A Month of Pumpkins

My goal this month was to do lots of pumpkin related activites with Marlee. Something every few days. Things about pumpkins, not just Halloween! So one of the things we did was talk about the life cycle of a pumpkin last night. I showed Marlee a picture (from the internet) and talked about each stage. Then I asked her questions about each stage and asked her to look at the pictures and tell me what stage each picture represented. She got them all right! When Jeff got home, she was able to tell him each stage AND something about each stage! By the way, the stages are 1. seed 2. vine 3. flower 4. growing fruit 5. mature fruit (aka "eating" fruit as Marlee call it). She remembered it all this morning too. We have also made a "pumpkin ruler" and measured different things. Marlee's hand was 3 pumpkins long and Shareen's hand was 5 pumpkins long. Of course, Marls went off and measured all kinds of things. We recorded a few of them to put in a pumpkin lapbook we are going to try to make. Key word -try-!

Socialized or Sociable?

Do we want our children to be little socialists?  Or, do we want them to be sociable? What is the difference?  Joel Salatin in Family Friendly Farming recounts author Rick Boyer’s perspective on the difference between socialization and being sociable. According to Boyer, socialization is social mimicry – conforming, becoming an indistinguishable part of a larger group. Being sociable is having social skills; holding polite conversations, not just with children of the same age, but with a wide variety of people.