Z has officially begun homeschooling, as Monday would have been the first day of kindergarten if she were attending school. We get a lot of questions about what homeschooling means to us, particularly since we are adopting a hybridized approach that encompasses some aspects of Montessori and Waldorf education but relies little on established curriculum and is generally more consistent with an unschooling approach. Rather than spelling out our overarching strategy or documenting our evolving educational philosophy, which may be irrelevant to parents whose children are in traditional schools, we thought it would be fun to share some of the activities and projects we do with Z, which you can easily do with your children in your time together, even to supplement and enhance a classroom-driven education.

Our target's for Z's first year of home education are loosely guided by our state's standards for kindergarten and first grade educational outcomes. Among them is a concern with basic organization and presentation of information in the form of graphs, which may sound crazy but is actually a lot of fun.

A couple of days ago while Z was playing with her collection of small plastic toys, for example, Jenni invited her to sort them by color, which she did with gusto for half an hour or so. Later she and I tallied the number of "friends" in each group, which ranged from two (black) to 19 (pink). This led to a discussion of how we could represent that information visually rather than with printed numbers, a significant improvement for someone who is still struggling with reading numbers, especially those with multiple digits. We ended up making a bar graph, with me showing her for the first time how we could label an x axis with the color groups (using colors themselves rather than text) and a y axis with markers for 5, 10, 15 or 20 items in the group. I didn't call them the x and y axis, mind you. Then we worked together to find the correct height of each bar, and she drew them and colored them in, first freehand and then, near the end, using a ruler she received at a science camp a few weeks ago. We had a couple of color decisions to make, too - the white group ended up represented by a gray colored pencil (white didn't show up at all on our paper) and the princesses, a special group not organized on the basis of color, adopted the color gold, for obvious reasons.


Z identified several things she wanted to add to the graph, including writing the number of friends in each group below the columns, drawing an icon representing each group at the top of their column, and making a line next to each bar indicating whether she felt it fell into the category of "a lot" of toys or "a few."

I led her through each step of this process, explaining how this would help us because when we had to put away the toys, combining her carefully separated groups into one jar, the chart would be a reference for anyone wanting to know how many toys she had in each color. My thinking is that we can do this again, with her taking more assertive control of the steps involved, now that she has been walked through the process. I'm also pretty keen to introduce the concept of simple Venn diagrams (species of "friends" and their colors would do the trick).

We spent some time afterwards discussing generalized observations about her collection of small toys that we were able to make by looking at the graph, and Z seemed quite confident that the graph was valuable to have on hand. This is probably because she frequently creates things with her toys and then is disappointed to have to put them away and "undo" her work. She insisted on posting the graph on the wall of her room, yet in a location that would not easily be seen by someone who had not been pre-approved. I guess this is the five-year-old version of a classified document.