<Sigh> Well, it’s clear that I’m still not into blogging regularly. But I hadn’t planned on going this long between entries! Wow.

Anyway, R is about halfway through the Calvert Kindergarten program. Doing well and enjoying it. K turned 3 in November and likes to color (her school) while R and I work on R’s lessons. Last fall we attended several fun co-op classes given by various people in Common Ground Homeschoolers. And R joined a homeschoolers Girl Scout troop as a Daisy!

With the coming of the new year, I’ve been bitten with the declutter bug – and it seems to be going around according to another homeschooler’s blog that I try to keep up with. So far, I’ve partially cleared and rearranged the cabinets holding assorted sheets and towels (and other sundry things), and have mostly cleared one bathroom under-sink cabinet. Not much, but a good start. We still have many baby things floating around, too, that really need to find a new home…K’s definitely done with them! So, that’s my big project for the first few months of this year, at least.

I’ve also recently read The Well-Educated Mind (Susan Wise Bauer) and  The Well-Trained Mind (Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise) and am very impressed with this classical (trivium) approach to education. So, I’m reviewing and revamping our homeschool approach to take advantage of the things I really like from these books. The Calvert curriculum is very good, but I think we can do even better following the classical approach as described in the books. So, in addition to continuing to “do school” with R and decluttering the house (2 stories and a basement!), I’m researching prices of various curricula items to start R on the classical approach when she reaches the 1st grade level.

Whew!

Last week was much busier for us than we are used to! Doctor visit for me (ugh), dentist another day for all of us, and two co-op classes offered by members of my homeschool group. Whew! Four days of running around – not how we usually operate.

The first co-op class was a visit to a tropical fish store. the man there was very knowledgeable about fish and talked about many of the fish in their fresh-water and salt-water tanks and what they need to live. R found it all very interesting and really had fun. She particularly liked the two parrot-like birds that seemed to be store pets. K just kept saying that she wanted a fish, and not just any fish, a BIG fish. She had no interest in the pretty little ones that I found more appealing. We did not come home with a fish, just some great fish coloring pages and a fun craft from the class coordinator.

The second co-op class we went to last week was about flower fairies. The girls got their own special fairy names when they arrived and then got to enjoy some fairy and flower coloring pages and a really great story about flower and garden fairies. R’s fairy name was Holly Silver-Wand and K’s was Pear Blossom Ice-Web. During the class, the girls made cute little fairies from chenille stems and beads (I helped K). They turned out really well and were very easy. Then they put together little gardens for the fairies. I helped R and K a lot on those – hope they grow – I’m not a gardener, but the girls had fun arranging the decorations in their gardens!

Naturally, after we got home, the girls let me know that I had to discover a fairy name for myself, too. On the web I checked with a couple different fairy name generating sites (Fairy Name Generator and Fairy Name Quiz). The first told me my fairy name is Feather Saturnfrost, and gave this description:

She is a trouble maker. She lives in high places where the clouds meet the earth. She is only seen during the first snow of winter. She wears pale blue like the sky. She has delicate pale pink wings like a cicada.

The second site told me my name is Willow Sky Flyer, and gave this description:

You make your home up in the trees where you can see all that happens. Your element and your magic is Wind. You love to fly and make friends with the fowls of the world. You enjoy a nice breeze and are usually calm. When something threatens you, the winds pick up and blows the threat away. The color you wear is purple. Your pet is an owl.

Either name is kinda cool, but I don’t know about the descriptions. But anyway, now my girls are happy ’cause Mommy has a fairy name, too. Now they’re trying to talk Daddy into getting one!

Here are the pictures of the Deer lapbook that R completed. It is based on the one sold by Hands of a Child and was adapted for R’s pre-k level.

Well, OK, so I’m obviously not an every-day blogger. Or every-week, even! Things suddenly filled up my days – combined with a serious dose of spring fever and I just couldn’t make it here to write. And, for some reason, this writing seems to take me a long time. *sigh*

Anyway, in April, R and I completed our/her first lapbook. Hooray! It was adapted from the Deer lapbook that is available from Hands of a Child. R really enjoyed doing it – and once I figured out how to adapt some of the stuff for a 4 year old, I did too. (When I figure out how to post a picture here, I’ll show off the lapbook.)

Then, just last week, we finished up the Calvert Pre-K course. Now R is a Kindergartener! And she has just turned 5!!! Whew!

I’ve found a number of interesting-looking (and mostly free) materials on the web, so I feel confident going into Kindergarten that we’ve got more than enough to do for that grade level without having a specific curriculum.

By the way, I’m mainly using the grade names as a reference for me, particularly since at certain “grades” in the future I’ll need to test or evaluate and provide some info to my school district officials. As far as I’m concerned, the grade labels don’t really mean anything. My girls are learning, and learning a lot, and that’s the important part!

I am hearing this phrase a lot these days. “I can do that myself” seems to have become the mantra of younger daughter K (2yo). She particularly uses this when older daughter R (4yo) tries to “help” her do something. Things like picking out cereal for breakfast, closing the cabinet door, and putting on socks all elicit this comment! I know it means she’s learning, but sometimes I wish she’d still be my little baby, ya know?

Anyway, things that the girls have been learning to do just amaze me, sometimes. R is on the verge of reading. She sounds out the letters of words (sometimes really long words) and puts them together to form the words. She has always had a good relationship with math/numbers and is now working on counting to 200! And she’s already picking up on basic addition.K is learning her colors and already correctly identifies many of them. She can identify a few letters and knows her shapes. I think she’s trying to catch up to R as fast as she can.

Since September 2007, I have been using the Calvert Pre-K curriculum with R. We both like it, but after working with it now for several months, I am finding it just a little too rigid in its plan. I had thought that was what I wanted, but now know that we can be much more flexible and still learn lots. So, we are moving into what I am calling eclectic homeschooling. Right now, file folder games are a big hit with both girls, so we are getting and using more of those. I like putting them together (who knew that I missed cutting and pasting!) and the cost is much less than something like Calvert. Also, lapbooks look really good! R and I both like crafts and so making those will be lots of fun. And that’s something that K and I can make together, too. So, after not quite my first full year of trying to provide R with a specific curriculum, I have changed my mind about our approach. Wonder if I’ll be doing this every year!

(I’ve relocated my blog here from a different site. I’m still getting set up… I’m a very new blogger, so I’m sure it’ll take me some time to figure out how to get everything set up just so.)

(So here’s my first topic of my first blog.)

I have been trying for a number of months now to think of a good name for our homeschool. Several of the families in the homeschool group that I belong to have such cool names for theirs – and I wanted the same. I’ve tried variations of “freedom”, “liberty”, “knowledge”, etc. but nothing really jumped out at me as The Right Name.

Then, recently, the forum for our homeschool group was down, so I was poking around on the web looking into various homeschool related sites that I hadn’t had time to look at yet. And the light finally went on! I realized (consciously) that what I really want for my girls is to never lose their love of learning, to try to retain the sense of wonder with which they currently approach everything. And the description of “sense of wonder” in Wikipedia and “sensawunda” on the everything2 site just confirmed my realization: “It is an emotional reaction to the reader suddenly confronting, understanding, or seeing a concept anew in the context of new information.”(Wikipedia), and “You’d never read something like this before, and you were excited, and you wanted more.” (everything2).

Those descriptions sound like a good view to take for our homeschooling effort. So, I still don’t really have a name for our school. I’m considering “Sense of Wonder Academy”, but that seems rather long. But at least I have – finally!- solidified my initial philosophical approach to this adventure called homeschooling.