Schooling the Littles and Logic

My very favorite time to home school is with the little ones. I LOVE teaching reading and math. Many years ago when we first started home schooling, our oldest had to endure a stack of workbooks. Our approach has changed SO much over the years the reason being that my outlook has changed so much for early education. We have been "schooling" our 4 year old (soon to be 5 in a few short weeks) over the summer. This is not a dull task. It is fun because she thinks she is playing with Mommy.

- Our 9 year old set up a little farm corner for the little one to learn math with. Our theme is a family on a farm that has to count their animals.
-We have a number puzzle for recognition.
-We play LOTS of dominoes with her.
-We have a basket of books to read to her (which is ever changing).
-We read the The Children's Bible by Golden Press to her for religion.
-She has chosen The Kingfisher First Animal Encyclopedia for science. We will use this when she wants to but I am a big one for exploring natural history in the early years. (Trip at Cape Cod exploring at the beach was great for this!)
-For reading, we follow loosely Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
I have used this book with all of the children with great success. Molly loved reading her first word the other day by lesson 4 "am".
-She is memorizing the poem "Rain" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Does the above sound familiar? If it does it is because it is heavily MODG influenced but it is done in an "unschooly" manner. (I had to use your word "unschooly", Leonie.)
In fact, our whole household looks pretty "unschooly". I like lesson plans but I like to follow them in my own manner picking and choosing what works for that particular child. Now that I know how I like to school, it makes schooling so much more enjoyable.

We don't have one workbook for our kindergarten child and I don't plan to. She was writing "h" on her own yesterday and she does write her own name. She decided to write the number "0" and "1" the other day.

Where does art, music, and history fit in? Throughout the day! There is LOTS of time for spontaneity. Here's an example:

Yesterday, I had to work at our store. Our little one came along and after we set up she wanted to "play" with me. (Do school.)
I read her a book on rhyming. She is really into rhyming...I mean REALLY into it. She goes around the house rhyming nonsense words :)
We did a few schooling things...like recognize sounds of letters she already knew but she wanted more. So, I made a suggestion, a spontaneous suggestion that we play a game. We sat outside the store with a few yellow Post-Its and pens. Molly's part of the game was to tell me the color of each car that went by. My job...to tally each car that went by. We did this for ten minutes. We talked about what color car went by the most and what color car went by the least. We decided to do this again. This time our 14 year old joined us. This was fun because we started a logic question.

By tallying the color of cars that go by in ten minute increments, can you tell what is the most popular color in America?

We talked about scenarios like the same car went back and forth three times, so can you really count him?
I did figure that you could estimate approximately how MANY cars go by an hour during 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. My question was, "If I've been sitting here for three hours and the approximate amount of cars that have gone by are 900 then how come nobody stopped in?" :>) I'll let you try to figure that one out. My husband said, "It's numbers, baby. Ha! Ha! I say.

I plan to make a poster of Molly's tallies...perhaps different color cars and the amount of each color that went by in a ten minute period. That should be a fun "art" and "math" project to do with Molly:) So there you have it...schooling out of the box.