February 2024 was a busy month in our home education.
Art and Art study
Ahna loves working with paints and crayons. She colours almost 2-3 pictures every day in her own time. It has been helpful to have her handle her crayon drawer and colouring books on her own. She is also growing in learning to be responsible for it. She has ‘set up’ colouring activities for Hope also and enjoys the bonding experience(even though Hope is not able to colour for long periods)
With our Art study, we have been doing the “Come look with me” series of landscape art. We look at 1 picture in 2 weeks and discuss it. She can understand different shades of colour and underlying emotions that the artist might want to portray. In one of the pictures we studied, she saw bones and no life and said that it was a place where nobody visited and in another one, she saw no children or people playing outside a house and thought it was not a very happy picture because there were no people in it.
Music and Gymnastics
Since music(keyboard) and gymnastics have been the new additions to home education this new year, there is so much excitement around it. With her keyboard skills, she is learning to differentiate between the high and low notes, is learning to name the notes and find the keys. She learned the ABC notes in order and labelled all the ABC notes on the keyboard. She then explored how each set of ABC sounds different in increasing pitch as it progresses down the keyboard.
With the exposure to gymnastics, she has been getting freer with her body movements and is encouraging her baby sister to take risks (that keeps me on my toes!)
Writing and reading
Since Ahnas fine motor skills have improved drastically over the past few months, we have taken up tracing and writing of 1 letter a week. I encourage her to put in ‘best effort’ as recommended by CM. We don’t focus on doing too many a day. This lesson takes about 2 minutes that one day of the week. She has not learned the lowercase letters through play so we are currently doing it together through these tracing tasks and through her reading lessons.
We are following the Alpha phonics primer for our reading lessons. We try to do one lesson a week. Sometimes this can be 5-6 words and other times it can be the whole lesson as designated in the book. Since the words in the book include lower case letters, I usually use magnetic substitutes or foam letters in capitals to do the same lessons with her. Simultaneously, I introduce what the lower case letter counterparts look like.
Geography/ Science/Math/Nature
For geography we have been studying the places, people and cultures of the world. Using an interactive globe has brought so much excitement to this unit study. This month, we got invited to a Vietnamese home-cooked meal after which we enjoyed reading about Vietnam and some tribes in the country that don’t have the bible in their language.
For science and nature study, we just closed our garden for the month. Winter has ended and summer is beginning here so it is time to harvest the winter crops and start summer ones. I am taking a month-long break from gardening till I feel better with the pregnancy, however, this was a fun winter season for us.
Another topic we picked up for science(Archeology) this month was roads and construction. Since there has been so much road repair work going on in Goa, it was inevitable to answer 135760384 questions about it on drives. So we made a short unit study and picked up some books from our home library, plonked them together, sat down and read about roads, soil, digging, earth, different digging tools and bones.
Math included revisiting counting numbers and introducing her to the concept of skip counting. This is still very fresh so she does not get it yet but with more exposure in different settings, we’ll get there in time. This month was an exciting one for Ahna with her penny reward system because she got to buy the most expensive reward on her list; a trip to her favourite indoor playgym worth 50 pennies! So by default, she also counted to 50 several times. (Her concept for counting numbers in rote and understanding the value of the number is only up to 10) but we are increasing her familiarity with larger numbers. I am hoping to have her learn the concept and rote counting up to 20 by the end of this year and understand measurement and time as well.
Outdoor time/Social interaction/Servitude
Since the nausea has reduced its frequency, our social activities as a family have increased.(Ahna still went out with her dad for outings but he is not the picture-taking kind). We visited dear friends from church every week for playdates and spent time hanging out at a park with them playing different sports. Pool time and beach time has been special too. Ahna loves running to and from the water while Hope leans more towards collecting shells. Both of them love digging in the sand!
We visited a neighbour’s child and made cookies for him. This was kind of an important moment for me to resume making my cookies and be able to give them to someone to enjoy. I was so pleased when Ahna wanted him to have ‘the best ones’ just like God gave us His best.
Nature
I add this again here because what we have been learning is so different to gardening, and yet, conceptually quite similar. Ahna has been learning personally and closely where her meats come from. Her dad has been taking her to the fish market once a week when they buy fish together. She can identify the fish out there and choose which ones they would want to bring home to eat that week. We also connected our food source to a local farmer with chickens and we chose one chicken to butcher and bring home. She named the chicken “Gogogaga” like almost everything else in her life right now (her imaginary husband, sometimes the imaginary baby in her womb, sometimes her friend who she plays with)
Next blog will hopefully be broken into 2 parts for March since I am now almost all caught up! See you all next weekend.
Incredible initiative
We enjoy it!