Weeks 1 & 2: Creation

School is finally underway at Veritas Academy!  We began school on August 15th, so we just finished up our 2nd week.  In My Father’s World, this means we just finished our foundational ‘Creation’ unit.  N joined us for this fun study.  I let him pick and choose the things he wanted to do, and that suited us both just fine.  Here are some pictures of our 1st day:

On the first day, we studied how God created the light and how He separated the light from the darkness.  The boys really enjoyed their snack for the day: separating the chocolate chips (darkness) from the marshmallows (light).  My sister suggested (after the fact) that I should have had them sort my laundry.  AGGH!  I hate missed opportunities!!!

J worked on a Creation book all week.  He made one page per day for the first 7 days of school.  When I stapled all of his pages together at the end of the week, he was so proud that he had actually made a ‘real’ book!  The individual pages are below:

The Cover Page

Day 1: God made light.  God divided the light from the darkness.

Day 2: God made the sky.  God divided the water above and below the sky.

God made seas, dry land, and plants.

God made the sun, moon, and stars.

God made living creatures in the sea, and birds.

Day 6: God made animals and other living creatures on the land.  God made man and woman.  The letters ‘Wo WO’ are supposed to be the dinosaurs saying, “Roar, ROAR!” He’s trying to sound out how to spell but his pronunciation doesn’t always point him in the right phonetic direction!

Day 7: God rested.  J wasn’t really supposed to draw anything on this page but he really wanted to draw God taking a rest, so if you look closely you can see God resting in ‘huvin.’  I love all the labels in this picture–the sun, the earth, the stars, the moon, Mars, ‘Jooptr’ (see the green on it, Mom?), another ‘planit’ and Netflix.  Because when God rests, apparently that is His entertainment of choice.  What am I going to do with this child?

This was another project he worked on throughout the study.  I was quite impressed with his cutting skills this early in the game.  His gluing skills need improvement.

Part of being created in the image of God means that we too can be creative.  J tried to create little Play-Doh people.

We also played a review game of Creation to test our memory.  We took turns rolling a die and whatever number came up we would have to say what God created on that day.  We got a little carried away with it but it was a huge hit.  This was one of the things N participated in, too.

I was amazed as I was re-reading the Creation story in the Bible on a review day.  Though N had skipped out on many of the projects and study times throughout the two weeks, it was he who could fill-in most of the words I left out.

J also did this Creation Collage on a review day.  I love old National Geographic magazines.

For reading, J is using a book basket.  I put a bunch of books in there-both fiction and non-fiction, and we try to look at one each day.  Sometimes we read a whole story, other times (like Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation) I let him look through the pictures and have him tell me the things that especially interested him.  Then we would read the caption or the article(s) that went along with what he wanted to know more about.  When he has his quiet afternoon rests, he can take books out of his book basket and read quietly.

In the book basket this week:

What a Wonderful World by George David Weiss and Bob Thiele

Song of Creation by Paul Goble

Read-Aloud Bible Stories Vol. 3 by Ella K. Lindvall

Eyewitness Science: Life by David Burnie

The Story of Creation illustrated by Jane Ray (words from Genesis)

All Things Bright and Beautiful by Ashley Bryan

Crafts to Celebrate God’s Creation by Kathy Ross

Stop and Look at God’s World by Donna Drion

The World God Made by Donna Cooner

Let the Whole Earth Sing Praise by Tomie dePaola

Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation by Dennis R. Petersen

Light: The First Seven Days Retold by Sarah Waldman

This is J and me on our date the week before school started.  We were celebrating his achievement of finishing his reading lesson book and we were anticipating the start of a very fun kindergarten year!  I just love my boy.  He excels at silliness.

Next week: Sun!!

Kindergarten is here!

Actually, our kindergarten box arrived several weeks ago, but I had to finish writing about our preschool year before I could even think about posting anything for kindergarten!

We are so excited to be using My Father’s World curriculum.  I am thoroughly impressed about the company, its educational philosophy, and the way each subject in each unit ties into a Biblically-based theme for the week.  For example, when we get to our unit on apples, the theme will be, “if I stay in Jesus I will have much fruit.”

Ever since we got the box earlier this summer, J has been asking *nearly* every day if he is in kindergarten yet.  N, who will be doing a year of preschool, keeps asking what kind of garden is a ‘kinder’?  When we had the boys use their imagination to draw the Garden of Eden last night, N asked me what a ‘kinder’ looked like.  Apparently he wanted to draw a ‘kinder’garden instead.

Well, we started kindergarten this morning.  J thinks he’s big stuff now and N is joining us for the first couple of weeks as we study Creation.  But it is late now and this teacher/mama needs to get some rest before Day 2!  The ’1st day of school’ post will have to wait for another day.

Miscellaneous

As the title of this post suggests, this is the place for other pictures I wanted to include.  Some of the activities were directly related to preschool.  Others are just fun things we did.

The police hosted a family day at the park and let the kids explore different vehicles.  J was most interested in the helicopter they use for their drug enforcement unit.  Just before this picture was taken, he was sitting in the cockpit asking one of the policeman about the speedometer.  The policeman told him how it worked and said to go outside and blow as hard as he could into the front of the helicopter.  So, J discovered how fast he can blow air.

This placemat craft was a little trickier for the boys than I had figured.  I think they did this in November, and the fine motor and coordination skills required to weave (over, under, over, under) were lacking.  I’d bet if we were to do it today, they would do much better.  The result was not bad, but the process was frustrating for them.  Yet, as Calvin’s dad would say (from the Calvin and Hobbes comic books), “Go do something you hate.  It builds character.”

We recently got to attend our first hot air balloon festival.  The highlight was definitely the balloon glows.  Gorgeous!

During our family devotions we are reading from The Big Book of Questions and Answers.  We recently read about how God created man and woman.  We decided to see what would happen if we breathed into dirt.  Could we make a man, too?

Using a stethoscope to listen for sounds of life

N’s turn!

That incredulous look on N’s face is because he was convinced he actually did hear heartbeats.  But sadly there were no additional vital signs.  We had to conclude that we were, in fact, not God.

Speaking of devotionals, here is little J marking up my Precepts Bible study with my colored pens.  Got to train them young…

J just finished The Reading Lesson a couple of weeks ago.  We worked on it for probably 8 months off and on.  The picture above was taken after completing only the first 2 or 3 lessons.  These were all words I dictated and he spelled by himself (he was still working on writing his letters at this point, so he used the tiles from Bananagrams here) just a few weeks into the book.  The success he felt early on gave him the motivation to keep going.  Each lesson taught new sounds, thereby increasing word recognition exponentially as he progressed through the book.  He is now reading ‘I Can Read’ Level 2 books with ease or maybe needing help on 1-2 words out of the whole book.  I couldn’t be more proud!

Learning Through Play

As a homeschooling Mom, I sometimes feel pressure to create environments and opportunities for learning to take place.  There is a time and a place for that-no doubt.  But if there’s one thing I learned this year, it is that preschoolers, being naturally curious, often create their own learning environment.  I just need to keep my eyes open to recognize those teachable times.  For example:

Rubbing balloons in your hair creates static electricity.  What?  How?  Why?

My boys can spend hours building marble runs.  It is a great learning activity that requires problem-solving skills.  There are opportunities to teach about gravity and why each piece of the run needs to be angled slightly downward so the marble doesn’t get stuck.

J wanted to build a tall marble run but it kept falling over.  We took a pause in building to figure out what would be a better design for the base of a taller marble run: I gave him 2 pieces; one had a wider base.  I asked him to stack units on top of the bases until they fell over.  The result is clear in the picture above that if J wants a tall marble run, he’s got to use a wider base at the bottom.

We ‘painted’ letters and art on the sidewalk–using water and paintbrushes on a hot day.

M&M math: we sorted by color and ‘subtracted’ the numbers of candies by eating them.  This was a biiiiiig hit! 

We flew a kite on a windy day.  A great opportunity to talk about weather, wind, and flight.

The boys participated in the program for kids at Lowe’s and got to build a wooden train for Christmas.

A twist on the classic toy, here is a real ‘Mr. Potato Head’ complete with nuts, bolts, washers, and pipe cleaners for features and appendages.

I cannot tell you how much this made-up ‘toy’ got used over the winter when it was too cold to play outside.  They put the handle of the mop bucket over the back of the ride-on and played train, fire-engines and more with this.  I let their imaginations take the lead on this but we got to talk about all sorts of community workers this way.

Here is J braving the zip line during our end-of-the-year co-op celebration.

Learning Through Nature

This is a picture heavy post, so I’ll keep the words to some of the topics we discussed and let the pictures tell the story.

Fall.  Seasons.  Colder weather.  Leaves.  Shorter Days.  Photosynthesis.  Chlorophyll.  Leaf piles.  Jumping.

Winter.  Cold.  Water.  Ice.  Snow.  Keeping warm.  Baking.

Spring.  Colors.  Flowers.  New Life.  Birds.  Migratory paths.  Nests.  Beauty.  Outdoors.  Nature walks.

Storms.  Meteorology.  Wind.  Clouds.  Rain.  Lightning.  Thunder.  Tornadoes.  Flooding. Shelter.  Damage.

Learning Through Celebrating the Holidays

I’ve always loved the holidays and the family activities associated with them.  Until this year, I never looked at them in terms of their educational value.  The goal I had was to engage the boys in fun activities without them necessarily realizing they were doing school.  One of our hopes is that our boys will become self-educators, learning as they pursue their interests.  The idea of life being boxed into ‘school’ segments or ‘home’ segments or ‘hobby’ segments is not at all attractive to us, and we do not believe it is consistent with a Biblical worldview.

Whoa, getting back on track now…In order of the holidays as we celebrated them throughout the school year, here are some of the highlights/things we studied.

Fall/Harvest/yes, even…Halloween *gasp*

J picked out a heavy pumpkin this year.  It took quite a bit of effort for him to wrap his arms around it!

Here is J carving his pumpkin (a valid canvas for art).  We also like to scoop out the guts and roast the seeds.  Mmmm!!

Thanksgiving:

One of my favorite activities that we worked on throughout the month of November was a “We Are Thankful” tree.  I hope it will become a tradition in our family.  We started out with a blank tree in the beginning of the month.

After cutting out several colored leaves, each one of us (except for the wee babe) took one leaf each day after dinner and wrote down one thing we were thankful for.  At the end of the month, it looked like this:

It was great for preparing our hearts for Thanksgiving and for directing our praise to the Giver of Every Good Gift (James 1:17).  Another result, though unintentional, was that it gave us great insight into our boys’ hearts as to what they hold precious.  Not surprisingly, N mentioned trains almost exclusively for the first week of the project.  Every night was different though: big trains, little trains, freight trains, toy trains, etc.    But what a blessing that they mentioned Mommy, Daddy, Fairview Baptist Church, Grandma/Grandpa, cousins, and others.

Related to this activity was another project in which they wrote what they were thankful for on feathers and attached them to a headband.  It is a great way to introduce the history of Thanksgiving with the pilgrims and Indians.

We were blessed to be able to spend Thanksgiving with some friends of ours from California who had also recently moved to Tennessee.  They were such gracious hosts and we enjoyed the company, the food, and the surroundings.  They live in a beautiful area with lots of land.  For young visitors, they keep carrots on hand so the little ones can go across the street and feed the neighbors’ horses.  Here is N feeding the horse.

Advent/Christmas:

We started a new tradition this year of doing a Jesse Tree.  I made these ornaments to go along with our daily readings of Scripture.  Each day we would read the passage and hang the corresponding ornament onto our Jesse Tree.

I love that it put the story of Jesus’ birth in the context of redemptive history.  I am also looking forward to seeing how the boys’ understanding and appreciation of the Scriptures will grow each year.

In addition to the Jesse Tree, we also baked homemade sugar cookies and decorated them for our neighbors.  I like to introduce math concepts (measuring, fractions) while inviting the boys to bake with me.

Cookie decorators extraordinaire:

The *scrumptious* results (at least in their eyes):

Well, I was more concerned with teaching the boys to serve others than what the cookies actually looked like!  I saved these for the kids and decorated some to take to our neighbors.  We also practiced some Christmas carols to sing while we delivered the goods.  This year we sang “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Silent Night”

Bundled up warm and ready to go sing and bless our neighbors:

St. Patrick’s Day

I don’t know that I’ve ever celebrated St. Patrick’s Day apart from wearing green as to not get pinched.  But, I took the opportunity to make some special cards for the boys so that when they woke up to their “Lucky Charms” breakfast, they could read about how “Lucky” I am to have them.  We played Irish music throughout the day, read about rainbows, made a craft, and had a traditional Irish meal, complete with green “leprechaun” apple juice.

They were both SO shocked that their juice was green!  J just could not figure out how it got that way!! 

Learning Through Traveling (Chicago)

We traveled to Chicago one wintry February weekend this year.  All N wanted to do was ride a train.  Here he is waiting for it:

We went downtown that day to walk around and to go to the Children’s Museum at Navy Pier.  Here are a few things we did there:

J and N learned about firefighting and fire safety.  I have never seen J as serious as he was while he was playing at this exhibit…he totally took on the role of ‘fire chief’ and every child that came to play was subjected to his direction of where to go and what to do.  A little bossy, yes!  But I will give him this–he was an effective manager and all of his playmates happily obliged.  They probably spent 3 hours or more here.

Then it was off to a teamwork/construction exhibit.  We were given some materials and a time limit to see how high we could build a skyscraper.  It was tougher than it seemed.

Here is J ready to get started:

This picture makes me laugh every time!

After the museum and a quick dinner, we walked to one of my favorite buildings: the Tribune Tower building.  The link has lots of interesting facts about the building including a list of the 120 stones embedded in the base from important locations around the world (including stones from the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, the Pyramids, and many more).  Here is Noah touching a stone from the place where the explorers Marquette and Joliet landed in Louisa County, Iowa.  (Granted, not the most exotic of locations represented, but one of the ones he could reach.)  I think this would be a very unique place to study geography and history.

The Tribune Tower, up until recently, was home to the McCormick Freedom Museum, which is dedicated to educating guests about American freedom with a concentration on the First Amendment.  A quote by Milton is etched into stone: “Give me Liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all other liberties.”

We had a lot of fun that weekend, despite braving blowing snow in the city, being all bundled up plus having to carry a diaper bag full of diapers, snacks, water for the day AND having to carry 1-2 tired children who are also all bundled up in winter jackets to keep warm.  Have you ever noticed how slippery two winter coats are when they are next to each other?  Note to self: remember the stroller next time.