January 5: Day One

To kick off our home school adventure, I developed a six to eight week project that we are undertaking on the Fibonacci Sequence. Our research will encompass all areas of our curriculum including math, science, history, writing, art, music, logic and reasoning, and computers. Wow! We launched the project today and began to learn the concept behind the numbers. Keep in mind that when and if this is taught in regular schools, it is a high school or college level concept. But I just knew my kids would get it.

Austin was getting very frustrated with the Fibonacci concept partially because Frankie was nailing it. This kind of thing is just completely intuitive for him. It's deep in his DNA. But the real problem was that I wasn't explaining it right because it was the first time I was teaching it (and truth be told, I don't fully understand it myself). She was getting frustrated and shifted immediately into a state of learned helplessness. She threw herself on the floor, completely withdrawing from the lesson. Essentially, she completely "gave up". So I quickly shifted to damage control mode and took them to a website that has numerous examples of the concept hoping there would be something she would grasp onto. (For those who are interested, a great website is http://www.phisource.com/).

There are many fascinating aspects of the Fibonacci Sequence and one can get lost on this site for hours. But, we found a the theology section of the website and it was like a light bulb came on for Austin. Her entire face lit up and she launched into a whole dissertation about how the Fibonacci principle relates to religion and the trilogy. Soon, they were working together, fully inspired, feeding off each other and building on these concepts around religion and the Fibonacci Sequence. They spent a solid hour exploring the website and digging into interesting aspects of the Golden ratio and the Fibonacci principle. They were fully inspired and engrossed in learning. At the end of the day they told me that they loved it, and learned more in one day than they do in a typical week at school. If we can keep this up, the kids will be off the charts in their learning.