Baseball may be as American as apple pie but I must confess it has never been ‘our’ game. Basketball has been the sport of choice to play for our guys and football the game to obsess over all winter. It was military appreciation day at Coors Field however, and the little boys were itching to see a game live. Allen took all but Brendan last week.
A good time had by all, though I think the necklace and dog tags given as phone company 
promos were an even bigger hit.
Go figure <g>
We actually tackled the craft room job last summer though you wouldnt know it by the stacks of books in the craft room at the moment. : / I mentioned I have a room for scrapbooking and sewing in this house. It is painted a taupe/tan color with cream trim. We purchased a large black banquet table which is the perfect size for crafting – not too deep and long enough for more than one crafter or to use one side for sewing and one for scrapping. I had an old armoire style entertainment center that was on its last legs. The doors had long since broken off. We painted that black and it holds large items now. Next I bought several sets of the black wire snap-together cubes from Target and made shelving around two sides of the room. They are deeper than most shelves and can store deep photo boxes and fabric cuts etc. Also on the shelves are patterns, magazines (in holders) paper, scrap supplies and unfortunately preschool materials. They are safer up there!
Creating Keepsakes has a great article online this week about organizing your scrap space. Many of the tips could be translated into a home office imo. They have a second link to organizing on a budget featuring my favorite – magazine holders with labels. <g> Here is yet another room we haven’t linked to previously. Very bright and cheerful.
I am also in love with the home office and storage pics at Pottery Barn online (sample pic left). Lots of great ideas for stashing your stuff. <g> My fantasy is to move directly into a Pottery Barn catalog – preferably a page with LOTS of fabric lined baskets and deep shelves lol!
Speaking of shelves – we decided to tackle the bookcases downstairs completely this week. Realizing how stressed the stacks are making me it seemed wiser to move the best of the old cases into the living and box whatever doesn’t fit comfortably. At least we can get back to order and clean. I don’t think the built in’s will happen until after the baby with all we have scheduled in the next two months and the thought of approaching Christmas and birthing with a torn up main level puts me over the top. SO, better get moving on that note!
Oh, yes, the home office. In progress! We have yet to decide where that will be. It is in the kitchen right now and may move to the craft room or livingroom. We are organizing the components and then a move won’t be a big ordeal. Remember that organized does not need to look institutional nor modern. This site explains. or you could go Mexican country, English Country,primitive, cottage, or American classic country.
Here are some further links to organizing your home office:
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/dc_design_office_workspace/0,1792,HGTV_3378,00.html home offices
We are plugging away at our home organization project. I got a copy of Simplify Your Life which Cheryl recommended. So far I have been diving into one such book every other month. This one was quite nice. Some parts, particularly the beginning about organizing time, were worded a bit awkwardly to me. But lots of food for thought in practical areas. The prayers at the ends of each chapter are definitely as nice as Cheryl described. Those will be saved since I expect I will be praying for the fortitude to persevere with this project for some time to come. ; )
The author suggested listing your hot spots and estimating how much time they would actually take to tackle. This is my big bugaboo. How much time? Um well if I had tackled them before I might know! Or if I didn’t have half a dozen children needing to be fed, clothed, bathed, educated, and taxi’d precisely while I attempted the hot spot tackle. Being that I do it sorta changes things!
Apparently I am not a good estimator anyway. I figured the current project – paper files and piles – would take about an hr per file drawer. To which I now can only say BWA-HAAAAA!!!! Perhaps make that a day each to sort, purge, and refile into a new container. In all it took the better part of a week to do five drawers which hadn’t been touched in yrs some of them. All the needed papers are now re-filed. There are still a few stacks awaiting permanent storage.
This has been very gratifying though! I had seen a review of Easy File Solutions on a large family blog. (course, which one escapes me now!) I was intrigued by the tabs – pic at left. They use a straight line filing method so all the stand up tabs are lined up behind each other vs zigzagging across the tops of the files. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the logic or the system so I googled straight line filing and found a flash tutorial on Smead’s site. Nothing earth shattering but it made sense. The eye follows a straight line better than others which is why the phone book is set up in columns. You can memorize colors easier than letters also so they color code categories like yellow for education, green for finance, red for medical etc. The Easy File people also have a second tab on the right for the first file in a category. I can’t tell you how nice it is to look at the files now!
Fwiw I used the hanging files with the clip on tabs instead of the ones Easy File uses. The others tend to fall over or slip down if they arent tight in the cabinet. The hanging files are much easy to adjust tabs on also. I did not purchase the Easy File set. You can buy colored tabs to place on the hanging files in the office supply section of Walmart etc. Honestly once you choose your category colors I can’t see that a premade set would be necessary.
There is still more work to do. I have a lot of softcover stuff on the bookshelves. Those will be boxed til the new shelves are finished but at that point I plan to put all softcover and booklet type bks into upright magazine holders which can be labelled more easily. If it doesn’t have a title on a binding then it may as well be in a black hole once it hits a shelf. I am also getting mag holders for the kids school books. We have used crates in past yrs but they tend to wreck the books and cause lots of rifling through during selection. Open shelves are nice but the soft covers tip or bend.
Finally there is the binder project. I am collecting all my articles, printable school projects, and craft patterns etc into topical binders. The thrift shop tends to have an abundance of empty binders cheap. So I am grabbing those each trip and starting to gather all these ideas into binders.
Montessori Mom linked to this site this weekend and I am linking to it also in case you missed it. The Montessori Discovery School has an excellent, concise overview of the method, terminology, and goals for elementary level students.
If the next question is "Why do I care?" you might like to read the results of this study which showed Montessori trained children were head and shoulders ahead of their age-mates in both academic and social/emotional areas as compared to children in non-Montessori schools. Particularly noteworthy to relaxed homeschoolers was the comment that althought they were "not regularly tested or graded, they did just as well in spelling, punctuation and grammar exams as those given conventional lessons." This doesn’t have to be painful folks. ; )
I am knee deep in file cabinets and filing system set up this wknd so am sending another link for grins. The So You Wanna site is like a "For Dummies" online. It has cheat sheets and short explanations of all sorts of basic educational topics like avoiding writing errors, delivering a speech, interpreting poetry, etc. The ettiquette section has additional edu-categories, but do but careful with some of the other categories. A few of the topics are definitely not those you would want to share with children. Consider yourself forewarned <g>
The little boys are on a transcription frenzy this week. After several rounds of "how do you ‘pell….." I suggested to Kieran that he might like to take the pink and blue series control cards (the uncut set with the pics and labels) and copy down his favorites. There was dead silence while he worked only broken by his final sigh of satisfaction when he finished all the words he set out to write. It reminded me of Julia Fogassy’s article describing her girls as preschoolers deep in thought while working on different tasks. That "Montessori sigh" is a beautiful thing!
Aidan was similarly inspired though he decided to ‘write some books’. He took his Bob books and began carefully copying the text word for word. This was an all-consuming task as evidenced by the protruding tongue. ; ) Please ignore the syrup spill on his shirt – it was right after breakfast. <g>
On the Games4Learning yahoo list Heidi shared an idea she heard from a special ed teacher. Save the broken crayons, the tiny ones you would normally throw away, to be used for writing practice. The small size forces the child to use the correct grip (thumb/finger). They also reminded readers of the various pincer grip activities we have talked about over the yrs like pushpin work, tweezer games, bead sorting. Kristen had a nice idea on her blog. Her son was busy putting the colored head straight pins into the holes of a sugar shaker lid. All this pre-writing work is so much more fun than teary agonizing over workbooks in the early elementary years.
It is errand day here. Thought you might like to go on a field trip too. Country Living has a lovely Parade of Rooms to peruse. Better Homes and Gardens has a great slide show and galleries as well. Lots of inspiration there!
I am working on updating and rearranging my sidebars to include our favorite curriculum picks and things we love to fill our home with. The Prairie Home is finished and the math has begun. Over the next few weeks I hope to have it all uploaded.
The Prairie Home Picks include things we own or collect, namely my Blue Willow dishes. Nothing says country and heritage and warmth to me like Blue Willow on a crochet tablecloth. : ) Guess that is the midwest childhood in me. I was very pleased to find an inexpensive source for sets. Allen will see this on my wishlist lol! The image uploaded here is from our China unit this summer. The girls and their friends each got a paper plate and blue marker. After reading the Blue Willow legend they proceeded to create their own.
The curriculum picks will be largely self teaching and inexpensive as well as limited to things I have actually used over the yrs. I am so glad I am a pack rat in that sense because so many books that I bought and shelved are now standbys in our program. I think life was overwhelming when we first began with the medical issues and constant moves. In looking back over these books I would come to find they were delightful and incorporated them into our days. Not ALL of them at any one time mind you. Each year we have subjects that are more notebook based and a few that we hit with worktexts.
No way!
Way!
Aidan went out to feed the dog yesterday and came running back in to say there was a snake by the doghouse. We weren’t too concerned since we have found a few garter snakes in recent weeks. The only other big snake we have seen here was a giant gopher snake a few yrs ago. He was carried off by a hawk shortly after that. This, howevever was another story…..
There in the yard was a smallish (3 feet?) snake coiled and hissing at the frantic dog. The snake’s tail was poised and rattling in the middle of the coils and its head was tracking the dog menacingly. It was venomous. Allen got his gun and shot it, though let me just say these buggers are remarkably resilient. : / Took a few shots to finally do it in and safely remove it from the yard. We were able to all get a good close up look so we know what to look for in the future.
The future is our concern today. This snake was clearly not full grown which begs the question of where it came from and if there are more. Everyone is on snake alert. We can’t figure out what the draw would be to the house since we are pretty much rodent free with all these barn cats. The net did say that snakes are more active in early fall as they seek warmer winter quarters. It is enough to give a mother a good case of the heebie jeebies regardless of the snake’s original intention. Thank you guardian angels!
pRebecca commented about fantasy play:
<<How would you discourage them from doing so? Would you? I just can’t imagine being able to do it. In theory I could but it would be difficult in reality. >>
I think this is where the confusion arises. Fantasy play would be considered more of an indicator than an end in itself. Akin to attacking a fever without addressing the underlying trigger. Like you said, it is more prevalent after tv viewing. In our family it is way more prevalent after stressful times or times when the little ones are left to their own devices.
We have found that, just as the articles suggest, our small people resort to fantasy play less as the opportunity to do ‘real stuff’ increases. If they can prepare real food and serve a real family – and it can be done!- they eagerly abandon the toy kitchen. If they have sports equipment they will generally choose to play real games. If they have help working with the horses they will trade the toy animals for real any day. Now animals may not be available but usually yards are and real tools can have their handles cut down for smaller hands.
Ditto cleaning tools. Rebecca says,"Everyone is willing to repair the fence with a hammer and nails but no one want to sweep the floors." Sometimes it’s the accessories that seal the deal lol! Individualized chore aprons, a personal set of tools and nontoxic cleaners etc. Moreover I think the European Montessori school linked to yesterday said it best when explaining the practical life activities – the motion of scrubbing the table and the suds created are both more important to the preschool child than the end effect of a clean table. To me this is the whole point of prepared practical life activities. Rather than being artificial they serve as a sort of mental and physical calisthenic to refine motions, a lab of sorts. No one likes to do a job they are not able to do well. Practical life trays can be an important precursor to effective real life helping.
Likewise the school says that children "spontaneously and naturally seek order". This may not be evident at home though I noticed that when it was not it was usually due to the fact that we had gotten snowed under with stuff. Once they have a space that they are able to maintain they tend to do so much more willingly. This was driven home to me last night. We took the toys out of the boys bedroom. Some had migrated back in during the wknd and there was a mini-tornado left from church prep since we had gone to the park after church last week and had not put one pair of church shoes away properly. It looked daunting but the boys knew where everything went and didn’t fuss over picking up. Aidan even remarked LOOK Dad, that didn’t take long at all to pick up!! this is rather revolutionary in my life. <g> Huge incentive to stick to the routines and continue the purging.
So bottom line,I try to keep the little ones right with us doing meaningful things like carrying the library bks or helping bathe and dress the real baby. Read about real people who did fascinating things. They get the impression early on that they, and their contributions, are greatly valued and that they positively impact the family. This is important because when left to themselves they tend to get mischievous and they quickly sense that they are a liability rather than a blessing. We work to be blessing – all of us. All of us are coming around to cultivating a deep appreciation of our roles in maintaining our environment. (yes, mom too!)
Anyway, no I wouldn’t discourage the play. I would use it as a gauge to see if it may indicate a need for less tv (no tv?) or less stimulation (clutter, over-scheduling) or more satisfying activities. I think once we read the method over and over we generally know when we are dealing with a proper use of imagination and when it signifies a deviation or a stress reduction technique. A good measure would be our comfort level. I don’t allow for fantasy play with school materials. That would be a good example. If they don’t understand a concept or are over(or under)stimulated in an exercise it tends to disintegrate into sword fighting or tossing the pieces about the table. Actually this happens with toys as well. IMO,that is normally my cue that something is amiss, rather than a sign of immense creativity.<g> If they were playing St George slaying the dragon I would be tempted to smile and leave them be.
It is usually easy to discern if you are dealing with reenactment – which I would interpret as the child working out the functions of different roles – and disordered play. In the latter they are still working internal things out but it might signal to us a need to assess the environment.
Starry Sky Journal 