Home Education South Africa Style

We are grateful to have more space to spread out our home learning area here in South Africa. Much of my week between Christmas and New Year was spent organising education materials while Dave helped occupy the children.

We now have a large open plan living area where we can have more distinct areas for our learning materials, play and our sitting area. There is lots of wall space for displays. Below is my desk with an education materials shelf next to it, then some lovely new daily and monthly calendars, and a little blackboard. We also have our music spot with the piano and our music players. Mercy has begun to take an interest in learning the piano and I am attempting to include lessons.

These pictures were taken after our domestic worker comes on Tuesdays, things are not normally quite so neat. God has been good to us in blessing us with a good helper. It has also been a huge step forward to finally purchase my lockable toy and puzzle cupboard! You can see it here next to the play mat. This really helps to keep the craziness under control. This cupboard was purchased second hand and has four levels and even smells nice inside . . . all in all it is a great blessing and help (yes, almost as good as having another adult in the house, as I once read).

Near the door to the garage there is a sweet little nook that we are shaping into an art and craft and science area. We are keeping some materials out all the time and Nate spends a lot of time there. I put up some drying lines on the wall for paintings. I found a bucket caddy for pencils, sticky tape, watercolour paints, and glue that can be used on a daily basis. This has the added bonus of temporarily housing the random pieces of paper with possibly precious creations that are always around this table. God is good to give us the space to have a little table like this that can stay a mess. Later on I hope to get a small lockable cupboard to house craft materials and paint that become unmanageable if the children are allowed to access them at any time.

We are keeping some nature finds on the top shelf. I read the idea of a nature discovery table but realised this would not work in our house if kept out at all times . . . think pieces of coral in beds. So I decided to display the items out of reach and bring them down for specific nature discovery times. The other day Nate painted a watercolour of some of his finds.

Opposite the wall with the piano, bookshelf, etc. is this green wall. We hope to put up a big display board there when we find the right one to finally use some of our posters and create craft displays. Meanwhile the easel is getting more use as there is space to keep it out.

In the garden we had the delightful surprise of being given a chicken house. Eventually we hope to turn this corner into a chicken run. We are not quite ready to resume having hens yet though.

Finally we went to a birthday party with new friends on Sunday. We joked that the children were having "sensory play" in the mud at the Helderberg Nature Reserve. 

 Who needs sensory tables when you can have the joy of painting red clay on banks and trees in nature's playground?

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iSonto #67

Here are a few pictures of things we have done during April. 

Nate spontaneously began to make letters out of leaves!

We made salt dough creations. Mercy is painting a dinosaur and Nate a mound that we used at Easter to represent Jesus death and resurrection. The mound has a hole in the side of it for the tomb and place for a cross to stand up at the top. We use a little pipe cleaner person to represent Jesus' death and resurrection. The pipe cleaner person remains in the grave from Friday to Sunday but on Sunday morning the grave is empty!

We enjoyed cousin time during the school holidays. One activity we did was alligators with a special paint technique using bubble wrap to make spots. Meanwhile Bill covered himself with paint!!

He gave himself a green eye :).

One day I was happy to discover that Nate had made a 0 -5 block creation. He had found the correct numbers and lined up block creations to demonstrate the numbers. This is what I imagined him doing with the blocks when I bough them a couple of years ago!

Some thankful thoughts I jotted into my ipod this week:

Praying in rain misted car

Seeing sunrise

Warm bed

Promises of God

Knowing my Heavenly Father

Warm shower 

Family Autumn ramble to anticipate! 

Flexibility to do this.

Courteous driver let me in

More courteous drivers!

Glorious sight of a platypus amongst the autumn leaves in the water

Joyful sight of an old neighbor we hadn't seen for years

Reliable car

Tissues and napkins

Perfect opportunity to collect leaves and make notes on their names 

Nate helped up into nooks of Monterey Cypress by Dave

Dave climbing up himself

Clean toilets out and about

Nate wanting to stay at Salmon Ponds as he loves it too much to leave!

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iSonto #65

Hello from the Drew Patch! Bill was very pleased when he got to have a go with kid-safe scissiors.

We had a train play time with chairs lined up as the train, thanks to our Sonlight P 3/4 Richard Scarry reading. This was the suggested accompanying activity! Mercy is joining in with Nate's Sonlight Core A studies but I am also incorporating some of the preschool fun she may have been too young for when I did it with Nate.

We are also pressing repeat on some crafts, at their request. We did this one last a couple of years ago now. I love my "Crafty Ideas A-Z" book so I'm happy to do it as many times as everyone is happy! This time we not only made the ants but also an ant hill. We painted the ant hill and ants this time, which appeased my home school mummy guilt about not painting as much as might be good!

Mercy is "reading" our Curious George story book to their monkey. He was formerly called Luca, but is now George for obvious reasons!

Nate is showing the number book we are putting together. The rice in the dish in the backgrond was an attempt at tactile help for letters like lower case a and h which are difficult to write correctly when you first start. The idea is that you form the letter with your finger in the rice, and therefore feel the way it is formed.

Our biggest achievement though was our terrarium! It has taken me some weeks to get all the materials together. A jar from the reject shop, appropriate ferns from a garden centre, potting mix and peat moss from Grandad, charcoal and pebbles from our garden.

These are they types of things that seem oh so daunting when I read about them in the curriculum. Where am I going to get the time to organise all those extra bits and pieces I think to myself??? Yet when it is eventually done we learn a lot, have a lot of joy, and it is all worth it.

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iSonto #64

We have had lots of good times with the "I See Sam" books available for free download from http://marriottmd.com/sam/index.html

You can print them out and colour them in and most importantly, read them!

We are really pleased with Nate's reading progress so far this year.

Our schooling was a bit more challenging to get to when road works visited our cul-de-sac for nearly an entire week! "Dozy" (Bill's word for the digger), and compacter that jumped up and down on the soil, and the vibrator to smooth the soil were all much more interesting than the school books!

Bill has begun to use chalks. So sweet!

We had a fun family apple harvesting time.

It is surprising how much fruit our little tress can give. We have dwarf and espailier trees. There are lots of apples still ripening on the other trees!

Dave took the two older children on a road trip to see the steam fest at Sheffield.

More thankful moments:

• Cuddling with Bill as he excitedly and loudly names words in picture books. 
• His satisfied nuzzle when I acknowledge his contributions!
• Reading books to all three children together
• A chance to tidy the garden on a warm afternoon under the expanse of the sky
• Reading 50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die for Easter
• Reading The Wilderness Family aloud with Dave
• Phone to keep in touch 

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iSonto #63

 This week we had some pyjama schooling! Dave is in charge of science experiments and they are done as "family play" after dinner. This week we were learning about hot air rising.

It was delightful to see this experiment. The children cut out snakes from a spiral drawn in a circle. When the "snake" was hung from a thread and placed over warm air rising from the heater, it would twirl. This experiment is part of our Sonlight Science A curricula. I was initially concerned about adding science to our list of subjects so early, but it is turning out really well. Nate has a great interest in sientific subjects, perhaps inherited form his Daddy. Mercy is enjoying the experiments as well.

Bill is looking more and more like a little boy instead of a baby! He loves to say cheese to the camera. We are having "tot school" as part of our school day where we do puzzles or other activities appropriate for Bill. He has also begun to enjoy playdough and painting. His favourite thing at the moment is to tackle his siblings to the ground and climb on them.

Bill is enjoying longer stories now, so all there can enjoy listening together.

We also have a lot of new stories for the older two that are part of their Sonlight Core A. I am reading a lot of them after dinner now, instead of in our morning "school" time, because Elnathan is in Prep now and needs to be doing more reading, writing and maths in the mornings. This is a big change for us and we are still getting used to it.

More things to be thankful about . . .

• A new pastor at church
• Dave whipping up beautiful food in the kitchen and loving to do so! 
• Time out at a cafe on Saturday morning looking at ideas on Pinterest! 
• Mum making amazing seasonal paintings with the children, just what I wanted them to do.
• Making playdough wells and remembering the story of Isaac and the wells. 
• Sonlight instructor's guides which offer good questions and vocabulary explanations for the books we are reading together. 
• Nate's question: at what time did the knights wear slavery? which made us laugh
• A string of sunny days

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iSonto #49

This week we are thankful for the fun morning we spent creating little pictures for our doll house, "framing" them with paper and laminating them.

It was one of those rare times where an activity with my children actually happened in the pleasant way I imagined it!

Elnathan was always eager to watch Daddy go in the morning.

 Mercy was happy to dress up Bill as, apparently, a "stripy elephant".

Bill was moving further! It was so cute when he crawled out the door.

One memory verse we practiced was "Be kind to one another" Ephesians 4:32.

From garden to tummies . . . the first broad beans in a risotto.

A book we enjoyed together was "Things People Do", part of our Sonlight P 4/5 Curriculum. You know that you're onto a good thing when the children keep bringing the book to the dinner table to show Daddy what they learned!

Encouragement, ideas and inspiration came from the Girltalk blog. A post about the kind of young women the church needs was perfect tonight as I've been thinking over the need to embrace rather than resent the massive learning curve that is raising little children. There are so many great posts on this blog I've been perusing the archives in the few spare moments over the past two weeks.

One funny moment was seeing the children with their massive pieces of cake at a friend's party! Three layers for three years of life. Each child started pleading for a different bit of the bird decoration . . . please may I eat the tail, the feet, the beak, etc. It was the most perfect afternoon garden party.

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Daily gifts: cubbies everywhere, dummy victories, and more!

* Nate did not wake us at all the night after giving up his dummy!
* Nate eagerly putting on his shoes to take his dummy to the outdoor bin after being promised a toy store trip in exchange!

* Mercy reading the Bible to Billy (who has a funny habit of sticking out his tongue)
* Nate showing Billy his colours using different objects "look Bill, this is red" etc.

* Enthusiastic tiny people finding cubbies in the fern corner and under their outdoor table. Our yard is still for them an adventure. 

* Nate: "We are having  a very exciting day, we posted three letters and now we are going to the park". Walks to the post box and park from our house are rare for us this year. This walk went perfectly, with the two children holding onto the pram all the way there and back.

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