Teaching

Is there anything better than overhearing one of your children teaching another one something that you taught him first? It is one of the best pleasures.

Xander is talking Nick through a drawing technique from Drawing With Children that I had him do last week. Just before this, he helped Nick identify things on the pages of the Usborne First Book of Nature: Birds, Trees, Flowers, Butterflies and Moths. I had wanted to go through that book with him but never found a good time, and he was never interested. But he did go through it at Nick's request.

Today, school was:

• I read aloud The Nutcracker (an excerpted version) and The Velveteen Rabbit.
• I read aloud two chapters of A Child's History of the World, by V.M. Hillyer. We found relevant places on the world map and relevant pictures on our timeline. (We started this year doing The Story of the World, because we had it. Recently, I bought a copy of A Child's History of the World, and it is fabulous so far. I love the conversational tone and the level of the information. It is not dumbed-down - in fact, it includes important concepts that I don't usually see included in other children's books - but it is delivered in a way that keeps my son listening. He can narrate from it in great detail. At this point, we have fully converted to A Child's History of the World but we are a tiny bit behind in the chapters.)
• A few new, simple spelling words were introduced and written on the chalk board. I got out the index cards of the spelling words he missed on a spelling test a couple of weeks ago. Xander wrote those seven words on a dry-erase board.
• Xander completed two exercises in the Singapore 1A workbook.
• I read aloud two chapters of Paddle to the Sea and we moved our clay Paddle to the right places on the map of the Great Lakes.
• Xander chose the next poem he will memorize ("Time to Rise" by Robert Louis Stevenson) and began the memorization. 
• I taught Xander the beginning of Lesson 5 in Progressive Recorder Method for Young Beginners and he practiced some. Mary Had a Little Lamb is one of the songs he learns in this lesson. He was so excited to see and hear that there was a song he knew that he would be able to play on his own.