Homeschooling

Art Projects

September 10, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I do not teach art to my children. As I said in my guest post on Esther’s blog, the year I decided to teach art we had a grand total of three lessons. However, my boys are very creative and some have made some pretty impressive items. This train model is the latest project. Mr. Diligence had the idea, and did the painting. He and Mr. Intellectual made the models. Mr. Inventor drilled holes.

The garden—raised beds. He filled them with glue, then added bits of macrocarpa needles.

A man made out of copper wire, in a tree.

Another man, at the gate.

The train station.

The train.

The fences and telegraph wires were made of copper wire threaded through holes drilled in the posts. The posts were glued into holes drilled in the board.

Here are some more projects Mr. Diligence showed me when we talked about their creations. He made this man by gluing rocks together.

He built this house a couple of years ago.

He carved this boat.

Mr. Diligence also made this windmill.

Mr. Inventor and Mr. Diligence worked together to build this truck. They use it to store treasures.

Reading, Art, and Guilt–A Guest Post on Purposeful Learning

September 9, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I am guest posting (for the first time ever!) on Esther’s blog, Purposeful Learning. When I told Esther about the two revelations I had recently had, she told me I should write a blog post for her. So, here it is! Please go to her blog to read the full post.

Twice in the past two months I have had an “ah-ha!” moment. Both times, I suddenly had an answer to something that I had been feeling guilty about for years.

I was reading by the time I was three years old. When I was a baby, someone gave my mom a book, something about “Teach Your Baby to Read.” I was the first baby, so she had time, and she made flashcards to put on objects all over the house. I can’t remember not being able to read, and I’m guessing maybe she eventually regretted teaching me that young, as I quickly developed an addiction to reading! I remember being excited to start first grade, but then being very disappointed because the first day of first grade the reading lesson was simply, “God.” I was reading whole books by then! I spent hours and hours reading thousands of books as I grew up, and put that love of books to good use when I started a bookstore in my late teens. However, after I got married, little by little I started feeling guilty for loving to read, and guilty for taking time to read when there were other things to do, as there always are. Comments some people made such as, “I only ever read the Bible and ___________(church paper),” or, “Reading is a waste of time for me,” added to that feeling of guilt. I still read, because I can’t make myself stop reading, but always with a slight feeling of guilt.

Reading, Art, and Guilt — One of my son’s art projects.

Last year, my daughter came in from her bedroom one morning saying that she felt like the Lord had given her an idea. She wondered what I thought of a website devoted to book reviews. She would include warnings with the reviews of anything that parents might want to know about the book before giving it to their child, and build a search function to help parents find books about a particular area they were studying. After we all prayed about it, she built the website, and soon I started writing some reviews for her of books I read to myself or aloud to the other children. Still, I felt somewhat guilty about loving to read!

Cape Farewell

August 21, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

After eating a late picnic lunch after the long walk at Farewell Spit, we drove around to Cape Farewell. It received its name because it was the last land seen in New Zealand by Captain Cook and his crew as they headed home in 1770. The cape is included in land operated by the Department of Conservation. The land is used for grazing animals, and we had to walk past a few cows to get up to the viewpoint. A crew of DOC people were cutting up a huge macrocarpa tree. We really enjoyed the bright green lush grass—such a beautiful sight in comparison to our drought-stricken area!

Mr. Handyman, Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Inventor heading up the hill. I gave them strict instructions to stay at least 10 feet from the cliff edge or be sent back to the van. They did well at obeying.

Mr. Imagination coming up the hill with his daddy.

The tree-cutting operation. They were putting branches on a bank to stop erosion.

The boys had fun rolling and bumping down the steep hills. This is Mr. Imagination and Mr. Diligence.

Mr. Sweetie

The sun was in the wrong place to get a good picture of this rock formation, but trust me, it was spectacular.

Mr. Imagination was bumping down the hill on his bottom. I was trying to get a picture, and just happened to snap this as he flipped around to grin up at me. I love that look of delight!

Mr. Diligence found a cave, and Esther was there with her camera.

Mr. Inventor rarely slows down.

He did here, though!

How do you like the look of determination on Mr. Sweetie’s face? He wants to keep up with the big ones!

Mr. Diligence

Impromptu Lessons

May 5, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One thing I love about homeschooling: Learning truly happens at all hours of the day.

One evening at bedtime, Mr. Inventor was busy working on his math lesson for the next day. He likes to do his math after dark, when it’s harder to work outside, so that he can have more daylight hours for doing his own things outside. He asked me a question about what he was doing, and I suddenly had an inspiration for a way to teach him something he had been struggling with for a long time! He was not understanding the difference between perimeter, area, and volume, and when to use a plain unit (such as inch) and when to add a superscript to indicate square or cubed units. To illustrate, I asked him if he had a string in his pocket, and being a boy he did. I took the string, a piece of paper, and a wooden block that was laying on the floor, and illustrated the different dimensions. It was so fun to see his face light up as he got it! He actually understood a concept that he hadn’t grasped before.

Another evening, as I was cooking dinner, Mr. Diligence came along and asked if there was a way to tell if something was heavier than water. We had just read Archimedes and the Door of Science, and one chapter talked about how Archimedes figured out that the king’s crown was not pure gold. I told him that if something floated in water it was not as heavy as water, but if it sank it was heavier. He grabbed a cup of water and started dropping things in to test them—mustard, ketchup, honey, a raisin—all sorts of things! He would guess if they would sink or float, and then check his guess. When one of his brothers showed up, he had great fun getting him to guess, too! I loved that informal science lesson. The picture isn’t very clear, but there are a lot of bits of things at the bottom of the water in that jar—things that are heavier than water!

Diligent Students

April 30, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I thought Grandma might like to see pictures of my diligent students! These were not all taken at the same time; it’s hard to get this kind of picture, because I’m busy teaching lessons at the same time.

Mr. Handyman

Mr. InventorMr. Intellectual

Mr. Diligence

Mr. Sweetie

Mr. Imagination

And this is how Little Miss does her schoolwork! We’re all glad when her eyes are closed during school hours.

This was another day. She was happy in her new Bumbo for a long time, and Mr. Imagination was quite entertained as well, putting her socks on top her head and then making them fly off. Thankfully, he never hit her head!

And, just for fun: The one picture I took at the Waipara River when we went there for a fun day with our homeschool group (not the fossil walk but a different day). When we first arrived, Mr. Inventor and Mr. Diligence found this tree they could walk up. I told them they couldn’t do it with other children around, though.

Sonlight

April 24, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We have been using Sonlight Curriculum ever since Esther was six years old. This week, I started using it with Mr. Sweetie. He was thrilled: Stories just for him (and Mr. Imagination, when he feels like joining us)! Today was our third day, and he was happy to have me take a picture with them holding the books we read from today. This is my fourth time through this level! You can tell that some of the books are pretty worn! The Boxcar Children is falling to pieces; I need to use some glue on it one of these days. It’s been quite a favorite. I love Sonlight because it gets me to spend time reading with the children when I otherwise would probably let it slide.

Fossil Walk in the Waipara River

April 22, 2015 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Two weeks ago, one of the dads in our homeschool group led a walk up the gorge of the Waipara River, to look for fossils. There are a lot of fossils in the rocks there, and they wash out in floods. He has an extensive collection of fossils, and has found some pretty interesting animals—one was even named after him!

We started with a picnic in the river bed. After everyone was done eating, we started walking. The first thing we did was cross the river in a place that was about a foot deep, then walked through a very rocky area. For a ways, we walked in the river, where it was only a few inches deep, then walked on the rocks again, then on a grassy area. Eventually, we came out at the base of a cliff littered with concretions, enormous round rocks. They are at all levels of the cliff, and as the cliff face erodes, they come down. Thankfully, none came down while we were there! Our leader didn’t allow the boys to climb as high as they wanted to, for their own safety. We only saw a few fossils, but had a beautiful walk with good friends! The man in front center of this picture, wearing a backpack and gumboots, was our leader.

That tiny white object my finger is pointing to is a shark’s tooth! In the one area we walked through, there were a lot of these shattered rocks.

This was a vertebrae from a marine reptile.

My Mr. Diligence found this greensand, a type of sandstone.

That’s my Mr. Handyman in the middle, helping carry one of the little children. The first concretion I found. I sat on it to feed my baby, and the wife of our leader commented that she had sat there to feed her baby several years before!

The boys all had fun climbing up and sliding down this cliff!

One of the concretions, ready to come down (it was probably 50-100 feet above us).

Another fossil vertebrae.

More concretions. Mr. Imagination on a concretion in the river.

This picture is for my Mom. I thought of you, Mom, when I saw this very unusual thistle here and there along our walk.

Mr. Handyman on a concretion!

The scenery along our drive was spectacular, too! Also, notice how dry everything is. We have only gotten about an inch of rain since New Year’s.

Yes, one place the road was really this steep!

Two Videos

March 7, 2015 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We ended up with two videos worth saving in February on my memory card. I found a lot of other videos, from the evening I let the 5-year-old take my camera outside, but it was getting dark and they were quite grainy, and some were so shaky I felt queasy just watching them! Our latest budding photographer needs a few lessons before I share many of his videos.

This first one shows a science experiment we did. We’re studying Apologia’s Zoology 1 book this year, about flying creatures, and they suggested an experiment to show how lift makes flight possible. Air going over a bird’s wing moves faster than the air under the wing, because the top of the wing is curved. That causes less air pressure above the wing than below it, which causes the wing to be pushed up. To demonstrate this, we cut a drinking straw so it would come just above the top of the water in a cup, then blew across the top of the cup through another straw. Because the air pressure directly above the straw was less than over the water in the cup (because it was moving faster), water blew out of the straw!

This second video is from one evening when Gayle coached the little boys and then brought them to the kitchen to sing “Read Your Bible, Pray every day” for us.

A Field Trip–On Sunday?!

April 17, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I’ll try again with this one, too; it is one that vanished in the past week. Rather frustrating!

This story really starts back in January. We were on our way south and passed a big yellow railroad track fixing machine. We’ve seen those a lot of times, since we drive along the railway so much (it parallels Highway 1, which is the main highway on this island and we drive on it practically every time we go anywhere; the railway is visible from the highway probably half the distance from Christchurch to Kaikoura). That day, my 8-year-old asked me how those machines work. I told him I didn’t know, but that if we saw one sometime that was at a place we could pull off, and if there were workmen there who seemed to have time to talk, and if we had extra time, we would stop and ask. Well, one Sunday morning soon after we moved, all those things came together. As we were driving to church, we reached the coast after coming down out of the hills, and approached the first tunnel that the highway goes through. Ahead on the other side of the tunnel, we saw one of those track-fixing machines, and I told Gayle what I had told our son. As we came out of the tunnel, we saw that the machine was right at the end of a short passing lane, with a pull-off right there beside it, and there were two men standing behind it on the track, talking; one was obviously the operator of the machine! We had a rare extra 15 minutes, so Gayle pulled off and asked the man if he would tell us how it worked. Sure, he was glad to! He explained it all, and then took us up into the cab to show us the computerized controls. That machine clamped onto the rails and pulled them in or pushed them out to make them exactly the right distance apart. There were two or three other machines that traveled in a unit with that one, which did other jobs, leveling the track and I’m not sure what else, but they were ahead, through another tunnel. We thanked him and went back to the van as he started moving ahead again. When he came out of the next tunnel, we got to watch as they coupled that machine to the next one. What a great field trip! It was especially meaningful to me because a man in the church I grew up in, someone I knew all my life and who died just about six months ago, had spent a lot of his life building that type of machines. He didn’t build this one; it’s Austrian-built; but it was the same basic idea.

Science This Year

March 20, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I’m excited about what we’re using for Science this year for the boys. Until now, we’ve always used Sonlight Curriculum’s Science, which is a variety of subjects each year and mostly Usborne books. They have activity sheets to go along with the books, and the curriculum is all right as far as it goes. I was starting to feel, though, that we were just scratching the surface of all the different subjects and never digging in deeper, and the boys were getting very bored with it, groaning when it was time to do science. That’s not what we want! Well, sometime around the first of the year I noticed some science books come up on an email list I get, on which homeschoolers around New Zealand can buy and sell books they don’t need anymore. These books were published by Apologia Press, and I knew how much my Mom liked the high school level books they put out. Esther used one last year, and loved it–I never heard her talk so much about what she was learning as with that book! So, I took a closer look on the Apologia website at these books, for elementary students. I liked what I saw! They have six books for younger children, covering Astronomy, Botany, Zoology (three years: birds, fish, land animals), and Human Anatomy. There is a hard cover textbook for each level/subjects, and a notebooking journal to go along with it, with lesson plans. There are actually two notebooks for each textbook, one for older children and one for younger. I was able to get a couple of the textbooks, and notebooks for the Human Anatomy book, from the email list, so we could take a good look. Wow! I liked them immediately! The boys picked up the one about fish right away and were fascinated; one boy even started doing a project from it. I decided, though, that since we had the notebooks for Human Anatomy that we’d do that one this year, and ordered more notebooks so each boy will have one. One of the boys is still proclaiming loudly that the book is boring, and one is ambivalent, but the other two are enthusiastic–and I love it, too! This book glorifies God as Creator and designer all the way through, and shows clearly how wonderfully we are designed. So far, we’ve studied cells, and the boys each got to draw a diagram of a cell (not a simple thing, by the way!). Now, we’re studying bones and the skeleton, and when we happened to eat chicken the day we learned about growth plates we actually found a growth plate on a chicken bone! The notebooking journals provide a great way to write down what they’ve learned, and draw pictures. Some pages have questions to answer or activities to do; we’ll be building a “personal person” for each boy as we go, with overlays to glue onto a picture, showing the skeleton, muscular system, nervous system, etc. I am so thankful to have stumbled onto this book!

This is how we do science–all of us sit on the floor. I read aloud from the textbook, and then we work on filling in the notebooks.