Shark Week

The past week has been a little lax as far as schoolwork. Granted, we watched videos about sharks, read some books about sharks and made some shark pictures, but we never got around to my idea for shark math, and several other thoughts I had. So, into the future idea bin go: School of fish drawn on paper and a paper shark cutout. Cover a number of the fish school and count how many are left! And… Once more we’ve not written our shark song, or our spider song, or our horse song. So…this coming week we are writing a song about something.

That aside, Ronan made a breakthrough this week in his coloring of a shark page from our creatures of Hawaii coloring book. Using both hands indiscriminately, he colored his sharks with more care than I’ve ever seen him use in coloring. While he didn’t remain entirely in the confines of the shark’s outline, he still managed to color the shark and not just scribble the whole page! Jonas used a red pen and a blue pen, making his shark picture a two-toned marvel of precise scribbles.

Perhaps the reason we did little this week as far as sharks go was because the boys already know a lot from one of their favorite books: “Surprising Sharks,” by Nicola Davies. This book is beautifully written and illustrated to teach kids about sharks, showing them the marvelous and irreplaceable creatures that they are. Jonas has learned from this book that sharks bones are made of the same stuff as our noses and ears, cartilage! Both boys point out their favorites from the pictures of different sharks that are illustrated in the front and back of the book. “What’s this mom, oh yeah it’s a whale shark!”

Aside from reading stories, watching videos and coloring pictures, the boys worked on letters and attempted to memorize the name for shark in Spanish. ‘R’s still manage to elude them in Spanish so the actual pronunciation ended up being Tibuón, instead of Tiburón, but they were very close and I applaud their attempt!

Next we study knights and chivalry in preparation for Jonas’ knight-themed birthday party!

Horse Week

After the completion of our first week of homeschooling with the subject of spiders I offered the boys the chance to decide what we would study next. It was unanimous: Horses! With Kimberly, we eagerly planned a week of barn visits, riding lessons on Jax (Kimberly’s kid-friendly thoroughbred), basic horse anatomy lessons and much more.

We started the week out with a study of H and O (followed later in the week with R, S, and E, repeats from SPIDER week). Jonas learned the sounds of the letters and offered possibilities of other words that began with those letters. He practiced writing them while Ronan drew pictures on his writing pages and then we left for the library to find some horse books. Among our horse encyclopedias we also found some story books about a horse named Blaze and his adventures with Billy. The Black Stallion also made it home with us as one of teacher mama’s favorite movies from childhood.


Jax obliged us with a lesson on basic horse grooming, anatomy and riding. Very quickly Jonas learned to give Jax a few basic commands with his body in order to steer the horse in the direction he chose. Jonas learned to keep his toes pointed toward the sky, sit up straight, look where he wanted to go and hold his ice cream cones upright (hands holding the reigns). With the help of a drawing on poster board done the night before by teacher mama, Jonas and Ronan got a bit of anatomy practice before their visit with Jax so that they were somewhat prepared to point out his muzzle, flanks, hocks, withers, nostrils, mane, tail, knees, neck and other basic body parts. Ronan, of course, made sure to point out where his weenie was hiding.

After our visit with Jax we decided we’d like to visit some other horses as well so with the help of the internet and Kimberly we found two more barns to visit. The first we saw was Natural Horse Savvy, run by Monica Meyette at Eden Farms Stables. Monica is truly invested in the horses she works with and rescues horses from bad situations to train them and the people who deal with them to a better understanding of each other. She showed us a Hanoverian mare who had been stuck in a stall for over a year before Monica rescued her. The mare was doing very well when we saw her but had needed extensive physical therapy after being rescued.

Our visit with Natural Horse Savvy flowed quickly into a short visit at Kimberly’s previous barn where we got to see a variety of horses in a beautiful barn setting.



Back at home the boys built a round pen in the living room out of chairs and cushions and we practiced lunging each other. Jonas drew a very beautiful picture of Roskve, his favorite horse that he calls his (grandma’s first filly born at Landwoven Farm). His math for the week was a series of word problems involving counting grandma’s Icelandic horses and imagining rearranging them according to different pastures at the farm.

Horse week was a spectacular success!

Week One: Spiders!

Upon embarking on our unique homeschooling adventure I am overjoyed at the progress already made by Jonas especially (Ronan enjoys everything but at 3 is basically mimicking his brother). He is quick to learn letters and enjoys our games finding other words that begin with the letter we are working on. “S” is a particular favorite of both boys because it begins “Superman” and “Spiderman” in addition to “Spider” and “Soup.” Jonas created spider art paying particular attention to the number of legs the spider we were studying had (sadly we noticed that the specimen we were studying was one leg short). Ronan promptly named the spider Jackson (a nickname Kimberly uses for her horse Jax) because the spider was discovered in Kimberly’s bathroom. I should note that Ronan’s tiger stuffed-animal is also named Jackson. Seems it’s his favorite name.

We observed several spiders over the course of the week and noticed differences in coloring, length of legs, size and shapes of their bodies and more. We even attempted to keep a spider egg sac in a jar in the hopes of seeing it hatch but were not rewarded with baby spiders due to the season already ending.

One particularly note-worthy achievement of Jonas’ was the idea to make, and construction of, a spider web out of string taped to a poster-board. With a little help from teacher mama, Jonas constructed a beautiful web which now hangs in his bedroom.


Spider math was great fun as well. We drew pictures of spiders adding their numbers together and talking about the new number of spiders we’d created in the group.

Jonas was quick to demonstrate how spiders move and had us all crawling on the floor like spiders. This quickly morphed into moving like tigers and we noted the differences in how these very different creatures move.

We did sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider but didn’t get around to making up our own spider song. Also missed this week was a great idea from grandma to capture a real spider web with spray paint on hard cardstock (being careful the spider is out of the way and not repeating the same technique with the same spider’s web continuously or the poor spider wouldn’t be able to catch anything to eat!). Both of these ideas I hope to use in the future.

Now on to horses!