March’s Adventures in Homeschooling

This year we began homeschooling Lucy (7), Hattie (5), and Beatrice (2). We’re including this on our Giants & Pilgrims blog as all our family adventures seem to impact our art & music so much! Also, we just like sharing the stories. So we’ll be sharing posts on the themes we’ve been covering each month and calling the adventure “ABACUS”! Our hope is that these posts will help spark creative direction and inspiration for your family as well as giving us somewhere to be document and record our experiences.

March has been a journey of “chasing the spark.” Lots of wonderful explorations lead by curiosity. March was about humor, and Egypt, and computer coding, and St. Patricks day, and musicals, and so much more. I am loving these simple full days with the people I love most. I love being able to share in the education of my children. I love that the world we live in is so rich and fascinating to explore. I love that in both the most mundane moments and the most extravagant they are still learning and growing. Tim and I have looked at each other so often in this last month and said “Man, I love our kids”. What a gift it is to be living out this story as a family.
Thanks for following along with us.

Coding & Quilting:

This pictures captures our two oldest daughters perfectly. Lucy working on learning how to program on Scratch (because she wants to make her own robots) and Harriet making a tiny quilt (that she wants to use for babies, picnics, and snuggling). Love seeing them discover new interests and following “the spark”.

Color and Light:

A few years ago our theme for March was Spectrum. In keeping with the tradition and all things rainbow for St. Patrick’s day, we did a little color work this month.

A new awesome one-player game called Colour Code by SmartGames – like a more interesting version of tangrams.

Color mixing, painting color wheels, and learning about hot vs. cool colors.

And discussions about what it would be like to not be able to see colors. We read I am Helen Keller and the Black Book of Colors. (both of which are great).

We also learned how to write our names in braille!

Ancient Egypt:

For our country this month, we took a trip to Ancient Egypt! (which tied in great with our Rich and Rooted Passover study as well!) .

These were a few of our favorite books we dug into.

The girls set up an Egyptian style Bazaar (which Harriet made traditional shaped Egyptian bread for!). My sisters and I used to play this same game – brings back fond memories.

We added a new game to our collection called Imhotep. It is great! You play the role of ancient Egyptian architects and are working to build monuments.

Inspired by the game, we build some block monuments of our own.

This lead the girls to build a whole city of mini block monuments.

We got this little mummy excavation kit on amazon. It was really great (but do it outside!!). It comes with a plaster block carved with hierogylphics. The kids use tools and act as archeologists to unearth the mummy inside.

I happened to have some Egyptian wrapping paper, so we made bracelets.

We talked about the significance of the Rosetta stone and then made our own clay Rosetta stone cartouches. Lucy did her name in English, hieroglyphics, and braille.

Getting Moving:

Lucy and I are taking up a new hobby – Rock Climbing! We went to a ladies night at the Rock. It was a little momma daughter date night. Pretty great.

We haven’t started up our Monday adventures again yet, but we did try to get to as many parks as possible.

Musicals:

From now until forever, I have officially dubbed March Musical Month. We were given (thank you Patti!) tickets to a local production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella and we rented Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat from the library. The girls LOVED both and we have been listening to the soundtracks non-stop (maybe a little too non-stop…go go go joseph you’ll make it some day….go go go joseph….!!!!!)

We went to Cinderella in costume.

Afterwards was a Princess Tea Party where the actors and actresses came out in costume and interacted with the kids! It was great fun.

Reading and Writing:

Our two read-aloud books we finished this month were Finn Family Moomintroll (one of my all time favorites) and The Search for Delicious. Both were perfect for the kids age – funny and light heartened.

Harriet has been working on the first steps of learning to read, so we made some sight word blocks together in fun bright colors.

She also practiced her letters a lot in her sand (cornmeal) box (…that is until little sister got ahold of it…)

The 2nd of March was Dr. Seuss’s birthday, so we celebrated by getting cake pops and reading all the Seuss books.
For writing practice, the girls both wrote out their elaborate plans for their birthday parties (which are in June/September…ha ha).

Character Building:

During the season of lent, we have been going through Jennifer Naraki’s Rich and Rooted Passover guide. I am hoping to make this a yearly tradition as well. There is a lot depth to her guide that we barely scratched the surface.

One Sunday we headed to Fort Collins because their local Islamic mosque was vandalized. We joined with a large crowd of others in solidarity and support of those effected.

Science and Logic:

Grandpapa reading an old family favorite – the Mad Scientist Club to Lucy for the first time.

The girls requested to learn how to play chess. Our local coffee shop has this great “Easy to Learn Chess” game that makes it simple with the little reminder graphics on the pieces.

We finally did some of our Christmas test tube science kits the kids got in their stockings (from the dollar bins at Target).
This is gravity goop –

St. Patrick’s Day:

A selection of St. Patrick’s day books we got from the library –

Grammy Didi reading one of her favorite – Tommie DePaola out loud to the girls.

Getting ready for our annual St. Patty’s day feast and sing along

Aquarium:

All three girls (but mostly Beatrice) have been obsessed with the kid’s show Octonauts. I think they have watched every episode at least 3 times.

In the show, the team of animals are always working to rescue/help undersea creatures. Each episode ends with a “Creature Report” which has cool facts about actual sea critters. The girls have learned all sorts of interesting aquatic facts. So, we thought a trip to the Denver Aquarium was in order.

The girls loved it. We all had a wonderful time – especially petting the sting rays.
The next day when we got back, they did their own “Creature Report”s on their favorite animals they saw.