Weekly Review

We have a shortened week for homeschool co-op classes. Even so, we've managed 2 sciences, 2 histories, and 1 art.

Math: 8yo finished 3 digit addition with renaming (regrouping, borrowing - whatever). She started today with making sets and counting them (multiplication). The 5-almost-6yo has been learning about Measurement this week. We've covered cups/pints/quarts/gallons, inches, pounds, and now temperature. She's got a cold and insisted that she take her temperature, so that worked into our math lesson. By the way, her temp is fine!

Language Arts: 8yo is doing well with the double reading lessons. One more week and she'll be half way through. In English, she finished up her Shape Poem, and took a test. Today we starting the unit on Listening skills. We're really struggling with this one! The 5/6yo is doing a great job with spelling & dictation. She's catching on to capitalizing 1st letter, ending w/ punctuation. This week's spelling (List 5) was a review week, and she remembered her words. She continues to do well in her English/Phonics. Nothing really new, other than the handwriting demands have increased and her stories are getting a bit longer. She is also beginning to write "stories" for her schoolwork. This week's theme was "Penguins".

Science: We've been reading through the Kingfisher Young Knowledge book called Planet Earth. I really like this book, and have ordered the Rocks & Fossils book in this series. We read about Climate, Clouds/Rain/Snow, Wind, and Hurricanes/Tornadoes.

History: Read about India & Buddhism, and marveled at the Ajanta caves online. We also read about Mohammed & the beginnings of Islam.

Art: We learned about Warm & Cool colors from KinderArt (www.kinderart.com/artbook ).

Weekly Review

It's Friday. It's my oldest daughter's birthday. She's now 8 and we can legally burn the car booster seat. Woohoo! So here's the happenings...Let's do this backwards today, just for kicks!

Friday - 2 girlfriends (sisters) are coming over to spend the night. We're all very excited!
Thursday - the kids spent the evening with G'pa and Uncle E, & had cake & icecream. We (the parents) went to the Maxwell Family Conference (Managers of Their Homes, Titus 2, etc.)
Wednesday - kids had AWANA; Z-the-5yo got her Hiker's patch
Monday & Tuesday - I don't think we did anything other than laundry & school.

Art: we did the Patterns page from Kinderart. I've noticed that my now 8yo is at the perfect age for following directions and making a nice project. My soon-to-be 6yo, however, is not. She has her own ideas, and if she even manages to make a book, it will be a rather quirky book:)

Science: We managed 2 earth sciences this week. We watched this really neat documentary on the Crystal Cave. Here's a great site with photos:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/207775/Naica-Crystal-Cave-You-Have-to-see-this
What an amazing place!! Yesterday I read from the book Planet Earth (a Kingfisher Young Knowledge book), and my now 8yo decided she wanted to draw her own water cycle.

History: We finished reading the SOTW 2 chapter about Emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora. Hopefully we get one more history in today (we'll see!)

Language Arts: the 5yo's stories are getting longer. She is having a hard time remembering letter formation and makes some pretty strange letters at times. BJU is now having her write little stories. They are only having her do 1 word or 1 sentence stories, but she filled the page on one of her stories. BJU 1st gr spelling is a great program - it has her writing a sentence from dictation 2xs per week, and it uses word families, but adds endings so that she learns how words change, as well. I wasn't sure if I was actually going to use a 1st gr spelling program, but so far, I have been impressed. The 8yo is doing 2 lessons of Reading every day so we can move on to 3rd gr. She also wrote 2 shape poems for BJU English 2. In her spare time, she is working on a "novel" and she continues to read Rainbow Magic Fairies.

Math: The 5yo finished her chapter on Math Fact Families. This week we started Measuring. We looked for pint sized items in the grocery store yesterday, since today is Pint & Cups day in math. The 8yo is adding numbers in the hundreds with renaming. She is doing very well with this and does not want a 10-base-block presentation of the concept. I'm surprised at how fast she is able to do the problems. She can even do the problems horizontally. I expected us to take an hour to do 5 problems, but fortunately, it is not taking that long:)

A Homeschool Quote from Jane Austen

Old Schoolhouse Magazine has an email newsletter called The Homeschool Minute. This week's Homeschool Minute is about favorite homeschool quotes. I'd like to add my latest one, from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey...

"You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonimous words."

Columbus Day ("Why I Homeschool")

I love Columbus Day because it reminds me of one reason I chose to homeschool. In public school, I was taught every year that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He had this radical idea that the earth was round, and that by traveling around it, he could wind up at the other side. This "round earth" idea was ludicrous to the rest of the world, who believed Columbus would sail right off the edge of our flat earth.

It wasn't until my teen years, when I started studying ancient history for kicks, and watching TLC shows like Connections, that I questioned what I had been taught. I began to see Greek maps that portrayed our earth as round. I began to see Medieval scientists, explorers, and navigators refer to these same Greek maps; accepting without a second thought that our earth is round. I began to wonder...if this "flat earth" concept is taught every year by public school textbooks and accepted so easily...what else have I been taught that is, well, WRONG?

If you are new to this idea, or just want to back up your own claims, I found this article online:
http://www.biblicalcreation.org.uk/educational_issues/bcs105.html
If you aren't Christian, or have no interest in Biblical Creation ideas, just kindly skip the bottom section. Or Google-search "did people believe the world was flat in 1492?" and see what you get.

I know, I know...I'm not going to be able to figure out all the falsehoods out there. There is a lot of things we either just don't know, or tall tales that have been passed throughout the generations. But I felt I had more freedom to explore those things in homeschooling, and certainly a better chance of refuting them, then we would in a public school setting.

Happy Columbus Day!

Doin' Da Loop

Thought I'd write more about the Loop and how to implement a Loop schedule.

You make a list of all your subjects and the order you want to do them in. Here is a generic sample:
Math
Spelling
Handwriting
Reading
English
Science
History

Here is a Basic Loop (but it can get more complicated, depending on how many brain cells you choose to burn with this process):

Day 1 - work for 3 hours (or as long as you determine). Say we got through all but History (we did: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Science).
Day 2 - pick up where we left off: Start with History, then Math, Spelling, HW, Reading. Now lets say time is up, and we didn't get to English or Science.
Day 3 - pick up where we left off: Start with English, Science, History, Math, Spelling, HW, etc.
Day 4 - keep "looping" and eventually you'll end up back at Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Science, History again.

Now, I've decided that we only want to do History 2xs, Science 2xs, and Art 1x for every complete loop. So I grouped my History/Science/Art together and Loop like this:
Day 1: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, History
Day 2: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Science
Day 3: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, History
Day 4: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Science
Day 5: Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Art

What happens if we don't get to History on Day 1?
Day 2: History, Math, Spelling, HW, Reading, English, Science (if we get to science).
So you start with whatever subject you didn't finish the day before, and keep going in that order. You may end up with the occasional weird day that begins History, Science, Math, ...etc... and ends with History again (wouldn't that be productive?) The idea is that if you consistently don't get to those non-core subjects but would like to integrate them, then the Loop will bring those subjects in and give them the attention they deserve.

Weekly Review + Loop Schedule

One of my hobbies is to create schedules for fun and then not follow them. Here is a simple "Loop Schedule" that I created, and successfully followed for 2 days last week. The trick was making a loose schedule and then loosely following it.

The idea here is to work for 3 hours total. We started at 10am (yes, that's early!) and ended at 1pm. For me, the challenge was to keep us working for 3 hours without snack and play breaks. But what a great 3 hours it was! The week previous to this we skipped science, history, and art, and just did math/LA. The last 2 days, following the Loop, we fit in 1 science & 1 history. Yes, Reading is on there twice for A (the almost 8yo). She is doing double lessons in Reading, but skipping handwriting and spelling, so that we can start 3rd grade in January. More on loops another day -

This week - we had a crazy week.
Monday - Mom (that's me) cleaned the house, planned, and hosted a Parent Support Meeting for our local homeschool support group.
Tuesday - Soccer. Math & LA for both kids.
Wednesday - implemented above Loop. Did History by reading a historical picture book on St. Nicholas using a mozaic style artwork (Roman/Byzantine style)
Thursday - implemented Loop and did Science. My husband explained Rocks to me because I was so confused by our books (he said, "its not rock-et science". Ha ha!) After my sciencey husband explained Rocks, I did a better job of teaching it. So we studied Igneous rocks, found Granites in the yard, and broke them apart with hammers, looking for its make up of feldspar, mica, and quartz. We oooh's and ahhh'd at its crystaline structure.
Friday - we had homeschool co-op. Z brought home some snails from Creatures class. A is learning hymns in Choir. Z did much better in 5th hour today, since I loaded her up with sugary drink and cookie beforehand:)

And now I have a co-op hang-over (I mean, headache), and need...something...to fix this.

Textbooks

In case you are wondering why I use textbooks...another example popped up today...

I decided that Scotts Foresman Science 2 was easy & repetitious (same old, same old), and that I wanted that "love of learning" experience that homeschoolers are supposed to have. So "we" decided to study rocks. We went on walks, collected rocks, & started ordering library books on the subject.

We've skipped science for 2 weeks now as I try to find interesting books on rocks (ugh). I mention today to the kids that we're going to do either science or history (having neglected both as I waited for those darn library books to arrive). The almost 8yo says, "History! History! I hate Science!" I wonder, "do you even know what we're studying in science?" she says "yes, rocks - I hate rocks, its boring!"

So there you have it...that's why we use textbooks for Math & LA, at the very least. This comes from the same child who also said, "Lapbooks? I hate lapbooks!"

My latest favorite homeschool quote is this...
"Show me a product that's called Handwriting Without Tears, and I'll give you a child that cries over it."