Mt. Rainier from the window seat
Mom!
Planning our zoo route
The new penguin exhibit
Yusuf's beloved jaguar, up close and personal
Mansoor is eating raspberries by the bowlful these days
Getting dirty at the beach
And oh the sunsets... Photos never do them justice (especially those taken with a camera phone)
I admit it, I can’t draw. Really, I simply don’t know how to draw anything other than maybe a doodled flower while I’m supposed to be taking notes. So, when Yusuf and I sit around to draw together, I’m far from an inspiration for him. Our drawings tend to consist of geometric houses (you know, a triangle roof on top of a square house), stick people, grass and sky. We make great messes with paint and construct all sorts of cool 3D projects, but drawing has eluded us both. It was time for an intervention.
We finally purchased Draw, Write, Now last week, and this lovely book entered our school room yesterday. Today we have masterpieces! Behold Yusuf’s Mama Hen and Chicks:
Notice the big brother chick and the little brother chick
Yusuf decided that this one will go to our dear friend Zahirah as she is currently raising chickens. Tomorrow we will try to create another drawing, I’m hoping for (my) Grandma. This breakthrough is making the idea of making cards for relatives and pen-pals much more exciting!
Witness:
Just another worksheet?
Yes, this looks like just another page of math sums. Watching Yusuf work them out however reveals the brilliance that is RightStart. Take 4+3 for example. Instead of starting with 4 and counting up 3 like most K/1 math programs teach, RightStart has taught Yusuf to mentally take one from the 3 and move it over to the 4 to make the problem 5+2. Similarly, 6+1 also becomes 5+2 and 4+4 becomes 5+3. The more math we do the more incredible I think RightStart is! The program spends a lot of time at the beginning teaching kids how to visualize numbers without counting, using their fingers, tally sticks (popsicle sticks used as tally marks), and the abacus.
RightStart's Standard Abacus
We do a multitude of activies and play many games in which Yusuf shows 7 fingers with one full hand and two others (5+2), builds 7 in tally sticks with a group of five and two others, and sees 7 on the abacus as 5+2. While other elementary math programs emphasize the decimal or base-ten system (Montessori, Math-U-See), I have never seen a program teach the base-five model like RightStart does. So many of the students I tutor use their fingers to “count up” when solving basic addition problems, and they’re upper elementary, middle, and even high school students! One of my biggest goals for homeschooling Yusuf is to give him a solid math foundation, it is so gratifying to watch him start to really understand.
In other math news, we have been having a lot of fun working with money (just dimes, nickels, and pennies of course, to reinforce the decimal and base-five systems), playing with mirrors (exploring symmetry and reflections), and using calendars. Yusuf counts to 100 pretty well now, and can count by twos and tens also. Mansoor can always name the current month before Yusuf can remember, but surprisingly (and thankfully), this doesn’t bother Yusuf in the slightest. From Mansoor’s perspective, I imagine it’s fun to finally have something he can do faster than his big brother.
Over the weekend, I did a massive restructuring of the school room. Here are some photos.
From the Doorway
The easle, finally up from the basement! That paper did not stay white for long.
One of the art shelves
Our nature table, in progress. Our jewelers loops are hanging on the left wall for up-close investigation.
The first stage of our workbox system. Eventually Yusuf will have 12 and Mansoor six. More on this later insha'Allah!
Checking in and out. How cute are those pirates?!
Making friends with Cuisenaire rods
