The Teacher's Lounge Giveaway

*this post contains affiliate links*

 I am excited to announce that I am now an ambassador for Playful Learning's The Teacher's Lounge.  We have been fans of Playful Learning for years.  Way before we even began this homeschool journey.  My oldest was in preschool when I came across Mariah Bruehl's book Playful Learning on a search for ways to foster learning in our home (this was way before IG).  We used many of the ideas in the book and watched as the blog grew to include online classes and explorations with beautiful printables.  When I heard about the Teacher's Lounge I signed up immediately to be a beta tester and set up a subscription the day they went live with the program.  I love it so much and I think you will too!

 One of the reasons I love Teacher's Lounge so much is that the printables are as beautiful as they are educational.  The graphics are so striking that your child will instantly be attracted and eager to dive into the explorations.  You can see in the pictures below how much Sean (shown at ages 4 & 5) enjoys the lessons.  I paired a beginning letter sound worksheet on ocean animals with a metal easel and magnetic letters to create one of his favorite activities.  How nice that all I need to do is print and use a piece of washi tape to set it up!  In the other pictures below Sean is working on math skills with a size comparison activity from the Outer Space set of lessons. He loves their many cut and paste pages!

 

 Another exceptional thing about The Teacher's Lounge is that my youngest is certainly not the only child to use these lessons.  I have found many instances where the lesson sets cover topics that my fourth and sixth grader are studying.  In the examples below we used many of the lessons in the Flowers unit for fifth grade botany.  We found the anatomy of a plant from TL to be the best version amongst the many resources we had for our botany block. We are looking forward to using lessons from TL Geology for one of our sixth grade science blocks.  It's great to be able to print and laminate a play dough mat for a preschooler and a superior science resource for an advanced grade school student at the same time!  

  Lately, we've stopped waiting for our lesson blocks to coincide with the Teacher's Lounge offerings - they're  just too good not to use right away!  Instead we've been using a lesson for our Science Friday afternoon and incorporating literacy into our days as well.  We recently used the awesome lesson on animals to explore what pupil shape and eye placement mean to predators and prey.  We checked a few of the suggested books out of the library and had a great time learning about animal eyes as a family.  My three boys, ages 5-11, were all engaged.  Sean was cutting, sorting, pasting and talking about the animals while his older brothers were busy categorizing the animals by taking cues from pupil shapes.  I love it when we can learn as a family and I don't need to scour the internet for hours to find something appropriate for everyone!

 The Teacher's Lounge offers lots of support for your development as a teacher.  The Professional Development pages offer lessons for you on how to teach and include printables for planning, observing and assessing.  The galleries are also a great resource to see pictures of the lessons in action.

 Just click any of the links on this page to sign up for The Teacher's Lounge. If you are interested in checking out the Teacher's Lounge, enrollment is open on Wednesday, September 26th and will close on October 24th.  Just click any of the links on this page to sign up for The Teacher's Lounge.  The Teacher's Lounge adds new topics twice a month and as a member you have access to all previous topics (there are dozens - each topic includes many lessons).  Topics range from Poetry and Writer's Notebook to Architecture, Mapping and Geology.  Here is one last example of some printouts from the Sea Life topic:

I will be offering one lucky reader a FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTION on Instagram next week when enrollment opens.  Be sure to visit @lyons_academy to enter the giveaway!

Art Appreciation: Van Gogh

  With a background in art history and a lifelong passion for creating and enjoying art, it really surprised me when I realized we were more than halfway through our first year of homeschool without ever having studied any art. Certainly, we had made a great deal of art, we just had not spent any time really studying famous painters or works of art.  Somehow I happened upon a lovely book, Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories by Michael Bird, and we began incorporating art history into our weeks.

 
  I love how each chapter (arranged chronologically) highlights a masterpiece, from a cave painting to a Byzantine mosaic, and tells the story of its creation.  These tales quickly became an integral part of our morning circle time, and they still are, but this year I was determined to do more.

  I decided to try a picture study from Simply Charlotte Mason and ordered the Van Gogh portfolio. I really wasn't sure if a guide and eight nicely printed art prints were worth the price, but the quality is very good and I don't regret the purchase at all.  So far we have used the biography as well as the talking points and information for three of the works and plan to study a few more. I must have had sunflowers on the brain because I bought a bouquet at Trader Joe's and then realized they would be the perfect prop for our own still life painting session.

  We also have been reading some picture books from the library about Van Gogh.  Camille and the  Sunflowers is the hands down favorite.  It's such a sweet story and teaches the importance of accepting and loving people that seem "different."

  We fit art into our rhythm by incorporating it into our morning story time; just ten minutes once or twice a week.  Painting is such a soothing thing for my boys that we tend to do that in the afternoons when it can be hard to start up school again after a lunch and free play break.  They are eager to paint their own versions of Starry Night, so we will attempt that this week. Van Gogh will remain our focus for a few more weeks, so if you have any resources to share please do so.

Our Daily and Weekly Rhythm

  I think one of the biggest questions I had before I started homeschooling, and one of the most frequent questions I am now asked, is how a typical day looks.  The short answer is that it can vary. Wildly.  Flexibility is one of the great things about homeschooling and we exercise that flexibility to learn and have fun often!  However, my kids thrive when they have some structure to their day. That's why we have a rhythm, even though we do not have a schedule. I have times listed here, but we really only focus on the activities and never stop them or drag them out to fit a time slot.  This is more about the order of events that the kids have come to expect.

  I often refer to myself as a "cheater homeschool mom" because I send my little one to preschool.  He's three and goes three mornings a week and loves it.  He goes to the same school that his older brothers thrived at and I knew keeping him there would give me a few precious hours to devote to teaching the big boys without any distractions.  So far it has worked great.

  Here's what an average week looks like at Lyons Academy:

Baking brothers

Monday:
8-9  Breakfast, dress, maybe some baking
9 - Drive Sean to preschool (the boys do reading from their Brave Writer selections while I drive and drop off)
9:30 - Morning Time - we start by lighting a candle, setting an intention or hearing a prayer or poem and reading a book (Here's a list of some favorite picture books) and then moving on to Waldorf Essentials Main Lessons.  Main lessons always start with form drawing on Mondays.
11 - recess/walk/snack
11:30 - Brave Writer Arrow & Quiver of Arrows copywork passage
12:15- Lunch
12:40  - Pickup Sean, more reading or an audio book in the car
1 - Free time to play
2 - Read aloud from our Early American History book and drawing/painting to go with it
2:30 -  Independent time to practice piano, read, journal, use the Duolingo app for Spanish

Art class

Tuesday:
8-9 Breakfast, dress, outdoor play
9 - quick morning time with story book or read aloud.
9:30 Mom to Yoga class and boys to my Mother-in-Law's for cursive writing lesson
11 - Back home for snack and recess
11:30 - Main Lessons from WE
12:30 - Lunch
1:30 - Art class (we use various classes on CreativeBug, currently Lisa Congdon's Boot Camp)
2  Narrating from our previous day Early American History book read aloud
2:30 - Independent time for copywork (any non-fiction passage they choose), piano practice, Duolingo Spanish

Main Lesson - Math Block, Grade 4

Wednesday:
8-9 - Breakfast, dress, outdoor play
9 - Drive Sean to school/reading time in car
9:30 - Morning Time with Main Lessons
10:30 - Piano Lessons - each boy has a half hour lesson with an instructor who comes to our home while I work with the brother on their Arrow copywork passage for the week (learning parts of speech, spelling, language mechanics
11;30 - Recess/lunch/free time (the boys are worn out from a busy morning so we relax a little!)
12:40  - Pickup Sean, more reading or an audio book in the car
1 - Read aloud from our Early American History book and drawing/painting to go with it
1:30 Creative Writing/Shakespeare
2 -  Independent time to  read, journal, handwork and use the Duolingo app for Spanish

Ant study from Abundant Garden

Thursday:
8-9 Breakfast/dress
9- Drive to Homeschool Gymnastics at the Harris YMCA/boys read
9:30-11:30 Gymnastics/Sean and I run at the track, play on the playground and grocery shop
Often the boys go home from gymnastics with my Mother-in-law for knitting and write their previous days' narration there, if not we come home and eat lunch and do it
1 - Abundant Garden Science Lesson
2 - Narration from previous days' Early American History lesson

Poetry Teatime

Friday:
8-9  Breakfast, dress, maybe some baking
9 - Drive Sean to preschool (the boys do reading from their Brave Writer selections while I drive and drop off)
9:30 - Morning Time - we start by lighting a candle, setting an intention or hearing a prayer or poem and reading a book (Here's a list of some favorite picture books) and then moving on to Waldorf Essentials Main Lessons
11 - recess/walk/snack
11:30 - Brave Writer Arrow & Quiver of Arrows copywork passage spelling/grammar test
12:15- Lunch
12:40  - Pickup Sean, more reading or an audio book in the car
1 - Free time to play,  practice piano, read
2 - Poetry Teatime

WHEW!  So, that would be if we had no field trips or special activities in a week.  If we do, we still always try to get in four main lesson blocks, a lot of reading and our literacy work with Brave Writer.  History, art, copywork and science get shuffled around as needed, not because I don't think they are important, just that we do cover those areas in main lessons a bit too.

If you ask my boys they would probably say the week goes like this:

Monday - Form Drawing
Tuesday - Cursive (or field trips)
Wednesday - Piano
Thursday - Gymnastics
Friday - Poetry Teatime

Those are the highlights for sure!

Favorite Picture Books

  Our favorite way to start the day is with some breathing exercises or yoga, an intention for the day, candles and a storybook.  Sometimes we read it cuddled together on the couch.  Sometimes we read it sitting at the work table.  We read lots of different types of stories and don't worry about them fitting in with any of our other subjects.  These are just for fun.  They have beautiful pictures, or words.  They are seasonal.  They might remind us how to be a better person, or give us something to think about.  They might just be funny.

  How do we choose our book each day?  Sometimes we just are attracted to the cover at our library, or we already have it at home but haven't read it in a while. Most of the time we heard about it from a friend or a blog post or Instagram blurb.  When I see an interesting book recommendation, I go immediately to our library website and reserve it.  We go to the library at least once a week and having that reserved stack of books ready for us is the most amazing thing ever!

  Without further ado, here are some of our favorites from this past fall:

This is My Home, This is My School by Jonathan Bean

  We read this on our inaugural day of homeschool and it couldn't have been more perfect!  The illustrations are busy and fun and the text perfectly conveys how I would want to describe our homeschool efforts.  The fact that the author was homeschooled leaves me hoping my own kids have such fond memories of the experience.

On a Beam of Light by Jennifer Berne

  The boys have read about Albert Einstein before, but this book really pays homage to his imagination and creativity in a way that isn't conveyed as well in a traditional biography. It encourages kids to wonder and imagine and ask questions.  It's perfection.

Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford

  The boys had a vague idea of what infinity meant before we read this, but I think the idea is much more firmly planted now.  Uma asks everyone she sees what infinity means to them and the answers vary from an endless line of ancestors to a spaghetti noodle cut in half again and again.  

i carry your heart with me by e.e. cummings, illustrated by mati mcdonough

  A beautiful poem with sweet, whimsical illustrations.  I'm always happy to expose the boys to more poetry and this type of book is a great way to do that.

Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, illustrated by Susan Jeffers

  This is my favorite poem of all time and I love seeing it set to such beautiful illustrations.  My favorite page was the old man joyfully making snow angels beside his bewildered horse, although most of them are more serene.

 Zen Shorts by Jon J. Muth

  We read all of the books about Muth's lovable and wise panda.  I still think this one is the best.  A mysterious panda moves in across the street and the siblings all come to him with their problems.  He tells them each a tale to gently show them the way.  A thought provoking serires with beautiful illustrations.

The Midnight Library by Kazuno Kohara

  We were first introduced to Kazuno Kohara from her book Ghosts in the House, which was Will's favorite book for at least a year.  Her illustrations are instantly recognizable to us, with their bold use of black and limited color palette. We realized that her books are available in Spanish at our library, too.  We love to find good Spanish picture books to learn a few more vocabulary words and recognize the words we already know. It's adorable in whichever language you choose. When I see this book I think of the turtle happily heading home with a book he has fallen in love with tied to his back. We have reserved her version of Jack Frost at the library and can't wait to pick it up this week.

Seven Silly Eaters by Marla Frazee

  This is an all time family favorite.  The story is very silly and the rhyming text adds to the fun.  Mrs. Peters is exhausted preparing food for her picky brood.  When they decide to give her a break for her birthday, they inadvertently find a long-term solution to her woes.

How Full is Your Bucket? For Kids by Tom Rath & Mary Reckmeyer

  This story takes the abstract concept of how actions and words make us feel and gives it a very concrete visual.  I hope we are still talking about "filling our buckets" when they are in college!

The Knight and the Dragon by Tomie dePaola

  I have a soft spot for Tomie dePaola, as he was one of my favorites as a child.  This retelling of the classic St. George and the dragon tale is wonderful.  Instead of fighting they figure out a fun way to work together and still use their talents.  My boys thought this was the best story we heard leading up to Michaelmas and they were glad to see the dragon didn't get killed.

My Teacher is a Monster by Peter Brown

  A chance meeting at the park allows a teacher and her pupil to interact in a fun way, as the drawings of the teacher morph from monster to human.  The boys think this one is great fun.

A Hungry Lion or A Dwindling Assortment of Animals by Lucy Roth Cummins

  This one is really cute and has a nice surprise at the end.

The Snow Globe Family by Jane O'Connor

  This one is just so fun!  The little tiny family that lives in the neglected snow globe on the mantle is just hoping someone will give them a good shake.  They haven't had a real blizzard in years.  The only excitement is from the occasional flurry when the maid does the dusting. 

The Garden of Abdul Gasazi by Chris Van Allsburg

  The illustrations are superb. The tale of the boy searching for a runaway dog will leave you wondering.  A perfect combo for a book that will stay with you.

The Trouble with Trolls by Jan Brett

  This has been a family favorite for years.   When Treva hikes up the mountain to visit her cousins she encounters one troll after another along the way.  They all want her dog.  She manages to tempt them with her lovely mittens, hat and sweater to get him back.  Finally, she runs out of trinkets to ransom the dog with.  The boys love the greedy, fighting trolls and delight in the heroine's clever way to deal with them.  

The Bear's Song by Benjamin Chaud

  This is a book that gets read often in our home.  Mostly to the three year old, but the older boys are happy to listen.  They love finding the bear cub and bee on each page and absorbing all the details of the Paris scenes in the illustrations.

Home by Caron Ellis

  Beautiful, whimsical illustrations of all kinds of houses, both real and fantastical.  A great prompt for drawing homes.

Happy Reading!

:Waldorf Grade Four: {Geography Block}

  Somehow 2016 is nearly in the books and I still haven't had time to post about what we've been up to for the first semester.

  Jack's first block of Main Lessons from Waldorf Essentials is Local Geography. We started with drawing maps of our home, our street, our neighborhood, city, county and, eventually, state.  I really like how Waldorf Essentials provides a basic framework for lessons (and weekly form drawings and some writing practice) but leaves some room to customize them to fit your own needs.

Jack adding rivers and highways to his NC map

  We added in some local history by visiting Big Rock Park, which is conveniently just a few miles from us.  Nomadic groups of Paleo (or Archaic) Native Americans used this site as a campground dating back 12,000 years.  The gigantic rocks provided shelter from the cold winds that blew across the ancient grasslands and made great lookout points as the clans followed herds of big game.

Learning about the abundant tree nuts around the park.

Big Rocks are awesome!

We traveled to Winston-Salem for the Old Salem homeschool day to learn about the Moravian settlers who founded the town in 1766.  The boys were able to see demonstrations about gardening, rifle making, dyeing, hearth cooking and furniture joining. They got to make marbles from the clay that is dug up in a nearby creekbed, sample hot chocolate and cinnamon water as well as try their hand at writing with a feather quill and ink.  They had a really fun day and really got a sense for the life of an eighteenth-century settler.

Visiting a recreation of a typical kitchen garden

  In addition to drawing maps of the world around us, we also learned about map reading.  I used the Montessori three part (or nomenclature) cards to help us learn terms.  For fun we used our Safari Toobz World Landmarks and Around the Globe with these cards.  The cards don't quite match every landmark from our sets so I made a few more cards by finding a blank template.  The boys got the terms down quickly (yes, this activity was so fun the second grader joined in too), and worked together to plot out the landmarks.  We followed this blog post and used Google Earth to find the latitude and longitude of each landmark and then place it on the big world map.  They worked on the Great Wall of China first and were surprised that their coordinates led them to North Carolina!  They quickly realized that the Google Earth search found a local takeout restaurant instead of the actual Great Wall.  It was a great exercise to emphasize the importance of the East/West and North/South designations on the coordinates.  All three boys loved matching the landmark figures with their three part cards.

The First Week of School at Home

Adding some wet on wet watercolors to our main lesson books.  St Francis, Leif the Lucky and a Compass Rose.  Sean loves to join in on the painting.

  Although I was very excited for our first week, I really was worried about how it would go.  I think it went much better than anticipated and we learned quite a bit about a lot of different things.  One of my biggest lessons was how important timing is for the reception of certain assignments.  Both of my boys balk a bit about writing assignments, so I've been trying very hard to observe what times of day they are better received and fit them into the (loose) schedule accordingly.

  This week our loose schedule has been to start with Circle Time around 8:30 and then move into Waldorf Essentials main lessons/independent fifty states work followed by recess around 10:30.  After an invigorating walk or bike ride we settle down for read aloud time from our American History and Spanish picture books and a little artwork before lunch.  After lunch we indulge in a little free play time before finishing up with piano practive and Brave Writer literature work/reading.

I'll share some of the highlights of our week in pictures:

Discovery Place science museum field trip on Tuesday.  Sean's expression on the bed of nails cracks me up!

More Discovery Place field trip photos.  Exploring simple machines, rainforest exhibit (only interested in the rope bridge climbing), and life cycles of a frog.

Multiplication flowers and writing work

Making pinecone bird feeders to go with our St. Francis unit study

Jack & Sean working together to make muffins

The boys were pretty excited that recess was not "rained out"