Homeschool Discoveries

I had so many ideas for blog posts starting with M — Messes, Math, Music, Museums…

But I decided to go for something a bit more unique to us — My city Minneapolis, Minnesota and a unique celebration in our neighborhood for May Day.

Despite the drawback of cold, snowy winters, Minneapolis is a beautiful and fun city to live in, and a city with so many great resources for homeschoolers:

• We love the many, many beautiful parks, lakes and trails in the city.  Almost every park has a free wading pool! Many of the parks offer reasonably priced sports programs and other activities.  Miss M even did pottery classes at our neighborhood park last year!
• So many wonderful museums, historical sites and other attractions in Minneapolis and in the larger Twin Cities (aka Minneapolis, St. Paul plus their suburbs) metro area.
• Our huge downtown library with many neighborhood branches, plus the resources of the entire county library system.
• Enough homeschool groups, co-ops, classes and activities that you can really say there is “something for everyone” somewhere in the Twin Cities metro area.  (I guess this can be a drawback in some ways as well — one family can never do everything, so I sometimes feel bummed that we can’t do many of the neat things I hear about! We are in a stage of life where it’s difficult to do too many organized classes and field trips…something that will change I am sure as the kids get older!  With so many options even just for choosing a co-op, there’s the potential to spend hours doing research to find which one is “best”).
• Opportunities to be exposed to lots of cultural diversity.  I’m sure this isn’t unique to Minneapolis, but I like the fact that my kids are playing at the park right along side kids speaking Spanish and kids from Somali families that may dress differently than we do…but they are all kids, just playing together at the park.   If anything, I wish we had more opportunities to not just see a variety of people around us from various countries, cultures and races, but to really interact and get to know them (since in reality, most of the people we spend time with regularly still look a lot like us!).

Within Minneapolis, we live in a neighborhood called Powderhorn Park (named after, yes, the park in our neighborhood!).  It’s a fun, quirky and diverse area.  We have a really unique neighborhood celebration called May Day.  It’s usually on the first Sunday of May.  This year, it got rained out and had to be postponed to the next weekend (which was this past Sunday, on Mother’s Day).

The May Day festival brings out tens of thousands of people from the neighborhood, the city, and well beyond.  There’s a parade like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else, and a festival in the park that includes some of the “normal” stuff like food vendors and music…and also a pageant of sorts that celebrates the arrival of spring in a way that is, well, pretty pagan (with elements of things like bowing down to the sun).

The pageant is a bit much for us, but the pagan element of things in the parade is a bit more subtle. We feel like we can enjoy the beauty of the artwork in the parade, appreciate the diversity of cultures, opinions and world views represented, and use it as a good opportunity to teach our kids how to respect and appreciate all they see around them in our neighborhood while still viewing it through the lens of our Christian worldview.

It’s so far from the typical parade you almost have to see it to “get it.”   The only motorized vehicle in the parade is the obligatory police car at the beginning.  Everything else is human/bicycle powered! The parade always tells a story in a few “acts.”   Usually the story has something to do with protecting the earth, conserving resources, the evils of hyper-consumerism, and sometimes a jab or two at big business.   There are always a number of fun musical groups — rag tag “marching bands” of local residents of all ages, a calypso band, and a couple groups of traditional Aztec drummers and dancers.   The parade ends with a “free speech” section where anybody or any group can march to promote or protest anything they please.   This year we left before much of that section came through.  It can get a little crazy!

Our kids love the crazy and beautiful costumes and the fun music.  As they are getting older, it spurs all kinds of interesting questions and discussion (both the parade itself and the people gathered to watch it).  Miss M asked why a particular group of people was dressed all in black.  My flippant response was “oh, because they think it’s cool to do that.”   Tony had a more thoughtful response, something along the lines of how people often feel they have to dress a certain way to fit in, and many people who choose to wear all black may do so because they feel like they don’t fit in or have been hurt by the culture around them.

I’m glad he had such a thoughtful response, because I want my kids growing up thinking in a caring way about all the kinds of people they see around them, and how they might be able to show them the love of Jesus.

To see what other bloggers are writing about for the letter M, visit this week’s Blogging through the Alphabet @ Ben and Me!

Lapbooks are one of my favorite “special” things about homeschooling.  It’s a type of project I had never heard of until we were homeschooling, and something that it seems few people outside of homeschooling have ever heard of.  Maybe you could say it is one of homeschooling’s “best kept secrets.”

What is a lapbook? A lapbook is a project (usually on one topic) composed of multiple small, paper “mini-books” folded together, then glued into a file folder or perhaps onto individual pieces of cardstock bound together in some fashion. If you are new to lapbooking, I recommend this Squidoo lens as an excellent introduction to the topic.

Over the past three years, we really haven’t made as many lapbooks as I hoped we might.  As  a part of a geography study when Miss M was in Kindergarten, we made an extensive lapbook on Antarctica, and started (but unfortunately didn’t finish) lapbooks on China and a general one on the Seven Continents.  We used a lot of free resources to make these, mostly from a great site called Homeschool Share.

Then the summer in between Miss M’s K and 1st years, Miss M wanted to make a lapbook about the Besty-Tacy books.  Not finding any resources already created for a lapbook on this topic, I spent hours creating one from scratch.

You can download the templates for yourself at homeschool share if you are interested in it!

Last year (Miss M’s first grade year), we didn’t end up doing any lapbooks.  By this spring, Miss M was interested in giving lapbooking a try again.  This time, we used a lapbook kit e-book from In the Hands of a Child for the first time for Miss M to create a lapbook about horses:

We have two more lapbook projects going currently:  a lapbook on flowers and other plants, (to go along with our current science studies) and a lapbook about early flight/famous pilots to go along with our current unit study on that topic.  I’m using a combination of free printables from homeschool share and other sites, as well as some portions purchased from Hands of a Child and Currclick.

Miss M really enjoys the “crafty” aspect of lapbooking.  She enjoys the cutting, pasting, coloring and drawing.  She doesn’t enjoy the writing aspect of lapbooking quite so much. When she was younger, she didn’t like trying to write in a small space.  Now that’s less of a problem, but she gets easily stressed out about not knowing how to spell the words she would like to write.  Some of the Hands of a Child lapbooks are available with the text already filled in (sometimes in a “traceable” font) — though I wonder if this produces quite as much learning about the topic in question!  I’ve also had her at times narrate to me what she would like to say in a particular lapbook piece.  When Miss M was younger I would write in the mini-book for her, or now I might type up her narration and have her copy it into the lapbook piece.

Assuming Miss M’s enthusiasm for lapbooks continues, I am hoping to incorporate even more lapbooking into our homeschool next year (perhaps also mixed in with some notebooking). I have purchased several Hands of a Child lapbooks at deeply-discounted sale prices (watch both the Hands of a Child site and Currclick for regular sales and even free titles!) to go along with some of the history and science topics we’ll be covering next year.  Maybe we’ll get Mr E in on the lapbooking act next year too!  So far his patience for anything related to lapbooking has been cutting out pictures and gluing them into a folder.  But as he gets older, I’m guessing he will enjoy making lapbooks too.

To see what other bloggers thought of to go along with the letter “L” visit “Blogging through the ABC’s” at Ben and Me!

I really, really enjoy playing board games.  Of all the hobbies or activities that I find it hard to make time for in my crazy homeschooling life with four young kids, playing “grown-up” board games is one I miss the most.  I really enjoy games like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride and Carcassone.  While you can play these games on the computer or Tony and I could just play them alone, it isn’t quite the same as playing with a few other friends. I really look forward to the time when our kids are old enough to play these games with us.  Miss M probably could learn some of these games soon, but it is tricky when the boys would want to play too, but would still have a hard time actually playing these games.

Meanwhile, I love to have lots of games on hand for our kids to play.  The large brown cabinet in this picture is our game cabinet.  We own many classic board and card games for kids, as well as a few less common ones.  We also use this cabinet to store some of our puzzles, our play-doh, some magnet activities, and some math manipulatives that we use for fun (but aren’t a part of our Right Start curriculum).

As the kids are getting older, they are more and more capable of getting out a game and playing it themselves.   As any adult who has patiently played Candy Land with a group of kids knows, some kids games are more fun for the grown ups that others!  😉  In our family, Sequence for Kids, the Ladybug Game and Zingo are frequent favorites.  Even Mr. E and Mr. K are able to get out a game and at least have some semblance of a game by themselves — they played “Don’t Spill the Beans” almost by the rules just today. 🙂

I often think about trying to incorporate games into our school day — games can be a great way to reinforce concepts from many subjects!.  Our math curriculum, Right Start, has a heavy emphasis on playing math card games.  We don’t play them as often as we should! With kids at varying ability levels, I find it a challenge to keep the game interesting for my oldest, while still including the youngest.  If Miss M and I want to play a harder game that neither of the boys are able to play, we typically have to find something to distract them first, or they may not be able to leave our cards or other game items alone.

Do you have any tricks to share about successful game playing with a range of ages? (My kids who are old enough to play games are currently 3, 5 and almost 8).  Any less-well-known games that are a hit with your kids? I’d especially love to hear ideas of games that would hit the 7+ age range, since we don’t own many games between the preschool-age games and the grown up games.

I’m linking up with:

As I read various homeschooling blogs, it is very interesting to see the sorts of “fairs” that homeschoolers participate in.  Most of us are, of course, familiar with science fairs.  I did a few of those when I was a kid!  I also see many homeschoolers participating in fairs I had never heard of before I starting homeschooling –  History Fairs, Geography Fairs, Literature fairs and more.

Our homeschool co-op takes a unique twist on the “fair” concept with our annual Expert Day. Instead of limiting projects to one subject area, students in grades one through six may choose to become an “expert” on any subject area of their choice.   Students often bring projects on favorite animals, historical events, or various hobbies.

Here’s Miss M last year (as a 1st grader) with her project on Sea Horses:

Instead of all students bringing their projects on the same day, Expert Day happens during our co-op’s “assembly time” (the first 45 minutes of our co-op meeting after announcements) for three co-op meetings in a row.  Two grade-levels bring their projects each week, and all students not presenting move around the room in small groups and listen to each “expert” give a three minute presentation on his or her topic. Students are expected to bring some sort of display.  Many choose a standard three panel display board, but others just bring props, while a few go high-tech and have a computer or iPad presentation.

Miss M’s turn for expert day will be on the 2nd Thursday in April.  She actually picked her topic for this year – horses – soon after last year’s expert day! She began a few weeks ago preparing for expert day by working on a horse lapbook.  Over the next couple weeks I’ll be helping her find more library and internet resources, narrowing her topic for her oral presentation, and of course we’ll be working on the presentation itself.

I am so happy to be a part of a co-op — it’s a great way for my kids to have valuable learning experiences like this in research, public speaking, and so on (that I would have a hard time providing with just my family alone!)

I’m linking up with: