We had a busy couple days so here I am playing catch up.
Who's bright idea was it to relight the fire under this blog the first month I attempt at homeschooling, anyways?
Yesterday I was itching to do a fall craft because it's you know fall and the only thing that was missing from my house full of pumpkins and fall leaf garlands and pumpkin-banana candles burning and apple-cinnamon muffins baking was a craft. We crashed through our school day (which again is based on early settlers) and after a quick search on Youtube found a great video on Johnny Appleseed (that's a little more grown up than the Kindergarten version of him). So they watched the video and then we did a fun little craft where we stamped apples in multiple colors on a piece of paper and then weaved brown construction paper over the top of it to make it look like a basket full of apples.
I'm counting my blessings that my kids still like to do crafts - even Calen, at 11 1/2, who still finds them incredibly fun.
Today, we had a shortened school day (as our main curriculum is technically 4 day weeks) but I also needed to head to a house across town to clean it (a little side job, because I don't have enough to do). So we flew through a spelling test, a quick math lesson x2, and then ran to the house with the kids in tow. I was thinking there had to be something they could do while they were there that was school related, so I packed up a couple of spiral notebooks and this little box of pirate themed storytelling dice that we bought at a mom and pop toy store in California several years ago. The idea is you throw the dice, and whatever pictures end up front side up (a sword, a pirate ship, a shark, etc) you have to make a story involving each dice. We've done it a bunch of times verbally but I had an "aha" moment that this would be a great way to do a writing assignment for school.
Camden hates writing. Calen loves writing. So when I announced to the boys that they had to write a full page story while I was cleaning this house, Calen was like "YES!!" and Camden was like "UGH!". Calen rolled his dice and flopped on the floor and wrote not one but two pages worth of a wonderful story. Camden struggled to figure out how to get started....but once he did get started, he took off, and wrote a fantastic story about a pirate that sailed to a tropical island to sell shark fins and got attacked by a gigantic king crab and once defeated it, feasted on it.
Well I'd count that as a success. This might become a weekly thing.
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