Random Fall Fun

While the above photo isn't quite the picture of jumping up and down fun, I just had to include it here in my blog because I love seeing my two boys cuddled up together. As much as a pain it can be at night sometimes for us to have the kids crawl into bed with us and get kicked and elbowed in the stomach in the middle of the night, I know I will deeply miss smelling the tops of their little heads before drifting off to sleep and watching their chests slowly move up and down.

While digging through their Halloween candy, the kids found this mini War card game. I had never played the game before, so it was a fun new experience for us all. Many times people who are deeply entrenched in school mentality cannot fathom how anything math related can spontaneously occur- they think everything must be pre-planned and thought out. Not that researching cool number and pattern games is bad, in fact I find it a lot of fun browsing through catalogs like Mindware, but even without any extra thought things like this random finding of a card game and exploring how numbers can be more or less than each other happen all the time.

I don't know if you have anything like this at your library, but  our neighboring town's library had these awesome cloth activity bags. The kits usually include a book, a laminated card showing you how to "teach" the material, and some cool toys. How's this for serendipity? It was a week before Halloween and we had been reading online about different Halloween traditions and also how other countries have similar traditions. Around this time the kids had also watched Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, which plot takes place during the Day of the Dad festivities in Mexico.

Then Alexa picks this bag out at the library without even looking inside it, and when we get home we realize that it's all about the Day of the Dead. We read the book and played with the toys. The family in the book talked about making Pan de Muertes. I asked the kids if they wanted to make the bread with me, and they did. It was the first time I had made bread before by scratch, and to my surprise it turned out great! It was like this perfectly planned out unit study, but of course much better because I couldn't have planned it out so perfectly.

I've mentioned before how Jared is our late-night boy, sometimes not falling asleep until 11:00, yet still up by 7:00 the next day. He gets into the most wonderfully creative moods late at night. Here's one of his late night Lego creations.

Jared's the type of kid who wants everything. Right now one of his favorite activities it to take all the ads out of the Sunday paper and point out the hundreds of things he wants for Christmas. Alexa, on the other hand, is much different. We gave her $20 this vacation to buy whatever she wanted, and she would always leave stores, aquariums and other attractions empty-handed because she didn't find anything worth spending her money on. So, when she saw a commercial for the Glo-Doodle and was jumping up and down saying she wanted one, we took her right out the next day to get one. (She had so much allowance built up by then it was crazy).

Awesome Abacus

We've been into counting a lot in our house. Jared loves counting everything he can get his hands on. It's very, very interesting and exciting to watch your kids from birth develop their own learning styles. You do really appreciate how unique and individual every child is and that must be respected.

As I've said, Jared loves to count, but for him in mostly involves touching and manipulating things. Alexa loves anything to do with the computer. She is very adept for four year old. She loves when I find new computer games, video or hands-on computer activities for her to do. A few week ago, I showed her a site that basically was a set of math flash cards. You simply punched in the correct answer, and the computer tallies up your score at the end. I didn't expect her to really like it, and she lost interest in a few minutes.

However, a few weeks later she asked me to put on the site for her again. This time I thought she might like to use the abacus, too. It really was a nice way for her and Jared to play together on something. She'd read the numbers aloud to be counted together and he'd push the correct number of beads. They did this for quite a while that morning, and have not asked to do it since. I wonder where their counting interests will take them next?

Measuring without Lessons

Jared and Alexa will often get some of their most creative energy at night. Jared especially loves to stay up, just laying in bed with me, talking and talking and talking and talking!  He will first want to put together a puzzle at 9:30. Alexa usually is more tired than Jared, and prefers to watch something, read out loud to us, or have us read to her.

That's why it was a little unusual when one evening she had this sudden burst of energy. She had seen Steve measuring things earlier, and after taking a bath, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed the measuring tape and wanted to measure everything. I'm pretty sure without exaggerating she measured about fifty different things. She learned more about measurement in that hour than it would take school kids to learn in months. She was just ready. She asked questions about the numbers, started to get the idea of twenty, thirty, forty and so on, and showed a lot of intuitive knowledge about size.

This would not have been as effective as a "lesson" in measurement. If it hadn't been at a time of her choosing and when she was ready for it, she wouldn't have been as excited, wanted to keep at it for so long, or retained anything she had been shown. Now, she has brought out the measuring tape on several different occassions this month and is much more curious about numbers. Both kids can count objects and tell you how many, say, carrots there are on a plate, up to at least the number 10. This really is just from playing board games, helping me cook, me asking them how many of something they'd like, and so on.

I've had someone ask me what if kids become young adults and not learn to read or do any math because they didn't want to. I had to ask how could you get to be 18 and not want to read or do math?  Would you at least want to drive a car?  You need to read to do that. Would you not want to know how much change you have, or how much percentage off you're getting at a big sale, or how much you still have to save to buy a new car?  I don't get how a healthy human being, who hadn't been tainted by a formal school institution, wouldn't be intensly curious about reading and math. If presented in an interesting way, I don't see why most people wouldn't be eager to explore algebra, physics, geography, biology, or any number of other interesting things about the world.

The secret is: be right there to answer your children's questions when they come up and allow them to explore these new ideas, even when it's getting late and you're tired. Easier said than done, but very important to remember.

Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

I didn't get as many good pictures for the activities we did with this book, but it was a fun book for me and the kids. We went on a walk around the block to find "magic pebbles" like the one Sylvester found in the book. This went ok until they decided to run away from me and wouldn't come back. This is a big issue that we're trying to work through. One of them will say, "Quick, Hide!" when I come towards them and then take off running. It's difficult to take them places by myself that aren't somewhat contained because they tend to run away from me at some point and won't come back when I call them. We've been instituting punishments for this lately because no amount of reasoning, requesting or pleading will persuade them to come back to me when I call. Oh, well. It's a work in progress.

Anyways, later that afternoon we painted the rocks and pebbles different colors: red, green, pink and blue. Then we set up bowls, and they really enjoyed separating the rocks by different colors. I didn't know if they'd like that since it's a thing they liked to do when they were much younger, but they still did. It's kinda how they like to bring up their baby board books and look at them again even though we are currently reading Charlotte's Web out loud.





We also read Spinky Sulks by William Steig and Fish is Fish and The Wingdingdilly which are books about being content with who we are.

Playdough drums and Grandfather Tang

MAY 7

Once again, the morning started with the Wee Sing Dinosaurs CD and book over breakfast. In fact, they wanted to play it twice. I’m actually beginning to remember most of the names, too. They broke out the play dough shortly after and Jared wanted me to make some dough drums, cymbals and drum sticks. As I washed dishes, Jared would ask me over and over to push the play dough through the mold that shoots the dough out in long strings. He calls them his worms.

They had a longer DVD time then I would have liked today, but they really enjoyed several episodes of Liberty’s Kids. I can’t believe how much they love the show. Although they don’t understand everything, it’s surprising how much they remember.

They continually amuse me with their pretend play. Having twins is extremely difficult, especially two spirited children, but the times they play well and don’t fight are really precious. They adore playing a game where they take everything from the fridge and drop the items off in different places of the house. For a long time today, they also bend over Alexa’s dolls pretending to be dentists. They’d pry at the dolls’ mouths with nails and butter knives. I just love knowing that they will always be unschooled and will have hundreds of hours in play just like this over the years. If they are anything like me, I know they will soon be creating complicated little worlds of their own.

During lunch we read the Grandfather Tang’s story again and made pictures with the tangrams. Lately they’ve been going in spurts where we’ll read for almost an hour during lunch and then others where we read one or two books and then they want to jump down and play or read on their own.

We were going to go the Grau Mill today to feed bread to the ducks; however Alexa was super whiny and difficult after lunch and I knew she was tired. It just takes a lot to get her to sleep on her own. After some shouting on my part (I’m trying to work so hard on this. I don’t really shout that often and my goal is to help them work through problems instead of rushing into punishments or raising voices, but my patience gets a workout with the two of them. I always apologize afterwards and they are so cute to say “I forgive you, Mommy.” So after stepping out of the bathroom, I found Alexa asleep on the couch. I was able to coax Jared into snuggling with me on Steve’s and my bed, and we all took a good nap. The downside to this is that they stayed up until almost ten, and then Steve and I don’t get much alone time, but I try to get the rest where it comes.

They are 3!

April 29

My babies turned three! They are such little kids already. They talk so much. Once in a while I’ll count how many words they use in a sentence. When they were younger, I’d worry a bit about their speaking. While Alexa had close to 400 words by age two, she or Jared still weren’t putting two or more words together besides phrase that go together like all done, hi ma, or oh no. Then within a month she was putting together four to five word sentences and Jared was doing the same about two months later. Now more often than not I’ll notice her using eight to ten words in a sentence and Jared six to eight words. They both string many sentences together, and I’m imagine they’ll be speaking in paragraphs really soon.

For the fun of it, I used to keep a log of all new words they’d use. Unfortunately our hard drive crashed a few months again and I hadn’t saved the info. At that time she had around 1,700 words and he had about 1,500. I imagine she now is well over 2,000 and Jared somewhere close to their too.

Since I did a huge cleaning this past weekend before everyone came over, so I wanted to do a lot of extra things with the kids this week. On their birthday, we made a jelly roll. It turned out pretty good. We made it to go along with reading Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. There’s a book called Pre School Activities. It’s sort of like the Story Stretches book where you read a picture book and then do related activities. Last week, they painted in the bathtub using shaving cream dyed with food coloring.

Let’s see, we read Grandfather Tang. I’m able to request things from other libraries through interlibrary loan, so other libraries have literacy kits where there will be a book and then a related toy with it. This book has a bucket full of tangrams. They play with a small set of tangrams, but I wasn’t sure how they would like to hear a story where I made a different tangram picture for each page we read. They loved it!

Their aunt game them My Very First Science Kit this weekend, so we played with that some. They really enjoyed mixing the color tablets in the water and watching the bubbles fizz. Then they played with mixing red, blue and yellow colored water to make purple, orange and green. Alexa was so intent on pouring water from the cup into the test tube. Lots of spills the first few times, but I was surprised how well she did just within a few minutes of practice.

They loved playing with the fishing game Grammy gave them. The larger version runs on batteries. They fish rotate in opening up their mouths and then you have to hook them with a fishing pole. There is also a smaller wind up version with a magnet. Another thing they had fun with was the slinky. They did try to get it to walk down the stairs a few times, but mostly they just ran around the house, each holding onto one end, screaming their head off. Needless to say, by the end of the day it was all stretched out, but they had a blast with it at the time.

A huge hit was the cardboard castle Uncle Andy bought them. It is about three feet tall, so they could climb inside it like a real castle. They colored it for a long time. I think it won’t be here for long, though, as Jared had jumped on top of it so many times already.

When Steve came home we went to eat at Culvers. We were able to get a booth (which was hard because the place was packed since it just opened about a week ago) which helped since they do not like to sit very long and it helps to contain them somewhat. Halfway through the meal, however, Jared was sliding under the table. A worker gave them a sample sundae for their birthday, and they looked so proud carrying them to the car.

We stopped at Jewel to pick up a small cake before heading home. They were very excited about the presents. It’s funny because this past Christmas Jared went into tantrums just at the mention of opening presents. He refused to open them for a while on Christmas. Anyway, it was nice that we could open them slowly, unlike the rushed way we did it with family this weekend. They loved their new books, and we had to read most of them right away. I went to the thrift store and was able to pick up 16 books for $10.50. Buying books at thrift stores is probably one of the greatest resource tips I know for unschoolers besides the public library. I’ve also picked up extremely inexpensive craft supplies like yarn, doilies, fabric, and ribbons. Since we still have our VCR, I often find some VHS tapes for .25-.50. I’m sure if I look more closely, I’ll be able to find games there, too.

The Melissa and Doug wooden castle was probably the biggest hit. It came with tiny puppet king, queen, prince and princess, two horses, a tiny treasure chest, bed and two chairs. They also received about six other figures from the same set for their birthday. Steve and Jared worked for a while on Jared’s new 100 piece Safari Melissa and Doug puzzle. We had bought a Wedgits set for Jared since he had loved the sets at the Field Museum so much, but it turns out that Alexa plays with it more. Jared also received a set a pattern blocks, Alexa a ballet flannel graph set, and they each will share a play space shuttle and astronauts.

They were pretty tired that evening and went to bed around 8:30. Turns out we didn’t even need to buy a cake since they had forgotten that we had even bought it!

Fall 2008

Fall 2008

I have about a month’s worth of blog posts to get up, so I’m going to just write in short check list for the some of the highlights from the fall, winter, and spring before their birthday. I hate to make it so matter of fact and would love to comment more and share what I thought about some of the things we did, but I’ll never get up to date. I really, really, really want to record more of our unschooled life to look back over through the years and to share with other families, so I have to figure a way to be more efficient at this and hopefully improve at making my posts more interesting to read as well! I hope to very soon post pictures because I love reading other blogs that post pictures along with what they are posting about.
So, here going our fall highlights:

Playing in the leaves

Making a dough sculpture by sticking leaves, sticks and rocks in the dough and letting it harden

Reading Blueberries for Sal and then eating blueberries for the first time, making blueberry muffins from scratch, and counting our blueberries

Carving pumpkins and lighting our pumpkins every night a week before Halloween while singing Happy Birthday, pumpkin (they came up with that entirely on their own!)

Reading Make Way for Duckling, Lentil, Frog and Toad series

Halloween costumes – Jared, pirate, and Alexa, pirate princess – trick or treating will all the grandparents, great-grandma and Aunty Cheryl and Uncle Zach

Museum of Science and Industry trip – climbing inside the combine, the Idea Factory, the Plane and Train exhibit – and watching the baby chicks hatch

Blackberry Farm – Riding the carousel, riding the train, painting pumpkins, looking at the farm animals

Cooking – Alexa helping me by cutting carrots, garlic and onions on her own, Jared stirring and mixing

Annie obsession – Watching the movies about seven or eight times, singing Annie songs while at the dentist where everyone in the waiting room could hear!

Music we loved listening to – Glen Miller Orchestra, Andrea Bocelli, James Taylor, Credence Clearwater Revival, various classical CDs

Garfield Park Conservatory trip – splashing in the puddles in Monet’s Garden, watching the fish in the coy pond.

Naming different countries and states – they can locate dozens of countries and can locate most the states

Puzzles – Jared stated to really love doing puzzles. We have a forty-eight piece United States puzzles and within two weeks he could put the entire thing together without any help

Rolling trucks down the hallway

Walks in the Cermak Woods – getting within fifteen feet of a family of deer, throwing stones in the pond, running through a flock of almost a hundred geese.

Bounce City – celebrating cousin Owen’s first birthday

Music – playing on guitar, lots of singing, playing on Steve’s guitar, playing the keyboard

Wonder Works trip – Riding the floor vehicles, “digging for dinosaur fossils” by finding pretend dinosaurs buried in clay, exploring the wigwam, playing in the tree house

Fun with Grandma

5/2
For the next three days, I’m gonna play catch up with this blog. I wrote down sketchy notes but I forgot what we did most of the day. Not a great start to my goal of recording our learning experiences throughout the day, but I hope to get better.

I know my parents came over this afternoon and watched the kids while I went grocery shopping. My mom usually comes every Friday afternoon. I would love to take the twins shopping with me for the experience, but they won’t stay in the stroller anymore and I definitely wouldn’t be able to carry or watch them both while shopping.

My mom said they played with these number containers she made for them. She put different numbers on the outside of empty containers. The game is to put the correct number of shapes in each container. Also, there’s this website that shows an animated Santa and reindeers singing I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas that my mom said Jared wants played over again and again. Not something I’d choose for him to listen to for that long, but he does have an amazing attention span for such a little guy. Jared also impressed my dad with hitting from the tee ball stand. Jared will set the ball on the stand, swing back far, and hit the ball dead center, not even touching the stand, with a line drive across the room.

I‘ve complied a list of books for gifted readers that I’ve created through several different books, including My Best Friends are Books. So far every book I’ve checked out that has been recommended for the two year old range has been a hit with Jared and Alexa. They both were excited to see a few new books I’d picked up for them on my way home this afternoon.