The Quales

It’s only Wednesday but that means half our week is already over, and I can say that today we hit a good groove with home schooling.

CQ took Teo to school, so Miles, Niko and I had the entire morning free. After breakfast of fresh strawberries and bagels with homemade blackberry jam (YUM), Miles read two books. He read The Very Hungry Caterpillar (which was bittersweet since it was a book I read to him many times when he was Niko’s age) and a Grade 3 book on sharks. Then, we worked on an entire chapter of math, on bonds, adding and subtracting. We made our own flashcards and played a game adding to the number 10 in different ways. Miles really enjoyed the flashcard game, which I’ll have to remember to incorporate more. Having fun will make learning easier, I think.

Then, we did some crayon drawing. We are practicing a certain way of drawing, and starting with only the primary colors. Notice the misspellings in his lesson book. I am purposely not correcting them because I want him to get used to sounding out words. His reading level is pretty advanced, reading at least Grade Level 3 now and I feel that the more he reads, the more he’ll get used to spelling words correctly and sounding them out better. Plus, it’s pretty cute to see how he is spelling words!

After drawing, I read him a book on honeybees. A bee will make one ounce of honey in its entire lifetime. Amazing how the worker bee just works and works til it dies of exhaustion. Worker bees are all female, and all they do is work; they make the hives, they feed the babies, they feed the Queen, they clean the hive, they protect the hive (and if they sting, they die); they do not have their own babies. And in the end, after traveling to and fro thousands of times to collect nectar, they die of exhaustion, literally. In contrast, Drones are all males, and all they do is mate with the Queen (and of course, eat). Then, they die. They do not protect, they do not help clean, they do nothing but mate and then die. Maybe they are both selfless but it seems to me the Worker bees got the short end of the stick.

Miles still has not asked me how bees mate.

Then, we spent some time learning how to weave on his mini loom. His idea is to weave a rainbow piece and give it to Baba as a birthday present. Baba has a really big loom and Miles wants to surprise her with something he’ll create.

After weaving, we did some gardening and gathered eggs from the hens, had soup and bread for lunch, and then left the house for the first time all day to get Teo. Now, Miles is in chess class.

All in all, a really fun and productive day!

We spent Labor Day weekend hanging out with friends, gardening and riding our bikes. Tuesday was Teo’s first day back at Rose K. I was surprised that I got teary eyed saying good bye to him in the morning (since he has been attending “school” for more than a year now). But, he is now four, and this will be his first year at school without Miles. I am not surprised at how easily Teo assimilated himself back at school. He has always been the more independent and naturally happy one. It helps too that his school is just an amazing environment, with wonderful families and a dedicated teacher.

Tuesday was also Miles’ first official homeschool day. He spent the morning after breakfast working on his “Singapore Math” workbook, and then we went to the Berkeley library for a few hours, eventually checking out a gazillion books on bees.
Since deciding to homeschool, I have contemplated many different styles of homeschooling: being enrolled in a formal private homeschool institution, not having a curriculum at all, I even thought of getting my teacher’s credentials so that I could one day teach at an actual school. But in the end, we ended up partnering with FAME (www.famecharter.org), so technically we are public schoolers because FAME is a charter school. But we are free to choose our own curriculum and we get money from the state of California for school supplies and enrichment classes! Miles is now enrolled at Sienna Ranch for outdoor education, carpentry, a clay class and chess. He has also started formally taking fiddle classes with Catherine.

This is the long way of explaining why we have a gazillion books on bees. I decided that the best way to teach Miles is to ask him what he would like to learn, and from there spend a month or more learning all aspects of that subject. So, bees it is. We will learn the history of bees, the science of bees, incorporate bees into our math, draw bees, and live bees for the next 30 days or so. Friends of ours have beehives so it will be fun to visit those later in the year.

We are also spending Fridays going on a hike with other homeschoolers and friends. Today, we spent the entire morning and afternoon doing an Alvarado Wildcat Park loop. There were five adults and twelve kids, 19 months to ten years old! I am ready for a nap, but amazingly the first thing the boys did when we got home was to play outside. They are building “nests” in hopes that a bird family will come move in. I hate to tell them that birds probably won’t use a nest on the ground so close to where Lola, our dog, runs around.

This afternoon, after swim class, Miles bit twice into one of grandma doris’ apples before his left front tooth came out! I didn’t think it’d come out til later. There are such mixed emotions. He’s 6 1/2 now so it’s not like when he was an infant or even one, when every month there seemed to be some kind of milestone (look! he’s walking/talking/smiling/pooped solids!).

I was so happy for him, he had been wiggling that tooth for a while now. But it was also a bittersweet moment, knowing that he is really on his way to boyhood, that my baby, my first, is growing up.

We had bought a toothfairy pillow a few months back – anal that I am – but it somehow ended up in CQ’s car, which is currently in the shop. I didn’t want to put his first tooth in just a plastic baggy under his pillow, so I asked him if I could make a toothfairy pillow and we’d place his tooth in it tomorrow. He is excited to have the fairy visit but he also wanted a pillow. So, finally around midnight, I finished a very simple one, with spare felt lying around. There is an opening in the tooth for his real tooth and a treat. It’s got a crooked smile, but it reminds me of miles’ toothless grin.