* Sir I. loves The Hobbit. He loves it so much that he drew a picture of Smaug and insisted that he be assigned the first paragraph of the book as copywork. Check out that monster of a second sentence:
Not a dirty, nasty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
* Miss M. loves unicorns. She loves to color unicorn pictures, cut them out and twirl around the house flying them. Apparently these unicorns do fly, even though they have no discernable wings.
* The Baron is saying color words: “boo”, “een” and “bown”.
* We drew birds. Lots and lots of owls, hummingbirds, parrots and just generic birds. Don’t ask me why the olders are so into them right now.
* We got into all the scrap fabric bags left over from David’s sewing projects and my college costume design class from mumbletymumble years ago and made a coat of many colors. Ouch. I hot-glued my fingers way too many times. Now you know, kids, why glue guns are only for mommies!
Not sure you know that I homeschool as well. Any fun math suggestions? Right now I’m trying to teach my daughter addition by having her Aladdin rescue the princess from a makeshift cave outside of number 30 on a hundred number chart. He has to jump to all the numbers via addition. It really seems to be motivating her!
Oh, that’s fun! I should remember that one for my princess-mad daughter.
I’ve used a lot of manipulatives—C-rods, pattern blocks, geoboards, counting bears, and such. I find games like Yahtzee and Addition/Subtraction War to reinforce math concepts and math facts in a fun way. Not sure how old your daughter is, but we also like the MathStart books. We’ve also done a lot of word problems in the context of a story.
I use Singapore Math as my main math curriculum, and Miquon and MEP on the side.
I loved being homeschooled growing up, but I don’t think it was quite THAT fun! Of course, I was the kind of girl that was begging to start school every time it rolled around and finally got to when I was four!
We used ACE curriculum from School of Tomorrow. Pretty much all the time. But it was fun.
The only thing that I pouted over was that we rarely got to do the activities–like making soap. That looked soooooooo interesting to my six-year-old self! π
We-ell, I’m sure Sir I. could come up with a long list of un-fun things I make him do. π
I’ve never heard of the ACE curriculum. I’ll have to check it out.
I do the low-stress activities with the kids. Any involved projects like soap-making–they can do it themselves when they’re older.
I’d love to hear more about your homeschooling experience from the point of view of the student.