First Post

If you would like to buy any of the books I talk about in this post, please click on my Amazon carousel above. Any money I make as an Amazon associate will be used to fund our homeschooling adventures.

What have we been up to at Iggyschool? Right now we're doing a lot of reading. Iggy has been enjoying all of the different Basher books - Math, Physics, Astronomy, Planet Earth, Rocks and Minerals. We've been getting them from the public library, but Iggy seems to like them so much that my mother has volunteered to send us a small book allowance each month and we will be collecting the whole series over the next year. He has chosen Punctuation as his first book - our library doesn't have it. I will make sure to read it myself - I am a comma junkie and have no idea how to punctuate.

The local library didn't have the Grammar Ray series, but since Iggy loves graphic novels, I ordered the Nouns and Pronouns book, hoping that Iggy would enjoy it. And he did! We'll get one book a month from the series. I had him take a 2nd grade Language Arts standards test at the beginning of the year and he got 2/3 correct (50 out of 75). Grammar seemed to trip him up the most (I remember this being an issue for me, as well) so I am hoping these comics help him retain the information.

We've gone back to the Ancient World Story of the World audiobook. He was desperate to start Volume 2 (Middle Ages), but once we did, he found that he wanted to go back and do more of the workbook and add more to his Ancient World bibliography. I don't blame him. It is a wonderful series and we have more than enough subject matter to last us all year if we stay with Volume 1. Secular homeschoolers - don't let the Christian slant of Classical education scare you away from Story of the World. It is a fantastically written and really unbiased history.

Math seems to be trucking along. We're neither ahead nor behind. Right now we're mainly dealing with place value (up to the thousands) and double digit addition with borrowing, with some very basic multiplication facts thrown in. All normal second grade stuff. Isn't there some joke about homeschoolers trying to make their little kids learn calculus? I think the temptation is there to try and get far ahead - especially as a validation for homeschooling! Hey, I admit it! But, the temptation is small. Though I wonder......if only there was a calculus Basher book, we might dip our toes in. Just kidding! I've never even taken calculus and I think Larry will have to take over for math from seventh grade on (he is the math guy, after all).

We've got a garden (Iggy is holding a little pumpkin he grew from seed in the picture above), which has been lovely. Right now, though it has been totally neglected for a couple of months, it is still churning out cherry romas, peppers, cowpeas, and eggplant. Plants want to grow! This was our first year with a garden and we will definitely do it again next year. Iggy and his little sister Lucy were both very helpful in the garden. Lucy loves to pull a cherry tomato off the plant and eat it raw. While Iggy maintains his "no vegetables" stance, at least he can identify them.

Lucy is 18 months and just starting to pay attention to books being read to her. In true pre-literate fashion, she has chosen two books and mainly wants to be read to from Where is Coco Going? and Mister Dog by Margaret Wise Brown. Where is Coco Going? is really cute and there are a couple of pages where she has memorized a word or two to go with the story. She is "reading". Freight Train by Donald Crews served this purpose for Iggy when he was little.

Mister Dog's appeal for a tiny girl is a little harder to understand - it's a strange story. And it's wordy. But Lucy loves it (I love it, too.), particularly the page where Mister Dog frolics with other dogs and the page that begins something like "Mister Dog was a conservative, which means that he liked everything at the right time.". That cracks her up. Picture a giant question mark over my head.

Oh, and we have a piano! A real piano! A wonderful old upright that is in great shape. It was a gift from a dear friend up the block and Iggy and Larry have been messing around on it quite a bit since we had it moved. We're finally putting Larry's 2/3 of a degree from Berklee School of Music to good use!