school-y-ish-ness

we took a cue from my brilliant friend Megan who had the great idea to use your candy as cash towards toys. it's not so much for the kids- who get a piece of candy less than once a week, but i found myself unable to resist the temptation of 7 mini 3 muskateers for breakfast. (i wonder why that last 10 lbs just hangs on?!!!) i have NO self control and if it's in the house...well, i'm eating it.
back to the kids: they went to the store, lugging around their pumpkin bags, to see if anything might be worth the relinquishment of candy. Jackson wasn't that interested in shopping. He saw one huge robot type thing he wanted and "didn't have enough candy to purchase", he played with the trains, he asked if we could go. I had to drag him along to look at a neat bow and arrow set, a spiderman game and he finally settled on a batman guy with a 'shooter'. Billie can't make up her mind: she wants everything. she wants a wig, an umbrella, a kids needlepoint set, a watch, a ball net game set, a lego castle, a set of accessories to give your baby doll a bath, ugh! Finally she picks out a remote control car, tries to convince Jackson to get one too, but he won't trade the batman. We purchase. The lady at the counter is confused when I wink and make the kids hand over their candy luggage and ask her to put it in the T-R-A-S-H (we spell A LOT!). As soon as we get home Jackson wants to go back and trade his batman for a remote controlled car. ugh!
As for school: we've been doing America lately. Since we moved here and Thanksgiving is coming up and all. Learning the States, how we came over from Britain, map skills, George Washington, Betsy Ross, flags, Indians, Colonial times and all that. We learn in mostly a unit studies way. Which means I pick a topic (usually based on a recent interest of one or both kids) and we relate EVERYTHING to that. We take field trips to the Claude Moore Colonial farm and see everyone in bonnets, play with a stick and hoop, spin wool from sheep directly into yarn, see an old fashioned puppet show, pretend we're having breakfast at the farm and have to milk the cows for our cereal. We relate it to Math and Science and talk about how steam power got beat out by electrical power. I love it and i think the kids do too. We've been to the Nat'l Gallery of Art and the old Air & Space museum just this week. I LOVE leaving the house and being at the steps of an amazing FREE museum in 20 minutes! You can just imagine all that we can find to relate to the Little House on the Prarie stories we're doing...and the Tall Tales of Paul Bunyan and Babe, Johnny Appleseed and all the other 'American stories' we listen to on CD in the van. The kids learn more than I could ever guess they would when we work this way.
For math Billie can now solve for an unknown. Which sounds really 'Wow' because they way we do it in school is like you spend all this time memorizing your times tables and other crapola - quick everyone, what is 6x7? Which you SORT OF get and then all of a sudden there's an X or N in the equation....what the crap? (by the way- crap has taken the place of all bad words in our house, as it's not really that bad) But the math books I got for us, introduce algebra now. And it's so simple. what + 5 =8? X + 2 = 10 Billie can do it no problem, Jackson can do it if we use counters (like cheerios or raisins) and hide the unknown under a bowl and ask him to make that match the other row of cheerios.
So, i get a lot of questions about what they're doing for 'school' just thought I should fill you in. sorry this post was so long- you probably feel like you're in school having to read through it all. Maybe we could all take turns reading a paragraph outloud...