Previewing the Uncorporated Garden 2011

I will never again take for granted having a piece of land in which to grow food. Discussions of health, convenience, and food security aside, it's just plain fun to go out and dig in the dirt. And if I'm going to dig in the dirt (sorry - the soil), I might as well get something productive out of it beyond just pretty flowers.

As a family, we have lived in four places over the last six years. When my wife and I started out, we had a "garden apartment", which allowed us a small garden on the north (!) side of our unit. We got lots of shade from the surrounding buildings and the garage, but I think we managed to eke out some flowers. I remember specifically having some spectacular (for us, anyway) sunflowers that were the result of some forgotten birdseed.

Just before Isaac was born, we moved closer to my workplace at the time. We had a second-floor apartment with no garden space of our own. It did have a balcony, though, that overlooked an ecologically-poor stream (but it was so nice to have the sound of water outside). We had a couple of container gardens out on the balcony (north-facing, again!) in which we grew flowers and a family of ducks.

During our 18-month housesitting adventure, we finally had a decent plot of land (just shy of an acre), but it wasn't ours, so instead of ripping up the acre of golf-course grass and planting veggies, I got the privilege of mowing and mowing and mowing and mowing and mowing. For the record, grass is (mostly) evil. Just sayin'.

If only he was really cutting the grass!

I stuck a few spring bulbs in the flower beds, and had a container of chives, but beyond that the gardens were fairly ornamental. I suppose I could have done some significant container gardening, but my work schedule never permitted me the time to get it organized.

Here in Saline, we have garden space on both sides (south and north) of the townhouse, and even a raised bed that a previous resident constructed. It had rhubarb and ornamentals when we moved in; the back garden bed had hostas, century plants, and others. I like rhubarb, but I'm the only one, so in the larger interest of starting fresh, we cleaned out the beds and did our own thing.

Someday, I'll have enough space (and construction capital) to build an herb spiral, but that will have to wait a few years.

Herb Spiral illustration from The Saturday Evening Post

Next time: Last year's efforts and this year's plans

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We are ostensibly homeschooling our two kids (ages 2 and almost-5), although it's been rather informal so far. We are however seizing opportunities as they arise to reinforce reading, math, and other basic skills, with the hope of laying a solid foundation for when we ramp up a formal curriculum.

This garden update is part of The Homeschool Village's Garden Challenge - we will continue updating through the growing season.

But Don't We Walk By Faith?

My current project is setting up a pre-test for Isaac with the Dolch sight words. One of our curriculum goals for this year (I'll get them all up here eventually!) is for Isaac to master all 315 of the sight words.

I'm planning to quiz him on batches of flash cards - no more than 25 per day - to get a baseline. From there we'll figure out how to work with him to learn the rest.

Check out our Dolch Sight Words page to track our progress!

How have you worked with your kids to learn sight words?

Introducing Journal of the States - Delaware

Over the weekend, we purchased a couple of composition books that are set up with story pages (blank top half for drawing, guide-lined bottom half for practicing handwriting).

One of these is going to be (well, has become) Isaac's Journal of the States. Our hope is that for each state he learns, he completes a page in the journal. At a minimum we'd like him to draw the state, draw a couple things associated with the state, write its name, and include whatever else he wants to describe. (Overall, our state curriculum goals also include identifying the name and location of the capital, and naming two "state facts": state bird, state flower, state insect, state tree, etc.)

I started it with him today. Delaware was our state last week, so he drew the state, added a dot for Dover, wrote "Delaware" 1.5 times (after getting hung up on the first W), then drew another figure. I was looking at it upside down, so it wasn't readily apparent. "What is it, Isaac?"

"It's the United States. Here's Delaware. It's kind of hard to see."

Putting on the Brakes

So, I had the realization last night that perhaps I'm pushing too hard on developing a curriculum **RIGHT NOW**. I've had marketability on the brain at the expense, I think, of my child's education, which should be the primary focus here.

He's four. In some ways, an advanced four, but he's four. I don't need to break my neck creating the *perfect* curriculum by next week. Let's just go with the flow for at least until January and see how it goes. I can develop curriculum later. Maybe let's wait for "kindergarten" and see how far along he is.

That said, I'm liking some of the curriculum resources that I've come across.

• Typical Courses of Study by grade level from World Book. Tiffany and I read through the preschool and kindergarten lists last night - Isaac is definitely beyond the preschool things (with one or two exceptions) and definitely not at the kindergarten level yet. I'll probably refer to the kindergarten TCoS over the next year, but I figure we've got two years to get those done.
• I checked out How to Write a Low-Cost/No-Cost Curriculum for Your Home-School Child (quite the title) from our library this past week. It's information-dense (and could stand new typography to open up the pages a bit), but I like how it steps you through the process of developing individualized curriculum. Again, it starts with kindergarten-level goals, so I will likely refer to it often over the next year and ease into things. First objective: determine our philosophy of education and life-long learning goals for Isaac.

For the immediate future, we'll probably stick with our geography framework - one state per week in the order they joined the union. We'll read lots of books from the library on the state (e.g., Delaware), items associated with that state (e.g., chickens, ladybugs, maybe holly), try to find some typical foods from the state (saltwater taffy, anyone?), work on reading and drawing maps, etc. Once we hammer out some broad objectives for each state (hopefully, over the holiday), I'll share them here. If I can pull in some "curriculum" ideas from my various sources, so much the better, but I'm not going to make myself crazy pushing it.