Music ideas

I have seen quite a few posts in the past few weeks on the homeschooling boards with questions about what to do for music.  I wanted to share a little of what I have been using.  Granted, my son is 3, so it may be too young for your children. However, it does work for some older children as well.

Most parents know the author Sandra Boynton from her wonderful board books.  What most parents don't know is that she also composes songs.  Some of these songs even go along with her books!  She publishes these songs in a book with great illustrations.  It comes with a CD with the songs sung by different celebrities.   What I like the best is that some of the CD's have a karaoke version after the regular version of the songs. This gives the kids to sing the songs themselves.   There is sheet music in the back of the book for parents, or kids, to play the songs.  Here are the books that I own, but there are more.

My son likes to sit on my lap while we go through the cd/songs page by page.  Sometimes he will get out some pans and spoons to drum along with it.  Other times he will play his harmonica to the music.  Then of coarse there is always lots of singing!

 There is also this book by Ben Kingsley.  The book goes through different instruments, some music history, and brief overview of a variety of composers.  It comes with a CD as well, but we haven't listened to it yet.  It is above where my son is at, so we are holding off on this.

I know it's not much, but I thought I would put this out there for those of you who are searching for where to start with your kids.  This is easy, and non threatening.  I also encourage you to look into community centers to see what is offered.  I know that there is a lot offered here in Columbus, Ohio.  Music doesn't have to be too involved at first.

The First Week

I had originally planned to begin preschool with my son last Wednesday since that was the day that all of his friends were starting school.  We sort of started on Tuesday because he kept begging for school to start.  I have learned a lot in this first week.

The first that I learned is that Isaac knows a lot more than I could even fathom!  That first day I made a concentrated effort to read to him.  He didn't want the reading to stop!  In any case, through this reading binge I found out how much he knows about dinosaurs.  We had a discussion about why dinosaurs are not lizards, and he listed off all the different kinds of dinosaurs (correctly) shown in the book.

What surprised me the most was when he stopped me mid-sentence to say, "That's a triceratops.  It's a triceratops because it has three horns."  I am assuming that I can thank Dinosaur Train for that one.  This is the book that he loves.  There isn't a picture of the book, so here is a picture for you.  It is an older book, but it is a good one.

Feel free to check out my Goodreads profile for more books here.  

I will admit that this week has consisted of a lot of TV watching.  The last few days have been difficult in my pregnancy, so it's what I have to resort to.  However, my son has decided that he loves the Leap Frog movies on Netflix.  He has been watching that or Magic School Bus this week.  He seems to be learning from it.  He has always been good at differentiating what letter is which, but didn't know the sounds very well.  

Up until this morning I didn't know he knew the corresponding sounds at all.  Last night I had finally got around to laminating the worksheets for this week.  These are two examples.  Isaac was able to get a majority of them correctly.  Didn't expect him to do that well at all!  

These worksheets go to Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear and can be found here.

Before Five in a Row has been interesting.  This week was Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear.  It is a cute book.  I think the most important thing my son has learned from the book was how important it is to have a clean room (I stressed that while looking at the pictures).  The first day that we read the book, we lasted 20 minutes.  I didn't have any worksheets for him yet, so that was all that we did.  Now that we have our worksheets we can last a few hours.

Today I got the water color paints out.  My son is a bit different.  He HATES getting his hands dirty (unless it is mud).  Regular paints he has always detested, and refused to do anything with them.  However, he loved his water color paints!  He painted for about an hour, and still wants to paint more this afternoon.

 This weekend we went to the Ohio Historical Society.  We had never been there, but they were having a food truck festival there.  With the festival (which only cost $6 for parking) came free admission to both the museum, and the historical village.  I wasn't doing well pregnancy wise, so we didn't explore the village much.  My son seemed to enjoy the museum.  He found a trolley to play on, and he loved the skeleton of the Mastodon.

I have learned that my son is capable of learning from me.  Up until this point, if I asked him a question he wouldn't answer me.  Now I know that he is willing to answer me in the right conditions.  He much prefers reading while sitting on my lap, and activities while sitting at the table.

I have also learned that I need to find a way to fill our days better.  I don't want television to be the filler, but that's what it is.  If anyone has any ideas for easy, unsupervised activities for a 3 year old please let me know!  I just can't handle much with this pregnancy.

Something I want to work on is our eating.  I need to find a way to eat healthy.  That is the difficult part.  I would just stick something in the crockpot, but the smell would just make me sick all day.  Lately, Isaac's lunch is fruit, crackers, cheese, and lots of snacks.  No smell ;).  I really want to start doing little cooking lessons with him, but it just isn't possible at this point.  Perhaps in another 4 months.  

The Brainy Bunch

                In June, The Brainy Bunch was released.  It is about a large homeschooling family that was able to get their kids in college by age 12.  I expected the book to be similar to the Tiger Mother, but it wasn't. They seemed fairly laid back. 

                There are parts that I could do without.  For instance, the family seems extremely religious.  I understand that most homeschooling families are, but that isn't the perspective I am interested in for my family.  One part really irritated me because there was a few pages of talking about how they couldn't understand how people can have small families.  How if you have a small family you could be preventing the next Mozart or Einstein from being born.  I took this hard because they didn't acknowledge health reasons as being OK for small families.  They just were down on people deciding not to have more children.  Since I am one of the women that cannot have more children because it would be dangerous, I took this hard. 

                There were a lot of parts that would be great for families that send their children to public school as well.  Reading the book got my wheels turning.  It was able to give me a new perspective on how to teach my child.  They give a lot of examples on how you can “after-school” your children.  I think this book will help any parent become more motivated when it comes to being personally involved in their child’s education.

                Another aspect that I really liked was that every few chapters there were a few pages written by one of the children.  These were written at different ages, so the quality of the writing varies.  It was nice to see how each child views their education, and how it impacted their life.

                Towards the end of the book they would give examples of their homeschooling approach (unschooling for the most part).  I have had a hard time wrapping my head around how this approach could possibly work.  They gave a fantastic idea for a science experiment that could have come up in an everyday conversation.  They suggested asking your child to find out what the city adds to our water.  Then you can take a bottle of water, and put a few drops onto a slide.  You also add a few drops of tap water onto another slide.  Then you examine the two slides, and go from there.  I would never have thought of doing something like this, but it seems so fun!  I guess you just get better at finding ideas as you go. 

                Overall, this was a good book to read.  It kept my attention fairly well.  It offered a plethora of ideas for families to try.  In the back there is a helpful section where they list their different curriculum and gave examples of their transcripts.  All very handy for new homeschooling families like mine. 

               

                

Finding Learning Opportunities

Lately I have felt pretty deflated.  This pregnancy has been extremely rough, and it has resulted in my son watching entirely too much television.  Before I started getting sick I was working with him on his letters, colors, and numbers.  Once the sickness began, that all ended.  I have felt that everything he learned has slowly slipped away, and I will have to start all over again.

I am not sure if planning out how I am going to implement Before Five In A Row has changed my way of thinking, but this week was a bit different.  The week started with a trip to the library because I had a book I needed to pick up.  I let my son pick a bunch of books out (even though the ones he picked I wasn't thrilled with).  Two of the books he picked were Elmer and the Whales and Whoosh and Chug.

Elmer and the Whales may have been one I picked out, but I can't remember.  My son is convinced that I am having a baby whale, so we are trying to convince him otherwise.  This book didn't have a particularly exciting story, but it did allow us to work on his counting.  The art work has multiples of animals on each page.  We would spend the time counting all the different animals (which also involved finding them).  He really enjoyed it.

Whoosh and Chug was not a book that I wanted to read.  It was one of many train books that have entered this house.  It ended up being quite fun to read, and it has a lot of sight words in it.  Some of the words I know my son has memorized from the story, but this evening he surprised me.  He recognized the word stop! without any prompting from me!  It's fun having him participate in the story for once.

This week we also went to a local splash pad.  On Wednesdays during the summer they do special things for the kids.  This week was everything creepy crawly.  We went because we expected snakes, but there weren't any.  However, there were lots of other fun things to learn about.

There was a bee keeper there with his bees.  He had honey samples, dried honey comb, and beeswax.  It was fun explaining to my son how honey and beeswax are made.  This ultimately was his favorite part of the excursion.

A lady was there with lots of bugs in plastic for the kids to examine.  My son spent about an hour in this tent.  She was awesome with him!  She answered all of his questions, and told him lots of additional facts.  I expected this to be his favorite part of the day because he has been asking for weeks to see a bug in amber (thank you dinosaur train!), but it wasn't.

 Lowes was there as well.  They had brought a bunch of soil, pans, and flower seeds.  Kids were able to plant there own seeds, and now we are waiting for them to grow.

As you can see, I am finding lots of different learning opportunities for my son.  Even though I am still unable to do much (even our Wednesday outing was too much for me) I can still adequately teach him.  It is exciting to watch his little brain work, and it's nice to know that he will learn in spite of me.