Homeschool Discoveries

Better late than never,  I guess.  Despite the fact that it is Monday morning right now and we are about to embark on a brand-new school week, I wanted to still post a weekly wrap-up…so if nothing else I can remember what we did this week.

Between a long trip around town Friday afternoon to buy a new fridge seal, a chore that took most of the day Saturday, family time and grocery shopping on Sunday after church and then some church ministry responsibilities I needed to take care of on Sunday afternoon and evening, I just couldn’t find a time to write this up.  I am still hopeful that this may be the week that I get back into my regular blogging routine since I still have so many other things I want to write about.  Or maybe not since I have another quarterly editing deadline looming. I guess becoming a super-awesome daily blogger will have to wait! 😉

Here are a few highlights from our week:

1.  Last weekend I re-arranged some of the kids’ books.  Now at least when Baby J does this while we are doing school, it is mostly board books he is pulling off the shelf!

2. Miss M wanted to be a “mad scientist”, and put on a “show” for us involving science demonstrations she had seen at a birthday party.  Not to be outdone, Mr. E also made a great concoction that ended up looking at bit like a slimy green volcano.

3. Volcanoes are so last week…as of the middle of this past week, space is the boys’ new science obsession.  Ever quick to the printer, I found them some coloring sheets and a printable book.  Then daddy even let everyone stay up late and he took them outside star-gazing on Friday night.  (Well, as good as one can do in the middle of the city!).  I often miss taking pictures of the Kindergarten work that Mr. E is doing, but we also practiced writing lower case letters, and he practiced ten minutes of reading each day.

4. Miss M and I played Phonogram Tic-Tac-Toe  this week.  We both thought that was a fun Logic of English game.  Miss M worked on Lesson 9 of LOE this past week, but still needs to take a test on those words.  I entered some (so far) of the Logic of English Essentials spelling lists into Spelling City, so Miss M can use their iPad app to take a spelling test each week.  It’s much lower stress for both of us to do spelling assessment that way,

5. It was a big week for RightStart math games as well.  In this picture we are playing a multiplication game called “Who’s on Top?”  Miss M and I both liked this one. Some RightStart games do turn out to be boring or confusing.  We tried one called “Multiple Authors” earlier in the week, and we were pretty confused!  Miss M completed 117-120 in Right Start C.  Mr. E is still sailing along through Right Start B’s early lessons.  We did lessons 13-16, including playing Go to the Dump and Memory to find pairs that equal 10.  I am amazed that he seems to already have 10 partitions fairly well memorized!

6. Recycled art this week — a “can Rapunzel” and a “can drum” made by Miss M.  The boys made can robots (all of this Miss M’s suggestion and leading…I love that she can lead the boys in crafts!), but I think they broke/lost them from rough play soon after they were made!

7. Miss M read many books from our history book basket this week (some I assigned, some she read on her own time, even on Saturday!).  I also “assigned” her to pick an activity to try from one of the activity books I picked out for this unit.  She waited until I could buy strawberries, then made her own “Berry Ink” and wrote with a homemade quill pen (made from a feather we found this summer).  Very cool!

8.  Miss M and I channeled our inner pioneer women and scrubbed the floor by hand on Saturday.  I really spent almost all afternoon at it on Saturday! We rent an old house with an old, old floor that never looked clean even after I mopped it.  I have known for a while that I really needed to put some elbow grease into it and scrub out the ground in dirt.  The floor is now several shades lighter in color even than what it looked like when we moved into this house three years ago!

9.  In many ways, most exciting of all was our Sunday morning.  Miss M and Mr. E both decided a week or two ago that they wanted to get baptized! Both have placed their faith in Christ and having seen others at our church get baptized, they wanted to take this step as well.  We studied verses on baptism this week and they took this step of faith and obedience on Sunday.  We are so proud of them and happy for the chance they have to grow up learning to obey God from a young age.

I hope your weekend was wonderful and that you are ready for a new week!

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!

Wow…it’s been three weeks since my last Collage/Week-in-Review post!  Two weeks ago at this time we had just finished up our Vacation Bible Camp at our church.  It was my third year organizing/directing the program:

After VBC week we had our family vacation/staycation.  You can see a few photos of that in this post. 🙂

That brings us to this week:

I like how the collage turned out but I didn’t quite get them in “order” as I wanted to tell the story of our week.  (In other words “sorry for the weird # order in this post”).  😉

Of course after a week of vacation/staycation. we had piles of laundry, bags to unpack and some overdue dishes from quick meals eaten on the way to and from our family fun.  So most of Monday was devoted to “vacation recovery.”  And with the busyness of VBC and summer fun in the weeks prior to VBC, I didn’t quite get all my intended school year preparations done.   A lot of Tuesday and Wednesday were devoted to that effort.

The kids were more helpful than usual in getting chores done around the house, and also did a great job amusing themselves with efforts like building the “world’s tallest duplo tower” (#8) and getting some very early Christmas preparations done by making some painted pine cone ornaments (#9).  We also enjoyed some impromptu nature observation as a very large (for around here, anyway) spider made a web about 2 ft. in diameter between the deck/part of the house. (#1 & #2).

Finally on Thursday I hoped we would be ready to “officially” start our school year with the first full day of school.   My mom visited on Wednesday, and stayed overnight since she had an obligation nearby on Thursday morning.  Having grandma around first thing in the morning was, of course, a bit distracting.  The kids found out on Wednesday about a book-making contest sponsored by our nearby Little Free Library, and they were eager to work on their books (#4 and #5).  Taking our back-to-homeschool pictures took a bit longer than I expected (#11 — see the rest of our “student photos” in this post).

So, needless to say, we didn’t accomplish our new “regular schedule” much at all on Thursday!  We did have some fun with handwriting practice outside (#10).  Mr. E is learning his lower case letters.

On Friday we did something my kids have been asking about all summer after reading this book — “Backwards Day”!   Tony was getting back from a short work trip on Friday morning (flying home on a redeye flight from the west coast), so it seemed like the perfect day to do it.  Usually the day ends with daddy coming home, but on Friday that’s how our day began.  We actually started Backwards Day with “lunch for dinner” the night before (aka a really easy dinner since daddy was gone!).  Then we had “dessert” for breakfast (apple crisp with a bit of ice cream on top — #6), “dinner” for lunch (meatloaf — something we never eat for lunch), and “breakfast” for dinner.  And of course the kids wore their clothes backwards!

We also completed our first “regular day” of school on Friday, trying out the new daily schedule I created.   I’m trying out short subject blocks of about 20 minutes each, with some five or ten minute breaks interspersed through the school day.  It felt a bit frenetic switching from topic to topic and kid to kid so quickly…but I am not sure how else to get to everything, not finish too late in the day, and also give enough attention to my 3rd grader AND my K’er.   I’m sure I’ll be writing more about our new daily schedule in an upcoming post.

I didn’t take many pictures during our first full school day (I was too busy trying to keep moving with the lessons and make sure we sort of stayed on schedule).  I did take photo #7 of Mr. E practicing his reading outside…and #3 of baby J creating chaos while I worked with the older kids.  🙂

Even though it was a little funny starting school with just a day or two before a three day weekend, I’m glad I had a chance to run through the schedule as tweak as necessary before we start an almost-full week.

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend!

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

Temperatures have finally moderated and it’s getting cooler at night.  We didn’t go to the pool at all this week.  The boys pulled out pants and long sleeve shirts (I guess 55 or 60 feels cold after weeks of lows in the 80s!).  We added back in another school subject for Miss M.  Slowly, it’s starting to feel a bit more like fall around here.  We even found a few leaves prematurely changing color!

We still have a few last hurrahs of summer left on our calendar though before we really dig in to our full “school year schedule.”  Next week we have Vacation Bible Camp at church.  I’m directing our VBC for the third year in a row.  I have to admit I have been kind of “phoning it in” in terms of my organizational duties based on work done in previous years — but that kind of caught up to me this week and I spent a lot of time answering emails (hence the lack of blog posts…too much computer time eaten up by that effort!).  Following our week of VBC, we have our vacation/staycation week 11 days.  We’ll be taking a couple of short trips out of town, plus doing a few more summer bucket list items here in the metro during this time Tony has off from work.

Here are a few highlights of our week:

1-2:  I love our annual block party for National Night Out.   NNO is very popular here — the city of Minneapolis makes it really easy for individual blocks to block off the street and have a party for a couple hours on the 1st Tuesday of every August.  Many, many blocks in our neighborhood participate! This year we were treated to a visit from the mounted police officers!  Doesn’t baby J look relaxed? All the kids have a great time playing with other kids on the block, on the one night of the year that it’s okay to ride your bike in the street!

3: This week’s “most creative” awards go to Mr. E for his collage of a “candy robot” and a collaborative effort from all the kids on this airplane.

4-6: Cooler temps meant more time outside doing things other than swimming.  We took the books and blanket outside for some school time (which never happened outside…too many distractions). Miss M tried rollerblading for the first time!

7. A sudden rainstorm led me to declare a spontaneous indoor picnic yesterday with cocoa, popcorn and finger foods for lunch.   I read three and a half chapters of our current history read aloud (Om-Kas-Toe: Blackfeet Twin Captures an Elkdog) while the kids enjoyed their “picnic”.

8.  Besides our history reading, I worked with Miss M on spelling  (LOE lesson #6), and Math (RightStart Level C, lessons 107-109).  These were our first new math lessons since May! Most of spelling and math were smooth sailing, and I think the bumps in the road we did have this week with school and otherwise (which on at least one day were not necessarily minor bumps) are helping reveal ways that I can be more effective in working with Miss M.

9. Today we spent almost all day with friends at a huge park about half an hour from our house — it has so many slides and ladders that its nickname is “Chutes and Ladders” (It’s really the Hyland Play Area).  I can’t imagine having done this while it was so hot earlier in the summer, but today’s weather in the 70s was perfect.

Have a wonderful weekend!  I hope to come up for air from Vacation Bible Camp long enough for at least a couple posts next week.  🙂

Linking up with Collage Friday and The Weekly Wrap-Up.

I got all the way to Monday morning this week and realized I had never sat down to write a collage/weekly-update post for last week!  We got just a bit distracted over the weekend by this, among other household projects:

Last weekend was a big “milestone” weekend — it seemed like all the boys were growing up a bit.  A co-worker of Tony offered us free bunk beds, and considering we had just been discussing building bunk beds for the bigger boys, we could hardly turn down “free” — all we had to do was buy mattresses and slats (and of course put them together, which was a little tricky since the beds weren’t originally set up to use Ikea slats…but still easier than building a bed from scratch!).  With the boys moving into a bunk bed, Baby J could move in with his brothers!

Over last weekend, Baby J also got his first tooth (#2 came in yesterday morning!) and we also moved him out of his “bucket” car seat into a regular convertible seat.  He’ll be 9 months old next week…hard to believe, time is going by so fast!

Other than those big milestones, we’ve had a lot of regular old summer fun the past couple weeks — playdates with friends and neighbors, trips to the pool and playing outside.  And regular life stuff like trips to the dentist (twice for me, unfortunately since I had to get a cavity filled!).  Miss M also went to my mom’s house for three days for her special one-on-one time with Grandma.

Here are a few highlights of our last two weeks:

1-3:  My kids always love to do arts and crafts, but we’ve finally had some much-needed rain over the last two weeks so we’ve had extra time for inside activities — during these rainy mornings and afternoons there’s been lots of paper airplane making, origami, water color painting, and paper crafts of all kinds.  I’ve noticed a big change in Mr K’s artwork over the last few weeks – he has finally hit that stage where he actually tries to color in a picture instead of just scribbling on it, and he takes the time to draw/paint things that have some meaning to him.   It was fun to hear him describe a fancy airplane to me that he had drawn in pencil one day.  🙂

4. Last week was the end of tennis for Miss M and soccer for Mr. E.  I never took any pictures of them playing this year! But here’s baby J enjoying watching all the soccer players (while sitting on our new awesome picnic blanket I got on clearance at Target for $5!)

5.  Sidewalk chalk and sidewalk paints, made possible by the now-somewhat-cooler-most-days weather

6. We tried homemade ice cream again, this time with an ice cream maker borrowed from a friend — I found this much easier and more satisfying than the make-it-in-a-bag method!  Here the kids are enjoying their yummy cherry ice cream!

7.  It’s a little hard to see this well in the picture, but this is a giant cardboard maze that filled up the entire gym of our neighborhood park rec center!  A local artists puts on “cardboard camps” at the park where kids build amazing things out of cardboard.  Various weeks’ projects include boats, castles, medieval weapons and this maze.  Some friends participated in the cardboard maze camp and invited our kids to come to the open house. The kids all had a ton of fun getting lost, finding their way out and generally running around the cardboard maze.  I hope they are still running these camps at the park when Mr. E is old enough, because I think he would really get “into” doing one!

8.  and 9.  We’re still mostly on summer break, but we are doing some history reading (no pictures of that), and spelling with Logic of English.  Last week we did all of lesson 4 — in #9 the kids are enjoying a phonogram board game together.  At the end of week wrote an entire story using her spelling words and dictated phrases…with no mistakes! That is huge for her! There were a couple words she wasn’t sure how to spell, but she knew she didn’t know how to spell them and asked for help before writing them down.

Unfortunately after not working on spelling for a few days (due to the trip to Grandma’s house), yesterday’s attempt to start lesson 5 (an assessment and review lesson), produced a giant meltdown/disrespectful behavior and mistakes on words I know that Miss M could spell last week.  Sigh. When she is thinking with a clear head, Miss M tells me that LOE Essentials is a great spelling curriculum.  When she’s frustrated though…boy watch, out. I think we need lots of consistent practice…and continued discussions about both appropriate behavior during school time and how to communicate frustrations.

Today we’re heading out for a “field trip” to a local historical site, and then we have a church conference this weekend.  Hope you have a great weekend too!

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

This week marked a bit of a transition in our summer.  It was still a week full of summer fun, but we added in some “summer school” as well.  The kids and I aren’t ready to say we are “back to school” yet.   But everyone was okay with the idea of adding a bit of more formal learning back into our routine.

Here are a few highlights of our week:

1. We started our week with a trip to the Minnesota Children’s Museum on Monday. One of my friends from high school had the day off work and joined us at the museum!   The kids had a blast (pun intended!), and they were happy to see the Curious George exhibit they had been eagerly anticipating.

2. We kicked off “summer school” on Tuesday by beginning our American History journey for the year.   We also dusted off our Logic of English materials and reviewed the lesson we stopped on (and didn’t quite finish) back in May.  For the month of July, History and Spelling will be our two formally planned subjects (besides Mr. E continuing 10-15 minutes a day of reading practice).  We’ll most likely add in Math in August, and then have our “official” back-to-school either the last week in August or the 1st week in September.

3. One of my goals for the summer is to teach the kids new skills around the house.  This week Mr. E (age 5) folded and put away all his own laundry for the first time, while Miss M taught Mr. K how to sort the towel/napkin laundry and then fold the washcloths.

4. We fit in two pool trips this week.  Mr. E spent about 48 hours at Grandma’s house (each kid gets 2 or 3 days of 1 on 1 time with my mom each summer).  While he was gone, we went swimming.  Mr. K tells me he is pretending to be a mummy as he drys off after swimming.  😉

5. Always lots of arts and crafts and messes around here.  You would never know we had desks and tables in our school room for the volume of work the boys do on the floor!

6. And there’s always plenty of time for play, as my firefighter-super hero-pirate shows.

7. and 8.  We had some unplanned/spontaneous science this week.   Among other things, we investigated a really large caterpillar in our back yard, and we tried to figure out why pop cans explode/burst in the freezer.  I’ll post more about our science endeavors sometime in the next day or two!

9. I went to a local homeschool mom’s book sale.  It was at least her second effort to get rid of books and they were priced to sell — 25 cents each!  Here are a few finds I was particularly excited about   I came out with 28 books, including lots of history, science and living math titles.

Then today, we had a big family outing:

We did an interest-led unit study on the History of Aviation and Early Aviators back in May.  I did a little research and found out that an air show/expo of historic planes would be in the metro area over the summer.   Today was the day!  We spent a couple hours at a small airport in the suburbs seeing authentic WWII era planes and replicas of even older planes.  Some of the planes did flights while we were there.  No stunts at this air show, but some of the fighter planes did fly in formation.  It was hot and tiring but fun for all — but as you can see in the last picture, Baby J was really ready to call it a day by the time we were done.

I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and the Weekly Wrap Up @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

We’ve had another fun and adventurous two weeks of summer break since my last “wrap-up” post.  Of course it’s been hot and sticky here…I think that’s true everywhere at the moment, right?!?

Here are a few highlights from the past two weeks:

1.  Almost two weeks ago (wow, time flies!) we went to ride the Como-Harriet Street Car line. (Read more: S is for Streetcar).

2. Our monarch caterpillar finished it’s metamorphosis and became a lovely butterfly (Read more: From Caterpillar to Butterfly).

3. We visited the Minnesota History Center with my mom last week.  We viewed a rare early copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, saw Depression-era art work, viewed a few of the regular exhibits and the kids made “fly around Minnesota” pinwheels.

4. Homemade ice cream in a bag — another item checked off the summer bucket list! It was tasty but we didn’t shake the bags long enough — the ice cream was a bit liquidy!

5. Spontaneous kids-doing-something-educational-together time.  The boys were working on a Kumon cut and paste book while Miss M did tanagrams.   What was particularly significant about this was that Mr. K  (age 3) was actually following the directions.  After Mr. E told him what to do, he did the activity as directed! Aww, he’s growing up!  😉

6. I cleaned out our “done bin” today. (See more about our “done bin” in this post).  I had done this only two months ago, but it was already stuffed completely full.  This stack was just Mr. E’s item.  It was so tall I counted the stack — 175 items!  Most of them are original drawings…only a few are coloring pages or worksheets.  Amazing!

7.  Some of the kids’ “big kid” cousins visited last week.  Lots of fun and wrestling was had by all.  🙂

8. With all this hot, hot weather we’ve spent a lot of time at the Richfield Pool (where we have a pass).  Happy 8 months old to Baby J in this picture, who loves to sit and splash at the edge of the wading pool area.  We’ve also had our backyard wading pool inflated twice, and the kids have been to three neighborhood park wading pools. We are so thankful for all these ways to cool off.  I think the kids have cooled off in the water in some way maybe 12 of the past 14 days!

9. “Music Man” movie night with friends!

10. & 11.  We skipped a couple of our usual 4th of July traditions (going to the parade and hosting a big backyard BBQ) due to the humid, 101 degree heat.  Instead, we did some decluttering and cleaning, made solar-oven cookies (Read more in this post!), and had one family over for dinner, and still went to fireworks at our neighborhood park!

12. Today we cooled off with a trip to Target and a treat of Frappucinos (thanks to two BOGO coupons, they were even a good deal!).

Hope you are keeping cool in the summer heat! I’m linking up with the Weekly Wrap-Up and Collage Friday!