Posts Tagged ‘home-schooling’

creepy crawling creatures

January 27th, 2010, posted in Educating You

Taking delight in creepy crawling creatures

I encourage you to take your children outdoors to explore what is around them. Going on a nature walk with Joshua usually means I must take the insect book with.  He is fascinated with creepy crawling creatures and will spend as much time as I allow staring at the insect and asking questions about its habitat, food preferences, predators, colouring, defence mechanisms and asking what sound it makes!

It is quite humbling. I’m the parent, right?  So I have all the answers, right? Wrong, oh so very wrong! The more we live in this wonderful outdoor world of arthropods, the more I have to learn because I know so little.

So it’s back to searching for them on the ground and researching them back home! It makes for wonderful hone-schooling projects too, we count the legs and appendages and classify them, then together (child and adult) we learn all about our subject!

Are we as adults too tall to bend down and look at the little things in life?  Is that why we miss them? My dear friends, there is a reason for us to take time to smell the roses – when we bend down, we may see the ladybird eating the aphid on the stalk of the rose and the camouflaged spider on its petal and the butterfly on the rose next to it.

What a wonderful world we live in. Take delight in the creepy crawling creatures – you will learn a thing or too from them!

Round 1

January 12th, 2010, posted in Home Schooling

Home Schooling a Five year old:

Round 1 has started, we took our first steps yesterday and it was a challenge! I have allocated Joshua a table and chair in my office and a set of drawers for his books and stationery.

Counting went well as did tracing his name and numbers.

We are busy with Maths – holding up fingers, using stickers and actual objects around the house to match the quantity to the digit. We break and get stuck into reading, I take 3 letters and 1 vowel that he already recognizes and play; I spy with my little eye, something that begins with “s”.  Joshua copies the letters I have written in his excercise book and we write his first word – os – which is Afrikaans for ox! By this time, I need a tea break – it’s hot today!

After the break, we read about plants and how they grow, then I ask Joshua to load the hand spades in his wheel barrow.  I have some transparent containers that we fill with a few stones, then some mowed lawn cuttings and head down to the vegetable garden for some good soil!  While we are digging up the soil, we find an earth worm and a short biology lesson follows about why earthworms are good for our vegetable garden soil and what they do and what they eat – all promoted by the onslaught of questions from my very curious son!  I allow Joshua to push some holes into the soil and to plant a variety of vegetables, which he covers with a light layer of soil and waters them.

We break and we do a bit of  colouring in – I need to recap and check if he knows his colours in Afrikaans! My son knew all his shapes and colours at the age of 3 (we had an issue with red& green and thought he may be colour-impaired at one stage), but now we have chosen to teach him in Afrikaans and that means all basics need to be learnt all over again! Besides purple and grey, he got them all!

Shew, time for lunch and his first day at home-school is done!

 
 
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