Holidays (and lots of school related ramblings...)

I had great plans about topics and themes we’d cover during the holidays with the kids. Well… My sister visited us for some three weeks over Christmas and New Year and my mum is still here with us until the end of January. So instead we’ve simply enjoyed holidays, which, I think hasn’t been that bad at all… We went to visit my sister-in-law in the countryside for a few days, went to a water park for a day and visited the state capital Porto Velho as my sister left. Above pictures from the water park and from Christmas.

December was spent pretty much at school for my part. I had seven students that didn’t pass English and had to take a week of extra classes and then another test. I actually quite enjoyed teaching only seven kids although they were from four different grades. We were able to play a few games and I was able to give lots of individual attention to each of them. It seems to have paid off: they all passed their test at the end of the week. In Brazilian schools teachers have an incredible amount of paperwork to do. There is a diary for each subject (in my case for each class) and you record what you taught and when as well as who was present that day. All grades go into the diary and at the end of the year you calculate the final notes and copy them to several different places inside that one diary. It’s not difficult but very time consuming and I must have spent hours completing all the diaries.

We did some homeschool work right in the beginning of December and just re-started today. I’m hoping to clarify some Finnish spelling to Luana as well as simple maths in Finnish. She’s simply out of practice with numbers in Finnish (although she does know them perfectly well) and she has only learned to write in Portuguese so now it’s time for Finnish. I’m also hoping we’d get back to the Outdoor Hour tasks especially now that the kids got a kids’ microscope for Christmas.

Luana will start English lessons at the same language school I teach in but that’ll be in the beginning of February. The kids have been asking for English lessons at home too so I might take a look into that as well.

The kids will change schools (from private to public) and will for the first time not be together in the same school. Luana will star first grade and Lucas still has two more years of pre-school left. The schools are right next to each other and they will take the same school bus there and back. I’m not worried about them being in different schools as they’re both very outgoing and definitely not shy. They’re both really excited about their new schools and new school uniforms. They will also get new backpacks this year and their old ones will go to kids that don’t have any. I think we might fill the bags with some stationary before passing them on to their new owners.

Today is a rainy day that will be spent indoors decluttering the house. I've already set aside clothes we don't use anymore and will tackle the kids' toys next...

No time for the fun stuff

I started a new teaching job some weeks ago and all of a sudden I have no time for the fun stuff with my kids... I work almost every afternoon and come home when it's almost time for the kids to go to bed. I'm at home in the mornings but that's when they're at school. That leaves us the weekends but as I'm working and we don't have anyone to clean the house and wash the laundry we end up spending a lot of time on Saturdays doing household chores. I'm not very happy about the situation but I realise that it's also good to work and get some experiences from here in my CV. Thankfully summer holiday starts soon enough (end of November for the kids and a little later for me), my mum is soon here as well as my sister and I've already got lots of nice ideas for the long holiday months (two if the kids continue in the same school and three if they go to a public school).

The kids did get to paint their faces and loved it! They got inspired after they saw the paintings my students had made at school (did I mention I get to teach one art class apart from all the English classes and I'm LOVING it!).

We also made loads of bead bracelets for a birthday party that I worked at last weekend. Luana was such a great sport about this; the beads weren't mine and she helped me making the bracelets without getting to keep one for herself. I did promise her we'd buy lots of beads for the holidays...

Here are some of the bracelets we made.

Basically all homeschooling activities are on hold at the moment and we're really looking forward to December when my mum and later on my sister will be over here and we'll have lots more time to spend together.

Outdoor Hour

This post is long overdue... I recently started a teaching job twice a week and that together with some other English and Spanish lessons at a private language school take up most of my afternoons. So homeschooling (and many other activities) have been on hold for some time now. I'm hoping things will calm down once I get more used to planning my lessons and I'll have more time for our usual activities.

We won't be following all the tree related challenges as the trees over here are quite different. I will try to look for some pines so I can introduce the kids to the notion of evergreens. However I chose to start with our own back yard examining the trees we have over there. This time we took a look at acerola, lime and guava (in the picture above acerola on the left, guava on the right and lime somewhere behind those two...).

We've been able to enjoy acerola fruits until recently and the kids just love eating them fresh. We all really like the juice too.

There were still some tiny flowers on the acerola tree. They're so small and fragile but oh so pretty.

Luana sat on the swing and drew the trees after we observed their shapes and their differences.

OK so she was in a bit of a hurry with this one :D I tried to encourage her to colour the picture but she had something else interesting on her mind at that time. She did write down the names of the trees though.

We also talked about vitamine C that all of these fruits have plenty of and I explained very briefly a few things about vitamines in general.

Outdoor Hour # 31 part II

During our second outdoor hour last week we went to look at one plant in particular. I had seen it as I passed by and was curious to take a closer look.

It just happens that we have cotton growing around the corner by the street. I have no idea where that came from and I can't believe I've never seen it before but there it is now. The kids thought it was really exciting and we obviously picked some cotton to take home for an even closer look.

Luana spotted this pretty flower and wanted a picture of it.

Half-way through our walk we had something to drink at this tiny bar.

We some bananas growing by the river Mororó.

We passed through this quiet and cute street...

... and saw our own house (the white one) from a completely new angle. It took the kids a while to recognise it was actually our home.

This was such a nice walk. We had taken these route already before but that was ages ago and lots of things seemed different this time. The best thing during the walk was definitely the cotton :)

Outdoor Hour # 31 part I

We actually did two nature walks looking at trees. This post is with pictures from the first walk when we mainly looked at what grows near our house and which trees can we actually name.

The one the kids always remember: papaya (carica papaya) or mamão in Portuguese.

Lucas spotted this achiote (bixa orellana) seedpod. In Portuguese the plant is called urucum and the name comes from the indigenous Tupi word uru-ku meaning red.

The kids also recognised these two: coconut and mango.

This is cashew tree (anacardium occidentale). In Portuguese it's called caju, which comes from the Tupi word of acaiu meaning "the nut that produces itself".

This is river Mororó, flowing very peacefully at this time of the year.

This horse was one of the favourite things of this walk.

Outdoor Hour # 30

This was supposed to be weeds and seeds but we concentrated on the weeds only. At first I read the kids a story from this book:

In the story the kids shrink and are able to go and visit seeds underground. They see how carrot seeds start sprouting (above) and visit onion ladies (below). They also hear the weeds boasting about how they won't let the small carrots grow and they promise the carrots that they'll pull all the weeds out the next day.

The kids already know the story but don't mind hearing it over and over again. Apart from the story we also love the illustrations.

This is part of our garden. The picture was taken about a week ago when we did this study and the difference is already huge; everything seems to grow so fast! Closest to the camera are kale (Brassica oleracea Acephala group), then rocket (Eruca sativa) and closest to Lucas dill (Anethum graveolens). We also have spring onion, basil, broccoli, green beans and maxixe growing.

We pulled some weeds from the dill and the kids thought it was great fun. I picked dill for them to work with as the leaves are so clearly recognisable that I knew they would be pulling only weeds and not the dill :) They obviously also got to taste some dill and thought it was yummy.

We also took a look at the weed situation in the front yard and found some amongst the grass. We also marvelled at the blooming heliconia (above) and the almost ripe cherry tomatoes (below).

Outdoor hour # 28

This week we took a closer look at dragonflies. We have plenty of these flying around but again it was so hot that we didn't do a nature walk. Dragonfly was the last in my collection of dead insects and now we'll move on to study trees. As we observed the dragonfly I told them about how they are born, what they eat etc. Even the kids' cousin joined us in our study today.

The kids were most impressed by the beautiful wings and the huge eyes.

The picture on the top is Luana's and the other two are Lucas'. I did draw their attention to the shape of the dragonfly's body but it still didn't really come out in the drawings. Bless them :)

Edit. I'm beginning to think this is a damselfly instead of a dragonfly. I bet they have different names in Finnish too but we simply used the one people mainly use when talking about dragonflies/damselflies...

Outdoor Hour #26

Ladybugs were a fun theme that the kids liked a lot. We saw lots of ladybugs in Finland last summer but haven't really seen any over here. We looked at different kinds of ladybugs on the internet and inspired by the images the kids produced the ladybugs above.

We also talked about their life cycle as well as aphids in general. The kids were amused by the relationship of aphids and ants.

The ladybugs below are about 20 cm in diameter and we stuck them on the wall by the blackboard in our library/study room.

Outdoor Hour #27

I'm sooo behind in posting things and I just realised I'm posting in the wrong order... Ladybugs were supposed to be first and bees after them. But here goes...

We studied bees quite recently although we had made big cardboard bees with pipecleaner legs (first picture) already earlier. It's so hot outside at this time of the year that we don't really want to venture outside until much later in the evening. Hence our nature studies haven't involved a nature walk for a while. Instead we look at pictures on the internet, craft and talk about different insects.

We drew this beehive and the kids decorated it with small bees.

It opens up so that you can see what's inside. The kids practiced some hexagons, coloured some (honey) and again decorated with some bees that we glued on.

We also baked a honey cake and have been enjoying honey in general :)

Outdoor Hour # 25

This time we took a closer look at houseflies. It wasn't the most pleasant topic but it was good that the kids also learned about the importance of not letting flies close to your food etc.

We checked out the life cycle of flies from here. We also tried to watch the video of houseflies that Barb recommended but it didn't work for some reason. Might check that later on though.

Lucas drew a giant fly (on the left), a man that's looking after it (the one with the read hair sitting on a chair), a horse and a princess.

Blogger decided this picture looked better this way... Luana drew a woman riding a horse and a man walking. Oh, and there's a fly on the sky too :D

Outdoor Hour # 24

This time we were off to study crickets and unfortunately I don't have any of those in my collection on dead insects :) I knew some of our books happen to have crickets and grasshoppers in their illustration so I asked the kids to find them. Lucas went through two smaller books and Luana took the bigger book in order to find the cricket.

The kids made drawings looking at the books' illustrations and I told them about how the crickets lay up to 2000 eggs at one time. Luana was so impressed by this that she drew loads of eggs in her drawing :) Lucas decided to draw a mantis (that was a new word in English for me!).

We also talked about different beliefs involving crickets here in Brasil. Depending on its colour a cricket is said to bring illness, wealth or hope. They are also said to predict a pregnancy in the household.

And look what the kids found just outside our front door later on this afternoon! What a perfect timing!

Homeschooling in May

Butterflies related to our Ourdoor Hour theme the kids made last week.

Our homeschooling has been really irregular lately and I figured I should focus more on the planning (and actually executing my plans). So I thought I'd write down my expectations for this month.

Finnish:

May 12th is the day of Snellmann (a Fennoman philosopher and a statesman) and I want to use the opportunity to enforce the use of the language. We speak Finnish all the time but lately we haven't sat down to read, sing etc. as much as we used to do. So this month more reading, poems and songs in Finnish. I will encourage Luana to read one small book each week and to work on her reading journal. I discovered a great site that Luana can use by herself in order to practice writing and reading in Finnish (as well as a host of other skills) in here.

English:

I want to introduce the notions of singular and plural (the kids already have some vocabulary so we can practice those). I'm also going to work on "I have", "I like" and "I am". Depending on how that goes we might expand these into other persons as well. I'm actually curious to see how they'll handle verbs as we've only learned nouns until now.

Outdoor Hour:

I don't have any specific goals or expectations other than completing one task each week. Luana should have her cast off this weekend so we can do our nature walks again.

Bible Study:

I'd like to be a bit more creative with our Bible Studies. The children's Bible we use has great illustrations but I'm going to do some arts and crafts related to what we've studied each week.

Arts and crafts:

Crafting has been happening but not as much as the kids (or I indeed) would have liked. I think I've been a bit disorganised with my time during the afternoons. I'm hoping to explore more the idea of a weekly theme and I'm hoping that'll help me to supply the needs of my little craftaholics :)

This afternoon it'll be English with animals from the zoo for us.

Outdoor Hour # 23

It was time to study yet another dead sample of my collection and this time it was a moth. We observed the moth with the magnifying lense and talked about the differences between butterflies and moths (which in Finnish are called simply "night butterflies").

I encouraged the kids to divide their paper in two sections and to draw a butterfly on one side and a moth on the other side. Lucas drew a huge sun and a butterfly underneath it (see it? It's his first ever butterfly and he was sooo proud!) :) On the other side he drew a moon (see it? It's his first ever moon and he was again sooo proud!). Later on he also drew a moth underneath the moon.

This is Luana's picture. We did discuss the colouring of the moths but the one on the right is however a moth (see the stars and the full moon that tell you it's night?) :)

Best part of this task was by far Lucas' joy of his new drawings.

Outdoor Hour # 22

This week's theme was butterflies. I've been really lucky with dead insects lately (if you can call that being lucky...). I've collected a few dead houseflies, a butterfly, a moth and a dragonfly and kept them in glass jars for the upcoming Outdoor Hour challenges. I'm not much into insects but looking at the kids' joy when they study different things through the magnifying lense is so gratifying that it makes me want to collect even dead insects :D

This post is a little different in that the kids took all of the pictures. This is the dead butterfly that I found on the porch the same morning I had planned to do this challenge (and yes, that's Lucas having a mini melt-down on the background, can't remember what that was all about...) :D

We talked about the different stages of the butterflies and made a notebook page about them. These are the eggs that Lucas drew.

This is Luana's butterfly.

And this is Lucas' version of a butterfly.

We're planning to take on moths today. There's a dead one already waiting in the glass jar :)