Today.... The up side of homeschooling.

The I get to cut paper and make my children think I can do magic! LOL! My son thinks fringe cut from construction paper is magic! This is the first of our 3 kings. I hope my son will want to make the other 2 himself tomorrow. This isn't a craft I came up with on my own it came from a craft book..... Ice-cream cones or something like that. I will look at the name of it tomorrow if I think about it. My MIL gave me the book it is one she used with her boys.

We are reading about Norman Rockwell for our art studies. It doesn't fit into the time period we are learning about in our other subjects (Late Renaissance/Early Modern 1600-1850) but my son likes to look at Norman Rockwell's work so that is who we are learning about this year. We read how his art always stressed the positive. I got to talk to my son about being positive. We even roll played several times taking turns on how to find the positive if this or that happened. I decided not to go get out our art book to do a drawing class when we finished reading about N.R. I thought instead of reading about "how to draw we could try to copy "My Studio Burns" by Norman Rockwell. We spent time talking about our thought on how he told a story of the fire. You can see what we tried to copy http://tinyurl.com/ydxecg . This is my son's version. It is kind of hard to see but he is 6 and not a great artist yet. LOL!

My son was laughing. It was nice to talk about a fire and not have my son afraid! My son was happy to know that all the family bikes got rescued. I am glad that we went off course and skipped our planned lesson. I know that anyone who knows me in real life is laughing at that line...... I am a person who always gets off track when it comes to our days. We get done all I plan each week but we often take a round about way of getting it done. We use the Classical method for education but I try to never let the perfect unschooling moments skip by. I think that many people who use the Classical method would disagree with me saying that is how we homeschool. I should clarify.... We follow the book The Well Trained Mind. We follow what the book says to teach. I DON'T teach it the way the lessons say. We learn lots of the stuff by jumping, hopping, playing games and such. My children are very active and I guess I am not as structured as some other homeschoolers. We do learn all the stuff in the books (I don't even move ahead on a spelling lesson until my son knows every word) but how we learn the stuff isn't always by writing on paper reading books sitting at the table. This is what is working for us right now. Ask me next month and I might not think the same way I do now. I will try to post the down side of our day tomorrow. I need to get to bed.

Mom's picks #1

I am going to jot down everyday one thing my children and I had fun doing . My pick for today for Mom's favorite things to do with my children is play trains and sing train songs. Some of the songs we sang today are I've been working on the railroad, John Henry, and lots of our own train sounds. We also watched and sang songs on the Wee sing train movie. I found that when I play trains with the children my son who thinks he is to old for train play will join in and my little one will learn how to play. My son was obsessed with John Henry a few years back that was all he would talk about. It was kind of like visiting an old friend. We like adding in the tambourines and harmonicas. Loud but fun.

My son's art-puppets

Art is one of the hardest things for my son to do. I made up some simple puppets today and my son drew pictures on them. I thought he was going to make a bunch of animal ones for his sister. He went with a Christmas theme. It is so neat that he is now old enough to be able to think about what he wants on them and do it himself. This is his Santa puppet. A Christmas tree.

An Elf. this is his most creative. I did make this puppet with a mouth but I thought he was very creative in making it a frog. He colored the top all green. He made the bottom green with a white circle on the belly. He told me that is the only way to make a REAL looking frog. He then snipped of a piece of elastic. I must admit I wasn't happy that he went into my sewing box and got stuff without asking but I didn't say anything once I saw what he was doing. He took a fabric marker and made the elastic red then asked me to sew it in the mouth to make a REAL frog tong. LOL! OH! BTW I don't know if you can tell in this picture but my son's hands aren't black and dirty they have green markers on them.... I had to go look at a larger copy of the picture to make sure. LOL!

My son is doing Christmas CRAFTS!

My son isn't big on crafts. He would rather have his nose in a book than crafts. I was so surprised to see him doing crafts on his own this morning. He got out our beads and some pipe cleaners and started making ornaments for the tree. This is something he has done every year from the time he was 2 or 3 years old. This year I didn't get out the stuff and ask him to make them he just started making them on his own. He was happy doing it! I am so happy that he is starting to find crafts fun! I guess I need to get the tree set up.

4 with large and small beads.

2 with all small beads.1 with all star beads.
This I thought was an original idea. His sisters wooden lacing beads! LOL! Yup! We will hang them on the tree. I don't want to take his new crafting joy away. I'll have to keep telling myself that this will work out great because my 1 year old will be trying to climb our tree this year. We will not be using any glass on our tree. It might be all decorations done by the children this year. Maybe next year when the baby is a little older we will be able to do more decorating with glass and such. This year we will have to be creative with it or DD will get hurt for sure!