Hehehe, Um Yeah

So, last week...What happened to it? Where's my report?

Well, I'm sure that last week happened. In fact, I vaguely remember last Monday. But I had three doctor's appointments last week and Harry had one. All of them were at least 45 minutes away and I could take the kids to none of them. So I begged for people to take the kids when I couldn't be there and I prayed that one week of educational neglect wouldn't doom them for life.

The list of what we accomplished was short...math and reading happened most days (thank goodness books are portable). Mostly we rolled with the punches, tried to get to outside activities on time and I don't think anything major fell through the cracks.

We're back at it this week. Harry has a pulled leg muscle which is bad for a variety of reasons so he's not moving at all. That in itself should ensure that things go more smoothly. I don't have any appointments and as far as I know, none of the kids do either (I could check the calendar, but I kind of don't want to know if they do.). The dishwasher repair people are coming on Wednesday for the sixth time, but that's the extent of major house things. All in all, it should be a much quieter week. Thank goodness.

It's Important to Be Fancy

In her last-year's dance recital costume.

Math is always easier and way more fun with fancy clothes on.

Pharaoh Kluckfu Returns

Salt is amazing stuff. Seriously. I knew that salt has been an incredibly important method of preservation, but I've never seen it in action.

Until now...

For some reason I have avoided the good Pharaoh these last few days. I was supposed to change the salt on Thursday but just couldn't bring myself to do it. But finally, tonight I was resolved. Pharaoh Kluckfu was going to bathe in new salt no matter what. I also decided to have the boys help. They really haven't done much since the first day. Harry was kind of into it but also being goofy with a friend and Sam refused to be in the same room with so much raw chicken. So tonight they were going to get their hands dirty and make this project theirs.

Until Harry started wiping off the chicken in a motion best described as "the method guaranteeing that salmonella-laced salt would get all over the kitchen." And Sam stirred the salt mixture so hard that most of it went onto the floor.

So yet again, I was relegated the main chicken duty. Thankfully it still doesn't smell. I have newfound respect for salt. The skin feels pretty much like really dry skin, but the meat of the chicken is feeling really leathery. I think I decided that the chicken seemed lighter on an earlier change, but this time he actually felt heavier. I'm not sure why though. I took pictures, but I don't think it was close enough to see a real difference. Plus I'm not entirely sure there is a real difference in how the chicken looks, so I think I'll save those for another day.

Once I got the chicken filled up with salt, I did have the boys come over and fill the bag up with the rest of the mixture, which they were happy to do. And since it was clean salt, I didn't have to worry too much about unintentional food poisoning.

Anyway, Pharaoh Kluckfu is well on his was to an eternal rest. And I'm just going to rest. Hopefully not for eternity though. The kids aren't as well versed in mummification as they should be yet.

This Week

Another really bad picture of one of the kids' projects. The finished ziggurat.

Things are just a blur. By the time I get to Friday, Monday is just a vague memory and by next week I'll have forgotten this week ever happened. So I think it's a good thing I have this blog and these reports. So let's see what I can reconstruct.

Harry:

He is still working in WWS. He's on week 4 and has just started the topos section. He read that he had to write a paragraph or so that is between 150 and 300 words and just about cried. So I showed him the word count on just one of my blog posts and he was somewhat mollified. Meaning he didn't actually cry, but he also didn't jump up and do the work. It got pushed back to Monday by the need to get to football. Lucky kid.

I have somehow become a person that does several different math and Language Arts programs in the hopes that, I don't know, the kids will know everything and no one will ever think their homeschooling was a failure. Something like that. So, we read about direct and indirect objects and subject complements in Grammar Town. We really do have a lot of fun with that curriculum. It's so worth it. And eventually we'll finish Grammar Town and move onto the rest of the books.

Harry has been plugging away at Latin for Children for oh, the past two years. As of right now I don't have any real specific goals for him in Latin, other than lean it, so this is fine. But I was reading on the WTM boards last night how other people do the program and it gave me some great ideas. So we're going to try a few of those and see how it goes.

Science was human reproduction. He did all of the work asked of him in My Pals are Here and now knows how babies grow inside the mother. He's known the mechanics of how babies are made since a second-grader at his old school told him. The lesson was pretty much review and he's moving on now.

Papyrus (grass) started growing along our Nile River this week, so of course I took a picture or twelve. (Look, it's a centimeter higher than ten minutes ago, quick guys, get the camera!) We also read about Hammurabi and his code of laws, did the maps for that and for Abraham and the Israelites, and Harry outlined the relevant pages in the red KHE.

And since Harry's reading assignments go with history, he finished the Illustrated Children's Bible and started something else, that I can't remember all of the sudden. Oh, The Broken Tusk. We'll be starting India soon and since the library's copies of any Gilgamesh stories at all are on hold, we decided to skip around a bit.

Ziggurat in progress.

Sam:

Sam does what I ask him usually with no trouble at all. He goes down his little checklist, does the work and checks it off. He might ask for help if he has a problem, but more likely he will just skip the problem and go to the next thing. So I have to watch him pretty carefully.

Math is fine. He's working through MUS Beta in his own systematic way. This week the focus was on multiplying 9s.. So he did that, took the test and moved on. Sam is incredibly smart, but I have to be careful about how I challenge him because if it's too much for him, he shuts down completely.

Reading...He moved on to the Illustrated Bible. He's a couple of days back from Harry so that they aren't trying to read the exact same thing at the exact same time. It's better that way. The only trouble he had was on answering some questions about "what to you think?" Sam is firmly in the grammar stage in his concrete thinking even though he is an incredible reader, so those questions are tough. But it gave me a good excuse to talk with him about what he'd read.

History is the same as Harry's, minus the outlining. WWE, FLL, and spelling are all going fine. He's just chugging along in them. Although we were feeling silly with the new outlining rule in FLL and we kept drawing lines on his paper until we had a little guy.

Who knew that outlining could be so fun?

I know we did some science together--it was about mass and matter. He finished the chapter and we'll move on next week.

Sam spray painting the ziggurat.

Annika:

I had the hardest time with her at the beginning of the year because she kept asking me over and over for things to do and couldn't just wait.  I'm happy to say that she doesn't bounce right next to me asking for work. She now bounces across the room, so I think that's progress. I actually had the genius idea to create a little board with all of her subjects on it. So she does her math, for instance, then she pulls the little tag off and brings it to me. The she knows what comes next and is usually willing to wait for a minute or two until I can get to her. I usually have the tags organized so she has something that's dependent on me, then something she can do independently next. It really has seemed to help.

Annika's board.

Annika started subtraction this week in Singapore Math. We have little counting bears, so we would set them up and half of them would go to the movies and we'd count the other half. First grade math isn't nearly as stressful as fifth grade math.

WWE, FLL, spelling and reading are fine. Annika learned the definition of a noun and then promptly taught it to her little sister so now they say it in unison, all. day. long. But I guess it's a good thing she knows it, right? We are reading from Tomie DePaola's Book of Bible Stories for reading, so she's going over stories that she mostly already knows. I usually read these to her so she can concentrate on the story, not the reading. She reads to me later from something that she's picked out.

She did the same history as the boys, but we talked about her sense of sight for science. I have a book or two that I want to read with her next week and then we'll move onto hearing.

Annika used her sense of sight to compare these three objects.

These reports always end up longer than they should. I think I just talk to much. So if you've actually read this, thank you. I'll try to make it shorter next week.

We Have Papyrus!

The inundation this year was just enough for the papyrus on the banks of the Nile to start growing:

Again, please ignore the stripes. Argh.

See the little shoots of grass? Cool, huh. But it looks like the Nile is a little low, I'll have to fill it up again in the morning.

Math Anxiety

I don't know if it's true for all homeschoolers, or even most homeschoolers, but for me the subject that can literally keep me up at night is math. How to teach it, what order to teach, what program and style, how many pictures on a page. All of these are huge questions. And I was going blissfully through life not unlike the grasshopper, saying that I'd get to those decisions later. After all my oldest is only ten and in fifth grade. We've had one major math issue and I switched him from MathUSee to Singapore to solve it. And it seemed to. Things have been pretty smooth sailing since then.

But then Harry decided that his life's dream is to take Pre-Algebra in sixth, not seventh grade. This wouldn't be a big deal except that I was counting on that year to figure out which math program to use going forward. And there are so many different choices out there. So many that I'm not even sure I know them all.

Let me list the math programs I know of, and if I have any thoughts about them, I'll list those too:

Saxon: Most likely won't use Saxon. Didn't like Saxon K and while it may be silly to base my decision on something Harry used for one month six years ago, I'm okay with that.
Singapore NEM and/or DM: I'm not entirely sure if these are the same program or what. I like Singapore Primary, so I lean toward these. But I have no real reason to lean that way, just as I have no real reason to lean away from Saxon.
AoPS: I'm not entirely sure what this is or if it will appeal to me, but I've seen it listed in various places and people seem to like it, so maybe it will work for us.

There are most likely lots of other programs out there that I haven't even heard of. There are certain companies I won't use, especially BJU, even if it's a great program. If there is something you think is fabulous though, let me know.

But, if you were picking from the three above, which would you pick and why? Sell me on one of these please. I need to sleep.

Recreating the Nile and Building a Pyramid

Last Friday my friend and I had the kids mix up a bunch of sand with a whole lot of glue to start the process of making sand cubes for a pyramid. We followed the ingredient list in the SOTW Activity Guide, which reads: "sand," "glue" but gives no measurements for either. So we just guessed. I'm not sure how much sand we used, it was a fifty-pound bag, I'm thinking it was about a quarter of it. But we did use at least three bottles of glue and some mod-podge just for extra sturdiness.

It worked! You've seen the pictures in other posts. But today we got to pull the cubes off of my baking sheet and build.

Building.

The end result. I am a terrible photographer. Sorry about that.

 Like I said, the pyramid would have looked a lot better if the blocks really were the same shape and size. But we had a good time building anyway. Maybe next time we won't do this during ant season and we'll be able to use the sugar cubes.

And now for the Nile...

This was a pretty straight-forward project, which was nice. It also didn't really take too long. The hardest part was getting the Nile Delta right.

Please ignore the colors and lines. I have no idea what's happening.

 Shaping the foil and laying down the river bed.

 Look, Sam is participating! Putting down the dirt for the banks of the Nile.

After the inundation. Hopefully the papyrus (grass) will germinate with in the next week or so. We'll have to get our Playmo Egyptians to mow their lawn.

And that's it for Egypt. This is more projects than I think I've ever done before and it's really because another mom and I realized that we were in the same spot in SOTW and that we also had free time on the same afternoon. That never happens so it must be fate that brought us together.

Next Up...A Ziggurat.

The Week in Pictures & Words

Emma playing Barbies. They were fighting over who got to wear the pink dress.

Panera School Math Class.

Emma's ouchy toe. She dropped a stainless steel water bottle on it last Friday.

Everything is easier if you can work on the floor (spelling).

Cheesy Harry sharpening his pencil for the umpteenth time.

Annika's Math Work

Sam pretending to be a scale and measuring the mass of the sand.

Marshmallow Constellations. I'm pretty sure this doesn't exist in real life. But then the marshmallows don't anymore either.

(Sorry for the lines in the pictures. I have no idea why they are there and I can't for the life of me get rid of them. If you have any ideas, let me know.)

So, for the words:

We are back in a better groove than we have been since our trip. Work is getting done more and more consistenly. Thank goodness.

I don't think there is anything major to talk about this week. Everything is just moving onto the next lesson or book or whatever. Oh, Harry did start piano again on Tuesday. It's not easy to find a teacher around here for less thatn $90/month. But I did. Sam will start in January when his schedule clears a bit (I wish I was kidding.) and Annika in a couple of years.

I have to say that I love reading everyone's weekly reports, I really do. But when it comes to writing my own, I don't want to say FLL, lessons 6-10 every single time. Instead, how about you assume that I'm keeping up with the kids main lessons in their core subjects and I'll post about more major things. Things like interesting books read or projects done. If the kids make a big leap into something new, I'll post that or if they totally fail at something...well, I might not post it in so many words. But if I start asking for help with something, it's probably because something didn't go so well. Okay? Thanks.

Keepin' It Real

On the off chance that you've discovered my blog and think that our days are all covered in rainbows and kisses, I will post an actual conversation that I had this morning with my 10yo.

Latin began at 11:30, it's now about 12:45

Harry, "This Latin is really hard." (Goes back to staring at the ceiling.)

Mom, feeling and sounding relatively sympathetic, "I know, but if you just look at the index in the back of the book, you'll probably find the word you need defined."

Five minute pass. I think he's working, but he's just looking at his book, flipping through it, hoping that something will stick as it passes.

Harry, staring at the floor, "Mom, are you going to dress up for Halloween?"

Mom, not quite as sympathetic as before, "Not the time. What do you need help with?"

Harry, flipping through his book and freaking out now, "I don't know...I don't know what this word is."

Mom, not sympathetic at all, "If you can't say it, spell it."

Harry spells sepulchre.

Mom, "It's sepulchre. What do you need to do with it?"

Harry, "Nothing, I just needed the answer."

It still took about another thirty minutes after this conversation to finish his Latin work. It was read a page and do a one-page worksheet.

And this ladies and gentlemen is why I'm grateful for the Word of Wisdom.

Chicken Mummy, Day Four

It's a good thing my friend also started the chicken mummification process with me. Otherwise I would have definitely given up by now. Not because it is smelly, because honestly, it isn't. Just because eww. I am not a fan of chicken and to have one, even one that is completely encased in salt, in my kitchen is just icky.

That said, I checked it again yesterday. It sits in an unused cupboard in it's oh so attractive Costco milkbox sarcophagus drying out. Really the only smell is the rubbing alcohol and a little bit of pumpkin pie spice.

This is the Pharaoh Kluckfu shortly after being taken out of his bags:

 He still has the old salt mixture on him.

This is a very brightly lit picture of what he looked like out of the bag and without the salt on him.

This is the mummification mixture. Two boxes of salt and half a box each of baking soda and baking powder.

I'll check him again on Thursday. See you then.

Color Coding

I put little colored dots on the kids books so that I can tell whose is whose just by looking at the spines. But it doesn't always work quite like I want it to when the books are pretty much the same in every other way:

It's almost enough to make me switch programs for at least one of the kids.

Book Work

If you ask the kids they'll tell you how much they love Fun Project Mom and that she really doesn't come around nearly enough. They usually have Sit Down and Do Your Work Mom instead.

This is what she presided over this week:

Harry:
Tales of Ancient Egypt for CHOLL. He finished the book and we're off to the Bible next week.
Singapore Math: I can't remember the lesson numbers but the big deal was learning negative numbers. I even looked up negative numbers on Khan Academy for him to watch. (It's a big deal because I usually forget to have them watch extra things.)
Life of Fred: Chapter 5. Another big deal, he did the "Your Turn to Play" and got the problems all correct the first time he did them.
Science: Human Reproduction. It's interesting. I won't be googling videos for him on this one.
History: You kind of already saw it. We also read the chapter in SOTW on Sargon I. Oh and I had him outline from Kingfisher Encyclopedia for the first time. It's been on his list of things to do since the beginning of the year and we finally did it. For some reason I thought it would take hours because again I was projecting myself on him. Eventually I'll learn not to do that, I hope.
Grammar Town: We finally got the Teacher Edition and I'm really excited about it. Harry isn't quite as excited.
Writing With Skill: I had to go buy a thesaurus but after that things moved swimmingly along. I am having to make sure he actually reads the directions and finishes the assignments. But when he actually works and finishes what he's supposed to his work is really good.
Spelling: He did some at some point.

Sam:
Sam runs through his work really, really fast. I'm trying to figure out what to do for him. He is so smart but he freezes when he gets to something hard. Sam is by far my most challenging kid--challenging because he's so smart but sometimes can't let out what's in his head.
Anyway, for right now, this is what Sam is doing:
Writing With Ease: We finally go the books we needed, so this started on Tuesday. Things are going fine.
First Language Lessons: Fine. We have a fun, goofy time with this. I would love to do Grammar Island with Sam--he's smart enough that he'd get it easily, but the scripted work of WWE and FLL is more his style. He has a really hard time with open-ended questions. Anyway, back to the goofiness. We make up stories and fun things to go with the scriptedness of FLL.
Spelling: fine. Spelling Workout is nothing to get excited over, but hey, he can spell.
Science: Umm...I thought we did some, but I can't find any evidence of it. We'll do better next week.
History: Check Harry's list, but he didn't outline anything.
MathUSee: He finished two lessons for real and a bit of Singapore Math 1B for fun. 
Tales from Ancient Egypt: I started Sam with the Grammar Stage lessons of CHOLL because he's in third grade and that's Grammar stage. Duh. He's been reading since he was three. So I bumped him up to the Logic Stage lessons so he and Harry are reading the same books. But I'm also having Sam read Annika's books to her because I want him to read the picture books too.

My one brilliant idea this week: Sam was having a really hard time narrating one day--I knew he'd read the book and understood it, but the words weren't coming out. So instead I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a web on it with the story title in the middle and then things I wanted him to tell me about around it. He actually had fun doing it and it opened him up enough to be able to tell me about the story.

Annika:
WWE and FLL: We did the next lessons, Annika thought it was fun to call Jason and I by our first, proper, special names instead of Mom and Dad for a day (I thought it would be fun for her).
Science: We made pumpkin playdough together. Does that count? We also talked about the different things we were putting into the chicken and why.
History: See chicken mummy. (I think if people ask me about history from now on, I'll just point to the chicken mummy and not say a word.)
Singapore Math: Addition. We're plugging along. She's remembering more and more and we're still using manipulatives and number lines. It's all good. She really likes math I think partly because it really reminds her of the structure of school. Math is math whether you are in a school building or at home.
Spelling: Kind of the same thing as math. Plugging along, going fine.
OPGTR: She's reading pretty well already, but I thought it would be a good idea to go through OPGTR anyway. I don't want her to get stuck later on and it's good practice for her speech issues. She's doing fine, I did find a place that she needs more help with, so we're going back through it again. But that's pretty much why we're doing the book.
CHOLL: Temple Cat and The Egyptian Cinderella. Complete with narrations and copywork.

And that's it. Sometime soon I'll post about Emma's preschool and some questions/problems I'm having. Maybe the five of you that read this will have some answers for me. Hopefully.

Craft Like an Egyptian

Let's face it, Ancient Egypt is cool and not only because it has it's own theme song. There are lots of projects and cool things to do.

You can write in hieroglyphics. I was going to post a picture of some hieroglyphic writing the kids did, but I forgot to take one. And I didn't save the actual hieroglyphics they did. Um, I know this is prior to the Egyptians, but here's some cuneiform the kids did:

I don't know what either of these say.

We also began the construction of a pyramid:

Mixing the sand and glue. It took a lot of glue.

This is about 24 hours after mixing. They have been cut twice and still have a lot of drying to do.

A lot of people don't actually make their own bricks and honestly I would be one of those people if we didn't have ants. It just seems silly to create a project out of sugar cubes and then break it up five minutes later because the ants found it. Plus I don't really need more bugs and semi-alive things in our kitchen with the whole chicken mummy thing going on. There is a limit.

I have to say that I don't normally do quite so many projects in such a short time. I have a friend that loves and thrives on projects and invited our family to hang out with hers. We also have the great Story of the World Activity Book that gives instructions on how to do everything.

Pharoah Kluckfu: The Next Day

I had to change the salt and spices in our chicken mummy this afternoon, so I thought I'd take a picture. Nothing much has changed with it. There isn't a smell (yet) except for the rubbing alcohol it was washed with. The hardest part was trying to get it out of the bags without stuff going everywhere.

And just because I don't want this to be the last image in your minds, this is Isis, our cat. Unfortunately she has become a Zombie Cat:

Pharaoh Kluckfu

A friend of mine talked me into mummifying a chicken with her. Well, actually it was supposed to be a kid project, but how often does that work out? Especially since Sam is one of the kids and doesn't touch icky things even in the best of times. Fortunately Annika really got into it--she was kind of scarily excited about it:

 Anyway, we got the requisite mummification supplies: dead pharaoh (chicken), and lots of salt, baking powder and baking soda. A friend supplied us with purple gloves which added an air of whimsy to the proceedings.

Combining the mummification spices.

Harry and Not-Sam. Sam was in the other room trying to stay as far away as possible. They were drying out the chicken.

The end result. I promise that there is a chicken in there somewhere.

Oh, and in case you hadn't hear, mummification Rocks! At least for some of us.