Fun with Shapes

I hadn't had any luck thus far with any shapes, but colors are starting to catch on, so I was going to keep going on colors today, but this morning he started pointing at random mostly-round things and saying, "Circle! Circle! Circle!" so plans changed! He is now into shapes!
And here is his shapes drawer:The shapes book, a puzzle, and propped up in the back of the drawer are his cards. I'm having good luck with the "drawer per subject" approach, he sees all his options and goes for whatever catches his fancy, and sees that he has MORE options if the first fails to hold his interest, so you don't have to keep bringing him back to show him what else he can do. And with it all being one theme, he sees the same shapes over and over. He calls squares rectangles, which technically they are, and the shapes book points that out - that a rectangle has four sides and four square corners, and that special ones where the sides are all equal are called squares. I switched out the Theotokos for St. Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of scholars. Makes sense for a school - and we can celebrate our "school's" feastday in November!
He's learning, too, that when we sit at our desk, we're going to do something fun - he likes to sit down and choose a drawer to play with.
He is going to blow them away when he gets re-evaluated next month.
And below is our updated space: I just love my drawers!!!

Our Homeschooling Space

Firstly, THE COMPUTER WORKS AGAIN!!! Meaning I can post pictures and whatnot, and much as I love my Gig, the desktop makes it far easier to accomplish a lot at once.
Here is the promised picture of Kittyboy on his first day of school, flipping through icon cards at his little yellow activity desk, listening to the daily readings.


I like this little desk, and it can be found at most crafting stores for around $8. You can't see in the picture, but the shelves the desk is in front of hold all his school stuff, and so it was all in one place and it was School. We have this ongoing conflict in our house, however, over vertical versus horizontal storage. My theory, only a theory, is that if we had more open space in general, the place would feel more open in general and be easier to keep clean - fewer things filling open space would make it easier to notice as clutter builds. Problem with his desk where it is, is that it's yet another thing on the floor.
Yesterday, we took advantage of Husband's day off to move furniture in the living room, and by accident discovered an actual homeschool space. I have this antique washstand, used formerly as a changing table, then as a collect-everything-next-to-the-door table, and I moved it from next to the door to in a corner by the dinner table. I was envisioning storing silverware and whatnot in it as a sideboard sort of thing. Then I realized that where it was, I could just turn his chair around to it from the table, and presto! A school desk!

We did colors this morning - he has flashcards with blocks of colors, flashcards with the name of the color written IN the color (so he can match the word Red, written in red, with the card that's red), his Colors Book, and fabric swatches. Red, blue and green are still problematic, but now it's more blue and green than anything else. He gets red sometimes. Orange, purple, yellow, pink, and brown, he's pretty good with. He has until he's five, Ginny says, and if he's still shaky on red-blue-green or blue-green, that's when we ask the doctor about color blindness. Last week he was calling all three blue, this week blue and green are both green. Ginny left her beading activity bag at our house last week, and I had it set up to return when we see her next, and guess who found it! So we named the colors of the beads, too. The trick will be hiding it somewhere he can't get it, but where I will remember it!


I love that little "I did it!" grin!


And this is his colors drawer! "The Colors Book" is one of the Britannica Discovery Library series. I was freecycled a big bag of upholstery fabric samples months and months ago, and went through just this morning pulling out different colored swatches for his drawer.
I think I will move the drawers and stack them in the corner on the washstand, because if they're stored across the room instead of right there, it will increase the likelihood of stuff not being put away promptly. I wouldn't have that kind of freedom of reorganizing if I'd gone with my original idea of a basket for each subject - my mom got me the drawers. I'm now seeing that they'll be much more versatile and take up less space in the long run. You can't stack baskets, and it would have contributed to the general appearance of clutter that I'm trying to avoid. Thank you, Mommy!

Kittyboy, Counting and Homeschooling

Christus resurrexit!
Vere resurrexit!
(the Paschal greeting in Latin)

Kittyboy has this rolling toy that counts to ten (in the creepy Fisher Price toy voice). It counts a number every time the wheels roll. He stepped on it coming in the door, it said "One!" and he immediately said, "Two!" Plain as day, nice and loud. I've been working on one and two, having him hand me one or two clothespins when I'm hanging laundry (not that he would actually hand me one or two when I ask, more like "Mommy needs one clothespin! Now Mommy needs two clothespin!"). Now I guess he can say at least the number 2 out loud! I think we need to find things to count one and two, and ask, "What comes after one? What comes after two?"
Last year, I was researching Montessori schools, thinking that if we had a prayer of affording it, it'd be a good match for Kittyboy, because of allowing the child to learn just as fast as he can. All I remember of third grade was that we seemed to spend months and months on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Hello, how hard is that??? I learned it in a couple days. I spent the rest of the year, it seemed, reading a book hidden in my desk, to the great annoyance of the teacher. A more adversarial child would have come out and said, "This is boring and stupid, can we move ON?" and gotten in even more trouble, which I didn't. I just passively read my book and didn't pay attention... because it was, well, boring and stupid. When it came time to do state reports, which is the only other thing I remember of third grade, I wrote my report on Pennsylvania - and then re-wrote it. I read it over, and dumbed down some sections. Simpler sentence structure, more basic vocabulary. I'm pretty sure I didn't deliberately misspell anything or change punctuation, that would have pained my pride too much, but I may have erased a comma here and there. Why? Because I'd already picked up on the fact that thanks to my mother's English degree and father's newspaper experience as reporter and editor, I did not write like my classmates. I did not speak like my classmates. And I was just sure that the teacher who expected us to take months to learn that red was not a noun would accuse me of plagiarism.
Don't get me wrong, I got along way better with teachers in following years than I did with the 3rd grade one. There were parts of school that I LOVED. There were more parts that I just - went through. There were other parts I hated.
There are kids who do great in public schools. There are kids who just go through them because they have to. And there are many types of children for whom it's not necessarily the best fit. What do you do when you're really, really good in one class but slow in another? Or you're ahead in everything - but you don't test well? Or instead of telling someone, "Hey, I know all this, can I work ahead?" the child is just bored and becomes bored with school in general?
So here I am with a toddler who will probably fall into the category of "very bright but doesn't test well", researching homeschooling curricula. And over the last year, Husband has gone from saying, "Oh, but he SHOULD go to preschool, he needs socialization" to "If you think you can homeschool, go for it," apparently without suffering whiplash. I think part of his change of mind is owing to Kittyboy making it abundantly clear that he is one of Those Children who will NOT go along to get along if he's not interested in what's going on. I can't see Kittyboy fitting well in a classroom, and I haven't come up with a way to nicely say to the frustrated teacher, "Well, maybe if he's not paying attention, it's because he's bored with what you're teaching?" I don't think teachers are superhuman, but I think they are expected to perform as such, and it's impossible. I think they are totally human, and only capable of so much, and far too much is expected of them, the result being that they absolutely cannot be and do everything they are expected to be and do for every single child who enters their classroom. I have the utmost respect for them - but their job is impossible. I'm going to make it easier, by giving them one less child with whom to struggle.
So now that Husband's open to it, I'm going for it. His change of mind might also be owing to the number of homeschooling children we've recently met - Kittyboy's best friend who is eight is homeschooled, there's a family at church who homeschools (and their fourteen-year-old is learning Latin), and all of these children are VERY social. I like that Kittyboy's friends are older than he, because instead of the Lord of the Flies social environment of children all in one age group learning social skills together, he sees behavior modeled by the older children and learns from that. And that's as it should be, children are supposed to learn from older children and grownups about acceptable social behavior - not their fellow four-year-olds. Gradeschool children learning social interaction from each other is like fifteen-year-olds teaching Driver's Ed.
Homeschooling, here we come!