Disobedience

We are reading a few poems a week from "When We Were Very Young" by A.A. Milne, this is our favorite so far...

Young At Art

I previously mentioned that we would be following Young at Art by Susan Striker this year, and this month we are focusing on Black & White. I really enjoyed this book but wanted the ability to easily incorporate some of the authors ideas into our art time without having to take the time to do a full-blown unit study as the lesson plans in the book suggest. So I took what I liked from the lesson plans and scrapped the rest. We will not be doing any of the themed songs, fingerplays, or snacks to go along with the projects. I am simply using the supplies lists and art projects listed for each color. Short and Sweet. This time will be focused on helping my 2 year old learn to identify colors and exposing both of the kids (and myself!) to different art mediums that we otherwise may not experience. Last week we started with drawing black and white, and this week we moved on to painting. First, black fingerpaint on white paper. This was the first time Kaylee realized that she could draw an object with her fingers instead of just scribbling, and so she made another fish.

Up to this point Matthew has not had many chances to fingerpaint with a new baby and move last year, so he just really enjoyed the feel of the paint between his fingers and the chance to get his hands dirty!

After a quick clean up we moved on to white tempura paint on black paper. I really like the fat paint brushes I picked up at A.C. Moore for the kids to use, they are able to grip them easily and get a ton of paint on them!

Kaylee continued her "water" phase (hopefully it's just a phase?) with a submarine!

This is so much fun for the kids, minimal planning on my part, and free personalized artwork to display in the playroom! We love Young at Art!

(Note: this is our makeshift drying line in the garage studio, where most of our painting takes place!)

First Steps

Today my baby girl took her first steps!

She was so excited afterward that she just giggled and giggled!

I think she knew from the moment she woke up that today would be the day she would let go...if only it was as easy for this momma to let go of the fact that we are almost out of the "Baby Phase". Lala will soon be celebrating her first birthday, she started eating real-people food last week, and this week I have had to spend a great deal of time packing up outgrown baby clothes. Hurts my heart just a little, but I am so blessed to have each of my children in my life, and to have the opportunity to watch them daily grow and change. All this constant changing helps me to keep things in perspective - both big and small.

And as tiny as those few steps were, it was a BIG day here!

First Day of School!

This past Monday was Frog Hollow Academy's official start to the 2010-2011 school year. Kaylee was so excited when she went to bed Sunday night, and she woke up super early the next morning and came jumping down the stairs dressed in her new outfit ready to learn! So as soon as breakfast was over we went outside for a quick photo shoot. I wanted to start the year off with taking pictures because of my own memories of posing for the camera and showing off my "new suit" before being taken to school, and I want my kids to have a similar memory even if they will not be leaving home for schooltime. I thought it so funny how little has changed in almost 30 years when I found my own "First Day of School" photo and realized my own little brother had hijacked my photo shoot too!

Then - 1983
Now - 2010
I look at this picture and I just think she is too little to already be starting this journey, where did the last 5 years go? But I know she is so ready and eager to learn and I am thankful for that!

After pictures we sat down for Bible/Calendar/Memory Time (which we have already been doing daily for a long time). Then Kaylee was all business, she asked "What are we doing first Teacher?" and I just cracked up I was so caught off guard by this because it had never even crossed my mind to discuss with her how she was to address me during schooltime. She came up with it all by herself and repeatedly called me Teacher throughout the day!

Since these first few weeks will be mainly meant for 1)getting my bearings about me, 2)establishing a rountine for all of us, 3)determining where Kaylee is at academically, and 4)my leaning toward a more CM-friendly lifestyle, our current schedule will be very light of awhile. We began with a review of letter A, and introducing lowercase a. I had her identify both upper & lowercase letter A from a sheet of various letters, and we also sang the "A says aah" song from LeapFrog Fridge Phonics. Next she did a lesson from her Kumon Tracing workbook.

And yes, I do realize that Charlotte Mason said workbooks were generally a "no-no", but I had already purchased quite a few of these before learning of Ms. Mason, and also I particularly like this book because working through it with Kaylee has really helped her pencil control more than anything else we have done. And she loves the maze aspect of it, figuring out what the hidden picture is, and then coloring said picture. I had planned on this page taking no more than 5 minutes, but she stretched this out to 30 minutes of creativity! It was during this time that I discovered my Lil' Man Dutch was very much interested in what was going on at the kitchen table, and why Kaylee was getting so much attention from Momma today. He wanted his workbook, and I was not prepared. So we made do with a coloring book page, and I will be brainstorming ideas of how to include him or have activities of his own in the coming weeks.

Thankfully the next activity I had planned was very easy to include him in. We played several matching and sorting games with a deck of color & shape flashcards. We play these types of games using various cards frequently and have fun with it. After snacks Matthew started to lose interest and asked to play with the baby, so this was a perfect time to work on counting. Kaylee & I made several piles on the table with large buttons and counted how many were in each pile, then combined the piles and counted how many all together(addition), then took some buttons away from the pile and counted how many were left (subtraction). Kaylee really enjoyed this and we will be doing it again soon.

Our final Table Time activity for the day was Art. This was also easy to include Dutch in because I had purposely designed this for him as an aid in teaching him colors. I am loosely following the lesson plan suggestions from the book Young at Art, and as the author suggests we are starting with black and white. So we gathered our black crayons, colored pencils, and graphite pencils to draw on white paper, then used white crayons, colored pencils, and chalk to draw on black paper.

I forgot to take pictures of all the final pieces, but these will be going up in the playroom along with our family art projects, and I will share what that looks like when more has been added to the walls.

I am going to be very real here, this morning did not start out as I had envisioned during all these months of planning, it seemed that everything that could go wrong before breakfast did, and I found myself really struggling to keep the volume of my voice in check. But I tried to keep in the front of my mind why I was embarking on this journey in the first place, and some of the reasons this is so important to me, especially the relationships that I hope my children form with their Heavenly Father, with their world, and with each other while sitting around their own kitchen table. And I think by the time we got our "lessons" underway, I had managed to capture a piece of that... And I felt at peace with the choice I was making, and for a few short hours everything in my world was right.

What's in a Name?

Someone will surely ask "Why Frog Hollow Academy?", and the simple answer is, we have alot of frogs. We have recently moved to a new neighborhood which has a creek running through it. On most evenings we can sit outside on the porch and listen to the calming monotony of the frogs croaking back and forth to one another along the creek. We try to guess how many frogs will jump across the road and up our driveway once it starts to get dark, and then count them to see if we were right. (And sometimes on our nature walks we count how many frogs didn't make it back across the road the previous night!) So it only seemed fitting to begin our unofficial "official" start to this homeschooling adventure by discovering a few tadpoles had taken up residence in the kiddie pool out on the back patio, convenient for us to observe and watch change into frogs.

Uh, did I say a few frogs? Make that a few hundred frogs!

Yes, we are about to be up to our ears in Frog!