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.

A train, one brick at a time.

Calvin got his first electric train for Christmas. He'd been talking about an "El train with doors that work and people that ride on it" for quite some time. Being that specific but without an actual item in mind could have been the end of that wish list item, but his Gram and Grampa found something near enough to fit the bill. And Lego (plus grandparents) comes to the rescue again. It's the Lego City Passenger Train, and while it's not elevated, it looks like the Chicago El insomuch as it's not a locamotive but a modern inner city train. He was able to assemble it entirely by himself (although we assembled the mechanics) and I love that this gives him a greater understanding of the toy itself. A better connection to it, if you will. In any case he's pretty in love with it.

The Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum (a review by Calvin)

We have read other books since we started this series. Really. In fact we read a multitude of other picture books and have also perused The Hobbit in graphic novel form, but we keep migrating back to Baum. You've heard me rave about these before. Here is Calvin's review of The Road to Oz, by L. Frank Baum.

Journal entry: All I want for christmas is...underwear?

Calvin has been talking about what he wants for Chrismtas for many months now. I am on the fence about wether this is good or bad. On one hand he's been commercializing Christmas for that long and thinking "I want I want I want" while on the other hand he's been thinking "I want I want I want" instead of "I must have right now" so I'm leaning towards seeing this as good planning and patience. The other plus here is that the list is not long and has been exactly the same for all that time. He wants a microwave and coffee maker for his kitchen, an "El that moves with doors and people" (like El in Chicago, that is) and underwear. Why underwear? It's not that we're raising an overly pratical child, nor are we failing to meet his personal hygiene needs, but in the Hiller household we each always receive underwear (and usually socks) as one of our gifts and Calvin does not want to be left out.

The second recital

Or actually the third. Two weeks ago Calvin attended a piano party with the older students of his teacher, Mrs. Faber. The difference between a piano party and a piano recital is the parents, or lack thereof; the piano party was a chance for students to play in a more relaxed setting without the pressure of performing for adults. I was lucky enough to be invited to attend, though, because Calvin was the youngest student by several years. Turns out he didn't need me at all and he had a great time.

So if we don't count the piano party as a recital, then this past weekend, when he played with Jon's students, was Calvin's second official recital performance. All of Jon's students did very well and improvement was noticeable all around. Comparing Calvin's playing in this recital to his playing last June is pretty amazing. Six months ago he was performing mostly with the one finger pick and was just moving into both hands on. This time around he clearly has both hands on the keys in proper playing fashion, is readng musing on the grand staff, and is playing some chorded piano. It's a joy to watch him grow and learn, and even more so because he enjoys it himself. There is a video, but with all teh Christmas goings on we're more than a bit behind in editing and posting, so look for that to be added to this post a bit later.