The Colton Family Schoolhouse

So far history has been a hit. We are reading Story of the World: Ancient History, volume one of a set of four world history books written for kids Anya’s age. The book itself is a light, story-driven tour of ancient history, and I also bought an activity guide which has tons of recommended extra books and crafts.  We’ve made:  - a model of the Nile delta in a giant pan  - sugar cube pyramids  - cuneiform writing in clay  - Sumerian clay seals  We really liked a library book called Ancient Egyptians and their Neighbors. A section on Mesopotamia talked about architecture, art, clothing, food, and work, and included some projects. Anya picked a weaving project. Mesopotamian weaving was done vertically.  Anya is keeping a history notebook—about once a week she narrates to me what she remembers on a certain topic, and I write it down. It is fun to hear what she remembers and she’s interested enough to narrate long paragraphs without prompting, telling me “...

School has been in session for a full month now, and it has flown by! I have started a blog post about it several times and never finished. There seems to be too much to say, as there is a lot going on here for the second-grader and preschooler. And for me! The summer was a time of learning and processing for me, and now I get to experiment with what I absorbed from multiple books on homeschooling.  I read:  - Family Matters  by David Guterson  - The 4-Hour School Day by Durenda Wilson  - Homeschool Bravel y by Jamie Erickson  - parts of The Well-Trained Mind and Writing with Ease  by Susan Wise Bauer  - I’m starting Teach Your Own by John Holt The biggest takeaways?  One of the biggest benefits of a homeschool education is that it is, in fact, not school at all. This is a terrible paraphrase of a really good quote in one of the books I read. I think it synthesizes what I learned about how a lot of what I think of as "school" or "educ...