The Two Cars and a hunt for more

Calvin has an inquisitive mind and, like most kids, an innate and insatiable hunger for knowledge. That's why, when we took him to the North American International Auto Show last year, I was sure he'd be awed, intrigued, rapt. I failed to realize, though, that the completely unknown is not automatically interesting, that our interest has to be piqued, that being surrounded by so many saturating stimulants—the people, the lighting, the colors, the sounds—can make concentration near impossible and can push our senses to a point of exhaustion, and that can make one very crabby. Calvin wasn't really crabby last year, and the trip wasn't a colossal failure, but he certainly wasn't rapt. So this year I prepared ahead. Since we'd rowed our first FIAR book the week before I decided to use that method as a template and found a great book about cars.

The story in The Two Cars, by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, is the tortoise and the hare, only with two cars, and the art is typical d'Aulaire wonderful. We spent a week reading and talking about the book, exploring the art and the writing, and also exploring cars. The personified cars in the story conversationally mention the crankshaft, the pistons, the springs, and their white walled tires. Calvin loved it. We drew cars, we made a road and drove mini cars, we counted by tens on a speedometer, we checked out an Eye Witness book about cars from our library and drew our own diagrams of their inner workings. I think the best part, though, the project that worked the most magic come auto show time in Detroit, was the scavenger hunt we spent a day together creating and putting into booklet form for use on the day of the show. Calvin was determined to look for oddities like pink or orange cars, motor specifics like an in-line, a V, and a flat crankshaft engine, and book specifics like those white walled tires. Amazingly the only thing we weren't able to find was a pink car.

Lapbooking our way (less busy work, more collection of projects)

Diagrams, art, vocabulary, learning tools, all in one folder:

Inside the Auto show booklet, which we assembled using a sheet of cardboard for a cover and braiding floss for the binding (and to which we attached a pencil for use at the show). We had a sheet of things to see, oddities to find, activities to do, and, at Calvin's insistence, blank space for drawing logos and other interesting things.

He made all his finds except for the pink car (bummer!) and he drew several logos. Recognize Toyota, Tesla, and Corvette on this page?

Ferrari, Maybach, Mercedes, Cadillac, Mazda, and Audi, and a picture of an electric car plugged in, too. He had no qualms about sitting down and sketching the logos when he liked them.

Inside and outside diagrams and a speedometer for counting by tens, plus a list of new words and the prized ticket from the Auto Show itself.

Calvin's own imaginative view of a motor (which he asked me to label the way I'd had him label my print outs, and I needed quite a bit of help with this one!)

Trying his hand at blending with colored pencils.

And we built a road for acting out the story, practicing with cardinal directions, and just plain having fun.

Rowing Katy

There's a lot of lingo in the homeschooling world and I guess I am expected to say that this week we rowed our first book with Five in a Row. I love learning from books. I first discovered this curriculum on the sites of other homeschooling moms and was drawn to it because it's just a list of general guidelines for doing exactly that, and because it is holistic in nature. The basic premise is that you read one book daily for a week and base a week's worth of learning around that one book. I'm not big on measuring a week's worth of learning, nor am I big on strict rules, but I'm new at this and I love suggestions. Many of the suggestions in FIAR are things that we've already been doing—talking about the illustrations in books and the vocabulary in them—but I'm finding many of the suggestions to be good brainstorming jump starters. This week we read Katy and the Big Snow, by Virginia Lee Burton, and had a great time doing some of the suggested activities and more. We will never limit learning to five days, five reads, or really in any way, but we both really enjoyed the spring board.

Sunday—read book, talked about Katy's antics and the massive amounts of snow; began a weather chart for recording the daily weather throughout the week (we used personal observation and Weatherchannel.com for temperature); talked about maps, the globe, and the compass rose.

Monday—Talked about the importance of all the different people/businesses in a city. Make a list of these and talked about them in relation to our own village. Built a city out of blocks. Calvin really loved building the city out of blocks, as you can plainly see, so we continued to add to this and play without throughout the week (and it's still taking up the whole room as we speak). We also noted the weather on the weather chart.

Tuesday—Defined personification as a literary device and identified its use in the book. Tried our hands at it by drawing characters and captioning. Created vocabulary cards for the words "emergency," "patient," and "drizzle" (Calvin's choices) using our own definitions and illustrations. Built Katy out of Legos (best part of the whole week, I think). Noted weather on chart.

Wednesday—Talked about the medium used by the illustrator (also Virginia Lee Burton) then tried our hand at her style using markers (ink) and crayon (charcoal pencil) in limited colors with only broad details. Kept weather chart.

Thursday—Played a bit with counting by fives and added many marker and crayon drawings to our collection. Weather chart.

Friday—Talked about maps and the compass rose some more. Printed and colored a compass rose and a map of Dexter Village. Went into the village for lunch and identified all the businesses in town and on the map. Went to the library to journal about the differences between Geopolis (Katy's city) and Dexter, and to look up other books by Virginia Lee Burton) and compare the illustrations (we came home with The Little House). Back at home we assembled our lapbook of Katy and the Big Snow and wrote on the weather chart.

Saturday—finished our week long weather chart, compiled the results, talked a little about ratios, and created a Katy and the Big Snow lapbook (not your typical lap book, but more like a folder in which he is keeping all his Katy creations, complete with Calvin-made cover).

Sunday—just for fun we drew a map of the inside of our house and had a big scavenger hunt.

For the most part these activities were chosen by Calvin, and by no means were they the only things we enjoyed all week, but Calvin really enjoyed rowing, and I think we'll do it again. Our way.

The Bob Books

Reading is something we've done an extra lot of as of late. Of course we always read a lot, but the difference is that now about half of that reading is being done by Calvin himself. At this point he is now reading a variety of books we have in the house, mostly the easy readers of yesteryear, like Hop on Pop, by Dr. Suess, or Snow, by P.D. Eastman, but before he started working his way through the longer books we started with books intended to teach reading and phonics. It was on a trip to the library a couple of weeks ago that he first asked to bring home a set of phonics books and I spent some times perusing the collection there, only to be disappointed by the number of books more interested in selling a branded character (like Clifford, Bob the Builder, or Thomas) than teaching the skill of reading, but there was one collection that was entirely devoid of that commercial culture so we brought it home. Turns out we were pretty happy with that selection. The Bob Books we had (and clearly we didn't try all of them) were a good workout for the new reader and even had somewhat interesting stories. I'm sure I was slightly drugged by the joy of watching my son discover reading, but these books were actually enjoyable for both Calvin and for me. Win win.

Reading

I have long been opposed to teaching reading at young ages. I think I have previously expounded the virtues of waiting to teach that skill, and my goal was to have Calvin reading around the age of six. I should know by now, however, that my son has his own ideas about learning (I still remember carefully researching all the important theories on potty training only to have him wake up one day completely potty trained all by himself). So I guess I can't say I'm surprised that at the library last week Calvin asked to check out a collection of phonics books, then at home proceeded to work his way through them methodically and voraciously, with little help from me. In the short span of a weekend he mastered all the words in the first set of Bob phonics books we brought home and is proudly asking for more.  Homeschooling is nothing if not exciting, being full of misdirections, u-turns, and somtimes complete transportations. I may have intended to save reading for another couple of years, but Calvin had other ideas.

Science in the bathtub

We are in the middle of reading James and the Giant Peach and if you've ever read it you'll understand how that book led us to doing a "sinks or floats" experiment in our bathtub. We didn't have a giant peach, or even a peach of standard size, to test in the tub, but we did find a myriad of other items to sink or float, like spoons, spatulas, toys, and even underwear and socks. It was a fun, and slightly wet, experience.