Homeschool in October

This month, I have been very glad to be homeschooling.  The shine of public school has definitely worn off for all the neighborhood kids.  This means that I hear a lot of temper tantrums in the mornings in the parking lot.  It also means that Soren has stopped begging for something I know he would hate.  We have been able to stop pining and start gloating.

I'm gloating because:
   * We get to be together.  I love that.
   * I don't have to leave the house when it is cold and dark outside.
   * The kids don't have homework.
   * We have time to go on cool field trips.
   * We aren't in a hurry.
   * We don't have standardized tests coming up.  (Seriously?  Our neighbors are having standardized tests for preschool!)
   * Soren and Carl help out around the house a lot.
   * I get to watch the boys play and observe first-hand how they are incorporating the things they learn.
   * All my former Kindergarten students talk wistfully of the good ol' days.
   * Our curriculum rocks!

In Kindergarten

Tikki Tikki Tembo - The kids went to the Hutchins' house for the first unit of the month and my friend Megan told them the story of Tikki Tikki Tembo.  Soren really took to the story.  He told me that since he was "the first and honored son" that I should have given him a longer name.  He experimented with some variations on his own name for awhile that were pretty fun.  I think he missed the point of the story entirely; it is Tikki Tikki Tembo's ridiculously long name that gets him into so much trouble!  On the last day of the unit, Megan made rice cakes with the kids.  Scott said they tasted very authentically Chinese.  No one but Carl really liked them.  However, Carl liked them enough to make up for everyone else.  He plowed very steadily through the whole batch!

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin - I wanted to tell a spooky story for the second unit of October but I remembered how upsetting that was to Soren last year and decided against it.  Instead, I picked a Beatrix Potter book called The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.  It's about a family of squirrels who gather nuts on an owl's island, which makes it a great story for fall.  The text is full of very old-fashioned riddles, which I memorized and used in the telling.  The riddles were a huge hit!  The boys enjoyed the silly language and I enjoyed listening to them speculate about what the answers might be.  They didn't solve any of the riddles correctly but their ideas were certainly inventive.  (Carl is pretty certain that Hitty Pitty is a spider.)  I chose nursery rhymes about nuts to accompany the stories: The Leaves are Green and I Had a Little Nut Tree.  I wanted to make buckeye candies with the kids as part of this unit but another neighbor made a huge batch for a catering job and shared some with us.  So we just ate hers and didn't make more.

The Frog Princess - For the end of October and going into November, Megan is doing a unit on a little-known Russian fairy tale: The Frog Princess.  As all good Russian fairy tales do, it features the unusual witch Baba Yaga as well as an evil lich whose death is hidden in something like a living turducken.  It's quite a bit more serious and complicated than the stories we usually chose for Kindergarten so I will be interested to see how the boys respond to it.