Homeschool Discoveries

Sharing a few things I've discovered along the way…

Collage Saturday: Welcome Spring (and other distractions)! March 24, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:02 pm

It was definitely a different sort of “busy” in our lives this week than last week.  Last week was full of on-the-go activities.  Other than the usual library and grocery store errands and our bi-monthly homeschool co-op meeting, we stayed at home this week.   We still weren’t as productive school-wise as some of those winter weeks when there was nothing better to do than stay inside the house.  🙂  That’s really okay though — I don’t have a formal “spring break” planned this year, so we’ll just take advantage of the nice weather as needed.

I’m also in the midst of my first quarterly editing deadline since I started this blog.  I am an assistant editor for a devotional published by our association of churches.  Two of my four deadlines fall during times when we are “in session” for school, and I always find myself a bit distracted during the couple weeks before those two deadlines.  We don’t usually take any extra time off from school, but it weighs on my mind (and blogging is a distraction from editing…but that’s another story!).

Here are a few highlights from our week:

Row #1:  We welcomed spring by climbing a tree across the street with neighbor friends (their tree may only be climbed on special occasions) and painting a tree stump that is scheduled for removal.  Miss M also built this “fairy house” in the upper right corner. The “first day of spring” rarely feels like spring in MN (last year we still had plenty of snow on the ground), so this year’s weather is a real treat! The kids spent a lot of time outside again this week.

Row #2: Reading, reading and more reading.  Miss M is reading books on horses for her Expert Day project at co-op.  She also decided to read the “Pooh” books this week.  I had purchased the original “Winnie the Pooh” at a Half Price Books clearance sale, but Miss M showed no interest in it…that is, until her best friend told her how good it was! Then she immediately read the first one, and found the second one at the library.

Row #3: We got out the watercolor crayons for the first time in months.  Works by Mr E and Miss M are on the left.  Miss M also made a “make believe world” book (on the right), with elaborate drawings and collages of the castle she wishes she lived in.  🙂

I tried to offer a Phonics lesson (middle picture) to Mr. E every day this week.  I think we ended up reading together 3 days this week.  I need to be more diligent to find a good time to sit down and do it, since he really is eager to learn to read.  In Phonics Pathways, we practiced four letter words with short vowels, as well as adding a “Y” to the end of words.

Row #4: In RightStart Math, Miss M and I worked on 2-digit mental subtraction, subtraction on the abacus, as well as a review lesson.  I think I am getting the hang of the mental subtraction strategies, which helps me to feel at ease in teaching them to Miss M.

Tony built us a new “display” bookshelf out of an old VHS rack (middle picture).  I’m so excited to have a place to put books for the kids with covers facing out.  I envision rotating through books on various themes in this spot.  This book shelf is so cool, I think it will get its own post sometime.  🙂

Finally, tomorrow is Mr. E’s 5th birthday! Yea!  We had a Star Wars themed birthday party with friends today.  Getting our house ready for the party was a definite distraction from school late in the week! He wanted a “Clone Troopers and Battle Droids” cake.  The cake in the picture, my friends, is “cake decorating for non-decorators”!  I printed out pictures, laminated them, and stuck them in the “mud” (aka chocolate frosting).

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

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Collage Friday: Museum Day, Pi Day, Sick Day March 16, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 2:43 pm

Wow, it has been a really out-of-the ordinary week for us!  For one thing, we’ve gone somewhere every day.  That never happens.   It may have helped that the weather was absolutely gorgeous.  Weather in the 60s and low 70s is very out of the ordinary in March in Minnesota! We didn’t get nearly as much “regular” school work done this week as usual, but we certainly had a ton of fun (and I’m sure plenty of learning happened along the way!).

I took a lot of pictures this week, so it will take three collages to sum it up! 🙂  On Monday, our water was off all day for water main repairs.  I considered my options and decided that hightailing it out of my house for a field trip day was the best one.  Lucky for us, my mom was going to be in town anyway for an afternoon meeting.  So we arranged to meet up with Grandma at the Minnesota Children’s Museum — one of our favorite “field trip” destinations.  If you are in the Twin Cities, I highly recommend their new exhibit “How People Make Things.”  I think I enjoyed it as much as the kids!

Tuesday was a pretty regular day, with school time in the morning and  just a trip to the library after dinner.  Though with the nice weather, the kids spent all afternoon outside, with Miss M’s best friend from across the street joining us for most of it.  Then on Wednesday, we celebrated Pi Day:

My collage came out non-chronologically, so my list will be as well.  🙂

1 & 2:  In the afternoon, we joined friends for homeschool skate at the roller rink.   It was the first time at the rink for all the kids.  Miss M got the hang of it and even made it around eventually without the push bar.  The boys, however, were much more interested in the arcade games!

3. All my Pi Day Pi-rates.  🙂

4. We followed most of the educational ideas I had in my Pi Day post. Here the kids have gathered plenty of round objects from around the house for us to measure.

5.  Pi Pie! (We tried to eat lots of round foods all day — cheerios and bagels for breakfast, Pizza for lunch, Taco Pie for dinner and of course this fruit pie for dessert).

6. A quick stop at Sonic for “happy hour” on the way home from the roller rink…celebrating Pi Day, warm weather, and Mr. K finally putting his poo where it belongs on his own!

7. Enjoying the nice weather outside after the roller skating outing.  Miss M is so glad to be able to head outside to read!

And for the rest of our week…

1.  Lots of time outside this week with the beautiful weather!

2. Work continues on Miss M’s horse lapbook.

3. Miss M had an “Intro to Woodwinds” class in the afternoon on Thursday.  The boys and I played at the playground nearby during her class.  First playground outing of 2012!

4 & 5.  Mr E has taken a sudden interest in the history of weapons.  At first he wanted to make a gun lapbook, and then this morphed into the idea of a lapbook on all kinds of historical weapons.  I couldn’t really find many pre-made lapbook pieces for him to use on this subject. Lucky for me, he told me all he really wanted to do was glue a bunch of pictures in a folder/on cardstock.  That’s easy enough!  We got a few books on the history of weapons from the library, and we’ll add some captions to his “lapbook” at some point.

6.  I had been hopeful for a full school day today (or as full as is possible during the first real week of warm weather).  Instead, however, it’s a sick day for Miss M.  She went to bed with a mild headache/sore throat with no fever, and woke up in the middle of the night with fever and much worse headache/sore throat.  A quick trip to the Target clinic this morning confirmed strep throat.  Miss M is resting and reading for fun today when her headache isn’t bothering her too much (and enjoying plenty of ice cream, applesauce and pudding  of course!)

I’m hoping everyone is well enough for some St. Patrick’s Day celebrating tomorrow! I’ve always wanted to go to the local  St. Patrick’s day parade and festival, and the weather should be great for it this year (though crowded I’m sure with the nice weather and the fact that the holiday is on a weekend this year!).

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

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“It’s Okay Mom!” March 12, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 9:05 am

Miss M was taking a break from school work on Friday to make her birthday list. She’s planning ahead — her birthday isn’t until late May.  Her brothers decided it was time to make a K sandwich on E and M.  🙂  Just as I was about to shoo the boys away and tell them to leave their sister alone, Miss M tells me, “It’s okay, Mom.  Let them stay there for a minute.”

Eventually it turned into them all giggling on the floor together.   For as many chaotic moments as we have had lately and the number of times that Miss M is running away screaming as the boys forget (again) that they may not point even pretend-finger-guns at their sister if she doesn’t want to play “shoot em up games”, I love to see the kids loving one another and having fun together.

And I even turned the birthday-list-making into an opportunity for spelling improvement once she had filled up a whole page of ideas, many of which needed some “assistance” in the spelling department. 🙂

I’m linking up with:

Moments to Remember and You Don’t See That in Public School!

 

Collage Friday: When Life Gives You Broken Eggs… March 9, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:36 pm
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Have you read the story or seen the episode of Thomas and Friends where Thomas drives too fast and breaks the farmer’s eggs? At the end of the story Sir Topham Hatt tells Thomas that all is well because he will eat scrambled eggs for breakfast (or was it omelets?).  I wonder if Sir Hatt got lots of dirt and straw in his breakfast.  I know that the floor in front of my fridge is not nearly clean enough to make breakfast from. 

Yes, Mr. K was feeling quite mischievous this past week.  The eggs on the floor were a bit of a “fail” on my part.  It happened in the evening and I thought both boys were upstairs with Tony.  I was relaxing on the couch, just me Facebook and baby J.  Eventually I became aware of a strange noise coming from the back of the kitchen (where our fridge and freezer “live”).  With dread, I made my way there and found Mr  K and the dozen or so broken eggs (a carton not in the picture was already completely empty).  He smiles and says to me. “I say YES to eggs!”

You may notice in the picture that several of the eggs are perfectly broken, as if they were ready for the frying pan — so he was clearly very purposeful about what he was doing.  And, believe it or not, this was only one of several mischievous acts on the part of Mr K this week.  I’m still trying to decide if he is bored, testing the boundaries or going through some other new developmental phase.  But keeping up with Mr K definitely took more time than usual this week.

We did manage to have some fun and learning this week amidst the extra chaos:

1. Miss M had a really great collage idea that she executed almost entirely on her own.  She found a picture of a doll in an old Christmas toy catalog we had in our stack of magazines.  She then sought out similarly sized pictures furniture, food and even a dog.  Then she asked me if I could “use google to find her a blank room”.  Smart idea on her part! I found an appropriate looking picture of an empty room and she made her work of art!

 

2.  The boys did water colors while Miss M did her collage.  Mr. E says that his work is entitled “Millennium Falcon and Storm Troopers.”  🙂 This boy always has Star Wars on the brain these days.

 

3. Mr E and Mr K with a new-to-us dinosaur game passed along to us by our neighbors.  It’s kind of like “Operation” for dinosaur bones…and it even relates to what we’ve been talking about in science, since we have been discussing human and animal skeletons!

 

4.  Miss M decided that Mr K needed some “tot school” this week.  So, to be honest, I haven’t been doing a lot in terms of working on numbers, letters and so on with Mr K.  He isn’t chomping at the bit to learn this stuff most of the time, he only just turned three, and I have other priorities for him like getting to the potty on his own more frequently and not causing chaos everywhere he goes!  But he seemed to enjoy doing a letter coloring page and “letter hunt” with Miss M while she read him an appropriately themed story that she picked out.  Hmmm…maybe we are on to something here!

 

5,  Oh, column addition…both teacher and student wished we never knew you.  We only made it through about two and a half RightStart math lessons this week.  We’ve made the big shift in gears away from geometry.   Miss M struggled with not making small mistakes in the column addition problems, which led to answers I could see were so close, but not totally correct.  It was discouraging for her to have to retrace her steps to find her mistakes and she couldn’t always find them.  Attitudes may have been deteriorating on both of our parts by the end of the week.  I am glad to see that after the lesson that is currently half-finished we switch gears again to subtraction for a bit.  Maybe that will go better for us!

 

6.  Miss M working on her math while baby J keeps her company (I had been sitting in between them, and when I got up I thought they looked so cute together!).

 

7. Family science night around the iPad, while daddy shows the kids pictures of animal skeletons to discuss similarities and differences between various vertebrates.

 

8. Snack and a history lesson.  We don’t read over a meal or snack very often…because, to be honest, I am usually too hungry to read.  But I wanted to read a long lesson from MOH III on Leonardo DaVinci today, and some cinnamon/sugar biscuits seemed like a nice diversion.

 

9. A complicated afternoon play-date situation didn’t quite work out as we had planned it, but the end result was great — we ended up with five kids around the table building with toothpicks and marshmallows (and only a reasonable number of marshmallows were eaten, I think!) provided by a friend who hadn’t originally planned on staying to play at our house.

 

I’m hoping for a relaxing, not too chaotic weekend and looking ahead to a busy week next week that includes a water-main shutoff on Monday, Pi day on Wednesday, a woodwinds class for Miss M on Thursday and maybe some St. Patrick’s Day activities thrown in for good measure. Oh, and we were invited to go roller skating too.  We’ll see if we’re ready for all of that!

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

PhotobucketWeird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

 

Collage Friday: Leaping, Cutting and Pasting March 2, 2012

Filed under: Holidays,Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:20 am
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1. We celebrated Leap Day with a “fun school” day.  Despite my previous aspirations, we did not do a 100 days celebration as well.  Between the amount of time I was able to find to prepare, and remembering how busy our fun school Valentines day was, I decided we would shelve the 100 days celebration for this year and plan for it next year (since we will, of course, have to wait another four years to celebrate Leap Day!).  In the picture, the kids are playing leaping lilly pad games inspired by this post at Toddler Approved.

2. Also inspired by Toddler Approved, we read Frog and Toad stories on Leap Day — including the story about cookies and willpower.  Then of course we had to make some cookies.  Peanut Butter kiss cookies are a favorite here…and who says they are only a Christmas cookie? Not us!  It was fun to talk about willpower and if there is any difference between willpower and self-control.  (The kids said “no” initially, but I tried to make the case that willpower is something of our own effort, while self-control is a fruit of the Spirit).

3.  Miss M helped daddy to make our second-ever batch of homemade rootbeer! I jumped the gun on opening the first 2 liter of homemade rootbeer, and it was not very fizzy.  We’ll open batch number two tonight!

4.  While getting out some science and geography worksheets for Miss M (she really likes these, and she is probably learning at least a little bit from them), I remembered I had a Kumon cutting and pasting book for the boys we hadn’t gotten out at all this school year.

5. and 6.  With completion of lesson 81 on Tessellations, Miss M has made it through the big section of geometry/drawing lessons in the middle of RightStart C.  We had a review day yesterday and a games day today.  Miss M was not pleased to hear that we are back to “regular” lessons after this involving mostly adding, subtracting and multiplying.  She really likes the drawing and geometry!

7. Mr. E wrote a star wars story inspired by a book we read together.  I printed it out on a few sheets of paper, and he enjoyed cutting out and pasting on pictures to illustrate it from the Star Wars preschool pack at homeschool creations and from printables found on the Star Wars website.  We even bound it together with my new ProClick binding machine.  He told me, “this is a real book now!”

8. Miss M has her own cutting and pasting project — she is working on the Horse lapbook from Hands of a Child.  She has chosen horses as the subject for her “Expert Day” project for our homeschool co-op.  More on expert day in coming weeks!

9. Aren’t Baby J and Mr. E cute in their almost-matching shirts? One was a hand-me-down and one was from the thrift store — they have the same picture but different words! It’s not the best picture of the two of them, but every picture I tried to take where the boys were looking at me, Baby J’s hands were blocking his shirt! Baby J turned 4 months old this week and is now 15lbs and 12 oz!

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m linking up with:

Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and the Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

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Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

 

A is for Abacus February 27, 2012

Filed under: Curriculum,Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 8:51 am

I love moments like this in homeschooling:

Miss M with our RightStart Abacus

Last Friday, Miss M asked if she could do school in her “prairie girl dress” (and of course the bonnet is a required accessory).  We weren’t doing anything messy, so there was no reason not to wear it. She’s using the abacus here to help her say the multiples of seven.

The abacus is one of my favorite parts of RightStart math.  It helps the student easily visualize what is going on with various math operations.

I’m linking up with…

Caitlin @ Those Wandlings for “You Don’t See That in Public School!”

and

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Collage Friday: A Short School Week February 24, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 2:09 pm

This was a short week of school for us.  Tony had the day off on Monday for President’s Day, and he took a vacation on Tuesday so I could take baby J to an all-afternoon appointment without the other three kids in tow.  Here’s a few highlights from our week:

1.  Here’s two things Mr E is proud of this week — His “Giant Monster” duplo creation and reading the book Stop Pop (nearly) all by himself!  The flip-a-word series of books is a great phonics-based series of books. (we find them at the library) — it’s too bad they are out of print!

 

2. It snowed on Tuesday, producing great excitement in our household.  Have I mentioned lately that I live in Minnesota?!?  Normally, we should be groaning and complaining about snow by the end of February, but not this year! I think this is only about the second time we’ve had enough snow to need a shovel or be able to send sleds down a hill.  While James and I were at his appointment, Tony took the kids sledding at the neighborhood park and out for hot drinks and treats and the nearby coffee shop

 

3. We were back in the swing of things on Wednesday.  More math drawing lessons for Miss M!  I think we’re almost through the geometry/drawing lessons in Right Start Math level C.

 

4. We’ve been working on lesson D-7 in our science book, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, for the last couple Family Science Nights.  We talked about orbit this week — I didn’t know until recently that orbit is caused by a perfect balance between the forces of gravity and inertia.  Here, Mr. E is “orbiting” the “earth” (aka tape on the floor) and learning this concept.  We also listened to a really interesting portion of a Radio Lab program talking about Newton’s theories about orbit.

 

5. Monday holidays generally mean 50% of sales at our nearby thrift store.  Often the sale is just on clothes and textiles, but this time it was on everything! So, Miss M and I spent some of our President’s Day holiday perusing the book section, and picked out…18 books! Miss M was excited to add more Boxcar Children titles to her shelf, and I was excited about several Newberry award/honor books and titles to fit in with future history studies.

 

6. We started a new “whole family” read aloud — Prince Caspian, the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.  Mr. E took this picture of daddy reading to everyone.  We haven’t done whole family read alouds very often yet,  but I am sure it is something we’ll do much more of as the boys get older.

 

7. Just in case you ever think that things are peachy and perfect all the time around here, I thought I better share a picture like this from a couple days ago. The school room looked like a disaster after the boys spread leftover valentines and miscellaneous art supplies around the room.  Then Mr K dumped the crayon bin on the floor.  On purpose.  After several refusals to clean up (complete with consequences after each refusal), he finally cleaned up.  Needless to say, school was interrupted while all this happened.  Then this morning I went upstairs for less than five minutes, the boys decided to make a huge mess by dumping a bunch of tiny stuff (legos, cars, etc) behind the couch.  Life is not always smooth sailing as we homeschool, but we try and learn through it all (including me, as I learn to keep my cool through it all!!!).

 

8.  Not really related to homeschooling, but I was so happy that I was able to get baby J on my back in my mei tai carrier without help.  After a couple nearly disastrous tries when Mr. E was a baby, I never even tried with Mr. K and assumed I would need to use a buckle carrier (I have a toddler patapum) to carry my babies on my back.  But apparently lots of practice with a buckle carrier prepared me to now be able to safely do it with the mei tai. Yeah!

 

9. Miss M “caught reading” at the table.  She decided to go back and re-read “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for herself (we read it outloud as a family several months ago).  She is enjoying it so much that she’s been reading it every spare minute and will finish in record time.

 

Have a happy weekend! I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and Weekly Wrap-Up @ Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers! 

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Collage Friday: Valentines Fun and New Stuff February 17, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 2:42 pm
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Our week had a bit of a different rhythm than usual with a fun day of “Valentines School” on Tuesday.  Here’s a snapshot of our week:

1. I had so much to say about Valentines day that it got its own post with a full recounting of our activities.

2. Grandma Karen dropped by for a couple hours on Wednesday.  Aren’t all the kids cute cuddled up with her in the big chair while she reads?

3. Miss M got a “Sand Art” craft kit from Grandma Karen as a Valentines gift.  Here she is working on it at her desk in her room.

4. The geometry lessons in RightStart Math C proved a bit more challenging this week.  At one point neither of us could figure out how to divide a circle into thirds.  This happened in the late afternoon one day (we had procrastinated finishing the math lesson).  When I was more awake the next day I remembered how to do it and could help Miss M!  Using the drawing tools to make a clock also proved a bit challenging.  I thought I was giving Miss M the proper directions, but the first result was a clock with 12 numbers ending about where the seven should have been.  Whoops! I had to make one myself before I could explain to Miss M how to do it properly.  The drawing lesson directions clearly assume a bit more spacial reasoning than I seem to have!

5. We finished Mystery of History vol. 2 this week and started in with the first two lessons of Mystery of History Volume 3.  I love the full color pictures!

6. I also gave Miss M a new book for writing practice — Spectrum Writing Grade 2.   While I wouldn’t say that this basic workbook is an excellent method for teaching writing, I am in the “something is better than nothing” mode with this.  Since I was ordering Mystery of History Vol 3 from the Hearts at Home curriculum store anyway, I picked up this book on sale as well.  Miss M told me she really likes her new writing workbook, so that is a good sign, I suppose.

7. Miss M practiced counting by sixes and sevens this week.  When Mr. E saw the bugs on this sheet from Miss M’s math book, he wanted to know if he could learn how to “count by sixes all the way to nine.”  That led to a great discussion about what it means to “count by” something, and he practiced counting by 2’s!

8. Late night Lego play with daddy — he let the boys stay up an hour past their bedtime to make some really fun Lego creations together.

9. Just for fun — gotta love the Nutella “beard” on Mr. K!

Now TGIF!…(part of our day today involved all three kids taking a turn at spilling all the cards to a certain game in which the cards need to be sorted in a particular way…and the cards were spilled on purpose each time.  Sigh!)  We’ll have a definite three day weekend from school since daddy is off from work on Monday.  Tuesday baby J has a medical appointment and circumstances are such that we might not get much school done that day either.  A mini-break will be nice!

Linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and Weekly-Wrap-Up @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers! 

 

Collage “Friday” (on a Saturday): A Birthday and other Fun February 11, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 5:26 pm

Here’s a little bit about what we’ve been up to this week:

1. & 2.  Happy 3rd Birthday to Mr. K!  His birthday was on Monday, and we had a small party on Sunday afternoon. Our family tradition is to let the birthday boy/girl pick the menu for the day and a fun activity on the day of his/her birthday.  Mr. K picked donuts for breakfast, Cars soup for lunch, Cars Mac and Cheese and chicken for dinner, and bowling as his fun activity.

3.  We had a Valentine’s party at co-op this week. Miss M wanted to make her own valentines this year for her co-op class, but wasn’t sure what she wanted to make.  It was the perfect use of pinterest! I showed her a number of links I had pinned to homemade valentines, and she picked the one she liked best.  I printed out the template, and she took it from there!

4. I haven’t had much patience lately to let the kids help me in the kitchen, but this week I let them help me with the dumplings for our chicken and dumplings in the crock pot.  Miss M made most of the dough balls, but the boys helped a bit too.

5. We scrubbed off the old exersaucer and brought it out for baby J this week…he seems to like it a lot.  It’s nice to have one more way to keep him occupied while we are doing school or I am cooking.  He’s getting more interested in trying to play with his toys every day!

6. Mr. K got some new play-doh this week.  I really, really hate the smell of play-doh (yet, somehow I never quite get around to making my own).  After Miss M was finished playing, I let the boys continue mostly unsupervised with the play-doh, since they were quiet and not fighting.  The result — one entire container of play-doh cut up into tiny chunks and spread out over the table and floor.  Sigh.  At least it swept up pretty easily.

7.  We got out the Right Start fraction chart for the first time this week.  The lesson called for folding and cutting strips of paper, but I am glad I remembered I had this instead!  We only made it through three lessons this week, having gotten bogged down in the warm-ups on two different days.  The geometry/fractions portions of the lessons were only mildly challenging for Miss M, but we discovered a particular subtraction strategy that had been forgotten, and some of the multiplication proved more challenging for Miss M than I had expected.  It was good to slow down both for the purpose of review and reinforcement, but also to deal with the character issues this brought up.  Miss M was not happy to hear that she had given me the wrong answers on these warm-ups.   We took the time necessary to deal with the heart issues.  While I don’t “love” these moments as the occur, I love these opportunities homeschooling brings us to work on Christ-like character (for mom and children alike!).

8.  Arts and crafts completed by Miss M and Mr E this week.  While sometimes I think to myself that we should be using some of the art curriculum materials I purchased for this year…other days I look at the projects my kids complete of their own volition, and remember that they have many, many good art/craft experiences with very little involvement from me at all!

9. We had a very short morning of school on Friday, leaving most of the rest of the day for fun.  We enjoyed a gym playdate, hair cuts for Miss M and Mr. E, and a trip to Half-Price Books.  I brought a huge box of books in to sell (mostly some pretty junky books that were really dead weight on our bookshelf), and of course still spent well beyond the credit I received for the books I brought.  🙂  Each of the kids got to pick out some books for themselves, and I found a few titles I was looking for.   After our outings, the kids packed their bags and went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for the night so mom and dad (and baby) could go out for a fancy early valentines date and then our church’s annual marriage retreat.  What a fun Friday!

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

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Collage Friday – Enjoying our New School Room February 3, 2012

Filed under: Weekly Highlights — kirstenjoyhill @ 10:18 pm
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This week feels like it went by in a bit of a blur.  I was pretty distracted by organizational projects around the house — our school room project was finished by late Sunday night, but the boys’ room still needed organization, piles of items remained in the dining/living room to put away (mostly in rooms other than the school room), and I had a mountain of items to donate.  We had outings on three out of five days (usually once or twice is my max these days with both a baby and a not-very-well-potty-trained toddler), and some members of the family with a bit of a cold…which also thew off the rhythm of the week. Yet somehow, we still managed to get most of our school agenda for the week accomplished.  We really enjoyed doing school in our newly organized room!

Here are a few highlights:

1. Miss M found cursive to be more of a struggle than usual last week, and didn’t finish last week’s verse from “A Reason for Handwriting C” until Monday.  But she was so proud of it when she was done! This week she worked very diligently and finished all five “days” of this week’s lesson in only three school days.

2. Grandma Karen visited on Monday, which is always a treat! After a shortened morning of school, the kids worked together with Grandma to build an entire duplo zoo, among other things.

3. We’re so happy to have our newly re-organized school room, and one big benefit to the new arrangement is better access to our bookshelves! Here Miss M is taking a break from her regular school work with a picture book she rediscovered on our shelves (Mirette on the High Wire).

4. I got out our Lakeshore Learning “cars” themed math box for the boys. I had a nice time doing some counting and matching with Mr. K, and Mr. E had fun with it too.  Then they scattered all the cars out over the rug and the cars had some kind of a battle with the lego guys.  🙂

5.  Mr E. wanted to “draw rectangles too”  just like his big sister was doing in her Right Start math lessons.  So, he traced the 1 inch math squares. 🙂  We had a nice discussion squares being a special type of rectangle.

6.  Miss M completed five Right Start C lessons again this week! While the drawing lessons were not quite as much of a breeze as last week, Miss M persevered through the challenging points of using the drawing tools (and the tricky business of using the 1 inch squares for making a rectangle of a certain perimeter) to get each day’s lesson done.  I think she has inherited some of her daddy’s visual-spacial abilities that I don’t have! I don’t think I would have done well with these types of lessons at her age!

7.  A game of sequence turned into a lesson in patience and bearing with one’s younger sibling.  The object of the game is to get four chips in a row…you may notice there are multiple spots in the picture with four green chips.  Mr K really wanted to play, but didn’t quite “get” that he couldn’t put his chips any where he pleased.  Mr E and Miss M did an admirable job of humoring him while still playing the game by the rules themselves…until Mr. K started taking their chips off the board.  When I told Mr K that this wasn’t kind behavior melt-down ensued and Mr K needed to take a few minutes to rest with mommy.  Then Mr E. got a good reminder about being a good sport even when you lose.  Board games sure are character building!

8. We are finally back at it with our “Family Science Nights” with lessons from Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU).  This week’s lesson was on gravity.  Which will hit the ground first, a flat piece of paper or a ball? How about a paper airplane or a ball? Why? And what does air resistance and gravity have to do with it? That was our discussion this week.

9. And finally…happy Three Months Old to baby J!

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

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