Homeschool Discoveries

Happy Weekend! It hardly feels like it should be the weekend already with the four-day school week.  We took Labor Day as a holiday since Tony was home from work — I hit the 50% off sale at the local thrift store, then we biked to the beach in the afternoon.   A fun send-off to summer.  🙂

Our four days of school had their ups and downs.  On the down side, we really still haven’t hit our groove in terms of our schedule.   Both Miss M and Mr. E have requested to have their subjects-with-mom first.   Sorry guys — you can’t both be first!  Miss M seems easily distracted by the boys’ fun Preschool and K work and would like to watch or join in…but she also wants to get school done by lunch if possible.   After a major meltdown on Wednesday, Miss M let me know that she felt too much time pressure with the first schedule I set up.   But today when I tried having a 50 minute block with her to do her “with mom” subjects back to back, Mr. E had really hard time waiting for his turn.   I try another schedule iteration on Monday and hopefully we’ll find something soon that works for us.

Despite meltdowns and schedule issues, we still had plenty of learning and fun this week:

1.  I pulled out some preschool busy bags to help keep the boys busy and quiet during some of Miss M’s work-with-mom time.  It worked…a little bit anyway.

2.  Miss completed lessons 113-116 in RightStart C — introducing on area, reviewing subtraction strategies and practicing Multiplication.  I liked how these lessons were short and sweet.  At least they were sweet once subtraction strategies were firmly in the forefront of the student’s mind.  🙂  In other math news, Mr E is breezing through early lessons in RightStart B.  We did portions of RightStart A, but didn’t necessarily go through the program sequentially.  So, some is review and some is not.  We either reviewed or covered for the first time portions of lessons 4-12!

3. We’re trying some calendar time all together.  It’s easy fun/review for Miss M, new and “right on” for something Mr E is ready to learn and a bit above Mr. K’s head.  But we’re trying to spend a few minutes on it all together each day.

4. This was a light history week for us.  We’re finishing up our unit on American Indians and Explorers by gluing important explorers dates into our timeline book.  We already started a read-aloud related to our next unit, and next week we’ll jump in full speed with Settlers/Pilgrims/Colonists.

5. Miss M requested we make homemade lemonade with fresh squeezed lemon juice, since we didn’t get that checked off our summer bucket list.  So we enjoyed our lemonade Friday afternoon along with a couple of pastries and had a fun snack/story time.

6. I haven’t put a lot of effort yet in how to keep Baby J out of trouble during school time.  Luckily taking all the clean towels out of the laundry basket doesn’t cause too much chaos.  😉

7. I finally added labels to all our school drawers.  Unfortunately, Baby J immediately pulled all the labels off the bottom set of drawers!!!

8. The most exciting thing that happened to us this is week is…we bought a new van!!! After years of saving, we paid cash for a 2007 Toyota Sienna.  It is much bigger than the old, tiny mini-van we drove previously.  I even fit 12 bags of groceries in the back with room to spare after a big stock-up trip.

9. I purchased a set of the small We Choose Virtues flashcards to try out this program. I’ve read a lot of positive reviews of this program so I was excited to give it a try.  We chose “diligent” as our first virtue.  So far I am really liking how it motivates the boys and gives them a practical handle on how they can grow in something that is a bit of an abstract concept.   Even Mr. K was walking around telling us he was “Diligent Man” while reciting the catchphrase from the card and actually cleaning up his duplos! Yay!

10. Random cute smiley baby J picture…just because.  🙂

11. – 12.  It was a science-y sort of week…both in ways I had planned and ways that  I had not planned.  Last week we reviewed lesson D-2 (Day, Night and the Earth’s Rotation) in BFSU.   This week I had planned to cover lessons D-5 (Time and the Earth’s Turning) and D-6 (Seasonal Changes and the Earth’s Orbit).  We did cover, but not finish, portions of both of those lessons.   Thanks to inspiration from a library book, the boys begged to study volcanoes.  That’s what they are doing in the picture.  In #11 Mr. K is perusing a Magic Schoolbus book about volcanoes.  #12 shows some of Mr. E’s work — a notebooking page he narrated to me, a drawing and a Hands of a Child lapbook piece from V is for Volcano.  We also had a random lesson about how Yo-Yos works after Miss M got a new yo-yo.  Thank-you Google for helping me find the answers about questions like this!

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap-Up!