Homeschool Discoveries

It’s been a whirlwind of a week for us as we traveled to visit family, celebrated Miss M’s 8th birthday and declared ourselves finished with the 2011-2012 school year.  With nearly 120 pictures in my folder for the past week, it takes three collages to fit it all in.  🙂  First, the special trip and Miss M’s special day:

The kids love going to Grandma’s house (Tony’s mom) and experiencing the wide open space of the Iowa countryside.  The kids played with their cousins, we celebrated a family graduation and Miss M’s birthday.  She is super excited to have her own tennis racket!

Then right on the heels of the trip, we celebrated Miss M’s birthday on Monday:

Miss M wanted a field trip day for her birthday, so after birthday donuts and pastries for breakfast (our family tradition) and a “reveal” of her birthday present (a small trampoline) we headed for a day at the Minnesota Zoo!  We ate Miss M’s birthday dinner of choice and had a fruit tart/pizza for dessert! What a fun day for a wonderful 8 year old!

Here are a few more highlights from the other four days of our week:

1-3: Miss M finished her Early Flight/Famous Aviators lapbook.  This was her primary schoolwork this week. I really wanted her to finish this up before our summer break, because I was pretty sure that if we didn’t get it done this week it might not get done at all!

4-5: Mr. E did at little bit of math at his request, and started a new “reading challenge.”   Mr. E recently saw a sign at a bakery advertising “Angry Birds” Cookies (and we know this boy loves Angry Birds!). I told Mr. E that if he completed a reading goal we decided on together, we could all go to the bakery for cookies.  We decided that he would read all 10 books in the “Now I’m Reading” Level 2 set “Amazing Animals” by Nora Gaydos.   He’s already finished four books from the set!

6.  We discovered Miss M’s new trampoline has a nice side benefit.   Have a crabby baby? Just set him in a spot on the deck to watch the other kids taking turns jumping on the trampoline.  No more crabby baby!

7. We had our last co-op meeting of the year on Thursday morning.  We were supposed to head to the park for a big picnic after co-op…but we got rained out and had an indoor picnic instead.  After the picnic, we met up with my mom for a brief belated celebration of Miss M’s birthday (one of her gifts from Grandma Karen was her very own sewing box!) and a new summer haircut! (Check out the 4 inch difference in length in Miss M’s hair in the earlier pictures to pictures 8 and 9!).

8. We went to see a musical performance of Pippi Longstocking at the children’s theater on Friday morning.  We’ve been looking foward to this for months, and it was indeed a great show!

9. Today (Friday) was our “official” last day of school before a six week summer break.  We’ll start adding subjects back in after the 4th of July.  We celebrated the end of the school year with a family ice cream outing tonight.  Tony asked the kids what their highlights were from this school year.  Mr. K said, “seeing People Longstocking” (as he was calling it all day long).  Mr. E said “learning to read!”  and Miss M said, “Finding a new spelling curriculum.”  (That really surprised me!).

I’m looking forward to a three day weekend filled with projects around the house, BBQs and 50% off sales at the local thrift stores! Enjoy your holiday weekend!

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

The end is in sight!  This is our second-to-last week of school before we take a six-week break from almost all schoolwork, though it was hardly a normal week!

Miss M took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills on Monday and Tuesday.  Minnesota is a fairly lightly regulated state when it comes to homeschooling — besides filing a minimal amount of paperwork each fall, students age seven and up need to take a nationally-normed standardized test.  Any test is fine, as long as it gets done!  Some families opt for an oral exam like the Peabody, some families hire a private tester to do a written test, some families purchase and administer a test themselves, and some do what we did — join with other families (in our case, from our homeschool co-op), to do testing in a small group situation.

I wanted Miss M to feel comfortable with written standardized testing right from the start, so there’s less stress and change for her as she gets older and has to take tests that really “count” for something.  And I knew I couldn’t administer a test at home.  Besides the huge number of distractions in our house (well, three brotherly distractions!), I’m not sure I could be fair and unbiased as a test administrator for my own child!  Other than the time involved (3 hrs on 2 days this year, and it will take three days next year when she is a 3rd grader!), the co-op testing situation worked super well for us.  Miss M tested with one other 2nd grader, while I read a test to a 1st grader from another family (1st and 2nd grade ITBS tests have most questions read aloud).  The boys got to hang out with all the other younger siblings who were not testing, with a few moms who were not reading or supervising a test.  We won’t find out the results until July, but Miss M seemed confident and at ease about the testing process, so I am sure she did her best!

Besides the testing all morning on Monday and Tuesday, a big focus of our week school-wise was playing games:

We played games for quite a while on both Wednesday and Thursday (and maybe we’ll do that today too — we’ll see how things go!).  The highlight of our game playing for the kids probably a game I created that they named “Phonogram Treats.”   I showed the kids Logic of English (LOE) phonogram flashcards, and they got a piece of candy for saying all the sounds of the given phonogram correctly.  We cheered on the three-year-old, Mr. K, for saying anything remotely close to a correct sound or letter name and made sure that with enough hints, he ended the game with plenty of candy in his bowl too. We also played a Logic of English game called Dragon from the LOE games book. Mr. E chose not to play with us and Miss M and we found this game was not quite so fun with only two players — but at least it was good practice.

Miss M requested fraction games from the RightStart games book for our math game time.  She decided after taking the Iowa test that she had “forgotten everything she knew about fractions”.  🙂  A quick review of the RS fraction chart brought it all back to mind, and we enjoyed “Fraction War” and “One”.  Mr E played “One” with us (making rows of fraction cards to equal one), and it was impressive how well he was understanding fractions after just a short introduction to the subject and playing the game with us.  Joan Cotter is so right — even Kindergarteners can understand fractions by playing games!

The boys continued the game playing theme on their own by dumping out a variety of card games, and playing a few by their very own rules, including a messy, crazy version of Uno.  🙂

Here are a few other highlights from our week:

1. and 2.  We kept things light and fun on Monday and Tuesday after testing.  We celebrated completing the day of testing on Monday with our first water gun fight of the year.  We celebrated completing the test as a whole on Tuesday with Miss M’s choice of lunch — her favorite take-n-bake pizza and watermelon (our first watermelon of the spring/summer as well!)

3. The boys enjoying their library books

4. The kids decided to hold a “funniest costume contest.”   After I refused to pick a winner, they demanded I put the picture on FB to have my friends vote.  After not-quite 24 hours of voting, I think Mr. K (the pirate-cheerleader-granny as one friend called his costume) will be the highest vote-getter.  Many friends declared it a three way tie and also refused to vote.  😉

5.  Artwork created by Miss M and Mr. E.   Mr. E drew the toucan-like bird in the upper center of the picture.  His drawing skills have taken a massive leap forward in recent weeks!  I continue to think I don’t really need to teach these kids how to do art or drawing…they are so creative and talented all on their own!

6. Another week, another trip to Ikea to meet an out-of-town friend.  Seriously, we had not been to Ikea for months, and now we’ve been twice in two weeks! This time we met a college friend of mine visiting from Colorado.  The kids enjoyed afternoon treats and a movie in the kids area while my friend and I chatted!

7. Our flight unit study continues.  This week read read about Charles Lindbergh (book not pictured) and Louis Berliot.  I found a PBS/NOVA video about Berliot at the library that we all enjoyed watching together.  Miss M completed a few more lapbook pieces as well.

Later this afternoon we leave for a weekend trip to visit my husband’s family in Iowa and hopefully catch up with a few friends as well.  As much as I would like to get a bit more school-ish stuff done today, I have a suspicion that today will be mostly consumed with errands and packing as we get ready to go.  It never seems like it should take very long to just pack for a two day, two night trip…but somehow it always does!

Have a wonderful weekend!

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

Do you ever have those weeks where you waaaay over estimate what you can accomplish? Capped off by a day where you pack in waaaay too much activity?  That was my day yesterday and my week in general.   We still had a great time.  But I did figure out that just because we decided by the end of last week to take a break from new math and spelling lessons for several weeks, that doesn’t mean we can expect to  play a bunch of educational games and spend a bunch of time on a new unit study and practice for standardize testing and plan some special outings (in a week when we also have our co-op)…and expect to actually get that all done.  Lesson learned!

Our frenetic day on Friday wasn’t originally planned that way.  I started my week thinking that baby J had a pediatrician appointment on Wednesday, and that after the appointment my mom would meet up with us to go to the Sea Life aquarium at the Mall of America to take advantage of their special homeschool discount week.  Then on Tuesday I discovered the appointment was really on Friday, and my mom let me know that her schedule changed and Friday would be a better day for her to come too.  Meanwhile, I had previously signed up for a Friday time slot to bring a meal to a family from our church who recently had a new baby.  And Miss M was having an early birthday sleep-over with her two best friends starting after dinner on Friday.  Yep, I was crazy agreeing too all that action in one day!  But we survived and a good time was had by all.  🙂

The Sea Life Aquarium was fun, and probably at least a little bit educational:

My favorite part was the bright blue frogs.   That and watching baby J watch the jelly fish! After lunch at the mall, we spent the afternoon in the kitchen cooking up a storm — a double-sized dinner and treats for the slumber party:

 That’s a heart-shaped red-velvet cake, homemade berry “sorbet” (from a magazine recipe that Miss M really wanted to try), and a strawberry Jello with strawberry puree and pineapple.  I think I must have had too much puree in the Jello, however, because it didn’t hold the shape of the mold at all!

Miss M’s actual birthday is a week from Monday, but this was the best date for the sleep over.  The girls stayed up until almost midnight, then were up by 7:15 or so on Saturday for raspberry waffles and lots of crafting and playing before heading home.  I was pretty exhausted by the time they left!

Here are a few other highlights from the rest of our week:

1.  Monday turned out to be our only day for game playing. Miss M and I played more Multiplication Memory in the morning, while in the afternoon Mr E and Miss M (and Miss J, Miss M’s best friend from across the street) humored me by playing Phonogram Hopscotch when they really just wanted to be riding bikes and scooters up and down the sidewalk.

2.  Happy Baby J hanging out outside on Monday, watching the big kids ride bikes/scooters and play hopscotch.

3.  Mr E did a bit of reading and math this week, mostly on Monday and Tuesday.   Here he is on Tuesday showing Mr. K how to make the stairs on the abacus.  Mr. K wore the bee costume all afternoon that day.  🙂  Tuesday was a big day for Miss M and I to work on test prep (we have standardized testing next week — it’s a requirement in MN).  She learned the difficult lesson that if you do a four digit subtraction problem and get an answer that is not among the choices listed, it really is the student who is wrong, not the test booklet.  A tough lesson for a 2nd grader to come to grips with.  At least it was tough for my 2nd grader who is not used to multiple choice tests!

4. We have a Family Science Night nature walk on Wednesday night to discuss flowers and other plants and how they adapt to their environment.  With our schedule freed up during the day on Wednesday from our initial plans of appointment and aquarium, we were able to accept an invite from friends visiting from out-of-town for an early lunch meet-up at Ikea.  Between that and a much-needed grocery store trip…it turned out not to be a big school day for us!

5. Thursday afternoon was our second-to-last co-op meeting of the year.  Miss M has been preparing for the geography challenge since January, and she passed!  Students at our co-op are rewarded with $5 if they complete the geography challenge for their grade.  Miss M proved she could locate all 50 US states on the map to earn her five bucks.

6. & 7.  Sprinkled in throughout the rest of our busy week was our new “delight directed” unit study on flight.  We took a trip to the big library downtown last Saturday and found many books on flight.  Miss M wanted to focus primarily on famous early pilots, so we came home with picture book biographies on fliers like Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Erhart,  The Wright Brothers, and more.  Miss M read several on her own, I read one out loud to all the kids, and read a couple of the shorter ones to the boys that Miss M had read herself.  Miss M also got a bit of a start on a lapbook about early flight and famous fliers.   The kids were so excited to tell everyone this week that they “know stuff about a bunch of famous pilots” as Mr. E likes to say.  Our study will continue for the next couple weeks.

Have a wonderful Mother’s Day!

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

We’ve had a lot of rain the past several days.  On Thursday, the first rainy day, the rain showers hit just as we were coming home from an appointment at the clinic for baby J.  As much as the practical side of me wanted to keep the kids inside, I let them head out in the rain to play:

I just love how Miss M shared her umbrella.  🙂  Mr. K stayed out the longest of the three big kids.  He broke his umbrella last fall and we did not replace it…but he didn’t care how wet he got at all!   I had a bit of extra wet laundry to wash, but it was worth it to see them have so much fun out in the downpour.

We’ve had a looooong week.  I’m rarely so happy to be finally relaxing with my decaf latte on a Friday night! If you want to see fun pictures and read about the silver lining we found in the storm clouds of our week, scroll down a way.  If you want to read the “real life” stuff that was going on, continue in the next paragraph.  🙂

Miss M in particular was having a rough time of things this week.  We had a few rough patches last week, especially while doing math.  I wasn’t sure if the math was to blame, or something else.

This week the math lesson that caused tears on Friday was “so easy” on Monday.  But the spelling lesson that was “the best way ever to learn spelling”  as of last week was “way too hard” on Monday when it should have been only incrementally more difficult that what we were doing last week.  Then I heard from Miss M that she has “never seen anything like this before” when she was doing a math review lesson on Tuesday.  By Tuesday afternoon, Miss M’s behavior while doing school and otherwise had resulted in the consequence of losing a few privileges.  And Wednesday was better, but not much.

Tony and I discussed what might be going on, and we couldn’t put our finger on any one reason for Miss M’s uncharacteristic behavior and difficulty with school work.  I think it could be a combination of things: burnout as the year ends, “spring fever”, schedule changes/longer school days as I try to work in Mr. E’s Kindergarten work into our schedule, maybe not getting enough sleep and probably a few character areas that need some refinement (and training/practice during times of non-conflict!).

Whatever the case, we sat down and looked at our calendar and realized that with a variety of things going on this month that will take us away from time spent doing school (special events, field trips, Miss M’s birthday, annual testing…etc), we have few “regular” school days left at this point.  Tony and I decided that we could end a week earlier than I had initially planned (finishing right before Memorial Day instead of on June 1st), and we could also take the rest of the month off from new spelling and math lessons.  The times of stress while doing these lessons were coming frequently enough that the negative consequences of continuing was probably more than the educational benefit we would get.  We’ll spend extra time playing math and phonogram/spelling games instead!

Despite the “storm clouds” that seemed to follow Miss M most of the week, our week definitely had a pretty silver lining:

1.  Baby J turned six months old on Monday!  Here he is laughing at something Mr. E did…a frequent occurrence in our house.  Baby J is so giggly — probably the most giggly any of our kids were as babies.

2. It was convenient that the next lesson in Right Start C was going to be a game lesson anyway…so we can at least say that we finished 2.5 lessons this week.  🙂  This game was multiplication memory.

3. Meanwhile, while Mr. E practiced writing numbers and I helped Miss M with the math game, Mr. K played with his puzzles…by dumping them all out to find the one he wanted!

4. and 5.  With formal lessons not going so well this week, I encouraged Miss M to spend extra time reading.  I gave her a stack of books I picked out at the library to give her some variety from her typical picks of late (boxcar children and horse/pet books).  She is really enjoying the “Toys Go Out” trilogy (she just finished the second one tonight).

6. Making a water color painting of the garden.

7.  Our state requires annual standardized testing beginning the year the student is seven by October 1st, so this will be Miss M’s first year to test. Knowing that Miss M does much better in situations where she knows what to expect, I decided to order this test practice booklet.  We spent about half an hour going through it orally today, and we’ll spend maybe 15-20 minutes a day on it next week as well if all goes as planned.   Most of the questions themselves are really pretty easy for Miss M, but we are discussing how to read directions, the types of questions she’ll see on the test (she has seen very few “multiple choice” type questions before!), reviewing terminology, as well as talking about some math terminology that is different than what we are used to with Right Start.  The results of this test are really for our use only, but I know that Miss M will be much less stressed out while taking the test if we’ve prepped for it a bit ahead of time!

8.  Stopping to watch ants while out on an evening walk/ride.  Another day the kids were finding cracker crumbs to give ants on our sidewalk, and watching with interest as the ants tried to carry them away!

9. This is my favorite silver lining of the week.  🙂  On Tuesday night after our rough day, Tony “randomly” selected a NOVA documentary on Netflix about the Wright Brothers for us to watch as a family in the evening.  Now everyone is super excited about studying aviation history!  Now I feel vindicated for keeping around this four-volume series of books about aviation history that I picked up free at some point (You can get the series free in .pdf format here!).  😉  Miss M read three of the four books this week.  Today we used Ami’s Delight Directed study planning page @ Walking by the Way to brainstorm how we will study aviation history further this month.

Oh, and Mr. E has been doing some Kindergarten work here and there:

His enthusiasm is waning a bit from a few weeks ago as nice weather abounds.  🙂 But a lot of progress can be made on K level work in a short time.  Mr. E enjoyed coloring while I read the first book in the “Boxcar Children” series, practicing writing on paper and in a salt tray.  He asked to go back to learning printing this week and to learn lower case manuscript.  So much for cursive first! Maybe he can just learn both at the same time.  He wanted to “write some math” too, so while Miss M and I played a math game, he wrote out adding equations and asked if they were “true” or not.  They were almost all “true”, other than a few backwards numbers.   We didn’t do any new phonics lessons this week, but he continued to read a few pages per day out of the phonics readers I downloaded a few years ago from readingatoz.com.

Whew! That’s a long week-in-review too!  I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a relaxing and fun weekend.   Hope yours is great too!

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

Wow.  This week has really been a blur.  My birthday this past Monday already seems like a long time ago!  Since Tony took the day off work, other than a few minutes spent working on Miss M’s expert day project, it was a day for fun!

Then I went to our state’s homeschooling convention yesterday and today.  That will have to be another post in and of itself to describe my adventures there. 🙂

That only left full days on Tuesday and Wednesday plus Thursday morning for regular school work…and getting ready for Expert Day (Thursday afternoon at co-op) took all of that time.  No other school work got done this week, but I’m okay with that.  We had plenty of learning, and it was kind of nice to have a week  that was a change of pace.  Here’s a few highlights of our week:

1. Playing Triominoes on my birthday. I love playing games as a family.

2. Getting ready for Expert Day (read about our Horse Unit Study in this post).

3. There’s always time to read, even in a busy week.  After taking a break from Boxcar Children books for a few weeks, I think Miss M read about five of them this week!

4. Miss M wanted to find a few horse drawings she had made over the past few months, so that meant cleaning out the “done” art work bin.  This is was a much over due project!

5.  With just a little help from mom and dad, Miss M created a Popsicle stick feeding trough for her horse display.  It felt like the essence of a school project to create a model out of Popsicle sticks!

6. The boys kept busy with some artwork.  They told me that this was a paper plane.

7. and 8. Mr. E created a story loosely revolving around Angry Birds Space.  After writing some of it out himself (asking me how to spell words), I ended up typing it up for him to decorate with pictures of the Angry Birds.

9. First bubbles of the spring.  I finally remembered to buy the kids a new jug of bubble stuff.

I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and Weekly-Wrap Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Some local friends were on Spring Break this week, but we forged ahead with our schedule as usual.  The best part about the local schools being on Spring Break was that I had the opportunity to hire two teens with some time on their hands to clean my kitchen.   I find it hard to make time for serious cleaning…and it’s not just because of having a baby…I always can find some excuse! 😉  It was a win-win with the teens earning some money toward their financial goals, and me ending up with a kitchen that hasn’t looked this clean since we moved into the house for a reasonable price.

Here are a few highlights from our week:

1. Mr. E working on a Lego set he got over the weekend as a belated birthday gift.  I’m so proud of him for focusing on the directions and assembling one car from the set almost entirely on his own!

2. Miss M assembling her horse lapbook.  We didn’t quite finish the assembly, as it kept getting pushed to the bottom of our to – do list.  With Expert Day coming up next week, deadline pressure will help us finally bring it to completion next week!

3. I found an offer for a free horse magazine a couple months ago, and the first issue arrived this week! Miss M enjoyed looking at all the pictures and reading some of the articles, even though it is really not a magazine aimed at kids.

4. Miss M’s writing and spelling work came in the form of letter writing.  Inspired by a lesson in her Spectrum Writing book, she wrote a letter to friends from across town that we don’t see very often.  A question directed to Miss M in a family Easter card from her great aunt about what books she has been reading prompted her to begin a letter about some recent favorites. Since spelling is still a big struggle for Miss M (to the point where I think it would be difficult for others to “get” what she is trying to say), I have her write a rough draft. I then correct her spelling mistakes and have her write a final draft.

5. & 6. The kids were given the suggestion at church to make “Easter Bags” to give to friends. There were some pre-made bags with treats and info about the meaning of Easter we could have picked up at church…but my kids really want to go the DIY route and make their own.  I made sure they had some empty bags, Easter eggs and candy and they are pretty much taking it from there!

7.  Math….oh, Math.  There is something about doing math that lends itself to being a refining, character building process.  For both me and Miss M! We worked on lessons 92-95 in Right Start C this week.  Some days were a piece of cake — Miss M finished the lesson 92 worksheet with ease on Monday.  Presented with the exact same sort of problem on Tuesday, we had nuclear meltdown.  Today’s struggles were less about how to do the math problem, and more about how to use the calculator as the lesson suggested (as Miss M is doing in the picture).  I tried to explain that as long as she got the concept, I could help her with using the calculator.  But she was determined to do it herself, to the point of frustration.   Math is a testing ground for learning patience of my part, and for Miss M to learn about humility, being teachable and dealing with frustration/asking for help appropriately.

8. The boys came up with a great project idea today.  Disappointed that I couldn’t find any “Angry Birds Space” coloring sheets to print out for them (I could only find coloring sheets of the original “angry birds”), they asked me to print out lots of small pictures of the various birds and pigs from the space game.  They got started cutting these pictures out and gluing them on large sheets of paper (Thanks to Grandma Karen for supplying us with lots of blueprint-sized scratch paper!).  They are creating their own “angry birds space” levels on paper!

9. Continuing on the “Horse” theme, we read this book, Once Upon a Horse, instead of our regular history this week.  I’ll be writing more about this book for Read Aloud Thursday next week!

Have a wonderful Easter weekend!

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