Homeschool Mami's World

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Palm Tree Pundit. (Palm Tree Pundit is living out one of my fantasies--homeschooling in Hawaii!)

This carnival is a weekly round up of blog posts from different homeschool blogs and is a great way to virtually meet new people and to see what other people's homeschooling experiences are. My post Spider Web of Ideas is among the entries.

I'm off to read through the rest.

Homeschool Mami

If you are new to blogs, you might be new to these silly quizzes, but they are fun occasionally. Click on the link below and find out what kind of homeschooler you are and then click where it says "comments" on my blog and tell me what you scored.

I apparently am Tigger:

You are a Tigger Homeschooler. Tiggers jump into homeschooling with both feet, as a grand adventure. Everything is about learning, and their days (and houses) show it.


What kind of Hundred Acre Wood Homeschooler Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

How do they know what my house looks like?

Homeschool Mami

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Challenger Disaster. Every time a shuttle goes up now (especially since the more recent Columbia disaster) I pray and worry and wonder all at once.

Although an entire crew of astronauts died, everyone best remembers the New Hampshire school teacher, Christa McAuliffe. In December we visited the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord, NH and enjoyed the hands-on exhibits and watched a planetarium show. CNN has brief article about her. I didn't realize that she was originally from Framingham and graduated from Framingham State. I also just learned about Challenger Learning Centers which are all over the country, but there is one right at FSC, the Christa McAuliffe Center. They have programs there for grades 5-8. If my kids were older, we would definitely check it out.

My son, Jedi Knight, is fascinated by space (not just Star Wars) and we are constantly getting books on space shuttles and astronauts at the library. I even woke him up early last summer ago when the shuttle Discovery landed safely, piloted by the able Eileen Collins. We pulled out the globe (of course--we're addicted to geography) and I showed him where they landed it in California at Edwards Airforce Base, where NASA Mission Control is in Houston, and where the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida. We also talked about the fact that a plane was going to fly the shuttle piggy-back style back to Florida. He was talking about that for weeks.

Here's to the final frontier...

Homeschool Mami

One of my favorite parts of homeschooling is the ability to talk to my children throughout the day. Our conversations cover wide-ranging topics: music, art, theology, science, family dynamics, world poverty, ecology, pop culture, materialism, or whatever they are currently reading. If we were to suddenly stop homeschooling I think what I would miss most is knowing what is going on in the hearts and minds of my children on a real time basis.

Piaget is one of the most influential educational psychologists of the 20th century. Time's 100 Most Influential 20th Century People describes him like this:

"He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge — little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world."

He called the structures these "active builders" made schemata. They are often compared to ladders of knowledge on which you hang new information. I prefer to think of schemata as a spider web. As you spin your new ideas into your existing body of knowlege you need to find connecting points on the web. The more knowledge you have, the more complex the web structure becomes. Each web is beautiful and practical and yet utterly unique.

One of the joys of being my kids' primary teacher is that I can help them make connections and that I can also point them to new and interesting things to learn that connect to what they already know. As we read books we always have a globe nearby to look up the place that we are reading about and to remember other interesting facts about that region of the world. When reading Heidi, we look up Switzerland, and find the Alps, and feel the raised topographical surface of the globe and discuss that one of our favorite movies, the Sound of Music also takes place near the Alps, although in Austria, and then we find Austria on the globe...and so it goes.

This is not only instructive for the kids, but keeps my mind sharp and the conversations we share are as much fun for me as for them. And by sharing ideas we are buiilding webs of shared experiences and family memories which will sustain us long after story time is over.

Homeschool Mami

you tell your game-playing 7 year old that it's time to do school, and she says, but Mommy, Monopoly is school. I'm learning about money!!!!

And then you laugh, and see her point, and let her play a little longer.

Homeschool Mami

I really love living in Worcester and schooling my kids here. We love the Higgins Armory, the Worcester Art Museum, the Ecotarium, and (further out) Old Sturbridge Village. We love Moore State Park (in Paxton) for walks and Elm Park. We spend an inordinate time in the libraries: Worcester (downtown), Auburn and Leicester. And we also love our home, our yard and our "woods."

What are your favorite spots?

Homeschool Mami

This crazy weather has me upside down. It was so warm yesterday I took the kids into the woods behind our house in the afternoon. Well, I suppose "woods" is a relative term, but we are city dwellers and so we've got a good few trees behind us that we can wander in, so that's what we call it. We were decked out in snow boots because I thought surely it would be one giant mud puddle, but it was pretty dry. We turned over rocks and found a few hibernating bugs and scurrying spiders. We examined rotting tree limbs and climbed logs. We breathed in the fresh clean air. I started planning my vegetable garden, and then I reminded myself, it's January. Vegetable gardens will have to wait.

Homeschool Mami

you have to move the globe to sit down on your couch.

Homeschool Mami

As I start posting regularly on this blog, I am hoping to use it to build some local community, as well as the virtual community that naturally grows up around a blog. Those of you who know me and my kids know the names of my little learners, but for the purposes of this blog, they will have the following nicknames:

Super Lasso Girl(age 7) (Who has her own blog)
Jedi Knight (age 5)
Little Star (age 3, soon to be 4)

One of our favorite places to go is the Worcester Art Museum. Super Lasso Girl & Jedi Knight have just started a class there called Wild About Art. The catalog is on line here.

While her older siblings are viewing art in the museum, hearing a story and working on a new project for an hour and a half, Little Star and I wander the museum hand in hand and have long conversations about what we are looking at. When her little legs get tired we sit in a gallery on a bench and look around the room and tell each other what pictures we like and why. Having conversations with my little one about art is so much fun. When she decides that we are finished, we go back to the waiting room and pull out our library books and read until other young kids come back to wait for their artistic siblings and then she goes off to socialize. It's a lovely hour and a half.

Homeschool Mami

This is a blog about homeschooling, urban living, finding educational opportunities for my kids, bilingual parenting, and exploring Worcester, MA.

Homeschool Mami