Ukukele Madness!!
June 18, 2016
Each of Us Is a Flower (Charlotte Diamond)
(C) Each of us is a flower, (G)growing in life's gar-(C)den.
(C) Each of us is a flower, we (G)need the sun and (C)rain.
(C)Sun, shine your warmth on me.
(G)Moon, cool me with your (C) night.
(C)Wind, bring the gentle rain.
(G)Earth, take my roots down (C)deep.
Almost 6! And a new silly song!
Lydia here! Excuse any typos... no time to proofread!
What a busy day we have had! Pretty typical, actually. Every day is full of wonderful experiences and opportunities for Dilara to be creative. I had been planning for months to take her to the Celebration of Cultures at Centennial Park today, but I didn't feel up to it physically. I have to say that even when we have to cancel planned events, and that happens a lot, unfortunately, we always have plenty to do and see and learn and experience. We started learning about chess today. For some reason, the king and queen are missing from one side of our chess set. She made replacements by drawing faces on a couple of small foam blocks. We got the "Don't Break The Ice" game out and after breaking the ice, she hammered at the big block with the skating bear on it and said, "Now I'll play 'Don't Knock The Bear Off The Ice,'" or something like that. We hung a shelf above the dry-erase board.Always fun to get the tools out! We didn't realize till today that our level has a magnetic strip on one edge. It was super cheap, too! I got it either at Harbor Freight, or else the dollar tree. In this video, Dilara is sitting on my bed. Many mothers who homeschool their children in spite of having chronic illness (either the parent/teacher, or the child, or sometimes both mother AND child have health issues!) spend time teaching and learning from the couch or bed. I would have spent MORE time in bed today, except that I washed my sheets and my dryer is having issues, so it took a LONG time for them to get dry! I finally found my Cuisinaire Rods today (most of them, anyway...I have a LARGE set I paid about $40 for when Callie and Noah were little. Even with some of them missing, we have more than enough for one child to use. Dilara was just as thrilled with them as I expected her to be. She spent at least an hour working with them. I am encouraging her to work on a rug on the floor, Montessori style. I kept the tempered glass shelves from my old refrigerator, and one of them is a nice size for her to have a nice, level base when she is working on the floor. I told her we'll just shove it under the love seat when she isn't using it. It will be nice to have to make a "light box" with someday when we have time. Like this one http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Your-OWN-professional-arttracing-ligh/ I need to buy her a package of tracing paper for her, too. She really enjoyed tracing maps at her GeoDrawing Camp this summer while I was at the Classical Conversations parent practicum. I am NOT worried about the glass breaking. It is tempered and she will be using it while in a carpeted area. This video and photo are about some of the last things Dilara did today. I found this great magnetic dry-erase board at the thrift store and got it for $2.50. Pretty good deal, I'd say! Dilara always has plenty of things to do and I let her do her own thing as much as I possibly can. Even when I am unable to interact with her as much as I'd like to because of my health problems, I have her environment set up where she has an abundance of tools and materials to form her own learning experiences. I had MUCH rather sit back and see what she comes up with, than for me to start off telling her or showing her what I want her to do or learn. I think we strike the perfect balance of adult-directed vs.child-directed activities. Dilara wrote "The cat and the dog." With the period at the end,. She said, "Look, I made a sentence!" I told her how it wasn't really a sentence, and how it would be a sentence if it wasn't alone, but was, for example, preceded by something like, "Who ate the hamburgers?" The "ate the hamburgers" part of the sentence would be understood. "The cat and the dog (ate the hamburgers)." I told her to see what she could think up to make a sentence about the cat and dog. I think she will enjoy diagramming sentences. I always thought it was great fun, but not everybody appreciates it. http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/22/341898975/a-picture-of-language-the-fading-art-of-diagramming-sentences She didn't stop with thinking up a predicate (and a rhyme), she took it a lot farther than I ever expected. You can't see it very well in the video, but she did her own "musical notation" by drawing a short blue line above the words. It showed up NICELY above the top line of words, but she didn't have much room on the second line of words. You can still see how the blue line above the "a" is a lot higher than the line over "blog." Also, she spelled every word by herself. Yes,they are all super easy words except "every," which she spelled it phonetically ("evre") but that will be the last time she ever misspells that word. I don't believe it is a good use of time to spend a LOT of time on phonics. In my experience, if you are reading enough, the kids figure phonics out on their own. I am quite satisfied with how much Dilara is learning under my supervision. She is doing nothing less than first grade work at home. Most of what she does is in the range or what is typically considered to be between first and third grade level. "Every" is on the first grade spelling word list here: http://www.time4learning.com/spellingwords/1st-grade-spelling-words.shtml . We also got our piano keyboard out and while Dilara was working on finding the notes, I made a photocopy of the music manuscript page in the Classical Conversations book. We ran out of time, but I did at least write down the notes. We haven't worked much on music theory yet, but it was something I had planned to work on every day when I planned our homeschool schedule for this fall. There just aren't enough hours left in the day for her to learn much of what she wants and needs to when spends 7 hours a day in an institutional setting, with NO control over her own time or activities. I think you learn time management better when you are managing your own time, rather than when you are having someone else impose a schedule upon you. We get 6 days "off" for fall break, and a teacher inservice day so, we get to do ONLY home-centered education till Oct. 14. Anyway, Dilara has always been very interested in music and I look forward to exploring it in a lot of depth over the next week or so. Found this site tonight: http://www.music-paper.com/ |
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August 2013. Dilara's first song.