Swimming Milestone: Climbing Out of Edge of Pool (Safety Skills) - Age 25 Months

Ever since Damien was a newborn, part of his home swim lessons has been hanging on the edge of the pool, and once he learned how to crawl, he has been practicing climbing out of the pool from the edge, with my help.

I have always given him as little help as possible so that he could learn to do it by himself one day.

Being able to get out of the pool - especially in the case of an accident where there is no one there to help you - is a vital safety skill and is part of the reason why I have always emphasized it in our lessons.

One or two weeks ago, Damien, at age 2 years 1 month old, finally climbed out of the pool on his own.



We were pretty excited!

Is learning how to climb out of the edge of the pool part of your swim lesson experience?

High School & Plans for My Eight-Year-Old

This summer I have been mulling over our plans for the future, realizing that I am going to have to alter my original intentions when I began this homeschooling journey.

See, from the time I first decided I wanted to homeschool my oldest child, I always said that I did not want to homeschool him all the way through high school.

I wanted him to have an accredited diploma, and I also wanted him to be able to make use of the many free resources public high school offers: foreign language, science labs, sports and physical activities, interesting electives, and so on.

But then, somewhere along the line I kind of forgot how quickly he had been going and what that would mean for enrolling him in high school.

I don't know why it never hit me before, as we have been on this "accelerated education" path for quite some time now. I suppose I just never put the two and two together and connected the dots.

What dots? Well, Hunter is currently somewhere around three grade levels ahead (he started 5th grade halfway through the year he "normally" would have been in 2nd grade). And because of this, I only recently realized that by the time Hunter will be old enough to traditionally start middle school, he will have already completed the entire middle school curriculum.

Which also means that by the time he is old enough to start high school, he will be pretty much done with the entire high school curriculum, as well.

Hmm.

There are several ways I could move forward at this point:

1. Early enrollment. I could attempt to work with the schools to enroll him when he is academically ready for the work, but I am probably not going to take this path.

For one, I have my doubts on whether or not the schools would be accommodating. And two? He would be ready for middle school sometime this fall and the kid still plays with nerf guns and wears Ninjago underwear. He's eight. Interacting with older kids within society? Great. The not-very-supervised, full-of-kids-who-are-bored-out-of-their-mind jungle that is junior high? Not so much, at least not for an eight-year-old.

2. Keep on keepin' on. At the moment I have decided that we will, for now, plan to continue homeschooling for the next few years as we work towards early "graduation" (completion of K-12 curriculum).

The curriculum provider we use (Time4Learning) actually just expanded their offerings (as in, this happened within the last week!) and now have a high school curriculum available, including four years of English, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Hooray!

This was such a relief to hear of this news, as I have spent quite a bit of time plotting out where on earth to buy textbooks, online courses, or in-person classes to cover high school level material, and it was looking so overwhelming (and expensive). Such a huge load has been taken off my back and this now seems doable.

3. High school after high school. In all of this pondering I had this funny thought that even if by the time he is old enough to go to high school he has already completed the entire basic curriculum, that doesn't mean he can't still attend.

Many states and school districts allow homeschoolers to enroll in public school classes part time, taking only a few classes (such as art and choir) without taking the traditional full course load.

He could certainly, as a fourteen-year-old, simply take some free classes such as foreign languages, computer classes, physical education, woodworking, photography, all of those classes that the rest of the world would have to pay big bucks for if they wanted to, he can access for free, simply because of his age.

This is something that could also be possible to do for part of the day while he goes to community or online college for the remainder of the day, pursues his interests, or more.

Of course, I'm not exactly sure where we will be living at that point, or what kind of school district we will be working with, or even if that is something that he will want to do.

But I guess the nice thing about homeschooling, and specifically accelerated homeschooling (finishing early), is that it opens the door to all kinds of possibilities and choices, so he will actually have the freedom to choose how he wants to spend his adolescent years, from an array of nearly endless options.

Hunter is currently 8 years, 4 months old 

Toddler Activities Week in Review 7.21.13

Playing with a 24-piece floor puzzle, which he still needs some help with, but gets it out by himself a lot and has gotten better at putting it together

Damien was 2 years, 1 month old this week

I didn't post a weekly summary last week, so this will be a summary of the past two weeks (at least the things that I got pictures of). We have used the same learning materials for both of those weeks, and I have decided to go ahead and start using a two-week schedule with Damien like I do with my 8-year-old.

Having my plans in two-week blocks gives a little more room for error, as it always seems to happen that there are at least one or more days where something comes up and we are away from the house, or just get caught up in some project, or some other thing that distracts us from having are "usual" daily routine.

And then I get stressed and feel behind, which is of course never fun, so planning in two week increments leaves more room for error, as even if when there are a couple of days where not much gets done, it doesn't make or break the entire learning plan. You can see the schedule I use here.


Snuggled up learning constellations

Our digital flash card playlist of the past two weeks included:

Paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, set 1
Parts of the Sun
Constellations, set 1
USA State Flags
Learning Basic Numbers: 50-60
Learning Basic Numbers: 60-70
Addition: +3's
Presidents Song

He also regularly asked to watch some other addition videos, as well as the history timeline song, and occasionally the Scientific Twinkle Twinkle Little Star song.

Watching part of his math playlist while doing a puzzle.



Damien is still very interested in coloring. He loves to "scribble" elaborately with lots of different colors in specific places on the page. It's definitely not mindless lines and he takes it very seriously! He asks to color multiple times a day and will often sit for quite long periods (30+ minutes).

We had to start using colored pencils or crayons only because, well, this:

There have been other times where he has colored himself a little bit, but it was usually just a few marks on his arm or something.

One day he was sitting in his chair coloring, and there were some bags on the table so I couldn't really see him from where I was sitting. When he was done and asked to get up, I found this. Took a while to get off, to say the least. He certainly was thorough!

Impromptu color sorting with this Playful Patterns toy.

His most recent favorite thing to do on my phone is... play on my calendar?

He loves to open it up and click on all the numbers while naming them. I am pretty sure he knows all of them up to 30, although I pretty much never "test" him so I'm never really sure of everything he knows. He just spontaneously shows me his knowledge from time to time.

Another random math thing he has been doing is playing with rulers and some clamps from my toolbox.

He calls the clamps "measure mice" for some reason (in this Leap Frog video that is on Netflix they use "measure mice" to measure things, teaching nonstandard measurement units). He takes the clamps and points to different numbers. He actually used the centimeters portion of the ruler to count backwards from 30 one day.

He played with this smooth stone natural play set a few times, mostly just as free play.

We have worked on back floating a handful of times, which he sometimes is just fine with and sometimes protests still. He has gotten better now that I have been singing "The Wheels on the Bus" while we practice and doing silly motions.

We swam quite a few times, and while we were at a pool one day he actually climbed out of the edge of the pool by himself (deep end), without a ladder. I am so thrilled he is able to do this now, as it is such an important safety skill.



Walking on the balance beam. We did balance activities a few times, but haven't been very consistent with incorporating these daily.

Some playtime pictures:

Throwing rocks in the lake. He loves doing this way too much.

Playing with miscellaneous puzzles. He does so many puzzles every day, it is another one of his favorites!



Enjoying the sun at a family member's backyard.

Plans for the next two weeks:
Art: Paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Set 2
Biology: Birds of North America, set 1 (ducks)
General Science: Constellations, set 2

Meteoroid, Meteor, Meteorite

Geography: Countries of Europe (locations)
History: Presidents of the USA
Human Anatomy: Bones of the Foot
Mathematics: Telling Time, Part 1 - Hours

That will be our flash card play list at least. The rest will probably be spontaneous, we are going to be really busy!