Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Recent Reads- November



Very inspiring and a great look at unschooling. However, I'm not planning on doing radical unschooling. I still plan some lessons and projects and regulate what the kids eat and the amount of screen time they have. I do enforce house rules and have a daily schedule. There is a lot of flexibility in the subject matter and learning approach.


I like some aspects of Montessori. We will continue with child led learning and having the kids help out with daily household tasks. I would like the kids to come up with their own way of using certain materials instead of demonstrating everything before hand. We are not able to afford all of the Montessori school supplies so sometimes we will need to make our own. 


Too many ideas to skim through at once! One that we added to our week is to write every Wednesday. It could be a list, a letter to someone or chess notations. Recently the boys wrote letters to Santa, to their cousin and grandparents. 


Sometimes I just gotta chill. This reaffirms that parenting doesn't have to be planning and doing every single minute of every single day. Sometimes you just have to be present.

Digital Frame



We are loving the digital frame for homeschooling. Thanks Grandpa! Every month we change the pictures and each morning we play them during breakfast. It opens new avenues of conversation, interesting questions, and inspiration towards starting new projects. This way we can save trees instead of printing out so many pictures for the country and artist of the month. Our photo frame this month contains pictures of Belarus, Rene Magritte paintings, pink dolphins, venus flytraps, angora rabbits, pandas, bottlenose dolphins, ninja and nunchuks.

Snack Mix


One of our favorite snacks is to make a mix of stuff. Here are some things we put in it.

- roasted pumpkin seeds
- raisins
- dried cranberries
- roasted almonds
- sunflower seeds
- walnuts
- graham or chocolate graham bears
- chocolate covered quinoa
- yogurt covered raisins
- kashi crunch cereal
- cinnamon harvest or shredded wheat cereal
- goldfish crackers
- dried tart cherries
- macadamia nuts
- pretzels
- banana chips
- dried coconut
- mini m&ms or chocolate chips
- cherrios

Everything in moderation right?