Backyard Birthday Party

Josiah is 7! Like all parents, I find it hard to believe he's grown up so fast--and yet it's hard to remember him as a baby and toddler! He's growing into a fun, creative, curious boy--and has recently started arguing with us in a way that makes me tremble a little as I anticipate the teenage years.

He requested a host of friends for his birthday party, so we compromised and invited two families and also had his cousins Elias and Cedar here (plus their parents, of course). He had a blast:

In keeping with the last couple years, Josiah requested an ice cream cake. I baked a thin chocolate cake base (using a recipe from Smitten Kitchen, in case I need to refer to this next year) and then spread a layer of mint chocolate chip ice cream, then a layer of crushed oreos, and then a second layer of ice cream. On top I piped (via ziplock) "Happy 7th Birthday Josiah" with chocolate sauce. It turned out decently and tasted great--and it wasn't a huge amount of work. I kind of like the ice cream cake trend--it eliminates the need to make a pretty-looking cake and frost it, at least!

Josiah with sisters and friends: l-r Abby, Leo, J, Niko, Lydia, and Massi

Niko, Massi, Josiah, and Leo

Lydia and Cedar

E and L enjoying watermelon

What fun to have cousins come visit!

cutie Cedar

We gave Josiah a dwarf mine Lego set from the bin Jeremy bought from someone on Craigslist. It was a hit! He's been designing impressive "sets" of his own, typically using a "map" (directions) as a jumping-off point and then embellishing or changing it based on his own imagination. He often has an extensive set to show off to Dad when he arrives home from work!

Josiah continues to be our socialite. He regularly asks if and when we can have someone--anyone!--over for supper, looks forward to every Friday park day when he can run wild with his friends, often declares a new acquaintance as "one of [his] best friends," and still says hi to random strangers in the grocery store. I love his outgoing frankness that encourages me to reach out to others and get out of my comfort zone! 

But for all his extroversion, he does look forward to "nap" time every afternoon when he can get some time alone to work on Lego sets and listen to audio books. His recent favorites are Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, and Otto of the Silver Hand. He loves our history and literature books for Ambleside Online's Year 1, especially Just So Stories, Aesop's Fables, The Blue Fairy Book, and Viking Tales. While he struggles with phonics and has been slower than many of his peers to start reading, his capacity for good books delights my literature-loving heart.

I love overhearing the kids' discussion of books and watching them play out the stories they've heard. It's been a lot of Peter Pan recently--with gales of laughter over some funny exchange between Pan and Hook, or the way Peter tricked Hook on Marooner's Rock. In April our kids and some of their friends performed a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream in a Shakespeare festival another mom hosted. Josiah was Puck and did a wonderful job remembering and delivering his lines! (The girls were fairies in Titania's train and dressed to the nines. They got a little shy and quiet during the performance, but they stayed on stage and said all their lines.)

A Little Homeschooling Snippet

I've been meaning to post about our homeschooling for some time--partly as a way of reminding myself what we've done, how far we've come (hopefully), what has changed over time, or what I discovered once and might have forgotten. But between my wordiness and interest in all manner of philosophy and practice of education--and the varied things we actually do--a "homeschooling post" seems overwhelming. So I never sit down and type one out.

But I intend to change that by doing shorter posts--just snippets of what homeschooling is like in our house right now. Hopefully these posts will add up to a more complete picture and record of what we've done once a year is through.

This first one is about logistics: how does one manage and contain home schooling supplies in a small house without a dedicated school room?

In other words, how do we combine bibliophilia + small house + four children + a tendency towards disorganization + lack of time without degenerating into complete mess, crazy, and chaos? Ha, I don't really have an answer to that.

But I'm making small steps of progress in organization, and I'm pleased with how our homeschooling cart is helping in this endeavor. For now, it's a great solution. It's just a small, wheeled, metal cart from Ikea:

I pull this cart into the dining room at breakfast time so we're ready to go for our morning time routine when everyone finishes eating. After memory work and Bible story, I pull from the cart our calendar, book of nursery rhymes, poetry book, Aesop, Explode the Code, and flower or bird flashcards (depending on how far we get in morning time before Clara needs Mama time!).

Later I push the cart back into the computer/Lego/Clara room, and Josiah and I often work for a bit together there--perhaps on math or reading/phonics while the girls play elsewhere. It's also easy to access the current literature and history if I load them onto the cart, and then I switch them out when we're done with one book and replace it with a new one from our bookshelves. I like that the big kids can push the cart themselves and so fetch or return it for me, too. (Unfortunately, they are tempted to ride on it!)

It doesn't seem like it should be a big deal to take a few extra steps to fetch things from another room in this small house, but having everything I need on the cart within reach has really helped our school mornings run more smoothly.

The Literary Six-Year-Old

 Dressed in his cloak with battle-ax

Josiah listens to a lot of audio books. Every afternoon during rest time, he happily tinkers with his Legos and listens to story after story. Often he bursts out of the room to update me on the plot or retell a particularly thrilling bit (or just a mundane detail). In this way, he's listened through lots of great books--Narnia (many times through), Thornton Burgess animal stories, George MacDonald's fairy tales, versions of King Arthur and Robin Hood, the Little House books, The Wind in the Willows, several Paddington books, Winnie the Pooh, The Cricket in Times Square, The Moffats, Thimble Summer . . . and plenty more I'm forgetting.

Recently he's been into Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. (On his first listen-through, he came out to tell me about Akela's death [the wolf pack leader and Mowgli's adopted father], and he was fighting to hold back tears--my sweet boy!). Though his reading skills are currently lower than most of his peers, and he still lags behind in intelligibility and speech clarity, his capacity for good literature and his vocabulary certainly aren't suffering.

I've heard the influence of audio books (and books I read aloud) on his conversation and commentary. For instance . . .

One morning, Josiah contemplated his breakfast and then, apparently approving, said, "It's enough to feed a man."

Another day he was annoyed at a cut on his toe: "This owie has a little piece of skin coming off. Wretched foot!"

After listening to a bunch of Narnia, Josiah unfortunately picked up on some of the less-acceptable insults the Pevensie children use. When Lydia was getting a bit crazy/silly at lunch one day, he said (laughingly), "Stop being such a beastly ass!" (Needless to say, we had a little discussion about the necessity of avoiding that epithet in our society.)

Josiah listened to Howard Pyle's Robin Hood for about a week straight and subsequently commented on games, tricks, jokes, etc. by saying, "That was a merry jest!"

He loves to play Robin Hood, too!

In a less cultured style--but thankfully not as shocking as his Narnia lingo--Josiah currently likes to imitate Jonathan from the Paddington books in using "Crikey!" as an exclamation. It sounds a little funny, but hey . . . why not?

Homeschooling: Art Lessons

I've been using Mona Brooks' Drawing with Children to teach art to the kids. First we covered various exercises in using the elements of shape and analyzing and drawing designs.

One of Josiah's transitional worksheets--moving from just design/elements of shape 

to recognizable objects

In the last couple months I've moved onto some of her suggested projects: drawing a stylized lion and then a more realistic bird. She gives some good step-by-step instructions for talking kids through drawing the simplified animal shape, and then I've given them freedom to choose their colors to complete it.

My art students

Josiah has really taken off with his drawing in the last several months. He loves drawing war scenes on his own, usually involving characters modeled after whatever book we're currently reading (Narnia, The Green Ember, Robin Hood, etc.) But he seems to have an eye for detail and has latched onto these drawing lessons. He applies the analysis of elements of shape to his independent drawing, and it's fun to see him figure out how to draw a new animal, weapon, or whatever. Often he says, "Mom! I know how to draw rabbits [or bears, ducks, turtles, whatever]! Look, I do a circle here, little lines for whiskers, curved lines up for the ears, eyes go here . . ." etc. He even started drawing foreshortened circles for moats around castles--without any instruction or suggestion.

While he's an eager learner, he likes to jump ahead of our lesson steps when we're doing our "formal" art lesson time. He doesn't like to wait around for his sisters. Sometimes he also gets a little sloppy or inserts extra items that don't really fit the scene.

Josiah and Lydia

Lydia loves to do the drawing lessons, too, and has surprised me with her aptitude and good work. She is sometimes careless in handling her markers, though, and makes accidental swipes on her paper that cause much consternation. I've shown her how we can remedy mistakes like that by adding landscape details--tree branches, flowers, and such--or coloring over a small error. She gets a little too ambitious with her "fixing" sometimes, though, and ends up with a plethora of twigs all over the paper!

Lydia's drawing moods

While Lydia gets frustrated with her perceived inability at times--or with mistakes--she generally plugs away at following directions and has produced some nice drawings because of her perseverance. She also likes drawing independently (what Mona Brooks calls "symbolic drawings"--stick figures, mostly, that narrate a story), but is not as avid a drawer as Josiah.

Lydia's first completed drawing project: Leo the Lion

Josiah made multiple lion drawings after our initial lesson on Leo and ended up with a good one of a lion in a tree. He then wanted one on the ground, too--and he wanted it to look more realistic. So I looked up a picture of a lion online and stepped them through a shorter lesson to draw that. Lydia joined in as well, but Abby had given up in despair at a couple attempts at the original lion's eyes.

Abby has been my most challenging art student. She's perfectionistic but not as coordinated as the other two. (Where they naturally hold their pencil/marker properly, she still consistently grips it as a shovel.) She often falls apart when the lines she makes on paper don't match up with what she envisions. It's been a challenge to get her to even try--to attempt to follow directions without giving up on the second or third step. We've had lots of drama and tragedy: tears, drool, frustrated scribbling--the works. I've had to excuse her from the drawing lesson to look at books or play by herself a few times, because each step reignited the meltdown.

Abby

Lydia's second lion drawing

Our second project was birds. I love how all three kids' drawings turned out! Abby struggled and had to spend some time away from the drawing table, but she did finish a bird drawing and was mostly happy with it. I think she did a great job.

Lydia's parrot

 Abby did two birds!

We branched out from the book's scripted lessons and chose a monkey as our most recent drawing, with mixed results. I still followed Brooks' basic steps (starting with the eyes, moving out and paying attention to elements of shape, giving step-by-step instructions verbally) as I outlined the monkey on the whiteboard and the kids followed along. I should have chosen a better monkey model, and my demonstration on the whiteboard didn't exactly look good.

This was the first full lesson Abby completed without a meltdown; thus it was a real success in that sense! She and I discussed the lesson and the temptations that would beset her during it. We talked about saying "no" to tantrums and meltdowns, persevering even when she didn't like the look of a dot or line she made, etc. I stressed that she didn't have to like everything she drew, that we can often remedy mistakes, and that she'll only get better with practice. Anyway, she worked hard at self-control and was very pleased with her finished product (even though her monkey is perhaps a bit more porcine than primate).

Proud Abby

Lydia with her monkey holding a banana

Josiah trying to look like his monkey

Josiah's monkey (he's holding a banana with his dangling foot)

Abby's partially colored creature (it ended up being almost entirely pink)

I plan to continue using Drawing with Children to guide my art instruction this year and next. I really appreciate Brooks' method of training one's eye to see any subject in terms of the elements of shape. This approach has helped my kids gain confidence that they can draw just about any subject, and it has helped hone their observation and drawing skills. I also think the practice sheets (and ideas for producing your own) are worthwhile. Brooks' simplified line drawings of birds and other suggested projects helped me in demonstrating and teaching, and she outlines a good script for step-by-step instruction. Her inclusion of sample student drawings is helpful, but she includes an awful lot of them. She's also a bit wordy, spends a lot of time discussing her theory of teaching art, and doesn't organize the actual lesson parts in an easy-to-use manner. I wish she had more practice worksheets and step-by-step project drawings, as well as more (and more orderly) instruction on techniques.

I think I'll be supplementing this drawing book with others. I hope to purchase Drawing Textbook and may look into others. Eventually I'd like to branch out beyond drawing to painting and other mediums with the kids--we'll see when I work up the courage to do so! Meanwhile, at least we've made some headway with art.