Sunbeams and Nature Centers

Wow, we've been busy!

On the home front, I finally convinced Husband that our house will never get painted unless we hire someone to do it. So Bingo! Youngest now has a peach colored room to move into, and Oldest got her wish for a room that's green on the bottom and blue on the top, with flowers sprinkled in between.

In between dodging paint pots and spackling, we've continued our math journey with our favorite gnomes. This week Mini, Paddy and Max have been invited by King Dominic for tea, and they're playing games with their counting jewels. As they all try to see how many different combinations of stone piles they can make, they are inventing the different math signs that promptly get named after them.

We also had another fantastic day with our science coop. We are going through Arabella Buckley's Fairyland of Science which in a hundred years of scientific discovery has lost very little of its relevance, and is simply a beautifully written text. My friend and I decided how to structure the lesson, then she taught it. Yesterday's lesson had the kids learn that sunbeams are made from waves of different lengths which produce different colors when lying next to each other (prisms are fun!) but white light when bundled together. Oldest told me that sunbeams give us heat and light and that without either there would be no life on earth. The kids also made "sunprints" on light sensitive paper and in the process learned about failed experiments. Finally, they got to make a solar oven out of pizza boxes and melt beeswax in them. I am hoping we will get to do the lecture on bees soon, as my friend has her own hive and I haven't had a bee "fix" in a decade or so. Sensory overload, here we come!

When I came to pick up Oldest, the kids had just changed into bathing suits and so a frolicking gaggle of little girls had their first sprinkler party of the year. A lovely ending to a great afternoon.

This morning we hung out with our gnome friends and wrote notes from yesterday's class. Then Oldest made a beautiful drawing of what sunbeams mean to her, and she copied a short poem to end the lesson. Then we fixed lunch, picked up Youngest from preschool and headed to the woods at a nearby nature center. We walked around the pond admiring millions of tadpoles, looked for frogs, snakes and other living creatures, found mostly birds though. We also found a fantastic playground where the kids ran themselves ragged until the rain started. Thank you rain for making it easy to get my kids in the car today!

It's been a great homeschooling week. Since we took a break last week, it was challenging for Oldest to get back into the swing of things, but in the process she made some outstanding drawings to go with our math block, mastered a recorder song, figured out some math, studied sunbeams, played with good friends, identified several species of fish, snake and frog at the nature center, and gained a whole lot more confidence in her abilities as a scholar and a person. And that is the greatest gift of all. As mother and teacher, for me, being there in those sweet moments of "getting it," or problem solving with friends, or discovering the workings of the world, is a true privilege. Today I feel blessed to be able to home educate my kid.