Homeschool Discoveries

It’s a happy Friday indeed around here…the kids are still excited about the fun day we had yesterday for Valentines…they’re excited about the surprise I had for them today — we’re taking a “mini-break” today through next Wednesday from our regular routine for a few fun outings and some relaxation.  🙂

We had pretty normal school days Monday through Wednesday (and an abbreviated school day on Valentines Day before we headed out for co-op):

1 – 3:  Mr E’s week (Kindergarten) involved an extra helping of games.   He finished lessons 61-64 of Logic of English Foundations, which included Phonogram Slap and a reading game called “Fox in the Hen House”.  Mr. K (Pre-K) played phonogram slap as well this week and loved it!  We discovered a new RightStart game called Addition Bingo, and we played a few rounds this week while Mr. E also practiced 4 digit adding (RightStart B, lesson 91).

4.  For math this week, Miss M (3rd grade) focused on measurement (Length, Weight and Liquid Volume) with Math Mammoth 3-B.  A lot of this was review, but some was new (especially metric units).  We made this handy reference chart to hang on the wall of our school room with abbreviations, conversions, and so on.

5.  We continue to focus on the 1815-1865 era in US History.  Pictured are a few picture books we’ve recently read (some outloud, some read independently by Miss M).

6.  In Science we’ve been doing a unit study on Rocks and Minerals…I think we’re about ready to wrap it up.  I couldn’t find a nice venn diagram lapbook piece, so I made one myself. It turned out kind of small though so I did the writing as I discussed with Miss M the similarities and differences between rocks and minerals.

We had a fun, family-focused Valentines Day:

While I love a date night for Valentines or other romantic gestures…this year our “romantic” celebration of Valentines is on hold until Saturday due to work travel for my hubby.  I wanted to make it a special day for the kids, so I surprised them with small Valentines gifts and  a special breakfast when they woke up yesterday morning.  The three older kids each got a mini Lego set, and they were more interested in assembling the sets than eating the yummy breakfast at first!

Following breakfast we did a light school day and got ready to go to co-op.  Our co-op meeting involved a Valentines party.  Miss M made homemade valentines for her classmates while the boys opted for store bought cards.  Miss M also helped me assemble Valentine treats for my students in the class I teach at co-op.   After co-op we had a bit of a “theme” evening with a Spaghetti dinner and a viewing of Lady and The Tramp.  🙂 We had Lava Cake for dessert!

Our mini “mid-winter break” started today.  The kids were excited for a change up in the routine.  Today we went to an indoor play area…and conveniently for me, there just happened to be a homeschool used book and curriculum sale happening in the same building as the play area.  😉

Look at Baby J getting his “walk” on!  He still prefers scooting or crawling, but is walking a little more each day.

Finally, here are a few more just-for-fun highlights from our week:

1.  Baby J practicing his latest skill, building block towers (to knock over, and build again!)

2 -4: DIY “Star Wars” dress-up fun (Darth Vader, A Clone Trooper, and Queen Amidala)

5. More snow play, as we got a couple more dousings of snow within the past week

6.  We played Settlers of Catan twice within the past week.  The kids are enjoying learning the strategy of this game.

7.  Our British-style thin pancakes for Pancake Day on Tuesday.

Have a great weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday, The Weekly Wrap-Up, and It’s a Wrap!

We certainly had a whirlwind of a week…lots of fun stuff…and some schoolwork too.  🙂

A big highlight was our 100th Day of School and Mr. K’s birthday (link to a post earlier this week with a birthday interview), both on Wednesday:

I took some ideas from my post earlier this week to fill our “100th day of school” morning.  The kids favorite activity was making a “100 Snack” (10 each of 10 snack items).  I think their second favorite was guessing how many of various activities they could do in 100 seconds, then trying that out (how many times to jump up and down, count to 10, say the alphabet, etc).

Here are a few highlights of our school work this week:

1.  “Just Dance Kids” on the Wii is good “PE” time, right?  It’s hard to help kids find ways to burn off energy in the winter when it’s too cold to go outside or when we really only have time for a quick physical activity break (and of course just getting winter gear on and off takes about half an hour in and of itself!).   So, while Wii is normally not allowed during the day, I made an exception and let the kids do about 20 minutes of singing and dancing one day this week.  Another day we incorporated exercise and math by figuring out how many times they would have to go around the perimeter of the living room rug to run a mile — It turns out you would have to go around 207 times! I don’t think anyone made it around that many times.  😉

2-3.  We’re still enjoying Sentence Family for grammar — we’ve now met 8 “family members”, including four parts of speech.  This is enough for some basic sentence labeling.  Today I helped Miss M (3rd grade) label nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs by their special “sentence family color”.

4.  It was a review week for Miss M in Logic of English Essentials.   Here she marked the words she thought she needed more practice with from the previous 4 lessons.  We tried to play some spelling review games, but due to various distractions we didn’t get very far in our game playing.  The games are a lot of fun with more than one player…but Mr E (Kindergarten) was not in a very good mood about playing games versus his big sister (even with his own spelling words) this week.   Mr. E did two more lessons in LOE Foundations (plus those attempts at additional spelling and phonogram games with his big sister), and in the busyness of this week I just did a bit of phonogram review with Mr K and didn’t do any new lessons for him in Foundations.

5.  Mr. E continues to speed along in RightStart B.  He LOVES his math time.  We covered material in lessons 84-89 (again, not doing every exercise), and started in today on lesson 90. Lesson 90 is supposed to be 4 digit adding on the abacus, but Mr. E was far more interested in learning the pencil-and-paper algorithm, so we did a few problems together that way (as you can see, he still has trouble with directionality when he is writing).   Miss M finished up the geometry chapter in Math Mammoth 3-B, and we did an overview of the Measurement chapter to decide which areas will need our attention.  She has covered some measurement in RightStart, but MM 3-B brings up some new measurement topics we haven’t done much of yet, like weight.   She is also doing daily multiplication fact practice.

6.  One of Mr. E’s big reads this week was Green Eggs and Ham. He loved it and did a great job reading this book.  He asked an obvious question I had never thought much about before.  Why in the world does Sam insist that this guy need to eat the green eggs and ham in the first place.  I mean, we all have our favorite foods but we don’t usually chase people around and tell them that they have to eat it too! 😉

Just for fun, here are a few more non-school-related highlights from our week:

Top Row:  Baby J looking cute, making messes.  Don’t you just love the spot he picked to “read” his book?

Middle Row: Even though we didn’t have any one over for a Superbowl party, we still made some fun “party food” and watched the game (and the commercials, of course!) as a family.   On Saturday night we met some of Tony’s coworkers and their families at the Mall of America (it’s just down the road from our house) for dinner and rides.  Did you know there’s a Peeps store at the mall? I just had to go in and buy some candy.  🙂

Bottom Row:  Need to keep two middle boys amused for a while? Just print out a stack of Star Wars coloring sheets!  Our Rock Candy turned out pretty well (post coming next week about that).  The final picture is another cute shot of Baby J from our trip to the Children’s Museum on Mr. K’s birthday.  Tony left work early to meet us at the museum!

Have a wonderful weekend!

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

It’s the end of another week and we are back to sub-zero chill here in Minnesota, at least for the day.  I think by next week we’ll get above freezing again.  Meanwhile, I am sitting warm inside while not looking forward to (eta) having survived bundling everyone up to go to Miss M’s guitar lesson this afternoon.   I’m comforting myself with the fact this might be the last below-zero cold snap this winter, if we’re lucky!

Here are a few of our school work highlights for this week:

1.  History: Miss M (age 8.5, 3rd grade) loves our current history unit — We are studying the time period of US History between about 1815 to 1860, with a focus on the pioneers and westward expansion.   Our history book basket is full of books she is excited to read.  I didn’t get as much history read aloud done with all the kids as I had hoped I would, but I did finish a bedtime read-aloud with Miss M faster than expected. Look for a review of Birchbark House next week!

2 and 3.  Mr. E (age 5.5, Kindergarten) and Mr K (age almost-4, Pre-K) loved the new Angry Birds printable packs from Homeschool Creations — so much so that they did almost all the activities on Monday, the day I printed them out!

4.  Science: Miss M asked me on Monday, “Mom, why haven’t we done a lapbook in a long time?”  I reminded her that the last time we were working on a lapbook (near the beginning of the school year), she told me she was tired of lapbooks and didn’t really like them so much any more.   She had no memory of telling me that, and asked to do a lapbook for history or science.  We decided together that she would do a science lapbook first to go along with our current unit on Rocks and Minerals (conveniently enough, I already had a Hands of a Child lapbook on that topic just waiting to be used!).

5. and 6. – Math:  We played a couple of RightStart math games this week.  “Rows and Columns” was suggested in one of Mr. E’s lessons for RightStart B (Miss M asked to take my place as his game opponent), and Miss M asked that I find a new multiplication game to try from the RightStart game book, so I found one called “Ring Around the Products” that was pretty fun.  We didn’t finish either game — it would have taken a couple hours! (I guess that means we started with too many cards in our stock!).  I love math games but even when you cut them short, they are time consuming.

Besides the games, Mr. E worked on lessons 76-83 in RS level B (we didn’t do all the exercises in all those lessons — he was catching on pretty fast, though we may go back and do some later for further practice and review). Miss M worked through a lot of the Geometry chapter in Math Mammoth 3-B (she is currently on a “break” from RS level D) — a lot of it was review from RightStart, but I am finding some of the same concepts are presented differently, so it is good for her to see things from this different angle.

7.  Spelling/Phonics: Bigger boys working on the table…little boy playing under the table. 🙂  Mr. E is working on a Logic of English worksheet here.  He worked on lessons 54-58 of Foundations — a number of the concepts here were review, with some new.   I didn’t do as much Foundations work with Mr. K this week.  This is a beta- test product and new teacher’s manual files were released for lessons 1-20.  I tried to jump in where we should have been with the new file in lesson 11…but the order has changed up a bit, so I had to back up and figure out what was new.  So, I worked on a couple of new phonograms with Mr. K, but I guess we are still somewhere around lesson 9 or 10?  🙂  Miss M did the next lesson in Logic of English Essentials this week, Lesson 24.

8. My mom, Grandma Karen to the kids, comes to visit once every couple weeks.  When we don’t have a field trip planned we often try and incorporate Grandma into our school day.  🙂   Here, Mr. E is practicing reading with Grandma.  He read a level 1 book he picked out for this week called, “Space Cat.”

9.  Everyone gathered around the table with Grandma — the two older kids playing Corners (a RightStart math game), Mr. E coloring and stickering, Baby J eating a late lunch after nap. 🙂

More “Just for Fun” Highlights:

1.  We made Maple Sugar Snow Candy at the beginning of the week — read more about that here.

2.  Given our success with that project, we started some Rock Candy on Tuesday…hopefully we will have something positive to report about that project in a week or two!

3.  Siblings having fun together!

4. After a weekend snowfall, we had nice (above freezing!) weather for a couple days early in the week — perfect for snowballs and snowmen.  This potential snowman got too big, too fast (no one could lift the midsection on to the base), but the big snowball in the backyard makes a nice…leap frog obstacle?  😉

5. Baby J is now 15 months old, and inching ever closer to being a toddler.  He takes a few steps now before falling down, but definitely prefers scooting to walking.   Here he tells me, “all done” — he put all his fabric scraps back in his fabric fun box.

6. This is Mr. E’s favorite Lego accomplishment of the week.  He loves Star Wars legos and we have several sets — but not very many Jedi or Sith.  He spends hours pouring over his Lego Star Wars Character encyclopedia.  This is his “homemade” version of some of his favorite Jedi and Sith — made from pieces we already own.  🙂

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

I’m really enjoying how our “second semester” is going so far.  I hadn’t planned ahead of time to make a lot of changes to our curriculum line up, but a few small changes have added up to a feeling of “freshness” to the new calendar year and the second half of our academic year.  No winter blahs for us, despite the sub-zero weather!  Here are a few highlights from our schoolwork this week:

1.  We’ve been a bit slack on our family science lessons with BFSU this school year, for a variety of reasons.  But this week we started a Rock and Mineral unit, using some inspiration from a couple different BFSU lessons, Rock and Mineral study kits, and books and videos from the library.  Besides having fun with the study kits, this week I also read a Magic Schoolbus chapter book to the kids entitled “Rocky Road Trip.”

2.  Miss M probably got the most out of the experience with the Rock and Mineral kits.  She found a favorite rock from her personal collection, and wrote “My rock study” on a blank piece of paper, and and tried to identify her rock using the tests we learned about in the kits.  We didn’t quite get to the bottom of  her rock’s identity though.

3.  I’m teaching 1st/2nd grade science at our co-op this year, and my lesson this week was on inertia (BFSU lesson C-5).  My kids enjoyed helping me practice my activities and demonstrations.

4. Mr. E continues to enjoy the challenge of two digit plus two digit addition in RightStart B.  This week he did lesson 75 and most of lesson 76.  We also read 4 chapters of  Life of Fred Apples (The level is appropriate for Mr E, but Miss M listens in for fun).   The kids would probably do the entire book in a week if I would let them!  Miss M continued with lots of  multiplication practice (via iPad apps, music, games, and worksheets) and finished up a section of Math Mammoth 3-B on rounding and estimation.

5-6.  We started Sentence Family this week for a fun introduction to grammar and it was a HUGE hit! Sentence Family takes a fun “art and storytelling” approach to basic grammar.  I intended it to be just for Miss M, but after the boys overheard a bit of the first chapter and saw the drawing Miss M made, they insisted on listening as well.   After that first day, all three kids old enough to draw came to listen when it was time for this study.  You’ll see in picture #6 I made some very basic notebook pages to go along with each character.  I don’t think Mr. K (Pre-K) is getting much out of it — he just likes to draw.  But I think Mr. E (K’er) is “getting it” just about as much as Miss M (3rd grade) is.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this fun program in the near future.

Not Pictured: 

Spelling/Phonics: Everyone had another great week with Logic of English.  Miss M finished lesson 23 of Essentials, while Mr. E finished lessons 51-53 of Foundations.  I worked with Mr. K on lessons 9-10 of Foundations — I didn’t quite get as much quality time with him this week on his phonograms and writing.  That’s okay — there’s no rush with my not-quite-4-year-old.  🙂

History: We started our next unit in our US History studies.  We’re now up to the period of time between the War of 1812 and the Civil War — So essentially about 1815-1860.   The main focus of our study will be the Pioneers and westward expansion, but we’ll hit briefly upon other major events of that period like the Trail of Tears, the Alamo, etc.   We’ll save some of the major topics about slavery as a prelude to our study of the Civil War.   I don’t have a spine text or key text I’m super excited about for this period, but we are trying out a bit of This Country of Ours by H.E. Marshall.  This is an older work and requires an occasional bit of “editing” as I read for dated (aka somewhat racist) language, but I like how it gives an overview of American history while still being engaging in its tone.   Of course we also have an overflowing book basket of books for Miss M to read independently or me to read out loud.

And finally…Guitar Lessons: Miss M had her first-ever guitar lesson this afternoon.  We got the two older kids a guitar for Christmas, but we’re going to wait on formal lessons for Mr. E until his hands are just a little bigger and he has a bit more patience for practicing.  Miss M is very eager to learn and we found a teacher that I think will be a good fit for her, at a location that is a very reasonable drive from our house.   She has been asking for music lessons for quite a while, and I am so excited for her to be starting this journey.

Have a wonderful weekend!

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

After a couple weeks that were a bit more on the “boring” side for us, we had a bit more fun and excitement this week…and plenty of learning.    🙂

One of our big highlights this week was a field trip day to The Works with my mom.  The kids love bringing Grandma along on field trips (and this time she even treated us to a late lunch at Baker’s square after our time at The Works…thanks, Mom!).

We really enjoy the small size of The Works (the big Science Museum of MN is a bit more overwhelming with the younger kids), the room with hands-on projects that rotate every month or so, and just the general hands-on feel there.

Here are a few other highlights of our week:

1. We definitely had more than our usual number of outings this week.  Besides our trip to The Works, We headed to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for their monthly Family Day on Sunday afternoon.  The theme was “food art” and the kids created candy jewelry, clay pizzas, and went on a “gallery hunt” to find certain works of art containing pictures of food.

2. Then on Wednesday afternoon the kids were invited to a birthday party at an indoor play area.  The bigger kids were running around in the play structure so I couldn’t really snap any pictures of them, but Baby J and I enjoyed the slower paced toddler area.  We don’t have very many mirrors in our house at his level, so he really liked this baby-height mirror.

3.  Miss M enjoyed the “Silent E” game in Logic of English Essentials lesson 22.   We skipped over this game in Lesson 21, so we cut out the cards from both of those lessons, and took turns deciding the reason for the silent E in a variety of words.   Many people only learn one reason for a silent E (making a vowel say it’s name or long sound).  Did you know there are actually seven possible reasons for silent E at the end of a word? This game was good for me too, as I did not have the seven Silent E rules memorized yet!  This was a great LOE week for Miss M — she got a perfect score on her assessment at the end of the week!

4. For math, Mr. E spend most of the week hanging out in lessons 73 and 74 of RightStart level B.  He enjoyed building 3D structures with the cubes, but didn’t want to do very many in one sitting.  Lesson 73 on finding 2 digit numbers plus a multiple of 10 wasn’t difficult by any means, but I wanted to not rush past this point and have him do all the practice problems over the course of the week.  We started Lesson 75 on Friday, and I think we’ll spend a lot of next week on the practice problems from that lesson.  Mentally adding two digit numbers with a result over 100 is a little bit trickier concept!

5. and 6. We found time for Logic of English Foundations on three days this week.  With Mr. E, I spent one more day reviewing in lessons 46-48, then we also did lesson 49 and most of lesson 50 — we still have a few games and activities from lesson 50 to save for next week.   Mr. E’s favorite activity was definitely “shooting” phonograms with his Nerf clone trooper gun!  I worked on lessons 6-8 with Mr K.  In picture #6 he is practicing his handwriting strokes (the building blocks of letters).  In lesson 8 he “officially” learned his first phonogram and how to write it — “a”.

7.  After some stress and dissatisfaction with RightStart D for Miss M, I decided we would take at least the next 6-8 weeks off of RightStart, and do Math Mammoth 3-B (plus some multiplication fact practice) instead.  So far so good — she worked on a couple topics I don’t remember seeing in RightStart yet — rounding, estimating, and order of operations (the latter was actually from the Math Mammoth topic packet Multiplication 1).

8. To add a little spice to our math time, I purchased the first book in the Life of Fred elementary math series entitled, “Apples“.   I got this primarily for Mr. E’s benefit, but Miss M thinks it is fun and is listening in too.   We read three chapters this week — we easily could have done more, but I want this to be the frosting on top of our math time — a treat for finishing other work….and these books are a bit expensive for what you get, so I don’t want to have to buy another one TOO soon.  😉

9.  We capped off our week with a trip to our favorite bakery to buy donuts and pastries in celebration of our half-way mark in the school year (see this post if you want to read a bit more about how we’re doing with our curricula right now at the half way point), and to celebrate that Mr. E has now read two Dr. Seuss books with just a bit of help — he finished One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish on Friday!

Have a wonderful weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap-Up!

Happy New Year!  I feel like we I am still recovering from Christmas, New Years, our holiday travel, and other post-holiday responsibilities.  We returned home late in the day on New Year’s eve from a  six-day trip.  I had started feeling sick that morning…and then I was sick for almost a week (I really regret procrastinating on my flu shot this year!).  Meanwhile, I still needed to take care of my family and try and get some work done on my quarterly editing deadline.

Miss M was sick for about 24 hours last weekend, but thankfully everyone else escaped this round of sickness.  In an effort to return to normal,  I started Miss M on some light independent school work last week, before returning to a mostly normal schedule of school work this week.  My throat was still pretty scratchy, so reading aloud was at a minimum.  Meanwhile, I still feel a bit behind the eight ball. I just finally finished my quarterly editing project this afternoon, my house is still full of Christmas decorations, and it took me a week after we arrived home from our trip to get everything unpacked! 😉

While it wasn’t perhaps the most “fun and exciting” week of schooling, we did accomplish a fair amount:

1. & 2.  Logic of English Foundations with Mr E and Mr K.  Okay, so this is a bit fun and exciting.  🙂 I purchased the pre-press/beta version of the Logic of English early childhood program, Foundations.  My original thought was to use this with just Mr. K.  He is really eager to learn his letters!  But as I read through the program I realized it could really be a good fit for Mr. E as well – a better fit than what I’ve been able to do in Logic of English Essentials with him.  Mr K really enjoyed doing lessons 1-5 of Foundations — we learned about voiced and unvoiced sounds, and he got to “squish” compound words together as well as identifying words that would segment. (i.e.  j – u – m – p …do what I just said!).

In trying to figure out exactly where to place Mr. E, I worked on some concepts from lessons 46-48 with him.  Some items in those lessons are review, while some are new. He seems to like it — I wish I would have bit the bullet and bought this product when they first announced the beta last summer!  Even though we could have flown through the early lessons super fast, we would probably actually be at a further point in his phonics/spelling that we are now. Oh well, live and learn!

Miss M did lesson 21 in LOE Essentials.  We’re over half-way through that book now!

3.  We’ve never tried to keep track of our number of days in school before this year.  It’s not required as a part of our state homeschool regulations.   But I thought it would be super fun to celebrate the 100th day of school this year, so we’ve been keeping track.  This is Miss M’s “100 Days” chart.  Only 17 more school days and we’ll have our 100th Day party!

4. With the new year our family has made a renewed commitment to read the Bible daily.  It’s a habit that slipped in the last couple months of 2012.  Miss M is reading 2 chapters per day starting in Genesis (she tells me she really wants to read through beginning to end — I told her she might want to rethink that plan once she hits a few of the harder-to-read books in a row!).   I am having the boys listen to audio Bible using the YouVersion App on the iPad.  They also wanted to start the year in Genesis and have been listening to 2 to 4 chapters each day.

5. Mr. E is still my math-loving boy.  The so-called “wall” in lesson 68 of RightStart B was no trouble for him.  We finished lesson 68 this week and worked through lessons 69-71 as well (including this long addition page pictured!).

Miss M worked on lessons 83-87 and started #88 in Right Start D.  We’re finally to the point where all the lessons all seem “new” and not like a few new topics mixed in with review.  However I am still not exactly happy with RS D, or at least how it is going for Miss M.  She still finds the presentation of the material in many of the lessons to be less than clear…and she really hates having to do a series of problems followed by a question like, “what pattern do you see in these answers?”  She finds it frustrating that she usually sees some other pattern other than what the lesson is getting at.

I think she would do much better with a math program that was more straight-forward somehow.    I’ve been browsing other math programs the last couple days.  Math Mammoth is an easy program to try out since it is a download…so I am seriously considering at minimum taking a break from RS and doing Math Mammoth for a few weeks.  Maybe it will be a permanent switch, who knows!?!

6. Back in December, Mr E. chose to start reading Cat in the Hat, and he finished it this week! It’s a long book for a new reader!  His next book pick is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish…another book that will take many 10 minute sittings for him to finish.  🙂  Both of these books have contained some new phonograms we haven’t covered in Logic of English, but having gotten through most of the LOE basic phonograms with Miss M, I am finding I can usually give a rule-based explanation on the fly of words that are new to Mr E.

Have a wonderful rest-of-your-weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap-Up!

In the midst of preparing and celebrating, I wanted to not forget what we were up to this past week.   We did a light school schedule Monday through Wednesday (mostly so the kids wouldn’t get too bored or stir crazy!).   Miss M did math and spelling review and read an assigned book.  Mr E worked on reading Cat in the Hat and played math games:

We did lots of baking and treat making.  The gingerbread people and house were from a kit that Grandma picked up for us after Christmas last year.  Saving it didn’t work out as well as I hoped — the frosting and icing was very dried out!

And as always, we had lots of fun.  And our new camera arrived (nothing fancy, just a point and shoot to replace an old one that was flaking out), causing me to follow kids around and get cute pictures.  Tony and I  also couldn’t resist opening up our Christmas gift to ourselves — a new espresso machine.  And the big boxes it came in were like an early Christmas gift to the kids.  😉

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!  Between celebrating, traveling, attending a church conference and my quarterly editing deadline, I’m not anticipating posting for at least two weeks and maybe closer to three weeks.  See you after Christmas break!

Linking up with Collage Friday!

We had a real snow storm last weekend (over 10 inches!), so this was the sight at our house:

Many years this isn’t really news in Minnesota, but this is our first “big” snow in almost two years! Last winter was very dry, and our biggest one-day-snow-total was only about 4 inches.  The last big snow similar to this was was way back in February of 2011.   The kids had a blast playing outside and helping with the shoveling.  And we were very grateful for help from friends and neighbors to get our long sidewalk shoveled out (my husband broke his leg in a bike accident last month and is still on crutches!).

Learning Highlights this week:

• Miss M (8, 3rd grade) did school in her prairie dress on Monday.  She is seen here reading her assigned historical fiction for the week – The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz.  Miss M also picked a few other titles to read from the book basket this week.  We didn’t do a ton of history reading all together — Just a little bit of “A New Nation” by the Maestros.  Miss M and I are working on another history-related title at bedtime, Carry on Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham.
• Mr. K (3.5) asked for more “school work” this week.  I printed out the letter pages from the free Preschool Daily Learning Notebook @ Confessions of a Homeschooler, and he really enjoyed those!
• I planned this to mostly be a review/practice week for math.  Mr K (5.5, grade K) and I practiced some of the adding strategies in Right Start B (completing the 10, 9’s trick, Two 5’s trick), including playing “Adding War” with numbers 4-10.
• Miss M wanted practice on her 7’s and 8’s facts in multiplication, so we played some Speed, a really fun skip counting game from Highhill Educational Supplies.  I also planned on having her review finding area in inches and centimeters, a topic we just did a couple months ago in RightStart C, and is repeated in RightStart D.   I guess I must have skipped or glossed terms like “square inches” and “centimeters squared” though for the most part in RS C — because that totally threw Miss M for a loop.  We’re still working on that terminology.
• Not pictured: We did spelling as usual (Miss M will finish lesson 19 today in Logic of English and Mr. E is pretty much finished with Lesson 7).  Mr. E read a couple I See Sam books, and also wanted to start reading The Cat in the Hat.   Miss M read and notebooked another chapter of Sassafras Science Adventures: Zoology.

Fun Highlights of our Week:

1. Sorting out our “done bin” of artwork and miscellaneous school work.  The boys in particular create A LOT of artwork.  Some of the best from the year got scanned in and turned into a calendar to give as gifts.
2. Making homemade Christmas cards
3. Miss M made a “fire” and “S’mores” for her favorite doll, Raggedy Ann, to enjoy. 🙂
4. This is our attempt at an advent wreath.  We are doing a weekly family devotional for advent this year with Everyday Emmanuel from “What’s in the Bible?” and their video Why Do We Call it Christmas? 
5. Strawberry Jello Spritz — made with a vintage “cookie gun” from my childhood.
6. Chocolate Peanut Butter Holiday Bark
7. Baby J (13.5 months) is cruising super well now…and that means a much higher level of chaos.  😉  Maybe I didn’t really think so clearly about all the consequences when we put this much-lower table in the school room.  Baby J is just super curious about everything, and is trying to figure out how to open every drawer and cabinet, press every button in his reach, and even open the fridge to pull things out (somehow none of the other kids ever tried that as toddlers).
8. Mr. E had a bit of a fever and a cough yesterday, so he couldn’t go to our co-op for the Christmas party.  I was able to drop off the older two kids so they could still go to co-op.  Mr. E didn’t seem too upset at missing co-op — he got a strawberry shake and watched videos/played iPad for the afternoon.  I was probably more bummed than him to miss eating cookies and seeing friends I haven’t seen for five weeks and won’t see again until after Christmas!
9. Mr E, excited to show us crafts he made at co-op.  The kids made crafts, did a gift exchange, ate yummy treats and still did their regular classes too.  🙂

I’m looking forward to another day of laid-back learning today (The older two kids may be getting a touch of a sore throat/cough as well), and a fun weekend with more preparations for Christmas.  The two older kids will also get to sing in the church service along with other kids from church — so I am really hoping they can fight off whatever bug it is that has hit our house!

Have a wonderful weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap-Up.

It’s only natural to put our best foot forward when writing a week-in-review.  By the end of the week, hard moments are usually water-under-the-bridge compared to all the fun and learning.  But I’ll be honest — yesterday was one of those really hard days.

Math tends to be a crucible for character development at our house, at least where Miss M (3rd grade) and I are concerned.  We’ve had a pretty easy-going past month since we started Level D of RightStart, but we hit some new material this week.  Miss M easily became frustrated, and had a hard time listening to my explanations of the concepts.  I guess by both she and I had had enough by Friday.  She got highly frustrated and I got highly frustrated in return.  Not good.   By the end of the day all was forgiven and schoolwork finally got done.  But this is one of those weeks I am really happy for the break the weekend brings!

Here are a few learning highlights from this week:

Spelling/Phonics:  Miss M completed lesson 18 in Logic of English Essentials.   To practice the “WOR” phonogram words, she finished writing a story she began a couple weeks ago (you can read here story here).   Mr. E (Kindergarten) started lesson 7 in LOE Essentials, but we weren’t super motivated in the spelling department this week, so we’ll be continuing on with that lesson next week.  🙂  Mr. E also read from I See Sam books every day this week.

Math:  Mr. E enjoyed using the geoboards in RightStart B, as well as getting out the math balance again and learning about vertices and diagonals with hexagons and pentagons.  Mr. E also continued to practice the “9’s trick” and started learning about the “Two fives” trick. All told, we worked on lessons 62-66 — but he still needs more practice on these two adding strategies before we move much further in the lessons.

In RightStart D, Miss M worked on lessons 68-70 covering large numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and 73-74 covering multiplying a larger number by a single digit.  We’ve been skipping around a bit due to many of the lessons being review from Level C.  On one hand, I want to coast for a bit and just do some of the review lessons from now until Christmas given the challenges we had this week and the fact we have ample time to finish D before the end of the year.  On the other hand, I really do believe the issues we are having is less about math and more about the character area of being teachable (like when Miss M says to me, “I just hate it when anyone has to teach me how to do something”…LOL!).

History: We’re really diving in to the period in US History after the Revolutionary war.  Our non-fiction read-alouds at the moment are “A New Nation” by the Maestros and “The Year of the Horseless Carriage 1801” by Genevieve Foster.  Miss M read, “Away Goes Sally”  by Elizabeth Coatsworth for an independent fiction reading assignment this reading.

Science: Miss M continues to work through Sassafras Science Adventures Zoology.  With some prodding I convinced her to write on the notebook pages on her own (with the promise that I wouldn’t correct her spelling unless she asked me to!).  The kids also enjoyed watching a couple episodes of “Sci Girls” this week.   We’ll be picking up more science study as family after the Christmas break.

And now for the FUN we had this week:

Top Row: Baking and decorating sugar cookies with Grandma Karen

Middle Row:  Miss M’s friend Miss J spent the afternoon with us on Wednesday.  The kids made pretzel/kiss/m&m treats and had a tea party.

Bottom row:  Mr. E’s Lego Angry Birds Level,  A trip to Ikea (yea for “kids eat free Tuesdays”!), and a few of the 16 Christmas books we hauled home from the library.

Have a wonderful weekend!

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