Logan's Attention Span

Logan has an amazing attention span.  We've always known it.  When he was only a couple of months old, he'd sit still for up to an hour looking at just a couple of pictures in a book.  When he was a little older, he'd sit for hours being read to.  At 17 months, he watched all of Ben Hur without moving (the 4 hour, very adult movie with Charleton Heston).  His endurance for storytime is limitless.  He sits still in Primary and listens to all of sharing time.  When he finds a project he's interested in, he works on it and works on it and works on it.  He follows every word of our conversations (watch out for questions!) and doesn't tire of working out explanations.

Last week, he outdid himself, though.  He pulled out a lego set that he hasn't played with in at least a year because it was too difficult to do by himself.  He started working on it at noon.  At 5pm, he was still working on it, but was finally getting frustrated.  (He hadn't been convinced to follow the instructions when I pointed them out.)  So he took it all apart, even though he'd made significant progress, and started all over again with the instructions.  At 9:30pm he finally finished it.  During that time (12-9:30) he probably spent less than an hour in forced meal breaks.  Otherwise, he was focused.  He was SO proud of himself.  We were SO amazed that he worked so long and hard on it.   

Read This!

Today my attention was drawn to this speech given by John Taylor Gatto:

http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm

There is a lot to think about in there, and wow am I glad I homeschool!  I don't have time to comment anymore on it (my thoughts aren't organized enough at the moment to do so anyway) so that's all I'll say.

(I highly recommend his book, Dumbing Us Down.  It's a very insightful and easy read.)

Back At It

We had a nice Christmas break and did nothing school-ish aside from reading as a family.  We didn't exactly plan a break, but we never have kidschool on days when Jim is home...and since he had a week and a half off, they did too.  Add to that two months of pregnancy/ miscarriage related sickness, exhaustion, and other related symptoms, and these kids have had quite a few other 'break' days recently.

So I'm happy to announce that I'm back at my normal energy levels and kidschool is a daily thing again.  It feels good.     

Core Curriculum

I have to keep reminding myself that our core curriculum is: right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, play and work, and that the rest isn't the most important to focus on.  Well, with Christmas approaching we've done really well in the play and family work categories.  :)

Here is round 1 of cookie making.  They helped me with four types of cookies.  It's a shame I didn't get any pictures of our gingerbread cookies today.  Those were very involved and very fun.  (Though a lot of work for me!)

This was also my week to host playschool.  My kids had been eager to decorate graham crackers houses ever since we pulled out the Christmas decorations, and we just hadn't found time to do them.  So that was our playschool activity this week.  Fun.

Reading, Art, Puzzles

So what've we been up to lately during school time (when I feel good enough for anything)?  Well, lots of reading and story time of course.  We just finished reading A Little Princess as a family; it was very enjoyable and we had some great discussions about sacrifice and how to treat others.  Jim read the entire thing out loud to us, and now I can't wait for the next family book.  Logan is starting to take off with his reading, and now Annie has no hope of keeping up so she looks at books during that time instead.  I should probably explain reading time.  After no school all summer, and no reading practice Logan forgot what he'd learned and had become VERY anxious about reading.  We laid off for a few months and continued to do nothing with it.  A few weeks ago we decided to try again, and started with me pointing at the letters, making all the sounds, and them just watching.  We'd do one very short book each day...like only 24 words long.  So it started at Annie's level.  It only took a few days for Logan to begin reading the words himself.  Now he reads the whole book each day and walks around spelling out words to himself.

We're doing plenty of art too.  Logan has suddenly decided he likes to draw and he usually 'gifts' his pictures to me.  I have quite a few tornado pictures now.  :)  Annie continues to be an amazing little artist.  Our art wall is VERY full right now.

This week Annie has developed a sudden interest in puzzles.  She initially worked on the 24 piece jigsaw puzzles we have, but those weren't a challenge for her at all.  Then she pulled out this book that contains several 48 piece puzzles and has been working nonstop on those for a few days.  They are pictures of animals in various habitats, and they aren't cartoon like (although they aren't photographs either), so they are actually fairly difficult.  I'm talking about a lot of brown and green in all of these.  It takes me some time to do them!  I'm very impressed with my little girl; she's only 3!  Math ability, hmm...  Logan has been working on the puzzles with great interest too.  It's been really nice for me as well, because they are so focused and quiet.  I'm really glad that we bought each of them a harder puzzle for Christmas. 

Keeping My Balance

Whoever coined the term "morning sickness" could not possibly have been pregnant.  I hear there are women out there who are actually only sick in the morning, though I have yet to meet one, and I know there are the lucky ones who aren't sick at all.  Let's just say I'm among the majority, and if you've ever been pregnant you probably know what that means for the first trimester.  School has suffered and benefitted from this lately.  My energy has been gone, my stomach has been in an uproar, and I never feel fully awake.  It's so tempting to give the kids something to work on and lay on the couch.  Actually that's happening a lot lately.  We're having a lot more do-it-without-mom art projects, I'm loving their penpal letters (more on that), and reading/ story time prevails as the easiest thing for me to do from the couch.  It's a good thing that's the such an important part.  :)  We're also learning all about growing babies.  Logan has had tons of questions, and is currently working on a picture of my womb, complete with baby and umbilical cord.  (I haven't given him certain full explanations; he is content to understand that some things are too sacred to discuss at this point.)  I've benefitted from lots of other TJEd moms who've been where I'm at and remind me that my kids are young, pregnant mommies need their naps, and don't worry!  So I'm not worrying too much.  (Although sometimes I worry that I'm not worrying enough.)   

 

Anyhow, they've been corresponding as penpals for several weeks now with my sister Sarah, and brother Josh.  I forget exactly how I came up with the idea to do it, but it's been great writing practice for them without pressure or monotony.  I'm really amazed at how quickly Logan's writing skills have increased considering the only time we 'work' on writing is when he's responding to a letter (about once a week).  Here's a sample of one of his letters to Josh.  I've had this sitting on my counter for two weeks because Annie didn't want to finish her letter to Josh, but also didn't want me to mail Logan's without hers.  I think I'm just going to mail hers incomplete and not allow her to dictate such a long letter next time.

Today they received letters from Sarah, so we had letter time again today.  They were working really diligently when I started this post, but their attention seems to have wandered in the last few minutes.  Sounds like it's time to end this post.  :)

Aha!

During story time the other day I had an "aha" moment.  We were reading a Curious George book and these were the words that struck me,

"Poor George.  He didn't mean to cause trouble.  Now he only wanted to get away."

I immediately thought, "Poor Logan...or poor Annie.  He/ she didn't mean to cause trouble.  Now he/ she only wanted to get away."

It was a good lesson for me.  I need to be more aware of their intent when they make trouble.  Like when Alex turns the oven on to broil and I discover it after it's been heating for a long time. Or... as I was typing this paragraph, Logan appeared with a long screw and a screw driver.  He'd started taking apart a bookshelf.  It's really easy to focus on the problem that they created, and forget about the curiosity that started it.