don’t blink

We are still here, just busy wrapping up some freelance projects and nesting like crazy. Fin is doing well with his homeschool project. There is a whole lot of dinosaur talk happening. What is nice is that the project has actually morphed into more of an animal project. It kind of starts with dinosaurs and then can transition to talking about reptiles, or dogs or turtles. We talk about how some animals are cold-blooded animals and others are warm blooded.  That conversation can lead to another exchange about where and how animals live, what they eat, how they benefit society. While I feel like somehow we should be doing more, I can see how the learning it taking place. I want to get better at documenting the conversations we have and maybe capturing the ideas. Tobias has been working on reading with him but it is in a very loose way. It  is exciting because recently, it is Finley who initiates the lessons. He will ask what something says and then, with a little pressing begin to sound out the words himself. I love seeing his curiosity.

In knocked up news. Nothing happening…33 weeks and counting. Tired but starting to have time to think about the fact that I am going to actually going to have to give birth. Again. Not that I am not excited but birth is still as little scary. We are going the birthing center route this time. I am excited about that but again, a little nervous.

I have had several adventures in bread baking. So far I have baked the famous No Knead Bread, a couple loafs of white bread, cinnamon rolls and french bread. The most successful of these was the No Knead Bread. Coming in second was the cinnamon rolls, the other breads just come out really dense. Maybe I am over kneading, Maybe my oven isn’t getting hot enough? The search for a good bread recipe continues. If anyone has a good recipe or some good bread baking tips please send them my way.

So, thus begins the observations of Fin for Homeschooling. He is three an a half so he interest are all over the place, but I noticed this week he asked me repeatedly about three things, Fire, Dinosaurs and Sheep. I know right? So random and so wonderful. Taking a cue from the Camp Creek blog, I decided that when he asked me a question about any of these things that I wouldn’t give him the answer instead  I would say, that I didn’t know but that we could find out by going to the library and asking the librarian for books. The idea was that he was going to to do the asking and the interacting with the librarian, and pick the books out, I was there merely to set the wheels in motion. So we did it! And it was a lot of fun he was great with the librarian and picked out several, and I mean like 10 books on dinosaurs, one on sheep and a book on fire.  We read parts of the books at the library and we’ve been concentrating on Dinosaurs at home.

He definitely learns when he is interacting, doing, touching, asking questions, being part of an action. He is not so interested in the lecture kind of learning. When I start to take a little more control of the teaching and not include him, I lose him almost immediately. He likes to answer questions,  and is enthusiastic when he knows the answers. He is definitely into praise. The one thing I have noticed is he really has a difficult time sitting still. I thought I would buy some fancy lined “school” paper and have him practice writing. I neatly wrote the word Dinosaur on the top of the page, the idea being that he would copy the letters on the lines below. Yea, no. It was just too high an expectation for him. He wanted to write the letters but only the ones he wanted to write (skipping the “S” because he thought it was too difficult), the lines on the paper were of zero importance to him, and getting the letters in the same sequence wasn’t real high on his list of priorities either. It ended up being more of a lesson for me than it was for him. Interesting enough, the very next day we made Valentine’ Day cards and part of that activity was that he had to write the word “love” on all the hearts himself. It was essential the same exercise but the context was slightly different. This he did happily. So again another lesson learned.

He loves to be read to and seems to have a pretty high attention span. For awhile we were experimenting with long books. We’ve read The Little Prince, Stuart Little (but haven’t finished it), and we have started the Freddy the Pig series. He liked the first one, slow going on the second. He seems to be happy to listen as long as you will read. He asks questions about the characters and about words he doesn’t understand. This out of all the learn/teaching we do seems to be the most effective. He is still, concentrating, and inquisitive. So this is what I have gleaned from my recent observations. We will see what this week has in store.