A slow but steady start to our adventures

                                                                             Hello! 
This is my first post on our new Homeschool Blog. Along with that, this is also my first time homeschooling my son. Gavin is six years old and entering the first grade. He's going through a lot of changes in his life. Actually, our family as gone through a lot of changes in the last couple of years. In July 2012 we moved to the state of Maryland after living for four years in Japan. Although Gavin was originally born in Maryland, we moved to Japan when he was just a year old, so all he was familiar with was there. The transition to the states was not easy on him, or on any of us.  However, it was time for changes and we had lots of wonderful friends and family waiting for us in the states.  So far, I can say that it was hard leaving Japan, but we are sure having a lot of fun here, and we look forward to what the future holds for us. Having mentioned that, next week our family will be moving into a new home, so we have not started any formal homeschooling. We plan on making a school room in our new house, and little by little we are collecting supplies to start first grade this summer. I plan to share the progression of our school room as it comes into place along with all of our adventures before we officially start.

Right now I am teaching Gavin things here and there before we get settled into our new home. We go to children's events at libraries, take little field trips to museums, go out into nature, and work on his academics in and out of the home. Not too different from what I will be doing once we officially start school. Right now, it's just much less structured. And as much as Gavin loves everything we have been doing, he craves structure. Every morning he keeps me on track with our morning routine; breakfast, educational programing for an hour, and then yoga. Much like his father in that aspect, and a quality I wish I had. I imagine he will be a very organized and well planned adult in the future.

Above you will see a picture of my husband showing Gavin the constellations. At night we try to do relaxing activities, and this one was lots of fun for Gavin. I am not sure where they sell these tiny planetariums anymore, but this one is actually a very old one we bought from the Discovery Channel years ago. Still works great, and we blew the dust off of it last night and enjoyed an evening under the stars in our living room. 

This morning we celebrated the Summer Solstice, the very first day of summer! I own an online jewelry store, so I have a very large collection of beads. I sorted through my beads and took out anything that was sparkly, translucent, and colorful and set it out for a relaxing morning of making suncatchers. I used beading wire and attached a crystal or droplet bead to the ends with a crimping bead. I let Gavin pick out the one he liked best, and had him bead the rest of the way up. It's fun to see what kids come up with. He pretty much stuck to a pattern, but then ran out of the ones he needed to continue his pattern, and then just started adding a collection of sparkle and clear colors.


 Honestly there is no right or wrong way to do this. As long as you have any kind of bead that catches the light, nothing can keep it from being beautiful. We have these in Gavin's room in our apartment now, but they will be hanging from our window in our new school room soon.

We originally planned to visit the library today for a science Lego lab, but it was the official first day of summer and the day was beautiful, how could we not spend it outdoors? Gavin and I put together his first Field Journal today. We used one of those typical Mead notebooks. Gavin wrote in crayon "My Field Journal" on a piece of green construction paper, and drew a picture of a little bird at the bottom to symbolize it was to be used for nature study. 

I decided to have him start off this book with a little leaf study. I took him to the Robinson Nature Center in Columbia, Maryland, which was extra fun because we got to see so much of summer coming into bloom. Then to the Centennial Park, where he got to play in the playground afterward. We didn't take the leaves home, instead Gavin put the leaves behind pages and used crayons to rub on top of the page the leaf was laying under.

The result was a work of art and science. Tomorrow we plan on looking up the tree the leaves came from, and write a few facts next to his pictures.

Gavin enjoyed using his circular crayons for this project. We make these often using broken crayons (a great way to recycle them) and placing different colors together in a cupcake pan. Then melt them in the oven for a few minutes.