Continuing down the Berry Trail

I love homeschooling! I love the flexibility and the ability to go with the lessons that God brings across our path. :-)

After a lot of cuddling this morning, the girls asked to go play outside. Since it was still early (in other words, not AS hot as it normally is) and it looked as though it would rain later, we decided to go play in the hot Texan heat. The girls had fun on the swings, watering their pretend gardens and bringing me their nature finds, while I read a bit more in Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home by Elizabeth Foss. This book is SOOOO Good!!! After awhile, we all decided it was time to go back into the A/C!

We then drove to our handy dandy drive-thru library to pick up a new title for our Berry/Jam week, Bread and Jam for Frances. This is the fourth book that I have gotten that ended up being one of those "big books" that publishers put out for classrooms to try to recreate the home setting of sitting on someone's lap. . . The girls love these books because they are different (although there is definitely a challenge in turning these huge pages when you actually do have little ones on your lap!) but they are definitely not drive-thru friendly! They are way too big for the little slide window thing they have, which is similar to a teller window at a bank. I wish they had a different code or something that let me know ahead of time the format the book will be, but luckily the librarians know me by now -- I am the crazy homeschooling lady who picks up at least 10 books on most trips -- so they just laugh and run out to bring it to the car. Oh well. . . like I said, the girls do love these books, so it is worth the extra bit of hassle :-)

Once we got back home, we immediately cuddled up and read our new book along with Jamberry and The Giant Jam Sandwich. We talked more about rhyme and we did the tracking exercises the HSS unit study recommends -- the characters in Jamberry are wearing hats or at least have them on every page, and it is a good pre-reading skill to look for the hats on each page.

We ate some more berries for lunch and watched a Dora the Explorer episode on Berry Hunting that my wonderful husband found on TIVO for me! I always forget to do that but he made wishlists for "berry," "jam," and "jelly" and set all the good options to record. He is such a good homeschooling Daddy :-) We then planned on making Strawberry Jam but we noticed the sky getting really dark and you could hear the wind blowing hard. I could tell the girls were interested, so I decided to go with that!

We pulled up all the blinds and sat in quiet listening and watching the storm outside our window. Until it started coming down hard, we pushed the window up as well so we could feel the wind, too. It was fun talking about the wind, thunder and lightning, and we had a really good discussion on why rain is actually a gift from God. All the songs they hear and know are things like "rain rain go away, come again another day," so they started to sing that before I told them that rain is actually a really good thing! We talked about all of the benefits of rain and how it is one more way that God takes care of us. It was one of those really good homeschooling moments, you know? It wasn't planned but it was fun, gentle learning together and a nice memory.

A little later, we decided to watch Magic School Bus. This weekend, Gregg and I went through and recorded all the episodes we had on TIVO and made a list of them all. There are 55 episodes in all, and we (now) have 46! We all love these shows so much, and I plan on making it the bulk of our science curriculum for the next few years, along with the applied science in all of our unit studies. ANYWAY, wouldn't you know that today's episode was on the weather! It was about how the town really needed a rain storm and they all hopped on the bus to learn how weather happens.... all about wind and rain! Isn't it so cool how things work out sometimes? :-)

The rest of the day was just fun. We cuddled, tickled and talked a lot, we watched an episode of Between the Lions about Popcorn, and we made and ate our own popcorn. So maybe it didn't fit all my well laid out plans for the unit study, but we definitely still learned about berries and jam, had fun with rhyming and other lessons in the unit, and then took a totally unexpected rabbit trail! I hope that I am always able to see these opportunities as good things, and not interruptions or worse, not even think about the learning potential in the LIFE happening around us, instead focusing only on what is on my lesson plan. Everyday life truly has so much learning potential for all of us if we embrace it!