Today we are visiting the neighbourhood of We Don’t Need No Education.
Lansing, Michigan is our destination.
You know the drill by now, click the button and enjoy your visit. See you all tomorrow.
Today’s Neighbourhood Walk: East Devon, England
Today we take a visit with Knitty Lorn in East Devon, England.
You will see photographs of Beer, the village not the beverage, the beach and the countryside. It is well worth a visit.
Click through the button to see East Devon, England.
Today’s Neighbourhood Walk: The Canary Islands
Today we visit with “Je veux une ‘tite soeur-fille” in the Canary Islands.
Not quite sure where that is? They are a group of islands just off the northwest coast of Africa. Here is their Wikipedia entry to help with location.
So, lets take a stroll in this warm archipelago and visit with T.J. and his maman.
Today’s Neighbourhood Walk: Vätö, Sweden
Today we stroll around the neighbourhood of Little Red Farm.
So, if you want to see a slice of life in a mostly rural area of Sweden then click through the button and enjoy the walk around.
Today’s Neighbourhood Walk: Los Angeles
Here we are on Day Two of the Neighbourhood Walk…Around the World.
For this part of our journey we join Akatsuki ra-ra-ra in California.
Click on through the button to take a walk around a Californian neighbourhood.
A Neighbourhood Walk… Around the World
I have joined in with a great fun idea that Jojoebi from A Bit of This and That has suggested and co-ordinated. It is a walk around the neighbourhood, with a difference. A number of bloggers will be posting images from their home towns and today starts in Saitama, Japan. My contribution will be in a little while, but I will be linking to each of the blog posts for you to enjoy.
It will be a fun way to see what other parts of the world are like, without the airfares and jet lag. I hope you take your children on a virtual tour of the world.
Click on the badge to visit today’s Neighbourhood.
Matching and Grading skills
A few days ago I thought I would get out some of my older Montessori inspired activities to see how Master Oh Waily would go with them. He has been interested in puzzles for a while now, so I wondered how he would get on with grading sizes and seeing other sorts of patterns.
The first activity we tried was the arranging of images in size from largest to smallest. He did really well and lined up all six different images and only had slight issues with one of them.
After that I pulled out our frog matching set from the freebies section of the very useful and time saving Montessori Print Shop. He set out to do all of the sheets at once, and bar one mismatched blue frog which he fixed once he had the correct one on hand, he set about the task happily and successfully. As you can see below.
Boy and Frogs
So now that I can see how good he is with patterns and visual discrimination I think I will look through other old printables and similar items and see what else he may be comfortable doing until his interest in patterning and recognition wanes.
How do you help your children develop their visual discrimination skills?
Detours and Rerouting
The stay at home section of the Oh Waily family have fallen into some rather undesirable habits of late. The dreaded television has become rather more than an occasional treat and enjoyment, to the detriment of concentration and the ability to self-entertain. Worse still, the very excellent habit we had of reading LOTS of books had shrunk to Lilliputian proportions.
I won’t regale you with the hows and whys of us arriving at this situation. They are mostly mundane and directly related to extra-family stresses. What they did do, however, was start a slippery slope of auto-pilot parenting.
Find the simplest solution in order to accomplish non-kiddie related tasks?
What better than the television as babysitter?
Tired at the end of a stress-filled day? How quickly can we get to stress-relieving hobbies and habits?
Read less bedtime stories.
Seriously. What a numpty. Two of the biggest promises I made to myself when I became a Mum were – no babysitting by television and instill a love of reading.
So the auto-pilot changes have been recognised for what they are and what they have been doing. No more. Television has been relegated to the short time between waking and breakfast, plus the afternoon addition of Art Attack. Any time in between is for play, reading (oh yes, it is back), arts & crafts, field trips or other regular events – like our Tuesday afternoon swimming lessons. And the assumption* that the couple of hours of daycare made up for any stupid amounts of television in the afternoon has been kicked to the kerb, permanently. Now we have lots of imaginative play, and I mean LOTS.
I am also trying to introduce a regular, once a day, Reading Hour – separate from the bedtime stories. I have been finding this one a little harder to implement. Tearing them away from their games, having to run family or work errands, and generally having to squeeze it around the existing activities has proved a little less simple than I first thought. But I am determined to have it become a permanent fixture in our daily rhythm. I just need to work out when is best, and where it works best in any given day.
I feel slightly embarrassed to have fallen into such a simple trap. Auto-pilot, thoughtless, parenting. Not the way forward when you are planning to home educate your little people. Then again, I’m not superhuman. It’s time to face that fact, and realise that to keep on track means to take care of myself, make choices that help reduce external stresses and take a regular look at what we are doing around the Oh Waily household. We do much that is good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also have areas that could do with changing.
How about you? Do you have any areas of auto-pilot parenting that you want to challenge and conquer?
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* like I didn’t know that it was a load of the proverbial !
Poetry
Do you read your children poetry?
I remember being very ambivalent about poetry at school. I don’t ever really recall understanding meter and how to structure a poem. I could probably barely tell you the difference between a haiku and an epigram.
I finally enjoyed reading poetry when we studied the War Poets, and Wilfred Owen in particular. I’m still shaky on the technical aspects, but I am now willing to learn. My little people are clearly not of an age where understanding the differences between poetic styles and the technical aspects of poetry construction are necessary. However, I am keen for them to learn rhythm and word play through poetry. So I have been trying to make sure we always have at least one book of poems for reading when we bring a bag of books back from the library.
The latest book is from the “I Can Read!” series and it is called Dizzy Dinosaurs: Silly Dino Poems.
So far we have a couple of hits from this volume. Admittedly, the cute dinosaur cartoons are helping my cause. Here is the current favourite:
School Rules
by Sarah Hansen
No chomping
No romping
No treading on tails
No clawing
No climbing
No gnawing your nails
No roaring
No soaring
No sharpening teeth
No stamping
No stalking
Small friends to eat
These are rules
All dinos must follow
They keep school safe –
So no one gets swallowed!
I am convinced that this is a great favourite, not only because of the rhyming and rhythm, but because it is accompanied by a picture of a small, very toothy dinosaur about to bite the tail of a larger, clearly the teacher, dinosaur.
So, what are your children’s favourite poems?
Family Field Trip: Pauatahanui Inlet
The Oh Waily family are very familiar with the Pauatahanui Inlet as we drive past it at least once a fortnight on the way north to Paekakariki Beach or much further north to visit family. I have been promising myself that we would stop and walk the reserve paths one day, as the variety of bird life is plainly visible even from a speeding car.
Today we were heading to Paekakariki to play on the beach. Sadly Ms Oh Waily didn’t do her homework on the tides before setting out, so instead we sat on the beach promenade and watched the large rolling waves come in charging like white stallions. Following a bit of sea-spray adventure and an in-car picnic lunch, we turned back around and headed home again. This time, finally, stopping at the entrance to Pauatahanui Inlet reserve.
As this was an impromptu visit I shall apologise in advance for the quality of the photos that follow. We made do with the camera on the mobile phone.
On the Shells – at the Entrance
I must admit to being slightly concerned that my two little people would find the walk boring and that I’d end up being a pack horse to two little people complaining to me about having to walk so far. I was pleasantly and happily surprised that they walked the whole kilometre and a bit without a peep.
Reading the Info Board
I recommend you wear wellies or similar if you are planning on doing these walks. Nothing was under water when we walked, but one area definitely sank a bit. And soggy grass is never that much fun to walk through without some waterproof shoes anyway.
Forging Ahead
And now I am the one bringing up the rear. No time for photographs, lets get on, there might be something really interesting just around this corner. Come on…
Well, are you coming?
And yes there was something interesting. A boardwalk to the hide.
On the boardwalk
And once we reached the hide we could just see across the way a number, and variety, of the birds promised by the information board at the beginning of the walk. Sorry that this photograph is so poor, apparently the camera phone is not too slick at long distance shots.
View from the hide
Then, just when I thought that long distance viewing was all we were going to get, around the corner come three swans. Miss Oh spotted them, so that was wonderful. She was so excited when she saw them coming. So naturally we needed to take photographs of them.
Swans swimming by
The photograph doesn’t really give you a good idea of how close they actually swam. Master Oh squealed a bit at one point and they picked up the pace and paddled away to the others. One took off, which was quite interesting to see close up. A shag came across from the group for a short visit before diving and disappearing.
The kids asked to go soon after. So we did. Miss Oh was all keen to do the other walk straight away, but Master Oh was definitely flagging by the last hundred metres when he asked to be carried over the soggy grass. Bless him. Then he wanted to get down and walk the other track. But by the time we reached the fork in the track I had convinced both of them that we could come back and walk the other way another day. They seemed happy enough with that in the end.
Now all I need to do is learn a bit about the seasonal cycle of the birds, as well as buy us some good field guides for the littlies to use on these walks.
Where have you been with your children lately?
The Pukeko Patch 