It just recently started raining and even snowing a little, but for the most part, Fall has been beautiful here in the mountains.  Cool nights and sunny days have been perfect for hiking and collecting rosehips, riding bikes and playing at the park, and cleaning up outside before the real snow comes.

As usual, we are enjoying lots of reading together.  We finished The Wizard of Oz and Just So Stories, the books that Caleb and I take turns reading aloud to each other, and have started Charlotte's Web.  Caleb has a selection of seasonal books he is reading to himself and we are reading poetry books together as well, including the favorite, A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.  Caleb is putting together his own collection of favorite fall poems, which he is copying and illustrating. 

 

 

Smiley also enjoys reading these books with us, as well as stories he picks out from the library; right now he is enjoying a large collection of Mo Willems books.  We continue to read fairy tales together, as they make the basis for our alphabet writing and review.

 

The boys also work on handwriting, and Caleb works on spelling and grammar.

 

Social Studies is taking us through more Ancient Civilizations, after Egyptian and other African cultures, we began reading Native American stories.  Caleb works with world maps, while Smiley is being introduced to maps, by mapping his bedroom and making 3D maps out of blocks.

 

Caleb is catching on to multiplication, applying math to story problems, finding the area of squares and rectangles, and reviewing multiple digit addition and subtraction.  Smiley continues to work on the basics of adding, so far covering digits 0-2 and 8-9, and counting by 10's and adding 10's and 100's.
Caleb's math samples:

 

 

 Smiley's math samples:

 

 

Science continues to cover a range of things in the natural world.  In addition to reading and drawing, both boys spent some time using charts.  Caleb charted an experiment about water evaporation and Smiley charted his observations of the weather.

 

 

Every week the boys enjoy a variety of outdoor group games, jump roping, hiking, and more with their friends at Riverwood Community School, in addition to the art and Spanish classes they are taking.  We've had a few more field trips to help on different farms, enjoyed seasonal fun like pressing cider and carving pumpkins, and worked with volunteers who helped teach the kids a variety of outdoor skills like fire building (without matches!), plant identification, and shelter building.  At home, we have found time to make applesauce with bushels of apples donated by a friend, and made many quarts of tomato sauce with the abundance of tomatoes we grew in the garden.  Making bread and cooking together is also part of our weekly routine, as well as cleaning, playing and practicing instruments, reading, crafting (usually drawing for Smiley, knitting for Caleb) and whatever else the kids find fun and interesting that week!

 

Over here in Eastern Washington, we are enjoying every bit of the end of summer that we can.  The September days have been a perfect 80 degrees and sunny.  When we're not doing schoolwork inside at the table, we enjoy reading outside together, hiking, working with dad, and playing together.

Smiley's Fairy Tales that we are reading for Language Arts are classic stories filled with heroes and heroines, magic creatures, and many morals and lessons about right and wrong.  In addition to drawing pages for each letter, Smiley works in a handwriting book and we work on letter sounds orally through games and tongue twisters.

Caleb practices reading orally and independently every day.  We are reading The Wizard of Oz and Just So Stories together and he also chooses his own fiction books from the library and reads non-fiction books that go along with other subjects we are studying.  In addition to writing about and illustrating the stories he reads, Caleb is working on his cursive and spelling.  He also writes regularly in a journal.

Caleb's has learned how to multiply with zero, one, two and ten.  He also practices skills he has learned previously and reads and completes his story problems independently.

Smiley is working on adding.  The units he's completed have covered adding zero and one, and he found it very easy and breezes through math.

Caleb's study of Ancient Civilizations has been fun for everyone since we've all been reading stories of Ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Egyptians together.

We are having lots of fun studying nature outside together.  Both boys have science journals that they can draw the things we learn about.  Caleb's leaf rubbings and Smiley's drawing of a caterpillar are below.  After a field trip to a vegetable farm, Caleb learned about the plant's food cycle and how plants make their own food.  He also is identifying more plants and trees on his own. 

The boys started their classes at Riverwood Community School.  They love attending every Wednesday where they have been learning songs and words in Spanish, sculpting with beeswax clay, journaling, playing games with friends, and Caleb has started a new knitting project and Smiley started making his wooden knitting needles.  They highlight for the boys has been Friday's Outdoor School, (which is spent entirely outside as the name describes).  In addition to fun games and songs, activities have included hiking, identifying local plants and animals, and harvesting vegetables and helping with chores on a local farm.  This week we'll be taking a nature walk on the shores of the Columbia River and helping carve a birch bark canoe!

A New School Year!

We're back at it!  Another year of fun and family and learning . . . Smiley is a First Grader and Caleb is in the Third Grade.  We started school officially at the beginning of August.  We like to mix in time for visiting relatives and working on the farm, so we start school a bit earlier than usual.  Here's a bit of the fun and learning that we've been doing during our first month of homeschooling on Mountain Moon Farm:

Smiley's math so far has covered place value (reading numbers into the hundreds), a refresher on writing numbers to 20, and using math blocks to prepare for addition.  

 Math is Caleb's favorite subject and he was excited to start exercises in early multiplication.

Language Arts has Caleb reading the classic Winnie the Pooh stories by A.A. Milne and Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.  Below are his paragraphs and illustrations about his reading.  (Remember to click on a photo to enlarge.)  Caleb is also learning cursive and practices spelling words each week.

Smiley is practicing each uppercase and lowercase letter of the alphabet while illustrating the fairy tales we read together (the letters are usually in the shape of the characters; he's done A - E so far).  He is also working in a handwriting book.

Social Studies has Caleb learning about the ancient Hebrews and Smiley is making his own calendar.  On Smiley's calendar he sees the transitions of days, week, months, in addition to illustrating the cycle of the moon.

For Science, Caleb is learning about the moon and sun and how they relate to the earth.  Hands on projects, and discussions are illustrated in his science notebook, in addition to the independent reading Caleb does from library books.

Smiley has been collecting leaves and flowers on our nature walks which we press and add to his science notebook, after learning how to identify and use them (he pasted and colored on the pages; I write the plant name cards).  In observing the seasons, Smiley illustrated a tree and how it will look different from summer to fall.

Caleb is able to do much more work independently this year, as a third grader, and I write out a list for him each week so he knows what will need to be completed.  Here is an example of Caleb's weekly list:

This month we have also take time for Smiley's violin lessons, camping at the beach, reading for fun, collecting moths and caterpillars, and whatever else we can find to do outside.  On our very first day of school in August, we had a calf born.  Dave kept interrupting our science lesson, where I was fastidiously acting out the earth's orbit of the sun, to update us on the mama cow in labor.  I finally realized that the kids experiencing a real live birth was probably more valuable than my own science lecture, so we spent the afternoon sitting in the field with the mama cow and her new baby.  Next week the boys start their classes at Riverwood Community School which will help round out their academics with art, foreign language, and outdoor science.  We are off to a good start and looking forward to another year of homeschool fun!