Attentiveness – Week 1

Our KONOS week got off to a bit of a rough start with KONOS Kid 2 having come down with a tummy bug during the night and as a result slept most of Monday away trying to recoup. As we are at the end of our school year, KONOS Kid 1 has already completed her Math u See as well as her Llatl, her only independent work being her Apologia General Science course. She worked on that during the day, all our KONOS work was put on hold as we do that together.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw us starting our new unit – Attentiveness. Although we did this character trait right at the beginning of our home educating journey, the girls were very little and could not recall much of what we did. The remembered building a crawl through ear but that was about it. I actually think that they will get so much more out of this unit now that they are older and their reading, writing and understanding skills have grown.

Some of the activities scheduled for this week are memory or concentration games to play. Having watched some of Sonja’s videos of her teaching {from Oikos Family Ministries}, I noticed that she started a lesson with one of these games in order to get the children in the right frame of mind. Ingenious! So I determined that before devotions, before we did anything in the day, I would start each day with one of the games in the activity pages – there are more than enough to have a different game each day of the week. This has proved to be a hit! ‘What game are we starting with today mom?’, is what greets me at the learning table each morning. They are really engaged and excited to start the day.

After our game, we start off in the Word. We have been working through a lovely little devotional called ‘Simple Life’ which focuses on the Amish and their lives of faithful servant hood to Christ. We then read from our favorite character book ‘Wisdom and the Millers’. We have read through this book 3 times over the past 6 years, yet the girls never tire of it – as you can see. We are reading it again at their request. I have a few more character books on my ‘wish list’ which will come into rotation once we have finished this book.

I write out our Attentiveness Bible verse on the board, ‘The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made both of them.’ Prov 21:12 we spend some time discussing how if God saw fit to create ears and eyes for us, then we need to be sure that we use them wisely and well for Him and in our daily living. Being careful what we allow ourselves to see and hear.

We then get busy taking down our vocabulary words {tomorrow’s post looks at this a little more closely}. We discuss the meaning of each one. If we could not clearly tell what the word meant we looked it up in the dictionary. The girls noticed that each of the first days words all were about concentration and paying attention. Even the words that at first did not obviously appear to be so. Great connections they made! Mama is suitably impressed.

Then, as we follow Jessica Hulcey’s recommended daily schedule, we get down to the math and language. KK1 (KONOS Kid 1) gets to go and do her own thing {remember, she has completed her work this year} while I work with KK2. We break for a short while then call down KK1 to join us for reading. We enjoy reading through the fun ‘Magic School bus’ book which takes us on a journey through the ear. We read a short biography on Helen Keller. The girls are impressed at how much disabled person can learn if they really want to. They also work out that KONOS Papa was born 4 years before Helen Keller died at the age of 87. They then do some quick mental math to see the difference in years between KONOS Papa’s current age and the age of Helen Keller when she died. We break for lunch.

This week we have drawn our own diagram of the ear and labeled it. KK2 found this challenging as she finds it difficult to copy drawings or diagrams down. However she per severs and succeeds. We are all very pleased with her, more importantly, she sees that with perseverance she can accomplish the task set for her. Next – the fun part – building our own crawl through ear.

I was fascinated with how the girls did this. The last time we did it I was definitively in the lead because they were so small. I asked things like, ‘what shall we use for this or that?’. They brought lots of very literal objects, things like dad’s hammer for the hammer bone, etc… This time round I stepped away completely. They had their diagrams and they had to decide together how to build it.

Interestingly, with their natural growth and development, they {as you would expect} have moved away from the more concrete and literal learning and built this ear in more of a abstract way. So instead of finding objects to place in their ear that represented the ear drum, and ossicles etc, they diagrammed and labeled the ear {which took away an activity from tomorrow but anyways -LOL}.

They also thought about what it would really be like to crawl down someones ear and included ‘wax’ along the auditory canal… as you can see above. The eardrum was a sheet of paper that you could lift and crawl through to get into the middle ear.

Once our ear was built, it was snack time. ‘Lets have our snack sitting on the auditory canal,’ say’s KK2. So that’s exactly what they did :o) – what fun to be a KONOS KID!