day 1

I'm Will Pflaum and I have a lot of blogs even one about homeschooling already. This one is about what we actually do as homeschoolers -- the exercises and activities that make homeschooling work for (or don't work for us). I guess the point is to show in a detailed way what we do in case it helps someone out there either currently or potentially homeschooling.





So right now there are three kids in the family, Ollie, 11, Lotta, 7, and Leo, 5. Another one should be here in about four weeks. The mom is Aenne and the dad Will.

Today was an unusually unbooked up day -- where we actually stayed home most of the day.

Ollie has his own blog. Ollie did some writing and reading today, plus wrote down his goals for the week and practiced piano. He plays piano well. Then he worked all day learning how to edit movies and put this video together. He won't figure in today' blog post much, as he was busy editing. Here he is editing:

I got in from the barn and the dogs and we got into full swing about 9 AM. First class, Lotta had a math class. Here she did multiplication:

We're just introducing the concept, with graph paper. We make flags: you make a row of, say, 6 boxes, then make 4 stripes, then count the boxes: 24. I gave her the list of problems and some colored pencils and she did a page of that.

Then we did place value. We got an abacus, a red pencil and a green pencil, and a 10 sided red die (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) and and a green one the same. The red would be the ones and the green would be the tens in all of the areas: pencils, dice and abacus.

So, go ahead Lotta, roll:

She got:

Okay, good, 38. Write it down.

Now, show the same on the abacus. When using an abacus it is always important to say "ca-CHING" when you trade in 10 ones for a ten.

There, that's 38. Again, green for 10s, red 1s. Notice the book in the back there, Are You My Mother? by Eastman. Lotta read that to her mom and I earlier. Now, roll again and get another number:

Got a 45. Now add them up:

We did a ch-CHING. Okay, that was math and reading (the book above). Now Spanish:

And a little more Spanish:

Lotta practiced a little piano:

And then Leo came home from his grandmother's, where he had been making fish/birds to hang over his bed:

Also with his grandmother, he had been to the library and brought home two great books. Here's one:

Then lunch. We were lucky mommy was home for lunch, so it was very good.

No reading at the table, Ollie. I went back to the barn and then about 2 PM Lotta and Leo went to piano lessons:

While Leo did his lesson, Lotta wrote a letter to her friend Lily:

Then back home I said that if they got all the snow off the trampoline and jumped on it for awhile they could have popcorn. I went back to the barn and Aenne was at work by this time -- she worked a long evening after working at home during school time:

Then some silliness:

And then they watched the Sams (German movie) while Ollie uploaded his video, practiced a bit, did his blog and helped with the firewood. I snuck out to the barn one more time. Aenne came home after dinner. A little more play, we started a new book, Fray Perico, then bed. 

And that's the day.

Google wants to compete in social media with Facebook, to Google put all my pictures from this blog on my google+ account, and I tried to de-link the two from within google + but all I managed to do was have google erase my photos from my blog. What I learned is to nevcr use google + for any purpose and have as few friends, etc. as possible and hope it goes away.

So my pictures are supposed to be in order but their not and the blog is messed up.