Fall term: Week Four notes

Here are the two notebooks I use for my planning.  One is my notebook for all four blocks, plus Friday activities, and the other is specifically for Circle time.  My planning will look a little different this coming week because I have switched Blocks Two and Four with each other.  Also, I've started putting my prep to-do's on a separate piece of paper.

MA and I read some library books for some of her time with me.  I liked all three of them, so I have them pictured below to share.

We also did some patterns with beads and with Duplos.  I had made these cards for one of the other girls a couple of years ago.  MA liked getting all the beads set up right on the card before stringing them onto the pipe cleaner.  She went through all five cards on her own.  Then she found the Duplo cards I had made and wanted to do them.

We tried Geoboards another day, but she lost interest quickly.  I think we played a game instead, but my notes are downstairs, and I can't remember exactly.

CN liked trying markers on paper in his chair.  He mostly got marker on the tray, but he enjoyed it.

On Friday we worked on some AHG badge work.  RJ finished three out of four of her stamps she designed for the Dawn of our Country badge.  She made a stamp of Monticello, the Declaration of Independence, and a Thomas Jefferson profile with the dates of his term in the office of President.  AG finished up her Music Appreciation badge work, and she has chosen to do the Sign Language badge, so we talked about that and what we need to get to work on it.  She also got out a place mat with the ASL alphabet on it and tried signing her ABCs.  I worked with each of them for half an hour.

I found a fun way to practice the state capitals the girls are learning: Duplos and wet erase markers.

RJ has been bored with her All About Spelling lessons.  She says the words are too easy.  This weekend I went through the next few lessons and pulled out words to test her on.  If she can spell them, we'll skip a few steps.

That's all I can remember this week.  Off to bed so we can start the day well tomorrow!

Rough week

We had some rough moments this past week.  I might have cried or wanted to cry more than once.  It was discouraging.

I think it would help to get up on time in the morning.  If I get up late, everyone else does too, and then we feel the time crunch on our morning.

We're switching things around (Sonlight read alouds are going into the Block Two slot and Morning time will become Circle time and go in Block Four after lunch).  We tried it one day, and I think it will work better.  CN is usually asleep after lunch, so that makes Circle time a little less hectic.  I can always nurse during read aloud time if he gets cranky.

We're also dropping our Apologia Science read aloud.  This is the second time I've tried and failed to use an Apologia book.  And that's okay.  They just weren't interested, and it wasn't worth forcing it.  We're picking up composer study (it's during Circle time) and reading a book called Mozart: The Wonder Boy by Opal Wheeler.  We read it one day last week, and that went well.

I don't think this will eliminate our rough days completely.  We're simultaneously saints and sinners, forgiven and yet still struggling with our brokenness.  Being together all the time gives us more opportunities to have those hard moments.  I am praying that God will give us grace to have more encouraging days than discouraging ones.

Get moving!

Even though I do like doing things like taking walks, riding bikes, and being active, I struggle to find a way to fit it into our schedule.  At the end of this past week I decided to take a step to get us moving more.  I hope to do a Barre3 workout in the morning by myself too, but if I don't make it up, at least we'll have our walk.

I asked each of the older two girls (mostly RJ, but AG wanted to try too) to be my walking buddies.  Our goal is to get out three days a week to take a walk.  I'll pull MA and CN in the wagon.  RJ and AG can either walk with me, run, or go on their scooters.  Our goal is eventually to go for a full 30 minutes each time.  We have a chart for each of us.  Our first goal is to make it to 12 times, and then we each get a new book.  After reaching that goal, we'll bump it up to 18 or 24 times.

We've been once so far.  Our first time was a 15 minute, 1.25 mile walk/scoot.  Half the time I'd like to go, but no one complained, and I got to walk fast, so I was happy.

Fall Term: Week Three Notes

This week we had three days of our full schedule for fall term (that is what I'm calling this first seven-week term).  On Thursday we went to the Children's Museum.

MA and I had four 20-25-minute morning times together this week.  We did:
--Math--Lauri shapes stacking sorter--M stacked them by color and then by shape.

--Math--Super Sorting Pie--I was a bit distracted this morning, but I think she sorted them by type.

--Read aloud--I read The Mitten by Jan Brett.  We had a paper mitten pocket with animals that she had made last year at homeschool co-op, so she used that to act out the story with me.

--ABCs--I buried the capital letters from the Lauri letter puzzle in her rice bin.  She had fun finding them, naming them (with my help), and putting them in the puzzle.  This was a favorite activity, and she continued to do it even after our time together.  She took out the lower case letters too and buried those along with the capital letters.

Something else we also tried this week was to read through some nursery rhymes in hopes that we could start having her memorize them one at a time.  I printed out a cute printable of nursery rhymes for that.

Block Three (RJ's and AG's times with me and their piano practice and handwriting time) went pretty well for the first week.  I think we are getting the kinks worked out.

This week was a lot of review.  I reviewed both of their mastered All About Spelling cards and moved the ones that needed more practice back to the review section.  A is at the end of Level 1, and RJ is halfway through Level 2.

I decided to skip the rest of Level 2 of First Language Lessons with RJ.  The main thing I wanted her to get out of it was the memorization of the rest of the definitions of the parts of speech, so we are playing games to memorize and review them before moving onto Easy Grammar 3 and 4.

Both RJ and AG were very into their copywork this week, which surprised me greatly.  AG copied the whole poem called "The Eagle" by Alfred Lord Tennyson in the first week and even wants to memorize it.  RJ coped the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and Mark 10:14.

We did not get through all of our Sonlight read alouds this week.  The part of me that likes to get all the boxes checked cringes a little at the thought of continuing them next week, but I know it is good not to rush through them just to get it done.

One reason we didn't get them done was that RJ had a horse riding lesson on Wednesday afternoon.  She loved her second lesson almost as much as the first.  The instructors said she had not forgotten anything and even worked some things out that had been confusing to her before.  I'm so glad it went well.

Tuesday I gave in to RJ's requests to take out watercolors in the afternoon.  They had fun creating many paintings.  Watercolors are by far my favorite paints.  They are the only ones I consistently allow upstairs instead of in the art area in the basement.

I even painted--you can see my flower on a card I made for a friend

Two of AG's paintings

RJ's last painting

MA's painting of a cave, according to her

 Thursday morning I woke up later and ended up letting everyone sleep in later too.  I decided to take them to the Children's museum.  We went to the museum store first, which was a fantastic idea.  Usually we go when I'm exhausted and grumpy, and it's packed.  At 10:30 am it was empty, and I had plenty of energy.  We spent time in the China exhibit, then had lunch, played in the Playscape area, the carousel area, and Science works before heading home.  I was pretty spent after all that, but I think everyone had a good time.

On Friday we did not work on American Heritage Girl badge requirements because a friend came over to show the girls how to make paper.  She spent three hours with them and was so sweet, patient, and encouraging to them.  Even MA tried making paper and did pretty well.  I spent the time pulling CN and her daughter in the wagon and figuring out other ways to keep the young ones occupied.

AG tipping the paper onto the cloth

RJ getting ready to tip her paper onto the cloth

Round pink paper drying on the line

Fall term: Week Two notes

This past week we added Block 2 (exciting name, I know) to our morning schedule.  This follows the Bible and Math/Maggie's Mommy time and 15 minute or so break of Block 1.  Block 2 includes Morning Time (MT) and a 15 minute break and goes for about an hour total.

Morning time is not my invention.  I first heard about it on Sarah Mackenzie's blog Amongst Lovely Things, and she credits Cindy Rollins from Morning Time Moms.  I liked the idea of setting aside a time to meet together to do the things that might usually get pushed aside in our homeschool day even though they are things that are either important to me or bringing beauty or interest into our days.

My plan of what to put in our MT has gone through endless revisions and will probably continue to be revised as needed.  I initially wanted to loop through a number of things, but have decided that, since one of my goals this year is to simplify and dig deeper in our learning time, I needed to simplify MT content.

Here is MT currently:
Daily: Start with reading one or two poems from Read Aloud Poems--Edited by Glorya Hale
Loop:
Latin (Prima Latina for RJ and AG)
Science Read Aloud (Apologia Anatomy for Young Explorers)
Latin
Shakespeare
Science RA

The idea is to practice Latin everyday and to read from our Science book everyday.  On the days without Shakespeare, we spend a little more time on Latin, either learning new words and concepts or playing review games like Fiddlesticks or Race to the Colosseum.

Ideally we will read poems to start and then move onto Latin each day and end with Science.  The nice thing about putting our subjects on a loop is that if Latin and Shakespeare take up the whole time, we can start with the Science RA the next day and not miss out on it.  This helps me not to feel like we have to rush if we are really enjoying something.

For Science we are just reading from the book and narrating back what they can remember.  We may or may not do the experiments and extras.  We will continue to include science for this seven-week term (until the middle of October).  Next term we'll replace science with a composer study (Mozart)/artist study (Renoir) combo, I think.

Shakespeare is a combination of reading one or two retellings for children and memorizing passages from that play.  Currently we are studying A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I read E. Nesbit's Shakespeare Stories for Young Readers version and will start Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare version this week.  It's a bit longer and has more details, so I thought it would be good to read both.  I are using Ken Ludwig's How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare to help guide us in understanding and memorizing some passages from the plays.

So far the older girls really like Latin.  They aren't crazy about the science.  I might end up looking for some library books instead.  We'll try it this term and re-evaluate as needed.

MA's Mommy time this week:
--ABC activity--Chicka Chicka Boom Boom--we organized all the magnetic upper and lower case letters in alphabetical order and then read through CCBB using a cute printout we put up on the magnetic white board.  It took a long time for her to organize the letters with my help, but I tried to not worry about the length of time.  We worked for 25 minutes and then left it to finish up later.

--Read Aloud day--I can't remember what we read.

Other activity--Playdough--Always a big hit.  I took out the printouts in page protectors that have shapes on them.  We rolled dough snakes and tried to make the shapes.  She also just played.

MA tries to make a heart shape with playdough

CN gets in on the playdough action

We also did our Sonlight Core C read alouds.  I can't say that I'm excited about many of the read alouds yet, but we have some good ones coming up.  We also used the Fiddlesticks game to practice state capitals while waiting for our table at the restaurant on Saturday.  I only included half the states right now.

First week of 2014 homeschool year

After much thought and prayer, I have again decided to start a blog chronicling our experience educating and learning with our kids. I hope to write once a week. I am mostly writing for myself--as a creative outlet and a record. If it helps a couple of other people get ideas or be encouraged, that will be an unexpected benefit.

This year I have four little learners along on this journey--three girls and a boy: RJ is 9, AG is 7, MA is 3 (almost 4), and CN just turned one.

Last week we started our current homeschool year on Tuesday after taking a rather frustrating trip to the dunes for Labor Day (remind me later that we do not do well with one-night-away trips). I have found that easing into our year makes for a happier mama and kiddos. We took all of July and August off (doing a little math and finishing Sonlight Core B read alouds in June), so adjusting to a new schedule is a big transition.

I've arranged our schedule this year into blocks of about an hour. They include 45 minutes or less of time to spend on our work and then 15 minute breaks of free time (or, in my case, diaper changing time). We will have three blocks before lunch and one block after lunch before rest time.

This past week we started Block One and Block Four. Our aim was to have kids dressed and breakfasted by about 8:15 at the latest. Then we gathered in the living room for Block One.

Block One includes:
Bible/Family Worship
Math for RJ and AG
Mommy time for MA while the older two did math and Caleb did his impression of a tornado
15 minute break

I was so pleased with family worship time. It's only the first week, granted, but it went a lot better than anything else we've done before. We all have folders (even the three-year-old) containing our memory work and hymns. We began by reciting the Apostles' Creed together (our memory work). On Wednesday we came up with motions for it. Then Nathan read the collect prayer for this week and we discussed any confusing parts. Then we repeated after him to say the prayer. The rest of the week we just repeated the prayer after him, and then he read a scripture and we talked about it and how it went along with the prayer. We ended each time with singing part or all of our hymn (God, All Nature Sings Thy Glory) for this term (we are doing a 7 week term at the moment). This all took about 15-20 minutes.

Cuddling during family worship time

RJ and AG went with Nathan to work on their math. RJ is working through the second half of Math Mammoth 3 and AG is in the beginning of Math Mammoth 2. Both girls are working on their math facts on my iPhone. They both were done with a sheet or two of math in about 10 minutes, and they were excited to find out they had a break for awhile.

While they did math, MA and I had some time together.  We are working through a loop (for more on loops see Sarah Mackenzie's blog: Amongst Lovely Things or read her book Teaching from Rest).
Her loop: Read books together/Math activity/Read book together/Alphabet activity/Books/Workbook (like Kumon or coloring)/Books/Other activity (like rice bin or play dough).

Over four days we went through the first three in the loop.  We spent two days on the Math activity (Lauri puzzles).  I try to set my timer and spend the full 25 minutes with her, even if RJ and AG finish math "early".

Block Four is basically Sonlight read alouds. We are in Core C this year. We loop through the read alouds as we have time. Each day I start the block with playing the geography song we are learning. Then if it's the first day of a new week (not an actual week, but a new week of read alouds, which might or might not be the same thing) we do RJ's and AG's timeline books. Then we do the loop (History read aloud/Bible read aloud/fiction read aloud) until we finish our hour. Normally we will do this block right after lunch, but this week we did it in the morning.

Friday is a little different.  We still have Bible, but then Nathan is trying to play Pentathalon games with the older two while I have mommy time with MA.  Then I spend a half hour with each of the older girls to work on part of a requirement for their independent badge work for American Heritage Girls.  RJ wants to do Dawn of our Country, and AG wants to do Music Appreciation.

So far it's gone all right. We've had frustrating moments and good moments. The girls are enjoying the read alouds so far. And they love the geography songs. I think the hardest thing will be to get going on time.

This week we will add Block Two: Morning Time.