Happy Fall

Never mind the song, this is the most wonderful time of the year, at least to me. Time to bring out the best of the autumn read-alouds, and begin thinking about big bowls of morning oatmeal studded with chunks of walnuts and cranberries…. Frost on the pumpkin, and all that…

Old habits die hard. It was 90 degrees today. This is Houston, TX, not Housatonic, MA. If I was incredibly rich and irresponsible, I would set the thermostat on 60 and wander around the house in cozy clothes drinking hot chocolate. This is my favorite season, despite the fact that dying St. Augustine grass heralds the change of season and constitutes fall color, or lack thereof, in the Houston area.

Where there is a will, there is a way to engage in autumn tradition, and I have found that fall is a state of mind, not temperature. Away go the weathered sea shell collections and red cherries of summer. Out come the faux pumpkins (the real ones rot on the front stoop in a matter of days), dried gourds, thick, nubbly candles, keepsakes of dark mellowed wood, and the recipe for apple cake with warm cream sauce. Underfoot, thick rugs are spread across bare smooth floors. Folded into the cupboard go the lemony, breezy linens, replaced by warm homespun. It’s fall, after all. Would someone tell the mosquitoes?

Houston has the advantage of two growing seasons and for this I have been thankful in the past. This fall, however, we will rely on the local farmer’s market to bring forth it’s fruit in it’s season. We have got too much going on to invest the time in a fall garden, and that is fine.

I am home schooling a kindergartner for the first time! Farm Girl attended public 4K and 5K, so this is truly a new experience for me. To take complete responsibility and/or blame for a child’s early education is heady stuff. To get us ready through the summer, I have been teaching Farm Boy to read, using the book, Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons . Like his big sister, he is quick and keen to learn.

We are one month into his school year, and it goes very well. We are using Sonlight curriculum with an over-arching Charlotte Mason philosophy of education, giving us healthy doses of nature study and outdoor play.

So far we have read aloud:
The Box Car Children -Warner
Johnny Appleseed - Holland
My Father’s Dragon - Gannett
Selections from James Herriot’s Treasury For Children
The Wish At The Top - Bulla
Make Way For Ducklings - McCloskey
We are halfway through the Magician’s Nephew, by CS Lewis, and it is amazing to watch his power of recall as he recounts the daily Digory events to his daddy.

We are utilizing Usborne’s Children’s Encyclopedia and First Book of Nature for a very broad overview of nature, science, and history, and off the shelf handwriting and math programs, utilizing a huge set of math manipulatives (or “manipulars” as Farm Boy calls them). Bob Jones Bible K has proven laborious, but the benefits outweigh the tedium, so I pick and choose what we do from each of the lessons.

Weak areas so far: not keeping a time line, too much “craft time” while not enough art appreciation, and inconsistent focus on character and good habits. Now that I’ve acknowledged them in print, I will be more apt to make improvements.

Field trips were one of the highlights of Farm Girl’s education, so we purposed from the onset to make sure we had field trips monthly throughout the year. Our first was a cross country endeavor that included his grandparents. We attended the Revolutionary War Battle of Huck’s Defeat reenactment at Historic Brattonsville in South Carolina. What a day! Dragoon, Loyalist, and slave now have real meaning, and we hope we have stirred up a fire of interest and affection for our nation’s birth that will burn throughout his life.

A Kindergartner and a 10th grader. I am blessed. What a privilege. All those years of infertility after Farm Girl, thinking I would never get to teach another child. I could go on but I won’t. We’re learning the number 8 today, and I don’t want to miss a minute with those math manipulars.