Homeschooling One - Art

As I homeschooled my son, I came to realize there was much more to the label "Art" than I had previously thought. Using the Ambleside Online curriculum, much of the "Art" that we covered was more Art History, in the form of artist study and studying an artist's specific works.

This suited me just fine, because as an older mom, I no longer enjoyed cleaning up messes after art projects were completed.

However, it became clear that the student likes to do hands-on stuff, too! So sometimes he got to do that at Home Depot workshops. Sometimes art projects took place as part of 4-H.

and sometimes we worked on art curriculum where he was learning specific things such as primary/secondary colors, shading and depth, etc. Often he just tackled projects because the County Fair was coming and he wanted to have art projects to enter.

One of the girls in our 4-H Club was taking art classes and learning wonderful techniques. I wanted to sign my son up for classes, but he didn't want anything to do with it. He did not want group classes, and he did not want to be taught or be required to do a certain type of project at a certain time. He wanted to continue his art "free style".

As he got older, the line became fuzzy between "art" and "craft". He no longer does paintings, seldom does drawings (although occasionally he comes up with an amazing drawing). 

Now, though, he is a craftsman of whips made out of paracord -- bullwhips, snakewhips, and I don't know all the names of the types of whips he makes. He got a blue ribbon and a champion ribbon on the bullwhip he entered at the county fair.

He has started his own business selling his whips on line (Eagle Whips on Instagram). And he loves making them!

So what I learned about art while home schooling my lonely only is to let the student lead. I don't expect him to have a career in Art when he picks his career, so what does it matter if he ever learns how to draw a picture with depth, or create a landscape with pastels, or that red paint mixed with blue makes purple? My goal as the teacher, in addition to directing my son in ways that he can learn about art, should be to introduce art in ways that help him love the art! And my son was able to pursue what interested him and then specialize in what he loved. And that is why we home school!

Homeschooling One - "Socialization"

Following my theme of home schooling with only one student, today I will focus on "socialization".

For many home schoolers, however in my home school a day arrived when we began to see a need for changes in this area. Through no fault of the student, there had been a season of less-focused parenting. One day, when he was six, I received a call that my dad had died.

That same year my step-dad had been in and out of hospital, nursing home, hospital, and ultimately hospice. Six months after my dad died, my step-dad died.

I was struggling to home school, with a senior in a private school (using my car), and I was now responsible for my dad's estate, selling house, condo, collections, stocks, properties out of state -- I was over my head. I assumed my mom would handle my step-dad's estate. She did not. And six months later we learned she was terminal with lung cancer, and seven months after my step-dad, my mom died.

I'm not making excuses, but I wasn't doing well, and I needed some sort of help, some group activities for my son. I had done 4-H with my older (now adult) children, so I started my son in 4-H Clovers, and then 4-H as he got older.

In spite of the fact that I knew how to "do" 4-H, it was never a good fit for my son. For years we continued with 4-H, but we made efforts to branch out in other ways as well. We tried going roller skating with other home schoolers every Friday afternoon. That, it turns out, is still a rather solitary activity. We joined a home school field trip group, where we went on a group field trip twice a month, but it was also not a good fit.

We tried home school co-op classes. Not a good fit. Look at that face!

We finally found a groove in Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts.

We finally had some constructive activity to help us shape his character, direct his activity and energy level, and something he enjoyed doing.

But as the years passed, he came to enjoy it less. To a degree it still came down to some difficulty dealing with others (boys). There was even some bullying going on (our son was short for his age, and for a time he was stout), and there was difficulty with adults and scouts thinking he was younger than he was.

He was also not happy with the disrespect the boys showed to other scouts and to the adult leaders. When the Senior Patrol Leader said, "Line up!" my son wanted the other scouts to line up at attention and quietly listen for instructions. They didn't.

Seeing this aspect of my son's personality (what he wanted seemed to be military discipline), and knowing Boy Scouts was not supposed to be a military organization, I started brain storming again. When I was a kid my brother was in Civil Air Patrol, and I'd seen blogs of others whose kids were in Civil Air Patrol, so I told my son about it and we checked it out. My son loved it and joined.

By this time, though, he had a lot invested in Boy Scouts and wanted to finish to Eagle. It was a tough go of it, with ups and downs in his motivation, but he finally did finish to the rank of Eagle.

The Boy Scouts program ends at age 18, unless you go into leadership from there. My son turned 18 during his senior year and was so busy he did not go into a leadership position from there. He has been working on his education, and is also working to achieve a similar honor awarded to Civil Air Patrol cadets, the Billy Mitchell Award. He can do this because Civil Air Patrol permits cadets to continue until age 21.

In addition, he is considering a career in the military. In college he will be participating in Air Force ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps).

My point in walking you through my experience is to encourage you to consider socialization, particularly if you are home schooling a lonely only. Maybe you don't need to, but we sure did. If you brainstorm and research you will find there are many activities available for you to consider. If you don't know where to start, you can try to find other home schoolers by posting a 3"X5" card on a bulletin board at your local grocery store! My area has home school groups for chess club, 4-H, Boy Scouts, field trips, co-ops, classes, and on and on. Find out what is available to you!

Homeschooling One - Nature Study

When you are homeschooling only one student, there can be challenges. To name a few:

• you can feel like there is no one you are accountable to on any given day, so you can slide into a loosey-goosey attitude where your plans are not concrete and the urge to change your plans can win at a moment's notice;
• these whimsical changes in result in you not getting as much done as you had hoped;
• when your student argues to not do something, it is hard to stand firm since you often feel like it really doesn't matter overall;
• there is not "competition" between students, so it can be hard for a student to be motivated to do their best or to do a better job -- it can become an attitude of just getting it done because mom assigned it.

 

 Some methods I employed over the years to combat these tendencies toward malaise:

• Make plans to do group activities so that there are set plans, a set time and date, and other students so that there is good peer pressure for the student to do a good job.
• Blog, and join blog rings where you post certain blog posts on certain days.

Overall, though, most of our days did just slide into slogging through it, just my student and I. So my friend became my daily lesson planner. If I planned it, I tried to make it happen.

For our Nature Study efforts, in the style of Charlotte Mason method studies, we were using the Ambleside Online curriculum. I discovered another blogger, Barb, over at Handbook of Nature Study, and she had a weekly Outdoor Hour Challenge (with a free subscription), and that kept me going for a long time. I loved being able to complete the challenge, write a blog post about it and link up on her blog. And Barb would comment on my blog posts -- a small thing, but it kept me going.

It is fun to look over my nature study posts. My student isn't in every post, but he is in many. It is fun to see his growth through the years. You can visit my nature study posts here:

• Monarch Life Cycle
• Leaf Study 
• Thistles
• Preparation for Winter - Plants
• Silent Walk Challenge
• Winter Bird Study - Chickadee
• Chickadee Study - Part 2
• Twig Study
• Mullein
• Snow! 
• Second Snow 
• Birds
• Nature Walk 1 - 2013
• Nature Study 2 - 2013 
• Nature Study Through a Window
• Slate
• Arizona Grassland Flora
• Arizona Grassland Fauna
• Arizona Sonoran Desert Flora and Fauna
• Reptiles and Amphibians
• Identifying Native Plants (Boy Scouts Requirement)
• Autumn Leaves 
• Bird Feeder
• Clean as New-Fallen Snow
• February Flowers
• How Does Your Garden Grow

Menu Monday for 10-1-18

Here are our menu plans for the upcoming week:
Saturday - Baked stuffed potatoes (potato, broccoli, chili, cheddar cheese, sour cream)
Sunday - Grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup

Monday - lasagne roll-ups, salad, garlic knots
Tuesday - cheeseburgers, veggies
Wednesday - chicken Caesar salad, rolls
Thursday - lentil soup, salad, bread
Friday - date night - dinner out

What are you eating for dinner this week?

Menu Monday for 9-24-18

Late posting this, but better late than never I say! Here are the menu plans for the week of 9/24/18:

Saturday - hubby home from his CAP mission; dinner out (Chinese)
Sunday - leftovers
Monday - French Bread Pizza (bumped from last week); salad
Tuesday - Pan-fried chicken, pasta salad, asparagus
Wednesday - Pork Chops, Stuffing, squash
Thursday - leftovers
Friday - date night, dinner out (Red Robin)

A Time for Crickets...

Mid-September, and the evenings are beginning to cool down. When I open my window at night I hear that old familiar sound that means Autumn is in the air.

Speaking of... Have you ever studied crickets with your students? Crickets make a great Nature Study for September and/or October.

The first book I think of when I think of a Cricket Nature Study is Comstock's Book of Nature Study.

It has a great section on crickets. Did you know that some cultures keep crickets for pets? If you want a fun way to interest your child in crickets, consider making a unit study out of it. This can be short and sweet, so that you can keep cranking with your previously scheduled plans, or it can be expanded to include everything you want to do for the week.

The first thing to do is to get some picture books to read. I recommend at least one fiction and one non-fiction. 

Here are some picture book titles I found:

• The Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle 
• Chester Cricket's New Home by Garth Williams 
• Cricket in Time Square by George Selden

Here is a non-fiction book I found about crickets (in addition to the Comstock Handbook of Nature Study):

• Crickets by Cheryl Coughlan

You could do your Cricket Unit Study work all in one day, or spread it out over the full week. I recommend you begin by reading the section in Handbook of Nature Study about Crickets. 

It is very informative. Pay special attention to information about different types of crickets.

You will want to figure out, later, what type(s) of crickets your child finds on his cricket hunt. We also had fun making a cricket house. Instructions are in the book.

 
It was doable, in my house, because we have way too much clutter. We were able to come up with a flower pot, soil, sand, moss, and a globe to an oil lamp. Initially, though, we just used a shoe box.

This type of hands-on activity is fun for a little guy. He was having fun learning, and I was still able to write "school" activities down in my school planner (for accountability - I get reviewed every year because of state law).

Here the unit study activities might look like:

Bible: Read Deuteronomy 28 and ask your student to listen for the mention of crickets in the reading. (It is in verse 42)

Math: Send your students on a cricket hunt. Give each one a mason jar with a lid. Send them off to the edge of the house foundation. They can look under leaves behind the shed, or under random tarps under the deck or around the yard. Check the wood pile. (They might want to wear gloves.) Have them round up as many crickets as they can find. Have them count them. Who found more? How many did they each find?

Science: Look at the various crickets. Do they all look like the same species? Within the ones that seem to be the same species, are they all the same? When we did the study, we found we have black crickets in our area. We were actually able to learn that you can tell the difference between the male and female crickets. Who knew? 

Art or Science: find a diagram of a cricket online so you know the names of the cricket parts. Print out a blank diagram and have students fill it in. Have student draw their own drawing of a cricket.

Literature: Read picture book/have student read picture book, or begin reading The Cricket in Time Square (a classic!).

See how this works? You could practice handwriting by having them write out one sentence from the book you read. You could work on spelling by creating a list with words you introduced in this study, like "thorax", "cercus", "palps", "spiracles" and "ovipositor". You could work on vocabulary by having them look each word up and write out a definition.

You could include physical education by actually going on a nature walk to try to find crickets, but I guess even hunting for them in the back yard would be fine to count for physical education. You can include "health" by having them wash their hands at the end of the activity and talking about the importance of washing hands when dirty or before eating.

The only subject I didn't include was Social Studies, but you could include that by researching the cultures that keep crickets as pets (I think it is Japan, but I might be wrong). 

I hope you have enjoyed by recounting of our cricket study and my brainstorming on how to make a complete unit study of it. Unit studies can be a great way to cover school for grades K-3 in particular. I hope you enjoy!

What's New and Exciting for September 2018

A post to update folks is long overdue.

We got a family photo taken (above) the day my youngest celebrated high school graduation. I'm on the far left, then Dad, then my youngest, then my oldest, then my son-in-law, then my middle "child". (I don't use names -- want to protect some privacy." Then there are the dogs -- Cody on the left, and the yellow blur on the right is my oldest's dog named Coda.

My high school graduate was not able to find summer work. He spent his summer promoting his home business - Eagle Whips (you can find him on Instagram). And he built up his inventory of whips so they could continue to sell even while he is away at college! (He's not allowed to make them at college. They are considered to be a weapon. Go figure.)

He also finished his requirements to be promoted to Cadet Senior Master Sgt.

 
August arrived. The college freshman packed his bags, and we flew to Arizona.

 We landed in Phoenix to a temperature of 108, then we drove to Flagstaff.

Getting moved into the dorm was such a small part of that week. He had to get his new ID card first...

 There was an expo, where he met the Lumberjack...

There were days of orientation. The lad plans to participate in CAP in AZ, working to achieve rank of 1st Lt. He also plans to participate in AF ROTC, but that has been postponed til the Spring semester.

Since launching the lad I've been working to stay motivated. I've got loads to do -- I just need to stay on track. I'm making maternity clothes for the momma of my first grandchild...

I'm quilting...

I'm trying to sell off 27-years-worth of homeschool books...

And there is plenty of decluttering and cleaning to catch up on now that I am done home schooling.

But... I still love reviewing home school products... So right now I have in the hopper:

Teach Sunday School Bible-At-A-Glance

Brinkman Adventures Season 6

and Heirloom Audio Adventures St. Bartholomew's Eve

Can't wait to tell you more! 

I will try to give a new update in mid-October. So what is new in your world?