Homeschool Days Highlights

I told you all I was really going to try to make an effort this year to share some of our school with you! Here are some glimpses into a few of our days the past few weeks!

Inspiration happened in a minute. We read the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today. We had a discussion about how to be bucket fillers instead of bucket dippers. In a flash, they had our counter filled up with supplies and went to work creating.

And the results, a plaque for the World's Greatest Librarian, a painted block with inspiration words, a short note, and 2 wooden bookmarks--one a portrait of our favorite librarian, the other a fictional character.

The boys were about to explode as we waited for the arrival of the Bookmobile at Birmingham Ridge that morning. 

They dropped their creations into Ms. Barbara's "bucket." I know I have said this before to you all, but she really is the best librarian ever!

I am so thankful my boys get to know and interact with Ms. Barbara.

Another day, we visited Oren Dunn with some friends. Our purpose was to look at an exhibit of photography depicting Southern life. While there, the idea was birthed of the kids photographing things representing life and/or history in our area. They are going to write a paragraph about each photo and create a book about life in Mississippi. (A teacher from a local school has done this every year with her class and gifted it to the museum. I am so thankful she shared her work--it has gifted us with the idea to do the same project!) 

Another day during writing I showed picture prompts from the Scholastic book, How Are You Peeling. The boys wrote descriptive sentences about the pictures. We discussed how important the author's choice of words are to a written piece and how our writing comes alive when we use creative description instead of sticking to factual description.

To further drive home the point, they chose one of these pictures and wrote about it. They would then read the description to see if we knew which one was being described. They loved this. As a matter of fact, we have had to continue this activity every day since. If they choose to continue on Monday, it will be our 4th day doing this!

Every morning we have a business and school planning meeting. They plan out their day and discuss any matters that need attending to for their business. On this particular day, they wanted to prepare their cans to take to the recyclers and post some things for sale they had outgrown (bikes, outside toys). The cans had to be bagged and arranged in a way that could be transported. They worked together about 20-30 minutes on this task and did great--this was right as they finished.

 They also put on their list for that day for us to go on a bike ride. However, on this bike ride they wanted to see if we could also pick up cans. I knew this was going to be a difficult task but thought I could use it to see if they could problem solve. Sure enough, the first can was in the ditch near our driveway. JG immediately discovered it was a difficult task managing a bike and trying to pick up cans, etc. So, I issued the challenge, "I wonder if either of you can come up with a way to make this process work better?" And of course, it was on...it is so easy to motivate these boys (most of the time). 

 In the matter of almost 3/4 a mile-they had created a workable system. Jackson would ride ahead on one side gathering the cans from the ditch and would throw them into the road for collection. John worked on getting cans from difficult areas while I held his bike.
                                        
Jackson would stop as he would get a little ahead, come back to where we were and walk John's bike until we were ready to move on. It is amazing at the skills they used (problem solving, hard work-it was EXTREMELY hot and not the easiest of work, teamwork, and communication). Once the bag was full, we just continued and had an enjoyable ride with lots of fun conversation.

Yesterday (Sept. 17th) we had a packed day. We had our first Career Quest for this school year. We were in Saltillo and started the day at the E911 office. We learned all about how they take calls and how the antennas and communications work.

Next, we visited the guy's dream store, Elmo's. Since it happened that our entire group was boys, there were many moments of eye popping excitement.

They showed us all kinds of new and old things within the store.

This is a helmet from Vietnam. I explained to Jackson this was the war that his Pops served in. He was so proud to put on that helmet. He asked if Pops had worn one like it.

The boys were both excited to be holding real grenades in their hands. 

After Elmo's we stopped at City Hall. They had definitely prepared for us--they had the Mayor, city clerk, public works director, main street director, zoning enforcer, fire chief and police chief all rounded up to talk to us. 

After telling us about their jobs, they took us to tour the fire and police departments.

The fire department actually has a training room maze and they walked through that and learned about the training they do. At one point I heard them ask if they could crawl through something...Gotta love boys!

Our last stop for the Career Quest was House of Bounce. He spent some time telling the guys about the operation of his business. Basically, if the parents are happy, the business succeeds :).

Again, the career quest was such a great day of learning. All of the places we visited were so kind and did such a great job teaching our kids!

The boys played and had lunch at HOB. After a couple hours, we headed to the Natchez Trace Trail Head for a scavenger hunt another homeschool mom had organized. Jackson was so excited to be able to help a mom by pushing one of her strollers (she had 2 and needed an extra set of hands).

 He didn't give up--even when it got hard. He was determined to make it to the end.

They had lots of fun roaming the woods in search of something alive, something dead, and something changing. After our time there, we were off to meet Granny. The boys were excited to be spending the night with her. It also gives me some interrupted time with Johnny and time to plan our future activities. Next week, we are reading a book about monsters that we got from the Bookmobile. We are going to create our own, name them, and write stories about them. So there you go, a quick look at a few of our days!

Live a Meaningful Life!