Our week

After recovering from all the relaxing of our vacation we are finally back into the swing of things around here!  I've been making the next sequence of language/math materials for D like crazy.  Almost done!  D and M have been happy to be back home and are enjoying the time in the school room.  Seems like they missed it while on vacation!  Here are a few pictures of M revisiting all her works on her shelves.

Alaska Vacation

If you've been wondering why there is no update on this blog that is because we have been on a two week vacation to Alaska!  Two week vacation in the beginning of September?!! Love homeschooling!  Here are some pictures for you to enjoy!

Mendenhall Glacier - Juneau, Alaska

Whale watching - Juneau, Alaska

Bald Eagle - Skagway, Alaska

Sled Dog Ride - Skagway Alaska

Mt McKinley - Denali, Alaska

Oil Pipeline - Fairbanks, Alaska

Santa's House, North Pole, Alaska

 Lovely Moon - Anchorage, Alaska

Glaciers at College Fjords

Glaciers at Glacier Bay

White Pass Railway - Juneau, Alaska

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Cultural Exchange - USA: Ohio

As I've mentioned here before, I am participating in a Cultural Exchange.  You can read about what we sent the other families here.  One of the first packages we received was from this lovely family from Ohio.  The amount of thought and effort they have put into creating this package is just amazing.  Everything was neatly packaged in a nice box, I can only imagine what it would have cost them to ship it internationally!

We received this nice letter with tons of information about the life of kids here in the United States and about the things they do in Ohio.  It also had a nice picture of the family. Here is a look at a page from their letter.

They had included a map of the United States and some coloring sheets.

They had included some Red Carnations and a Cardinal, the State flower and bird of Ohio.  What an amazing idea!  Also included were a snowman and a bale of hay.

More stuff related to the States.

Craft items, rainbow crayons and fall leaves.

US Flag and stickers.  A wooden Star shape for craft work.

Monarch Butterfly, more stickers, watermelon sucker, start shaped silly bands and a couple of american pencils!

Amish County travel brochure and a beautiful postcard if Amish children.  My daughter loves this picture and this has led so many wonderful conversations about the Amish!

Some fun activity books and Star shaped notepads.

A lovely American basket that will be put to so much use in our school room!

Many thanks for the family that sent this to us! I can't even begin to imagine the amount of patience and effort that was needed to put this thorough package together!  We received this package first and this inspired so much of what we put together for this exchange.  We feel so blessed to be participating!

To see more of the Cultural Exchange Packages that were exchanged visit here.

FIAR - Volume 1: The Story About Ping

We rowed "The Story About Ping" by "Marjorie Wise" for our first session of FIAR.

"The Story about Ping" is a delightful story about a duckling in China that escapes from punishment only to find himself alone on the Yangtze river, where he encounters different situations.  In the end he eventually decides that accepting his punishment and getting back home is way better than the other option.

We've discussed/done the following so far:

1. Located China on the map and pointed to the Yangtze river.
2. Learnt that the capital of China is Beijing.
3. Identified the Chinese flag on our Flags of the World Poster.
4. Colored the China map and the Chinese flag.
5. Read the following books related to China and the Chinese culture:
1. The Story of Noodles - A fun story about how noodles were invented.
2. The Story of Kites - How and why the Kite was invented.
3. One Year in Beijing - A Journal style account of a little's girls one year life in Beijing.  D loved this book the most.
4. Daisy comes home - A cute story about a chicken named daisy that gets lost.
6. Watched a few shows from the Wild China Series on Netflix.  It was amazing to watch Cormorants fishing for their masters!
7. Went through the Chinese items from our Asia Continent Box.
8. Made Chinese noodles for lunch one day and ate with chopsticks!
9. Learnt about the duck family.
10. Read books on the life cycle of ducks:
1. Duck
2. A Duckling Is Born
11. For art, we did a drawing of a duck and colored it using color pencils just like the illustration in the book by Kurt Wiese.
    
12. D narrated the "The Story about Ping" and I wrote it down.
13. Read "Make Way for Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey.  Such a delightful story!  We would be rowing this again during our FIAR Volume 2 session.
14. We discussed following rules and accepting consequences for your actions.

Below are some other things that I wanted to do, but could not due to lack of time.  We would probably complete some of these at a later date, may be when we row "Make Way for Ducklings".

1. Make a Kite using brown paper bag and ribbons and fly it in our back yard.
2. Learn to say "Hi" and "Bye" in Chinese.
3. Learn to count to 10 in Chinese.
4. Make a family tree of all of D's immediate cousins with their picture.  D would love this activity.
5. Experiment on sink/float and documented our findings.
6. Go and feed the ducks in our nearby park.

For our first rowing, I think we did great!  I tried not to focus too much on actual activities and frustrate D, instead focussed on general discussion about the book and mostly reading.  D loves anything to do with maps and flags so generally enjoyed those activities.  As far as art goes, she did the duck drawing to entertain me, but was not too enthusiastic about it.  So for future rowings I might not include art activities  unless D seems genuinely interested.  She is not into coloring too, so we might avoid that.  For future rowings, I am going to just get ideas from the FIAR manual for general discussion and not do much in terms of actual activities.  The only problem I see with this approach is that we would not have enough stuff to make those wonderful lap books that I see in the various FIAR forums.  But I guess that is ok as this whole process should be for D's enjoyment, not for me!

For our next row, we've selected Madeline and various other wonderful books! Can't wait to get started!

Here are all the titles that we read, linked to amazon:

Our first week of school for the 2011-12 year

With the school room all setup we started school (not that we took a break!) last monday (22nd Aug).  We started a couple of weeks early because we are taking a few weeks off next month.  The kids were sick Tuesday, so we took a break on Tuesday but continued to have school the rest of the week.

We don't have a strict routine, but we try to be consistent with what we are doing everyday.  We wake up, get dressed, have breakfast, change the calendar date (currently in our dining room) and get into the school room.  D does all the stuff she does without me doing any new presentations as I need to keep M from getting into all the good stuff in the room!  We stay there till M gets tired and starts getting into everything she is not supposed to and then get out.  Sometimes D continues in there without me doing mostly practical life stuff and then gets to our dining area where I have her art supplies set up.  At various times through out the day you can find her at her art area cutting, gluing, drawing, coloring and generally creating.

As far as RightStart and All About Spelling, this week we worked on it a couple of days each for 10 - 15 mins late afternoons.  We've been practicing the oral addition/subtraction problems for fun all week.  D even makes up her own which is a lot of fun.  For FIAR, we've been reading tons of books related to the FIAR book but have not been doing any actual activities.  I will keep it this way I think as I am pretty exhausted setting up all the montessori stuff for her anyway! The good thing is that we are reading a lot and the FIAR books are awesome.

Here are some pictures from our first day.  My 1 year old is working on pouring, open and close basket and stacking rings.

My 4 year old is working on stitching buttons, musical instruments, screws and hammering, astronomy, the golden bead material and fractions.

We also did a presentation on Living and non-living things and you can find a blog post on that here.

Apart from these, I had left the Object Box 1 and 2 out in the language area and over the course of the week D completed both of these.  I need to now start changing the objects in the boxes or advance to the next step in the sequence.  We also did a primitive map lesson in the geography area.  D has been working on tracing her numbers and is pretty good now with writing those.  The work on fractions during school time has made her think about how to make fractions with her food!

It has been a very interesting week and we hope to continue the same pace the rest of the year, God willing!

Our Unit on Living/Non-Living/Once-Living

After our unit on matter I wanted to present the Living/Non-Living/Once-Living chapters from Karen's album. We started a while back but then we never were in the school room for a significant period, so it was never completed.  Now that  school is open here we have started on this again.

The first is the presentation of the Control Tray and the Living Tray. The control tray has the four things that all living things have in common - food, air, water and re-production. Another reason I love montessori is the use of the correct vocabulary so the child learns it and has no fear of using big words in his/her language.

Our living tray had our kitchen herbs and a couple of ants in a jar.

Next up is the abstract portion where we introduce the pictures of living things and again stress on the things that all living things have in common using the control tray.  I got these living/non-living cards from Jojoebi.

If there is a classroom pet or a plant, a care lesson for that follows. Since we already have a classroom plant, D already cares for it daily. We don't yet own a classroom pet, getting D a fish to care for is on my to-do list. For now, we have a some food a couple of drops of water for the ant.

The presentation on non-living is next. Here is our non-living tray.

And the abstract with pictures of non-living stuff.

An activity follows the non-living one. We had this polishing/cleaning rocks activity.  The container in the middle has some wet wipes.

Here is a picture of D carefully wiping the rocks!

Here is our tray for once-living.  It has a dinosaur skeleton (dollar store find) and a few flowers picked off our garden.

The activity that follows this is a mini fossil dig.  I got this little kit at lakeshore learning for a couple of dollars.

We dug out the dinosaur bones and played archaeologist! D loved every minute of it.  Here are the bones we found!

This wraps up our lesson on this unit. I loved setting up the trays and D loved the presentations! I am planning to leave the picture cards for sorting in our shelves for a few more days.