A Homeschool Recap and New Books

So, we're still getting used to homeschooling but I'm feeling a lot more confident about my abilities these days.   What changed?  Well, one of the first things I did was start to contact mothers who were veteran homeschoolers, especially a friend of mine who has taught her own children for around 15 years and has (to me, at least) done it all.  She's tried the curriculums, the extra classes, the angst, the homeschooling groups, the online support, etc. etc.  And her children are lovely examples of what concerted homeschool effort can produce, so I arranged a coffee date and picked her brain for an hour.  After asking every question I could think of, I felt a little bit more prepared to venture into this unknown territory, and significantly more confident about my abilities to teach my child.

I've also started a homeschool binder, which is hopefully going to help me to keep track of what we've done, when we've done it, and how it all went.

The first week, if you remember, we were going to study pinecones.  Although it went very well, I think, it also ended up being very different from what I'd expected.  In hindsight, I don't know what I thought would happen, but the reality was...it just sort of 'fit' into our lives rather than being a separate school time.  Perhaps this is more of an indication of Samuel's age than anything else.

What we did:  We went for a walk and collected pinecones.  While we were out we talked about how pinecones come from pine trees.  I used the word 'coniferous', and I don't entirely know why.  There was mention of cones not being found under leafy trees.  We spent the next several days playing with the cones, looking at them, discussing their colours, sizes, etc.  We talked about how seeds are in the cone, which cones were open and which were closed.  The cones were THE toy of the week.  We painted using pine needles instead of brushes, and we started reading a few books about trees in general.  (Our picks were listed in the Currently Reading section of the blog, but as a recap, we read The Kids Canadian Tree Book, Have You Seen Leaves, Things You Find In The Woods, and Leaf Man from the library, and Little Mouse On The Prairie from our own library.) 

Week 2 was going to be Farm Animals.  We did make a field trip to a working dairy farm where Samuel got to see calves, dairy cows, pigs, dogs, roosters and chickens, and to collect his own eggs.  It was a great trip and he really enjoyed it.  We reinforced the trip by reading The New Baby Calf, a pick from our own collection.  Samuel used a lot of imaginative play this week in having fun with his toy barn and animals.  We also continued our exploration of fall by reading Fresh Fall Leaves, another personal collection read, and re-reading several of the books from last week.

Week 3 is this week.  We're looking at leaves now, and also including a bit about Thanksgiving.  We went for a walk to collect leaves and discussed what colours they were.  Once we were back home we looked at Leaf Man and compared our leaves to the pictures.  Then we drew pictures of our leaves.  We've added Thanks For Thanksgiving to our reading list and I have returned our week 1 books to the library. I made a run by myself to the library to spend some time in the stacks taking a peek at what sort of Thanksgiving books there are, and there aren't a lot.  It's a little overwhelming to see the gaps in our public library because it makes me realize more and more how much I will be relying on our own personal collection.

In terms of reference books, right now I'm looking through the following for ideas (all of these titles are from our personal collection right now, I haven't started using the library as a reference resource to any great extent yet):


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Definately going to use some of the ideas in here to make fall-themed crafts.  The main ones I'm thinking of are a leaf-shaped salt-dough garland and a recycled tray bird feeder.  I also like the animal-shaped sponges and may make a few of those myself to tuck into Sam and Clara's stockings.

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Still a bit advanced for anything Samuel could do or think about at this point, but two useful books for me to look through just for ideas.

Author's website

Apparantly a 'classic' in the world of books about reading to children.  I've been dipping into it when I can and am looking forward to getting into the treasury of titles for different ages listed in the back of the book.  Reading aloud is very, very important to us, and I hope this author can help us be the best at it that we can be.

Some other titles that are in my 'to read' pile but that I haven't gotten to yet:


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I'm really hopeful for this second one, especially the parts about making devotionals easy.  And a quick flip through gave me an idea for preschool 'fishing poles' that I think Samuel would really like.

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I like the sound of this one.

Anyway, that's where we are right now.