December! It's been a busy month and it's not over yet! But we have put homeschool away to enjoy our Christmas vacation. I will probably do a few read-alouds to catch up for the crazy days in October but other than that, we are off the hook! So I thought I would update early, to record what we did with our fraction of a month of school.
This month I started something new with Sven, in an effort to make special time for him, prepare him for school someday, and keep him from interrupting our homeschool time. I have instituted Circle Time again. Before he starts Room Time (and I start school), we take five or ten minutes to be together. I sit on the rocking chair with Sven in my lap. We start by singing "Happy Family". Then I tell him a nursery rhyme (preferably one with actions). After that, he gets a book, which I read to him. Then we are done and he goes to get his toys for Room Time. It is very short but sweet and he seems less likely to interrupt school after we have spent that little time together.
In Kindergarten
The Shoemaker and the Elves - Both Megan and I based our Kindergarten units around stories about craftsmen this month. For Megan's December unit, she chose the first tale from the Grimms story "The Elves", which features a shoemaker. She commented to me on her thoughts about the story: that it was a lesson in optimism and gratitude. Carl enjoyed the story so much, I heard him re-telling it to Soren while they lay awake in bed one night.
The Baker's Dozen - For my unit, I wanted to tell a St. Nicholas story. I really try every year to tell my children about the origin of Santa Claus because I want them to have some context for this very important cultural icon without getting carried away in the over-commercialized hype. For the past two years, I have told the same story so I wanted to do something new this year. The Baker's Dozen is a beautiful story about a tight-fisted baker who learns a lesson in generosity. To accompany the tale, I used Christmas nursery rhymes ("Christmas is Coming" and "Little Jack Horner") and songs ("The First Noel" and "Once in Royal David's City"). We made sugar cookies one day and decorated them with red and white icing, like St. Nicholas's cloak.
In First Grade
This month I want to highlight the work that Scott has been doing with Soren during their "Science Nights". Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, Soren stays up half-an-hour longer than the other boys to "do science" with Scott. Scott has spent a lot of time stressing to Soren that science is all about asking questions. Science, he says, is not a collection of facts about the natural world that we have decided are true; rather it is a method of inquiry, a way of developing and testing our theories about how the world might work.
They started the year by watching videos on youtube featuring Mr. Wizard, who asks questions and does cool experiments with kids. The very first science movie night, Scott recreated the banana trick for Soren, then they watched the corresponding episode of Mr. Wizard.
Then they moved to talking about observation, the main method scientists have for forming and testing hypotheses. They experimented with different ways to observe accurately: they measured length, volume, weight, time, and speed.
One night, when Scott was gone, Soren and I watched a video about the autumn forest, which showed how different plants and animals interact to create and sustain their ecosystem. At one point in the video, there was a sequence of time-lapsed photos showing the decomposition of a dead animal. Soren looked a little distressed and I asked him if he wanted me to turn it off. He said, "No. It's scary but it's very science-y."
Over the course of a couple of weeks, they watched a longer video about archaeologists uncovering the secrets of the Hittites. I didn't really think of archaeology as part of science but Scott talked a lot with Soren about how the archaeologists used a familiar pattern to reach their conclusions: they asked questions, they gathered data, they made hypotheses, they gathered more data, and they fixed their hypotheses until it fit all the existing data.
Because Soren was so excited about archaeology, Scott showed him an ancient linguistics puzzle: the Phaistos Disc. They made their own lexicon with all the signs and documented their frequency on the disc. They talked about various attempts to decipher the script and problems with each of the available theories. Soren had his own ideas about how to translate the disc, which mostly turned it into a 1 to 1 substitution cipher for English. An unlikely hypothesis but Soren had fun with it.
Scott thinks that it is really important for kids to be computer-literate, meaning that they really understand how computers work. So Scott transitioned from the archaeology units to a discussion of computers by introducing Soren to the antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer. They watched a video about its discovery and some theories about its purpose. Soren worked on his own antikythera machine, made from legos, for several days.
They made their own very rudimentary computer; Soren calls it "The 9 calculator". It uses two baskets and a handful of buckeyes to calculate the first 10 multiples of 9. Then Scott taught Soren to count in binary. Because he enjoyed the challenge of that so much, Scott also taught Soren to count in hexadecimal. Soren figured out counting in other bases on his own. He really liked counting in base 8 for a few days. It was rather dull for him when we covered how base 10 works in our math lessons the next week.
Just before leaving for Christmas vacation, they got to their unit on computer programming. Scott says the big question of computer science is: "Is it computable?" They are answering this question about a game we play frequently for FHE called "Robot Turtles". Robot Turtles is itself an introduction to computing for young children but Scott took it a step further for Science Night. He has Soren trying to create a set of rules that a computer could use to execute the game. It's like programming an electronic version of the game, but without a programming language. To facilitate creating these rules, Scott taught Soren about modulus.
This month I started something new with Sven, in an effort to make special time for him, prepare him for school someday, and keep him from interrupting our homeschool time. I have instituted Circle Time again. Before he starts Room Time (and I start school), we take five or ten minutes to be together. I sit on the rocking chair with Sven in my lap. We start by singing "Happy Family". Then I tell him a nursery rhyme (preferably one with actions). After that, he gets a book, which I read to him. Then we are done and he goes to get his toys for Room Time. It is very short but sweet and he seems less likely to interrupt school after we have spent that little time together.
In Kindergarten
In First Grade
This month I want to highlight the work that Scott has been doing with Soren during their "Science Nights". Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, Soren stays up half-an-hour longer than the other boys to "do science" with Scott. Scott has spent a lot of time stressing to Soren that science is all about asking questions. Science, he says, is not a collection of facts about the natural world that we have decided are true; rather it is a method of inquiry, a way of developing and testing our theories about how the world might work.
They started the year by watching videos on youtube featuring Mr. Wizard, who asks questions and does cool experiments with kids. The very first science movie night, Scott recreated the banana trick for Soren, then they watched the corresponding episode of Mr. Wizard.
Then they moved to talking about observation, the main method scientists have for forming and testing hypotheses. They experimented with different ways to observe accurately: they measured length, volume, weight, time, and speed.
One night, when Scott was gone, Soren and I watched a video about the autumn forest, which showed how different plants and animals interact to create and sustain their ecosystem. At one point in the video, there was a sequence of time-lapsed photos showing the decomposition of a dead animal. Soren looked a little distressed and I asked him if he wanted me to turn it off. He said, "No. It's scary but it's very science-y."
Over the course of a couple of weeks, they watched a longer video about archaeologists uncovering the secrets of the Hittites. I didn't really think of archaeology as part of science but Scott talked a lot with Soren about how the archaeologists used a familiar pattern to reach their conclusions: they asked questions, they gathered data, they made hypotheses, they gathered more data, and they fixed their hypotheses until it fit all the existing data.
Because Soren was so excited about archaeology, Scott showed him an ancient linguistics puzzle: the Phaistos Disc. They made their own lexicon with all the signs and documented their frequency on the disc. They talked about various attempts to decipher the script and problems with each of the available theories. Soren had his own ideas about how to translate the disc, which mostly turned it into a 1 to 1 substitution cipher for English. An unlikely hypothesis but Soren had fun with it.
Scott thinks that it is really important for kids to be computer-literate, meaning that they really understand how computers work. So Scott transitioned from the archaeology units to a discussion of computers by introducing Soren to the antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer. They watched a video about its discovery and some theories about its purpose. Soren worked on his own antikythera machine, made from legos, for several days.
They made their own very rudimentary computer; Soren calls it "The 9 calculator". It uses two baskets and a handful of buckeyes to calculate the first 10 multiples of 9. Then Scott taught Soren to count in binary. Because he enjoyed the challenge of that so much, Scott also taught Soren to count in hexadecimal. Soren figured out counting in other bases on his own. He really liked counting in base 8 for a few days. It was rather dull for him when we covered how base 10 works in our math lessons the next week.
Just before leaving for Christmas vacation, they got to their unit on computer programming. Scott says the big question of computer science is: "Is it computable?" They are answering this question about a game we play frequently for FHE called "Robot Turtles". Robot Turtles is itself an introduction to computing for young children but Scott took it a step further for Science Night. He has Soren trying to create a set of rules that a computer could use to execute the game. It's like programming an electronic version of the game, but without a programming language. To facilitate creating these rules, Scott taught Soren about modulus.
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