Adventures in Homeschooling...in which I nerd out about birds

I'm a total novice at this homeschooling thing; I don't hold a degree in elementary education. But ever since high school when I volunteered as a counselor for outdoor school I have been aware of the concept of 'teachable moments.' They happen a lot in the forest when you are hiking around with a group of sixth graders. And they also happen while volunteering with high school youth group students and those who are preparing for the sacrament of Confirmation. And, for the last 12 years, they have been a huge part of my parenting career. Naturally I am trying to apply them to my new career as a homeschool teacher. When the school year started we could still have lunch outside almost every day. It occurred to me we could track that and somehow, at the end of the school year, they could do something science-y with that information withe their science teacher. (My mom and her sister both love science and, mercifully, she offered to teach science to them for the entire school year. This is awesome because I can get super excited about humanities like history, art, literature and english, but would not have been able to muster that same zest for science.) So we had a conversation about data collection, and what data means and we have been tracking what the weather is like every day and whether or not we can eat outside.

We also began to notice a lot of birds flitting around outside their bedroom windows while we work at their desks. We decided to track that too. For example we noticed some Cedar Waxwings in the dogwood and fig trees. Cedar waxwings are a bird I was first introduced to in our previous old house. In the parking strip there was a crabapple tree that bloomed white in spring, developed red berries in winter and kept them all winter until they would eventually all drop over the course of one or two days at the end of winter. Except that one year I noticed a flock of birds I had never seen before. They had a little red tip and a tuft on their head. They swarmed our tree to eat the berries with some of them remaining on the power lines above ostensibly as look outs, rotating constantly. Over the course of two days they had eaten the tree completely clean of berries. They did this several years in a row and I never saw the Cedar waxwings except for those two days. So imagine my delight at noticing them at our current home devouring berries and fruit.





Deuce and I have gotten very good at recognizing black capped chickadees and juncos.

I have been following the Story of the World history program in which the children have optional maps and coloring pages. In addition to them Deuce has been creating scenes from the lessons including Lei Zu discovering silk from silkworm cocoons falling into her tea cup and a Mesopotamian merchant with his cart.

They also made snakes out of modeling clay after reading the legend of Gilgamesh and the snake eating the secret to eternal life. Deuce really loves snakes (more to come on this for his birthday party this year) so he enjoyed learning 'why' snakes shed their skins.