More tree love

I loved the 100 Species Challenge that swept (well, maybe it just burbled) through the home-schooling community a couple of years ago The challenge is to identify 100 plants growing within a mile of where you live. What a great way to engage with and get to know the natural world! And besides, I just like knowing the names of things.

But I'm not very good at it. I collect leaves and come home and look them up and discover I don't remember whether the leaves were opposite or alternate or whether the fruits hung singly or in pairs. I always intend to go back and answer my questions, but it seldom happens.

Which is why the park here is perfect for me.

The city provides free wi-fi all through the park. So I just bring along my laptop and identify in situ. I cannot tell you how satisfying this has been.

This, ladies and gentleman, is (I think) from a horse chestnut tree (which also grown in the parking lot behind our dormitory).

Voila!

Trees, Dinosaurs, and Us

In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv argues persuasively that children need the natural world (some of my favorite blogs make the same argument from a mom's point of view--here and here, for example).

But we are currently living in the center of a town of 144,000 people. We spent the last year living in the center of a city of 400,000. In the US we live in the center of a city of 800,000 people. And I love living in downtown areas! But where do I take my children when we need dirt?

Luckily for us, we are very close here to the beautiful Jardin Lecoq, a lovely city park. It is carefully manicured, as you might expect of a French park, but Isaac and Eleanor and I decided to each choose a tree that we can visit throughout the summer.

If you're making a friend, even with a tree, it's only polite to learn its name. So we've been trying to figure out who our trees are.

I picked this beauty. We used this user-friendly tree identification guide (even though it's based on Ohio trees) and decided that mine is a beech tree, probably a copper beech.

Trying to confirm that mine was indeed a copper beech, we stumbled on a blog about trees (which now, sadly, I can't find) and before we found the beech photo we were looking for, we found a photo of Isaac's tree!

This oddball tree is called Monkey's Puzzle (or in French, désespoir des singes--monkey's despair) because it would puzzle a monkey to know how to climb it. The tree is spikes all over. 

Monkey's Puzzle trees have been around since Jurassic times. The theory is that the tree developed the spikes to discourage dinosaurs from grazing on it! It grows in Chile and Argentina where indigenous tribes still eat its nuts (kind of like pine nuts) and use its wood.

Isaac has written a little song about it:

Monkey's puzzle is a spiky tree, spiky tree, spiky tree.

Monkey's puzzle is a spiky tree, and monkeys cannot climb it.

Eleanor chose an impressive tree, the tallest one in the park, we think.  We had a really hard time figuring out what it is, but I think we've finally cracked the case.

A Giant Sequoia! Native to California, it was first planted in Europe in 1853 and since has spread across Europe. One estimate is that there are 10,000 giant sequoias in Europe. Eleanor's tree has an even older history than Isaac. Sequoia fossils have been found with the earliest dinosaurs in the Triassic period. 


How perfect is it that my kids happened to both choose dinosaur trees?


(The photos on this website were what finally convinced me on the Giant Sequoia ID. This site and this one  tell about the history of the Giant Sequoia in Europe, and this site has photos of them all over the world.)

Collecting

Do all seven year old boys like to collect things? Isaac is collecting coins, rocks, and Nerf guns. He's been working on his times table for our homeschool math, but he didn't get excited about it until he discovered online multiplication games that allowed him to print a certificate every time he won the game. He printed out so many certificates that we finally suggested he set a goal of how many certificates to earn, and we promised him a big celebration when he succeeded. Here he is on our celebration day with all the certificates he earned.

A couple of days later I walked into the room and found him printing out another certificate. "Didn't you finish that up?" I asked him.

"Those were multiplication certificates," he told me. "This is fractions."

I think we'll just buy another ink cartridge for the printer.

Isaac's favorite online multiplication games are here and here and here and here. I love this use of computer technology--can't think of a better way to do rote memorization. We're always glad to get more suggestions of great (free) online math games.

Isaac's Journal

Last time I mentioned journals here, I was discouraged because Isaac had announced that he hated them. But then he came up with the idea of writing a manual for his favorite computer game. I was pretty sure we'd go back to complaints when his Starcraft Manual was done. I was wrong!

As soon as the Starcraft Manual was done, he wrote an exhaustive how-to-draw manual for every creature and object that appears in Starcraft.

Ever pessimistic, I was sure the happy days were ending once that manual was done.

But now he has moved on to cartooning. Inspired by Zebra and the stupid crocs in Pearls before Swine (and rather like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner), he created Rat and Worm. Writing this cartoon delights him. He regularly produces pages of comic strips in his journal, chuckling to himself most of the time. He also likes to make copies of his journal pages on our printer and cut the copies into strips--you know, comic strips. I have many, many, many strips of comics stacked up in the kitchen and in the dining room and in the living room.

He and Eleanor have entrepreneurial plans to sell all of these strips once we get back to the US. Here Eleanor models the sandwich board they designed to advertise them.

Despite the extra paper floating around, I'm really happy about how much he loves his journal now. I've been trying to figure out what lessons I should learn about teaching my kids. The best I've come up with so far is: Get out of the way.

I know we're several months off, but I will have forgotten by then--check out these amazing Halloween candy math investigations are here. 

Kids and Museums

When we started having children, I wanted to raise them to be culturally literate and artistically sensitive: they would know Impressionism from Cubism and have an opinion about each. So, we started taking them along to museums when they were still in the Snuggli.

I had the naive idea that these early visits would mean they would grow up loving museums. The truth was a little more complex. When they were little and I suggested a museum visit, reactions would range, depending on their moods, from outright whining to eye rolling to mild interest. But the truth is that I like museums, so we kept going to them.

When my kids reached high school age (um, late high school), they sometimes suggested museum visits on their own! and went to museums with their friends without me! One of my children even wrote a college application essay about how wonderful museums are and how much our family loves them! And now when they come home to visit, going to museums is one of the activities they suggest. So I guess our strategy worked--just with a little more pain and complaining along the way than I had imagined.

I thought about this again this week as we were traveling in central Europe. Several museums were on the agenda (suggested by older siblings!) and the little ones' responses ranged from outright whining to eye rolling (didn't quite make it to mild interest). Still, once we were in the museums, the little ones perked up. Hopefully things are percolating up there in their heads and someday they'll realize they actually do like museums (and possibly become culturally literate and artistically sensitive along the way).

Over the years, we have developed a few simple rules for making museum visits generally successful (no guarantees about the prevention of whines or eye-rolls, however). I'm assuming an art museum here, but these rules are applicable to history museums and places like aquariums, too. Here they are:

1. Go early or go late.
Almost without exception, our least successful museum trips have been when we arrive between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM. That's when everyone else who slept in arrives, crowding things. It's also right at lunchtime. Get to the museum right when it opens or go late in the day. Crowds are thinner and you're not competing with food for your kids' interest.

2. Keep it short.
My rule of thumb is that we never stay in a museum more than two hours. Some trips we have gotten completely absorbed in what we were doing and stayed much, much longer, but we never plan to. Sometimes two hours is about an hour too long. I love museum memberships so that I don't feel guilty about paying admission and then leaving while everyone is still happy.

3. Do what you want.
If you are enthusiastic about what you are seeing, that's what your kids will end up remembering: they'll remember your goofy smile and the little dance you did in front of that one painting and not that they had just asked you for the sixtieth time when they could get a drink of water. You don't have to convince them to be enthusiastic. Just emote away.

4. Do what they want.
Of course, it also helps to think about things from their perspective. Some of the standard tricks up my sleeve:

• Pose like the painting.
• Have everyone choose their favorite thing in a room and then walk around looking at everyone's favorites.
• Look for all the animals or children or toys you can find.
• Bring sketching materials. (Sometimes museums will allow only pencils, so be sure to have a few sharpened ones in case your markers or paints or crayons get the evil eye from the museum guard.) Find a place to sit and let them stay there sketching as long as they want. You should try it too--it's really fun!
• Find a place for them to sit down. Most museums don't mind if you sit on the floor, so flop down with them if the benches are full. You may first sit down just because little legs are tired, but the longer you sit in front of one thing, the more you usually see in it.
• It's tough to do if you're a tourist, but if you're local, check out what programs the museum offers specifically for children. When we lived in D.C. thirteen years ago, our children did a series of Saturday programs at the Smithsonian's Asian Art Museum that they still talk about in great detail--what art they saw, what activities they museum staff had them do. And they're still free, just like they used to be.

5. Go again.
First visits to museums are fun, but on the second and third visits, the museum starts to belong to you. You can have your kids be the tour guides, each showing you one favorite thing. Of course, if you're an out-of-town tourist, you can't very well just bop in for another visit. To achieve something close to another visit, go to the museum bookstore before you go into the museum (a great thing to do while leaving your spouse waiting in long ticket lines) and buy a picture book about the museum or some postcards of things in their collection. Speed-read the book, and as you go through the museum, especially point out the pieces featured in your new book. (Of course, if you, unlike me, are really organized and are going to a big famous museum, you can order a book from Amazon. Or you can look through children's art books and check the credits to see where the paintings are from.) Then, back at home (or in trains or planes), visit the museum again and again by looking at the book.

Conjugation Machines

Why machines? Because conjugation is a mechanical process in any language.

Isaac's machine is Lego. He continued to improve it over several days, but even the earliest prototype showed a sophisticated understanding of conjugation.

The first of these four levers shows whether the subject is singular or plural. The other three represent first person, second person, and third person.

Eleanor's machine wasn't as sophisticated.

You say the word you want to conjugate into the cone and then it gives you a piece of paper with the correct conjugation written on it (remarkably, in Eleanor’s handwriting!). 

We played lots of games with these conjugation machines. Most recently, I gave them complete sentences in English and asked them to give me the Bosnian translation. Isaac had already broken apart his machine to use on other Lego projects, so he did it like a worksheet. Perfectly. He doesn’t need his conjugation machine anymore.

Eleanor, though, pulled her machine out and opened her Conjugation Store. She even made a sign for the store (note that the "sh" sound is represented by the Bosnian letter that makes that sound--š).

As the customer, I gave her each of the sentences and she laboriously cranked out the translation. Once, she translated the sentence perfectly except that she left the Bosnian verb in the infinitive form. I asked, pointing to the verb, “Is this the way you say it?”

Eleanor looked at it and then took it back from me. “Oh,” she said ruefully, “a plug must have come undone. Let me fix it.” She worked on her machine for a while, rewrote the sentence, and handed it to me. “These machines are hard to keep working,” she told me.

I still don’t hear Isaac and Eleanor initiating conversation much. But Eleanor answered a direct question from the store clerk yesterday when we were shopping, and every meal now we all have to say at least one sentence with a conjugated verb.

It’s a start.

Conjugation with Scissors and Tape

Once they had those verb endings running around in their heads, I showed them, using a card with the infinitive form of a verb written on it and a pair of scissors, how you take off the infinitive ending

and put in its place one of the endings we had been singing. We spent a day doing a lot of cutting and pasting, or rather cutting and taping.

But, of course, cutting up a card isn’t the same as producing a conjugated verb in conversation.

Tomorrow is the final conjugation post.

Conjugation: Singing grammar

I don’t want Bosnian to be boring, but we do, in fact, need to learn by rote verb endings if we ever want to conjugate verbs. So I made up a song with a singsong melody--better to annoy them than to bore them!. The song consists wholly of pronouns and their matching verb endings. Here are the (witty! sparkling! unforgettable!) lyrics:

Ja -im

Ti -iš

On/ona -i

Mi -imo

Vi -ite

Oni/one -e

Then I started to sing it. All the time. Walking to school. Setting the table. Playing with Lego. Washing their hair.  When they started begging me to quit, I told them I would if they’d sing it to me once without any help. Isaac did it perfectly the first time he tried. (And then I had a hard time quitting, it was such a habit.)

Conjugation: Bosnian as a Second Language

Isaac and Eleanor are slowly learning Bosnian as they listen to it every day at school, but we decided they need more instruction to make quicker progress. Unfortunately, the school don't offer the equivalent of English as a Second Language program, and we haven't found any Bosnian teachers with experience teaching children.

       
So I decided that I need to create my own Bosnian as a Second Language support program for them. This is a bit tricky since, ahem, I don’t speak Bosnian. (Well, not much better than Isaac and Eleanor, anyway.)

       
Isaac and Eleanor know lots of nouns in Bosnian, but they haven’t taken the leap into speaking in sentences. So focusing on verb conjugations is a high yield endeavor: with just a bit of effort, they’d dramatically increase their ability to speak as well as their ability to understand. But how do you teach a five year old and a seven year old to conjugate verbs?

This turned into a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng post (who knew I had so much to say about conjugation?), so I’ve split it into three parts. I'd love, though, to hear any other suggestions for effective strategies to teach a new language to small children.

Library privileges

The headmaster of the local international school, QSI, offered to let us use their library to borrow books. Books in English!

Isaac read The Indian in the Cupboard in twenty-four hours, and now he's back to being completely absorbed in Harry Potter.



Eleanor is plowing through their early readers.



I do love libraries.

Why is it so much easier to teach them math?

Sometimes I think that the things I am most qualified to teach are the things I am least competent at teaching. Is this because I assume too much? Because I know enough to realize how poorly I teach it?

I have a Master's degree in English literature and worked during college as a writing tutor. I have published a couple of pieces and kept a journal since I was fourteen years old. I know my way around a paragraph.

And yet the single most contentious part of our homeschooling experience this year has been journaling. I let the kids pick their own notebooks to use as their daily journals. I gathered interesting writing prompts. I tried to pare down my expectations (five vivid sentences a day from Isaac, three from Eleanor), and yet they both hate writing in their journals.

I'm determined not to give up on journaling. Learning to write--not to handwrite or to spell but to convey ideas--is too central to the learning process in early elementary school (an interesting article on that topic). Even so, this week, I was too tired to battle Isaac over his journal. "Write about what you want to."

"Really? Anything?"

"Yep."



He wrote for an hour and forty-five minutes that day and then forty-five minutes the next to produce a manual for the computer game Starcraft.

I'm thrilled, but not sure how to build on this little glimmer of success. In the past when I've told him he can write about what he wants, he has just whined that he can't think of anything. Any suggestions for ways to help my kids love writing?

Graphing Candy

After a brief interruption with sickness (hmmm...is there a connection? hundreds of pieces of candy and sick children?), we finished up our Halloween math with Venn Diagrams, bar charts, and pie charts.






Now how to make all that candy unobtrusively disappear without disappearing into those tender little tummies?

Measuring Halloween Candy

Today we measured Halloween candy in as many ways as we could think of (except for their caloric measurement!).

Isaac finds his longest and fattest pieces.


Stretched end to end, 211 pieces of candy are remarkably long (1094 cm.).


We don't have scales, so we rigged up this balance scale with a hanger and plastic bags.


Here Isaac and Eleanor investigate how many pieces of candy equal the weight of one apple (25, in case you were wondering).

What do you do with all the candy after Halloween?

Our kids got a lot of Halloween candy. One hundred fifity six pieces for Eleanor, two hundred and eleven pieces for Isaac--and most of it not even stuff I'm interested in stealing.

In the interest of making myself less annoyed by all the candy piled up around our house, we're skipping our regular math and doing Halloween candy math this week. Today we did activities oriented around counting. Eleanor, who is still developing basic ideas of place value, counted all her candy by ones and then by tens.





Isaac has more developed number sense and is about to start a multiplication unit, so after he counted all his pieces (which he did by counting every other piece and then added the total to itself!), I had him count the sets of 3, 4, and 5.



At first, he was a bit confused by the "orphan" candy, the ones that didn't fit into sets. It led us to a discussion of factoring and prime numbers, and we discovered that he got a prime number of pieces of candy!

Don't know if it's worth ever trick-or-treating again with a record like that to beat.

Welcome to Platform 9 3/4

We have entered, no, re-entered, the universe of Harry Potter.



Our dinnertime conversation tonight:

Emma Lucy: Do you know how many sickles are in a galleon?

Isaac (without missing a beat): Seventeen.

Me: How did you know that?

Isaac: Mom! I read it.

Me: And you just remembered it?

Isaac (shrugging): Well, yeah.

Emma Lucy: But do you know how many knuts are in a sickle?

Isaac: Twenty-five.*

Emma Lucy: And how many knuts in a galleon?

etc., etc., etc.

*Those of you who are true Harry Potter fans will have already caught the error. There are 29 knuts to a sickle. Of course.

Miquon Math

Isaac and Eleanor both attend Bosnian public schools, Isaac for 2 1/2 hours a day (a full day for children his age!) and Eleanor for 3 hours a day. But I will be happy if the schools manage to just get them speaking Bosnian. I don't expect, given their very rudimentary language abilities, the schools to meet any of their other educational needs.

So, we spend two or three hours a day at home on math, music (they both are piano students), and reading and writing. I brought with us two math programs. One is the Singapore Math program (here's a great New York Times article from earlier this month about Singapore Math). Years ago, when I home-schooled my older children during some of their elementary school years, we used the old Singapore Math books that were also used in Singapore public schools. This time around, we bought new Singapore Math books that were published for the American market. All the story problems about durian and rambutan have been replaced with ones about apples and oranges, but the program is just as carefully thought out and easy to follow as ever.

I brought a second math program along as enrichment to the basic Singapore program. I hoped it would promote a different kind of mathematical learning. We've dabbled with Miquon Math in the past, but I've never used it as regularly as we have been doing this year (assisted by the very helpful First Grade Diary).

Miquon Math was developed in the 1950s for Miquon School. It is based on the idea that children learn mathematical concepts more thoroughly, more organically, and often more quickly if they learn them through manipulation of real objects and through playing. The centerpiece of Miquon Math is Cuisenaire Rods, small wooden blocks of graduated lengths. White blocks are one unit long, red blocks two units long, and so on up to the orange ten unit block. Through free play, as well as activities and follow-up questions from the teacher, children discover for themselves mathematical principles.



For example, last week, I challenged Isaac and Eleanor to find ways to find four blocks that, together, were the same length as the orange block. Then, exploring associative and commutative properties, we rearranged and replaced those four blocks with two blocks. Isaac became particularly involved in this activity and spent nearly an hour trying different variations and making up combinations that equaled other lengths of blocks.



I love how absorbed they become when we do Miquon Math activities and how they naturally expand and vary whatever activity I present. I'm almost always surprised at how long we spend doing Miquon Math, simply because they want to repeat or change the activity. They want to keep playing! It doesn't look like arithmetic, but I think much deeper mathematical learning is going on than any worksheet (or Singapore Math book, for that matter!) offers.

Maybe six months?

We packed enough children's chapter books to last a year. We hope. But only if we ration them: no more than one a week.

So when we upacked, I put them up on the highest shelf of our bookcase, out of Isaac's reach, to keep them under my control.

This morning when I came downstairs, this is what I saw:




Isaac was in the living room, absorbed in a new book.