Math - Garden Style

Oh, how I love learning with my kids at home!!

This morning the air is super clear and cool, thanks to a fantastic storm that rolled through town last evening. I think my pine trees grew a foot overnight! They seem so much taller, as I weave through them to water the squash plants. There are two acorn squash on the twining vines, and two or three butternut...though it looks like "someone" (a bunny invader, perhaps) knocked off two flowers that had baby squash at the bottom :-( Rabbit stew is good with squash, right?

Anyway, this morning I was out watering the garden, and was soon joined by my darling daughter. The beans are starting to come in good, and as Sweet Girl helped me pick them, she started counting them to see how many we harvested. It seems funny to me to count beans (I remember the days harvesting my Dad's garden, and there were way too many to count - I think we counted bug bites incurred in the garden instead!), but when they first started coming in, there were only a handful, and so that's when the counting began.

Sweet Girl started grouping the beans in twelves, and then started adding dozens. I love how we did not have to sit down and "learn" how to deal with numbers in this way. I mentioned it casually one afternoon, when we were picking beans early on, and she has taken it and run with it. Today, she was even converting "dozen" into twelve to figure out how many single beans we had...multiplication, here we come!! And how much more sense is it going to make to her, to have held the beans, manipulated them in her hands as she counted them, then to do the math in her head and then eat them for dinner?! I wish we had had "bean math" when I was in school!

Schooling in December...

I was talking to my sister the other day, and we both decided that we are closet "unschoolers"...we often do spend the day cooking or building mud flats out of pudding and marshmallows or a day running errands where we practice math as we choose each item from the shelf...but there is something in us that just won't let us put down that checklist of subjects that need to be covered.

So, in the spirit of really enjoying our time as a family this December, we are embarking upon a new course of study from today, until January 4th, when we will hit the books, and hopefully still be able to keep some of the fun in our day! And to help us out, my parents are joining us for two weeks, and Daddy has a nice long break from work between Christmas and New Years, so he can join in the fun too!!



I decided that every day, Sweet Potato is going to do her math lesson, her flash cards and a good journal entry. Jalapeno is going to do a reading lesson. And from there on...fun, fun, fun...and in the process, lots of learning!!

Here are the options we have to choose from:

Art - Sweet Potato has a great drawing book about horses that we never seem to get to...so I am going to ask Grandpa (who is a great artist) to help her through that book.

Science - a whole day doing science with water, or air, or in the kitchen. We usually read the book, but now, we are going to do ALL the experiments!



Cooking - there's always a lot of that going on around here...but how fun to get to cook with Grammie and for our friends! And Sweet Potato is going to spend the day with one of my friends, cooking sweets for a party...oh, soooo fun!!

Sewing - again, looking for some help from Grammie here. One of the projects I would like to do is teach Sweet Potato to piece a quilt top for our group Crafts with a Cause, who make blankets for foster kids.

Crafts, crafts and more crafts! Sweet Potato went through all our Family Fun magazines and marked a whole lot of things she wants to make, so we are going to try and do them ALL!

Games - I moved them all to the school room, where we now have a table big enough for everyone, so I am hoping we can play games every night after dinner. Oh, and puzzles!!!

Field Trips - a few places we would like to go: Whit's End; Littleton History Museum; DMNS; the Aquarium; letterboxing; and Night in Bethlehem - most of these are free, or we have a membership, thanks to super nice Aunt's and Uncles!!

Choir and band concerts - one of my MOPS mom's husbands is a principal near here and he gave me a schedule of all the Jeffco concerts for this season...we are going to try and go to a few of them.

So that is our plan, and we will try and keep the blog updated, so you can follow the fun!

What the boys do while we do school...

Sweet Potato and I were finishing up school when I heard a lot of giggling coming from the den. I went to investigate, and this is what I found!