As freeform homeschoolers, we are always walking the line between freedom and structure. We believe that all children benefit from freedom in their education, but that some structure can help guide a child and keep them centered. Since Z is 7, we've also been working a lot with calendars, clocks, and the idea of routines.

After some ups and downs struggling with getting Z to engage in "activities" (our code word for schooling), I happened on a solution that has worked better than I could ever have imagined: A daily calendar describing events of the day, including appointments that are outside of Z's control (my own appointments or commitments as well as her routine commitments to classes she has chosen, like ballet and gymnastics) and some portion of learning activities that she has pre-chosen in a weekly meeting as her goals and intentions for the week. I set up the schedule in the evening, filling in clock faces to show her what times events are scheduled to begin and end (she's learning to tell time) and writing descriptions of what we'll do, including morning routine reminders that help me get her ready to start the day by a set time, and take care of things we need to do around the house (pick up, feed the chickens, put away the dishes) and all the fun stuff we plan to do throughout the day. The schedule almost always includes free play periods where nothing is scheduled at all -- often an hour or two in the afternoons, as we do our best schooling in the morning.

The thing about the schedule is, while I write up this daily schedule (using activities she has outlined for the week), she is the one who holds me to it. It's only now that we have a schedule that I realize just how often, and how persistently, she was asking what was coming next, trying to fix the order of a day's errands or appointments her mind, and when she would get to do X, on an almost-daily basis -- and how frustrated she would get when an activity was interrupted by something else I had in mind for us to get on to. The schedule has given us both the structure we need, while remaining highly flexible, since its contents are negotiated in advance. Z is now eager to move through the events of each day, and the first thing she does every morning, without fail, is look over the schedule to see what's happening. (The "weather" and "moon phase" blanks at the top of the page are for her to fill in.)

If you'd like a copy of this schedule to use yourself, you can grab a PDF of our Daily Kids' Calendar here.

Z and I had a conversation about 911 earlier today - what it used for, why it is a short number, what types of situations she might need to call 911 for and what she should say if she did, and "how much" someone would be bleeding if they cut themselves so bad that an ambulance would be necessary. Thus the amount of blood in the human body arose as a significant question.

We did a quick web search and came up with a figure of six quarts of blood in an average adult. (Later, and perhaps better figures would knock this down closer to five quarts, but I have no regrets.) This means very little to a five-year-old; even showing a one-quart liquid measuring cup and saying "six of these" doesn't help much, because kids that young can't really visualize and estimate volumes. So we decided to make six quarts of "blood," to get a sense of just how much that was.

It all went down in the bathroom, where knew we could clean up any mess we made without much hassle.


We used this hair clip board to count quarts as we went. With each quart we poured into the larger container, Z "opened the doors" in one of the hair clip slots.


The red food coloring was the master stroke that made certain Z would both remember and understand what we were doing. Above, Z contemplates the volume of blood that is supposedly coursing through my body.

The next step was a discussion of the fact that she undoubtedly had considerably less blood. We did some quick math and guessed that although she was about 1/4 of my weight, she might have up to 1/3 of the amount of blood in her body that I had in mine. We really had no reason to think that, but it seemed like a decent guess, and I didn't want to slow down our progress by looking for more facts.

That's when things got really interesting, though, because after calculating how much blood we were going to measure back out of the container, we decided we'd take pictures of each of us with the quantity of blood that was in our bodies. In other words, it meant Z was going to get her hands on our Nikon D40. She's a pretty careful kid, but that camera is pretty heavy for a five-year-old.






In a way it seems like a lot of blood to have in your body... doesn't it?

When we removed the blood from the container to "draw down" to Z's level, she "closed doors" back up in our counting card and was able to tell me when we had removed enough.


This seems like a shockingly small quantity of blood for anyone to have, especially since we were probably overestimating. It's realizations like this that make kids' toughness in the face of great vulnerability so shocking, and so inspiring.


This photo is a few months old, from the time Z ran out of a restaurant more or less straight into a pole. There was a lot of blood at the time, and it didn't help that her tears mixed with it, reopening it several times as it healed. Clearly, though, there was plenty of blood left over.

Jeremiah and Z have been saving up a variety of items for another "Nature Box," and spent a couple of hours this weekend putting it together. It's more varied than their previous nature boxes, and includes:

• A real or concrete-generated fossil of a small clamshell Z found in our driveway


• A tuft of animal fur from the road, probably rabbit


• Half of a geode purchased at a museum and smashed in our driveway with a hammer


• A painted shell Z bought in on a trip to Galveston with her grandmother


• A dragonfly found in our yard


• Two moths, one found on our porch and the other in our garden


• An inch-long thorny leaf tip from a century plant (large agave) from our driveway


• A dead ladybug and a dead cranefly, both from our home office


• Part of a bird's egg found on a walk in a local park

One of the most interesting developments for this project, though, was the "map" they created in the box lid to identify specimens. Jeremiah drew circles to indicate each object, and then Z labeled them, and learned in the process how the "map" (a legend, really) can show a viewer what is in the box, without directly labeling the objects themselves. We've been working a lot on maps lately - a topic we'll discuss in another post soon on Punnybop, as it all started with a couple of great kids' books - and this plays into that learning well. As Z is busy learning to write, we are also very keen to use applications that are highly purposeful and meaningful to her, and labeling something she can refer to later offers tangible evidence of the value of writing things down!