Weekly Wrap-Up

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

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

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

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

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

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.