As with most of his emergent interests, we seek to nurture, inform and entertain rather than drill facts. Our goal right now is to foster appreciation for a variety of topics while nurturing basic research skills.

Translation: we monitor for interests and then use the Internet and our library to find age-appropriate material to give a little depth and background. With the chemistry, we’ve done a few small experiments, but mostly we’ve sought to connect the dots between the periodic table and real life–to break down the staid walls between Science–capital S!–and everyday living.

Secretly, however, I’m hoping that maybe he’ll try his hand one day at singing the periodic table on a Brit chat show while seated next to a chuckling Colin Farrell.

I mean, if it’s good enough for Harry Potter, well…

If your small fry are attracted to the idea of chemical reactions and the periodic table, then you might want to check out this stuff:

• Chemistry: Getting a Big Reaction and The Periodic Table: Elements with Style These are a lot of fun for kids because the illustrations are colorful and lively. Part of the Basher Laboratories series. Check your library or bookstore.

• The Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements is both a web site AND a book where you can “see” most of the elements.

• The Periodic Table of Videos is fun for all ages. A friend sent this link to me earlier today. Produced by a U.K. university, I have to say that I learned quite a bit myself about history, science and the trial-end-error nature of experimentation.

• This site features AWESOME, colorful, and printable periodic tables for FREE. We’re partial to the one featuring teeny illustrations and have placed it in our learning journal for handy reference. (We refer to it a couple of times a week, in fact.)

• Much credit to the ol’ Bill Nye videos for “sparking” our interest in chemistry. His “Atoms” video (see a snippet) rocked our world this summer, and we are slowly working our way through other videos thanks to our library system.

Spend a little time with these suggestions, and your kids will “get” this crazy cat pic in no time:

Also seeing as I found two of the above suggestions on Pinterest, it seems fitting to remind you that I have a homeschool/afterschool board that you are invited to follow.

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, and editor who also happens to homeschool in San Antonio, Texas. To be fair, her fave high school science class was, in fact, chemistry. She can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew. She writes about a variety of topics, including home education, at RedWhiteandGrew.com.

This charming photo is a self-portrait. I’m standing in front of my childhood home one last time. I worked hard to deliver a smile, but you can still tell it’s a bittersweet photograph.

Anyone who has navigated the waters of caregiving an elderly parent, especially one ravaged by disease, knows that the physical act of shutting down a home can be difficult on the caregiver both physically and emotionally.

Many of us–especially those of us who are only children of “collectors”–are faced with an added issue. We simply can’t keep every single item that our parents may have stashed away. If I had one piece of advice for anyone going through this process, it’s this: Give yourself as much time as possible to separate memory from stuff and keep only what pleases you.

I realize that’s not always easy. For many families, time is of the essence as they seek to come up with funds to cover long-term  nursing care. Moreover, if you have to  travel a great distance to empty a home, it can be hard to slow down and be methodical.

But do try to give yourself as much time as possible to prevent regret over lost items later. Even a solid hour alone jotting down priority items can help.

As the daughter of a talented woman with great taste, I went into this process recognizing that there would be a lot of beautiful items that I simply couldn’t keep. I just don’t have enough room.

So I prioritized items first by utility and aesthetic value followed by sentimental attachment. I also prioritized hand-made items over mass-produced goods.  Consequently, my stash of family quilts is pretty large. This is only a portion of them:

For some items in my mother’s house, I decided that a photo of the item would be sufficient to bring back a treasured memory. Once captured on my camera and uploaded to my computer (and backed up!), I could let the “thing” go knowing that I had some record with which to summon the memory. There were, of course, a few items that were given to friends and family. Several charities benefitted, too.

My approach has given me peace of mind in this storm that we call “long-term caregiving”. Although I did wind up with a lot of boxes filled with stuff, I don’t feel overrun by it. This month I’m slowly going through it all again, sorting and storing things in some semblance of order. Eventually I may release more of it.

For now, I’m content to know that my house–the “new Mothership” as I think of it–reflects more than two generations of cherished items. Take for instance a corner of my office:

Once vacant, it now holds a collection of floral paintings, a piece of my maternal grandmother’s wedding gown framed in glass, and the china cabinet my grandmother purchased with her “butter and egg money.” All of it rests alongside a cabinet inherited years ago from my paternal grandparents and filled with stuff from both sides of my family and my husband’s family as well.

Because everything  pictured was lovingly gleaned from the old house rather than hastily boxed away, I feel more connected to it all. I like to think it enriches our world rather than merely taking up space. Somehow–and to my surprise–the endeavor of sorting through one person’s collected material goods has yielded a deeper connection to people, not simply boxes of stuff.

And that, frankly, may be one of the secret rewards of caregiving in general: a chance to reconnect with one’s roots.

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor,  homeschooler, and caregiver in San Antonio, Texas.  She can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.

Also, we just read a fourth book from this particular series by Ann Whitford Paul and illustrator Ethan Long. It’s called Fiesta Fiasco, and it proved to be just as fun to read as the other three books. As an added bonus, the book demonstrates why it’s best to purchase a birthday regalo with the recipient in mind.

More stuff that I dug up over the last few days on the topic of early second language acquisition:
• Cognitive Benefits of Learning Language from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Noteworthy paragraph:

Furthermore, there is research … that shows that children who study a foreign language, even when this second language study takes time away from the study of mathematics, outperform (on standardized tests of mathematics) students who do not study a foreign language and have more mathematical instruction during the school day. Again, this research upholds the notion that learning a second language is an exercise in cognitive problem solving and that the effects of second language instruction are directly transferable to the area of mathematical skill development.

• Second Language Learning from Duke’s TIP program. A lot of this was “old news,” thanks to a college friend who was a linguistics/speech pathology major. Still, a good reminder that early foreign language instruction–even in a monolingual home–is a worthwhile endeavor:

For learning a contemporary language, younger is better. Babies are born with the capacity to learn any language. At age three, humans begin to lose the ability to discriminate among sounds that are not used in their first language. After age seven or so, for reasons that are not fully understood, it becomes much more difficult to develop a native accent in a foreign language.

• Foreign Language Software: An Alternative to Classroom Learning from Duke’s TIP site. This paragraph caught my eye in reference to Barcroft’s Five Principles of Effective Second Language Acquisition:

[In] addition to not forcing beginning language learners to produce whole sentences immediately, a vocabulary program should also avoid other kinds of elaboration that might produce negative effects on the learning of new words.

More research lead me to this site, which goes into more depth on this notion of “vocab first is best.” Hmm… I’m not sure that I agree 100%. While I don’t think that kids need to be pushed to conjugate irregular verbs, I do think they should be introduced to very basic sentences–enough to have a little polite conversation with a native speaker.

Full disclosure: I’m coming at this observation from my own experience. In my elementary gifted/talented program, we were taught basic Spanish vocab–numbers and letters. That was it. I was bored out of my mind. (Another post idea: how I got kicked out of gifted/talented classes in fifth grade.) Later, when I encountered  grammar-centric language instruction in high school, I found that I had a knack for picking up languages (well, reading them at least) and sailed through three years of French. I took Spanish in college–easy, peasy stuff–and then sailed through a graduate level review course of French.

Yet even though I can read both languages decently, I still struggle with speaking them. Unless I’m in a situation where I’m immersed in a foreign language, I’m hesitant to speak them. Is that a byproduct of not hearing/speaking another language until my teens? I wonder…

The upshot of all this research/reflection: Given that our son seems to have a knack for language acquisition, we’ll keep chugging away at vocab and introduce some basic sentences soon, too.
Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. She can stumble through phrases in Spanish and French and is a fan of Google Translate. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.

Either way, Santa made an appearance at the first-ever University of Texas San Antonio football game earlier this month at the Alamodome. How do I know? Well, I was there!

Proof:

Image copyright Pamela Price, 2011. All rights reserved.

He was seated with the visiting team, the Northeastern State University Riverhawks, but he watched the Roadrunners win their first-ever game. Which begs the question: whose side were you really on, Kris Kringle?

Go, Roadrunners!

Best retelling of "Little Red Hen" ever.

We’re about 6 weeks into the school year with the usual hits in rotation: language arts, science, math, history, character/social development, and a foreign language. Although we studied a bit of French during a trip last spring, we opted to focus on Spanish this year. Given our location (San Antonio, Texas), it was a more natural fit.

This means of course that I can no longer say that we’re following a traditional “classical curriculum,” something that I set out to do initially. Although ancient history is a big part of our studies–and we are dabbling in the Greek alphabet, this teacher felt that her pupil needed to learn a more practical second language. We will pick up Latin later. No rush. We’ve got 13 years.

Like a lot of new homeschool educators, I spent a lot of time over several months trying to figure out curriculum options. There are loads of them, some free and some pricey. Ultimately, I decided to cobble together most of our curriculum using primary sources. Yet Spanish, a language that I read much better than I speak, intimidated me. (Math did, too, but that’s another post.)

For Spanish, I figured that we could go with an inexpensive workbook purchased at a teacher supply store. I grabbed one in July and we picked it up in August. Within a week, I knew things weren’t going so well. So I bought three more–all in color–at Target. (The first one was black-and-white.) We tried again. Blech. We were both bored and drowning in a sea of flashcards, something that I’d sworn that we wouldn’t do. Back to the teacher supply store for another book. It wasn’t much better, but it did contain four little, all-color books and a CD.

The CD was a bust. But those little books were golden.

After we read two–and the kid was happy and giggling about Spanish at last–I saw that I needed to change up my game plan. Occasional use of flashcards and workbook pages is fine for review and assessment. What we really need to keep our foreign language mojo going is easy access to a lot of bilingual story books. ¡Hola, San Antonio Public Library! (@mysapl) Like out other subject areas, library books have proven to be our path to enthusiastic exploration of Spanish. Through them, we pick up the vocabulary with minimal effort.

Our favorites so far are a series of books by Ann Whitford Paul featuring four delightful animals named Conejo, Culebra, Tortuga, and Iguana. Here’s what we’ve read so far:

• Mañana Iguana – A retelling of “The Little Red Hen” with a happier ending that fosters positive social skills, too. I have to stop myself from laughing when Culebra says “I’ll help you mañana, Iguana…. When I grow arms.” This is my favorite.

• Tortuga in Trouble – A retelling of Little Red Riding Hood with a Coyote con ojos and dientes grande.

• Count on Culebra – A fun way to learn and review numbers, although some folks have expressed concern online that the math isn’t accurate in this one. (The animals put together numbered groups of kitchen gadgets.) It’s my son’s favorite.

We picked up Fiesta Fiasco yesterday. Haven’t read it, but I anticipate we’ll like it, too.

If you like these books as much as we do and want to bring them into your home or afterschool setting, you also might want to check out the teaching activities provided on the author’s website. For this particular series, the printout includes a list of vocabulary words suitable for printing and keeping in a notebook.

What about you and your kids? Any favorite language-centered books that you’ve enjoyed? Leave a comment porque yo soy todo oídos.
Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. She can stumble through phrases in Spanish and French and is a fan of Google Translate. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.

Here’s our solution for our resident hands-on, visual learner:

The laminated calendar board came ready-made from a bookstore, though you easily could make your own. The board is attached to the bottom of our fridge with inexpensive magnetic clips. We used the Post-It notes for a couple of weeks–no pressure, and now the kid “gets” the concepts.

It was amazing how much he enjoyed updating the calendar for the first few days. Then, right about the time of mastery, he stopped doing it. As our  mission was accomplished, we moved on to other things–like trying our hand at drawing Chinese symbols.

No pressure. No rush. No worksheets. Just another  marvelous example of learning in the context of everyday living.

Explore More:

• Ages & Stages: How Children Develop a Sense of Time

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. Yesterday she ate a Godiva chocolate bar and tomorrow she’ll probably regret it. At the time, when”yesterday” was “today,” it seemed like a good idea. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.

Image credit www. Book-Clipart.com

Remember my post re: creating a home learning environment? In it, I shared paragraphs from one of my back-to-school feature stories published in a local paper. I also glossed over what the local elementary school principals said on the topic.

Being as this is SlowBurbs.com–and we’ve got readers readying kiddos to learn in all sorts of school settings, I decided to go back and share relevant snippets:

“Students do their best when they get a good night’s sleep and start the day with a nourishing breakfast,” said Maricia Gregory, Julia Newton Aue Elementary principal. “In the evenings [during the school year], an established routine that provides time for the completion of homework and a time for the family to read for pleasure brings perfect closure to the day. Habits like these, established at an early age, will benefit children for the rest of their lives.”

From another principal:

“Developing the habit of reading a book together each night is such a wonderful part of childhood,” said Dodge-Clay. “There is a book that I just ordered for all of my fourth grade teachers that I learned about this summer while visiting my sister who is a teacher in Nebraska.  The title of the book is ‘The Reading Promise’ by Alice Ozma. It is a tribute to her father who shared his love of reading with her by promising to read aloud to her–she was in fourth grade at the time–at least 10 minutes a night. The book has a bibliography of classical and current literature that they shared.  The recommended list is full of wonderful pieces of literature.  I love the idea that read-alouds do not need to stop in first and second grade.”

More from Dodge-Clay:

“My son is entering 9th grade next year and I am seriously thinking about starting up a read aloud ritual this next school year,” said Dodge-Clay. “It is a calming way to end the day and a great way to have some conversations about vocabulary. The challenge is to be consistent and to make it a ritual and habit.  We all have so many competing demands… but there is no better gift than sharing a great book with someone you love.”

Great stuff. To those of you preparing your families for a new school year launch this month, best of luck!

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. She learned to read in 1st grade and is still addicted to it. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.

• From Tips for Parents: Executive Functioning at Home & School :

…Research indicates that success and happiness in life are mediated not just by raw intelligence, but also by one’s ability to apply oneself to a chosen task and work through the process. [Executive functioning  or "EF"] skills tend to transfer across domains; if a child learns how to self-regulate in learning one kind of task, it will generally be easier for him to learn to self-regulate in other areas. As adults, even if we struggle with some aspects of EF ourselves, one of the most important things we can help our children with is to develop their own EF skills.

• From NBC Nightly News, a thought-provoking video about the four day school week. This topic brings to a head several issues, including: How long should a school day be? What are the physical/psychological impacts of longer school days? When does school cease to be about learning and become primarily about babysitting? Will this lead to more afterschoolers?

• Again from NBC Nightly News, US now ranks 41 in newborn mortality. This seems unacceptable. It also seems like fodder for online debate about the ever-touchy topic of healthcare. Here’s the link to the study cited if you want to read up on it.

• “Caregiver burnout” is a serious issue that merits wider awareness. Alas, most of us aren’t even aware of the term until we’re caregivers ourselves. More here. Also, if you know someone caring for a sick child or relative–especially someone doing this work for months or years, consider asking them how you might help. If they decline assistance, consider a nice note and perhaps gift card to a suitable business. (If the caregiver must drive a lot to give care and is on a fixed income, a gas card can be a big help.)

• Written from a Christian perspective, this post on what to do when perfectionism and to-do lists overwhelm offers much insight. Yes, even non-believers may appreciate the humanity expressed by the author–and the need for us all to lighten up on ourselves and find comfort in gratitude.

• Ever wanted to teach meditation to your kids? Check out Baby Buddhas! On a related note, one of us has been reading Buddha at Bedtime: Tales of Love and Wisdom for You to Read with Your Child to Enchant, Enlighten and Inspire as part of an exploration of world religions.

One of us might come back to these topics, or we might just let them percolate here. While we decide, please tell us: Are any of these issues and topics top-of-mind for you right now? If so, why? Also, what things have you run across of late that you’d like to share? Let us know here or on Facebook.

But that won’t stop the sentiment on this board from being 100% accurate:

Credit: http://www.Book-Clipart.come

Now if young children especially 4, 5 and 6 years of age are pushed to read or spell, they can only do this activity by using their right brain since the left brain and bilateral integration of their cerebral hemispheres have not fully developed. These childen will try to read all words by sight memory. They will look at the first and last letters of a word and make a guess. A word like stop could be read as stamp, stump, or step. The right brain is working so hard trying to visually figure out the shape of each word, both large and small, that it is no longer available for creating internal pictures of the words.

These children still may read fluently, but they won’t be able to sound out words, spell or have lasting comprehension. The right brain reading pathway becomes over-worked and the children will end up being just sight readers with poor spelling and poor comprehension. Later on, these children often get labelled as having non-verbal learning disabilites since they have bright minds but aren’t performing in reading, spelling, and also math (especially word problems that rely on children’s internal picture-making capacities to solve the problem). (Read more)

Seriously, go read more. It’s worth it if this topic is important to your family.

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. She learned to read in 1st grade and is still addicted to it. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.