ThadenPierce School

Do you see Christopher back there? It doesn’t look like much space, huh? But wait…

As you can see, they’ve found another play spot! There’s quiet a gap between the bushes and back fence. I love these discoveries.

And here is Moira standing in front of the ivy hide out showing off a roly poly bug. She loves bugs. I don’t love bugs but I try to not let the kids know that.

The scientific method is “the game of 20 questions played in the language of science”.
— paraphrased from Barry Sharpless’ Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Here’s a post over on Newscientist.com that discusses a need for a Nobel Prize of sorts for kids. And it outlines the guidelines for a contest with that mission in mind.

The thrust of the argument is this: kids are natural scientists until that impulse is beaten out of them. The majority of their curiosity is thrown out the window while being prepped for standardized tests as young as the first grade. Here’s a riddle for you.

Q. What do you get when you teach all kids the same thing at the same time?

A. Average kids.

Only a precious few individuals retain that inquisitive spark and actually succeed as doers, thinkers, and seekers of knowledge. You don’t need to look very far to see this phenomenon at work.

Toward the end of keeping that spark alive, here’s the Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Award. Here’s what it’s all about:

Starting this May, the prize will be awarded annually to an equal number of girls and boys from around the world for posing the most penetrating and insightful questions related to molecular science, which encompasses everything from physics and chemistry to physiology and medicine.

Did you catch that? Not an award for the best project or what-have-you, but an award for the most penetrating and insightful questions related to molecular science.

Yeah, it’s fairly limited in scope, but it’s a good start.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~Aristotle~

Interesting discussion with dear friend and fellow homeschooler today, about what we choose to expose our kids to (what theories, ideas, history, etc) and what we avoid. This was in reference to our interesting spread of homeschoolers in this very conservative area, and how many choose to deliberately avoid a lot of topics that do not align with their religious beliefs.

I want my children to be able to know of the world around them, to know the history of our country and others and the beliefs of people not in their religion and the theories of scientists that will impact their lives (whether we like it or not.) But studying these things does NOT mean they will see them as truth, will accept them as absolutes and will deny God. Which some parents seem to fear. I believe my children will develop testimonies of their own that are strong enough to withstand any academic theory we may study.

So, they may entertain a thought. Study it, consider it, realize why others may believe it. Then they may choose to accept or reject it. My job is to help them analyze, to learn how to view things from different sides, to see the biases and to question the motivations of those proposing these theories. Seeking the other side of the history story. Not taking things as black and white absolutes. All while building and strengthening a testimony, a faith, of their own that exists independent of the theories of the world.

That’s not too much to tackle, right? But I do not believe shielding children from certain topics/subjects will benefit them in the long run. Eventually they will be faced with these theories and practices of the world and I won’t be there to discuss it with them, help them critique it, help them decide what they believe and how this all fits together. But I’m here now, so I hope that we can help them build these skills to prepare them for the world.

You know you’re a homeschool family when you buy this shower curtain and wonder if it’s an accurate reference guide:

Christopher we formally began homeschooling when he was 5, in January 2007. It was still his pre-K year and I needed a few months after Emy was born to mentally prepare. We started language and math lessons and joined an art co-op and started to do some pre-K stuff. Then in September we officially kicked off, though we were doing the same curriculum and didn’t start anything new – we just took pictures and gave him the kinder cone and had a back to school picnic with friends. Mid-year we helped set up a history co-op. So there is no rhyme or reason to our school year in regards to timing. We’ll be finishing our current language program (First Language Lessons second grade) in the next couple months, we’ll finish Saxon Math 1 around the same time. Story of the World volume 1 we’ll finish the end of August. We’re all over the place.

I’m wondering when to start Moira formally on lessons. For now she has no requirements, she just plays and joins us for reading aloud and when Christopher is working she’ll get a binder and do her math or language worksheets (we have some workbooks I put into page protectors and she plays with those and a dry erase marker.) We don’t expect her to do any table work yet but she likes to when Christopher is working. She’s turning five this week so she would be starting kindergarden in the fall, but I do like the Charlotte Mason philosophy of waiting until they are six to do table work – and Moira’s occupational therapist highly encouraged that idea. She wanted us to hold off on handwriting/table work with C until he was at least six, too, for a lot of reasons – she thinks kids are forced into developmentally inappropriate work far too early in public schools. I agree. His sit down table work, if he focuses, takes him about 30 minutes a day for math & language. Next year we will stretch that a bit, closer to 45 minutes because I want him to pay more attention to his handwriting (he races through writing now) and he’ll be 7 this fall. Then we have 1 to 2 hours of other projects, reading aloud, etc.

But Moira I’m trying to decide on and we’re looking at her strengths and areas that need help. She’s reading a bit but we’ve not tried to teach her any rules of reading yet or push her on it. Her handwriting is really quite impressive. She’s doing addition and a bit of subtraction. So I’m trying to decide (a) when do we start formal lessons (b) what do I start her with? I think she could handle a lot of the Saxon 1 (first grade level) and the Learn at Home 1st grade language… but she’s not yet 5 so I’m hesitant to expect that of her. I could start it and just do it a couple days a week (we do 5x a week with C for language & math.) Or we could do just worksheets/workbooks and reading aloud and no formal math/grammar. I could start in fall, September 1st – IF we feel up to it with a brand new baby. Or I can wait and start in January like we did with Christopher, after Emy was born… by January, after an August baby, I was good to go. She would be 5 1/2 years old then.

I should ask Mo what she thinks. I do want to have Christopher done with the math before I start Mo on it. And as much as I love the idea of waiting until 6 to start Mo, I think she’ll be ready long before then for this work. So I think I’m leaning towards giving her some table work starting this fall, whatever I manage with the new baby – and I’m sure C’s schedule will be a bit more fluid, too. And then in January we’ll get her started on the Saxon 1 and the First Language Lessons for grammar and do more reading work. And I’ll see how this works, two kids schooling at once. We better get good at it since soon we’ll be adding Bennett’s lessons to the mix.

We use some math manipulatives with the kids to help them grasp concepts of counting and addition/subtraction. Christopher has already given up on them and prefers to write out the problems or work them in his head, Mo has actually done the same. She grasps abstract concepts pretty well and the tangible seemed to distract her. Both kids, if I grab the math blocks or whatever, will actually push them away and look up and you can see their little brains whirling while they compute in their head and ignore the blocks. We still play with them and for Bennett and Emy I may use them for the same basics (counting, adding, etc.)

I read it’s good with kids to phase out manipulatives by age 8, when their more abstract thinking and visual skills are developing. You don’t want them dependent on it and here is an article Kit sent me that explains why even concrete examples can be detrimental to how kids (in the study it was college kids) grasp math concepts. They aren’t necessarily able to transfer the concept from one example to another. Interesting, but that makes sense to me.

I knew homeschooling was going to teach and challenge me in innumerable ways, but I still get excited when I learn something new. I find this stuff fascinating – how people learn, what they learn, why we learn, what we focus on, what we consider to be knowledge.

Those little wild strawberries –

The boys searching for bugs. You can see the workshop on the left and the sunroom on the right and our enormous mulberry tree –

I walked back out to see Christopher very carefully helping Emy look at & hold a rollypolly –

But then he took it away and she got mad –

They are so fun together, I love seeing how he teaches her and how she adores her big brothers & sister. I see this picture and it’s hard to believe they are almost 5 years apart! No family resemblance there, eh?

They have so many similarities in temperament, how they interact with the world, their budding personalities… Far enough apart in age that we don’t see a lot of conflict with the similarities clashing but close enough in age they are still becoming friends. We have introverts in the middle and extroverts as #1 and #4. This will be interesting to see what #5 brings…

The french drain wall is a favorite seat for them. You can see their feet in the rocks of the drain, we’ve been asked about it. Under all those rocks is a drainage system that leads to the street, draining from a pipe just under the curb. It makes sure our yard drains properly, away from our foundation & house (if we had bad floods like last year.) We are not in the flood plain but we’re close enough that it made the prior owners nervous and they had the drain installed. We lose some yard space to the rocks but since the yard drains so well, the kids can go out and play right after a rain and it’s not muddy. I really like it, and it’s better than losing the entire yard to the flood, which happened at our old place. The ground was saturated, we were down by the lake and with the bad flooding our yard was under water for the better part of two months. Here we have a yard we can use every single day.

At first I was afraid they were goathead thorns. That’s what we called them, anyway. In El Paso, those suckers were the bane of my existence. If you had the temerity to cut through a field on your bike, you were almost certain to be patching your inner tube by the end of the day. Hard little spiny rocks that would puncture just about anything, and the thing I remember the most was the bright yellow flowers. Cheerful little guys that belie their nasty seed payload.

Nasty, nasty things. Still, there’s hope (organic, no less), if you care to read about such things.

I saw tiny bright yellow flowers all over our yard. I was horribly worried about the state of my children’s feet, but the plants they were attached to didn’t look like the thorn plants. Not to mention that the flowers were a little larger than I remembered. I decided to wait and see.

A few days ago, it all clicked. I was weeding — noble work, weeding — and I saw a little hint of red out of the corner of my eye. I took a closer look, and sure enough we have wild strawberries. All over the place — around the garden, along the french drain, under the bench beneath the mulberry tree. And as we discovered more and more caches of little red fruits, the kids were running around telling each other not to step here or there for fear of crushing our agricultural bounty.

Moira, my darling fruit-bat, is especially excited. Every time we had gone to the store recently, she’s been begging for strawberries. Now, the berries come to her.

Every time I think “wild strawberries” the poem by Shel Silverstein comes to mind. Here’s an abridgment for you, mainly because I don’t want to get nailed by the copyright police:

Are Wild Strawberries really wild?
Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?
Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam?
Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home?
…And though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly,
Can you ever feel that you trust them completely?
…Anyhow, you’ve been warned and I will not be blamed
If your Wild Strawberry cannot be tamed.

A Light in the Attic, Harper & Row, 1981, pg. 66. Many of you will remember that the poem is accompanied by a little illustration of a feral strawberry with razor sharp teeth. So cute.

Bennett’s been asking Christopher to read him stories lately:

We moved the hammock, it’s now shaded by these enormous trees & bushes. We love our hammock.

We’ve been learning about our yard as we explore more – which sounds funny, since most suburban yards don’t have a lot to “discover” right? But there’s some climbing ivy thing in one corner that’s wrapping around our really tall bushes (taller than the house) and there’s a tree just off our property that’s behind those. We realized today that at least part of that climbing vine is grapes! Grapes, how crazy?

But even weirder, there are at least three spots in our yard that had some funny looking stuff we couldn’t identify. It’s strawberries. We have wild strawberries in our yard – in two corners, along the back fence and along the side fence all the way to under our stone bench and around the ivy. We finally realized what it was when the yellow blossoms turned into – you guessed it – STRAWBERRIES! We have strawberries growing in our yard, so crazy. Not a lot but I’m hoping enough for the kids to nibble sometime. Our carrots & green onions have sprouted nicely, the two kinds of pumpkin are growing, the pepper & tomato plants look good. My basil makes me want to make pesto. The parsley is looking really sad, though Moira’s petunias survived an Emy attack and are perking up. And the cucumber plant is just dead. We’re going to start our second batch of carrots and green onions this week.

The kids are also having fun identifying all the birds and insects we are seeing. We found daffodils the other day – apparently we have daffodils, irises and some type of lilly. Not sure about that last one yet, waiting for it to blossom to see for sure. And our back tree is a mulberry, according to our neighbor. The two rose bushes out front are trimmed back now, along with the bushes we have on four sides of the house (thanks to Kit and the garden shed tools.) What an amazing yard! I love it.

Christopher was expecting to get a chance to play Lego Star Wars a bit this evening, but to do that we would have had to boot down to Windows. I was in the middle of a two-hour upload for work, so I had to offer an alternative.

But oh, what an alternative I gave him!

I reviewed this game a number of years ago, and I thought C was old enough to give it a shot, so I dusted it off and reinstalled it for him to try.

In Enigmo, you’re presented with a task of routing dropping liquids of various types (water, oil, and fire) into their corresponding buckets. You have a variety of tools to help you redirect the flows: drums, platforms, even sponges. Water and oil can cross, but fire incinerates them both. Follow me so far?

The simulated physics are interesting — gravity, deflections, that sort of thing — and the puzzles are compelling. It had Christopher and Mo wrapped up for thirty minutes and when it was time to go to bed, they both begged for more.

Enigmo is a rare puzzle game. Simple in concept, challenging puzzles, a kid-friendly mode that encourages experimentation and exploration, and a level editor for when they want to do their own thing. What’s not to love?

More screens and info here.

Mac Demo here. (PC version here — can’t find a demo, sorry)

If you like what you see, it’s a $19.99 download. (That link is for Mac — I have practically no experience with the PC version.)

My kids love it.