Weeks 17-21: Unschooling

And we're back! I know, it's been a month since I last wrote a blog post and you've all been anxious to know where we've been. I titled the last blog post "All the time in the world" in reference to my recent discovery that I need to teach more patiently, allowing more time for my son to go at his own pace and for me to not feel desperate when he isn't interested in moving forward. Combine that with a very hectic work schedule for me last month and a family vacation to Ohio in the middle of it and we've not done much schooling lately. In fact, I haven't done any formal schooling and during that time I've seen what it might be like to follow an "Unschooling" philosophy. For those of you not in the know, Unschooling is (essentially) a homeschool method where the parent let's their child discover things on their own by making sure they have the resources necessary to do so. And that is basically what DJ has been doing the last few weeks.

Week 16: All the time in the world

After taking Christmas week off, DJ surprised me by voluntarily selecting the Movable Alphabet to work with. He still didn't want to write words. He tells me that he "has too many sounds in his head to think of a word". Instead he decided to match the MA letters to the double sandpaper letters, which was a great opportunity for me to see how many of those sounds he recognizes and he knows most of them.

Week 14: Contagious Math

DJ has a lot of friends. He is a very social creature. But he has known one of his best friends, A, since they were both just a few months old. A hasn't been to preschool yet except for some awesome outdoor preschools that have taught her wonderful things about nature and herself. But a couple of weeks ago her mom asked if they could do a day of school with DJ for me to show her some math.

Week 13: Reading, Writing & Geography

I am hopelessly late in writing this post for last week. Sorry to keep you waiting!  The holiday season has kept me running faster than I can keep up.

I started DJ on a modified version of Phonetic Object boxes. This is an early reading activity where a set of objects and written labels are matched. Typically the labels would be written on slips of paper and I may eventually get there but without the time to prepare the materials in advance, I punted and wrote the words out with the movable alphabet and then had DJ match the objects.

Week 12: Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! We certainly did so "school" was light this week.


Although DJ can easily count to 50 now, when I asked what he wanted to work on he chose to go back to the beginning and do the Cards & Counters. Because he has done this many times before I let him do the non-traditional pattern for the counters. Typically the counters would be placed in pairs so that odd numbers would stand out with the extra counter standing alone. But DJ fully understands odd & even already. After completing the layout, he chose to add the Bead Stair by matching each bead strand above its corresponding number. You can see he's also still in his PJs. Now that it is mostly too cold to go outside he has decided there is no point in getting dressed. Lol.

Week 11: Golden Bead Division & More

I presented Golden Bead Division to DJ this week. I had been most nervous about this operation and I don't know why because it seemed DJ understood it better than any of the others. I started by having him roll the place value ice to choose the starting quantity. He first rolled 9,290 so I began to use my calculator to figure out how to adjust it to a number evenly divisible by 3. But before I finished, DJ picked up the unit dice and said, "I'm going to change this to 7 because I don't want 0." Hah! Lucky me, 9,297 IS divisible by 3.

Week 10: Birthday Gifts

DJ received this neat US map placemat for his birthday last week. It has images on the various states representing things you would find in that state. Then the border has some of the same images so you can play a game of finding which state each one belongs in. It also sparked questions like why the pig was in Iowa and the alligator in Florida.

Week 8: Happy Halloween

We did almost no school this week. I spent most of the week sick and uninterested in being a responsible homeschool teacher. So this is going to be a shorter post than usual.

Week 7: Multiplication & More Writing

So as the school year progresses on, I presented Golden Bead Multiplication to my almost 4-year old this week! I would NEVER have thought to introduce the concept of multiplication in preschool but seeing the way Montessori does it, it makes SO much sense.

I started off by giving DJ a number, 1,324, and asking him to build the number with beads. Then, I laid out the same number two more times and asked him what he noticed about them. When he realized they were all three the same, I said to him, "Right, we're going to take 1,324 three times. That's multiplication."


Then I asked if he wanted to see what the total was. So he combined all three piles and added up the totals, to 3,972. I took away the two extra sets of small number cards and added a different card with a #3 on it to reiterate that the problem we had solved was "1,324 times 3 is 3,972". The next time we do multiplication, we'll skip the three sets of number cards and only use a single card for the multiplier.


In other exciting math news, my wonderful husband finished a new DIY Hundred Board. Yay! I had received the 100 tiles in a Craigslist lot of materials that ended up essentially being free to me. I really wanted to use them but there was no board, which I felt was important. DJ's dad, cut the back out of extra hardboard that we had in the garage and we bought about $2 of wood pieces from Michael's for the trim. The lines are just drawn on with a sharpie.


And this is why I am so glad I decided to make a board instead of trying to use the tiles stand alone. DJ is still working on learning the numbers from 21-40. I put the Hundred Board on the shelf and let him discover it and explore it on his own without any presentation. He immediately started to place the tiles on the board randomly and didn't stop until he had filled every slot. He was so surprised and excited to see that he had just enough tiles. I smiled and said, "That's right, there are 100 spaces and 100 tiles. Do you want me to show you something?" When he agreed, I pulled out the number tiles 1-20 and started placing them in order with #1 in the top left slot. I'd only made it to #3 when DJ took over and filled in all the way to 20. Then I pulled out 21-40 and we worked slowly through those numbers together.


I had planned on stopping there but DJ pointed to the rest of the board and said, "Let's fill these in too!" So I pulled out the high-end condiment cups that I had stolen from Five Guys Burgers (shhh) and we sorted the rest of the tiles in groups of 10's. DJ wasn't fully understanding what we were doing at first so we fell into a pattern that he would choose a tile, read the number to me (usually in the form of 'five-tens, two') and I would point to the cup it belonged in. As he was doing that, I sorted through tiles as well so speed us along. Even still, when we were done sorting, DJ was done with the Hundred Board, which didn't bother me because I hadn't expected to do that much anyway. On another day, he chose to work with the board again and went back to just placing the tiles randomly. And that is fine too. Connecting the truth of the 1-to1 correspondence with the written numbers 1-100 is a process and he's studying it.








On the writing front, I've been challenging DJ to write 4 letters and 1 number each day for 10 days. With 40 letter sounds and 10 numerals, he'll have written every symbol at least once at the end of 2 weeks. By the end of the first week, he was pushing back on the "assignment" nature of this work when he's used to being able to refuse work. But I'm pushing him because I know him. He's capable of writing these letters at this stage but he doesn't believe he is. Once he has experienced successfully writing each one, he'll be more likely to choose the work voluntarily. I'm definitely dealing with an intelligent boy here who believes everything he does should be easy so if it's hard then he must not be capable of doing it. I'm going to have to teach him that things worth doing as worth working hard for.


Speaking of doing easy things, this is an awful picture, but DJ has been choosing the Brown Stair and Pink Tower every week lately. He worked with these extensively last year. I'm struggling with allowing him to do this as part of "school" versus expecting him to choose something more "appropriate". But I know all primary works are supposed to be available for selection even if they're "too easy".


So while DJ was doing his Brown Stair, I chose to work with the Geometric Solids and these picture cards that I printed. DJ looked at these pictures when I first put them on the shelf a few weeks ago and immediately put them back so I was hoping I could inspire him by working on it myself. It sort of worked. I had matched a lot of the cards when DJ became intrigued and started taking over. He easily placed some of the pictures under the ellipsoid (watermelon), sphere (soccer ball), and cube (dice). But then he struggled with tripod (triangle-based pyramid) and wanted to put the work away. If it's easy, it's fun. If it's challenging, it must go far, far away. Hah. It definitely feels like 7 weeks into the year. Is it time for the holidays yet?


On another day, I read these books to DJ as part of introducing the 5 classes of vertebrates. These books are a little above DJ's level so it takes some of skill on my part to keep him interested. We happened to be in his play room as I was reading and we started with the book on mammals. It was complete serendipity that DJ's basket of jungle & farm animals was out in the floor. I guess he'd been playing with it and hadn't put it back. So when we got to sections in the book about horses having 1 toe, cows having 2 toes and primates having opposable thumbs, DJ was able to check these facts on his animals.


And while he wasn't checking the accuracy of my book, he was busily building this elaborate train set. The joys of homeschooling is sometimes allowing the learning & playing to happen at the same time.

Week 6: Writing Progress!

Early this week, I stopped at Michael's craft store intending to buy $2 worth of wood for a DIY project. I finally made it out of the store $18 later by begging my son to not let me look at anything else.

One of my impulse buys was sand for our sand tray. DJ had accidentally spilled all the sand a little while ago and although I had more white sand to fill it, I just wasn't inspired to do so. Then I passed the craft sand aisle at Michael's this week and saw a variety of color choices. I asked DJ to choose the color he wanted a and he chose pink!

Week 4: Numbers & Letters with Trucks

Did I just write that?  Are we finished with four weeks already?  Wow has this month flown by. DJ did a lot of great work this week but the one theme you'll see throughout is trucks. Very little schoolwork would get accomplished without the cooperation of DJ's trucks.

Whirlwind of activity

Wow. For some reason, DJ decided to take a tour of nearly everything on his shelves this week. Note that we are still NOT doing school in any formal sense of the word. But that doesn't seem to stop DJ.

Here is a list of all the activities he chose to do this week in no particular order:

M&D Pattern Blocks & Boards
Guidecraft Feel & Find shapes
Little Blue Truck Book
Knobbed & Knobless Cylinders
Golden Bead Subtraction
Sandpaper Numbers
Cards & Counters (1-10)
Sequencing Cards
Sandpaper Letters
Movable Alphabet
Touch Tablets w/ blindfold
Binomial Cube
Trinomial Cube
Zoology puzzles
Living/Nonliving cards
Rhyming Cards
Classification Cards (bathroom)
Parts of a Car (3-part cards)
Table washing
Vacuuming
Making PB&J sandwiches

Summer Fun & a Song

It has been a full three weeks since I last posted! That's the longest break since I started this blog just over a year ago. The lack of blog posts is mostly because we've been doing a lot of this...

Welcome to Summer

DJ did some practical life work in the yard with his dad recently. It was hot, hard, dry work... but...

Not school

I've been on furlough from homeschooling the past couple of weeks mostly because I was a bit burned out and looking forward to the summer. But there is no stopping DJ. He's like the Energizer Bunny, if anyone recognizes that reference.


As mentioned in recent posts DJ has been crazy about math lately. Last week, he selected the Pink Tower for the first time in a long time so he could count the number of cubes. As he was putting it away, he had the largest cubes on the stand and he stacked a few of the smallest cubes in his hand. I asked him how many cubes were on the stand and he said "six". Then I asked how many were in his hand and he answered "four". Finally I asked how many would be on the tower when he added the 4 cubes to the 6 and he immediately said "ten".

School Days

DJ is moving slowly through the early Golden Bead work. This involves matching the large number cards to the corresponding cubes, squares, tens and units. He enjoys this work but it is challenging for him so we are taking it very slow.

Life Cycles for Spring

DJ's grandpa Dennis has signed him up for the subscription service from Brainy Kits. We received the third set last week and it is their best one yet, by far. Although I might be a little biased because I needed to be putting together a study on life cycles but I was dragging my feet as I wasn't really sure where to start. Brainy Kits solved that for me!

Letters & Numbers

As we're winding down the first year of DJ's preschool, the work is all about letters and numbers. He still occasionally chooses cylinder blocks, geometric solids or lacing cards but those seem to be more like downtime for him rather than real, challenging work. In addition to the official school time work, I hear DJ counting his toys during playtime and he's analyzing the sounds in every word throughout the day... t-t-tiger, scared-d-d-d.

School Days

Geography: I presented the USA puzzle map last week. This is a BIG work for DJ. In this photo he's pointing to the state where we live. I showed him the states where his dad & I was born and all the places we've each lived. I also showed him where his grandparents live.

Sound Games galore!

DJ has been in love with sound games lately and is asking to play them all.the.time! It is so much fun but they don't really lend themselves to photos so I don't have many pictures.