the school stuff

new school supply caddy, a cutlery caddy from Target

I've been planning and organizing our school stuff the last few days and have said a few things about it on Facebook.  A friend asked to see how I had everything organized after I got it in shape.  So, here you go!

The vast majority of our school stuff lives in the enormous 5x5 Ikea Expedit.  I passionately love this thing.  I'll talk you through its contents row-by-row in a moment.  To the left of the Expedit is our current picture study. This summer we're studying local artist George Rodrigue, so we have some Blue Dog on the wall.  We change pictures every couple of weeks.  Underneath that, on the floor, is the basket of library books that is almost always overflowing.  I've got a small sling bookshelf on the way to better control the massive weekly library influx, so that will go in that space when it gets here.  To the right is a small bulletin board that holds recent art projects for display, and a 100 chart with some pails for hundreds, tens, and ones for us to work on place value. We almost never remember to use it, though. I either need to get consistent with that or take it down! 

On the top row, I keep things that are for mama only.  First cube has Five in a Row manuals and future books, and a bin with resources for picture, nature, composer, and geography study (our Charlotte Mason-y stuff).    Second and third cubes have readers and a few "occasional use" workbooks, things that I don't assign daily or even particularly often, but still hold some interest (Lollipop Logic, a Kumon cutting book, and a sequencing book from the dollar store).  The fourth cube has reference books like The Well Trained Mind, The Read Aloud Handbook, some Charlotte Mason books, etc.  The fifth cube has the kids' binders of finished work.  Those are still in need of a purging and re-labeling for the new school year.  

I'm pretty enamored with my "chalkboard" vinyl labels on my bins, too!

The second row holds most of the stuff we use day in and day out.  First cube is current workbooks (Handwriting Without Tears and Singapore Essential Math), plus small dry erase boards, clipboards, and my planner (pink binder).  Last year I had current workbooks in a portable file box sort of like this, but I decided to use cute magazine files from the Target $1 section this year.  I might end up changing that back, as it was pretty darn convenient to grab that file box and move it to the table and have all the workbooks right there.  It was also nice to be able to grab the box for school-on-the-go at the library or wherever.  So, we'll see about that. Second cube has reading materials for the twins (Happy Phonics games and Phonics Pathways).   The third box has a three-tiered tray thing for finished work (one tray per kid).  The last two cubes have handwriting manipulatives (sandpaper letters, Handwriting Without Tears stuff, and salt boxes).

The middle row has things that kids need regular access to. First cube holds our supply caddy.  The second and third cubes hold some frequent use math manipulatives.  The fourth cube has a 3-hole punch and a bin with phonics readers that have already been covered and are now available for free-reading.  The last cube has stacking trays with construction paper.

The entire fourth fourth row holds kids' books.  The baskets hold paperback books and the three cubes in the middle hold hardcover books.  Besides the paperback/hardback split, I don't impose any other organizational system on kids' books.  Chapter books and grown-up books live on bookshelves in the TV room.

The bottom row has Target Itso fabric bins for storage of things I'm not using right now or don't want kids rifling through (out of sight, out of mind!).  These are things like spare school supplies bought at back-to-school sales, the spelling curriculum a friend handed down that we're not ready for yet, paper (card stock, copy paper, handwriting paper, notebook paper) and such like that.

On the other side of the room, we have the orange dresser o' junk.  Not really junk, just less used school stuff.  There are more math manipulatives (geoboards, inchimals, play money, unifix cubes, pattern blocks), sentence strips, flashcards of various sorts, some busy bag sorts of activities, and who knows what else?!  The white cabinet holds mostly my yarn and knit/crochet things.  There is some kid paint in the top, but most of the kid art supplies are in the hall closet.  The baskets in the middle of the white cabinet have current yarn projects and kid bible resources (story bibles, bible coloring books, etc).

Our We Choose Virtues cards and poster are on the pantry doors.

Our memory box (for bible verses, poetry, whatever we're memorizing) is on the basket drawer thing under the bar that holds napkins and such.  We review our We Choose Virtues and our memory box during breakfast, so those things live in the kitchen.

The last school-y thing I have is my map, mounted on a large piece of foam core poster board and hung with Command picture hanging strips.  My USA map is mounted on the flip side, so when we need it, we just pop the map off the wall and turn it around.  Works well!

NICU day 2013

Hazel and I delivered our annual NICU knit/crocheted hat stash today, only a month late. This year, NICU day was a comedy of errors.  Every other year, we've taken hats ON the anniversary of her discharge from NICU, which is June 22, but this year, we had the big flood on June 21, which made the 22nd about the craziest day this family had seen in a long time.

We postponed it for the next weekend, but ended up with sick kids.  Same story the week after that. Finally, today, we got a good opportunity, but I forgot to take pictures.  Oh well.  We did have fun, it just wasn't well documented.

We took hats to the NICU nurses at our local hospital.  We don't actually get to go into NICU, but we got to peek through the window of the regular newborn nursery at some cute little squishes.  Afterward we went to Starbucks for cake pops and then stopped in the library.  Good outing.  Hazel also drew a picture to deliver with the hats this year, which was fun.  I enjoy seeing her take some ownership of this annual celebration of her homecoming!

This year's stash:




My favorites were the rainbows. Hazel said hers was the pink butterfly (bottom row, 2nd from right).  

Not our largest gifting, but it still exceeded my basic goal, which is 10 hats for Hazel's 10 days in  NICU + 2 more for Jono's 2 days.  I ran out of time to do some football beanies this year.  We'll have to make sure we get some of those in next year.

summer 2013, so far

After a few moments with a genius at the Apple store tonight, iphoto is happy again and I was able to get pics off of my phone to blog! Here's a summer update, so far.

Three kids have been doing two evenings a week at swim school and are improving by leaps and bounds! 

Some kids turned FIVE! 

Someone else turned SIX!

We celebrated with a yummy daddy-made cake and a weekend at Jellystone.

Someone got her braces off. (Less than flattering photo taken by the six year old.)

The mud room and TV room got flooded by a hot water heater leak...

resulting in several very noisy days with industrial fans and dehumidifiers to dry everything out...

and the removal of all the laminate flooring and some small sections of sheet rock.  

Repairs to walls, painting, and new floors should go in next week.  I'll post a finished picture, I promise. 

Someone is thoroughly unable to eat corn-on-the-cob due to lack of teeth.

We had a super cute family photo taken at a rainy Zephyrs game.

On the other hand, things that have not been happening this summer include NICU day and crafting in general.  

Hazel's NICU day landed on the Saturday after the Friday flood of the front rooms.  Things were too insane for us to go.  Then we had a long spell of random tummy bugs that kept us from rescheduling it.  We're trying again tomorrow.  Hopefully I'll have an update about that soon.  Better late than never, right?  

My craft supply closet got wet in the flood, so sewing is impossible until things are put back in place and fabric and machines are out of boxes.  Knitting doesn't appeal as much when it's hot, either, so this summer has been craft-light.  I've got a little cross-stitch project going for when my fingers get itchy, but that's really it!  

I've been spending lots of time hashing out our school plans for kindergarten and first grade in the fall, so I'll update about that sometime soon, too.  

Thanks for catching up with us!  

Routine Days

I had someone who has a 3yo and a baby and is thinking about homeschooling in a couple of years ask me what my best advice was for her at this stage of her life.  The pre-school age.  Easiest question ever, for me.  Establish routines.  Here is what I told her, more or less:

I am not a mama who thrives when things are chaotic, cluttered, unplanned, or unstructured.  The best thing have done for my life as a stay-at-home (and now, homeschooling) mom is to create routines.  Around when my oldest turned 3 is when I really started firming up our days and creating predictable routines.  We still have the routines that I put in place around that time.  They have morphed to suit our lives as a mama with kindergarten-ish aged kids instead of 3ish year old kids, but the bones are the same.  

I started with connecting "helping" (chores), "learning", "reading", and "outings" to other things that were a given in our schedule--mostly meals and naps.  Having a routine, not a schedule--no times are tied to most of it--helps the kids to know what to expect, and allows me to handle the chaos that kids throw with (some) grace.  Here is what our days look like.  Every day.  Summer, winter, vacation, when sick, when we have company, literally EVERY day.  The bolded things are the things that are a given.  We'll eat three meals, nap/rest, bathe, and go to bed every day, without fail (OK, sometimes the bath gets skipped). The things between are things that are tied to those givens in the minds of my children.  When do we do chores? AFTER breakfast.  When is story time? BEFORE rest and BEFORE bed.  When is free play? AFTER school work in the morning or after chores in the afternoon.  This way, they know what to expect.

Breakfast (a given in our schedule)

• Helping (dressing and brushing teeth, bringing breakfast dishes to the kitchen, sweeping up crumbs on the floor, wiping off the table)
• Learning (at 3, that might have been reading a book or two, over time it has grown into our full school time) --this is Monday through Friday only
• Outing (errands or play dates, if there are any on the schedule) or free play if not

Lunch (a given in our schedule)

• Helping (cleaning up from lunch)
• Reading 

Naps/Rest time I have never let my kids think that nap time was something that could be "given up"! Now they no longer sleep, but everyone gets an hour and a half in their rooms with books, toys, games, coloring, or whatever they want to do that can be done at a reasonable volume.  It's how an introverted mom survives the day. ;) 

• Helping (tidying up our toys and rooms)
• free play (board games, outside, crafts, screen time, etc)
• Outing (some days we have classes or errands to run in the afternoon)

Dinner

• free play

Baths 

• Reading

Bed
Notice that there are no times on my schedule.  It's all "what comes next".  And it really does work in all seasons and in all circumstances.  Sure, when company is in town, we skip the school part in the mid morning, just like we do on Saturdays, but we still do our chores after breakfast before we have an outing with Grandma!   On vacation, we still read books and have some intentional down time in the afternoon.  We rarely rest on vacation for the full hour and a half that we rest at home, and if we don't have the space for everyone to rest on their own, we compromise with being still in front of a movie, but it helps attitudes SO much to have that break in the middle of the day!   

Having routine like this in place has been a LIFESAVER.  We were able to  transition smoothly from toddlerhood to homeschooling without any problems at all as a result.  I know not all of my blog readers are homeschoolers, but I think the general principles of routined days apply.  Many of you moms probably don't need the same sort of structure that I do to thrive, either.  More power to you if you can handle the chaos with less imposed order!   Sometimes I wish I could, but I cannot.  This is what works for us.  I hope that helps someone else out there who is feeling like their days are a little chaotic.  Try to tie some routines to the set parts of your day and see if it helps! 

Picture Study: art appreciation for your homeschool

I was first introduced to Charlotte Mason at 22 years old, when I applied to teach 3rd grade at Regents School of Austin.  Teaching applicants for the grammar school were required to read two books, one on classical education and one on Charlotte Mason.  The curriculum in Regents' grammar school was a combination of the two methods, and a CM/classical mix remains my personal model for my homeschool.  The Charlotte Mason book I had to read was For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.  It remains one of the most lovely and inspiring books on education I've ever read.  I taught at Regents for 4 years and all of my favorite parts about the grammar school were the Charlotte Mason-y things that we did.  One of those was picture study.

I mentioned to a friend that we had just done our first picture study in our homeschool, and she said I should blog about it.  I was hesitant, since after all, I'm a rookie homeschooler.  My oldest child turns 6 this week.  We're just getting started! I didn't feel like I had enough experience to really give a how-to on the subject of picture study.  She insisted that my writing about what we did would encourage other homeschoolers who had never done art appreciation to try it as well.  If it wasn't too scary for me, it might not be too scary for others.  Fair enough.

Picture study is a really easy way to do art appreciation in your homeschool.   This little YouTube video from Simply Charlotte Mason is precisely the method I used.



The method is simply:

• Tell your children the name of the artist and the painting.
• Display the picture and have them study it quietly for a few moments, encouraging them to close their eyes occasionally and see if they can "see" the picture in their mind's eye.
• Turn the picture over and ask, "What did you see?" Let them take turns telling you as much detail as they can remember.  Participate and share observations of your own!   Ask leading questions if needed to jog their memories ("Yes! I saw flowers, too.  What color were they?")
• Turn the picture back over where everyone can see it and see if there's anything else they notice that they didn't remember the first time.  
• Hang the picture in a visible place for a week or two until you do another study. 

It's EASY.  It's FAST.  We did ours at the breakfast table this morning between bites of cereal and toast.  And my children completely loved it.  They dragged Daddy over to where I had hung the picture as soon as he got home and told him every single detail they could remember.  They were so proud.  

I am planning to do three artists a year--one in the fall, one in the spring, and one in the summer.  I plan to study approximately six works from each artist, doing a new one every other week or so.  For our first artist, we are doing George Rodrigue, who is local to us, has sculpture in our city park's sculpture garden and a gallery in the French Quarter.  There are adorable children's books about Blue Dog, his most famous subject.  I bought a Blue Dog calendar to cut up for our study of his art.

This fall, we plan to study Monet, and in the spring, Beatrix Potter.  I will probably try this pack of Monet pictures from Dover Publishing for Monet, and maybe just use our Beatrix Potter story book compilation for her, or try another calendar.  We'll see.

There are artist lists on Simply Charlotte Mason's website.  I also reference the curriculum lists from Regents (the school I taught at) for ideas on which artists, composers, etc to study which years.  Their two artists for kindergarten are Mary Cassat and Norman Rockwell, both of which would be so fun to study with young children!  Maybe we'll do them next year!  Their lists are available to the public, by clicking on a grade level under "What to Expect" on the right hand side of the page here.  They try to associate artists with the time periods they study in history, so we studied Greek pottery, Greek and Roman sculpture, etc in third grade along with our study of Ancient Civilizations.  Fourth grade has the Middle Ages, and on up from there.

I don't think you need to associate your art appreciation with your other curriculum, though.  Not necessarily.  It's perfectly fine to choose any artist that you're interested in, source some pictures of their work (or use Google Images to do a picture study on your computer), and go for it!  Ten minutes, twice a month is my goal, and I think that's completely doable!

Anyone inspired to join me?

Jack's summer wardrobe

The kids have been telling me that Jack didn't have enough clothes.  He needed some shorts and shirts and some pajamas, specifically.  I added a bunch to his wardrobe today, and thought I'd post some pics.

Robot pajamas, form a smidge of purchased robot flannel and a recycled tshirt.

Robot long sleeved shirt and gray shorts.  Shirt was made from an outgrown shirt of the boys' and the gray fabric was leftover from Hazel's Easter dress.  

Camouflage shorts and gray tshirt with fire truck appliqué.  Camo shorts and gray tshirt fabric were recycled from some outgrown clothes, plus one of those nifty iron-on appliqués from Joanns.  I threw his sweatshirt on over this because the length of the tshirt sleeves are funny.  Ha! 

Seer sucker shorts and orange tshirt.  Orange tshirt was another outgrown clothes upcycle.  I bought a smidge of seer sucker fabric for the shorts.  He's wearing Jess's flip flops here, which I'm not sure is a good look.  Poor Jack needs some non-soccer cleat shoes.  I'll have to look into that for him. 

I enjoy using outgrown clothes in my dolly sewing!  They're cheap, readily available, and the kids are always happy to see their old stuff made into something new!

Memorial Day sewing

The kids have been bugging me about making some more clothes for Jack, the American Boy.   Particularly, they thought he needed pjs, shorts and shirts, and underwear.  I set out to make all 3 this weekend, and only got as far as shorts and a shirt, and undies.  I was going to do pajama pants and a red t-shirt with an appliqué to match the pants, but underestimated the amount of red t-shirt fabric I had and didn't have enough left to cut out the sleeves.  I made a muscle shirt instead, and painted it patriotically to go with my kids 4th of July shirts.  I'll do a different colored t-shirt for the pajama pants at some point in the future.  I made some gray shorts with patch pockets.  They came out super cute.  The shorts pattern was this one, lengthened about 3/4" (and I'd lengthen them even a bit more next time) and I winged it with the pockets after reading through a tutorial for pockets on (full-sized) little boy's shorts.

Then the undies.  Oy.  I'd so rather buy underwear for tiny dolls than make them. Small fiddly things with elastic make my head hurt.  But as there is really not much market for 18" boy doll clothes, I got to  figure out underwear on my own.  I started with this pattern, which says it fits 11" waisted dolls (ballpark for AG).  I cut and sewed one pair straight from the pattern and found that they fit around beautifully, but were FAR too short in the rise.  That little bum was not covered!  I did a second pair, adding about 3/4" to the top all the way around.  Better.  I put 1" elastic to make up the rest of the rise, which was still a bit lacking.  I'd like to do another pair, add even more height particularly in the rear, and instead use a 3/4" wide elastic, which would look less disproportionate.  My kids are pleased though, so that's what matters.  

And yes, poor Jack had to suffer the indignity of standing outside in his skivvies.  

summer plans

I spent the morning working on our summer schedule and plans.  I had a bunch of thoughts floating around in my head about what I wanted to do this summer, which ways I wanted the summer to be a continuation of our normal routines, and which ways I wanted it to be different.  I finally sorted all those thoughts out on paper, and I'm excited!  I think we'll really enjoy the next few months!

Link to my schedule in Google Docs in case it's too hard to read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PS5eNxAdCAQo2z51poCa38G2KeTDrg_l-fdlu8-mQ7g/edit?usp=sharing

As you can see, our schedule is pretty loose.  No times are listed for anything, just suggestions of what activities to do on the different days.  David is off every other Friday, so the Friday plans are for those when he's at work.  When he's off, it counts as "weekend".

I wanted to take a break from our core homeschool curriculum, Five in a Row, mostly so that I could have a break in planning.  I want to continue with reading (phonics), handwriting, and math, because all of my kids are in a place where they are making major strides in those subjects and taking significant time off could cause big set-backs.  I wanted to hit each of the 3Rs at least 3x a week.  I decided to plan for 2 subjects a day, rotating.  Our school time should be doable in 30-60 minutes total, which should make it easy to fit in on any day, even when we have something else planned later in the morning.

Our MOPs group will have play dates at the park every Thursday in June and July.  Those are on the schedule.  I want to make a weekly trip to the library to check out books on some theme that interests the kids.  We haven't made a "library theme list" yet, but we will.  I think next weeks's theme will be bugs and bug collections.  Hazel has been asking a lot about that.

Other than that, I wanted us to have a weekly craft day, where we could do a craft on the theme of our library books, or not, whatever.  And I wanted us to have "fun days"--days where we chose something from our Summer Fun list to do.  We brainstormed a Summer Fun list at lunch today.  I thought they'd have more ideas, but it took a lot of suggestion.  Most of the list is outings (like the aquarium and eating snoballs), but some are backyard (sprinklers, gardening).  Some we'll do more than once, I'm sure.  Others will be added over the course of the summer as ideas strike.

Our music class is over after tomorrow, until the fall.  We're going to add swim school on Tuesdays in place of music.  So we'll have that two afternoons a week.  We're adding a family game night, which will be new for us.  Hopefully that's fun.  And it just occurred to me that I didn't include speech therapy for Jono on Wednesday afternoons.  I guess I should make sure we're continuing that through the summer!

But that's the plan! If you're local, I'm sure I'll be posting a lot of "We're going to ____, come with us!" on Facebook on our Summer Fun list days.  So, please do!

Wrap Up: Another Celebrated Dancing Bear

Another Celebrated Dancing Bear is a unit from Five in a Row, volume 1.  It was one of my absolute favorites!  This book was among some that my sister-in-law bought for my kids for Christmas (I asked for some FIAR titles that neither of our library systems had).  I had planned to row a different book this week, but forgot to get it at the library, and was facing Sunday afternoon planning time with no book. I grabbed this one off the shelf and planned it instead, and I'm SO glad we did!  

On our first day, we read a nonfiction book from the library about bears and tried our hand at drawing one.  I think they turned out really well!  Top row is mine and Charlie's, bottom row is Hazel's and Jono's.  Jono chose to color his bear black with a tan nose and ears like his build-a-bear Albert instead of brown like the bears in our story.  I loved that!  We used these instructions, and I only had to help with the heart-shaped noses for a couple of them.  The rest of the shapes were simple enough for them to do by themselves.  

The second day we spent on geography and the country and culture of Russia.  We found Moscow, St Petersburg, and Minsk on our map (the three cities mentioned in our story).  We read a library book about Russia, and looked some pictures of Russian architecture. We talked about things that were special from Russia like Tchaicovsky's ballets and matryoshka dolls.  We watched The Nutcracker (thank you, Netflix!), watched some Russian dancing on YouTube, and they chose from a coloring activity--either some printed stacking dolls or a coloring sheet of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. 

mine left, Charlie's right, Hazel's are still in progress.

Jono's

 Our third day we spent at the zoo, with a specific aim to see both kinds of bears that are in our zoo's collection.  Our zoo has Sun bears from southeast Asia, and the north american black bear, who live down here in Louisiana! As usual, the bears looked bored and sleepy.  

Our fourth day was a language arts activity on writing descriptive sentences.  In the book, the two bears are described, "Boris was a heavy-footed brown bear whose heart was soft as butter.  Max--short for Maximovich--was taller than Boris and always seemed quite elegant."  I had the children pick a bear's description and use the same form to describe someone in our family.  I wrote out their sentences and they used them for handwriting practice over the next couple of days.  Their descriptions are hilarious! 

The boys did their handwriting as tracing work.  Hazel did hers as copywork.  She's more confident in the fine motor department. ;)

Our fifth day was an applied math lesson on telling time to the hour.  In the story, Max tells Boris that  his dancing lessons will be "Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Seven o'clock to eight."  We got down the Judy clock and learned to read time to the hour.  We did a lot of practice, with everyone turning the clock to different hours and quizzing one another.  Afterwards, I gave them an optional time-telling worksheet from Kumon's Easy Telling Time.  Two-thirds of them chose to continue their time lesson with some pencil and paper work from the workbook.  Hazel showed additional interest and got an overview of telling time to any multiple of 5 around the clock.  She caught on quickly with only :05 tripping her up.  

Our last day we had a tea party like Max and Boris.  The bears in the story had tea with bread and strawberry preserves.  We had the same, except most of us opted for apple juice in our fancy tea cups instead of tea. Daddy baked us a big loaf of gluten free bread before he left for his business trip especially for the occasion. They were so thrilled to wake up to tea party for breakfast, to use the china teacups and plates, and to invite a "teddy bear" to our party.  Teddy bear in quotes because they came back with 2 cats and a fox.  

digging in

Hazel provided her tea set for the stuffed animals' use.  Kitty got serious about his tea.

Awesome first-thing-in-the-morning hair!

Napkin rings turn us into monsters.

and pirates.

Fox needed a refill.

We enjoyed several go-along books during this row.  They asked me to read The Littlest Matryoshka twice in the same day.  BIG hit.  I loved Renchenka's Eggs. You can never go wrong with Patricia Polacco.  Berlioz the Bear was also super cute.  We love Jan Brett, and this book had a bumblebee sting scene reminiscent of The Story of Ferdinand which the kids though was fun.  Our favorite of the nonfiction books we checked out about Russia was R is for Russia.

 Delightful story, delightful row.  Thanks for reading!

Wrap Up: Mirette on the High Wire

Sometime in the middle of last week, we finished a row on Mirette on the High Wire from Five in a Row, volume two.  Such a wonderful story on courage and determination!  We loved it!

For each of our FIAR subjects, we did the following:

Social Studies/Geography: We reviewed Paris and France.  We had read two other books with FIAR that took us to Paris and France (Madeline and How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World), so the location was familiar.  We made French flags out of construction paper, and then spent some time watching circus and high wire walking acts on youtube.

Language Arts: We discussed that Emily Arnold McCully had won the Caldecott Medal for the most outstanding picture book in the year that Mirette was published.  We talked about what made outstanding picture books, and then pulled from our shelves all the other books we had that were Caldecott winners or honor books.  We have a lot!  We took some time to read through and enjoy some of those books.

Applied Math: We went to the library and checked out this wonderful book, also about a high wire walker.

The Man Who Walked Between the Towers is about a French high wire walker who illegally strung a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s and walked back and forth between them.  There is a documentary on Netflix about him, as well, if you're interested, but it's not entirely appropriate for children.  I enjoyed it!  Our math lesson was about the shortest distance between two points being a straight line.  I drew a picture of the two sky scrapers on a sheet of paper (VERY rough sketch) and asked the kids if one of them worked on the top floor of one building and other worked on the top floor of the other building, what you would have to do to go visit one another.  We drew lines going down the elevator, across the street, and up the elevator on the other side.  Then we drew a line across from one building to the other, the way the wire-walker did it.  MUCH shorter!  Fun way to demonstrate that mathematical concept, I thought, and entirely my husband's idea.  Go Dad!

Science: We talked about our senses, and read a library book about how our body uses our brains, our ears, and our muscles to help us keep our balance.  I set up a little cinder block and 2x4 balance beam and we tried walking forward, backward, sideways, stepping over some bean bags as we walked the length, walking with a bean bag on our heads, etc.  The kids were MUCH better at this than I was.  Their balance is actually quite remarkable!

We enjoyed several go-along books this week about the circus.  There are also a few sequels about Mirette by the same author.  Our library had Mirette and Bellini Cross Niagara Falls, so we read that one as well.  

We are only rowing one more book this year before we take a summer break from Five in a Row! We plan to continue with some school stuff through the summer, especially phonics/reading, but this mama would like a planning break, so FIAR will be shelved until sometime in August or September.  I'll post one more wrap up of our unit on Another Celebrated Dancing Bear when we finish it, and then you can probably expect the blog to be pretty quiet for a few months.  Thanks for following along!

How I plan Five in a Row

When I settled on using Five in a Row for our PK/K core curriculum this past school year, I did some reading on various blogs and the FIAR forum to see how others plan their "rows".  I'm certainly not doing anything groundbreaking or new with my planning, but I thought I'd go ahead and post about it, in case it might help someone else.

When we decided to use FIAR, I bought the first 3 volumes.  Volumes 1-3 are all aimed at 4-8 year olds, and the units in them are stand-alone, so they can be done in any order.  In other words, there's no reason to do volume 1 one year and volume 2 the next, or to do the books in each volume in the order they're listed in the table of contents.  I started by checking out every book scheduled in vol. 1-3 that was available in the two library systems I have access to.  I holed up in my room and read them all over the course of several weeks.  This was a fantastic way to start and I highly recommend it!  It gave me an idea of where we were going, and let me get a feel for what books were included.  I was really surprised to see how much variety in subject matter the books had.  Some were light and fun, very accessible to young 4 and 5 year olds (like my children were at the beginning of this school year) and some were heavy and serious, with themes that I wasn't sure we would be ready for any time soon.  

I printed a copy of this wonderful list that another FIAR homeschool blogger put together, and made copious notes in the margins about what books I thought we might want to hit the first year, which might need to be saved for when we're older. I noted which weren't available in my library system, but that I wanted to buy or try to source elsewhere.  I made notes about potential field trips that came to mind as I read the books, or holidays or planned travel coming up that I knew could be tied into a unit study.  After all of that, I sketched out which books I wanted to cover in our first year, and made a weekly planning sheet.  

Several days before we start a new "row", I make sure I have the book (some we own, some we check out of the library).  The first thing I do is quickly read through the book, and then I read through the lessons suggested in the manual.  We stick to the manual for about 90% of our FIAR activities.  I use my planning sheet to jot down the activities that stand out for each subject from the manual.  If I had an idea for a field trip or something else I already knew I wanted to add, I jot that down, too.  Sometimes, at that point, my planning sheet looks full, fleshed out, and ready to go.  Sometimes I decide to browse a couple of blogs to see what other mamas have included in their study of a particular book.  I usually browse the archives of the FIAR forum, which is especially useful for go-along book suggestions.  Last, I hit the library. 

I head to the library on my own and grab some books to read that are related to our FIAR title.  For example, this morning when I went for go-along books for Another Celebrated Dancing Bear,  I pulled books from the children's nonfiction section on bears and Russia.  From the story books, I got a couple of titles suggested on the FIAR forum archives that were also set in Russia.  I'm excited about one of those, in particular, because it's by an author whose other books we love, and this is a new title for us! We discover so many wonderful books besides the specific FIAR titles this way.  

When it comes down to day-to-day planning, I plug in our FIAR subjects in to my weekly planner.  We generally spend a little longer than 5 days on a row.  Usually we spend 6-7 school days on a unit.  Every day, we read the book, often over breakfast while I have a captive audience.  Then our subjects go something like this:

Day 1: Social Studies/Geography--We identify the settling of the story and place the story disk* on the map. Sometimes we color the flag of the country the book is set in (crayola.com has great free printables for this).  If the book is set in a non-English speaking country, sometimes we learn a few words of their language.  In our read-aloud time slot before rest time in the afternoon on social studies days, we will often look at some of the library books about the country the book is set in.  

Day 2: Language Arts--This is a day that often gets punted for us, honestly.  The LA options in the manual are often vocabulary, which we cover organically as we read the book, "What does that mean, Mama?"  If there's not much else I want to do in Language Arts, I'll take this day as a field trip or combine and do language arts + something else.  

Day 3: Art--This is one of my favorite parts of FIAR.  We love so many of the things we've done in art.  Architecture, drawing, drama, dance, you name it.  All good stuff for the middle of the week.

Day 4: Math--Five in a Row includes applied math activities.  They often include counting, measuring, telling time, etc.  

Day 5: Science--We often spend two days on science.  This is where our rows end up stretching to 6-7 days!  Many of the books have too many wonderful science activities listed in the manual to choose just one!   So we don't!  Also, when a book is about an animal, I always want to spend a day learning about that animal (habitat, life cycle, etc) and animal study is not always listed as a science choice in the manual.  So I make it one.  We have this situation this week with Another Celebrated Dancing Bear.  It's an animal fantasy story, not about real bears in the wild, but where the characters just happen to be bears.  The suggested science topic in the manual is on the boiling and freezing points of water, which is relevant to the story, but I also wanted to read through a few library books on bears.  We'll do both.  No reason not to. 

The go-along books that I check out of the library are read before rest time in the afternoon, not during "school time".  They're not mandatory, and some weeks they get ignored.  Many times, though, we find some real jewels among them, and we sometimes find a story we love as much or more than the actual FIAR book.   

I thought I'd also take a minute to point out what we don't do.  Many times when you read about families using FIAR, they are doing lots of lapbooking or notebooking.  Most of the FIAR blogs out there are using a variety of free resources to make elaborate lapbooks to document their rows.  We do not do this.  My boys are almost 5 and almost 6.  They think coloring, cutting, pasting, and writing are things to be avoided at all costs.  They would run screaming if I suggested making a lapbook for our FIAR studies.  It would completely ruin the experience for us.  (Maybe not for my daughter--she might like it!)  I don't think that the authors of the FIAR envisioned the lapbooking that now seems to be so central to many families' application of FIAR. I think they intended the rows to be done "conversationally", mostly from the manual, simply, without a lot of planning or a big paper trail.  I don't think there's anything wrong with lapbooking your way through FIAR, if that appeals to you and your children, but I did want to point out that Five in a Row is wonderfully rich and rewarding for us, without it.  

The only things we add to Five in a Row to make a complete curriculum for PK and K are the 3Rs.  We use separate curricula to teach phonics (reading), handwriting, and math.  It's easy to think of the 3Rs as the main part of school and FIAR as "everything else" but really, FIAR is the meat of our curriculum.  We learn so much with it and we love it so much!!  We've had a wonderful first year with it, and we look forward to year two!

*story disks are illustrated circles about the size of a quarter that are made to be placed on a map.  They are found in the back of each volume of FIAR, to be colored, cut out, and (if you're like me) laminated.  Our map is covered in little story disks.  

chair pockets

I love a quick (less than two hours, start to finish), easy (followed this tutorial, more or less), and cute craft project that addresses a storage and organization need!  The coloring table is always junked up since it's not that big and my children apparently own more coloring and activity books than any ten kids need. Chair pockets get the coloring books off the table, but keep them accessible for use.  

Notice that there are nice tidy slots in the table that they could conceivably store some coloring books in.  Despite my best attempts, this solution has been repeatedly rejected.  Go figure.  I think it's because you have to turn the coloring books just right to get them to fit in the slots.  Maybe the chair pockets will be better used?  One can hope.