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.

 

 

 

 

 

The Complete Home Learning Source Book

This week I had the occasion to dig this book out of the back corner of one of my shelves, where it should not be because it is so useful.  The Complete Home Learning Source Book by Rebecca Rupp is an older book, but fortunately still in print.  How I wish for a revision!  But a revision of this mammoth book would be a mammoth undertaking, I'm sure.

I like this book for many reasons -- and not only for the lists of resources (books, games, science kits) that cover every subject imaginable.  (As the subtitle reads, "every subject from arithmetic to zoology".)  Because the book is now about 12 years old, many of the resources have gone out of print or production.  But the lists are still useful as a place to start, particularly if you're hunting through your library, used book stores, or garage sales.  Each listing is accompanied by a brief review written in Rupp's friendly, enthusiastic, and humorous style.

And that's really what I like most about the book.  I like that it's not just a listing of resources, but a giant book that you can also read cover to cover.  Rebecca Rupp's reviews are funny and helpful, as she has actually used many of the resources with her three boys.  (Another reason to like this book is its boy-friendliness.  Lots of explosive, slimy science kits.  Lots of hands-on suggestions.)  As an introduction to each new subject, she also includes excerpts from her homeschool journals... which, to me, as a beginning homeschooler way back when, were probably even more valuable than the resource listings.  Rupp and her boys (who are now all grown, I'm sure) pursued an interest-led/unit study/project-ish sort of learning in their home, and reading her journal excerpts I always think that I want to be her when I grow up.  I want to make home-made workbooks for projects that involve trying to lift eggshells by heating the air beneath them like the ancient Chinese supposedly did 2000 years ago and use Jello to demonstrate optics principles and rig pulleys from my living room ceiling beams (I don't have any) for physics experiments.  I want to celebrate Tycho Brahe's birthday with aluminum foil noses and sword duels. 

Actually, what I think I want is to have done school at Rebecca Rupp's house.

So this book is somewhat nostalgic for me.  It was one of the very first books I ever read about homeschooling after we pulled Gareth out of preschool, because it sat on the shelf somewhat near The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom, which was the first book about homeschooling that caught my eye, and the book that convinced me that even I (disorganized me) could homeschool my children.  I remember having just been reading some of Rebecca Rupp's journal entries when a neighbor called me to try to convince me that I'd need to buy a packaged curriculum if I was going to homeschool Gareth and that it would be hard work.  Having just been immersed in Rupp's joyful descriptions of her messy, learning-filled days, I answered confidently, "No, I think we are going to do this on our own."

If I had only known where that innocent comment would lead us!

"Homeschooling, as it turns out, is not at all the same as school at home.  Randy, my husband, and I    had envisioned, when we first set out into uncharted educational territory, a learning process not unlike   the one we had both experienced in our many years of public school: a logical and well-rounded             progression from counting games and basal readers to higher mathematics and English literature.  What we got were disorderly obsessions with Baroque music, glassblowing, particle physics, Egyptian archaeology, rocket models, telescopes, submarines, Shakespeare, and ant farms.  One kid refused to learn the multiplication tables.  One balked at geography, another at cursive handwriting.  One spent months reading nothing but The Encyclopedia of Fish.  Our sons, Josh, Ethan, and Caleb, all vociferously opinionated from day one, have always had distinctive educational agendas of their own.  Homeschooling, for all of us, has been a learning process." 

--from The Complete Home Learning Source Book by Rebecca Rupp, p. 2

 

(No, I didn't draw the rainbows.  I think that was Farmerboy, many years ago.)

Paging through the book now -- looking for interesting things to do with physics -- is a bit like excavating our educational past.  We have certainly had our own share of "disorderly obsessions" -- from garbage trucks, clocks and sailing ships to paleontology, birds, science fiction, and medieval history.  I can go to the Botany section and remember all the books about plants that Gareth demanded when he was five years old and how he ran into the plant sale at the botanical gardens with his arms open wide, shouting, "Solidago!" when he saw the goldenrod, and the open mouths of the workers as they watched him.  I can remember the temper tantrum in the art museum because the Impressionist exhibit was closed, and all the glitter glue, and the poems we wrote for the Japanese star festival in July one year, and how we assumed that Katydid was going to be an entomologist when she grew up because she was fascinated with insects for so long, only to watch her switch her passions to birding... which is where she happens to be this morning as I write this, happily attending the local arboretum's annual Early Morning Bird Walk with her father.

It's a messy, not always easy (but always interesting) journey we're on.  It's always nice to find a companion on the way.  That's how I feel about Rebecca Rupp's book.  It's become an old and trusted friend, the repository of many memories. 

New Year, New Plans, New Routines: part 2

New Work

Well, this is what I was actually going to write about when I started my post about New Year's planning.  As usual, I got a bit side-tracked and longwinded.  And out of order.  Before I started tweaking the schedule, the kids needed something to work on. 

We're beginning First Form Latin, and Katydid -- having learned the basics of long division and multiplying two digit x two digit numbers -- is ready to move on to Saxon 6/5.    Farmerboy is nearly done with his handwriting book and wants to learn cursive, and I'm debating whether to stick with Handwriting Without Tears or go with New American Cursive, Memoria Press' new program designed to teach cursive to first graders. 

Beyond that, I also had to make some more complicated plans for my older two.

Gareth -- 7th grade

 

Over the past year, I have been noodling around with the idea of using Ambleside Online's Year 7.  Last spring I bought some of the books to preview them for this year.  I bought How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books by Joan Bodger, which I never finished because I am not well-read enough, and frankly, does not seem to be the kind of book I could get Gareth to read at all.  (Katydid will be another story, but Gareth -- not so much.)  I bought Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, which is an amazing, amazing book that I love, but -- not so sure about Gareth there either.  Gareth himself snatched up Watership Down last spring and gulped it down, no narrations of course, and not as a school book.  (This was the same time he read Animal Farm -- sans reading guide, book reports, or narrations either.)  And then I kind of let things drop as we got into other "stuff" at the beginning of this school year. 

Unfortunately, the chart I made for Gareth at the beginning of the year mostly bombed.  He read a few of the books I had listed because they were sitting in a basket on the couch, I think.  He did not want to do many of the projects.  Sitting down each week to plan from the chart was a nightmare for both of us.  The book report I had him write on Out of the Silent Planet using Kolbe's Junior High Literature Guide sapped the joy from the book for him -- and for me, too.

We picked up medieval history as a family beginning in early November and that seemed to ignite a few sparks for him.  I had decided to use Our Island Story, another Ambleside Online selection from earlier years, as a spine and family read aloud.  By this point, we had also switched grammar books to use Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, also recommended in AO Year 7. Remembering that AO Year 7 matched up with the medieval material and that I had been thinking about using it... I went back and looked at the booklist.

It made a lot more sense this time.  And I had to scratch my head as to why I had picked up the books I had when obviously it was the history books that would make the big hit.  And Beowulf.  And maybe even Idylls of the King.  I was also pleasantly surprised to see that he had read a number of books from the Year 7 Free Reading List.  In the past year, growing from 12 to a few months past 13, he has also matured quite a bit.  So it seemed like a good fit. 

So now one can often find Gareth happily ensconced on the couch reading Winston Churchill, or Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, or practicing his Old English.  He probably won't be reading every single book on AO's booklist, simply because there are A LOT of books, and also because AO is a Protestant curriculum and we would need to substitute the appropriate Catholic books for the Suggested Devotional Reading List.  I haven't planned out his reading to a great extent, but I have begun making up weekly to-do lists for him:

We're still getting up to speed on these lists, and he doesn't really want to write twice a week, but so far I think they have proved to be a workable guide.  Although Gareth likes choice, he also needs structure.  For the moment, I think we've hit on a decent compromise.  Did he finish everything on this list last week? No. But he did accomplish a decent amount of work, and he didn't complain about much of it.

Katydid -- 5th grade

Katydid has enjoyed working with Literature for a Young Lady this year and finished up with our version of the Sunflower Basket in the fall.  During Advent and Christmas, she attempted our version of the Literature for a Young Lady Advent plans.  (I say "attempted" because December was a bit rough around here.) So with the start of a new quarter, she was also ready for some new work.  Fortunately I had made a bunch of hand written notes on the Ivy Basket back in November, so -- feeling somewhat less green by January -- I could finally sit down and add my notes to the Word chart which Jen so thoughtfully included in the plans. I had to make some fairly substantial tweaks in some instances -- to the literature section, because Katydid is 10 not 12 or 13, and because she has read the first three Anne of Green Gables books many, many times already; and also to the bits that were written with fall in mind, or a winter less snow-covered than ours. 

(Did I make any of you cringe with my creative use of punctuation? Mmm.  Sorry. I am overly fond of semi-colons.)

If you're curious, here is Katydid's version of the Ivy Basket:

Download Ivy-basket-

I'm not sure if Katydid will do everything listed for this basket, as she didn't do everything for her Sunflower basket, and some of the books have been carried over.  We usually sit down Monday morning and write out a list of what she wants to work on over the course of the week, along with the daily work that I want her to do (math, Latin, grammar 3x a week).  We don't map out page numbers or set specific goals or assign tasks (like reading Little Men or taking a nature walk) to specific days.  When we tried that what invariably happened is that I would find her sitting down with her watercolors for a couple of hours on the day that she had written she would be working on Apologia Botany ch. 2 and reading In the Days of Queen Victoria.  And if I suggested before she had a chance to start her work that today was the day she had decided to do xyz, she would sigh and huff.  But if we just write a loose list for the week, she usually works her way enthusiastically through most of it.

The picture I put at the top of my Part 1 post?

Those are Katydid's books.

New Year, New Plans, New Routines: part 1

(I started writing this post Monday, Jan. 4.  I am completely unable to start writing without setting the scene, and I like rooting my thoughts in time and place.  Even if the ending of a post is written weeks after the beginning.)

Yesterday (i.e., a couple of Sundays ago), while the snow whipped past my window and piled into 3 and 4 foot drifts like waves on a white sea, I sat down with a big stack of papers, catalogs, and books and attempted to provide some direction to my two oldest kids for the next quarter.  It was a good day for planning.  The wind chill never climbed above zero all day and the 4 inches of snow we were supposed to get turned into 6 or 8 or 10.  (I mean, if the size of the drift on my front walk is any indication.  It looks just like ice cream that's been frozen just a little too long, then cut with a scoop. Funny how I can go from waves to ice cream in less than a paragraph.)  We had been supposed to spend the afternoon sledding with our Little Flowers and Blue Knights group, and then on to dinner at a friend's house, but I had canceled a few days before because all 4 of the little boys have rotten colds and anyway, once the weather turned bad, sledding was out of the question. So there was really nothing better to do but sort through that big stack and try to make some sense of it.

I work from quarter to quarter.  While I might have a broad theme (usually historical) for our family studies for the whole year, or a math or Latin book, the details get planned out a few months at a time, and not in such great detail.  Around the end of December/beginning of January, I also think about how the year has gone thus far and if any changes need to be made for the remaining time.  (I think this is pretty common, so I'm not telling you anything original here. )

We often need a schedule shake-up in January, too.  The holidays plus winter's viruses (etc.) in combination with a definite change to WINTER weather have usually wreaked havoc on our schedule, and it usually becomes apparent about this time of the year that a portion (or portions) of the schedule are broken and need to be fixed.  Maybe we've been banging our heads against the wall over some piece of time management for months (usually mornings in our house) and things have finally come to a head.  So January can be a bit of a mix-up for a while as we sort out old, new, broken, and fixed.

My New Best Friend

 ... is a yellow legal pad.  Nothing fancy, 1 of a 3 pack picked up at the grocery store.  I had been using a moleskine journal to scrawl notes, but while it's good for brainstorming and writing, its size was a bit limiting and of course, I couldn't tear the pages out.  At this point I like my yellow legal pad better than a computer because it's a)more portable; b)it has no buttons for 2 year olds to push randomly in an attempt to demolish hours of Mommy's work; c)it requires no tutorials in order to use; and d)it can't crash, lock up, or perform any maddening adjustments to your formatting.  So here I am, a bit of a Luddite. 

Anyway, I have used my new yellow legal pad to troubleshoot our old schedule, to make various new schedules hoping to address our morning problems (i.e., big kids getting up later and later, therefore making it impossible to have our normal prayer/catechism/read aloud time), and to make a neat Montessori math chart for Farmerboy so I would have some idea of what to do next with him (which is what you see in the photo above.  Page numbers correspond to the NAMC Primary Mathematics Album.)

The New Schedule

After too many mornings that didn't get started until 10:00, I made out a couple of new schedules and showed them to Gareth and Katydid.  After discussing how the day would go using each one, they chose one they preferred.  Fortunately, it was the one I liked best, too, but it is requiring us to make a few more changes in our morning than just getting up earlier.  On the other hand, this new routine is much more like the routines we had when the kids were younger.

6:00-7:00: I get up and have breakfast with Andy.

7:00-8:00: I drag the big kids out of bed and at some point take a shower. The little boys usually get up some time in between 7 and 7:30 anyway, so this is normal for them.  They can watch a little TV at this time.  The big change is that the big kids do not have to get dressed when they get up, but they do have to be at the table for breakfast by 8 AM-ish.  (The reason we used to have the "you have to be dressed when you come out" rule was because certain people were taking so long to get dressed that it crunched the before lunch work time.)  And instead of everyone eating here and there, everybody eats at the table.  We have morning prayer, go over the Baltimore Catechism, and then I read aloud (currently D'Aulaire's Norse Myths and finishing up Beorn the Proud).  After the kids finish eating, they can get "something to do" while I read... this morning for the little boys it was paper punches and scissors.

 

Around 9:00 or 9:30 (depending on how long our reading session lasts; this morning we spent some time talking about Haiti before we read and then during our reading of Beorn, we had to get out an atlas to look at Jutland, so it was about an hour and a half), it's time for everyone to get dressed and do chores. We have an hour for this, as chickens need to be fed and watered in addition to everyone's assigned house chores, and it takes a while to help three little boys with clothes and teeth.

10ish/10:30 -- 12:00: This is a work period.  (Beginning with a snack for a pregnant Mommy and four "starving" small boys.)  We've always had a period of work (or choice time) before lunch, but it was getting squeezed shorter and shorter and/or pushing lunch later and later.  Hopefully, the new "breakfast at 8 in your pajamas" will help. 

A new element to this work period, however, is that Farmerboy (my 1st grader) is doing some of his required work -- math, phonics, handwriting -- at this time instead of waiting to do it all in the afternoon.  That's the way I used to have it set up because the twins and Chipmunk made it impossible for me to work with Farmerboy individually or for Farmerboy to concentrate.  So we waited until the three littlest were asleep before we tried to do any sort of required work.  The problem with waiting until afternoon has always been that a)it's afternoon and b)Chipmunk still will not sleep for more than 20 minutes on his own.  It is very hard to do any kind of math with manipulatives while lugging around or rocking a sleeping two year old. 

Anyway, although I do use phonics workbooks and primers, we're still using straight Montessori math.  He doesn't really have a choice of whether to do it or not, but I do like to introduce him to enough math works so that he has a choice of what math to do every day.

 Right now we're working on place value.

12:00-2:00: Lunch and a break.  Outside, weather permitting.

2:00-4:00: Another work period, primarily for Gareth and Katydid. And yes, it does usually go to 4:00... but that's only because either chores eat into the morning work period, or the kids are outside and don't come in until 2:30 or 2:45... I'm not likely to interrupt sledding if they've been stuck inside all week.  (I just count sledding as PE.)

This brings up another point.  Our work periods are not primarily devoted to seat work.  For instance, if Gareth decides he wants to use the elliptical during work period, or if Katydid tells me she wants to take a nature walk, that's perfectly fine with me.  The point is to be gainfully employed, not sitting around playing Pokemon.  Both kids do have some required daily work and/or weekly work (which I'll talk about in a minute), but I like to leave the order of the work up to them.  If there's a conflict somewhere (say, I can't help two people with math at the same time), I let them know my limitations and we work something out.

Also during this time I read to the little boys and put the twins and Chipmunk down for nap/quiet time.

4:00-6:00: The kids can play Wii during this time.  The problem we're having is they all want to play Wii individually instead of together, and so their allotted 30 minutes a piece (except for the twins, who do play together) racks up.  The related problem is that even though most of them are waiting for their turn, they're watching everybody else's turn.  Thirty minutes of game time a day I'm ok with; two hours is pushing it.  So we're still working on this.  Wii time was actually a point of contention in the creation of a schedule, because previously the afternoon work period lasted from 2:00-5:00... which, I will just tell you now, is nuts.  But we were doing that because  our days weren't starting, for one reason or another, until 10.  Anyway, if they had to work until 5, then not everybody could have Wii time before dinner, which made it seem like Wii just went on all night.  (On the other hand, Andy sometimes likes to play Lego Star Wars with the boys after dinner, which is a bit different.)

I usually get on the computer for a little while during this time, then wake Chipmunk up so I can fix dinner and do laundry.

Chipmunk helps.

Next up... new work for the new year.

Learning Plans for this week

Forgive me a "gathering my wits" post, but I need to gather my wits. ;-)  We've had a week long break and are supposed to be starting our second quarter this week, but with Halloween and All Saints Day this weekend, and a number of doctor's appointments this week, it's going to be a bit of a wash... I mean, if Monday was any indication, which began with the toaster oven catching on fire and proceeded into eye exams, spending a really obscene amount of money on glasses, and lots and lots of driving.  (But we did manage to listen to three hours worth of The Bronze Bow.)

Anyway, I'm just trying to collect some ideas in one place of what we might do if we're not in the van...

Faith:

• The Weight of a Mass: A Tale of Faith

A Child's Missal from Patmos Publishing (Apparently this is OOP and now available only for a really shocking price, so I'm not going to link it.)

A Life of Our Lord for Children by Marigold Hunt

Focusing on the Mass this week...

Academics:

• Reinstate daily math and Latin for all the big kids
• Check G's grammar to date
• Present either the 1000 chain or addition activities (or both) to Farmerboy
• Sit down with K and get started on her new First Start French
• Bring Muzzy French up from the basement (I bought this used for a good price many, many years ago when Gareth was going through his "Monet" period.)
• Get G started on his Teach Yourself Old English Package (Book + 2CDs)  (Lest you think I require really odd academics, let me assure you that Gareth requested this!)

Halloween activities for Halloween week:

• Multi-media pumpkins: practice painting and add collage jack o'lantern features, or encourage use of pens, oil pastels, etc. to add details
• For K: pointilist pumpkin painting, using q-tips (from Children And Painting ) 
• salt dough fall cut-outs
• simple construction paper jack o' lanterns
• tissue paper lanterns
• "spooky tree" drawings or paintings
• bake pumpkins and make pie or bread
• Day of the Dead/ Mexican folk art drawings or paintings
• P/Pumpkin printouts
• carve pumpkins/little ones draw on baby pumpkins
• Books from the Halloween basket
• G: work on Halloween costume
• Work on All Saints costumes

(Some of these we will definitely do, like pumpkin carving and working on costumes, and the rest is just a list for me to pick from.  This is sort of how I plan, although I often am just carrying the list around in my head.  In the morning I assess the kids' level of interest, hyperactivity level, the weather, how messy the house is, time available, and my energy level.  Then I choose one activity to focus on or present to the little boys.  The big kids are pretty independent.)

Stuff I need to remember to do:

• Ask Andy to buy a new USB cable for the printer to see if we can get it working again
• Gather collage materials for pumpkins
• Check G's grammar
• Set up new learning charts for G and K
• Work on quarterly reports

 

Week 4: We Catch Another Cold

Week 4 was this week, Sept. 7-Sept. 13.  I feel like I am writing a continuing saga with these colds.  "And then we got sick.  And then we got better.  And then we got sick again.  And then..."

It's just one of those years where I date events by the virus we had, I guess.

Anyway, I forgot to mention in week 3 that Gareth made his first ever trip to the ER.  The kids were having bike races down the hill in our yard and onto the driveway.  (The road is too busy to ride on.) Gareth hit the top of a metal trash can and fell off his bike, cutting his leg on the way down.  I was inside putting the little ones to sleep while this was going on.  So when Gareth came to tell me in a reasonably calm but somewhat loud voice that he had fallen and cut himself but that the cut wasn't bleeding much. I told him to try and take care of it himself so he wouldn't wake the boys up. 

When I came out in a few minutes (Chipmunk woke up anyway), I took a look at the cut and felt really, really bad for shushing Gareth.  Fortunately, Andy had just (as in, he'd been home for 5 minutes) gotten home from Boston, so he took Gareth to the ER for the staples that were removed on an extremely unplanned day in week 4.

Gareth and I are trying to work out a few kinks in the way the year is going.  I have tossed Lingua Mater... not because it's bad, but because it's just not working for him.  Katydid will probably use it next year, or perhaps even sooner, as she's using  Lingua Mater 6 with the grammar supplement right now and enjoying it.  I am thinking of using Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, which is what Ambleside Online recommends for Year 7.  For 2 reasons: 1) I own the book already and 2) it isn't as drill intensive as something like, say, Seton.  And then I think we're going to add in Editor In Chief Beginning Book: Grammar Disasters and Punctuation Faux Pas (Editor in Chief Beginining).  Because this is where we run into some of those learning difficulties I have mentioned before.

Another area we're tweaking has to do with planning -- his planning and his time management -- and also maybe a change in style to some extent.  What I've seen is that Gareth doesn't seem to be as motivated to work through plans that I make out of his interests after I have written them down and made them into "school" as he is if I just, say, leave the book out on the couch, or write down a series of choices on the whiteboard.  So I'm wondering again about unschooling vs. structured schooling, and how best to help Gareth learn to self-initiate, follow through, and finish projects, when goal-making on a weekly basis or making lists of assignments to complete both seem to some extent unpalatable. 

We also had to change the way we were planning with Katydid this week.  She decided she didn't like giving herself even vague assignments (like "botany") for each day of the week.  Instead we decided to make out a list of what she wanted to do for the week, broken down into subject areas.  In the morning she refers to the list and decides what she wants to do that day.  Katydid is mature for her age, motivated, and interested in what she's doing, so this works pretty well.  She knows she'll do some subjects every day -- math, Latin, language -- so those aren't written down; they're just assumed.

But the big deal this week was a visit to the NY State Museum in Albany. 

Your two year old throws fits when you attempt to make him leave the "mammufs", right?

Devonian era fossils found in our county... the bottom picture is a tree stump.

Playing in the Discovery Room...

Stopping to pose for a picture.

Week 2: We Catch the First Cold

I'm behind on my weekly posts already, not for lack of things to include... but for a combination of lots of stuff to include (we're busy!) and being sick.  Just colds, but we seem to be getting them one after another.  This seems to be typical of this time of year for us... hay fever dragging us down and more germs circulating with all the kids going back to school.  Now let's see if I can remember all the way back into August...

Oh, and just a note about what I like to include in these weekly review posts.  I make notes about the kids' work on a daily basis in my Homeschooler's Journal, and I also keep track of Gareth's hours on Homeschool Tracker. (I have the Plus version, which I am slowly figuring out. I have had various versions of the free Tracker and the not-free Tracker Plus over the years, and I have to say that I think the version I have now is much easier to use than what I had a couple years ago.  Also, I don't know why, but I get a lot of enjoyment from playing around with all the reports.)  Therefore, when I sit down to compile a "week in review" post, what I'm mainly focusing on are the details that don't fit into a more compressed format: stories, photos, what the little guys are doing.  So if you wonder whether my kids ever do math: yes, they do.  But I don't always mention it here.

Week 2 (August 24-30)

It was still warm, so we tried to be outside as much as possible.  Katydid and Farmerboy wanted to have a picnic, but I was feeling a little frazzle that week since Andy was out of town.  I told them I would love for them to have a picnic, but they would have to do all the preparations and cleaning up.  So they did, and everyone had fun.

We moved to a chart planning format for Gareth and Katydid.  Gareth seemed to think it worked pretty well for this week, but Katydid wasn't so sure.  Katydid likes to adjust what she wants to do in the morning when she gets up, and she's usually quite motivated to work.  So the weekly planning didn't work as well for her, even when she was the one deciding what to write in each time period.

And then there was this not quite average day in week 2.

The end of Week 2 was mostly involved in everyone sitting around feeling yucky.  Oh, and the chickens somehow contracted coccidosis (or something like it).  So, really, Andy and I spent the weekend feeling yucky and researching what to do for our chickens, who also felt yucky, and oh, yeah, standing in the pouring rain staring at chicken poop.

Seventh Grade Plans: Shield of Faith

Since I do everything backwards, I posted about a day at our house and our first week before I posted anything about the kids' plans.  I probably should have done it the other way around.  But like I said -- backwards.

Anyway, I am at long last getting around to posting Gareth's seventh grade plans.  I finally learned how to save screen shots, so I'm going to put up some copies of our plans saved in.jpeg format.  You ought to be able to click on the image and see it larger.  I did not do the original work on building the tables, however.  The tables come from the Sunflower Basket at Serendipity.  Jen was kind enough to send me editable files of the tables so I could use them to plan for Gareth, and also to tweak for Katydid (since I was making pretty heavy tweaks for her.)  All I did to make them into "boy" tables was to change the yellow to blue and add a knight graphic.  (And then my son said, "Why is there a knight on here?" And I said, "Because, you know -- Shield of Faith..." and then he looked at me with that look your kids get when they're sure you're slightly addled but they're humoring you.)

Before I start in on the plans, I should tell you a few things.  First, they are not designed to be generic.  They're designed specifically for Gareth, according to the interests he listed for me a month or so ago.  (The list: "How to throw a spear/prehistoric people/evolutionary biology/military strategy/communications badge/archery/fishing.")  I firmly believe that one of the best things about homeschooling is that it allows for quirky, individualized educations.  So, if you can use something I've put together, then by all means feel free to use it.  But if this all looks ridiculous to you, or like it would never work with your child... that's okay.  Your family and your child just need their own quirky education.  Quirky is good.

When Jen told me she was using the Catholic Girl's Guide for her daughter back some months ago, I immediately wondered if there was a Catholic Boy's Guide.  Turns out there is, only it's called The Young Man's Guide.  It's organized according to St. Paul's "armor of God".  Since we'd already planned to start medieval history this year, I thought such a guide would tie in well.  I thought it might also be good to emphasize chivalry at this age.  Then Gareth threw me for a loop with "prehistoric people". 

But I decided that a study of prehistory and evolutionary biology would go well with the first chapter of The Young Man's Guide, which is "The Shield of Faith."  Not because we believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis and a young earth (we don't), but because after reading through many of the resources I thought would be good for Gareth to use, I became frustrated with the two polarized positions inherent in most of the literature.  Apparently religion and science are "in a war", in which scientists must "fight back" against Creationists (and vice versa).  What has really happened it seems is that "evolution" has completely lost its status as a scientific theory and become either a religion or an anti-religion, depending on which "side" of the "war" you're on.  In the literature, evolutionists seem to be unable to mention God and so jump through lots of hoops which involve personifying the Earth and physical processes, as if they "sense" and "control" things, and of course anti-evolutionists must also try really hard disprove anything that seems to have taken a long time to form. 

Thankfully, the Catholic Church has a different position on the matter, which brings the theory of evolution back into its role as a theory, affirms God as the creator of everything no matter what mechanisms scientists discover (or think they discover) at work in nature, and does not require the faithful to deny evidence which would seem to indicate that the universe has been around for a long time.  (In fact the Big Bang theory of the universe was developed by a Catholic priest.)  In this way, Faith and Reason are not at war with each other, and this is something I want to emphasize to my kids -- that there is such a thing as the Unity of Truth.  But when you read any book that talks about evolution... ugh.  You need a strong faith, because almost everything I could find was written from an atheistic viewpoint, in which evolution is either "random" or guided by some unidentified superorganism called mostly "Nature" or "Earth". 

Fortunately, thanks to an enlightening old thread on 4real, I found Mary Daly's Creator and Creation.  This book includes Pope John Paul's Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on evolution. 

It's probably better suited to an older teen, but I've mentioned before that Gareth is "twice exceptional", and science is often where we run into that kind of asynchronous development.

Ok, so without further adieu... the actual plans.  You'll notice they're pretty full, and that I did not always include page numbers.  That's because I wanted Gareth to have some freedom of choice and I was not always sure which books would appeal to him most.  So I listed some I wasn't sure about and made it clear to him which ones those were.  These plans are also designed with our seasons in mind.  Until mid October, we will be able to get outside... and should, as much as possible.  Because after mid October we can get snowstorms.

  

Notes: This is Gareth's daily work, more or less.  We've made a few tweaks.  Logic is an experiment.  I wasn't going to include it this year because Gareth really needs to work intensively on writing and spelling.  But I do want him to be able to read critically for argument, especially in some of the selections regarding evolution.  Traditional Logic says it's for "as early as 7th grade", but once I got the book, I got the feeling that maybe the authors thought it might be better left until high school in the majority of cases.  The book was backordered, so it took a while to come, and Gareth just got started on it last week.  I'm not sure he liked it much, but I want him to complete at least a week or two of lessons before we decide whether to delay it or not.  (He is going to have to do it sometime.) 

 

Notes: This is the first year I have actually assigned Gareth any reading.  To be honest, the only reason I'm assigning reading this year is that Gareth's taste in fiction tends to be narrow.  Using the Kolbe Junior High Literature guide, I chose two books I thought would have a high level of interest for him, to kind of ease into this assigned reading thing.  All summer long I told him how I was going to assign him really boring books... you know, like Fellowship of the Ring.  And he would laugh.  So fast forward to now, two weeks into us being back to school.  He's been spending most of his time doing literature.  He gulped out of the Silent Planet in a matter of days before we even officially started, which sort of wrecked the plans to use the Kolbe guide to structure his reading and writing.  Oh well.  I'd rather him be excited about the books than just doing the bare minimum every week.  He's working on a book report for Out of the Silent Planet now and reading steadily through Fellowship of the Ring.  He did request the other two books in CS Lewis' Space trilogy and so we may scrap other parts of the plans so he can read through those.

Notes: Since I was just writing this for our use, I didn't always include on the chart details like author's names or (unfortunately) the whole titles of magazines.  I'm actually still waiting for those back issues to be delivered, actually, and will be trying to get in touch with the Cricket Publishing group again this week.   Five Boys in a Cave is a book I read when I was a kid and enjoyed.  It's a classic adventure story about five boys who get lost in a cave which turns out to have cave paintings like the ones at Altamira and Lascaux.  So it's not actually history, but it is a good read.

  Notes: Gareth tends to have intense interests, and, like I said before, sometimes narrow reading tastes.  He also has a tendency to be "bored".  Anything that falls outside whatever his interests are at that time is likely to earn the label "boring".  Unfortunately religious reading has always earned that label.  We do many religious read alouds as a family, go through the Baltimore Catechism as a family, read the Bible as a family, pray as a family.  But now that he is nearly 13, I want him to go a little deeper.  So I assigned him some reading.  I don't really want him to do it grudgingly, but I do want him to do it, so it's a delicate balance.  You'll see we're using Seton Religion 7 this year, which may seem somewhat textbook-y for a child who tends to label subjects "boring".  But I decided to include it because it has a lot of information in it that I, as a cradle Catholic who was basically uncatechized after the age of 11, am still learning about.  I found value myself in reading through the book, and so I decided to have Gareth read it, too.  

Notes: I wasn't sure whether or not to include the Zoology Coloring Book, which now turns out to be OOP (or something) because it is "currently unavialable" in its latest edition and only available used.  So I didn't buy it over the summer and left it up to Gareth.  It should probably have been listed in the "supplemental" section anyway.  (My thinking was that building up a decent knowledge of how animals are put together would help in understanding their evolution.)

Notes: This summer I could tell a new interest was about to develop because Gareth would say things like: "That might be interesting, trying to make a new strain of corn." Or, "If you bred a chicken..."  Then one day he said, "I think I'd like to breed that white Ameracauna hen and see if we can get any more that look like her."  (Ameracaunas are interesting-looking, with beards, and lay "Easter eggs".)  So I told him he needed to read up on genetics.  I included the project on his chart, although I wasn't sure just how interested in it he really was.  It turns out he was very interested in it, and has been reading Genetics of the Fowl before bed at night.  He even brought it to the ER with him when he needed his leg stitched up... er, stapled... last week.  (Actually, the illustrations in this book appeal heavily to boys... they mostly deal with genetic abberrations like, chicks with 4 wings, chicks with 2 heads... that sort of thing.)

I'm actually thinking that, together, the study of evolutionary biology and genetics would be for high school credit.  I ran across a CD-ROM text/course from Duke University's TIP program called Foundations in Biology: Genetics, Evolution, and Ethics for grades 7-10.  I thought, "Hey!  That's what we're doing!"  So I'll probably see about getting the CD-ROM for when the weather turns colder.

Gareth has added the book Swords: An Artist's Devotion to his "Military Studies".  He also watches documentaries on the Military Channel.  And he hasn't started the dulcimer.  And his "Field Guide to Imaginary Creatures" is something he enjoys working on here and there, but not a requirement.  I just wanted him to know it was an option if it was something he wanted to do during school hours.

So it's a lot.  Stuff I haven't written down: chicken and turkey chores every day, and he'll have a chance to get his First Aid Merit Badge in October.  New York State requires a certain number of hours in English, Math, Science, History and Geography every year for 7th and 8th grades, and a certain number of hours in Art and Music combined for 7th and 8th.  The state also requires Practical Arts, PE, and Health.  So I'm a little more regulated than some of you (an understatement, actually).

I hope to do a planning/scheduling post about all of this at some point, but right now -- it's Labor Day!  Hope yours is good :-).

Not quite your average day

The other day I picked up an old favorite that I used to read every year, Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days: Share a Day With 30 Homeschooling Families.  Reading it reminded me of what homeschooling used to be like before blogs.  It also reminded me that I haven't done a "day in the life" post in a while.  As it happens, on the day I decided to do a day in the life post, it also turns out that it was "Day in the Life Week" at the Not Back to School Blog Hop over at My 3 Boybarians.  But, as usual, it took me a week to actually write this post (because I don't know how to do anything that isn't long and complicated) so I missed the deadline.  However, if any of you, dear readers, would like to share a "Back to School" day at your house, I would love to read it.  Just leave me a comment with the link!

A few notes before I start. 

1) This day was "not quite average" because Andy was home for the morning, and then left around lunchtime to go on a business trip for most of the week.  This happens often enough, though, that it's just not "quite" average.  This is just our second week of school, so we did do school today. 

2) I don't usually work this hard first thing in the morning.  Usually I'm on the computer for a little while.

Monday, August 24

7:15 AM  I wake up, later than I wanted to.  Chipmunk went to bed at 11 last night and I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I might have a touch of whatever Pip and Farmerboy had this weekend.  Thankfully, I feel decent this morning.  The little boys are getting up, and Andy takes care of them while I take a shower.

8:00 AM: The boys are eating breakfast when I come out.  Gareth is up, too.  I head down to Katydid's room to begin the process of getting her up. (Which sometimes takes a while.)  The little boys finish their breakfast and talk Andy into letting them watch Chased By Dinosaurs: "Most Dangerous Seas of All Time". Andy made me some eggs, and while I eat I switch around some binders so I can organize the originals of some new recordkeeping forms I handwrote over the weekend.  (The USB ports on our desktop are fried, and the software from our printer is incompatible with the Vista on my laptop.  So I have a copier, but no printer right now.)

 

My "desk": tea cup, garden/nature journal, planner, record-keeping book, new Circa notebook for forms, etc.

8:30 AM: Katydid finally comes out. Now everyone is watching Chased By Dinosaurs.  Andy wants to take some food from the garden we (along with our Little Flowers/ Blue Knights group) are growing for the Little Sisters of the Poor.  We have a couple bushels of potatoes to give this time, several pounds of zucchini and patty pan squash, and there's more zucchini out in the garden to pick.  I head out while everyone is occupied and come back with several more pounds of zuchinni.

9:00 AM: Time for prayers.  After prayers, Gareth and Katydid go to brush their teeth and start on their chores, which include feeding and watering all the poultry (turkeys, layers, meat chickens, and bantams).  All together, we have a total of 59 chickens right now, and 6 turkeys.  It takes a little while to get it all done.  The kids dawdle a while, so they're a bit late getting out.  When they come back in, they do their inside chores: collecting and sorting laundry, and wiping out the bathroom sinks for Katydid, and cleaning up the breakfast kitchen for Gareth.  Andy takes the time to take the trash out to the curb so I won't have to do it tomorrow.  Farmerboy is supposed to be picking up the family room, but right now he is involved in a complicated game of "Divers into Dangerous Seas."  Props for this game include all my pots and pans, and cameras, which the boys construct from various toys and tape:

(I help with the tape a little bit.)

9:30 AM: Pop used buttons (like the kind you sew) for his camera, and Chipmunk (who is sitting on the table) is enthralled.  He wants me to identify the colors of all the buttons.  The other three little boys are still involved in their diving game, so I sit down with Chipmunk and help him sort the buttons according to color.  On one of Pop's trips through the dining room, he notices what we are doing and wants to sort, too.  I don't have enough buttons for that, but I set him up with some dyed feathers. Chipmunk soon moves on to pouring the buttons.  He's been occupied for about 30 minutes.

10:00 AM: The boys decide they want to glue.  I get them set up with collage materials, cardboard trays, scissors, papers, and their choice of glue -- Elmer's in a bottle or Mod Podge in a bowl with a brush.  Chipmunk is soon covered in glue, but does manage to also put some on his tray.  There is some frustration on the twins' part: Pip is gluing natural feathers to a piece of cardstock and unfortunately, most of them are small down feathers which are hard to glue without getting all gummed up and coming apart.  And Pop's scissors are not cooperating with him.  This is pretty typical.  My role is to dart from one kid to another providing help, encouragement, and exhortations for patience.  Andy tells me that there is a special room in heaven reserved for homeschooling mothers. 

Pip sets up his collage as part of our nature area.

10: 45 AM: By this time Katydid and Gareth are involved in their own activities.  We're experimenting with different ways to plan for them... or actually, to help them plan their own work. I asked on the 4real boards about planning with Literature for a Young Lady and Jen helpfully replied with how she helps her eldest plan her own work.  I presented that as an option for the kids, and they decided they would like to give it a shot.  So I wrote out a chart (no printer, remember) with days and times on it, and on Sunday we sat down to figure out what they wanted to do during the week, and also what was required for them to do (like math, Latin, and language). 

I clipped off a bit of the top, but you get the picture. 

When I emerge from helping the boys with their collages (and washing all the glue off Chipmunk), I find Gareth working on his math and Katydid comfortably esconced on the couch with Little Women.  Andy takes a break from working on the computer to get the little boys dressed and play with the transportation counters on the floor -- more sorting. Farmerboy can no longer avoid his chores and must get dressed and pick up the family room.  Because people need me -- often -- it takes a good 45 minutes to clean up the dining room. 

11:15 AM: Gareth is now working on his religion and informs Farmerboy that he's going to be done soon so Farmerboy had better get to work if he wants to go out to the archery range.  Katydid didn't know that Gareth was going to do archery, so she scraps the plans she made yesterday to go out and shoot, too.  She's been reading for about an hour with only a brief break, so it's just about time for her to do something active.

11:30 AM: The dining room is not completely clean, but the little boys are clamoring to be let out of the small fenced yard by the deck, and it would be nice to talk to Andy a while before he goes.  Andy takes the little boys out with him to feed greens to the turkeys, and the three older kids head out to practice some archery.  I pick up the transportation counters for the nth time this morning and follow.

 

(Andy took these pictures.  Gareth told me later he got a bullseye!)

While the big kids shoot, the little boys play "dinosaur hunter" in the sideyard with me.  They're gathering sticks and pretending they're dinosaur bones.

12:15 PM: Everyone is hungry by now, so we head in for lunch.  Someone lets Chipmunk in the bathroom first to wash his hands and is not supervising and Chipmunk dunks his truck in the toilet.  I clean him up (and the truck) and then make cheese quesadillas for the kids.  Andy and I eat leftover steak from the night before (I found a stash in the back of the freezer) and canteloupe. At lunch Andy mentions a book that has been recommended to him called The Ten Commandments of How to Fail at Business.  We have a discussion about that, and also about how a Christian should view or use wealth.  Then Andy loads his luggage and the vegetables for the nuns into his van and heads off to the airport.  The big kids are in charge of cleaning up after lunch.  The little boys and I go outside to play some more dinosaur hunter.

2:00 PM: I'm taking the little boys in for some read alouds and a nap.  Katydid comes in to get the camera, because she says the older three want to "study turkey behavior".  It turns out they just want to make the toms strut.

(Pictures by Katydid)

While I admit that the Naragansett tom is particularly impressive when he struts, banging things and making a lot of noise to get him agitated is probably not a good idea.  So no more "studying turkey behavior".

While the big kids are outside, I read Dinosaurs Big and Small (A Let's Read and Find Out title) , Little Tom Turkey (a book about wild turkeys told from the point of view of a small male poult; the writing is not so great, but it's tough to find picture books about wild/heritage turkeys), and a tractor book to the three little boys.  Then it's to bed for them.

2:45-3:00 ish: I've gotten the boys to sleep. When I come into the kitchen, I notice that the cleaning job done after lunch was not all that great.  But now it's time to do some concentrated book work with the older 3 kids.  Since the twins and Chipmunk require most (if not all) of my attention in the morning, the bigger kids have to save anything that needs my attention until the afternoon.  This is not my preferred way of doing things -- nor, to be honest, always the preferred way for my kids either.  But it's what we have to do.  It turns out that they have come in at 2:30 just like they were supposed to and gotten to work.  We've had this basic template schedule for a long time now, but this is only the start of our second week after being "off" for summer.  So I'm pleased that they're readjusting to our school schedule so quickly.  Katydid is working on the first lesson of Lingua Mater 6, and Gareth has finished his lesson for the day in Lingua Mater 7 and is on the couch reading Fellowship of the Ring.  Farmerboy has already done his handwriting (Handwriting Without Tears, My Printing Book) so I take him into the dining room to work on some phonics.  First I need to see what letter sounds he remembers from earlier in the summer, so we do a short "quiz".  Turns out he's forgotten about half his letter sounds.  He wants me to write some words for him to read, though, so I compose a variety of silly sentences using mainly -at words. (Sample: "I sat on the cat.")  He enjoys this and runs to show Katydid and Gareth how silly the sentences are after we're done.

3:30 PM: Katydid is done with her language, so we move on to Latin.  We're redoing the lesson we ended with in June, Review Lesson III from Latina Christiana I.  For some reason we only got through half the book last year.  I'm hoping to do better this year.  Farmerboy wants to get a board game out of the closet and "pretend to play it himself". Ok... he actually chooses the Rush Hour puzzle, which I mentally chalk up to math for the day.  I'm still trying to figure out math for him. I bought Making Math Meaningful Level I for him in the spring, but it turns out I don't really like it at that level. 

4:00 PM: When we're done with our chants and reviewing the vocabulary, Katydid switches to math, which she is able to do independently for the day.  (She is using Making Math Meaningful Level 4, which I do like at least for Katydid, as it seems to be sticking... no small feat for her.  Sometimes it requires me to make presentations, but I think she's finally gotten the concept of multiplying two digits by two digits... albeit in the non-traditional way taught by this curriculum.)  Gareth has written on his chart that he is going to work on a book "response" to Out of the Silent Planet, which he read last week.  He can either work on a graphic novel/comic book version of the book or he can write a book report.  I expect him to choose the comic book, but he surprises me by choosing the book report.  We spend a little over a half an hour discussing the book, how to write a book report, and then planning it out. 

4:45 PM: The kids are done with their work for the day, and Chipmunk is up, but not up, and is dozing on my shoulder.  I check email and the kids have their computer time.  Katydid heads back to her room when it is not her turn to practice her violin and say a rosary.

5:15 PM: Chipmunk is now up and playing with the Rush Hour cars that Farmerboy neglected to put away.  The twins are up and clamoring for their computer time, too. I go to start dinner and realize that I can not make a Dutch Baby because I do not have enough eggs.  What?  Right -- we gave away a dozen eggs on Friday and I made scrambled eggs and ratatouille one night for dinner.  Now we have to wait for the hens to build the supply again.  I remember that I have some frozen spaghetti sauce downstairs in the freezer, though, so I can still make dinner!

I also have to work on the mess left over from lunch.

Chipmunk keeps me company with the pots and pans.

6:00 PM: It took forever to defrost the spaghetti sauce. Dinner is going to be late.  The little boys are clamoring to be let out of the gate (again), so I take my record book and head outside with them while I wait on dinner.

7:00 PM: Dinner's finally ready.  I cave and let the kids eat in front of the TV.  I'd like to say they watched something educational, but no, it was SpongeBob.  And I eat in front of the computer, starting this post. Then Andy calls to let me know he's in Chicago and will be departing for Iowa shortly and also that the Little Sisters would like pictures of us planting the garden for their newsletter.  I am embarassed to say that I have no pictures.  We'll have to take some pictures of harvest instead.

7:30ish: Time for after dinner chores.  Usually I clean the kitchen, Katydid picks up the dining room and kitchen and sweeps both rooms, Farmerboy picks up the family room and vacuums the rug, and Gareth has the living room/entryway area, picking up and sweeping.  This makes it sound as if everything ought to be clean, but this doesn't account for stacks of books and other things on tables and counters, or the disorganization of the toy shelves.  Plus tonight the kids will have to knock off early to do all the chicken/turkey chores that Andy usually does (with Chipmunk and the little boys tagging along).

8:00 PM: The kids are out putting the chickens in for the night and I am trying to hurriedly wash the last pans and sweep the dining room and kitchen floors and switch the laundry before the little boys rev up too much.  (My kids never look tired because they just wind up more and more as they get tired.)

8:30 PM: I didn't make it.  There are still pans in the sink but it's time to get the little boys in their pajamas.  When the big kids come in from doing their outside chores, I ask Katydid to read to the little boys while I put on my pajamas.  Pop has been fascinated by the weather lately, so we also check the weather on the Weather Channel.  Then Katydid reads Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie! while I change for the night. 

9:00 PM: The boys still want books.  Katydid reads a couple of tractor books to Chipmunk, Little Tom Turkey (again), and Where Do Chicks Come From?  I take this opportunity to rotate the books in the book display, which sorely needs it.

9:30 PM: Time for bed.  Gareth and Katydid head back to their rooms and bathroom to take showers and read until who knows when.  The little boys want to know if I will read Farmer Boy while they're in bed like Daddy does.  I tell them that since it's Daddy's favorite book, we'll save it for him.  But I will read the next story from Egermeir's Story Bible.  Chipmunk is not having it, though.  I tell the boys I can't read because I need to nurse Chipmunk.  Pip starts complaining.  I attempt to balance the heavy book precariously past Chipmunk while I nurse him and read the story of "The Great Flood."  It begins with Enoch being taken up to God.  Pop wants to know how people get to heaven, and once you're there, how you can get back home.  Farmerboy tells him you can't get back home.  Pop starts to cry.  Farmerboy tells him that heaven is a wonderful place where you'll know everything, including what happened to the dinosaurs.  Pop says he wants our home to be his home forever.  Farmerboy says, well, his soul will go to heaven after he dies.  Pip says he doesn't want to go to heaven if souls are there.  Farmerboy says everybody has a soul.  Pip is furious because he thought souls were bad things! I'm sure he's confusing them with ghosts.  I would just really like to go to sleep.  But no.  As soon as I get them calmed down, Chipmunk starts fussing because this isn't our usual routine.  I try to take him into my bedroom, and Pip starts crying because he wants Daddy.  I sit back down in the rocking chair, and Pip stops crying but Chipmunk starts.  Finally, I have to take Chipmunk into my room and just let Pip cry for a while.  It's keeping Pop and Farmerboy awake, but I have to get one of the two fussing kids to sleep. 

10:30 PM: Chipmunk is finally asleep and I go back in to sit with Pip.  I bring my book and read a little in the hall light.

11:00 PM: Pip is finally asleep.  I add the last few things to the dishwasher and turn it on.  Then I head back to my bed, where Chipmunk is sleeping for the moment.  I try to write down a few notes, but apparently the scratching of the pen wakes Chipmunk up again.

11:30 PM: Everything is finally quiet.  Andy won't be home till Thursday, and I'm not sure I can survive that long. (But obviously, I do! :-)

 

Where have I been?

Well, mostly I've been writing plans for my two oldest.  This is something new for me, writing things down in an organized fashion, and I am hopeful that it will work well this year.  I guess I've still been planning a little differently than most people; the kids' plans are mostly based on lists of interests they gave me last month. Jen ever so kindly sent me some editable tables in Word which she and Elizabeth used to plan their Literature for a Young Lady curriculum, and I used them to plan A Bunch of Stuff I Think My Young Man Will Like.  I'm not sure it hangs together enough to give it a title, but I borrowed the idea of using a guide by Father Lasance -- in this case, The Young Man's Guide -- to be a sort of organizing thread.  Katydid will be following along with the Serendipity plans this year, by request, although I am altering them for a slightly younger girl.  (Katydid is only 10.  I guess technically she's in fifth grade, although for some reason I keep forgetting and thinking she's in sixth.  Oh well.)

If anyone's curious, I'll post my plans for Gareth, who will be in 7th grade this year. (I mean, for real, and not just as pictures.) But I have to warn you, they're a bit individual.

I mean, I doubt that every 7th grader will want to start with prehistoric people before moving on to a study of the Middle Ages.  But, to be honest, the subjects he wanted to study -- prehistoric people and evolutionary biology -- are just the sort of things you want to study with a "shield of faith" in hand.  I gave him the plans today and he seemed to think they were decent... He has the kind of personality that needs both choice and structure.  Using the table I was able to list a whole bunch of choices as far as projects go, which will hopefully solve the problem of the whiteboard.  We'll see how it goes. 

While I was working on the plans, I had to mostly go offline.  Which is okay because I have been in one of those funks where I'm not sure I have anything of worth to say anyway and the blogosphere left me largely feeling inadequate.  It occurred to me that since we usually go on vacation this time of year and I get enforced (and therapeutic) time away from all computers, I usually get a retreat that I wasn't planning on getting this year, with so much poultry to care for.  So maybe it wasn't really that I'm inadequate,  just that I needed some time off.  Then Andy sent me an email asking whether I thought we could make a family trip to New Hampshire with him when he visits there on business, so maybe I will get a brief retreat anyway.

(Actually, what Andy said was, do you think we could stock the chickens, etc. up on water and food for a few days and just have the kid down the street come by a couple times, and what I replied was, do you think we could put the kids in the coop, too?  Okay, so yesterday was a little tough.)