The Learning Umbrella

Now that the main push of Christmas is over, I feel a bit lost and down. It's hard to make that transition - and usually my house is full of wrapping paper and packaging and lots of new stuff that doesn't have homes yet. It all feels very messy and uncomfortable to me. So, I'm trying to sort and clean and tidy, and look ahead to the new year and what I need/want to accomplish for it. I have a huge event coming up - the birth of my baby. So there are plenty of projects I could be doing to get ready. But I still feel sad that Christmas is over.
One project I'm starting is a set of little scrap books for Carbon. I'm just using spiral bound sketch books, one for each exploration or topic we're studying together. For instance, right now we're doing Birds and Stories. The bird journal has a list of resources for the first couple pages, then books read for a couple of pages, then we'll be putting in observations we make and notes about what sort of birds we can identify. Eventually he can start drawing pictures of the birds. In his story journal, I'm writing down the stories he tells me, with dates. Eventually, he can illustrate them and then start writing them out himself. These journal/scrapbooks may take years to fill, but in the end I envision having something cool for him to look back on and having a record of what we were doing for schooling. For me, this is more fun than just keeping a log or stuffing a few things in a file cabinet.