Dottie's Homeschool Universe

Weekly Update: 2/6/12 – 2/10/12

2012-02-10T15:26:00.001-08:00

We had a great week! Lots of visible progress with both kids.

First for the fun stuff. I lied when I said we’d be starting our new Science, History and Geography this week. I decided to hold off for a few weeks since Steph, Daddy and I are going to visit friends in Mississippi and take in a few Mardi Gras festivities in neighboring New Orleans, while the little guys enjoy some time with their grandparents.

We decided to have some Valentine’s Day fun instead. We participated in a Valentine exchange through the Secular Homeschool forums. The kids were very excited as their Valentines came in the mail and eagerly looked for the right state (and one from Canada) to mark on our map.

Georgie made Valentine cards for his special cousin Jade and some other friends, while Vicki just made decorations to put up all over the house.

Vicki had a real break-through this week. I’ve been periodically trying different phonics reading programs with her including Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, the sample pages from All About Reading Level 1 and Progressive Phonics. But she just hasn’t been ready for blending. She knows all her letter sounds (thanks to Leap Frog videos) but she’s been working on the pre-level book Get Ready for the Code for extra reinforcement (and because she wanted to “do school”). We are almost ready to move on to Get Set for the Code and she’s been doing very well and enjoys the work. This past week I pulled out an old copy of The Reading Lesson which was the first thing I bought for Georgie to homeschool with when he was 4. He hated it but Vicki loves it and it worked! She was able to do the blends in one of the initial lessons (a t, c a, c o, t a, s a) without any problems.

She has been continuing along with Handwriting without Tears and has shown more willingness to carefully trace the letters and taking her time coloring the pictures. She hasn’t wanted to do the name tracing pages I prepared for her but I continue to bring it out everyday and just put it away if she doesn’t want to do it.

Georgie spent a lot of time this week reading a couple of the encyclopedias we have. He says he likes reading the books with “lots of different little informations in them”. His favorite was A Scholastic Kid’s Encyclopedia: Science but he also enjoyed the Little Kid’s First Big Book of Why. He had no trouble with the vocabulary in either of these and just started at the beginning and read them through in order.

I’m continuing to alternate Georgie’s Handwriting without Tears with some short copywork. I made the mistake one day of putting his HWT workbook out at the same time as his binder. He ended up writing a word in HWT, then doing a problem in the binder, then back to his HWT workbook, then back to his binder. Probably not the most efficient way for him to be working.

He has almost completed Explode the Code Book 3. Many people recommend postponing Book 4 since it is a big jump in difficulty. We will probably start with Book 4 and if it proves too difficult, switch to Book 5.

Georgie is also almost finished with Math Mammoth 1st grade. We will be working completely within 2A and 2B by the end of next week. He still enjoys being able to mix up topics.

He’s continuing with the free Scholastic GUM and McMillian/McGraw Treasures Grammar. We are currently working on adjectives and Georgie loves making things more complicated than they need to be. He had to pick an adjective for the sentence “The sheep ran down the _________ hill.” He had to think about this for a few minutes and then stated “well, sheep aren’t very good climbers so I’m going to go with small for the hill”. He also had to write other answers to fit the word – “red” was written in red, “pink” in pink, “big” was written BIG and “pretty” had to be written in pink and purple because “they are pretty colors even though I don’t like them”. Once we finish the first grade level of these we will be switching to Spectrum Grade 2 workbooks.

He is also almost finished with Level 1 All About Spelling. I’m taking some time to review all the past lessons to make sure everything has been mastered up to this point before we move to Level 2.

Next week we have 4-H Cloverbuds on Tuesday (topic for the day is Weather), Homeschool Bowling on Wednesday and Homeschool Gymnastics on Friday so we’re going to concentrate on our core subjects along with some more Valentine’s Day activities.

A couple weeks update

2012-02-04T11:36:00.001-08:00

After a really good start getting back to school right after the holidays, things pretty much fell apart. Between continuing improvement projects around the house, the resumption of homeschool bowling and gymnastics, the start of our 4-H Cloverbud club, and some absolutely gorgeous weather – formal schooling has taken a bit of a backseat.

It looks like we are going to have a great group for our 4-H Cloverbud Club. 15 children were enrolled ranging from 4 to 8 years old. I’m very excited at the possibilities for field trips and group activities. Vicki spent some time studying our Pledge of Allegiance and 4-H Pledge board, although she seemed to think it was a story about aliens and monsters.

The kids had fun playing grocery store with the cash register they received for Christmas. According to Georgie, the hat (from an old dance costume of Steph’s) is completely necessary for the cashier to be official.

We spent one day without power and without a car, thanks to a large tree falling across the road and on power lines. The kids spend the day camping in front of the fire and setting up tents all over the house.

We enjoyed some of the absolutely gorgeous, Spring-like weather outside preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse with the Nerf guns the kids also got for Christmas. Those bright orange darts showed up real well against the blue sky. I drew a target on a large box with chalk so they would have something to aim for and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time searching for darts in the neighbor’s yard.

Both kids did progress a little bit in their regular school work. Vicki insisted on doing “the duck page” in her Handwriting without Tears book so we ended up jumping ahead by about 10 pages.

After she worked in some of her wipe-off books while I worked with Georgie, which included coloring her toe nails blue and some face painting.

Next week we will be back to full days of school. We will be alternating topics in History (US starting with Native Americans), Geography (US starting with our home state of New Jersey) and Science (rocks and minerals).

Weekly Wrap-Up: January 6, 2012

2012-01-07T14:40:00.001-08:00

Yikes, 2012. It feels really strange to be typing that. Time sure is going by fast.

We jumped right back into school this week, at least our core subjects, and even finished everything that was planned for the week. Much better than I expected considering Georgie has pretty much spent the previous two weeks bouncing between the Wii and the computer.

The living room is still a little rearranged from the holidays so we moved school into the dining nook. We might stay there for a while since it worked pretty well. I set up the kids office boards as a divider and worked with Vicki while Georgie started on his binder.

Once Vicki finished her official work she played with their TAG, did her wipe-off books, cut paper into little pieces or did wooden word puzzles. Other than one incident of her cutting her hair, the week went very smoothly.

We seem to have settled on a good amount of school work for Georgie to do each day. It is enough for him to continue progressing in all his programs at a typical pace (at least one grade level per year) but not so much that he gets whiny and frustrated by the end.

What George is currently doing:

Handwriting: either a two page spread in the Handwriting without Tears workbook or a page of copywork each day. The copywork is mostly a short quote from one of the What Your x Grader Needs to Know books. He is about 2/3 of the way through the 1st grade HWT book. I don’t think he’s even close to being ready for the smaller spacing of the lines in the 2nd grade book, which is why I added the copywork.

Phonics/Reading: one lesson in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and 6-8 pages from Explode the Code each day. We will continue this pace until he starts having trouble with the lessons. He is currently on Lesson 75 in OPGTR and about 1/2 way through ETC Book 3. He’s reading well ahead of what either of these are actually teaching.

One page from Scholastic Second Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension each day.

Math: 3 to 4 pages from Math Mammoth 1B/2A each day. The pages are a mix of topics. Usually one or two pages from the Adding/Subtracting within 0 to 100 and one page from Place Value, Coins or Clocks (2A) each day.

Grammar: 1 to 2 pages from Scholastic Grammar, Usage and Mechanics and McMillian/McGraw-Hill Treasures Grammar each day.

Spelling: Two days to do one step in All About Spelling if he is able to spell the words easily. Usually one day to introduce the rule and practice and the next day to make sure he remembers. We do a mix of using the tiles, orally or writing on the white board or a magnetic doodler. I usually prefer the tiles or orally since he feels the need to draw pictures for each word when he writes them. We have five more steps to be done with Level One.

I’ve increased the amount of “official” work for Vicki since she is constantly asking for more. She plays a lot with various games, puzzles, scissors and crayons but it’s the work we do together that I count as “official”. She is not required to do anything and if she shows resistance, I put it aside. She offers the most resistance to anything that involves coloring but actually likes tracing letters, circling answers and drawing lines to show answers.

Handwriting: one 2-page spread in the Handwriting without Tears: Get Set for School book and an activity using the Capital Letter pieces. This week I also added a sheet to practice tracing her name since she has been asking to learn how to write her name. We actually ended up ahead of my plan for this week since I didn’t assign any HWT pages on those days I gave her the name tracing but she asked to work out of her “green book”.

Phonics: 2 to 4 pages (one or two sheets front and back) from Get Ready for the Code. She already knows all her letter sounds thanks to Leapfrog videos. I printed out the sample Lesson 1 for the new All About Reading Level 1 to try with her but she is definitely not ready for blending yet.

Math: 1 to 2 pages from Evan-Moor Teacher’s File Box and/or 1 to 2 activities from Mathematics Enhancement Program Reception Level.

I am hoping to add our elective subjects back in a week or so. We will be studying US History starting with Native Americans, States Geography starting with our home state of New Jersey and Science starting with Geology/Rocks & Minerals.

Last Weekly Update of the Year!

2011-12-24T08:53:00.001-08:00

We haven’t done much traditional school work in the past few weeks. Lots of games, lots of reading and LOTS of Christmas crafts. Georgie’s reading is improving at a very rapid rate and he’s now reading Level 2 readers quickly and easily. I may have to make reading to his sister an official part of our school day.

Our last two Christmas crafts were making paper strip candy canes and salt dough ornaments. I found about 4 completely different salt dough recipes online and used the one that used the least amount of salt since the only large container of salt we had was sea salt. Despite over 30 minutes of baking, the ornaments never became completely hard but I still let the kids paint them and we’re going to attach a few of them to the presents going to the grandparents.

We had the last day of homeschool bowling for the Fall session this week and the kids received their participation trophies.

We finished up the week with a trip to the movie theater to see Chipwrecked. This was the first time these guys have been in an actual movie theater in over 2 years, when we saw Up in theaters. That was such a traumatic experience that we blocked out all the details and only retained a strong feeling of dread at the thought of bringing these two into a movie theater again. But, they are more than two years older now and it was a school day so the theater was likely to be empty or full of younger children, so I decided to take a chance. They did pretty good. At least I don’t think they disturbed anyone but me. Georgie kept turning around to wave to the pretty girl in the row behind us and danced around at the end of the movie but all in all it was pretty good. By the time they have the free movies next Summer, I may even be willing to do it again.

More Christmas Crafts

2011-12-18T13:13:00.001-08:00

We have been doing lots and lots of Christmas Crafts.

We decorated foam stars and ornaments with glitter glue and stickers…..

crayon resist Christmas trees (which didn’t work well because the kids didn’t do enough crayon and I evidently watered down the watercolors too much).

Ornaments using sticky boards and tissue paper squares. This one is Georgie’s. Each piece of tissue paper carefully placed.

These two are Vicki’s. The one on the right was Georgie’s until Vicki threw a handful of tissue paper at it and he had to start over.

A wreath from a paper plate, bowtie pasta and pompoms. The symmetry tells you this is some of Georgie’s work.

popsicle Christmas trees….

There’s more to come.

Painting with Shaving Cream

2011-12-16T05:50:00.001-08:00

We’ve been doing lots of Christmas crafts in the past couple of weeks and we’ve done two different ones that involve shaving cream.

We started out with a technique that is supposed to give a marbling effect. I cut out various shapes from cardstock – stockings, trees, ornaments and stars. I put a small amount of foam shaving cream in a bowl and (my first mistake) let the kids take turn picking colors. It would have been easier, and much less messy, if I either made them agree on one set of colors to use for all the shapes or given them each their own bowl of shaving cream to chose one set of colors for all their own shapes. Instead I “cleaned” the shaving cream between each set of shapes so they could all be different colors.

We added of few drops of paint in two or three colors to the shaving cream and the kids lightly swirled it around using children’s butter knives.

We then placed the cardstock shapes on the shaving cream/paint and lightly pressed down. The cardstock was removed and the excess shaving cream removed using a ruler.

Vicki decided right away she preferred using the knife to just transfer plops of paint and shaving cream onto her cardstock shapes. At which point, I did end up getting a second bowl of cream for Georgie to use.

I evidently didn’t scrape off enough of the shaving cream (the paint appeared to be coming off as well when I scraped too close to the cardstock) and we ended up with a slightly puffy look to our shapes. Which was great except that any touch either flattened it right out or caused it to flake off.

The kids enjoyed this enough that they kept asking to do more. I found it messy and the results somewhat disappointing. I think marble painting (where a cardstock shape is put into a container, paint covered marbles are added and rolled over the cardstock) produces a nicer effect and is a LOT less messy.

Our second project was using a mixture of shaving cream and Elmer’s glue to make puffy paints. I drew the outline of a snowman on dark colored cardstock with chalk and allowed the kids to paint it using this mixture.

The kids then used pompoms, paper circles and googly eyes to decorate their snowmen. Georgie also did some embellishment using chalk.

I don’t know if I messed up the “recipe” even though it wasn’t very complicated (equal parts shaving cream and glue) but our snowmen weren’t as puffy as our other shaving cream paintings.

I’ll be posting about all our other Christmas crafts in the next week.

Lego Art at the Museum

2011-12-15T05:55:00.001-08:00

Our local museum is having a special exhibit of works by artist Nathan Sawaya – The Art of the Brick. The exhibit features large sculptures made out of Lego bricks. The kids had a great time viewing the sculptures (they were amazing!) and then heading down to activity stations where we could make our own Lego creations.

Vicki made one little display and lost interest in building. Instead she played with some of the other toys that were in the classroom.

She tried to interest Georgie in the dragon but he told her he was too busy making his art.

Georgie and I made some houses for a Facebook picture contest the museum is sponsoring.

The museum is having a big Toy Festival the week after Christmas that I’m hoping to take the kids to.

Wrapping up Prehistory/Dinosaurs

2011-12-02T12:51:00.001-08:00

We finished up Prehistory with some fun dinosaur activities. The kids and I have really enjoyed doing our prehistory unit. We didn’t get to all the activities I had planned, and it took WAY longer than I intended it to but we all learned a lot and had lots of fun.

Our wrap-up started with us playing a game where we matched up some of our small plastic dinosaurs with flash cards (from Target Dollar Spot). Vicki was upset because the pteranodon (her favorite) didn’t have a mommy. For most of the dinosaurs I had two of each kind in the size we were using but pteranodon I only had one. So, I had to pull out one of our larger dinosaurs so that they could play together.

Georgie really stretched his reading skills telling the information on the back of the flash cards to Vicki and I. We were able to match up all of our dinosaurs and after we were done the kids played with them for a while.

The kids painted some wooden dinosaurs models I picked up from the craft store. We didn’t use the paints that came with them since they were just boring old green, brown and red and Vicki had to have pink and purple, while Georgie needed yellow and orange.

Vicki painted her dinosaur, her shirt and the table.

We also did an excavation kit where you dig a dinosaur skeleton out of a block of plaster. The kids enjoyed doing this but it was a lot of work, very messy and they needed a lot of help. I pulled out some extra tools – toothpicks, brushes, a small screwdriver and a screw – since I didn’t really want them using the chisel that came with the kit. It had a fairly sharp blade on it which just seemed to be asking for trouble. Georgie was very excited whenever bones were uncovered and had the most fun doing the delicate work of getting the plaster out of the cracks. Vicki mostly used the hammer and a screw to chip away at the main block.

After all the bones were excavated, they snapped together into a full skeleton. There were no directions for this part but we were finally able to get him all together with just two broken bones (one toe and one arm).

We finished up by pulling out our Charlie’s Playhouse timeline and reviewing all the creatures we had studied. Georgie wanted to color a picture of his favorite, Cooperaceras, but since mommy has no drawing ability at all and there seems to be a shortage of coloring pages for Permian Period critters, he had to settle for a nautilus instead.

I still haven’t decided what we’ll be doing now as far as History/Geography/Science are concerned. For the next few weeks we’ll just concentrate on getting through the holidays but after that I have to decide between: 1) return to our world geography/cultures and habitats study (possibly with a quick review of what we’ve already covered), 2) do unit studies using Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus chapter books, 3) do US History and States Geography along with unrelated science topics. I have everything I would need to do any of these plans, I just have to pick one.

Liberty Science Center

2011-11-22T17:14:00.001-08:00

The kids and I had a great time at the Liberty Science Center today. I haven’t been there in years since I thought the little guys were still too young. While that was true for some things, they were able to enjoy the vast majority of the exhibits. Both kids had their own cameras and really enjoyed taking pictures themselves. (I don’t think Vicki’s camera actually worked but having it along kept them from fighting over Georgie’s.)

We started at the top in the Our Hudson Home gallery, which had exhibits pertaining to the Hudson River ecosystem and the way people interact with it.

There was a virtual crane operator game where they could try unloading containers off a ship….

a scoop to try dredging the sand on the bottom of the “river”…

and tanks with a variety of species that are found in the river. Vicki really liked the turtles….

while Georgie liked the Striped Bass (maybe because I told him that’s what Daddy catches).

I was a little surprised that Vicki recognized the sea urchins.

Our next stop was the Math Midway which was a temporary special exhibit. Vicki played around with a light and mirrors to show reflective properties….

and they both enjoyed changing the height of supports on a roller coaster to see how fast the car would travel and which set-ups gave the best ride.

Vicki did some geometry puzzles….

and Georgie did a drawing using a harmonograph, a pendulum based drawing tool.

In the Wonder Why gallery they explored the properties of fluids….

and some optical illusions….

did some stop motion animation using blocks…

and had fun being able to see sound waves.

We learned about different forms of energy at the Energy Quest exhibit. There was a game to learn where the best place was to find oil. Little model oil rigs were moved to different locations to see if oil would be found.

They were able to make models of different carbon based molecules….

and see how waves can produce energy.

The Eat and Be Eaten exhibit had a variety of animals and showed how they caught their prey or avoided becoming prey. Vicki really liked the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.

In another gallery, George had a great time playing a video game where you could choose to be a microbe or a T-cell – trying to cause an infection or stop one. He loves all things computer and video game so he played this for quite a while.

Vicki made a virtual microbe by choosing various options for cell shape and type.

Also in the Infection Connection was a giant model of a nose that would sneeze periodically but the kids both avoided that one.

At the Communication exhibit, they learned about how the brain processes information and Georgie made some digital graffiti.

Both kids had a great time being silly making digital recordings that they could play back and vary the sound quality.

There was a special exhibit on water where the kids could change around the pipes leading to different fixtures found in a home to see what would be most efficient. Of course, Georgie needed to take a rest sitting on the toilet.

The exhibit had an interactive station where you could choose to see how many gallons of water are used doing various common household things. It’s time to fix our dishwasher since hand washing takes WAY more water than using a dishwasher.

The Science Center has a special gallery just for kids from 2 to 5 years old. Georgie is 6 but Vicki is 4 so we were able to hang out there for a while. This room had a lot of really fun things to do.

The main feature of the room was a huge contraption where the kids could turn a wheel to use a pulley system to send balls on a ride up to the top where they would twist through a maze of tracks before returning back to the bottom.

Another wheel activated an air cannon that would shoot the balls up to a target at the top of the structure.

There was a rock wall that Vicki enjoyed “painting” with water….

and tracks where you could build cars and race them down but where Georgie decided he wanted to see how fast the balls from the maze would go.

Vicki played xylophone on some large stones….

and built model bridges with some blocks….

while Georgie spent a lot of his time hanging out in a climbing structure….

or playing on a responsive floor. This floor reacted to pressure and had a bunch of games for the kids to play like Frogger and Asteroids or just moving piles of balls or swirl colors around. Georgie liked pushing pool balls into the pockets.

There was also a giant rice bin with scoops and measuring cups where Vicki played for a while.

The last exhibit we saw was all about Skyscrapers. There was a shake table where they could build a building then see if the design was strong enough to survive an earthquake.

Georgie operated a crane to try and move metal plates around and insisted I take his picture standing in a steel girder that was bent in half.

This section also had an exhibit where kids could walk on a steel girder 18 feet above the floor. In this case, I was glad the kids were too young to fully participate. They had to be 48 inches tall and Georgie is only 45.5 inches tall (thankfully).

Here are just a few of the many, many pictures Georgie took with his camera at the Science Center.

The Science Center was a lot of fun and we had a great time. They do homeschool weeks a few times a year but from what I hear they get pretty crowded. I was surprised that there were actually a few school groups there today but it still wasn’t bad at all. The kids were able to take their time and really enjoy the various exhibits.

On our way out we drove into Liberty State Park to get a closer look at the Statue of Liberty. Georgie saw it from the car on the ride in and really wanted to get a closer look. It was a cold rainy day so we didn’t get any closer than we could in the car but next Spring I’ll have to take the kids on the ferry to Ellis Island and the Statue. I’ve lived my whole life in New Jersey and I’ve never been to either.

Weekly (?) Wrap-Up

2011-11-18T11:10:00.001-08:00

This wrap-up is the first in almost a month (besides our Halloween post). Things have been chaotic around here since the snow storm but we are slowly getting back into a routine. Of course, the holidays coming is going to totally mess with our routine all over again but c’est la vie.

Both

I’m going to start this wrap-up with the stuff both kids have been doing together since I think those are the more interesting activities, at least lately.

The kids have been participating in a homeschool bowling league for the past few weeks. At first I wasn’t sure if they were enjoying it. They both ran off in between every frame, Vicki would start complaining that she was too tired after one game and every single week (even when the other two members of our team were absent) we were the absolute last team done. By a lot. Like 30 minutes after everyone else. But at this weeks bowling the kids seemed a lot more into it.

Georgie really wanted to get a strike and this week he finally did! His previous “method” of bowling was unusual and varied. He would toss the ball sideways and have it zigzag down the lane (or land on the divider between lanes and have to wait for a bowling alley employee to come get it off) or spin around and toss it or dance up to the line and drop it or sit on the floor and push it. None of these methods were working real well for him (what a surprise). He has never tried the classic between the legs shot and he isn’t quite strong enough to bowl properly with his fingers in the holes, swinging the ball with one hand. I told him he needed to send the ball straight down the lane and harder if he wants to get a strike. His new method, of holding the ball in both hands and throwing it straight out, worked well for him and his scores this week were an 81 and an 82 (his average is a 47).

Vicki didn’t score as well this week but she didn’t complain about being tired and had a good time. She has actually been better than Georgie at getting the ball down the lane until now.

Even if the bowling itself isn’t a big thrill (although Georgie was very excited about his strike) the kids enjoy the time with other homeschoolers and it’s a great chance for them to socialize.

We started doing some Thanksgiving crafts this week. I am a big fan of foam sticker craft kits. The kids love them and the mess is usually limited to a pile of backing papers all over the floor. Which makes them great to pull out when I want to avoid big messes and drying time. I know these kits aren’t always popular since they are considered “cookie cutter” crafts and don’t give kids a chance to be creative. Not really a problem with my guys. Anyone who has read here for awhile will know how little my kids care about the “proper” way to do crafts.

We did two different craft kits. The first was a scarecrow. This is what the “suggested” finished product looks like….

and here’s what my kids did, Vicki’s…..

and Georgie’s.

The leaves, glittery pumpkins, acorns and saying stickers actually didn’t come with the kits. I have a variety of foam stickers in many, many themes and I pulled out the ones left over from last fall.

The other sticker project we did was turkeys. Here is the “suggested” finished project…

Vicki’s turkey (complete with V’s for Vicki)….

and Georgie’s.

We watched a couple of Thanksgiving videos on Discovery Streaming, read The Magic School Bus at the First Thanksgiving and we’re working on The Magic Tree House Thanksgiving on a Thursday.

In an attempt to encourage more independent reading, I moved the kids’ books again. They are now on the bottom three shelves of one of our living room bookcases, so right at kid level. I also moved their Tag reading system, maps and games down. This did result in much more interest in both the books and the Tag. Although one book was already sacrificed to Vicki’s destructive tendencies.

Georgie

Georgie is continuing to do well with all our subjects. We are doing much more dedicated school time but I am hoping we can get into a better routine once the holidays are over. He is currently working at either a first or second grade level in all subjects.

LANGUAGE ARTS

We are up to Lesson 70 in OPGTR and Book 3 in ETC but Georgie is reading above the level of both of these. He does sometimes have to take a minute to think about whether to put the silent e at the end of a word but this seems to happen only with spelling, not when reading.

He’s been on a real reading kick since I moved the books down. I have eight new circles to add to his bookworm, including a couple that he read during a wait at the doctor’s office. I love that he will now pick up a book to read wherever we are. He is still reading mostly Dr. Seuss level books but he did pick up a longer Stage 2 reader while we were at the doctor. After the holidays, I want to see if I can encourage him to try some of the beginning chapter books we have.

We haven’t made much progress in AAS the past couple of weeks but we should still be moving on to Level 2 right after the new year.

Handwriting is still the hardest subject to do with him. He plugs along with it but it’s the subject he’s most likely to “forget” how to hold a pencil or ask if he really needs to do all of it. I’m going to start offering him some copywork to do between HWT lessons.

He is easily doing the second grade Scholastic Reading Comprehension. He seems to really enjoy reading the passages and answering the questions. Once he finishes with the second grade level, I may get Writing With Ease and see if he can make the transition to a more formal dictation/narration.

MATH

We have moved onto MM 2a for clocks. We should be doing all level 2 shortly after the new year. The only part of this he still resists in the Shapes and Measuring.

Vicki

We have mixed results the last couple of weeks. Vicki started off very cooperative and excited about doing school. There were a few days where she actually asked to “do more paper stuff”. Some of the novelty seems to have worn off (or she was just in a mood) since the last couple of days she was very uncooperative. I am not pushing her to do anything at this point and if she doesn’t want to do it, I put it all away. The problem is that she will be uncooperative with everything, including games that are supposed to be fun but educational, then scream that she wants to do school when I put it away. The one thing she’s always willing to do is play with her Unifix cubes or the HWT capital letter pieces.

She was playing with her tangram puzzles one day and came to the realization that two squares could replace a rectangle and two triangles could replace a square. So, she is learning. ;-)

I’ve been looking around trying to find a good reading program for Vicki. She is doing well with Get Ready for the Code, which is great reinforcement for letter sounds, but I would like something that begins to work on blending. The All About Reading Level 1 Teacher’s Manual sample has recently been added to the website and may fit the bill. AAR is from the same people, and uses some of the same principles, as AAS. I really love AAS so I thought I’d see if Vicki seemed ready for AAR. I looked at the Pre-level when that came available but thought it would be a lot of repetition to things we were already doing. I printed off the first 5 lessons of AAR Level 1 to try it out in the next few weeks and see if Vicki is ready. We did a little bit of Lesson 1 and she did okay but was hesitant with the blending. This was also one of the days she was not in a cooperative mood so I’m going to give it a little more time before deciding. If we do go ahead with AAR, I will probably wait to order it until I’m ready to order AAS Level 2 for Georgie.

I’m sure things will continue to be chaotic for a few weeks a least with all the usual holiday fun (and some home repairs and renovations). At this point I plan to keep up with math and language arts as much as possible, finish our dinosaur study and then just do fun holiday crafts and activities until after the new year.

I’m still trying to decide what plan to go with at that point. We thought our living situation was going to change into one even less conducive to projects, I was planning to do some unit studies using Magic Tree House books. Since that plan has changed, I could return to our geography and habitats study that was put on hold back in April or we can start our US History and states study and return to World Geography when we start Ancient History after that. I have all the materials I need for any of those options so the decision won’t be an easy one.

A Postponed Halloween

2011-11-08T06:44:00.001-08:00

We are finally getting back to our normal routine after the disruption caused by the “freak October snowstorm” that hit the Saturday before Halloween.

Our museum was holding their annual celebration that day so we ventured out into the snow to check it out. The kids are old enough to be picking their costumes based on their latest interests so my days of making their costumes are over for now. Vicki dressed as Jessie from Toy Story 2 and George was Wario, the Mario Brothers antihero.

The museum had lots of fun craft activities to do. The kids painted pumpkins….

made Halloween lanterns (we may have to do these more often, both kids were able to do most of the cutting once I drew lines on the paper for them)…..

lollipop ghosts, and masks with gems, glitter, foam stickers and feathers.

The museum has a new, temporary exhibit right now of Brain Teasers - “an exhibition of hands-on puzzles designed to challenge visitors’ problem solving skills”. The kids (and daddy) had a lot of fun trying to solve the many puzzles. While daddy was able to do most of them, they were pretty advanced for the kids. They still had fun trying.

By the time we headed home from the museum, our neighborhood was completely cut off due to downed trees and wires. We went over to Granny Kaye’s house and ended up staying six days waiting for power to return to our house.

Thanks to the heavy, wet snow on trees that were still full of leaves (some haven’t even changed color yet) many trees fell and pulled wires down with them. Most of the towns in our area postponed Halloween activities until Friday for safety reasons. The kids were impatient but we did finally get to go out Trick or Treating in Granny Kaye’s neighborhood. The best part was coming home for a tasty snack.

Weekly Wrap-Up

2011-10-21T13:31:00.001-07:00

Another pretty good week of school. Vicki is really getting into “doing school”.

Vicki

Vicki is continuing to do well with Get Ready for the Code. I’m having her do one page – front and back – each day that she wants to do school. We are up to page 28 and have covered the letters b, f and m.

We are doing a variety of math sheets that I printed from the Evan Moor Teacher’s Filebox. This week we worked on understanding quantities from 1 to 3. We also did Lesson 4, Activity 1 from MEP.

We also played a game with our Unifix blocks from the book Developing Mathematics with Unifix. I made a stack of 4 blocks, then Vicki would roll a die, make a stack with the number on the die and decide if the new stack was bigger or smaller than the original (4 block) stack. She then filled in the our Unifix steps with cubes.

She also drew Mat Man for the first time. It’s a little hard to see since she made the arms, legs and face in her favorite color – pink.

George

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We are finally learning long vowel words. George can already read a bunch of them but it’s exciting to finally be learning how to tell the difference. We are up to Lesson 67 in Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading and started Book 3 of Explode the Code.

We are slightly more than half way through the First Grade Handwriting without Tears. This is the subject that gives us the most struggle each day. I try to do one 2-page lesson each day. This week we had to spread each lesson out to two days.

We also moved up to the Second Grade Scholastic Reading Comprehension. George really enjoys reading these short little passages and answering the questions.

MATH:

Math Mammoth is continuing to go well. We are working completely in 1B and doing a mix of Addition/Subtraction, Place Value, Clocks and Coins. We should be moving on to 2A in some topics by the end this year.

Both

We spent some time getting ready for Halloween this week. We played a Halloween Bingo that I made up for the kids. I wanted to challenge George a little with reading. I set up a call sheet where each symbol was assigned a number and I rolled three dice to make a selection. We used plastic spider rings as markers.

The kids also made some decorations using foam stickers. Pumpkins with masks and hats left over from last year and aliens from a kit I picked up recently.

We took a nice Nature Walk out at Great Swamp this week – see here.

Nature Walk at Great Swamp

2011-10-18T16:49:00.001-07:00

We had a beautiful Fall day today (along with a power outage for no discernible reason) so I decided to take the kids to check out another one of our County Parks. This time we went to the Great Swamp Outdoor Education Center.

The Great Swamp was created approximately 15,000 years ago, when the melting waters of the Wisconsin Glacier poured into the natural basin known as the Passaic Valley. However, the Great Swamp is not entirely swampland but rather a mixture of marshes, meadows, dry woods and brush-covered swamps. It is the intermingling of these four habitats that gives the Great Swamp its unique character, allowing the swamp to support a wide variety of plant and animal life.

As visitors walk along trails and over boardwalks, they can observe plants varying in size from the tiny duckweed to the towering red oak. A multitude of colors emerge, from the yellow marsh marigold to the blue iris.

I used to go to the Great Swamp as a child with my father who has always been a very active bird watcher. This was the first time I had been there in a very long time.

Our first stop was the bird blind overlooking the pond. The bird blind was a wooden wall with various viewing points in it at various heights. I brought along my binoculars and the kids had a great time learning how to use them and checking out some of the wildlife found around the pond.

The view through the bird blind.

After the bird blind we took a walk along one of the nature trails. This particular trail has portions that consist of a boardwalk sitting 3 or 4 feet above marshlands and a portion of the pond. When I was about Vicki’s age, I walked right off the edge of this boardwalk into the water, so I tried to make sure these guys paid attention and didn’t wander too far ahead.

At the portion of the trail in the woods, Georgie had the binoculars glued to his face most of the time. We heard a lot of birds, including a woodpecker, but didn’t see many. The kids were fairly noisy and we probably scared them away.

At the observation deck portion of the boardwalk, we spotted some painted turtles. The kids loved getting a closer look at them with the binoculars.

Originally there were three turtles sitting on this piece of wood but two of them went into the water before I could get a picture. Through the binoculars they looked like painted turtles but this guy looks like he could be a snapping turtle.

Near the end of the trail, we all of a sudden came across an interesting looking structure in the woods, with a ring of tree stump seats next to it. The kids ran right up to check it out.

Turns out it was a replica of a wigwam. From the trail guide - “the wigwam was the typical shelter built by the Lenni Lenape, the Native American tribe that historically lived in this part of New Jersey.”

The kids had fun checking out the wigwam. Georgie wanted to try and start a fire in the pit by rubbing two sticks together and I told him to go for it. He was shocked. “You would let us play in there and start a fire ALL BY OURSELVES?!?!” I did warn him that starting a fire with two sticks wasn’t that easy but if he succeeded to let me know since no, they couldn’t play near fire by themselves.

We checked out the Visitor’s Center while we were there. They had a bunch of interactive informational games the kids played. There were ones telling which animals were endangered or not endangered, identifying dinosaurs, identifying animals and birds of New Jersey, identifying scat and matching animals to their tracks.

There was also a classroom with more fun things to do. George played with some building blocks that were trees, leaves and birds. I actually found the set here. He mostly enjoyed sorting the birds into groups for some game he was playing.

There was a perch set up to try and balance on like a bird. George tried that out a few times and was able to squat down and pretend to sleep while still maintaining his balance. For about 10 seconds.

Vicki’s favorite was a sandbox with animal footprint stamps to use to make images of tracks in the sand. They had raccoons, opossum, mallard duck, Canada geese, deer and a variety of other animals commonly found in NJ.

There was also a small puppet theatre, posters about invasive species, tanks with Madagascar hissing cockroaches and giant millipedes. (I can handle the cockroaches but millipedes give me the creeps.)

All in all, it was a fun and educational day out in the fresh air. And we have another place to add to my list of where we need to go more often. This park does regularly education programs – for homeschoolers, for preschoolers, for school breaks – that we will need to start checking out.

Weekly Wrap-Up

2011-10-08T07:58:00.001-07:00

We had a great week of school this week. Both kids were (mostly) cooperative and accomplished almost everything I had planned for the week.

Vicki

Vicki has loved our Unifix cubes for a long time. She loves playing with them together with our balance scale. Not to do any actual measuring, of course. She fills the buckets of the scale with cubes then places it behind a chair to “cook” and brings George and I snacks as we work. Great pretend play and it keeps her busy for a really long time, so win-win.

She did use the Unifix cubes to do some patterns this week.

We worked on a few more math worksheets from Evan Moor Teacher File Box. This week we did Big/Small and Sets of 1,2 or 3. The Sets worksheet she had to color the set of 1 green, the set of 2 blue and the set of 3 orange. She did one of her neatest (and most thorough) jobs yet coloring the one frog green.

She did 6 pages from Get Ready for the Code this week. We’re still working on the letters b and f but she is getting much more cooperative about following the actual directions. She’s been walking around talking about letters sounds for the past couple of weeks. “Mommy, mommy starts with mmmmm, M. Zappa starts with /z/ /z/, Z.” Things definitely seem to be clicking for her more these days.

We built Mat Man this week in our Handwriting Without Tears program. (I forgot to cut hands out of paper so we used small curves for hands). Vicki had a lot of fun doing this and thought he looked like a monkey so called him Monkey Man.

She had so much fun with it that later on (after asking for a pair of scissors) she made a girl wearing a dress.

George also was very interested in Mat Man (maybe he remembers a little from when he did this program in Early Intervention) and after he finished his work, I let him use the pieces. He didn’t want to do boring old Mat Man. Instead he made a bull….

a camel (with a tiny Unifix cube person riding one hump)….

a snake….

and a hippo with a boo-boo on his knee.

I’ve been having George do independent work while I work with Vicki first each day. She seems to do much better keeping herself amused later if I give her some one-on-one time before trying to concentrate on George. She did some work with her wipe-off books and cards while I was working with George this week and evidently we were being too loud since she yelled at us “Quiet guys, I’m working here!”.

George

HANDWRITING: We start each day with handwriting since this is the hardest for him. We completed 8 pages from Handwriting without Tears this week. A couple days took extra long since he had to draw in pictures where they were missing. Other than the side trips, he’s doing very well with handwriting.

PHONICS/READING: We are up to Lesson 63 in OPGTR. He still hasn’t had any problem reading any of the lessons but he rushes through these as quickly as possible.

He did about 20 pages of Explode the Code this week (4-6 pages a day). He finds the sentences very silly and giggles at the pictures. So far he’s had very little trouble with any of this and we are almost done with Book 2.

We are in completely different places with OPGTR and ETC but the combination seems to be working very well for George so I’m going to continue with both.

MATH: George is continuing to love Math Mammoth. I did cut down his daily work from 3 pages to 2 pages. Money is definitely his favorite topic (especially when he can use real coins) but nothing has been particularly hard for him. He loves the puzzles that come up every few pages.

GRAMMAR/WRITING: We are continuing with the Scholastic GUM program for now. Once we finish the 1st grade book, I may switch to some Spectrum 2nd Grade workbooks that I picked up at a used bookstore last weekend. I was able to get 3 books for $1 each – Reading, Writing and Language Arts.

He really enjoys the Reading Comprehension pages from the Scholastic 1st Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills book I picked up at one of the dollar sales. He often flips ahead in his binder to do those first. We only have a few more of these pages left so, at the most recent sale, I bought the 2nd Grade Basic Skills book so we can continue.

SPELLING: We continued on in All About Spelling this week. I allocated the entire week for Step 16 – learning the different sounds of C and deciding whether to use C or K for the /k/ sound. This ended up coming much easier to George than I thought it would, so we moved on to Step 17 which was spelling words beginning with the /k/ sound.

He remembered the two sounds of C without a problem. As I explained that C made the /s/ sound before the letters e, i or y (which means in those situations, you would use k for the /k/ sound) he decided to set up “battle stations” where K had e, i and y on “her” side and C had a, o and u on “his” side.

As I would give him a word to spell, they would go to battle. To make sure he understood that it wouldn’t always be a vowel after the c, we had words like craft, crop, clam and crab. He had no trouble spelling any of the words on the list but, I did think the list was light on K words so I added a few to really check his understanding (king, key, kite, kelp, kin, keg, kilt, kind, kiss). We will move on to Step 18 next week and I just realized there are only 6 more lessons to go in Level One. We will continue on with Level Two since I think this is a great program and it really reinforces the phonics rules (which I think he may be rushing through somewhat in ETC and OPGTR).

We didn’t get to any of our Prehistory study this week but the kids did play outside with some dinosaurs.

We had beautiful Fall weather and after seeing an idea on Pinterest, I set up a balance beam for the kids. I used a bungee cord to attached a wood board to two plastic crates. The kids decorated it with sidewalk chalk and played a variety of games using it.

Simple, easy and fun.

Next week I hope to continue this new productivity in our core subjects and continue on with our Prehistory/Dinosaur study. I want to finish Prehistory in the next couple of weeks and either return to our Continents study (which we may need to start over since it’s been so long) or do unit studies using Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus chapter books.

Prehistory – Dinosaurs Part I

2011-09-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

We continued on in our prehistory study and we have finally reached dinosaurs! I decided to deviate slightly from my plan since I found that most of my resources are not divided by Period, but instead dinosaurs are all lumped together or they are divided by characteristics (meat eaters, plant eaters, crests and beaks, spikes and horns, etc.).

We started with an overview of dinosaurs. We read though our Usborne Internet-Linked 1st Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life. We discussed what is a dinosaur and what made them different than the animals that came before them. We played What Is A Dinosaur game at the Canadian Museum of Nature website. This game shows pictures of eight different prehistoric creatures. The object is to chose the ones that are not dinosaurs. Each right or wrong answer brings up information about the animal. After all the non-dinosaurs are removed, questions can be answered to put dinosaurs in their place. Both correct and incorrect answers bring up more information about dinosaurs. Computer games are always a big hit with George so we ended up playing this a couple of times.

We then discussed the Era (Mesozoic) and three time periods (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous) that dinosaurs lived. We added stickers to the timeline from our Magic School Bus Back in Time with the Dinosaurs kit.

I then pulled out all the cards for those three periods from our Charlie’s Playhouse Ancient Creature Cards and mixed them all up. I showed one card at a time to George and had him find it on the timeline. After reading about the creature, I had him name the period it came from and place it in the correct pile. By the time we were done, George was able to easily pronounce all three period names.

I placed our many dinosaur books into a bin and allowed the kids to pick out which book they wanted to read to finish up our day. George chose Oh Say Can You Say Dinosaur! by Bonnie Worth from the Cat in the Hat Learning Library. George is a big fan of the Cat in the Hat and loves the Learning Library series of books. He was able to read most of the book himself but got tired about 3/4 of the way through so I finished reading it out loud.

We will continue with our dinosaur study for however long it takes to get through all our planned activities.

Weekly Wrap-Up

2011-09-23T15:17:00.001-07:00

We had a fairly productive week with both Georgie and Vicki. I finally set up mini-office/dividers for them. Mini-offices are used to display useful information for the children to use while doing their schoolwork and can serve the additional purpose of providing a barrier that keeps them from “helping” each other with their work. This was a big problem I had whenever I tried to work with Vicki while Georgie was anywhere near.

I used a foam tri-fold presentation board, cut it in half horizontally and then removed one side panel (the side where I sit to help them). Because the cut foam board edge was ragged I temporarily covered it with masking tape. Since the pictures were taken I have bought pink and blue/purple tie-dye duct tape.

Vicki’s board shows her full name, the Handwriting without Tears guide sheet for the upper case alphabet, an alphabet with pictures and a number/counting sheet.

Georgie’s board has his full name, our address, home phone number, my cell phone number and daddy’s cell phone number, a sticker about money, the months of the year, days of the week, a hundreds chart, two number lines – 0 through 20 and 0 through 100 counting by 10’s, and the Handwriting without Tears guide sheet showing upper and lower case letters and numbers. When he saw his board for the first time he came up and gave me a big hug and said “Thanks for my board mommy. You’re the best. You always know what will help me.” Awww, so sweet. He really appreciated the HWT sheet since he often feels like he has to flip back in his book to see how to form letters. It also led to him writing quite a bit of his math by himself. Having the numbers written out in front of him gave him much more confidence.

Also on Georgie’s board is a blank area where I can pin up whatever is relevant to our current week. Right now I have our current word list for American Sign Language.

We use two adjustable folding tables for the kids to work on now and the boards are binder clipped together and sit on the edge of the two tables. They are sturdy enough to stand independently but clipping them together makes them a little more stable with two little kids using them.

VICKI

Vicki did a few pages from Get Ready for the Code. She’s definitely more cooperative doing written work than she was a few months ago but I still am not having her do the pages that are just tracing and writing the letters. We are doing Handwriting without Tears for handwriting and I don’t want her getting confused with different formats.

That said, we didn’t do much Handwriting without Tears this week. She mainly played around with the capital letter cards and pieces. Our next lessons will involve building Mat Man with the wood pieces and then drawing him.

She is doing well with the math sheets I printed for her from Evan Moor Teacher File Box, although there was one this week that involved cutting out bones to see if there were enough to give each dog one. She decided she didn’t want to cut out the bones, she wanted to cut “nothing” – her term for blank pieces of paper. Since cutting is a skill that her and Georgie both need to work on, I let her go to it.

I’m keeping the workbooks pretty light for her so far. She does one page from Get Ready for the Code, one activity from Handwriting without Tears which will only sometimes be a workbook page and one page of math from Evan Moor. The rest is fully hands-on games and activities.

This week she played with our Tag US map. She liked playing the music from different parts of the country and dancing along.

GEORGE

HANDWRITING: George just completed one 2 page lesson in HWT this week. Things went much easier once I set up the mini-office board with the guide sheet. Unfortunately it was almost the end of the week before I had them ready.

PHONICS/READING: We didn’t do any OPGTR or ETC this week.

MATH: George did get through 3 pages of Math Mammoth this week including completely writing out two pages for himself.

GRAMMAR: He did two lessons from our Scholastic GUM and McMillian Treasure grammar programs. I think he’s getting bored with deciding if something is a question or an exclamation so I may skip ahead if there is much more of that. So far all the grammar ideas are coming very easy to him.

SPELLING: We finished our review of Steps 12 through 15 of AAS this week. Next week we will start new lessons with Step 16.

Also this week, we took a nice walk looking for signs of Autumn (but didn’t really find any) which can be seen here…..

we cheered for Steph as she cheered for her high school football team….

and we finally moved on to the Permian Period in our prehistory study, including a visit to our local museum, which can be seen here.

Prehistory – Permian Period and a visit to the museum

2011-09-23T15:14:00.001-07:00

We continued our prehistory study with the Permian period. This was the age of the first reptiles.

We started by discussing our Charlie’s Playhouse Ancient Creature Cards and matching them up to our timeline. The kids love doing this and Georgie really stretches his reading skills trying to read the captions.

We also read the appropriate pages in our Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History and followed one of the link to see what it looks like inside a reptile egg.

Since we will next be entering the Age of the Dinosaurs – the Mesozoic Era consisting of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods – we took the opportunity to finally go and check out the new dinosaur exhibit at our local museum.

For some reason I thought the museum opened at 10am so we arrived around 10:30. Turns out they didn’t open until 11 but the person working the front desk allowed us to hang out in the lobby while we waited. Very nice of him considering there was torrential rain going outside but the lobby is a cavernous space where every sound echoes and my kids are not known for being quiet.

The lobby of the museum has images of various dinosaur skeletons printed on the floor. The kids had fun pretending to search for the bones and excavate them. Here they are using their pretend brushes to clear the dirt away from their specimen.

Once 11:00 rolled around we went right upstairs to the dinosaur exhibit. There’s was a lot of interactive stuff for the kids to do. A lot of the exhibits centered around fossils and dinosaurs that were found in New Jersey, especially the official state dinosaur – the hadrosaurus. A hadrosaurus found in Haddonfield New Jersey was one of the first reasonably intact dinosaur skeletons ever found and was also one of the first ever put on display. Hadrosaurus was a duck-billed, bipedal, herbivorous dinosaur.

The first exhibit we saw was a replica of a maiasaurus nest. Maiasaurus was a duck-billed dinosaur belonging to the hadrosaurus family. These dinosaurs raised young in nesting colonies and there is evidence that the adult dinosaurs bought food to the newly hatched younglings. The kids were able to climb into the nest and play with puppets of hatching dinosaurs.

After climbing out of the nest, the kids were able to feel a real fossilized dinosaur egg and see what it would look like inside the egg.

There were a couple of exhibit cases that showed the different movements of hand claws versus foot/heel claws.

They were able to simulate the noise that would be heard by sound being amplified through the hadrosaurus’ large nasal passages.

The wall of the exhibit was a beautiful mural of what New Jersey would likely have looked like during the Cretaceous period. There were also microscopes hooked up to a television screen that could be used to get close-up views of fossils and an assortment of larger fossils to look at. The new exhibit was a lot of fun and I’m sure we’ll return again as we progress through our dinosaur study.

Fall Fun

2011-09-21T11:25:00.001-07:00

We had a few beautiful Fall days last week and took a walk to look for signs of the changing season. We didn’t find too many other than some dried out leaves on the ground, lots of acorns and squirrels going nuts. I thought the kids were old enough now for us to take our dog Zappa along for the walk and the dog ended up being the best behaved of them all.

They did get the chance to pose all together on their favorite rock.

Later that night we took a ride out to see Steph cheer on our football team as one of the Co-Captains of the squad again this year. This was a special game for Steph because it was at the high school she would be attending if we didn’t switch her after 8th grade. This was the school district she attended from 2nd through 8th grade so she still has lots of friends that go to school there, including her boyfriend who is a captain of the opposing football team. He played a great game and almost scored his teams only touchdown but we still won 28 to 0.

Georgie showed how unsocialized he is by going up to every person arriving, introducing himself and Vicki and showing them to their seats. He made friends with a bunch of teenage boys (his “gang”) and charmed one mother into giving him some pom-poms to play with.

Starting a New Year

2011-09-16T07:13:00.001-07:00

Looks like we’re getting ready to start a new school year!

I finally got around to putting away the last couple of months of Georgie’s completed work into his Core Subject binder. The fullness of the binder had me looking at where it started (last September) and reminded me that despite schooling year round, my intention was for our “school year” to run September through August.

We took an unscheduled 2 week break thanks to a Hurricane Irene-induced power outage and the subsequent clean-up so this seems like a good a time as any to start fresh. Of course, none of our curriculum is actually changing since everything Georgie’s been using has been going very well and we move on to the next level whenever he finishes the previous one. But for record keeping purposes , it makes sense to have an ending and a new beginning. It will also help us keep track of his grade level. We are going by what grade he’d be in school if he started at 5 years old (even though they didn’t want him until he was 6) so he is currently beginning 1st Grade.

One thing that has changed is I am doing more structured work with Vicki. This is by necessity since she has been demanding to “do school” and she’s no longer satisfied with the wide variety of independent activities I have available to her. I’m choosing to start our day by sitting down with her, hoping that after a little mommy time, she’ll be happy to play more independently. To keep Georgie in school mode while I work with Vicki, I set up a basket of activities for him to do independently. This includes things like word searches, mazes, Mad Libs, graphing activities, word dice, cutting pages, magnetic words to build sentences and books to read.

Our first week back wasn’t a full week since we still had some interruptions thanks to the hurricane (we had a new fridge delivered since ours was fried from the power outage, which necessitated a lot of rearranging and organizing), but we had a pretty good week regardless.

I started each morning with Vicki, hoping that a little one-on-one time would lead to her playing nicely by herself afterwards (it mostly worked). She did a few pages from Get Ready for the Code, a few math sheets from Evan Moor Teacher File Box – one on counting and one on big/little. Those went very well. I printed off a modified Domino Parking Lot for her with spots for the numbers 1 to 5 and pulled out the appropriate dominos for her to work with. She had a lot of fun doing this for a little while, using her purple pen to count the dots….

but it didn’t take long for Georgie to join her in building with the dominos.

We also used her Capital Letter pieces and cards to work on some phonics. I pulled out the cards for A through E and asked her to build the letter that makes the sound at the beginning of a word. We did B, C and D before she balked and told me “Let me build what I want to build!”

Still, not a bad start.

Georgie enjoyed his independent work but was a little resistant to the rest of his work this week. We still managed to get done quite a bit of math. I usually do a lot of the writing for him, especially in math since his ability to do the problems far exceeds his ability to write that many numbers. He was giving me a hard time about answering the problems, randomly yelling out numbers for things I knew he could do, so I handed him the pencil, told him that if he was going to play games he could do it on his own. And I walked away (but not too far). He did two pages, including one with a fairly tricky puzzle on it, on his own before he decided he wanted to cooperate better.

We had the most fun getting back into AAS. I took this week (and probably next week) to review all the words from Lessons 12 to 15 to make sure he knows them well before we start with new lessons. We had the usual playing around with the tiles but he was doing well spelling the words. Then I offered him the option of using dry-erase markers to write out the words. I’m thinking a nice little list of words. Instead I got bubble letters…..

and pictures.

Other than “ribbit”, which isn’t on any of our lists, he spelled all the words correctly so I guess I can overlook the adornment.

He did draw me a nice picture on our first day home when the power came back.

We should have less interruptions next week so I’m hoping to have a more productive week and get back into our Prehistory study.

Weekly Update

2011-09-03T17:16:00.000-07:00

Very little going on this week. We still have no power at our house after Hurricane Irene. Evidently the local electric company is having trouble figuring out why we have no power, which is kind of delaying getting it turned back on again. We spent a couple days in a local hotel and are now staying with family. Between that and Daddy not being able to go to work since the town he works in is shut down due to flooding, we haven't done much in the way of school.

I hope we'll get back to it soon.

Weekly Wrap-Up

2011-08-27T11:21:00.001-07:00

We didn’t get a whole lot of school done in the past two weeks. Georgie was very excited about his upcoming birthday and Granny Franny came to visit over the weekend.

HANDWRITING – Handwriting Without Tears is still going well. We’ve moved on from magic C words to the letter corner starts. Georgie had his new Webkinz friends helping him out.

READING/PHONICS – We are up to Lesson 57 in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. I still haven’t had to actually teach any of these lessons yet.

We are finishing up Book 2 of Explode the Code and moving on to Book 3. Like OPGTR, this seems to be review for him. I’m going to have to decide if we are going to proceed to Book 4 or skip it for Book 5 and return to it later. Many users of ETC say Book 4 is harder since it goes into syllabication of compound words.

SPELLING – We didn’t get back into our All About Spelling yet. We continued to do some review but Georgie was so uncooperative for much of these weeks that I didn’t bother bringing out the whiteboard and tiles.

GRAMMAR – We are continuing with Scholastic Grammar, Usage and Mechanics and McMillian Treasure Grammar along with the Scholastic 1st Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills book that I picked up at one of the Dollar Day sales. He is having no trouble with the Reading Comprehension pages and once we are done with those, I think I’m going to add Writing With Ease to our days.

I’ve added some simple word search puzzles from another one of the books from Scholastic’s Dollar Days 1st Grade Basic Skills.

MATH – Georgie has continued to do well with Math Mammoth. He spent some time answering the questions on a blackboard.

Despite the fact that he seems to enjoy math and even loves to do word problems, one day he did describe it “It’s like someone is eating my eyeballs.”

SIGN LANGUAGE – We introduced conversation words from our sign language book but didn’t spend much time reviewing them so we won’t move on from these yet.

Some day I’m going to add an Art and/or Drawing program for Georgie. For now, he loves drawing pictures of aliens and monsters, like this “tickle monster”.

I did some reorganization of Georgie’s work (yes, again). I was using a modified weekly workbox type system in a hanging file folder holder where I could pull out a given days folder for a subject, have him do the work, then pull out the next subject’s folder…

but in the literally 3 minutes it would take me to pull out the next folder, he would wander off and it would sometimes take a while to get him back. He also would frequently ask how much more he had to do, or would want to do things in a different order and the file folders weren’t enough of a visual for him.

After a thread on TWTM forums about using a weekly binder, I decided to give it a try. We school 4 days a week (theoretically) so I used four dividers. Each days work is put behind a divider. Some are sheets that I typed up and will say “Do With Mom”, others are worksheets that he could do himself, but I pretty much sit with him for all his work. This allows him to see exactly how much is left for that day and he can do it out of order if he wants.

All my workbooks, except HWT already had the pages separated out so this was an easy adaptation. My hope is that eventually this will make it possible for me to work with both him and Vicki at the same time. So far he seems to prefer the binder.

Vicki has very strongly requested some additional school stuff to do. MEP isn’t going well since it requires quite a bit of preparation. I thought about getting Singapore Earlybird math for her but then realized that there were many, many Math activities available through my Evan-Moor Teacher’s File Box subscription. So, I’ve been working on gathering together some activities at her level. I’m hoping to start next week with a little bit of sit together time to do Math (from Evan-Moor), Phonics (I have Get Ready, Get Set and Go for the Code) and Handwriting (we already have Handwriting without Tears Pre-K). In the meantime, she’s been playing with our Tag maps and games….

doing her own “work” with the help of her new Webkinz buddy…

and still loving her HWT capital letter pieces.

This September is when Georgie would have started kindergarten if we weren’t homeschooling. He is working above that grade level in everything except maybe handwriting (although he is working in the first grade HWT book) so I think it has been a success so far.

Birthday Boy and Girl

2011-08-19T08:00:00.001-07:00

I never did a big post for Vicki’s 4th Birthday last month and since Georgie’s 6th Birthday is early next week, I decided it would be good to combine their pictorial flashback. People are always asking me if these two are twins so it seems even more appropriate.

Georgie came first:

Then Vicki joined the family:

Happy Birthday to my little guys.

Long Overdue Weekly Update

2011-08-12T12:17:00.001-07:00

My last Weekly Update was July 15th and covered pretty much dance and camping. Although most of my posts in July were field trips and family time, we did spend some time doing academics.

HANDWRITING – We are continuing along with Handwriting Without Tears. This is easily the subject that Georgie resists the most but we are averaging two new letters per week. Usually there’s a two page spread per letter so this means we’re doing about one page a day. I usually start with this since I figure it’s best to do it while he’s fresh.

READING/PHONICS – We are up to Lesson 55 in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. So far all of these have been pretty easy for Georgie. I usually make up a sheet for him of just the words he needs to read since he doesn’t seem to care for the look of the text in the book.

Georgie is just about done with Book 2 of Explode the Code. He could probably be moving through these much faster but I usually only give him 4 pages to do at a time.

I finally gave in and moved our reading books onto a shelf that can be easily reached by the kids. I had resisted doing this because Vicki has been very very bad about ripping pages. So far it is working well, we haven’t had too many repairs and Georgie is spending lots of time practicing reading. We have a good collection of Dr. Seuss-type books and I’m working on adding more leveled readers. He’s definitely reading far in advance of what we are doing in either OPGTR or ETC. I figure there are probably some gaps so we will continue doing both those programs in order.

I love checking on the kids when they are too quiet and seeing this -

SPELLING – We have started up again with All About Spelling. We did a review of all the cards up through Step 11. When we started our break from spelling we were up to Step 14 but I’m going to back up to Step 12 and do a little review as we get going again.

GRAMMAR – We are continuing with Scholastic Grammar, Usage and Mechanics and McMillian Treasure Grammar. Both are free online, both are intended for use in classrooms but are easily adapted and both are a nice, easy introduction to Grammar. So far, Georgie has had no trouble with any of it. We’ve covered nouns, verbs, sentences, questions and exclamations.

We’ve also been using Scholastic 1st Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills that I picked up at one of the Dollar Day sales. We are doing the Reading Comprehension pages, which consist of a short story (5 to 6 sentences) then six questions to answer about it. The first few we did I had to read the story, read a question and then read the story again especially the part containing the answer. But one day Georgie suddenly was able to answer all the questions without any prompting or rereading of the story. Now, he can read the story himself and answers the question right away.

MATH – We are loving Math Mammoth. We are done with 1A and will be starting Addition/Subtraction within 0 to 100 very shortly. We are almost through Clocks in 1B and will be starting 2A soon but it’s mostly review. Georgie can pretty much tell time to the minute now and do lapsed time if it’s just minutes or just hours. I have a bingo-type game for him to play to match clocks with digital read-outs.

Georgie seems to really enjoy all of Math Mammoth that we are doing so far, except Shapes and Measuring. For some reason, he doesn’t like to do those pages.

He loves word problems and on one page containing 8 word problems he answered each question and then decided to do a cumulative sum for the entire page. He added 10 + 4 (14), +6 (20), +6 (26), +4 (30), +7 (37), +5 (42), +8 (50). Pretty good considering we just covered adding three single digit numbers this week. Although these little side trips do make our day longer.

Each week we are attempting to complete 8 to 10 pages in Addition/Subtraction (1B), 6 pages in Place Value (1B), 1 to 2 pages in Clocks (2A), 1 to 2 pages in Shapes and Measuring (1B) and 1 to 2 pages in Coins (1B).

SIGN LANGUAGE – We are still working on American Sign Language. Georgie is doing very well with the alphabet and his name and we are getting ready to learn conversation words (excuse me, sorry, thank you, please, my name is.., hello).

Vicki celebrated her 4th birthday the end of July. I’ve slowly started adding a few school-like activities to her day.

I made up a unicorn-themed generic game board that we used to play a game identifying starting letter sounds.

We have done a little work with MEP Reception. We usually do about half a lesson (or one worksheet activity) each day, only on the days she’s feeling cooperative.

Mostly Vicki has played with her Melissa & Doug Pattern Puzzles, Wooden Magnetic Dress-up Dolls, Wooden Word Puzzles, Word Whammer…..

and her wipe-off books.

In the past few weeks we did get to the next chapter in our Prehistory study – the Devonian and Carboniferous Periods. Check it out here.

Sussex County Farm & Horse Show/NJ State Fair

2011-08-12T10:43:00.001-07:00

The kids and I went out to the Sussex County Farm & Horse Show/New Jersey State Fair yesterday. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in the high 70’s/low 80’s.

The kids weren’t to into looking at the cows and pigs this year but they really enjoyed the small animal tent with the rabbits, chickens and ducks. Georgie wants to raise rabbits someday and they both got a kick out of some of the really strange looking chickens. They especially enjoyed watching some eggs hatch and seeing the newly hatched chicks.

They enjoyed the pony rides (I think we may need to get Georgie horseback riding lessons some day) and the petting zoo.

There was an exhibit by the New Jersey Beekeepers Association that Georgie found very fascinating. They had a little touch screen set-up with videos about different aspects of bee life. Georgie watched a bunch of the videos and I grabbed a bunch of flyers so we could do a unit study on bees one of these days.

Georgie enjoyed playing a game of checkers set up in one of the smaller livestock tents (can you tell he just jumped two of my pieces?).

Both kids were able to decorate squares to be added to quilts intended for veterans hospitals. Georgie took this very seriously and was careful to do his best work.

The absolute favorite part of the fair for the kids, the place we spent over an hour and had to go back to later, was the Fun Farm set up by our local supermarket chain. It was very similar to last year and the kids LOVED it. Their favorite part was a grocery store set up with fake fruits and vegetables, cans foods, boxes of cereal and crackers (I believe it was supposed to be all food that came from the farm). There were kid size shopping carts that were really neat and I wish I could find somewhere. They were bigger than the ones usually found in toy stores but smaller than adult size ones. There were 3 toy cash registers set up for them to check-out their groceries.

There were also pedal tractors to ride…..

stick horses to gallop around on….

eggs to collect from stuffed chickens….

and fake cows to milk.

We went and looked at the Best in Class vegetables and Georgie was surprisingly very interested in them. He kept pointing to the various vegetables and asking me what they were. I will admit I had to cheat a couple of times and look at the labels. I think he will really enjoy helping when we are able to have a garden again.

We finished up our day at the fair by playing some of the carnival games. The kids both won stuffed animals (a pink snake for Vicki, a blue lizard and gray dolphin for Georgie). I think next year I have to remember to just go into the venders tent and buy them a few Beanie Babies. It would definitely have been less expensive.

Prehistory – Devonian and Carboniferous Periods

2011-07-22T09:21:00.001-07:00

We finally moved on to the next periods in our Prehistory study. The Devonian and Carboniferous periods are when animals began to move from living in the water to living on land. One of the adaptations that was necessary for this switch was the development of a shelled egg. Prior to this most animals were amphibious and had to return to the water to lay their eggs. To help the kids understand the difference, we did the naked egg experiment. We took a raw egg and soaked it in vinegar. After 24 hours, we drained off the vinegar and replaced it with fresh vinegar. Due to some poor planning on my part, the egg then sat in our refrigerator for about a month. It actually only takes a week for the shell to dissolve, leaving an egg held together by the membrane. The egg will be larger than it started since some vinegar is able to enter the egg through the membrane, which is semi-permeable (for older kids an explanation of osmosis may be in order). We compared our naked egg to a shelled egg.

We actually managed to do this without the egg bursting. Georgie kept taking it out of the bowl and rolling it around on the table so we didn’t spend too much time exploring it.

We matched up our Charlie’s Playhouse Creature Cards with our Timeline. Georgie is really taking off with reading and is having a lot of fun trying to read the information on each critter by himself. He also made up a game where he laid three cards face down and asked Vicki to pick the one with certain characteristics.

We read the information on each period in our Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History and Usborne First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life. The information and pictures in the two books are very similar (and often the same) but there are enough differences that it’s been worth looking through both. Both encyclopedias are definitely not necessary but I bought the First Encyclopedia for 60% off at a Scholastic Warehouse Sale.

We finished up this section of Prehistory by playing a fun game about Extinction. I found it at Borders when I was looking for Steph’s summer reading selection. It was a package that came with a book Gone Extinct, a toob of animals and a game board. Evidently it is just one of many Groovy Tube sets available. (They are available at Amazon).

Not all the extinct critters included were prehistoric. There were 15 animals included: Allosaurus (carnivorous dinosaur), Ammonite (ancient relative of squid and octopus), Archaeopteryx (first feathered fossil, early relative of birds), Archelon (giant sea turtle, extinct 74 million years), Arthropleura (giant millipede-like creature of Carboniferous period), Brachauchenius (giant swimming reptile, extinct 90 million years), Dodo bird (small peaceful bird, extinct around 1700), Red Colobus Monkey (extinct in 2000), Opabinia (tiny creature of the Cambrian period), Pteranodon (flying reptile lived with the dinosaurs), Quagga (looked like half zebra, half horse, extinct in 1883), Smilodon (saber-toothed cat, extinct about 10,000 years ago), Steller’s Sea Cow (large floating mammal, extinct in 1768), Tasmanian Tiger (marsupial, extinct in 1936), Wooly Mammoth (furry relative of elephant, extinct about 10,000 years ago).

The game is Journey to Extinction Island. The premise is that you have a machine that transports you to an island where extinct animals still live. But, there are poachers on the island as well. The animals are divided into zones (Swamp, Forest, Water and Sky). Players have to rescue one animal from each zone, save any animals taken by poachers and reach the End space in Poacher’s Hideout. We had fun playing the game. Vicki didn’t want to leave the purple path (since that’s her favorite color) and Georgie wanted to use the animals as game pieces but once they got the idea, it went pretty well. As each animal was rescued, I would read about it from the book.

Georgie’s favorite is definitely the dodo bird but he insists on calling it the doo-doo bird. I tried to tell him it was pronounced dodo (long o sounds) but he asked me “how do you spell do? D…O…so d o d o is doo-doo.” I can see we are going to have a lot of fun moments doing school with this one. He does not accept “because that’s the way it is” as an answer.

After, I let them play with the animals on their own and we ended up with Opabinia swimming with the Dodo bird on his back to go and rescue Archeopteryx.

Weekly Wrap-up: Dance Nationals and Camping

2011-07-15T16:35:00.001-07:00

We had a very busy week with very little (like no) actual school being done.

Steph’s dance Nationals this year was last weekend in Egg Harbor Township. Right up the road from the Egg Harbor City Campground where we stayed last year so we decided to turn it into a family vacation. Daddy and the little kids started camping on Friday, while Steph, her friend Coral and I headed down to a hotel on Saturday to prepare for Nationals on Sunday.

Everybody had a great time at Nationals and Steph did really well. She was 3rd Place Overall Senior Soloist for her tap solo to As Fast As You Can….

her, Robert and Cassidy were the TOP Overall Senior Trio for The Remedy!…

and her small group 5 Guys Named Moe won TOP Teen Small Group! They were one of only two groups that won Diamond level awards.

After Nationals, we headed over to the campground to join the rest of the family. Poor Daddy got to set up camp and spend Friday night with the two little guys in a tent during record rainfalls and a local tornado warning. Everything went okay and the weather the rest of the week was sunny and very very hot. High temperatures were in the 90 with high humidity. So, a lot of time was spent down at the lake splashing around or just relaxing.

Once again Vicki took it as her personal mission to get as dirty as possible.

We all headed home on Wednesday and Steph finished up the week by getting her hair cut and donating it to Locks of Love.

Kutztown Folk Festival

2011-07-07T07:28:00.001-07:00

Grammy Kaye and I took the little guys to the Kutztown Folk Festival in Pennsylvania yesterday.   Last time I went to the festival was probably over 10 years ago.

The kids had a great time riding a mule drawn carousel.   The kids ended up going back for a second ride. The kids couldn’t sit together and on one ride, were actually on completely opposite sides of the ride.

They also had a lot of fun running through the hay maze. I’m not sure what the big attraction was here since there was only one dead-end and one correct path through. It wasn’t a real big maze but the kids kept running back in to go through it again.

There was a petting area/zoo that we also had to visit more than once. Georgie really liked feeding the little bunnies. He showed an amazing amount of patience standing there holding a piece of cabbage for them.

The petting area also had some adorable baby ducklings….

and goats to feed. The kids had a lot of fun feeding the goats and thought it tickled. George was a little better about not trying to feed them one kernel or grain at a time.

The animal feed was sold in ice cream cones and this guy stole it right out of Grammy Kaye’s hand.

Vicki finally got to take that pony ride she’s been asking for ever since she chickened out at the fun fair back in May (or was it April?).   Georgie really, really enjoyed riding the big horse. He had the biggest grin on his face and was nice and relaxed. Vicki was able to ride a much smaller pony, which she liked.

We were able to see some antique tractors……

and turn the crank on an old corn husker.

We didn’t get too much of a chance to look at the many craft booths but Grammy did get to see the fabulous quilts.

We had a lot of fun at the Festival but didn’t linger once the kids had enough. We had record high temperatures yesterday – hitting the 90’s with lots of humidity – and Georgie was definitely getting cranky by the time we left.

Weekly Wrap-Up

2011-07-03T07:46:00.001-07:00

We’ve had a few light weeks lately due to Steph’s end of the year craziness and Georgie’s vacation with Granny Franny. We do school year round but summer brings more field trips and nature experiences.

Steph’s dance recital (her 14th!!) was last weekend. She had a great time, all the dancers looked wonderful and the grandparents were very impressed. We head to Nationals next weekend and another year is over.

We will be spending lots of time at our pool this summer. This is great exercise for the kids and usually wears them out, which is a bonus. We usually go down in the morning since the kids are very fair and I try not to have them spend a lot of time in the sun in the hottest part of the day. There is a canopy down at the pool now so I may start bringing down lunch and we can sit in the shade to eat.

This week we went on a field trip to a local zoo that I haven’t been to in many years. (more about that here)

I finally broke down and ordered the wooden capital letter pieces from Handwriting without Tears for Vicki. When we first ordered the program, I made up my own capital letter cards and used thick foam to make pieces. Unfortunately, Vicki (aka Little Miss Destructo) has already….destroyed quite of few of them. The wooden pieces should have a better survival rate, plus there seems to be many extra pieces in the set. I introduced these this week and she enjoyed exploring them but didn’t spend much time forming letters.

One of her favorite things to play with is our Unifix blocks. I had to order Steph’s summer reading books from Amazon so I threw a book on Developing Mathematics with Unifix in the order to get some extra ideas for activities to do with them. Georgie also loves the unifix blocks and since the book is for Grades K-3, I’m sure I’ll find activities for him in there too.

Vicki also played with our bottle cap letter matching games…..

and her wipe-off books. She’s actually started to trace the letters and numbers in these books instead of just scribbling but she always (ALWAYS) colors her hands, fingernails and/or face with the markers.

What Georgie did in his core curriculum this week:

Handwriting without Tears:
practiced numbers, Cc, Oo and Ss on paper; pg 18 and 19 in book – Vv and Ww.

Reading:
OPGTR Lessons 50 and 51. We are coming across some issues in the reading lessons due his pronunciation of words. He has a slight lisp and some difficulty pronouncing certain words/sounds. It’s causing him some frustration with these lessons, which leads him to wanting to rush through them which of course makes it worse.
He read lots of books this week but they were all ones he read before. I did order him a few new beginning readers. I’m still trying to figure out a way to give him more access to books while keeping Vicki away from them since she still tends to rip things (although supposedly it’s more often “accidental” these days).

Phonics:
We added ETC back into our schedule this week. He completed pg 1-8 in ETC2. ETC is covering many of the same words we are currently doing in OPGTR (beginning blends) but for some reason he has less trouble with ETC.

Spelling:
We didn’t do any AAS this week.

Grammar:
Scholastic GUM – Lesson 2 and pg 12 on Action Words, Lesson 3 and pg 13 on Capitalizing the first word in a sentence. We did additional practice sheets from MacMillian Treasure grammar workbook.
pg 28 from Scholastic 1st Grade Reading Comprehension and Reading Skills workbook.

Math:
MM Yr 1A: pg 92, 93 111, 113 (addition/subtraction) and Yr 1B: pg 51 (time order) and pg 65 (shapes and measuring).

Next week I hope to get back into our Prehistory study.

Space Farms Zoo and Museum

2011-07-03T07:44:00.001-07:00

Way back in November of last year, at the same Tricky Tray where I won the Family Membership to our local museum (that we are definitely enjoying) we also won four passes to a local zoo. This particular zoo is one I went to as a child and took Steph a few times when she was younger but haven’t been to in at least 10 years.

Yesterday I decided to take the kids to the zoo and check it out. First thing I realized is that it’s not nearly as “local” as I remembered. It took us just over an hour to get there with the kids complaining the whole time. It was a nice drive through the farms and rolling hills of Sussex County NJ.
The zoo had a mix of naturalistic exhibits and old concrete floored cages. It was nicely spread out with lots of shade but Georgie still started getting cranky from the heat. Vicki really enjoyed seeing the animals.

Petting a baby yak…..

and feeding the deer.

This zoo had a lot of animals that could be fed or pet through the cages. In addition to the usual corn and pellets provided to feed certain animals, many people bring their own food to feed some of the larger animals. For the larger, dangerous animals the zoo has low iron fences set about 3 feet back from the chain link cages. One of the times I was there with Steph, a man lifted his young daughter over the outer fence to retrieve some peaches that feel between the two fences while they were feeding the grizzly bear. Yeah, people can be pretty stupid. The zoo evidently doesn’t have any policy against feeding the animals – any of the animals.

I was mean and only let my kids feed the animals where food was provided. Georgie still likes to feed the animals one kernel of corn or one pellet of food at at time.
Vicki liked trying to pronounce coati…

and liked the jaguar “just like Diego’s friend”. The prairie dogs were also a big hit.

The museum part consisted of multiple barn-like structures full of antiques – cars, horse-drawn wagons, toys, artifacts, a replica of an old covered wagon…

a dog propelled treadmill used for churning butter from 1860’s.

The kids weren’t that interested in the antiques, except the toys which they wanted to know if they could take home.

It was an okay day but I think in the future I’ll stick with our much more local zoo (one I used to docent at) – it’s closer, cheaper, has more naturalistic exhibits and more educational information on the animals.

Keeping Busy

2011-06-24T06:12:00.001-07:00

Late June is always the busiest time of year around our house and this year is no exception. Steph is finishing up another year of school (a Senior next year – YIKES!), dance pictures, dress rehearsal, getting ready for recital and then Nationals.

Steph also attended her Junior Prom this week with her boyfriend Feyi.

Georgie spent the week on vacation with Granny Franny so it was just us girls all week. Vicki and I did play games and have some fun girl time, but mostly I spent the week preparing all the printable games I had from the various Scholastic Dollar Deal ebooks I ordered, and reorganizing some of our older games from Kelly’s Kindergarten.

We school year round but a little lighter in the summer. This year we are also going to be staying with my parents while our new house is being built so I need to avoid large projects. Games, field trips and lots of reading is the plan for this year.

The printable board games are easy – they are laminated into file folders. The card games are harder. I’ve been storing them in zip-loc baggies with the directions taped to the front. But I didn’t like how I had to look through all of them to find what I wanted and the cards would curl or get bent. So, I used cardstock and made boxes for the card games, with the directions printed on the lid.

They now store nicely in a shallow plastic drawer along with a variety of dice.

As we play the various games, I’ll try to feature how we play them, any modifications we make for Vicki and where they came from. We now have about 20 printable games which work on skills such as sight words, CVC words, letter sounds, following directions, counting and addition, as well as a couple of generic gameboards.

Let’s Bowl!!

2011-06-08T14:03:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I signed the kids up for the Kids Bowl Free program. Our local bowling alley has a homeschool league and I figured this would be the perfect chance to see if the kids would be ready for it in the Fall. It’s also a good place to hang out when it’s raining or just too hot to be outside.

This was their first experience bowling outside of the Wii. We started out really strong – Vicki got a spare her very first frame and it didn’t even bounce off the bumpers. She pulled off another spare her last frame but had a little extra help by then.

I was actually surprised that both kids were able to throw the ball hard enough to make it down the lane. Georgie’s technique consisted of tossing the ball and falling to the ground.

After about 5 frames we started using one of the ramps the bowling alley provides for little kids to use. Vicki would place her ball on the top, take a few steps back and run up to give it a push. She actually scored worse with the ramp but I didn’t think the kids would be able to handle throwing the ball for two whole games.

Their favorite part of bowling was running back after they threw their second balls to watch the videos that played on the overhead screen. When the player knocked over less than 5 pins total it played a video showing the pins marching out of a jail cell while the ball snoozed to the side. That one was Georgie’s favorite. ;-)

I’ve only been bowling once or twice in the past 7 years (since I was pregnant with Georgie) but before that I was on a league with George Sr. Our company bowling league is actually where we met. I had pretty decent scores – 129 the first game and 158 the second game (finished up with two strikes, a spare then two strikes and 9 in the tenth frame). I swear I didn’t use the bumpers at all. ;-D

Opening Day at the Pool!

2011-06-07T06:47:00.001-07:00

Sunday was the Opening Day Pool Party and BBQ for our neighborhood pool. Despite an air temperature of barely 73 degrees and a water temperature to match, the kids had a great time playing in the water with Daddy. (Mommy was sitting on the sidelines wearing a sweater!)

The kids can both reach in the shallow end of the pool this year and Vicki had a great time paddling around wearing floaties on her arms. I think this is going to be a great year at the pool – the first that I won’t have to spend the whole time holding one kid or the other.

Right next to our pool is a nice shallow part of the river that is great for searching for crawfish, river mussels, snails and other interesting critters. (One kid found a dead turtle with a cracked shell – yuck). Vicki enjoyed the river much more than Georgie, who didn’t care for all the mud.

We finished up with more swimming, than hanging out by the bonfire listening to folk songs sung by one of our very talented neighbors while having some tasty treats.

It’s official, Summer is here!

Searching for flowers

2011-06-03T15:33:00.001-07:00

We finally had some beautiful Spring weather – not crazy hot and humid and not torrential rain. We decided to give up on book work for a day (or two) and head outside. We went back to our local county park for another try at the Wildflower Trail, where Vicki enjoyed playing with a large leaf from a marsh marigold and checking out the xylem ….

while Georgie used my camera to take lots of interesting pictures of rocks, moss and ferns (this picture just happens to have all three).

What we didn’t see, despite extensive searching, were flowers.

The kids were really disappointed so we decided to take a trip over to Frelinghuysen Arboretum where we saw lots and lots of flowers…

a cross-section of a tree with information on how to read tree rings and numbers to coordinate the rings with specific years….

an astrolabe sundial that the kids really found fascinating….

a fountain pool that the kids found it impossible to resist splashing in.

We left the formal gardens for a walk in the woods and saw lots of Chinese Dogwoods….

the kids flopped right down in a nice shady patch of soft grass (our yard at the moment is a mixture of dirt, rocks and weeds)….

and we scared a groundhog into running across a meadow.

There was a fern path that had informative signs telling about how ferns have been around for over 300 million years. A great tie-in to our prehistory study.

We finished up with a visit to the Carriage House inside the Education Center.

The Arboretum ended up being a lot more fun than I expected. I have only been there once in the last 14 years (we went for Steph’s 3rd birthday) and that was in the middle of Winter for a Gingerbread House exhibit. I can see this being a very useful resource when we next study plants. They offer “backpacks” that you can rent which contain activities for kids to enhance the arboretum experience. We will definitely give them a try next time we visit.

2 Week Wrap-Up: 5/16-5/27/11

2011-05-27T09:33:00.001-07:00

We had a pretty slow two weeks. Daddy went away on a business trip and that always leads to cranky children and tired Mommy. But we did manage a few things.

Over the weekend, we went to a Fun Fair at a local elementary school after Georgie’s T-ball game. Georgie rode a pony for what I think is the first time. Vicki cried and refused but then spent the next two days saying she wanted to do it now.

Scholastic had another one of the Dollar Deals for ebooks so I bought a few more that had printable game boards. Last time I bought things that went along with our themes or things for Georgie to do. This time I looked for game activities for Vicki. Since Vicki badly wants to learn how to read, but hates doing worksheets, I had been considering Happy Phonics or subscribing to the Evan Moor Teacher’s File Box. Both are pretty expensive. The Teacher’s File Box I would also be able to use to get worksheets and activities for Georgie but, since I was considering this right AFTER the sale stopped at the co-op, it would have cost $99 and I really wasn’t sure how much we would use it. Especially since I already have a lot of the Evan Moor stuff that is specific to our upcoming activities.

I ended up finding 19 books that had games and activities that would be appropriate for Vicki. Most also had stuff for Georgie and things that we could use for future years. I spent some time printing out the games that were a good level for right now and Georgie spent some time helping me color them.

I also went to a Scholastic Books Warehouse Sale last week. I love going to these. The prices are wonderful and the selection pretty varied. Two of my finds this time were two wipe-off books for Vicki. While she hates worksheets, for some reason she loves white boards and wipe-off books.

The Learning book opens into an easel and covers letters, numbers, seasons, months, days of the week, addition, simple words, comparison words, color words, shapes, opposites, clocks and weather terms. So even Georgie could get something out of using this book. And, since it was 50% off, I only paid $4.49 for it.

Vicki and I also started MEP Reception. She enjoyed Lesson 1 and it was the perfect amount of time to keep her attention – about 5 minutes.

She also did some dabber paint pages. I have a pretty big collection of these from Making Learning Fun, Confessions of a Homeschooler and Homeschool Creations.

She did two or three pages before deciding that stacking the tops was more fun.

We did complete Part 6 of our Prehistory study on the Ordovician and Silurian Periods.

What Georgie did in his core curriculum these weeks:

Handwriting Without Tears:
Page 15 (lowercase o), practiced c, o and numbers on paper.

Reading:
OPGTR Reviewed Lessons 41-48 and did Lesson 49.
Books he read this week were all repeats except Rainbow Fish: Spike and the Substitute.

Phonics:
I expect to add ETC back in soon since we will be doing beginning blends in OPGTR.

Spelling:
AAS Step 13 – Segmenting blends (very easy for him), Step 14 – final blends (very easy).

Grammar:
pg 25 Scholastic 1st Grade Reading Comprehension worksheet; Scholastic GUM pg 10 – review of capitalizing I and telling sentences.

Math:
MM Yr1 pg 58, 59, 84, 85 (addition/subtraction) and Yr2 pg 63 (shapes).

Sign Language:
Continued reviewing the alphabet and his name.

Read Aloud:
Our read aloud this week was Magic School Bus Dinosaur Detectives. I found some great coloring pages (free downloads) from Dover Publishing that are pages full of sea shells. Lots of intricate coloring like Georgie really loves these days.

Prehistory – Part 6 Ordovician and Silurian Periods

2011-05-27T09:01:00.001-07:00

This week we learned about the Ordovician and Silurian Periods in Prehistory. I combined these two periods because they were covered together in our Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History and our Usborne First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life. That and making cooksonia was the only craft/activity I could come up with (and I actually didn't even come up with that one - Angela at Satori Smiles did). The creatures are starting to get more complicated and I am not at all artistic.

As usual, we started with going over our Charlie’s Playhouse Creature Cards and comparing them to our timeline. I did separate the periods for this activity. Georgie loves picking out critters from the timeline, reading what the timeline says, then learning more about them from the Creature Cards. As we move on to reading in our encyclopedias, he’s been really good about recognizing creatures that appear on our timeline.

In our UILEWH they have pictures of two other spore-bearing plants besides Cooksonia – Aglaophyton and Rhynia. Since they were similar to, but different colors from, cooksonia I let the kids pick what color they wanted to use to make models. I did tell them to make each plant one color but their creativity took over.

I thought it might frustrate them if the pompoms wouldn’t stay on the tips of the pipe cleaners well so I twisted the pipe cleaners into small loops to make a platform for the pompoms. Once again the kids did their own thing and glued the pompoms on to completely different places. They actually didn’t like this activity too much. Georgie thought it was too messy since the glue kept running down his hand. I stuck the pipe cleaners in straws to hold them upright and gave them cups to stick them in so they wouldn’t have to hold them but….

What they did enjoy was swiping a bunch of straws and joining them together into swords. I have a huge bin of neon colored straws and pipe cleaners that I believe I purchased to use for color matching activities. Since we are past that point, I guess I can let them be creative with them.

We looked at some web links with animations of Silurian creatures and watched Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters on Netflix. Not everything on the video matched our current time period and we will probably watch it again in a few weeks.

We read the book When Fish Got Feet, Sharks Got Teeth and Bugs Began to Swarm and The Usborne Great Dinosaur Search. The dinosaur search book actually starts with the Silurian period and we only covered that page but Georgie really enjoyed it. He loves I-Spy type books and computer games. I may have to buy this book since it’s already over-due from the library.

In getting these pictures from Amazon, I realized there is a whole collection of these books, they are only $7.99 to $9.99 each and they are part of a 3-for the price of 4 promotion. Cool.

Prehistory - Part 5 Cambrian Period

2011-05-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

We moved on to the Cambrian Period in our Prehistory study. This was the era where there was an explosion of new creatures appearing in the seas, many with hard exoskeletons to protect their bodies and jointed legs – the early ancestors of arthropods.

We started out by reading about this explosion of life in our Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History. We went online to learn more about a few of these creatures. We were able to examine them closely and decide whether they were arthropods or not.

We played a game online where we tried to identify the different Cambrian creatures in a crowded picture. We were really bad at this (yes, mommy too). We were able to get a few of them that appeared on our Charlie’s Playhouse timeline but on the rest we were completely without a clue.

Speaking of our timeline I spent way too much time trying to figure out a way to hang this temporarily yet securely while only showing the 6 or so feet we had space for. I finally managed it using an arrangement of binder clips, paper clips and rubber bands. I think having it hanging during our entire study will be more meaningful for the kids than pulling it out only when we are going to actively use it.

We pulled out the appropriate Creature Cards and matched them up to the animals on the timeline. Then we worked on making some critters of our own.

First, we made wiwaxia (basically because it seemed the easiest). Each kid made a slightly flattened ball of clay (with a little help), carefully added scales made from black beans and then added yellow toothpick spines.

They enjoyed this so much they were eager to try making another critter. Since this was supposed to be their project not mine, I picked hallucigenia as the next easiest.

A long thick snake of clay, matchsticks for legs and more toothpicks for spines.

Next we learned more about Trilobites by reading a book from the Exploring Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures series called Trilobites. We then made a papercraft Trilobite from here. These could be laminated to make them last longer but I didn’t bother. I also used tape (regular and double sided) to put them together rather than glue. The kids had a lot of fun playing with these including opening up their bedroom window so they could grab leaves off the tree outside to feed them.

We finished up by doing an online coloring page on Trilobites from Enchanted Learning. (A membership may be necessary to do this activity).

I finally found the secret to reading aloud to these guys – letting them color. It still doesn’t always work for Vicki but Georgie is getting very meticulous with his coloring and seems to enjoy it while still being able to follow the story. While I read from Magic Tree House Dinosaurs Before Dark they colored a page on The Paleozoic Sea from here. (The link for this coloring page is actually wrong in my Prehistory Lesson Plans tab but I will fix it).

We finished up by reading from our DK Prehistoric Life and Usborne Internet Linked First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life.

Next we will cover the Ordovician and Silurian Periods.

2 Week Wrap-Up: 5/2-5/13/11

2011-05-13T16:41:00.001-07:00

I never did a weekly wrap-up post last week since we mainly worked on our Prehistory study. This week was much more productive.

I decided to change the way I do my weekly wrap-ups (again?) to try and keep them more interesting. I’m going to start with all the fun, unusual activities we did and then just list what we accomplished in our core curriculum at the end.

Last week, we learned about the Vendian period (click to see details)…

while this week we learned about the Cambrian period (click to see details).

Georgie had his first t-ball game last Saturday. It was….interesting. Team sports may not be Georgie’s thing. He was extremely distractible and showed little interest in learning how to play. Instead he chased butterflies, dug in the dirt, kept sneaking over to talk to the pretty girl playing third base (at which point the coach actually picked him up and carried him back to where he was supposed to be).   He might need a few more years, and a strong desire to actually play, before he’s ready for sports.

Vicki did a few things this week (besides drive me crazy, that is). She played a solitary game of Very Silly Sentences which basically involved rolling the die/spinning the spinner, picking up the correct color card and stacking them on the game board. She did periodically ask what the cards said. This actually kept her busy for quite a while.

The other thing guaranteed to keep her amused for a little while is playing with our balance scale and Unifix cubes.

I’ve been trying to come up with ways to keep Vicki amused while I work with Georgie. I’ve set up Tot Trays, had special toys just for school time, had her own “school” stuff available.   Most didn’t work for very long – she either lost interest in what was available or wanted something completely different right from the start. Even television or Leapster games aren’t likely to keep her interest for more than a few minutes, and since they are very distracting for Georgie, I try to avoid them during school time. So, here’s my latest attempt.

I set up a crate with hanging file folders. In each folder is a different activity. We have counting cards and starting letter cards from Confessions of a Homeschooler that she does using dry erase markers….

picture cards to be done using bottle cap letters, some from Confessions of a Homeschooler, some from other sites and some I made up myself….

a pattern chart to do with our Unifix cubes…

a few file folder games from File Folder Fun, her Handwriting without Tears capital letter cards and foam pieces, a few dry-erase workbooks and Boggle Jr.

I think I may have to work with her one-on-one first to get her started before starting school with Georgie. I feel like by the time I find what works with her, she’ll be old enough to join us in regular school work.

What Georgie accomplished this week:

Handwriting:
HWT pg 12 (caps), 13 (numbers), 14 (lowercase c); additional practice on capital letters and numbers on paper.

Reading:
OPGTR Lessons 46, 47 and 48.   A review of Lessons 41-48.
New books he read this week were The Eye Book and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Phonics:
We are taking a break from ETC until we do beginning blends in OPGTR since I want this to serve as review/reinforcement.

Spelling:
AAS Step 11 – dictate phrases; Step 12 – th, ch, sh.

Grammar:
pg 24 from Scholastic 1st Grade Basic Skills: Reading Comprehension; pg 8 and 9 from Scholastic GUM (capitalizing I).

Math:
Math Mammoth pg 52, 53, 54, 57 (addition) and 76, 81, 82, 83 (subtraction) from 1A; pg 11 (place value), 50 (clock) and 62 (shapes/measuring) from 1B.

Sign Language:
Continued reviewing the alphabet, his name and I love you. He periodically “borrowed” the book to flip through and try other signs.

Our read aloud for the week was Magic Tree House Dinosaurs Before Dark. If finally found something that works to get them to listen during read-alouds – coloring!   It has mixed results from Vicki and usually keeps her semi-quiet but Georgie loves doing somewhat elaborate coloring pages. He's getting very meticulous with his coloring these days. After I read for a while, he may stop coloring and curl up on the couch with me to listen.   I do try to make the coloring pages somewhat relevant to what we’re reading or what we’re currently studying (which may be the same general topic, as they were this week – prehistory).

I feel like we have made some real progress and almost have a workable routine.

Prehistory – Part 4 Vendian Period/Making Kimberella

2011-05-04T09:00:00.001-07:00

This week we were finally ready to introduce our Charlie’s Playhouse timeline playmat and Creature Cards. While we will be concentrating on one Period at a time, the kids were very interested in this new toy with all the bizarre creatures and had to explore it more fully before we could narrow our focus. We spent quite a bit of time just looking at the timeline, reading the various description and trying to pronounce the creature names. Our living room isn’t long enough to open the entire timeline so we mainly concentrated on the earlier time periods, which definitely have some of the more bizarre creatures.

Once some of the novelty wore off, we folded the timeline so just the Vendian Period was showing. We pulled out the appropriate creature cards – Tribrachidium, Dickinsonia, Spriggina and Kimberella. We read the descriptions of each critter, discussed how big they were (mostly small but Dickinsonia could be 3 feet long!!) and how odd looking they were. We then matched up our cards to the timeline (pretty easy at this point) and read the timeline information for each creature.

The timeline describes Kimberella as looking like “a pasta shell on top of lasagna” so I decided to go with that. I soaked lasagna noodles in water long enough for them to soften (this took about an hour in warm tap water). Once they were malleable, I cut them in half lengthwise and wrapped each one along the outside of a piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a pasta shell. Once they dried and re-hardened, I glued a pasta noodle on top.

Once the glue dried, the kids painted their “Kimberella”. Since we have no idea what color most prehistoric creatures actually were, they were able to be as creative as they wanted.

We also read about the Vendian Period in our Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History and our DK Prehistoric Life.

Next, we will be moving on to the Cambrian Period and having lots of fun learning about Trilobites and Hallucigenia.

Weekly Wrap-up: 4/24-4/29/11

2011-04-29T06:34:00.001-07:00

We ended up taking an unscheduled Spring Break last week thanks to unexpected doctor visits and lots of practice driving. We were able to get right back in to things this week, despite spending most of the week away from home.

Language Arts

We didn’t do any spelling this week since I didn’t want to bring the large white board and all the little tiles with us.

Georgie is continuing to do fairly well with Handwriting without Tears. He really likes writing in the book but I usually have him practice on lined or gray box paper first. We have gone through the different uppercase letters forms but we are doing some review of the whole alphabet since he still doesn’t always use proper form (starting at the top and going down, etc.). We will probably move on to numbers and lowercase letters next week but continue practicing with uppercase letters at least a couple times a week.

We are continuing along in our Grammar programs. We are still working on telling sentences and Georgie is having no problem knowing if something is a complete sentence or not. We also played with our new Mad Libs Junior book – Animals, Animals, Animals. Georgie surprised me by being able to read most of the word lists himself. Which brings us to….

Reading. Georgie is doing excellent with his reading. We did Lessons 43,44,45 and 46 in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. These all dealt with ending consonant blends. We are doing about one lesson a day as long as he is able to read the lesson without a problem.

He read I Wish I Had Duck Feet all by himself to add to his bookworm. We read a selection from Frog and Toad Are Friends by alternating – he would read a two page spread, then I would read the next one. He also read most of Rainbow Fish – Finders Keepers but had me read the last few pages.

In addition to the books I pick out for him to read, he is trying to read every book we use for school. We used our Usborne IL Encyclopedia of World History to learn about evolution this week and he tried to read the selections we were discussing. He was only able to read about half the words in each paragraph but since he doesn’t mind if I correct him, I like that he is so excited to try. Even if it does make everything take twice as long.

We did three or four pages from Explode the Code each day. These are also dealing with ending blends and we ran into a few pages that we hadn’t covered in OPGTR yet.   Since I really want to use these for review, we may have to take a break to give us a chance to get a little further in OPGTR. I think I am going to continue using these for review until Georgie is proficient in reading. They really do a good job of reinforcing what we are covering in OPGTR and helps me confirm that he really does understand a lesson.

Vicki has done very little this week except play on the computer. She knows all her letter sounds but was resistant to blending so we may have to take a break for a little while.

Math

We are continuing along with Math Mammoth. I know I’ve seen on forums that students don’t need to do all the problems on a page if they show they understand the concept but Georgie actually likes to do them all. He won’t necessarily do them in order, but he likes finishing a page. Each day we are doing an addition page and a subtraction page from 1A, then each day we do one additional page on Place Value, Clock or Shapes/Measuring from 1B. We are holding off on continuing with money until he has a better understanding of Place Value and adding two digit numbers.

Electives

We did a brief overview of Evolution as part of our Prehistory unit.

Georgie recently saw a show that did a presentation of the American Sign Language alphabet.   This caught his attention in a big way and he came running into the kitchen where Steph and I were talking to show us some letters. Steph and I both know the ASL alphabet so we were able to explore it further with him.   Georgie showed so much interest, I decided to add Sign Language to our curriculum.   So far we are working on the alphabet, his name and the sign for “I Love You”.

The town where Steph goes to school has a K-8 School for the Deaf that sends its graduates to her high school.   They offer a wonderful 1/2 year course in Sign Language that taught about deaf culture and offered the opportunity for discussion and practice with deaf students. Steph took this class her sophomore year and was able to give me the materials from her class to get us started. They are a wonderful resource and will help me a lot as we proceed but since they are written at a high school level, I also ordered the Scholastic book Sign Language My First 100 Words.

Not too many pictures this week but I did manage to get one half-way decent shot of my three kids together.

Prehistory – Part 3 Evolution

2011-04-29T06:21:00.001-07:00

The next topic in our Prehistory program was a brief overview of evolution. Since we will be discussing evolution as we proceed through the eras of prehistory, this was meant to just introduce the concept.

We read from our Usborne IL Encyclopedia of World History and read the story Our Family Tree.

Then we explored watched some episodes of Just So Darwin, which are cartoons with stories about animals such as “Why does the giraffe have a long neck” and “Why is the Platypus so unusual?” told from an evolutionary point of view. My kids love watching programs about animals so these were a big hit.

We also played the Monster Game where you get to create a creature and see how well he survives in the jungle. Information is provided about animals with similar ears, noses, teeth and eyes and why they work well (or poorly) for survival.

Next week we will start working our way through the eras of Prehistory beginning with the Vendian Period.

Weekly Wrap-up: 4/11-4/15/11

2011-04-15T07:14:00.001-07:00

We had a really good week despite Daddy being out of the country and all the literal and figurative headaches that came along with that disruption to our routine. Not to mention the fact that I have to cook dinner.

Language Arts
Georgie is continuing to advance quickly with his reading abilities. I felt that using All About Spelling as a reading and spelling program wasn’t moving fast enough so we started Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading this week. I started him on Lesson 40, which is a review of short vowels words, since this is where he is as far as official work is concerned. He completed lessons 40, 41 (double consonants), 42 (ck combination) and 43 (lk, lb and lp endings) without any real problems. We will do Lesson 43 again next week since he did have a little hesitation with that one but I think we will be moving pretty fast through this, at least for now. We will continue with All About Spelling for spelling and the review of phonics rules.

Georgie read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish all by himself and completely in one sitting (it’s 63 pages long). His stamina for reading is definitely improving along with his ability.

I had the opportunity to let the kids try out Click n Read this week (Thanks Jana!!). Both kids really liked it so I’m going to be adding this to our curriculum. It won’t be a daily thing but it will be great to occupy one kid while I’m working with the other. There is a special buy of $29.99 for a lifetime account through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op.

Georgie is loving Handwriting without Tears. I’ve been keeping the plan for each day pretty short since he generally doesn't like writing. We’re doing the Grade 1 book so we’re starting with a review of capital letters. Since I want to make sure he’s doing them correctly, I printed off some gray block paper with the starting dots and I have him practice on that before doing the book. He’s so eager he wants to do multiple pages each day. I have to stop him since his hand gets tired and he ends up holding the pencil in his right hand but guiding it with his left.

We didn’t do any Explode the Code this week but we’ll start back up with that next week. It won’t align exactly with OPGTR so will generally be a review. We’re working in Book 2 and I haven’t yet decided if we are going to continue it after this book. With OPGTR, HWT and AAS, not to mention Click n Read, it may be too much to continue with ETC as well.

I started Vicki with Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading as well. We started by reviewing all the letter sounds to make sure she knew them well. She did, so next week we will try some blending and see how it goes. For now we are using the letters from Fridge Phonics.

Vicki also played on Click n Read this week. She enjoyed it as well and has no problem with doing it by herself. I set her up with my laptop on her table with her back to Georgie. She had to wear headphones this week since my laptop is set up to use a headset to do Skype video calls with Daddy. This actually worked well (except I couldn’t hear what she was doing) since it didn’t distract Georgie as much as I think it would with speakers.

Vicki is doing the Pre-K level of Handwriting without Tears. She used the capital letter guides I printed out, along with the foam pieces, to build letters this week. She really enjoyed this and went through most of the alphabet each day.

Math
We continued with our new Math Mammoth this week. We are doing a few selected pages from 1A to learn their method of teaching addition and subtraction. Mixed in starting next week will be pages on Place Value, Clock, and Shapes and Measuring. We will also continue doing MEP along with it but I’m thinking of moving Georgie up to Year 2. Year 1 is going very slowly and he’s starting to get a little bored with it.

We played one of the games suggested in Math Mammoth – 10 Out. Kind of like Go Fish but you put down matches that add up to 10. Georgie was VERY good at this and was making matches using 3 or 4 cards at at time.

Electives
I never posted a weekly wrap-up last week but we finished Part 1 of our Prehistory unit (formation of the Earth) last week and Part 2 (fossils) this week.

We also spent an entire day outside since we finally had some beautiful weather. (Counts as physical education, nature study and art, right?)

Finally – A Nice Spring Day!

2011-04-14T15:01:00.001-07:00

We finally had some decent weather around here. The kids and I took advantage of it to spend the entire day outside.

We went to a local county park that has a great overlook where you can see New York City on a clear day. I’ve been going to this park since I was young enough that my dad had to carry me part of the way up. Since I wasn’t too sure I could even make it up the fairly steep, 1.3 mile trail anymore, I wasn’t going to even try with the little guys so we stuck to checking out the wildflower trails.

Evidently it was too early in the year because we didn’t see any wildflowers. We did have a nice little hike through the woods and over a cute little bridge.

We saw only one small patch of little white flowers in one of the few spots without a sign telling us what grows there.

After our hike, we went and played in the playground.

After a quick trip to the store for supplies, I made some sidewalk paints (cornstarch, water and food coloring) and the kids decorated our patio and the outside of our chimney.

We walked down to the river but it was slightly over its banks making a big patch of mud, so we didn’t stay long.

All that exercise and the kids are now playing Wii Fit Plus. I think I may get my wish for an early bedtime tonight. ;-)

Prehistory – Part 2 Fossils

2011-04-13T10:06:00.001-07:00

We continued our prehistory study by learning about Fossils. What they are, how they are made and how they are found.

First we read about fossils in our Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World History. This book has wonderful pictures and brief text – the perfect combination to keep my kids interest.

We also read from the DK Eyewitness Books Prehistoric Life.

We learned about what tools paleontologists use to find fossils by doing a page out of our Junior Paleontologists Activity Book and then playing a game of Dig that Dinosaur.

Dig that Dinosaur was one of the games in a Scholastic Ebook I bought during their dollar days – Quick and Easy Learning Games: Science. In this game, each player is attempting to gather tools and get to the dinosaurs skull first. The directions say to use a spinner but I’ve never had a homemade spinner work well so we used dice. It also has each player collect three tools. I made an extra copy of the tools and had each player gather all six and discuss what each was used for.   I laminated the game in a file folder and we used plastic dinosaurs as pieces.

For the next activity, we used the Safari Ancient Fossils Toob (I love the Toob’s) along with the real fossils they were able to get at the museum during the Rock and Mineral Weekend, and some sea shells.   I wanted to do a semi-realistic dig site outside for the kids.   Thanks to pre-construction activities our yard is currently all dirt and rocks. Perfect for a dig. Unfortunately, though we finally had some warmer temperatures, it rained every day this week. So, I went with plan B and we had a “dig” in our rice bin.   There were a few plastic acorns in there left over from our Fall Sensory Bin but I left them figuring that some junk is usually dug up at any site.

Both kids had fun searching for the fossils. Vicki really had fun pretending to dig for the fossils and then brushing them clean as they were found. She re-buried them at least twice and found them all again. Georgie was only interested in finding them once and then looking up what they were on the information sheet that came with the Toob.

The tools we used for our dig and what we found…

We learned about how fossils are formed and the different types of fossils by doing the first few activities in our Magic School Bus Back In Time With the Dinosaurs science kit. We learned about True Form Fossils, Mold Fossils, Cast Fossils and Trace Fossils. We used the kit contents to (attempt to) make samples of Mold, Cast and Trace fossils but they didn’t come out too well. I think I may have added too much water to the plaster of paris mixture.

We also went to our local museum for the first activity in honor of the opening of the newly expanded dinosaur exhibit – making a coffee ground fossil.   First, we gathered our sediments (coffee, flour, salt), then the river water came…

and swirled them all together. Only Vicki was willing to put her hands in there and stir it all up.

The river dried up and left behind mud. Sea creatures died and their shells settled down and made impressions in the soft mud.

Then over millions of years (or the next day), the mud hardened into rock with an impression of the shell in it.

While at the museum we were able to examine some fossils in the Rock & Mineral collection.

We learned more about the conditions needed for fossils to form by playing the Burying Bodies game, which allows you to move a dinosaur body to different places (side of a volcano, beach, river, ocean) to find out whether its a good place for it to turn into a fossil.

We played The Road to Fossilization game from the Junior Paleontologists Activity Book which I laminated in a file folder.   We used some fossils from our Toob as pieces and rolled a die instead of flipping a coin as suggested. Even numbers moved 2 spaces and odd numbers moved 3 spaces. The game gave information on how fossils are formed and some of the things that can prevent formation.

During our study we also watched The Magic School Bus Shows and Tells and an episode of Sci Girls on Digging Archeology.

Books we read:

Coming up next: A brief overview of Evolution before we start on the first life on Earth.

My First Blog Award!

2011-04-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

I received my first blog award yesterday from Jana at Homeschooling a Texas Tornado and a Preschool Tag-along. Thank you Jana!! I'm so excited. Now I'm supposed to come up with seven random things about myself and pass it on to three other bloggers. I actually slept on this since it was harder than I thought to come up with 7 random facts. I ended up looking at old Facebook notes to see what I usually write about myself. :-D

1. I LOVE to read.
2. I'm currently getting book suggestions from Steph so I'm reading lots of teenage vampire stories.
3. I very rarely cook. DH cooks dinner 99% of the time.
4. I am not a morning person and I have one kid who is up by 7am every day. (it's not the teenager who actually has to get up for school).
5. I love musicals. Another fun thing I get to share with Steph.
6. My favorite ice cream is Double Dark Chocolate Fudge Crunch.
7. I love homeschooling - it satisfies both the teacher and the obsessive planner in me.

Now, I'm going to pass this award along to three other bloggers:

The Homeschool Den
Satori Smiles
Ramblings of a Dysfunctional Homeschooler

Prehistory – Part 1

2011-04-05T10:56:00.001-07:00

We started our Prehistory unit today by learning about the formation of the Earth. First we watched the National Geographic movie, Earth: Making of a Planet. The movie was very good (and appears to be available online) but at two hours long, the kids did not sit and watch the whole thing straight through. They would wander off for a while and then return for more.

After the movie, we read in our Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History about how when it was first formed, the earth’s surface was covered with volcanoes. We then made our own volcano. I have never done this with the kids before so it was a new experience for them.

I have been collecting all our old, mixed up play-doh for the day we would use it to make a volcano. We covered an old jelly jar completely to make our form. Georgie didn’t want to touch the old play-doh because he said it was icky. He usually likes play-doh and, other than the colors, this was no different so I’m not sure what that was all about but Vicki didn’t mind doing all the play-doh work herself.

Then we poured a mixture of vinegar, dishsoap and red food coloring into our volcano – our molten lava.

Last, we added some baking soda. The kids loved watching the volcano erupt and wanted to do it again right away. At first, it came out very pale pink but then it became a darker red.

You can see how big of a step back Vicki took once it started “erupting”.

Very cool….and very messy.

After our volcano settled down, we did a worksheet on the different Eras of time from the Junior Paleontologists Activity Book available from the National Park Service. This is a resource I forgot to list in my Prehistory Plan. We will be using different pieces of it throughout our study.

We read about Pangea in our UILEWH and did an activity showing how the continents would separate and how mountains are formed. Ideas that I found at The Homeschool Den blog.

Next we will be learning about how fossils are formed and found.

Our Upcoming Prehistory Plans Are Now Available!

2011-04-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Anyone who is interested in seeing details of our upcoming Prehistory study it has been posted under its own page right here. The plan covers from the formation of the Earth to the Death of the Dinosaurs.

Weekly Wrap-Up: 3/28 to 4/1

2011-04-01T06:04:00.001-07:00

We had a light but okay week. I’m still patiently awaiting my Math Mammoth so we can get started. We didn’t do any special subjects this week because I’m preparing a Dinosaur study to go along with activities at our local museum. I’ve been gathering our resources, ordering a few extra books from the library (even though we already own 16 books on dinosaurs and prehistoric life, not counting our Usborne IL Encyclopedia of World History) and setting up our plans.

Language Arts

Georgie continued with Explode the Code and Scholastic Grammar. So far there hasn’t been anything in either one that causes him even a moment’s hesitation.

Georgie was very happy to see the All About Spelling tiles come out again this week. We covered the /z/ sound at the end of a word and the /kw/ sound. He easily spelled all the Word List words for this lesson.

While we worked on spelling, Vicki worked on our other whiteboard with her Fridge Phonics letters. Georgie pointed out to her that the red letters were vowels.

She also worked on an upper/lower case letter matching activity I made up months ago. These two are pretty much all the school Vicki did this week.

I rearranged things so the many, many printable games and activities I have are easier to access so hopefully we will get back to using them more.

Georgie continued with Frog Jump capitals in Handwriting Without Tears. We will be moving on to Corner Starting Capitals next week and will probably start moving through the capitals faster.

Math

We are continuing along with MEP and Addition/Subtraction worksheets until our Math Mammoth comes, which should be TODAY! I can’t wait print it off and get started.

Stephanie

Yes, I have a brief brag on Steph this week. Last weekend was our last regional dance competition for the year. Steph has been having an amazing year but last weekend she really did well. Her tap trio (The Remedy) won Extreme Platinum (the highest award) and 4th place overall teen duet/trio, her tap small group (5 Guys Named Moe) won Extreme Platinum and 9th place overall teen small group (out of about 100 groups) and her solo (As Fast As You Can) won Extreme Platinum and 10th place overall senior solo (out of about 75 soloists). I’m very proud of her and all the girls, and Robert, at WTDA!

Weekly Wrap-up: 3/21 – 3/25

2011-03-25T06:26:00.001-07:00

This was my first week attempting to do “real” work with two kids. Vicki has played around with some stuff in the past but it was usually completely independent “play” or done without Georgie around. Even though Vicki’s is still completely optional, she now has some actual curriculum to work with.

My first hurdle was to find each of them a work area that would keep them from bothering each other. Vicki loves to grab Georgie’s stuff and Georgie loves giving the answers for Vicki’s. I went with setting up our two tables so they would be sitting back-to-back. Someone suggested this to me on one of my forums and I think it will work well. This way they aren’t too focused on each other and I can sit on the couch in between to help whoever needs it. Vicki’s table is not ideal since it has a (slightly ripped) padded top which is difficult to write or color on but it should do for now. Eventually we will get her a table like George's which is height adjustable.

When Vicki didn’t feel like “doing school” she played with the Tag map or on the computer.

Language Arts

Georgie is continuing along in Explode the Code. I think we are actually somewhere in Book 2 but I’m not sure since I separated all the pages in order to file them at the beginning of our year and match them up to AAS. He likes the silly pictures and continues to have absolutely no problem finding the correct answers.

For Grammer, we have moved on to simple sentences in our Scholastic GUM program. We’ve never covered this type of thing before but Georgie had no problem telling what was a sentence and what wasn’t.

We started our Handwriting without Tears. Georgie is working in the First Grade book since his primary problem is lowercase letters. It does start with a review of uppercase, which we will go through a little slowly to get him used to their method and to make sure he’s making the letters correctly. We started with Frog Jump Capitals – those that start with a straight line and then return to the top. I had printed off some gray block paper with starting dots for him to practice on.

Georgie also enjoyed reading his new issue of Highlights High Five and doing the puzzles. He used to get Your Big Backyard and when he’s a little older I hope to get him National Geographic Kids or Zoobooks. I think magazine subscription are a great way to encourage reading and an interest in new topics.

Vicki has expressed interest in learning to read (thanks to Georgie’s book worm) so I pulled out our Get Ready for the Code book again. She did really well the first day. I didn’t have her do any of the letter tracing pages but she liked circling the pictures that started with the correct letter sound. She knows her letter sounds from watching Leapfrog Letter Factory DVD.

I have the Pre-K level of Handwriting without Tears for Vicki. I bought the Teacher’s Manual but none of the other manipulatives. I made my own set of Capital Letter pieces out of thick black foam. The hardest part of preparing them was getting the price and brand stickers off. Next time I buy foam I’m going to try and get pieces that attach the UPC with a little staple because no matter what I tried (vinegar, alcohol) I couldn’t get the residue completely off. Vicki did enjoy playing with the pieces. I made my own set of Letter cards but have not introduced them yet. She also did a pre-writing page where she traced and then copied horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, and circles.

Math

We are continuing along with MEP and Addition/Subtraction worksheets until the end of the month when the Co-op sale ends and we can get our Math Mammoth. We do still need to work on sitting without correct posture while doing written work.

Vicki did some counting cards I downloaded from Confessions of a Homeschooler. She doesn’t like using clothespins but was able to use a dry-erase marker on the laminated cards.

She also did a counting worksheet from tlsbooks. In the past she would point to the correct number and I would circle it for her. This time she wanted to do it herself.

One unexpected effect of having Vicki join us for school was Georgie asked why he didn’t get to do “fun school” anymore. It made me realize that I had been very lax in adding games into our school day. So, we pulled out one of our word building games – Tri Words. It gave Georgie practice in reading, spelling and writing since he wanted to keep track of the words we came up with.

We continued to use the Wii Fit for some physical education. Georgie’s favorite is still the Basic Run where he gets to follow the kitten around.

We also got some fresh air and exercise enjoying the first week of Spring.

We finished up our study of Japan, which can be seen here.

I am going to be deviating from our scheduled program for the next month. We are scheduled to continue along in our study of the countries of Asia, followed by Desert habitats. But, our local museum is having a month of hands-on activities and science experiments to celebrate the opening of the newly expanded Dinosaur Den. In order to best incorporate all this fun into our schooling, we are going to play paleontologists for the next month.

Yay, Spring!! Wait….What???

2011-03-24T11:10:00.001-07:00

Sunday was the First Day of Spring! Last week we had a couple of absolutely beautiful 60 degree days. The crocuses were starting to show up, the trees were starting to bud, birds could be heard singing (mourning doves are pretty much the only birds I can recognize by sound and they’re back!). It was perfect! I began planning a small unit on Spring, including lots of nature walks. We would listen for birds, look at flower buds, learn about how plants grow….

I had it all ready to go. You want to know what we ended up doing this week? Here it is…..

It was actually kind of pretty. Just definitely not Spring-like. So, I got to explain to Georgie that just because the calendar says it’s Spring, doesn’t mean the weather is going to cooperate. Poor kid, I think this disappointed him more than not getting snow on December 1st.

Japan

2011-03-23T12:28:00.001-07:00

The next country we learned as part of our Asia studies was Japan.

We began by finding Japan on our giant wall map. Georgie noticed the longitude/latitude lines on the map and wanted me to tell him how to find it using those lines. We did spend a very brief amount of time learning about longitude and latitude when we first began our Geography lesson but it looks like it may be a good idea to spend some more time on it soon.   He was able to trace the longitude line at 150 degrees east down and look slightly to the west to find Japan.

We discussed how Japan was an archipelago, made up of a string of islands, some large, some very small. We looked at what bodies of water surrounded Japan – the Sea of Japan, the Pacific Ocean, the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea.

We went to National Geographic Kids and viewed a video about Mt. Fuji and a local celebration, looked at pictures of Tokyo, Mt. Fuji, rice paddies and Himeji Castle. We also read about the Geography, Nature, History, People and Culture, and Government of Japan.

We briefly discussed the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I did not want to go into a lot of detail since I felt it would scare Georgie to see too much of the devastation.   We did view some age appropriate information on earthquakes here .

We have a simple reader and a set of flashcards on World Landmarks, both from Target’s Dollar Spot. Both included information on the Itsukushima Torii, the Floating Shinto Shrine Gate. After learning about the Gate, we learned more about the Shinto religion in our new Usborne Internet Linked Encyclopedia of World Religions. I think this book is going to be a great resource and I suspect that I am going to learn as much as the kids.

We read from Children Just Like Me, and learned about Hina Matsuri, or Doll’s Day, and Kodomono-hi, or Children’s Day, in Children Just Like Me: Celebrations. We read more about Children’s Day in the story A Carp for Kamiko and made our own carp kites.

We learned about the Japanese flag, a red “rising sun” on a white background, which stands for warmth, brightness and sincerity, while the white stands for purity and integrity.

We looked at samples of Japanese alphabet and then learned how to speak some Japanese at Time for Kids. We heard how to say hello (konnichi wa), good-bye (sayonara) and thank you (arigato) which I already knew how to say – thank you very much Mr. Roboto. Georgie really liked saying konnichi wa for some reason.

We listened to some traditional Japanese Shamisen music through a link in our Intellego unit. Georgie did not like it at all so we ended up not listening to the whole thing and instead looked up some information on the shamisen.

We learned about the Japanese Art of Paper Folding, origami, and looked at some very elaborate samples through Google Images. Using a design I remember from elementary school, we made some jumping frogs that the kids then had fun racing.

We finished up by learning about some of the animals of Japan. We watched an episode of Be the Creature about the Japanese Macaques, the only monkeys found that far north.

Georgie did his notebook quiz on Japan. His favorite thing to learn about Japan was making the fish kites and the folding paper frogs.

We added stickers to our passports. Our next country will be Saudi Arabia.

Weekly Wrap-Up: 3/14 to 3/18

2011-03-18T06:06:00.001-07:00

We had another pretty good week despite an excess of outside noise. We had some trees removed this week which meant 4 days of saws and wood chippers right outside the window. It made it difficult at times to read-aloud or watch videos but we still managed to get some work done.

Language Arts

This week was a review week in both spelling and phonics. We completed the short vowels last week so this week I went back and reviewed all the cards we completed in AAS. Georgie did great – he had no problem spelling any of the words and could do all the sounds on both the Sound cards and the Phonogram cards. We will be moving on to the next lessons right away.

We continued with our Grammar lessons using the Scholastic books. We don’t have the readers they recommend using but we were able to do the assignments using readers we do have.   We are still working on nouns and one of the assignment was to go through their reader and find People/Animals, Places and Things and list them in a chart. We did it using Green Eggs and Ham, without any problem.

Both kids did some writing using the white boards. Georgie is wearing his “hard” hat so he can go help the construction workers take down the trees. (NOT!!)

Our Handwriting Without Tears came in so I’ll be spending the weekend adding it to our workfiles.   I hope it will help Georgie to start writing in lowercase letters more.

Georgie did some reading in his Tag books. He’s currently going through the TH, CH and SH digraph books.   He is also trying to read EVERYTHING. Every book I do as a read aloud, every worksheet, every website he wants to try and read it. He is reading a little ahead of the short vowel words we have completed but not that much so he can only read about 50% of the words in these. I love that he’s so interested in trying but it’s also frustrating because I’ll be in the middle of reading one paragraph and he’ll suddenly start to work on a completely different paragraph.   It’s making it a little hard to get things completed. We may have to start moving a little faster on teaching him the phonics rules (especially long vowel words) so he can start sounding out more.

With all the noise and chaos I didn’t take the opportunity to work on Phonics with Vicki. Hopefully I’ll at least get the chance to see what she already knows next week.

Math

We are continuing along with just MEP until the end of the month when the co-op sale will be completed and we can get our Math Mammoth download. I can’t wait and I think Georgie will really enjoy it. He’s definitely ready to start working on place value and getting past single digit addition.

I did some work with Vicki this week. Using neon colored spoons (left over from Steph’s sweet 16 party) we worked on patterns, more or less and counting. She didn’t have any problem with simple patterns, counting to 10 or telling which group had more. I am considering printing out some MEP for her to see how she does with a little bit of structure.

Physical Education

We were able to start some new exercises this week using the Wii Fit Plus. Georgie loves the Basic Run Plus where he gets to follow around a kitty. He did well enough to unlock two additional trails, which he wanted to check out right away so he ended up doing the course about 4 times in one day. Vicki ran along with him for the first couple of time. He also liked playing the Hula Hoop and being a penguin catching fish on a tilting iceberg.

Now that the weather is getting nicer, we also will be spending more time outside.   This week was gorgeous but we didn’t get out much due to the tree removal and next week we’re actually supposed to get some snow (???) but we’re definitely getting there.

Electives

We continued our Geography study this week with Japan. We have a few more activities to do so will be finishing that up next week.

We did take a day off for some St. Patrick’s Day fun, seen here.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

2011-03-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

We took a break from our regularly scheduled programming to have some St. Patrick’s Day fun. I didn’t plan ahead so we had no books from the library and nothing planned. What I did have was shamrocks, jewels and stickers left-over from last year.

The kids dressed in green but Georgie declared “I’ll wear green but I’m still not going to be Irish”. I did explain to him that he is, in fact, about 1/8 Irish (he gets a little bit from both sides).

The kids made necklaces by stringing pieces of green straw and stickers.

They decorated wooden shamrocks with paint, glitter, jewels and stickers. Vicki loaded hers up with so many layers of paint and glitter glue that it will probably take about three days to dry. Georgie did mostly stickers, with just one blob of gold glitter that he tried to get to dry faster before deciding to just wipe off the excess.

We learned about the symbols of St. Patrick’s Day, watched a Sesame Street video about Irish Step Dancing, read a story about a Dragon and a Leprechaun, and printed an easy reader from Scholastic.

We also played some fun St. Patrick’s Day themed games at The Kidz Page.

Weekly Wrap-Up: 3/7 to 3/11/11

2011-03-11T14:46:00.001-08:00

We had a pretty productive week despite my tentative plans to take it easy on weeks Steph is here.

Language Arts

Georgie has completed all the lessons on short vowel words in Explode the Code and All About Spelling. Things have been pretty easy up to this point but I expect they will start getting harder soon.

We began working on Grammar using the Scholastic Skill Builder: Grammar, Usage and Mechanics book with supplementation using the MacMillian/McGraw-Hill Treasures Grammar Workbook. Both were free resources but I decided to use the Scholastic as our primary because I have a Teacher’s Manual for that one. We started with recognizing nouns and Georgie had no problem with the concept. We also played Very Silly Sentences to help reinforce what he's learning.

I’m getting ready to order Handwriting without Tears for Georgie soon. He is still reluctant to write lowercase letters and I think HWT may help him get past it.

Vicki has shown a lot of interest in learning to read ever since Georgie's bookworm was set up. I’m going to start going through AAS with her, in a light relaxed way to see if she’s ready for blending the sounds (which she already knows) into words. I’m not going to worry about spelling mastery at this point in time.

I’m also thinking of getting the Handwriting Without Tears Pre-K workbook for Vicki. She’s starting to show more control when coloring and I like their easy introduction to writing.

Math

We are still using MEP and will probably continue to use it as a supplement but we are definitely switching to Math Mammoth as our primary program. It is available through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op this month and has already hit the 40% off level. If it reaches 250, it will go to 50% off.

I stopped using the Money workbook since the addition was getting too hard for Georgie without understanding more about place value.

I also stopped using the Time workbook since it was just doing time to the quarter hour and at this point I think Georgie can handle learning about the minutes associated with all the numbers. He can count by 5’s, which should make it pretty easy. I made him a clock where he can lift up the number and see how many minutes are associated with it. He’s been using it to compare to our clock (that shows the actual time) and see what time it is.

I’ve started doing calendar time with the kids again. I have a bulletin board set with pieces for the months and dates but it was hard to keep all the pieces together and keep the kids from pulling them off, so I stopped doing it. Oriental Trading recently had reduced price shipping and, in their clearance section, clear plastic calendar templates. I made a file in Word with a graphic in each space that should get a number for the month (I did start March too early) and the month at the top. I taped this behind the plastic template and we use our dry-erase crayons to write the date in each day. Then we go over the Months of the Year and the Days of the Week. The plastic keeps the kids from ripping it and if they scribble on it or write in too many dates, I can just erase it instead of having to print out a new calendar.

We continued our Geography study this week with India. More information on that can be seen here.

India

2011-03-11T14:09:00.001-08:00

We are still working in Asia but we completed our next Country this week – India. India is another country that Daddy visits for work so, once again, we had some actual currency to explore.

We started our study (as we probably all of them will) by visiting National Geographic Kids and exploring the pictures, videos and descriptions of the Geography, Culture, History and Physical Climate of India. The kids love looking at the beautiful pictures and watching the videos.

We found India on our wall map and circled it. We took a closer look and discussed some of the physical features, mainly that it is a peninsula surrounded by the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. We also noted the location of the Ganges River, which is sacred to Hindus.

We colored an outline map of India and a flag from Enchanted Learning. Georgie really struggles with being forced to make something specific colors and finished it as quickly as possible.

We read Toot & Puddle: Toot’s Tour of India. The kids enjoyed the story (they are familiar with Toot & Puddle from PBS) but I found it very light on actual information. There was a brief mention of crowds (not actually shown in any of the illustrations), a ride on an elephant and reference to the Jaipur Sundial.

We read from Children Just Like Me and discussed the variations between the lives of the children in the book and our lives. Georgie was amazed about the girl who lived without electricity or running water.

We read about Diwali in Children Just Like Me: Celebrations. We read briefly about Holi but I didn’t want to dwell on it and give the kids any ideas about having paint fights.

We made Diwali diya by decorating small tins with tissue paper and gems, then inserting red, yellow and orange feathers to simulate candle flames. As usual, Georgie did an even row all around while Vicki piled everything.

We looked at rangoli decorations on Google Images. From Wikipedia: “Rangoli is a traditional decorative folk art of India. They are decorative designs on floors of living rooms and courtyards during Hindu festivals and are meant as sacred welcoming area for the deities” They are usually made with colored sand or rice powder. I found some rangoli coloring pages from Activity Village. I originally printed out just one design but Georgie really enjoyed doing these so I ended up printing out more. He loves to color when he can be creative and use whatever colors he wants. He ended up doing five in all. Maybe in a few years we’ll try doing them using colored sand but for now, crayons are good.

While the kids colored their rangoli, I read to them from The Magic Tree House: Tigers at Twilight. This actually worked very well and was probably the best read aloud sessions using a non-picture book we’ve ever had.

I made an information sheet for the kids (another thing that will be done for each country we study) that showed a color picture of the flag, a sample of the currency and the alphabet. We were able to look at some actual currency from one of Daddy’s trips to India. The kids both liked the colorful money and that some of the bills had a tiger and elephant on the back.

We read the story The Birth of Krishna from Children Just Like Me: Our Favorite Stories. I really need to get a copy of the Usborne Encyclopedia of World Religions to use as a reference. I would like to be able to discuss the various religions better as we come across them in our studies.

We went to Time for Kids: Homework Helper and listened to the correct pronunciation for the Hindi words for Hello and Good-bye (namaste), which Georgie noted was like in Hawaii where Aloha is both Hello and Good-bye. We also learned how to say How Are You? (Aap kaise hein), Thank You (Dhanya vaad) and Hey, it’s my turn to use the computer (Suno, ab meri bari hai computer pe khelne ke liye ). I like how the site throws in a few fun phrases to learn.

One of the pictures shown on National Geographic Kids were of mendhi, traditional henna tattoos applied for weddings and special festivals. I cut out handprints from cream cardstock and let the kids decorate them with brown paint. I was hoping to let them use q-tips to draw finer lines but I couldn’t find any. The paint brushes didn’t work as well, especially when they were globbed with paint.

We went to one of the links from our Intellego unit and listened to traditional Indian music. We also watched a Bollywood style dance.

We watched Riki Tiki Tavi, which is one of the stories from the Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. The movie has been one of my favorites since I grew up watching it on television (we won’t mention how long ago that was). The kids were a little scared at the beginning but ended up really enjoying it and asking to watch it again. We did briefly discuss the English control of India and how the family in the movie was not Indian.

After the movie, the kids wanted to know more about mongooses and cobras so we researched the animals of India on National Geographic Kids and National Geographic. We used a print-out from Confessions of a Homeschooler and learned more about cobras, water buffalos, tigers and elephants. We also learned about peacocks. The kids have seen peacocks before since they are very common in zoos around here. We did a peacock dabber page from Making Learning Fun.

The kids played with some paper dolls I ordered through Dover books. To make them last a little bit longer, I laminated them and used pieces of velcro to attach the clothes. On the back of each outfit, I wrote about if it was worn for a certain festival or by a certain group of people.

We discussed some of the similarities and differences between life in the US and life in India. Georgie was really stuck on the “no electricity, that means no television” idea.

The kids answered questions for our review sheet and put their India stickers in their passports. Next week we will be moving on to Japan.

Nature Walks - Living on the River

2011-03-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

We finally had some decent weather and we took the opportunity to get outside in the fresh air.

Saturday morning was beautiful with semi-sunny skies and temperatures approaching the high 50's. We were doing some work outside and decided to take the kids for a walk down to the river. Our property borders on a mid size river but the yard and house are about 300 feet away from the river with a slope down of about 45 degrees (something we appreciated on Monday). Quite a walk so the kids haven't been down there too often. We may get the chance to go more often since Georgie can now make the hike down, and more importantly the hike back up, without assistance.

The kids had a great time throwing sticks into the river, playing on fallen logs, jumping in the few remaining patches of snow and enjoying the fresh air. Once the weather gets warmer we will be able to go wading or canoeing on the river to check out snails, tadpoles, fish, turtles and ducks.

This is the view of the River from our back deck on Saturday….

and this is the view on Monday.

We had just a little bit of rain on Sunday and the entire area the kids were playing in ended up under water.

Monday was a bright, sunny but really cold day. I decided to be brave and took the kids and Zappa for a walk. We kept an eye out for signs of Spring but other than hearing some birds, the kids and I agreed there weren’t any.

First we went down the street to check out how high the river was. The trees to the right just past the boat rack (the one on the left has a sign attached to it) are usually right at the edge of the river. We took the opportunity to discuss what effect periodic flooding has on the river and the land surrounding it.

As we walked around the neighborhood there were a lot of mini rivers of water running down the streets. I knew better than to think the kids (especially Vicki) would stay out of the water so I had them wear their boots on our walk.

We had the opportunity to check out some worms floating in the puddles and one that managed to escape.

By the time we made in back home, the kids were both wet to the knees.

I’m hoping we’ll start getting more nice days soon and we can start finding some signs of Spring.

Weekly Wrap-Up: 2/28 to 3/4/2011

2011-03-04T11:53:00.001-08:00

We had a good week with more participation from Vicki than we usually get.

Vicki was very interested in Georgie’s bookworm and decided that she wanted to learn to read. So, one morning before Georgie was awake, I opened up the Funnix program that we downloaded for free in January. We did about four steps of Lesson 1 before Vicki was bored with it and didn’t want to do anymore. I think I’m going to have to look ahead and get a better idea of where she should start before we try it again. Until then, we’ll have to stick with Starfall.

Vicki did play with her numbered hearts this week. She laid them out in order, then jumped or tiptoed from one to the next. And then I turned my back on her and she tore them all in half. I really can't wait until she gets past this destructive phase.

Vicki also likes to watch George play on the computer and he discovered a new place to play this week – Leap World. Leap World is an online play community from Leap Frog. You gain access by owning one of their toys that can be hooked up to the computer. We have a Leapster 2 and a Tag system so we are able to have two separate accounts for the kids. LeapWorld allows players to make up their own avatars and explore a virtual world with lots of learning games.

We are continuing with math using MEP and various worksheets but I will be purchasing Math Mammoth through the Homeschool Buyers Co-op this month. I may continue with some MEP for the puzzles but Math Mammoth will be our primary program.

Reading, writing and spelling are proceeding at our usual pace. He is much more interested in reading books himself now, even if some of them are beyond his ability. We read The Story of Ping as part of our China study this week and he wanted to read it aloud to Vicki and I. He went through the first five or six pages reading all the words he knew, letting me fill in the ones he didn’t, before he became tired and just let me finish the book.

I’m getting ready to add some Grammar to our day. I currently have the Scholastic Skillbuilder: Grammar, Usage and Mechanics Grade 1 Workbook and Teacher’s Manual, the McGraw Hill Grade 1 Grammar Workbook, Sheldon’s Primary Language Lessons and KISS Level 1 Grammar Lessons. All were free resources and I’m looking through them trying to decide which one(s) I want to start with.

For Physical Education this week, we did some dancing around to music from my ITouch. I have a fairly eclectic selection of music with a playlist of all kid’s songs. Their favorite is definitely the Chipmunks doing Shake Your Groove Thing although Vicki is also doing really well learning The Time Warp (Chipmunks version, of course).

We moved on to Asia for our Continents and Cultures study and learned all about China. Those lessons can be seen here.

Continents – Asia/Cultures - China

2011-03-03T15:47:00.001-08:00

We started the next Chapter of our Continents & Cultures unit study.   We found Asia on our large world map and outlined in with a dry erase marker. We read about Asia in our Scholastic Atlas of the World and discussed how large and diverse of an area it covered. We then narrowed our focus to China.   Of course, the first thing we had to do is grab the dry erase markers again and outline it on our world map. The kids really love drawing on our map so I let them have some fun but I told them to draw everywhere but on Asia. George drew some ducks in the Atlantic Ocean.

First we discussed the Physical Geography and Landmarks of China:
We looked at the Scholastic Atlas and discussed some of the geographical features of China. China has high mountains, deserts, modern cities and borders the ocean. We read The Story of Ping and found the Yangtze River on our map.

We went to the Time for Kids Homework Helper Sightseeing Guide and clicked on various features for a brief description.   We learned about the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City and the Grand Buddha.

We did a workbook page from A+ World Geography workbook that I’m pretty sure I bought at Target’s Dollar Spot. It’s easy to see that Georgie is not particularly interested in realism when coloring.

Our next and largest area of study was the Culture of China:
We read from Children Just Like Me, Children Just Like Me: Celebrations and World Folktales (The Blue Rose).

I made up a summary sheet with information about China before we began our study. It included a color picture of the flag, pictures of the currency, what language is most common (Mandarin Chinese) and how to say hello in that language (Ni Hao), and a selection of characters written in Chinese, so they could see the difference between Chinese writing and our alphabet.   I have a similar sheet for each Country that we will be studying in detail.

We listened to music from China that Georgie thought was too relaxing and said it made him fall asleep.

Once he “woke up” again, we continued listening while they colored a picture of the flag of China. Georgie had a real struggle with using the correct colors and ended up not finishing his picture. Vicki’s picture is on top and this is probably the closest she has ever come to coloring within the lines. The flag was printed from Enchanted Learning.

After discussing the meaning of the flag (the large star stands for the Communist Party, the smaller stars for the 4 classes of society – workers, peasants, soldiers and students) we were able to look at some actual currency thanks to one of daddy’s many trips to China. Both kids thought the money was much more colorful than ours and the purple bills were their favorites.

We discussed how they don’t speak English in China. We took a closer look at various characters and looked at how to write their names in Chinese. Neither of the kids wanted to try and write their name in Chinese. I couldn’t really blame them, it looks pretty complicated.   The top one is George and the bottom one is Vicki.

We went to the Time for Kids Homework Helper website and listened to the correct pronunciations for Ni Hao (hello), Zai jian (good-bye), Xie xie (thank you), Bu yong ke qi (your welcome) and Ce suo zai naer? (where is the bathroom?).   The kids already knew how to say hello from the PBS show “Ni Hao Kai-Lan” but they got a real kick out of the last one.

We read A Visit to China by Mary Packard. It is a cute little story that mentions how red is considered a lucky color. Georgie said “red isn’t my lucky color. Mine is green because red means stop and green means go, and I prefer Go”.

We learned about Chinese New Year using some materials we obtained through Panda Express’s educational program. Other than a few mentions of the importance of food during the celebration and a brief (commercial) mention of Panda Express at the beginning, it was a very good video. It explained the origin of the Zodiac animals, about the Dragon and Lion parades, about firecrackers and about the year of the Rabbit (2011). The kids enjoyed watching it and Georgie had me read every animal on the zodiac and what the characteristics of it are. Georgie and I are both Roosters, Vicki is a Boar, Steph is a Dog and Daddy is a Monkey. Georgie decided he didn’t like that and decided I was a snake, he was a Dragon and Vicki was a rat. Daddy was allowed to stay a Monkey (he actually put daddy down as a monkey before we knew for sure since Panda Express only listed birth years back to the 70’s) and Steph stayed a dog.

I had a coloring page on the Chinese Zodiac printed from Enchanted Learning but neither of the kids showed any interest in sitting down and coloring it.

We did play Chinese Zodiac dominos that were printed from DLTK.

We made Chinese lanterns using a print-out from Crayola.

We played a game using pictures and descriptions that I printed off from….somewhere I can’t remember. I thought they were from Teacher’s Book Bag but I wasn’t able to find them in any of my files so if anyone knows where these are from, please let me know so I can mention it. I separated out the pictures and the descriptions, laid the pictures out on the table, read the descriptions and Georgie would tell me which picture went with the description. We learned about pandas, pagodas, the Forbidden City, Buddha, rice crops and the Great Wall playing this game. We attached the matched up pictures and descriptions to cardstock to add to our notebook.

My kids are not adventurous eaters but we did try out using chopsticks to eat dry cereal. I did a "cheat" using a piece of paper and a rubber band since they don't quite have the motor skills to use them correctly. They really liked the chopsticks and every day tried to find something to eat that they could use them again.

To finish up we discussed some of the differences between life in China and the US (eating utensils, clothing, foods, language, names – last name first, first name last).

Our next (and final) area of study was the Animals of China:
We used an Animals of China print-out from Confessions of a Homeschooler.   We used our Scholastic Encyclopedia of Animals and the National Geographic and National Geographic Kids websites to find further information on each animal.

We did some coloring pages from Enchanted Learning. Georgie’s favorite was definitely the Giant Panda. You can see he still likes to get creative with his colors.

We were definitely able to get the most information on the Giant Panda. National Geographic Kids had lots of information including pictures and video about them.

As we proceeded through our study I mounted all our information to a tri-fold presentation board hanging in front of our fireplace so the kids could look at it frequently.

To finish up our study, I gave Georgie a brief quiz to see what he remembered.   He knew that China was on the Continent of Asia and he easily named an animal found in the country (Panda bear of course). When asked to Name one thing you liked learning about this country, he answered “about panda bears and the red flag with stars and the new ways to write kind, heart and good”.

The kids finished up by adding the China stickers to their passports. I made their passports by printing a cover and pages watermarked with a map of each continent. The stickers came from Highlights, either free with promotional materials or with our brief subscription to Hidden Picture Puzzles, I’m not sure which. Those countries that we will be covering that didn’t have stickers provided, I printed off my own.

Other books we used during this study:

Weekly Wrap-Up: Finishing up February

2011-02-26T09:17:00.001-08:00

The past couple of weeks have been a little light on photo-worthy activities. We’ve done a lot of doctor’s appointments, runs to Motor Vehicles and re-organizing.

One thing I did was set-up Georgie’s Bookworm. I decided to provide him with some incentive/ acknowledgement for reading books now that he can read some on his own. I had to think about what my standard was going to be for adding books to his worm – does he have to read every single word without help? or can he get assistance with a couple unusual or very difficult words? I decided that if he can read a book on his own except for assistance with 2 or 3 unusual/hard words (like “whisper” and “lightning” in Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?) we would give it to him. He was very excited and went right away to select some more books to read (and then pestered me for 3 days straight to add them to his worm). The worm itself was made using the shapes tools in Word.

I also downloaded some activities for Vicki from Confessions of a Homeschooler to see if she would enjoy doing them. They had mixed results. They kept her interest for a little while the first day but she didn’t want to try them again when I pulled them out later in the week.

I also set up one of Georgie’s lap-size whiteboards with a set of larger writing lines using a Sharpie marker. I’m trying to encourage him to do more writing with lowercase letters and I’m hoping this will help. So far, it is working pretty good. I’m still trying to decide if we need to buy Handwriting without Tears for him or if we can continue using free resources.

Next week we will be continuing our Continents study with Asia, which will include more detailed study of China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, South Korea and Thailand.