JPG, originally uploaded by MzMuze.

This is a photograph of the clock on top of my kids’ puppet theater. The hands only move at the urging of human hands to set the time. There’s no battery or clockwork behind the face, so normally it does not keep time. We use it as a learning toy for [...]

Tagged as: homeschooling

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Peanut Butter Dough

May 14, 2009

When I was a child, one of my favorite snacks was Peanut Butter Balls. The recipe for these is delightfully simple:

Wash all the hands that might go in the mixture. This includes your own, any child helpers, and any children who claim they do not want to help but might get drawn in once they [...]

Tagged as: food, homeschooling

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Reading Games for Four-year-olds

May 12, 2009

rio’s reading game.jpg, originally uploaded by MzMuze.
Rio made this!
Background:
I’ve been reading an interesting book, published in the 70s, called the Home Guide to Early Reading. This is pretty much the opposite of the Waldorf approach I’ve taken with my kids thus far. The author advocates a playful but structured approach to teaching reading beginning at [...]

Tagged as: homeschooling, play, reading, rio

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The Shrinking of Treehorn

May 8, 2009

Serena took this book out of the library. I think she chose it because it was a nice shade of green and charmingly square.
When we got it home, I noticed that the drawings were by Edward Gorey, a favorite artist of our entire family’s. We’ve been to visit his house on the Cape, and generally [...]

Tagged as: homeschooling, humor, reading

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Unschooling: the right approach?

May 6, 2009

Rio is changing. She wants to learn to read and write numbers up to 100. She wants to go out and play in the neighborhood on her own. She wants to read picture books to herself.
In most families, these would be signs that she’s ready for kindergarten. But she’s not going to kindergarten, and I [...]

Tagged as: homeschooling, rio, unschooling

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