Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Best cheapo building activity (but requires fine motor control an early elementary boy might not have yet, so maybe this is for 3+ years in the future) - toothpick and elmer's glue bridges. Go out and study the bridges you can find in your community, come home, design lots of different kinds of bridges (think about how you would add stability to the road using different shapes - triangles and rectangles in particular), and build them out of toothpicks and glue. After they're dry, you put them between two chairs or tables and can hang weights off them (bags of marbles or stones work) and add weight till they break. Then see which ones held the most weight and if you can improve on the design and do it all again. Appeals to both building and destructive impulses and is all kinds of sciencey and also helps them work on the idea of a draft process which is so important in all areas of life.

He's too distractable for most hands-on projects. I try to do some crafty stuff with him every now and then, but he isn't into it. And anything with lots of parts (like his blocks and puzzles) will eventually turn into projectiles and get strewn around the house if I'm not careful. He doesn't even like to help cook. ;p
I can sometimes give him a task, like putting the dirty laundry in the washer or getting him to draw a picture of something specific or getting the mail (although he sometimes doesn't want to come back upstairs), but if he is being really wild, it won't work.
Workbooks, though, as long as I keep an eye on him (because sometimes he gets crazy and just starts doing fake cursive scribbles), are usually really good at keeping him occupied!

(I think in the future, though, he will chill out and be a lot less wild -- and be a decent help around the house.)

They usually do! Silas is a whole different kid now than he was the first 3 years of his life. He was a wild guy too and some days it felt like he didn't hold still for a second.

So cool that B is so into the workbooks and math and all though, so interesting to see what captures each kids attention.

To get back to the original topic...

I went to a "non-coercive, parent-participation" school that was similar (though not identical) to Sudbury. Basically the way it worked was that no one was forced to take any classes and if kids wanted to learn about something specific they (with the help of staff) would find someone in the community (so existing teachers, parents, etc) to teach them. For example, I took an improv class with a school-mate's step-dad who was an actor, Tai Chi with a friend's mom, etc.

It's certainly not for everyone, but neither is the mainstream method, which I think is essentially make-work babysitting for the majority of the time. Being in charge of my own learning fostered a love of knowledge that was dampened only by the three years I spent in a mainstream high school. I didn't start learning math until I was 9, when I decided I wanted to do it and I ended up transferring to high school a grade ahead of my age group. And I graduated high school on the honour roll and university with an Honours degree.

I certainly saw kids who were struggling, but I imagine they would have struggled as much or more in regular school (in fact, many of them came because they *were* struggling in mainstream schools). At my school you had the freedom to figure out what was interesting to you, how you learn best, and how to advocate for yourself. I think those are all really positive, powerful things.

I think, ultimately, parents need to be working together with their kids and educators to figure out what works best for their kids within the parameters the parents have set. Sending your kid to an unstructured school for political reasons doesn't do your kid much good if they need structure to thrive. Sending your kid who needs freedom and the ability to direct their own activities to a mainstream school is also less than ideal.

Generally, homeschooling has been pretty straightforward and our biggest challenge is getting Beetroot to focus and work on the days he doesn't want to. Today was pretty amusing and challenging for another reason, though.

Beet finished his addition 1 through 9 workbook yesterday, so we started the measurement workbook. It turns out, the concept of weight is kind of baffling to him, even after Mr. Crabby and I busted out the scales and gave lots of demonstrations. It was kind of hilarious.

Thumper weighs more than Bugs. Loppy and Bugs weigh the same. This was all illustrated, and Beetroot just had to check the illustrations and fill in the blanks. He was fine with all this, but then the last question stumped him.

"Loppy is lighter than...."
"Loppy!"
"No..."
"Bugs?"
"No..."
"...Loppy!"
"No, Loppy weighs the same as Bugs, so Loppy weighs the same as Loppy. Who is heavier than Loppy?"
"Bugs?"
"...Okay, who is heavier than Bugs?"
"Thumper!"
"Good. Now if Bugs and Loppy weigh the same, and Thumper is heavier than Bugs, who is heavier than Loppy?"
"Bugs!"

This went on for about 20 minutes. Eventually, he answered Thumper and kind of understood it, but still seemed kind of baffled. (I'll cut him some slack since he's 4.)

Maybe you had to be there, but I was cracking up. Mr. Crabby was doing a really good job of not losing his mind, although it looked like he might at one point.

I gave Beetroot a pop quiz today. I had 2 goals for homeschooling this year. The first was for Beet to master single-digit addition (he surprised me by learning subtraction, too) and the second goal was for him to be able to write down a sentence if I dictated it to him. He could write his name when we started school, but not much else. His writing and spelling have really improved. I'm so proud of him. He's still 4 and we've done all this and more on only an hour a day!



I dictated the first sentence, he did fill in the blank for the next ones (he didn't want to write 'my mother's name is' and wanted to write 'my Motherwell station is' because he is train-obsessed (only real trains, he doesn't care about the toys or Thomas at all, although he thinks Chuggington is okay), and then wrote the last few himself.
Here's the translation (I ppk-ified our names, not that I care if you see our real names, but there are serial googlers in my family....):
Beet
Monkey does not like to eat poop.
I have a little brother named Raygold.
I want to eat pineapple.
tti
I think my daddy is working.
My Motherwell station is Crabby.
The train I would most like to ride is Motherwell to Milngavie.
I like to go on another train from Glasgow Central to East Kilbride; get off at East Kilbride.

And the maths...I didn't do as much because he knows his single-digit arithmetic pretty well and gets a bit wound up if we do too much. Plus, he wanted to finish lesson 13 of Explode the Code (almost finished with book 3!), so I was happy to get him to do maths at all:

Yay Beetroot! So awesome! Did he spell the words himself or ask you to spell?? I'm impressed either way, but super impressed if he is spelling that well!

Oddly enough, he only asked how to spell mother. I told him it was like the first part of Motherwell and he got so excited, he insisted he write out Motherwell station. He misspelled like once and Milngavie (pronounced kind of like mull-guy), but I'll cut him some slack. ;D

He spends a lot of time on the computer and often asks me how to spell words when he wants to google something, so that might be partly why he is such a good speller. "What's the first letter in...?" "next letter! ... next letter! ..." etc.

Just wow. That's amazing for a 4 year old! You have a bright kid on your hands!