Homeschooling, Cooking, Life Skills

I'm not one to take a lot of days to cook or do 'different' math with my kids. I LOVE homeschooling, the vast majority of the time, and with the way the human mind looks for patterns, I feel a routine with school aids success. Being deeply committed to my kids' academic success, I've worked to overcome my negative tendencies that are in total opposition to 1. starting early 2. routine. Be assured, natural tendencies can come close to imitating forces that cannot be altered!

All this to say, that with being sick as I presently am (and have been all week), and the presence of frozen white joy outside, I've been inspired to mix it up today. And wow, what a needed experience. I had my two youngest grade yesterday's math for each other.

Skill: grade someone else's paper and be kind--learning to 'see' the correct answer and how to mark another person's paper is a nice thing to know. They then corrected what they got wrong, having found similar problems in their text if it was the sort of problem that they couldn't honestly "redo" (whether that be because the person who corrected wrote the correct answer for them---ah, skill moment!---or it was too apparent for an honest re-appraisal). This took far longer than I'd anticipated, and a lot more energy than I'd forsaw when the brilliant plan occurred to me this A.M.

Following this learning experience, we did flash cards in a competitive way: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. With kids that are in Saxon 54 and 65, but 30 lessons apart within those, this was clearly not an evenly matched situation, but it motivated the younger to understand why skip counting isn't on par with memorizing multiplication facts, and we all had fun. It also demonstrated how important it is to repeat those basic skills because at this point, they are nearly evenly matched with the easier math.

With both these younger kids loving to cook, I'm now instructing them in the art of soup making. The broth was made last night in the crock pot, so they are doing the chopping, dicing, sauteing and seasoning. Kids who cook readily see the importance of understanding fractions!

Better get back to instructing on the soup. Hope this inspires you to have fun in your school on occasion.

~Ann