The daily agenda is now approached as a method to understand things that are French. Today we started a little unit which is meant to explore the medieval heroine, Jehanne d’Arc. TheBubster’s sentence today; she has a sentence ever morning in order to trace the letters of the words and then copy; read

To stand up for what you believe in - to change the world.

She also had the words, Courage and Hero as well as Jean d’Arc and Orleans, France. As she was tracing the words, she was able to read out loud most of the small words, and when we worked through to the point where she was able to read the sentence, she was extra proud because of what the words were saying.

We then dived into lessons by explaining where France is in relation to other countries and then looked at a map with Orleans marked out. We wrote the French and English words for the number/numero 2. We read the story about Joan of Arc. We learned how to read a clock and we sang an old English song about Joan of Arc. The afternoon was spent with games on the computer and playing outside.

Anyways just wanted to put down in digital ink the method which we are able to continue learning fundamentals while changing the overarching theme that we are presently interested in.

I tried for a little while to be a high pressure instructor to my kids, that lasted about ten minutes before there was general mutiny. This is mostly because we have been trying to teach them to make their own decisions from an early age. I am sure there will be times when this will backfire on us but for the most part we are confident that this is an exceptional philosophy for living.

When I try to be more results oriented, the schooling turns into a dynamic where I am trying to maneuver, manipulate and even trick TheBubster into completing whichever exercise I have placed in front of her to complete. Eventually, we do get through it and no one seems like they enjoyed the experience nor am I confident that we learned anything at all. However, if we go to the museum and pick a hall to look at and talk about all the exhibits in the room, answering as many questions as we can, then everyone enjoys themselves AND there is some obvious learning involved.

Rather than sailing into the wind, I have tried a different tack this week; one involving a more play-like atmosphere and more agreement in advance about what we are going to do. For instance, yesterday while we were working on the ABCs & 123s portion of the agenda, TheBubster expressed a desire to do art time next. So, I pulled out the paints and some extra cardboard that is lying around here and set us up for painting. Both kids really got into the fun of smearing paint around and one point TheBubster started singing a little song that ended with the line “I want to be an Artist!” and then she said to me, “Daddy, I want to be an artist.”

Complete immersion is the most effective educational strategy.

Physical education or exercise to burn off the energy of the afternoon as well as some socialization with other kids took place in a playground where she showed off her balance.

She also made fast friends with another little girl and her older sister, they had great fun sitting and chatting to each other about important things like birthdays and other stuff.

This morning, I was drinking coffee and sitting in front of my window on the world, ie my computer, when I noticed a particular friend of mine appear in my Instant Messenger buddylist. I said, “Hiya!” and she asked me what we had planned for the day because she needed something to do, so we made plans to meet up and let the kids all play with each other.

I hurried TheBubster through her ABCs & 123s; currently she is writing a sentence by tracing and then copying the words, the content is about Ancient Greece and her mathematics worksheet is Addition and Subtraction exercises with the number line Just as an important note, we are not yet dealing with negative numbers but it is possible that we will introduce them relatively soon. Then we hustled down the Westside Bike highway to get to the park.

The kids all got along swell. My friend made a comment about how good LittleBud’s is with a soccer ball. Later a complete stranger came over to the field to express his opinion that LittleBud has potential to grow up to be one of the “top 99% of football players in the World.” It was a bit outlandish to hear this, but the boy does love chasing after a ball.

After we were exhausted and overheated, we went home to wait for a surprise. I knew what it was but the kids were not expecting it at all, they just knew it was a surprise. When it arrived, TheBubster helped figure out what to do with it and how we should put it together with the large wooden box we found last week on the sidewalk. Pictured below is the kids enjoying their new surprise.

Finally, I got an email today from Kidzui, which is an adaptation of the Firefox Web browser which has curated content for kids. I like it alot because it gives TheBubster a great deal of freedom to explore the web and find things she likes, that are entertaining and sometimes even educational. It lists all the websites that she visits, the videos she watches and several other areas of interesting data is reported and I can make selections about permissions. Anyways this video keeps popping up in her list of watched videos, TheWife and I found it hilarious so you are all forced to watch it as well.

On a day like today; hot but not too hot, sunny and clear despite pronouncements by weather advisors that there will be rain; jumping in the bakfiets with our school supplies and a bag of food is exactly the way to do things. I did not create a map before hand because I wanted to leave some room in the day for spontaneous exploration, plus I was not certain exactly how far I wanted to go.

We ended up going a long ways.

As we were enjoying a transverse jaunt through Central Park, TheBubster posed a question that was especially relevant; the question in question also demonstrated a curious and insightful mind. She asked me, “Why is it harder to ride the bakfiets uphill than downhill?”

BOOM!

It was as if we were at home and Hell’s Bells rang out “Time for school robes and studying”, there we were, me huffing and puffing up the hills of Central Park and explaining, as best I could, Sir Isaac Newton’s work to a five year old. We discussed our planet, the sun, Jupiter, the moon, various bodies of various sizes (mass) and things of various distances from one another like space stations and ships on the oceans or even bakfiets. The amazing thing was the fact that she seemed to understand what I was talking about, certainly she will not be able to recite the description from memory in verbatium, however she does now know the reason a fully loaded bakfiets is harder to pedal uphill than it is to coast downhill.

She also understands that The Bronx is one of five boroughs in New York City. She already knows Brooklyn and Manhattan and now she understands that The Bronx is up and the Battery is down…

After we found a park with a children’s festival where she tried to jump Double Dutch, we went to Randall’s Island and did some writing and mathematics. She is having sentences from a workbook about Ancient Greece for writing and her work with the number line and the functions of addition and subtraction has progressed to the point where she does not really need to be reminded to check the sign before making the jumps with her spaceship. See the spaceship is a triangular piece of cardboard that serves as a pointer for our little game of jumping up and down the number line. The ‘+’ or ‘-’ only serves to tell her which direction the jumps are being made. I love that she is getting these concepts quite easily and the hardest part of the work right now is to get her started. Once she is doing the work, it gets done well.

So it was a long and exhausting day in the Eckenrode House Bakfiets School but we are all satisfied with the results.

Initially, my idea was to go and find some Crocs for the boy because LittleBud had seemed to fall in love with the ones that belonged to our little houseguest. Every time she would come home and take them off, he would scurry over and slip his feet into them. It was not just her little pink ones that he liked but Crocs period because we will wake up in the morning and put on his sister’s yellow shoes on. Its quite a funny sight, him in these slightly too large yellow shoes and his nappy padding around the house.
Anyways, the adventure Sunday turned out to be more surprise to us all than I planned. It was Sunday morning and the shops were all closed so there was no buying little shoes.

At this point, we just moved out to the edge of the island and rode the bike; looking at the water and the other side. As we were on the eastern shore of Manhattan and the greenway is not continuous; the United Nations building interrupts it for security purposes (I am sure they could secure the perimeter of that building with a greenway if they really wanted too but I digress….). This meant that we had to ride up a ramp, back into the main avenues and around the building and back down a ramp onto the greenway. We actually had to do this again further along because the greenway stops where the highway runs right up next to the water’s edge.

Finally, we came to a third ramp at 96th street. It was starting to threaten rain, so I took it with the intention of headed west and downtown to our home, but then at the top a saw that the ramp splits in two directions. One way goes west into Manhattan, the other goes over the river to Randall’s Island. We had a quick chat about what happens if we get rained on and everyone sort of agreed that we’d just get wet and so we crossed over to the east.

Randall’s Island is a cute little place that has athletic facilities and an insane asylum. There are nature reserve areas and a decent sized track and field stadium next to each other. There is also a huge car park and a place where outdoor music concerts take place. In fact while we were there a Puerto Rican organization was warming up for a summer party. There is also a Golf center with a driving range and mini golf. We stopped at that place to get some drinks and use the restroom. TheBubster then used her best requesting forms and asked to place some mini golf. So we did. It was great fun with the three of us, even more fun because I did not try to keep my score; I am certain that if I had Little Bud would have found a way to beat me!

So because you have sat through my prose or maybe because you skipped ahead, here are some photos.

On the way home both kids fell asleep in the bakfiets and I had to carry them both upstairs (four flights! heavy!)

Blog Games

And the employee at the Membership desk…

And the guards inside the museum…

and even the other visitors.

Wierdos!

You may be able to tell we joined the museum as members so that we could visit it on a very regular basis as the environment for our science lessons. The first day we spent dealing exclusively with the Big Bang and a display that put all 13 billion years between then and now into the kids minds. They were able to run up and around a long spiral ramp as part of the entire time span and cover the short amount of time that humans have existed with their hands.

I feel like I made a good choice with that purchase.

The posterboard was used to create a calendar and a behavior chart. The Summer Summer session was organized into five fortnights, each of which has its own divider in the notebook. The behavior chart was set up for one fortnight. There were fourteen tasks which were identified by the senior staff at the school; these tasks are rewarded with a heart upon completion or as soon as we get back to the board. There were a few other behaviors which were identified and selected to receive demerits or having a black mark placed upon a heart. At the end of each day the number of hearts is tallied. Upon completion of the fortnight a reward worthy of the number of hearts earned will be negotiated; the student will also be given an opportunity to hold the hearts until the end of the session.

The curriculum for this session is rather similar to the previous sessions; reading based upon phonics, writing and spelling, basic numbers and simple mathematics. In addition, a couple of extra areas of study have been added; vocabulary and languages as well as an introduction to civics. The Civics course is particularly impressive. Using New York City as a teaching tool, geography, history and other lessons in social studies can be introduced. For example today’s lesson involved predetermining a direction for travel based upon a decided destination, then actual travel was plotted against a map in order to determine distances general layout of the city. Points of interest along the course included the following statues, Liberty, Wall St Bull and Confucius. Each statue had a little discussion relative to their importance.

We are all quite excited to be back together and look forward to making great progress both educationally and as a family.