Three Plus Two

K-2 Year in Review: Everything Else

Well, as promised, here is the rest of my K-2 review.  Do you remember the first part?  It's only been a month in between!

I've been in a bit of a tizzy lately as I try to finish out the unpacking and setting up so that one day, we don't feel as if we are moving in anymore.  I'm not sure when that day will come, but I know the little boys are getting a little bit frustrated with the lack of structure.  Now that I don't have to report to the school district at the end of the year, here is my plan.

1. Blog year-end reviews here on typepad.

2. Print out my Learning in Review category and put it in a binder.  Let the kids look through it.  Look through it myself.  Remember that we actually did something in 2010-11.

3. Put the binder on a shelf.  Label it with a label maker so I know what it is. (Er... probably I should label it before I put it on the shelf.)  One day before I am done homeschooling (good thing I have at least 17 more years) collect all my other homeschool journal/(b)logs and put them on the same shelf.  A good thing about having to root through everything you own is that you find little gems here and there that at one time seemed to be rough stones but interesting enough to keep.  My homeschool journals are like that. In every single one I find myself questioning whether the effort is worth it.  In a word -- yes.  The effort is so completely worth it, but sometimes that's not evident until years later when you are trying to figure out what to do with the new kindergartener, or trying to escape the tangle of educational philosophies in which you suddenly find yourself wrapped. 

Now, onward.  The Review -- math, science, history, geography, nature study.  Did we do art last year?  Well, not formally.  There were many dinosaur pictures drawn, and I did discover Farmerboy's depiction of himself as a paleontologist wielding some ground-penetrating radar. 

What, ground-penetrating radar isn't in your art curriculum?

Anyway, really now -- onward.

Math

Next year (which for us begins in early July) I want to do more living math, with more allowance for projects like this:

It's a pattern picture, by Pop.  (And it's art, too!)  These pictures developed spontaneously from some art the younger boys were doing at the breakfast table.

(We also do science at the breakfast table.  Exhibit 1A.

Farmerboy's catapults.  But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.)

Mostly I either wasn't organized enough or available enough to do much "living math" this year, so we used workbooks in a fairly relaxed manner.  Pop is extremely fond of math (my only one, really, although his twin brother likes math pretty well, too) and ran through the arithmetic part of MCP Math K fairly quickly.  Not the writing numbers part.  Writing numbers is part of math but it is not really math; it is more about fine motor skills, and both twins have trouble with fine motor skills.  My biggest beef with early math curricula is that they are mostly about writing numbers, which is frustrating as heck to a kid who can use patterns to add three numbers in his head but can't figure out how to hold a pencil so that he can draw a straight line.  That's why, in the early years, I only use math workbooks in a voluntary fashion.  I much prefer a Montessori approach to math, but most of my Montessori materials are still out in the garage, in boxes. 

In any case, both twins were happy to use MCP Math K and some of the Kumon workbooks on their own terms.  They also pounced on the Flashmaster.  We used Usborne First Numbers and a 100 chart occasionally, and every once in a while checked out a math-related title from the library. (Mummy Math: An Adventure in Geometry was a big hit.)  I am not sure this was enough math for Pop, but I hope to do a better job next year.

Farmerboy, in Grade 2, used Seton's Mathematics 2 for Young Catholics, which is a heck of a lot of drill if you use all of it, but we didn't.  Since we were really focusing on reading with him this year, and since it was a year full of a fair amount of chaos, math sort of slipped through the cracks at times.  I am not terribly worried about it, because in my experience it's relatively simple to catch up by using Saxon 5/4 in 4th grade. 

Science

(See Exhibit 1A above.)

My mom is an engineer.  Every year she participates in a program designed by the schools to foster an interest in science and math in middle school girls.  Every year she builds something with the girls, and my kids benefit from the leftovers.  This year they built spoon catapults.  Spoon catapults are the sort of things that fire the imaginations of technically-inclined 7 year old boys.  Farmerboy has built a number of spoon catapults on his own using various materials.  The one you see above was constructed using a collage tray, a plastic spoon, a screw, a Playmobil basket, a wooden bead, and generous amounts of masking tape.  It will fling various small objects a surprising distance at high velocities. 

The other catapult on the table in the picture is his birthday present, also from my mom.  It will also hurl small projectiles with surprising force.  And she gave him the K'nex Bridges kit.

Do you sense a theme here?

Science is Farmerboy's "thing".  In addition to building catapults and really intricate bomb release mechanisms on Lego starships of his own design, Farmerboy also worked independently on experiments from the Thames & Kosmos Little Labs Stepping into Science kit and the Thames and Kosmos Little Labs Intro To Engineering set. These kits are mostly very good for the age range suggested (5-7), with a couple of caveats.  Kids (ok, boys) tend to be very excited about doing the activities and when they see pictures of scissors on cardboard figures (such as space shuttles), they will assume they know what to cut.  But they might be wrong.  Before you start on the kits, it is probably a good idea to enforce a rule about reading the directions first.  Otherwise, you may end up with an unusable space shuttle.  Our engineering kit was also missing a crucial piece for the crane, but that turned out to be a problem-solving opportunity in disguise; I can't remember what Farmerboy ended up using to replace it, but it was pretty creative and worked well, too.

Five year olds will need more supervision than a seven year old. 

We also took some field trips with Farmerboy in mind.  Farmerboy loves earth science.  In late April we drove out to Coon Creek Science Center, about 2 1/2 hours away from us in rural west Tennessee, for their annual member's day.  The really cool thing about the Coon Creek site is that all the "fossils" at the site are not really fossilized; that is, the shells were never replaced by minerals (in other words, rock).  The shells, therefore, are still shell, just 70 million years old.  The museum staff digs some test pits and makes the clumps of mud available to members who attend.  It's up to you to excavate the fossils from the clumps of mud.  You get to keep whatever you find.  It's a devilishly hard thing to keep the shells from breaking, but we did end up with some nice specimens that now grace the windowsills in our dining/school area.

And, of course, there was Meteorite Men.  Farmerboy's Christmas present?  A metal detector.

Nature Study

(He's looking at turtles.)

Katydid would tell you that nature study is science, and of course she would be right, but I'm following the homeschool mom convention here and separating the two areas.  Nature study at our house tends to be informal, but also an integral part of our daily lives.  To my children, nature study is a lot like eating.  It's something you do every day, and you would never capitalize it and compartmentalize it, as in, "For our Eating Curriculum this year, we had Pizza, Eggplant Parmesan, and Snickerdoodles."  On the other hand, sometimes I do have Ideas, and I try them out on my kids.  This year one of my Ideas was to use One Small Square books in a relaxed way to investigate our new yard.  We went through One Small Square: Backyard and One Small Square: Woods. That was about the extent of formal nature study.  Informally, the subject of the year was ANTS ... because we have A LOT of them.

The twins also discovered Nature.  Their favorite episodes have been Bears of the Last Frontier, all about bears in Alaska.

Geography

I had a really nice geography curriculum all charted out last summer before we moved, but with all the chaos of C-section complications and moving two months early, it proved to be somewhat ambitious.  I had thought that we could at least read some books about each of the states that we drove through from New York to Mississippi, but I didn't have the money to buy the books at the time and getting anything from our local library in New York proved impossible in the month before our move.  So we read just a few books from the titles I had written down, mainly focusing on Tennessee and Mississippi: Minn of the Mississippi (still need to finish this one); The Buffalo Knife ;  1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi: A Mississippi Numbers Book ; and M Is For Magnolia: A Mississippi Alphabet Book .  The kids also enjoyed The Scrambled States of America Talent Show, which we checked out of our library here in Mississippi in book-plus-CD format.

And then we had MAPS -- a lot of them -- when I unconvered the map container out in the garage. (It was just like Christmas.)  Recently I was reorganizing our school area... er, kitchen... and I took a couple of pictures.  In this one, you can see our large container of maps where it sits on top of the Montessori puzzle map cabinet.  (I hadn't straightened the bottom shelf when I took the picture, but it holds a markable map and some children's atlases most of the time.)  Most of the maps are from Highlights Which Way USA, which we subscribed to when Gareth and Katydid were little, but we also throw real maps from our travels in there.  This spring when the Mississippi suffered its historic flooding, we drove over the bridge to Arkansas to see it  (My camera wasn't working at the time, but I think you would have to have known what it looked like before it was underwater in order to appreciate the vast extent of the flooding.)  This fired the boys' imagination, especially about Arkansas, so we had a run on Arkansas maps for a while. 

History

The boys seemed to be more interested in geography this year, so mostly history came from the You Wouldn't Want to Be series.  (What can I say, I have boys.)  These are not the greatest books in the world, but they are very boy friendly.   

Faith

Mostly, we just tried to live our faith this year (with varying levels of success.) Books I did use -- Manner's in God's House and True Stories for First Communicants.

 

 

 

 

 

K-2 Year in Review: Language Arts

Note: I apologize for the state of my sidebar! The typepad design editor has not been working for me very often.  Sometimes my content disappears, sometimes it turns up again, and it never really goes where I put it.  

I don't have to turn in any end-of-the-year paperwork to the state this year, but I thought I would like a wrap-up anyway.  Nothing we did was revolutionary -- mostly it was just trying to hang on -- but maybe somebody needs to see what it means to just hang on in the early years.  Lately it seems that I have heard many newish homeschoolers with young kids really stressing out about first and second grade (or kindergarten) curricula and I always want to tell them to relax. 

So, anyway, this is a review of what I can remember that we did.  I'm combining my 7 and 5 year olds because they mostly did things together.  Technically my five year olds were not in kindergarten because their birthdays come in October, but it didn't seem to make a difference to them.   I decided to declare our year over about a week ago, and we'll start back up in July when it gets hot.  Although we did about as well as we could this year, considering, I am hoping that next year is better, and really thinking hard about homeschooling styles, balance, and this marathon that is raising (and homeschooling) a large family.

Phonics

Somehow my five year old twins (and my three year old, too) learned all their letters and letter sounds this year.  The twins and I occasionally sat down with  Phonics Pathways  (known in our house as The Big Book of Letters) for formal reading lessons, but mostly -- I am somewhat embarassed to say -- they learned these things from Starfall.  I felt a little guilty about this for a while, and then I thought, why not just be happy it was so painless.  The twins are blending, doing a little reading in McGuffey and Bob books, and Chipmunk is spelling STOP signs.  Pop is upset that he cannot yet read Star Wars chapter books.  They seem to get that words in books can actually be read, and that they ought to be able to apply the skills they're learning to books they want to read, or coupons, or whatever.  My second grader, on the other hand, is still convinced that letters are meaningless squiggles only designed to give him a hard time. We made it through long vowel sounds this year, and we have been using Phonics Pathways (and Modern Curriculum Press Phonics A ) methodically. In fact, I think a little too methodically; in April I became concerned that "reading" had seemed only to become a school subject for him, so I ditched the texts and just asked him to read to me from our large collection of early readers (Gareth was eight and a half when reading finally clicked for him, so I have amassed quite a few).  He chose to read from our sets of Brand New Readers, which are not strictly phonetic little books, but the stories are funny and Katydid loved them, too.  They're short enough and repetitive enough to give him a sense of accomplishment, which he needs at this point.

Handwriting

Pip and Pop used Handwriting Without Tears.  Sort of.  Both have problems with fine motor skills, and neither has the concept of "just do one page".  Or "wait and let's use this neat little chalkboard".  This was not something I required, just something I had on the shelf for them to do when they wanted.

Farmerboy (grade 2) has beautiful handwriting, especially for a leftie, and completed Copybook I from Memoria Press.  When I say "completed", I mean he did all the writing.  This child does not like to illustrate his work, so we just left all the "draw a picture here" pages blank.

Narration

I'm including this as a topic because I know people are interested in it, and I tried to do it more formally this year with Farmerboy.  I have to tell you, narration in my house is a little exhausting.  As soon as it becomes a formal process, no one wants to tell me anything.  If I am sneaky - or if we have a genuine discussion - my kids demonstrate excellent comprehension. (Educationese for: they like to talk about books.)  If I ask directly for someone to narrate or retell immediately after we read, I am usually met with rolling eyes.  I understand that doing formal narration eases kids into writing later on, but the energy required to sustain the process is often something I just don't have.  On the other hand, I know my kids pick things up just from listening to books and talking about them; the other day I sat down with Pip to read Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms and after I had read the first page, he said, "But what's the problem?  Books usually have a problem."

Yep, kiddo, a story without conflict would be boring.  (And Fletcher does actually run into a "problem", but not on the first page.)

Fairy Tales and Folk Stories

I stuck with something simple this year, and that was a good thing.  For some reason I had a really hard time keeping a regular read-aloud time, even for the little ones.  I did not write this plan down; I did not decide ahead of time which stories or books I would read; I just decided that this year I would try to read the younger kids more fairy tales.  There are many, many lovely picture books illustrating single fairy and folk tales, many of which we own, but we stuck primarily to collections this year. (The boys loved the Tiger and Rabbit stories in this collection.)

(Tried to narrate from this one.)

(Lots of short stories, with wonderful illustrations.)

(Farmerboy retold these tales for days afterward.  I began to think that Paul Bunyan was a relative.)

 

There were more read-alouds and books on audio -- including marathons of Redwall books -- but nothing terribly organized.  In fact, I think Ill remember this year primarily as "The Year of Biggles, Redwall, and Harry Potter."

I meant to do the whole year in review all at once, but at this rate its going to take me until 2012! Sheesh!  Cross your fingers and maybe I'll get to Science, Math, and History before the next presidential election!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Learning

March is nearly over, and I'm not done writing my math post yet.  I started it... and then I spent a day throwing up.  Which is how one of my children feels about math, actually.  I recently found an old homeschool journal in which I wrote about this child: "I just want him to learn to like to read, to think math isn't "boring", and to write using real letters instead of made up ones." 

"I guess we got 2 out of 3," I told him.

"No, I still write using made up letters," he said.

Inspired by Tolkein, he invents alphabets these days.  I'm pretty sure most of the story he's writing is in English, though.

I was going to call this an "in review" post, but then I wasn't sure if you could call what we've been doing "school"... maybe a lot of unschool.  Except not totally unschool either, because there was math and it was "boring". So there was learning, but only a fraction was orchestrated by me.

Maybe that's as it should be.  Because it's nice to see that some of your ideas -- written many years ago by a much less experienced you -- have borne fruit, and your kids really do like to read, and to learn, and can even write using real letters when they need to.

I still don't know how to make math not boring, but I'm working on it.  Maybe next year.  Anyway, one thing I've learned since I wrote that old journal is that not all learning has to be exciting.

So, some March highlights.

Katydid has had the camera out quite a bit lately, documenting spring.  Coming up on her agenda: an "azaela festival", in our shady backyard area the kids have dubbed Azaela Garden.

Some other photos I found on the camera:

Carolina chickadee, taking off...

Moonrise.

Of course, then I also find pictures like this:

I'm not sure who took this photo.  I think it was from the day I was sick.

(Don't worry.  No preschoolers were harmed in the making of this photo.  They have been warned not to do it again, though.)

Katydid is looking forward to the new photography series on the Weather Channel featuring photographer Peter Lik.  Over the weekend we watched a recorded NOVA about E.O. Wilson called Lord of the Ants, which she also enjoyed, particularly (I think) the sections about Wilson as a boy naturalist.  I think that Andy and I enjoyed it even more, though, because, as the parents of children who spend a lot of time mucking around in the woods and yard with ants and other creatures, it was nice to see the where that sort of learning can end up, and not, you know, as a deadbeat living in your parents' basement.

Hmmm.

Anyway, lots of ants and insects around here lately (and by lots of ants, I mean, really, billions) and the little boys have had a good time catching them using nearly every single one of my Mason jars. Farmerboy has enjoyed setting up food experiments for his ants.  I'm hoping to get a decent schedule going for the first time all year (in spite of stomach viruses and baseball season) and am trying to read to the younger boys while they eat their breakfast.  We've just started Insect Life from the Eyes and No Eyes series and Among the Meadow People.  

In addition to insects, there are still dinosaurs.  Andy and I have been putting up some new Ikea bookcases in the hopes of finally unpacking the garage, and in one of the boxes I found an old dinosaur skull kit that Gareth had built a few years ago but forgotten or gotten frustrated with.  He popped the rest of it together and Farmerboy spent a couple of afternoons applying clay:

 

He even added taste buds to the tongue with a clay tool.

Farmerboy's favorite TV show these days is Meteorite Men, so in addition to his dinosaur construction, he has also been throwing rocks in the front yard to test various theories about craters, strewn fields, etc.  So now we have a rule: Before any meteorite experiment, you have to yell "CLEAR!"

This isn't all we've been up to -- the little boys have become addicted to starfall (which now has a sister site with math, some of which you can only access with a subscription), Farmerboy is still struggling slowly through reading, and Gareth has begun working with his Greek tutor -- but it's where I'm going to have to stop.  Something I'm learning -- how to feed everyone around all the baseball practices!

 

 

 

 

Week(s) in Review: 8th/9th grade

I have really fallen off the wagon as far as recordkeeping is concerned.  December and January passed by in a blur of colds and teething baby.  February promises more of the same, I'm afraid, but I'm hoping to get my act together somewhat.  As with our learning life this year, I'm not looking for perfect, just "good enough".

Gareth: 8th/9th grade

Faith

Gareth's been using Seton's Confirmation Prep, in addition to our family time with the Baltimore Catechism (No. 2) and the CCC. 

Math

We had been stuck in chapter 4 of Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra for almost two months.  (The holidays didn't help.)  Chapter 4 is one giant word problem.  It is really, really, really hard.  It is a whole chapter full of the kind of problems that Jacobs in Elementary Algebra gives as "Set IV" (meaning: if you're a math whiz, you might want to try this, but otherwise don't worry about it) and divides into two or more chapters.  We battled to the end with me wondering how the heck I was going to give him a grade for something I suspected was far more difficult than your average algebra book, and then I pulled out Jacobs.  My suspicions were confirmed, as Gareth is whizzing through Jacobs chapter 5 with very little help.  So now my problem is: do we continue to try to struggle through Fred, going to Jacobs for explanation and review, and in essence, completing two algebra textbooks for Algebra I?  Or do we just switch back to Jacobs?  The cartoons may be funny, but Gareth's right; the problems are much more interesting in Fred.  They're just exponentially harder.

On the bright side, I think Gareth will have a much better understanding of algebra when he's done than I ever did, and I took honors classes.  (As a bonus, I know that I will also understand algebra much better, too!)

Languages

Still using First Form Latin.  But we've also managed to find a tutor to help Gareth with ancient Greek.  Andy sent an email to the classics department at the local liberal arts college, and the end result will be that beginning next week, Gareth will meet with a junior once a week at Andy's office.   

Language Arts

I'm trying to give Gareth a writing topic or two a week, and it seems to be working fairly well.  These writing assignments usually have to do with his reading in science and history, and I generally let him choose from a list.  So far he's done short papers on plate tectonics, the president's State of the Union address, and the Mongol invasion, and some creative writing about the Crusades.  That's in addition to his writing on his novel.  

He's also working in Grammar of Poetry (his choice), slogging through diagramming with Our Mother Tongue, and we have fallen off the wagon with Spelling Wisdom. 

Earth Science/Physical Science:

Gareth finished up Rocket Boys , Homer Hickam's memoir which inspired the excellent movie October Sky (which we also watched -- or tried to watch anyway, as the DVR cut off the end.)  In discussions we focused more on the science of building rockets than on literary themes... but really, I think this was just a good read.  

After he finished Rocket Boys, he picked up Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and started reading again where he'd left off.

He's also read many magazine articles over the past few weeks dealing with science -- from National Geographic, Smithsonian, Astronomy, and Natural History (which I would link you to except that my mouse has gone haywire) -- not assigned, just strewn.  And, as ever, television series remain a pillar of science learning around here: currently, Mutant Planet, How the Earth Was Made, The Universe, and NOVA and NOVA Science: Now! .   (Farmerboy and Katydid also like Meteorite Men, but Gareth thinks it's boring.)

Oh, and a couple of weeks ago he earned the Boy Scount Engineering merit badge.

History

Not too much reading here, as science has been more of a focus.  He's meandering through medieval Japan and China right now, The Story of Ancient China and China's Later Dynasties, as well as The 47 Ronin Story (Tuttle Classics) (I think).  He has a few books about Japan and the samurai in his basket, but I think he's been more focused on China lately.   

Art

We're not pursing art in a terribly organized fashion, but Gareth has been messing around with Artistic Pursuits (High School) and a "how to draw manga" book we picked up at Hobby Lobby the other day.  He just has to visit an art museum to get his Art merit badge.

  

K-2 and Early Learning: November 1-7

This week was a "hither and thither" sort of week... heavy on the "thithering".  Andy took off on All Saints Day so we could run moving-related errands; Katydid had her once a month choir practice for her once a month choir (which, unfortunately, she will not be able to attend because so many of us are sick); we spent Thursday visiting gyms to find a good preschool gymnastics program; and the little boys, pumped up on Halloween candy and irritated by a virus most of the week, did their share of "thithering", too.  In other words -- it was a light week academically.  

While we were driving around we listened to Hotel for Dogs, by Lois Duncan.  We haven't seen the movie, but the book is good.  I did my fair share of indentifying with Andi Walker, the 10 year old main character. 

Because I apparently have SO MUCH to talk about for a "light week" (ahem), I'm going to break my usual weekly review post into two.  This one will focus on Farmerboy and the twins, who are roughly 2nd grade and kindergartenish, respectively.

Art and Nature Study:

I forgot to mention last week that we started a family nature journal.  It's not an original idea, but I can't remember where I first heard about it.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to encourage the little boys in some nature drawing and possibly to encourage my 14 year old as well.  (Katydid has her own nature journal in which she draws frequently.)  Our first project was leaf rubbings:

(Sorry about the glare from the page protector.) 

We're just using a 3-ring binder.  Katydid and Farmerboy made a cover for it and then led all the little boys on a nature walk around the yard.  They drew what they found and filed the pictures in the binder. 

This week's "excursion" (hands-on science in the yard, basically) was a dig initiated by Farmerboy, who wanted to see if any rocks could be found at all.  When it was so dry, the dirt was as hard as rock, but with our rain this week, it softened enough to take a shovel.  Unfortunately, no rocks were discovered, but a long, rotting board was, and also signs that a raccoon has taken up residence in the barn.  The raccoon will have to be evicted somehow; one of our jobs this winter is to convert one of the big stalls on the outside of the barn into a chicken coop.  Raccoons are bad for chickens.

By Sunday afternoon, the trench had become an entire river system, complete with tributaries, mountains, volcanoes, bluffs, forts, and civilizations.  Chipmunk and Pop had apparently been assigned the titles of "Erosion." 

 

Pip worked hard coloring some bird notebooking pages.  He has become very meticulous about his nature coloring pages, prefering to work from actual photos in order to get the colors right.  In order to color his blue hen chicken (the state bird of Delaware), we had to round up Storey's Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds, which has excellent color photos of all the breeds it references.  (And, really, if you are at all interested in raising poultry, you need this book.  Read it alongside the poultry catalogs, which is what we're doing right now.)

Math

Farmerboy and the twins have also been learning to tell time for a while now.  Farmerboy started out last spring with a few pages in Seton's Math 1 for Young Catholics, but math workbooks usually give telling time and the concepts behind it short shrift.  Time (like most mathematical concepts) is a concept best dealt with in a practical, hands-on manner anyway, but the kids do like practicing their time-telling skills on paper.  This is where typical math workbooks can become frustrating, because once you've done a page or two of clockfaces, you've exhausted the workbook's fund of time-telling practice.  So this is what we do:

Montessori clock cards :  These are not the same cards I have, I don't think, because I printed mine from somewhere I can't remember back when Katydid was learning to tell time.  But Lori's materials are top-notch, and I'm fairly certain this set is more comprehensive than the one I have been using.  The twins are working on telling time to the hour; Farmerboy is struggling a little bit remembering :15 and :45, but he's getting there.

Judy Clock:  Again, the teaching clock(s) I actually own are not the same.  I bought them (I bought two of them, one for Gareth and one for Katydid, back when there were only two kids to buy for) at an amazing teacher supply/educational bookstore we used to frequent when we lived in the St. Louis area.  (The best thing about the store was that it had a large play area in the back.)  Our clocks are not as fancy, but I actually like them better because they have the corresponding minutes printed beside the big numbers to help kids learn to tell time in 5 minute intervals.  The boys use these a lot, for fun.  They sit on the couch turning the hands and say, "It's 7 o'clock!  It's 3 o'clock in the morning! It's 12 o'clock now!"

Clock Stamps: The boys are not as keen on these as Katydid was, but they do use them occasionally.

Books:  Well, you knew there had to be books, right?  Two of our favorites: Telling Time with Big Mama Cat and Little Rabbits' First Time Book (Little Rabbit Books).   Mama Cat has been read with so much enthusiasm over the years that the hands on the clock were torn off, so it is in need of being replaced.  Little Rabbits is one of Chipmunk's favorite books at the moment.  A book I found at the library this week that shows some promise is All in One Hour.  It's illustrated with colorful cut-paper collages and digital clocks timing a chain of events set off by a cat chasing a mouse in the early morning.  (Another book of which I have fond memories is Gail Gibbons' Clocks and how they go, which I read over and over and over and OVER to Gareth when he was about 4 years old.)

Another opportunity for time-telling practice is letting me know when it's 4:00 and time for computer/Wii time. ;-)

Farmerboy is also working on adding and subtracting two digit numbers in Seton's Math 2 for Catholics.  This is work he enjoys doing, but he gets horribly frustrated if anyone talks while he's doing it.  Finding him quiet corners in which to work has been a challenge.  Also, this is another instance where kids really need some concrete, hands-on work, but our base 10 blocks were all packed up.  I finally managed to unpack them this weekend and am hoping to introduce Farmerboy to "trading up" (and hopefully the snake game, too).

And the twins spent a few hours on Sunday morning before Mass inventing their own games using Rummy Roots card decks and other board games.

Reading

Because Farmerboy was sick much of the week (including a three day headache), he didn't do too much reading, which is more difficult for him than math.  But he did read most of a picture book to me, Drat That Fat Cat!, which I found at the library.  This is a really excellent book for young readers -- SO much more intelligent and funny than most phonetic readers, and with a vocabulary mostly based on short vowel words.  I had to interject some help here and there (eg.  as with "This is an outrage!"), but Farmerboy could read a lot of it on his own.  I think that struggling readers often think they are doomed to read short, meaningless books about "nags", "cats", and "hams" for a long time, so I was happy to be able to provide Farmerboy with something different.  Glasses certainly improved his reading, but we are still going slowly.  This week has been the first I have heard him try to read words in the books HE likes to look at, or on the closed captioning on the TV.

Pip and Pop are anxious to try out their fledgeling reading skills, too, and are just at the "starting to blend" stage.  Pip in particular demands long lessons using Phonics Pathways, and this week I helped him along through his first book: a short K-4 phonetic text from Abeka I have had sitting in our container of readers (I keep sets of early phonics readers each to their own ziploc bag in a tall Rubbermaid container) for... a really long time.  Gareth and Katydid never picked them up, but they seem to be just right for the twins at this stage. 

 

 

 

 

 

Week in Review: October 25-31

It's been a long time since I've done a real week in review.  I keep meaning to do a summary of our whole term (quarter, whatever you want to call it) along with my somewhat nebulous plans for the future, but weeks pass and there is no giant review posted on my blog.  So I am just going to try to jump in with one week.  This in itself may be difficult, as at this very moment one of my five year olds and my three year old are running in and out of the house filling up containers (and a squirt gun) with water to pour on our multitude of swarming, stinging ant nests.  I cannot think that this is a good idea, but we have had the "stay away from ants" discussion ad nauseum and they have even been stung before, but they are boys.  'Nuff said.

So... what did we do this week?

Well, the weather made a bit of a statement.  We had our first trial run tornado warning on Tuesday morning.  The historic Midwestern storm arrived at our house just as I was leaving to bring the baby to the doctor for a well-child visit.

Katydid took a picture of the approaching front, about twenty minutes before the storm arrived and the sirens went off.

I'm not sure if there was ever a tornado actually spotted, but the rotation passed several miles south of us.  Andy worked from home in the morning so I wouldn't have to haul all 7 kids to the doctor's office (which turned out to be a blessing, since I waited for an hour and a half in a small, windowless waiting room much like a tornado shelter), and he and the kids dragged all of the stuff out of the wide but narrow hall closet in preparation for riding out the storm.  Katydid and Gareth remember tornado warnings from living in St. Louis, but we had a basement there.  One of the first things I did after we moved in here was to think about where we would go in case of tornado.  (I have a "thing" about tornadoes.  Really, I'm much better now.)  Due to the quirky nature of our floor plan, we have no interior rooms in this house.  We have two places to go: a long, skinny cedar closet in the hallway, and Katydid's walk-in-ish closet (which is piled high with craft stuff... etc., etc.)  So I am just praying that we have no actual tornadoes!

On the same day, we received via UPS the highlight of Farmerboy's week...

A couple of rock collections!

The Deluxe Introductory Earth Science Collection at Home Science Tools is about $25 off right now.  Their Stratigraphic Fossil Collection is about $20 off.  I don't know why we haven't collected any formal rock collections until now, considering the high levels of interest I and all the kids have had in the subject.  What pushed me over the edge this time were the discussions Gareth and I have had recently about high school earth science.  Because Gareth was more interested in history than science last spring and summer, I had planned for him to do a survey course based on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.  I had planned for this to be roughly equivalent this year to a course in physical science.  But when we were unpacking, Gareth discovered The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery and started reading it.  The Eternal Frontier is a history of the North American continent beginning with the meteor strike 65 million years ago.  He left off that book around 1492 and picked up The Future Eaters, which takes the same approach to Australia and its surrounding lands.  (He's reading The Future Eaters right now.)  So we started talking about paleontology again, and upshot of that is we are now planning to cover the four traditional areas of high school earth science: Geology (including paleontology, unless we get SO much paleo by the end of high school that it can be broken out as its own course); Oceanography; Astronomy; and Atmospheric Science.  More details to follow (hopefully). 

I read the boys a Let's Read and Find Out science book, Let's Go Rock Collecting!  and we found more rock and fossil and dinosaur books when we went to the library.  Farmerboy and Katydid also set up an experiment to grow salt crystals up a string.

Halloween/Fall picture books read this week:

 

Other Picture Books:

 

School Books for K-2:

• Reading lessons from Phonics Pathways
• Narrations from Aesop's Fables (Farmerboy, grade 2)
• Read aloud from One Small Square: Backyard

Little Boys:

I bought a whole bunch of Kumon books for the boys to use independently.  The Mazes and Cutting books were big hits. Farmerboy then asked me to order a Mazes book for him, too, so I got him the Around the World mazes book.  Some of those are really hard!  

I'm actually quite happy to see them working with these mazes so much, given our past history with vision and occupational therapy.

Read-Alouds (Chapter Books):

• The Book of Saints and Heroes
  
• Mattimeo and The Bellmaker, Redwall books by Brian Jacques (Farmerboy and the twins)
• Finding the First T. Rex (ch. 1, Farmerboy)

Katydid:

• Finished Sun Faster, Sun Slower and Greek Myths
• Started A Wonderbook for Boys and Girls (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Outlaws of Ravenhurst
• Made a walking stick and sewed a fabric bag
• Continued work on her tropical birds notebook
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom

Gareth:

• Read and narrated from Glory Of Christendom: History Of Christendom Vol 3 (History of Christendom Series ; Vol. III) , The Future Eaters, and The Golden Thread: A Novel About St. Ignatius Loyola 
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom
• About halfway through the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum

(I'm not saying anything about the dailies here: math, Latin, grammar, copywork for Farmerboy. I do hope to make some general "curriculum" posts, though.)

And, of course, there was Halloween and the All Saints Day party.

 

 

 

 

Month in Review: August into September

What we did was mostly move 1000 miles. 

In a van that looked like this.

From this place...

To this place...

(Some of us are getting back to normal.  As you can see.)

Unpacking has taken up the bulk of the past few weeks.  But we've also been painting...

(When I say "we", I mean Andy, Katydid, Gareth, and Grandma.  My only contribution was to make friends at the Sherwin Williams store.)

Katydid also painted two small bookcases, all by herself.  One of them moved into the bay window in the dining area, otherwise known as "where we do school".  (Since we also eat there AND since it's part  of the kitchen, it really can't be called a school room.)

Here's a before picture:

(No Photoshop on this computer and the powercord to my laptop remains MIA, so I have to apologize for the lack of editing here.)

This space is considerably fuller now, but still not organized enough to merit an "after" picture.  More like a "middle" picture.  We've had to rethink our plans for several of the spaces in the house, actually.  First there was the problem of where to put everybody to sleep.  (Thought we had that one solved, but one of the kids who was upstairs has migrated downstairs again and is sleeping on a sleeping bag.)  Then we had to figure out what to do with the giant room upstairs in the finished attic.  Should we make it a school room or a play room?  Since it was off the beaten path and the twins need somewhere to run and around like lunatics roughly thirty seconds after they open their eyes in the morning, we opted for play room.  Thus, the school/dining area you see in the "before" picture.

Really, what I had wanted to do was make our front room (the room being painted yellow in the picture toward the top) into a school room.  But several people gave me odd looks when I voiced this opinion, as it is supposed to be our living room.  But then we discovered that we couldn't hook up satellite to a TV downstairs because whoever the drunk insane handy person was who designed my kitchen also put all the wires upstairs underneath the floor, so the old cable wires (of which we must 500, considering the number of cable outlets in EVERY SINGLE ROOM) could not be changed for new ones without tearing up the floor.  Therefore, the TV went upstairs in the playroom, and the front room was (or is being) turned into a "library".

This still leaves me with the problem that all the Legos are upstairs to get them away from the baby, but now so is the TV, so where do we put the Legos? 

(If you have many boys, you will recognize this as a SERIOUS problem.)

Anyway, it looks like a box factory exploded downstairs and I still haven't figured out my email address or memorized my phone number, but we have started school again after a fashion (mostly in self-defense, as the twins were driving me nutty), and I will be doing a wrap-up of our first two weeks the next time I am allowed 15 minutes on the computer.  For now I just want to post some of Katydid's bird pictures, as figuring out our bird population was a major part of our first weeks here.

We had a pair of Mississippi kites, but I think they have migrated away now.

We have had many hummingbirds migrate through, too, including one Katydid couldn't identify.  But I don't think I've downloaded that picture yet.

And we had a pair of bluebirds nesting in our mailbox.  Their three babies have fledged now.

(We couldn't get a good picture of the babies because we didn't want to scare them with the flash.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Month in Review: July into August

July was, to put it mildly, a mess.  A few bright spots, though: the baby is very sweet and good-natured and mostly sleeps MUCH better than his siblings did at this age (I have decided to call him Leo for blog purposes, since his blond hair, complexion, and place in the mob of little boys reminded me a little of a lion cub); my birthday was nice; we celebrated our 16th anniversary; and the kids have mainly kept themselves busy.  Before I forget, I wanted to write down some of the more schooly stuff, in a place where I won't forget it, lose it, or inadvertently pack it in a box.  (Actually, I've just put my record book in a tote bag which I will bring with me in the van, but it's set up in weekly fashion and I am just making a big ole lumped together list right now.)

Let me be quick to note that nothing on this list was formally planned or executed by me.  Some of it was informally executed by me, meaning that when I sat down to nurse and turned on the TV, I found something interesting for the kids to watch, or when Chipmunk asked me to read Thomas the Tank Engine ABC's I complied, or when one of the twins asked me what 3+2 was, I helped him figure it out.  But none of this happened because I had it written down on paper.  After 9 years of "official" homeschooling (more or less), this is just sort of our lifestyle.

Didn't want anyone to picture me cheerfully hustling kids through novels and physics whilst nursing a newborn, packing boxes, and recovering from childbirth, an infected incision, and wicked allergies.

Anyway...

What I know the kids were reading

Gareth: (lots of science fiction and fantasy)

• Foundation, Isaac Asimov (finished)
• Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula LeGuin (finished)
• Serpent's Reach, CJ Cherryh (finished)
• The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
• Ballad of the White Horse, GK Chesteron (still reading)
• Njall's Saga, (Icelandic saga, still reading)
• Just in Case (emergency preparedness, because I was reading it and it was sitting on the couch)
• a book about Robert the Bruce (still reading)
• the Iliad and Companion to the Iliad, keyed to the Lattimore translation... I think the one we have is by Fitzgerald, though (still reading)
• Patriot Witch, CC Finlay... otherwise known as my friend Charlie :-).  Not a YA book, this is written for adults, but appropriate for teens if they can handle a bit of gross zombie description. (Gareth didn't think it was too bad.)  Proctor Brown is a "witch" and an American patriot fighting in the Revolutionary War.  Magic here is based on faith in God and prayer (the good side), fighting against sorcery (the bad side), which is being used by the British (ahem) against the Americans.  I won't tell you who fired the first shot at Lexington, but it's a fun, fast read. 
• The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkein (still reading)
• "For the first time ever, scientists watch electrons moving in real time"

Katydid:

• The Gift of Music: Great Composers and their Influence, Jane Stuart Smith, Betty Carlson (thanks, Jen!)
• Rascal, Sterling North
• The Trojan War, Olivia Coolidge
• various issues of Birds and Blooms, Nature's Garden

I know this child has read more books than this!!!  Or maybe she's just been knitting when she would normally have been reading. Hmmm...

Farmerboy (RA and audio):

We actually got some interesting news about Farmerboy's reading this week.  Turns out that he can't focus and he sees double.  You'd think a child would tell you about this when he was trying to learn to read, wouldn't you?  At least he told our eye doctor!!

• Mattimeo, Brian Jacques (RA by Daddy)
• Mossflower, audio
• Otto of the Silver Hand, Howard Pyle (audio) -- Farmerboy and I had an interesting discussion about this book.

Little Boys (picture books):

• The Pirate Cruncher, multiple times (cute and funny book, which everyone has enjoyed)
• Richard Scarry's First Word Book
• The Lion Bedtime Storyteller Book (special favorites are the Tiger and Rabbit stories)
• What's Bigger than a Blue Whale?
• assorted DK books about robots
• a Marvel create-your-own-story book with cardboard flaps that allow you to give different superheroes and villains different heads, bodies, etc.  I have no idea how we came to own this book as it contains grammatical errors that make me cringe, but the boys, of course, love it.  I believe their latest adventure involved a discussion of Magneto's underwear (not pictured, of course).

What we were watching

• NOVA: Who Killed the Red Baron? 
• NOVA: Missing in MiG Alley
• Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman (episodes on how the universe began and what the universe is made of, including particle physics, mainly me and G)
• The Universe: Seven Wonders of the Solar System
• History Channel episode on Lord of the Rings (me, G, and K -- this one was pretty good and prompted G to work on revising his epic poem and K to begin a story where all the characters have "meaningful" names... lots of excitement from G as he recognized the parallels to Beowulf and the Norse sagas)
• In Search of Ancient Ireland (PBS) (G)

What the kids have been doing:

• Katydid: knitting and weaving and taking wildlife photos.  She also learned to fry eggs.
• Farmerboy helped Andy fix the toilet and figured out how it worked on his own
• Lots of Lego building
• G worked on his epic poem
• Lots of adding by the twins
• Chipmunk and the twins learning that there is such a thing as *too much love* give to a baby.