Example and Co-learning

One of the great benefits of Home Schooling is being flexible in how to approach the learning.  I love to read others way of learning and pick up on neat projects.  One of my favorites now is the lapbook, you can buy them as kits but we save money by making our own and we get all our learning materials from the library.  I had to get my daughter's attention to them.  Just talking about it was a start but she didn't go into doing it on her own.

She was sitting watching Avatar the last airbender (series) on our computer in our bedroom.  I brought in on the bed all our cooking books from the library and one of the file folders to use as a lap book and started making pockets.  She got interested in what I was doing and watched.  I made pockets for the lap books to put our recipe cards in, they were labeled snacks, meals, cookies and cakes.  I wrote in pencil but I had her trace it in ink.  Spelling and writing is her weak point and this helps her to focus.  And I started cutting out pictures from a catalog that had to do with cooking, she started pointing out other pictures she wanted for the lap book and I'd cut them out for her.  It sounds like I am doing a lot for a nine year old but really when she watches and observes for a while what someone else is doing then she will do it on her own.  Some people can just get the picture of what do do by spoken directions,  Ariel has to watch for awhile, I was the same way but I was a lot more shy about doing stuff on my own (except for art) I had to watch a great deal how someone does it and once I see how it is done then I can do it.

She is really into cooking now so that is our focus, that cooking lap book until she switches to a new topic which is why I love the lap book idea, you save it and can add more to the subject later on, like we are going to do one on pioneers and we read Sarah Plain and Tall, watched the movie, made corn fritters, she didn't like those very well  because she thought they would be like the ones she had at a Chinese restaurant.

On some of our recipe cards I wrote out some were so simple I didn't need to write how to make it, instead I drew a picture,  I had her color it but then she started doing her own pictures on the ones I had written directions on, she found space to scratch in a doodle.  She has always been a frustrated artist, I am an artist and she keeps comparing her work to mine, I kept telling her that I did not always paint like I do now and I had to show her works I kept when I was a teen and one collection I did when I was very young that I could never throw out.  She didn't start getting the idea till I showed her my very young works and compared it to the other works, and at that point I also told her don't compare yourself to someone else, compare your own works, see your own progression.  Be INSPIRED by others like for me it's Monet, Da Vinci and the modern day gifted artist Akiana  I paint the way I paint.  Each artist has their own way of painting.

We will probably do a lap book on artists as well.  I'm waiting for her cue, when she has the interest, I bring out the supplies for the lap books.  She has trouble organizing things on her own, at least when it comes to projects and writing, she can organize objects, but the organization of information and ideas are hard, especially for someone who's spelling is not there yet.  I am planning on spelling lapbooks starting with easy ones for her to work with our five year old who is picking up on short words and already knows her letters and sounds.  Having Ariel teach what she does know will help her in cementing her own knowledge and we can build on that.  I am surprised to find out she likes crosswords now.  She didn't before a few years ago, but now she does so that's another opportunity to work on writing words without being mundane repetition.
Constantly changing and growing, my mom called me up and said Ariel road her bike to the local grocery store to get chips, she's staying over at my parents and Ariel wanted her homemade guacamole but there were no chips, she said she would go to the store for them.  She did,  she got help across the busy main street, instructed what to do she was able to do it all by herself, first time she did that.  Yeah thinking about that scared me but she is nine and she does need to be given the chance to do that once in awhile.
It's a part of her learning too, doing things on her own.