Starting the planning for Term One!

Over the last few days I've been using the templates from Annette Louwen's book "Parent and Planner Records" from her homeschooling website to plan the first few weeks of term one with Emilie. So far it's very basic toddler stuff that I have planned and not much structure at all. I do have a handwriting book that I will help her to do. It's less about letters and more about learning how to make controlled squiggles, pencil grip and control etc.

I have also made a few charts, one is about her body and how she has looked after her body that week. The other is a weather and clothes chart so she can learn what different clothing is appropriate for different weather.

Haven't posted for a while!

Wow, so much has happened since I last posted!

Paul and I began extensions and renovations to our home in July, then in August we discovered we will be extending our FAMILY as well (a beautiful little girl due on the 1st of May 2012)!

We have been busy renovating the house and just under two weeks before Christmas the construction is nearly finished. Then next year we will concentrate on making the inside and outside look beautiful!

Paul and I decided we will start homeschooling Emilie in 2012, and I am just researching some topics for term ONE!

Term One runs from the 1st of February 2012 until 5th of April 2012. Because we will be expecting a baby in late April/early May, I will concentrate on the theme of ALL ABOUT ME

So far, in the 10-12 weeks of the term, we will do a sub-theme per fortnight. I will adjust this as I get a feel for her pace and her interests. I have thought a bit about sub-topics and I would like to include:

-My Body
-My Family/Home
-My Feelings
-Babies
-Easter

As I come up with more ideas I will post them :-)

Madison's Smile

When I was a girl, I would get so frustrated that adults never seemed to understand what it was like to be a kid. I wondered how come, if adults had been children also at one time, did they not remember how it feels to be a child? I promised myself that when I had children I would be different that I would remember how hard it was to be a kid and treat my own kids the way I would want to have been treated.

Well what happened??? Please someone tell me where I left my memory because I have lost it somewhere along the way...

I find myself with the desire to see things from Madison's perspective but I can't fathom dropping my parenting standards in order for her to always get what she wants. As a (step)mother of course you want your child to have what they wish for and to be happy, but somewhere along the line from being a child yourself to becoming an adult you realise just how unrealistic your childhood wishes were! You realise that for your child to be truly happy you have to sacrifice their immediate happiness for long term happiness. You can't just give your child whatever they want because after all it will never truly satisfy their desire for more and more and more, and ultimately they will end up unhappy when they realise life isn't going to always be served to you on a silver platter. My desire is for Madison to grow up to be self sufficient, confident and satisfied with her life. I would be terribly sad if she grew up to be the opposite, because the opposite of those things is unhappiness.

I realised again on Friday (very firm believer that you can fall in love with your kids over and over every day!), when I picked Madison up from school, as she approached the car and our eyes met, she gave me the warmest smile and my heart melted. As hard as being a step mum is (loving someone else's child who will never truly appreciate the sacrifices you make for them and still only be second best in their eyes) its moments like that that really reaffirm that you are doing the right thing, you are heading in the right direction, that she loves me even if she doesn't (if that makes sense - to any stepmum it would).

I didn't have to give her anything material or do anything for her to get that smile. It was a genuine "happy to see you" smile. It was worth the investment.

Emilie's drawing/writing abilities at 18 months

Emilie and I have read books together since she came home from the hospital. She absolutely loves me reading to her and I love it too. She sits on my lap while I read and my cheek against hers as we look at the book together and point out different things happening in the pictures.

Her favourite books at the moment are Cars, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Dear Zoo and My First Prayer. She will sit for ages looking and "reading" a book. We go to the library every Wednesday morning for Story Time (a librarian reads a story book, then the kids do a craft activity relating to the story). Emilie is the youngest there but she LOVES it!

Emilie has enjoyed "drawing" since she was able to hold the pencil to the paper. At first she would scribble back and forth unintelligibly. Then a few months ago she started "writing" where she would draw little tiny scribbles that look like W or M (letters) and she would recite "A, E, A, A, E, E" as she wrote them (like she was spelling out her words as she went along).

Emilie and I practise writing her name - I hold the pencil over the top of her hand and write each letter and spell it out as we go. E, m, i, l, i, e - EMILIE! "Emilie!" we exclaim when her name is written! She can spell out her name as we go along (but only if I am spelling it out with her, otherwise she says something like, E, M, I, M, E, M etc).

She can recognise a capital E and if she sees an E on a sign she will point it out to me and say "EEEEE!"

She has recently learnt to say her own name and she uses it a lot to describe something that is hers, or to indicate something about herself

"Emmie ouch", "Emmie car" or just pointing at any word and proclaiming that it says "Emmie" LOL

Just the other day, as I was watching her draw, it struck me that Emilie can draw faces! We have been drawing faces together for a while now (my hand ontop of hers and saying the facial features as we go - for example, "A biiiiiig round circle for a head, one eye, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, one ear, two ears and some spiky hair!"

Of course the faces that she draws on her own are very abstract at this stage, but each face has a big circle for a head, facial features and sometimes they have hair or ears (or both!) Sometimes when she is drawing her faces, she will say what she is drawing at the time - "Eyes, Ears, mouth, hair, nose" which is so cute to watch and surprising at how much she knows where features of the face belong from her own recall - for example when she draws ears she always draws one on each side of the head, right where they belong. Other features can be a bit of hit and miss though, sometimes the mouth is above the eyes, or there can be three eyes etc.

 Here are a few of her masterpieces:

Here is today's video of her drawing faces (she is not narrating this one - I'm yet to video her doing this but everytime I turn the camera on she stops!!!)

Hope you enjoyed watching!

Egg Cartons and Pipe Cleaners

Last Friday, Emilie and I made some craft out of an old egg carton. Egg cartons are, I believe, one of the most essential “junk” items in a craft box!! There are so many things you can create from one egg carton if you have a little imagination! Just as well eggs are so yummy (also something you can create many things from and edible things too – even better!)

Although I did most of the imagining with our craft session! Em is a little bit too young to come up with her own creations just yet, but she still had plenty of fun! She LOVES playing with pipe cleaners (another essential in craft boxes!) and she loved playing with our creations once we were finished making.

What we used:
6pack egg carton
Pipe cleaners
Sticky tape
Blue texta
Red texta
Imagination!

What we created:

GOOGLY GLASSES
I cut out the deep round egg cup parts of the carton, 4 in total. Using a cake skewer I poked a hole in the central part of the cup, then cut a medium sized circle in each one. Then I poked two holes on opposite sides of the cup in each. We threaded a pipe cleaner through one of each hole and made the arms of the glasses. Then I connected two cups together with a pipe cleaner through the remaining holes:

Emilie had fun putting on and taking off her googly glasses and enjoyed looking at herself in front of the mirror!


What do I think this activity provoked in Emilie’s development?


- Even though she is too little to use scissors, she was watching intently as I cut out the egg carton components. I made sure to tell her very seriously that scissors were very sharp and make an ouchie if you touch them.

- Threading the pipe cleaner through the little holes refines her dexterity skills and her understanding of making something go through a hole to the other side.


- Putting on and taking of the glasses helps train her awareness of her own body, in particular her face and eyes. She can see that my googly glasses cover my eyes and make my face look different, and her googly glasses cover her eyes, and makes what she sees around her different!

FINGER PUPPETS
Using the triangular pointy parts of the egg carton (the parts that separate the eggs), I taped pipe cleaners to the top point (I cut the pipe cleaners into shorter sections). This was the finger puppets’ hair. We had a blonde puppet and a red-head puppet! Then all that was left to do was to draw two blue eyes and a red lipstick mouth onto each puppet. Emilie had HEAPS of fun with the little people. She made them kiss each other, she kissed them and made me and Paul kiss them too LOL:

When we were done she played with a few other pipe cleaner people that we had made on another day. Here she is making them kiss each other!

What do I think this activity provokes in Emilie’s development?

- Emilie is starting to enjoy games that involve role play. Once she could recognise the puppets as “little people” she was free to explore a role play in what she believes people can do and what people like to do. The fact that she was making the puppets kiss indicates to me that she is in touch with her emotional side, in particular love (hence the kissing LOL).

- This also refines her dexterity skills, learning how to use certain digits for different things, making a fist with two fingers raised, inserting her fingers into the puppets etc.

PHOTO POST June 2011

Soaking up the sunshine!

At a local play centre

Madison and her friend eating fruit salad sticks

Vegin' with her teddies

Make-shift car / perfect tv watching lounge

Vroom, vroom! Playing with the truck uncle Russ gave her

She was too excited to sit still for a photo... she's a care bear...

Helping daddy in the garden

Madison 10 years

My step daughter, Madison, is 10 years old, she will turn 11 in September. She is in grade 5 this year. I’ve known her since she was 2, been with her dad since she was 5 and her step-mum since she was 9. Normally we are really close, but she is a troubled kid. She has experienced a few traumatising events in recent years, and she is behind in her education.

Before she started year one, she used to play “schools” with me, where we would sit and learn the basics of literacy and numeracy. She used to love learning, she has always been a very active girl, she loves dancing and wins all of her running races at school. The sad thing is that she doesn’t like herself, she thinks she is ugly (she is so beautiful). She still laughs and plays and there are many moments that she enjoys, but her overall attitude is that everything is boring and she prefers to close herself off from the world with her earphones in.

Even though Madison has noticeable strengths, she doesn’t seem to immerse herself in them. For example, she is very musical, she was chosen from her year group to learn the clarinet, however she doesn’t enjoy practising or applying what she has learnt from her music lessons to her life in the form of enjoyment.

In another example, she excels in sport at school, she is a fast runner and always does well in races. However she doesn’t play any sport. She doesn’t want to.

It’s difficult for me to understand why she doesn’t want to enjoy the things she is good at, because I know that my most enjoyable subjects/activities when I was at school were the things that I was good at. What I have put it down to is low self-esteem, low self-worth, self-hatred and low confidence levels.

Madison stays with Paul and me for one week when Paul is offsite, and for a weekend (2 nights) while he is away. The weekend just gone was a long weekend and I had Madison for 3 nights.

My mum has given me some home-schooling material which I have sat down with Madison’s mum this afternoon and showed her. I suggested that Madison be temporarily home-schooled so she has the chance to get her self-confidence back and get back on track academically. (Madison’s literacy and numeracy are very poor and she is very behind in her school work).

Madison’s mum seemed to take it in and she thought of it as a good idea. So when Paul gets back from site, we will have a family meeting, the four of us and discuss what the best option is for Madison.

Here are some photos of the girls from the weekend:

 This is Madison making a painting for her school teacher to say "sorry" -There was an altercation at school last week :-/

This is Emilie playing with the left overs after cutting out Madison's flowers!!!

Emilie 17 months old.

My daughter Emilie was born on Christmas Day 2009. She is a miracle child, following years of fertility problems and two precious angels in heaven. She was breastfed exclusively, started solids a week before she turned 6 months and she is still currently a boobie girl, in the morning and before bed at night. She has an older half-sister, Madison who is 10 and living with her mother.

Emilie has white blonde hair and blue eyes, she is curious and inquisitive and extremely active and outgoing.

She sat on her own at 6 months, started crawling at 7 months, cruising furniture at 8 months, standing at 10 months and walking at 12 months. She is an independent child, wishing to try things for herself, and very attentive, copying everything she sees, which means sometimes she can do things that I didn’t even know she could do, just from watching other people.

For example, one day she grabbed my keys from my hand and ran over to the car and tried to put the correct key (yes, she carefully selected the car key as I watched her) into the car lock. Considering my car has central locking, I was amazed that she even knew that some cars need keys to get into, and how she could recognise and select the correct key was freakish!

She has also taught herself how to hold a pen/pencil in the correct way as shown in the photos below.

I did not teach her that, she must have seen me writing and taught herself how to hold the pen.

She can only say a handful of words, but amongst those words are the numbers “One, Two and Three” (which she can use to count actual items) and the letters “A and E” (I’m always saying “E for Emilie”!)

Her first word was “hello” shortly followed by “daddy”, pretty generic words for a child. These were first uttered when she was around 8 months old and were spoken mainly as a repetition of the sounds we were making to her (she would say “HAWWOO” when we said hello to her). Her first word that I consider to be her first ‘real’ word (mainly because it’s a noun and it was the first word she used on her own and recognise the object) was “Shoe or Shoes”. She said this at 15 months.

Other words that she can say and recognise are:

Ta (thank you), No, bye-bye, car, banana (nah-nah), nose, baby, fish, ball, dog (which she says gog – very cute), gone, All-gone, Rachel (way-choo – she doesn’t call me mummy yet but we are working on it!), cheese and chair although cheese and chair sound very much like her saying SHOES so I suspect she may be using the word SHOES to mean all three things LOL!!!

She can understand simple sentences for example, “Where’s your ball? Go and get your ball!” Or, “Look at the plane in the sky!” (She is likely to point, then wave and say “bye-bye” to the plane!)

Although her language isn’t very developed yet, she likes to babble all day long, she enjoys ‘writing’ which are small precise scribbles on paper in a script fashion. She LOVES pretending to read books, pointing to letters and numbers and going, “A, A, E, A, E, E, A!” I think this is extremely cute as sometimes I spell words out to her and even though she cannot recognise the correct letters yet, she is giving it a go!

We read books together. Her favourite book is a book called ‘Bed-time Peek-a-boo’.  It is a book with flaps that conceal toys underneath. It also has a photo of a baby on each page that she points to and says “Baby”.

I use a few signs on her. Not conventional signs (the only conventional sign she knows is Boobie, which I might add she uses quite a bit!!!) I have made up all of the other signs, mostly because that way they will be easy for me to remember and easy for her to learn. I only started doing this about a week ago, since she sometimes gets frustrated when she can’t express to me what she wants in words.

She knows all the actions to: “Open, Shut Them”, “Twinkle, Twinkle”, “Rock-A-Bye Your Bear”.

She can stack ten stacking cups in the correct order from a scattered state, and we are working on the shape holes!! Not quite there yet, but she will pick up a shape and try different holes, usually unsuccessfully. She has been able to make a tower of pegs since about 8 months old.

She likes to play with simple picture puzzles, but still hasn’t mastered getting the correct pieces where they belong (sometimes she flukes it though!)

We enjoy doing a lot of picture gluing. I cut out interesting pictures from wrapping paper,
junk mail and magazines and she glues and sticks them to her scrapbook, and we make stories out of them. She loves stickers too. Sometimes if it’s nice weather outside I will get some paint pots out and we do some painting, but I find this very stressful for me as she tends to get very innovative and more likely to paint the house than paint on her paper! So this activity is reserved for when I have enough energy and when she is in a good mood.

I am going to start researching different ideas and activities. Of course once our house is built I will have a little play area for her where I want to set up a ‘home corner’ where she can role play with pretend kitchen stuff or dolly stuff or cars/trucks/workshop – whatever she is interested in when the house is finished! I have a few hand-me-down dress-up clothes that I will keep in a chest for her, that will be fun.

Next post I’ll write down some ideas that I have come up with J

Thinking about Homeschooling...

I am starting this blog as a beginning of a journey into home schooling. I want somewhere where I can refer back to my daughter’s development and progressions, also as a place I can have feedback hopefully in the future from followers, who may be my mother, friends, or other home school families I meet along the way.

My daughter’s name is Emilie and currently she is 17 months and 6 days old :-P

I have only recently considered home schooling, probably because my husband and I just assumed that a public school is just “the thing you do” when your children reach school age.

I would like to, for my first blog post, write down some of my initial reasons for thinking about schooling at home.

Number  1. I love my daughter! Well this is an obvious one, not just the fact that I would love to spend every waking hour with her (oh, please let the waking hours be during daylight!!!) but that I also love watching her learn, showing her things that are old and boring to me, but delightfully new to her. Even at only 1½ years, she has taught herself so many things that I am amazed at how clever she is! Life and learning is for sure a real miracle! I would love to be able to be the one to guide her in her lifetime of learning, to be there to celebrate each achievement and to comfort and encourage at each pitfall.

Number  2.  I am scarred. Yes, scarred. The school system has ruined my desire for learning. One of my first memories as a child was of my mother, a teacher, tutoring school aged children when I was only about 2. I remember them learning to read using a cardboard stand, with word tabs that were slipped into pockets along the stand to make sentences. I REALLY wanted to be like those big kids and be able to read like that, so my mum showed me. I picked it up really quickly because I WANTED to learn it. My mother was a great teacher. She taught me so much in my years before school, and allowed me to explore and discover things for myself too.

Then I started year one. My teacher was heavily pregnant, grouchy and just downright awful! Not only did she squash any pride I had in what I was already able to do, she squashed my desire to learn on top of what I already knew how to do. She was not my last experience in this. I’m sorry to say that most of my school years were unhappy. I was angry at my mum for telling me that I was smart, when WHAT DID SHE KNOW??? Obviously I’m dumb because look! I can’t do anything right, I hate learning!

I do not want my daughter to end up in the same cycle of hating to learn. I want her to be able to discover life, to love learning, to share learning with me, my husband and any siblings that may come along after her! I want to get her off to the best start and to tailor her education to suit her ability and her pace. To slow down or speed up when she needs it, not when the classroom teacher says so.

Number 3. I can already see what the school system is doing to my step-daughter, Madison. Before she went to school she was a bright, bubbly child who loved to play “schools” with me and learn because she wanted to learn. I taught her the basics of reading and her proudest achievement was being able to count in “twos” – Two Four Six Eight Ten Twelve!! She is ten now, year 5, and she is lagging behind greatly. My greatest annoyance is that her teachers have never done anything to try and help her catch up, or understand something that is baffling her. I don’t want this for Emilie.

Now, I have a plan in my head that at the moment probably doesn’t match the plan in my husband’s head! My husband, Paul, and I have discussed our future. We are in the process of extending our house (which means a bigger mortgage :-/) which should be finished by Christmas time 2011 (Emilie’s second birthday) and we want to start trying to conceive our next child in July 2011, meaning that if we fall pregnant in that month we will have an April 2012 baby, or more than likely, we will have a baby later in the year of 2012 or even 2013 if we are unsuccessful for awhile.

Our plan we discussed was to have our two children fairly close, and as Paul is on good money working fly in fly out on the mines in Christmas Creek, Western Australia, I would be a stay at home mum until the children reach school age, at which time I would return to work either part or fulltime and have Paul come back to work in Perth again.

Now, I cannot say what will happen in our future. One day I will look back on this first blog post and think, wow, things really didn’t go the way we saw it!! But I have a plan hatching in my head (which hasn’t reached Paul’s head via my mouth yet LOL) to see how things go with homeschooling Emilie for her first few years while I would still be home with her younger sibling. Ideally, if I were to have a baby after July 2012, then their “school years” will have a larger gap (3 years instead of 2) so Emilie could be homeschooled for longer if it so happened that our situation meant that the kids were forced to go to conventional school in the end.

I have made a few comments about homeschooling to Paul just in passing conversation!! His reaction hasn’t been negative, so that is a start. I don’t want to jump in and say “I’m going to home school the kids!!!” That is likely to scare him. He will think, “I’m doomed to work the mines forever!!!” And to be honest, that’s not what I want for him either. I hate the fact that he is away from Madison and Emilie, and if we were millionaires (ooh that would be nice!) then we could all be together and he could even be involved in the homeschooling environment. On his two week break when he is at home, he will be able to see how well homeschooling Emilie is going (he has already complimented me on how well I am doing as a mother to Emilie) and possibly that may convince him that homeschooling isn’t just some backward, hippy-style, commune-ish, cult that weirdo parents do because they are paranoid of the government or teachers in general!

So my plan for now is to just go with Emilie’s pace at her age of 17 months. In my next blog post I would like to describe Emilie and her capabilities at her current age, and a few ideas I have tried, or ideas I would like to try. I’m going to go with what my mother describes as EPIC – Explore, Ponder, Investigate, Celebrate. See her website www.educationathome.com.au Emilie has plenty of time until she is what is deemed as “school age” but there is no reason why I cannot start the learning process today! She is a bright girl and all I want is to nurture her desire for learning and to see that passion be sustained into her future instead of getting squashed as mine did.