Mom Remembers

It probably makes sense that I have thought a lot  about how I want to incorporate music into my homeschool.  It is my area of expertise.  I know that it may not be a top priority for a lot of educators but learning about, appreciating, and creating music will (hopefully) be an important part of my kids' educations.  Because it's a big deal to me. My goal is to raise adults who can use music to bless their own lives and communities.  I would like our home to be what John M. Feierabend called "a tuneful, beatful, artful learning community."  I believe that the way to accomplish this is by teaching my children to use their own bodies  to make and respond to music. I try to incorporate a lot of singing and some dancing (probably not enough) into our Kindergarten.  I hope to tackle this even more seriously as we begin formal grade school.  There are some lovely music curriculae out there that look appealing but they tend to be very price...

1. This week, we got our tax return and decided to spend it.  That was really exciting.  We don't buy new things very often, just food.  (Lots of good food.)  So dreaming and shopping was super fun. 2. My friends Megan and Michelle got back from LTUE and we spent a lot of time together talking about their writing.  They have inspired me to write and I have been doing a lot of that lately.  I'm writing a novel about Steampunk Vikings!  It's really hard work (not as much fun as I thought it would be).  But I am still going strong, I think because I know that anything worth doing takes a lot of hard work.  So I am proud of myself about that. 3. There were a few days of temperate weather at the beginning of the week.  I knew that it was only false spring but I really enjoyed it.  I went outside without a coat on!  Scott rode his motorcycle to work!  The kids ran around the yard for hours in the afternoons!  It was lovel...

SOREN:  Mom, I can't wait to get our car renewed! ME:  What do you mean? SOREN:  You know.  When you get new stickers on your license plate.  By paying the government money. CARL:  But the government is bad! SOREN:  No, the government is good. CARL:  No!  Remember the government shutdown? SOREN:  But you need money!

Homeschool this month started out so promising.  I had a lot of enthusiasm for the new year as well as for a fantastic book that I read ( Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov).  But that enthusiasm fizzled out pretty rapidly in the face of winter blahs.  I think we even totally canceled kindergarten 5 times this month!  In Kindergarten The Three Wise Men - This is the unit I was really trying to incorporate new ideas in.  I wanted to hold the kids to a higher standard and help them really learn about and from this story.  So every day, I had a learning objective for our little class.  For example:  "Learn the meaning of the word jealous ", "Tell the story of the three wise men in your own words" and "Identify the gifts of the Magi in the song We Three Kings ".  Stuff like that.  I really enjoyed the way these objectives made our Kindergarten seem more purposeful and effective.  It was also a lot of mental work.  I accomp...

Yesterday morning, Sven used his first sign: "All done." He was standing up in the high chair, so I sat him back down.  Then I asked, "Are you all done?  Would you like to get down?" I reached to grab his hands and help him say "all done".  But before I could get there, he was flipping them back and forth and making an approximation of the sounds all on his own!  So I swooped him up, kissed him, and took him for a bath.  He was very happy.  That was exactly what he had wanted. Then, this morning, he used the sign for "more" while making a very distinctive "mo" sound.  However, he did not actually want more.  When I tried to give him another bite of cereal, he pursed his lips and turned away.  So I asked, "Are you all done?"  Once again, he lifted up his hands and flipped them: palms in, palms out, palms in, palms out.  I put down the spoon and lifted him out of the high chair. This is such a fun age!  He is learning so...

SOREN:  On the Langers label, the blue represents green and the lion represents white.  That's because Langers is an Italian company. ME:  The lion represents white?  That's really confusing. SOREN:  That's the science of representing.

We got a jar of homemade marshmallows for Christmas.  They were very yummy and we have been slowly enjoying them with hot cocoa for the past month. This past Friday, I gave quite a few of them to Sven.  He was cranky and I was being a lazy mom; marshmallows worked.  He was very happy to plow through a substantial chunk of the jar and subsequently forgot what he was so cranky about. Apparently, he will never forget the marshmallows.  They made quite an impression on him, as the following story will show. Yesterday, Scott opened the jar to put some on his cocoa.  Sven was in the other room but he crawled as fast as he could to the kitchen.  He climbed up Scott's leg and began fussing rather pointedly.  Marshmallows were exchanged and then Sven was satisfied.  It all seemed very deliberate so we hypothesized that Sven could hear the click  of the jar opening and had made an indelible connection between that sound and the most deliciou...