Wordless Wednesday: Homeschool

Preschool Fun

A friend and I do a little preschool once a week for our four-year-olds. It's scheduled when Harry & Sam are in classes, so they're out of the house and Annika is my Special Helper.

Anyway, today we read about caterpillars and butterflies. We also made this adorable craft from pinterest, where everything fabulous and guilt-inducing is found.

I love preschool day. It's work but it's also Emma's day to have some undivided attention. And for a 4yo that's the youngest in a homeschooling family, that's pretty rare, and dare I say, special.

Good Things

Most afternoons Emma sleeps and the rest of us try frantically to finish as much as we can before we head out for activities. But somehow today we were able to finish most everything in the morning.

That makes for a more peaceful afternoon, even if Emma is awake.

Here are some quick pictures from a minute ago:

Playing Sorry with Cinderella and the Cat

Playing physics games

Weaving on her loom

Changes: A Math Story

For the record, I hate change. So I swore that I wouldn't become a curriculum-hopper when I started homeschooling. I would stay with something and make it work.

You all can laugh now, if you need to. I understand.

That philosophy lasted me a couple of years. Things went swimmingly for Harry and Math U See until they suddenly didn't anymore. I remember it vividly, he was at the end of Gamma where the multiplication changes to multi-digit multiplication. It didn't stick and he was ending every math lesson in tears. So I let him off the hook for the rest of the year and we just played math games and did lots of printable math worksheets. His confidence was so low that I had to bring him back to where he trusted that he could do math.

I switched him to Singapore Math at the beginning of fourth grade, which started out great. The books were engaging and he loved it. I did too. Sam still worked with MUS and did really, really well. He could finish a level in a semester. But we stuck with it because it was working well. I thought we had it down.

And we did, until...Annika came home for school this year. So now I have a 5th grader, 3rd grader, and 1st grader. I started Annika on Singapore. They did not get along. There were battles of epic proportions to get her to listen to me and to actually do the work. She is good at math but she suddenly was saying that she isn't. I freaked and got rid of all of the Singapore 1A books because I'm not having my incredibly smart and talented girl telling me that she isn't good at math before she even hits seven.

I stepped back and tried to figure out what to do. I went the route of playing games and printing stuff until I decided to try MEP. So far so good. She's working through Year 1 and a lot of it is easy, but there's enough of a challenge that I'm okay sticking with it. Annika doesn't tell me that she's bad at math anymore and I'm hoping she doesn't actually remember that she thought she was. She does about three lessons a day, but worksheets to only two of them. I know it doesn't make sense, but it works for us.

A funny thing happened when Annika came home for school. All hell broke loose. I don't know how else to describe it. She's high maintenance and trying to teach two separate Singapore levels and stay on top of Sam and his MUS was too much. We were spending half our day on math. So I decided to give Math Mammoth a try for Harry. He needed a little more practice with fractions, so I got the fraction book to try. He liked it (I feel like saying it like Mikey) and we switched after Christmas to MM for Harry's math.

Sam is just plugging along with MUS and doing well, so he's not changing. Ever.

Really, I swear. No more changes.*

*Unless absolutely necessary. I get to decide what "absolutely necessary" means.

New Desk

When we bought this house four years ago, part of it's attraction was the large loft at the top of the stairs. The model had a built-in desk along one wall that we really liked. Eventually we looked to see how much it would be to have someone build us a desk and it turned out to be way more than we wanted, so Jason decided to build it himself. (I'm pretty sure he wanted an excuse to buy tools too, so it worked out for everyone.)

Anyway, this is the desk in the garage:

It is really long because it will go across most of one wall. There will be three "slots" for kids to use and they'll put their books in the shelves underneath. As of now there is trim on it and Jason is ready to stain the wood. After that he'll put something on it to protect it from little people's pens and pencils. Eventually it'll make it into the upstairs.

This is part of the wall it will go across:

Why yes, that is the head of a four-year-old

Not an exciting wall, yet. But soon...

This is Valentine's Day

This is the box that has held all of our Valentine's Day mail.

This is Emma telling me "how beautiful" her Valentine is.

This is Annika opening her Valentines and gasping for joy (seriously)

This is the display the girls created so that anyone who walked through the door could see their beautiful Valentines.

This is the pile of Valentine's Sam opened. No pictures, but trust me, there was excitement!

This is Harry's stack. He's too cool for pictures and gasping, but I heard a bunch of "oh cools" and "I love this ones."


Finally, and no picture for this, but this is their Mom saying thank you to everyone that participated and spent the time to send Valentines to a bunch of kids you don't know. It really made our day! Thank you.

Wordless(ish) Wednesday: Reading, Writing, 'Rithmatic

I've never done one of these before, but hey, there's a first time for everything.

Harry turned 11 on Saturday

Which explains the conversation I just had with him (at least I think it does):

Harry: From now on I'm going to use Celsius.

Me (talking the bait, I know I shouldn't have): It will be difficult because everything here is in Farenheit and most people won't understand you.

Harry: I'm still going to switch to Celsius.

Me (pretty much losing it): You can't. People won't be able to understand what you are talking about. You'll have to move to Europe.

Harry: But I don't want to move to Europe.

Me: Just do your work!

A few minutes go by in which he is actually working.

Under his breath Harry mumbles, "Dad uses Celsius."

Me: No more about Celsius. Ever!

(Jason does use Celsius because he is a scientist and Harry is planning to be one. But in order for that to happen, he's going to have to survive 5th grade.)

Quick Pharaoh Update

I realized the other day that I hadn't changed the Pharaoh's salt in a while. By a while, about three weeks. Then I just put it off because I didn't want to deal with it in case it was gross. But I didn't smell anything from the box it's in, so I was hopeful. Then today at the party, one of the kids wanted to see it, so I took it outside and opened it up.

It was fine, but I was quite concerned for a while.

And that is how it became 9:00 on a Saturday night and instead of enjoying a cheesy tv show and some hot cocoa, I was standing on my porch in 50 degree weather, changing the salt on a chicken. (And, the 50 degree thing, give me a break, I live in Southern California. It's chilly out there.)

So I took a picture and wondered again what I'm going to do with the thing. I suppose I could wrap it in linen, but I really don't want to store a mummified chicken forever. But I've put so much work into it that it seems a shame to stop now. Maybe I'll give it to another homeschooler that doesn't want to start from scratch but wants to have experience. And they can have a turn with the whole salt thing. Then when they are finished, they can pass it on. It'll be like the exersaucer of homeschooling.

I'm brilliant I tell ya.

Here's the picture I took. Please remember that it was 9:00 on a RAINY cold night and we were in the dim light of my porch.

The Week That Was

I have decided not to complain on this blog anymore. In that vein, let me tell you of some of the exciting new challenges this week has brought. There is no end to to the dishwasher situation, which means that I have been without a working dishwasher for four months now. My crock pot cracked, but the crack was in a cool spiral pattern, so that was kind of interesting. My printer broke mysteriously, which makes my kids happy. And on Friday my car got a flat tire after the kids' sports class. The timing is only interesting because a friend's kid noticed the flat as I was turning to go to Costco to go buy a new crock pot. Instead I got a new tire, but at least we had lunch as planned.

Anyway, I swear I'm not complaining. Earlier in the week I did, but now it's just an interested chuckle. We'll survive without a dishwasher and possibly without a crock pot. The printer is important because of school, but we're off next week so that can wait. The tire was important and was fixed promptly and since the old tire was pretty new I got a discount on the new one. (Clear as mud?)

As far as school goes, we did some. All of the kids did their required number of days of math, reading, grammar, writing, Latin (for those who have it), and history. We were a little more hit and miss with spelling and science. But if we did everything perfectly I wouldn't have anything to blog about.

There were no real huge leaps this week. Most of what we're doing is plodding along until the next interesting thing comes up. So we're fine. Harry is flat out obsessed by Algebra and I've caught him multiple times this week trying to get the older neighborhood kids to teach him some. I had Sam read the Story of the World chapter to Annika this week, which was cute. And it was good for me to hear just how far he's come with speech therapy.

Being without a printer makes it much more difficult (really, almost impossible) to entertain my 3yo long enough to do anything of note with the other kids. She depends on the letters and other things I print out while we do school. So I've had to be a lot more creative. And that's good for all of us. She did things like cut out the toys she wants for Christmas and glue them to paper for her Santa list, empty an entire box of needles into the brown upstairs carpet, and cut even more papers out to give to me. Most of them say "Emma." So I'm keeping them all. Maybe I'll glue them to a piece of paper for a Christmas list. I need more Emmas in my life.

So, that's about it. Normal chaos around here. I hope this doesn't bore anyone. I'll try to put up a list of books we're reading on the sidebars in case anyone is interested.

Oh, we do have a birthday on Monday, so we had a birthday party today. Sam is soon to be 9. I don't have any pictures of Sam on my phone, so here's Perry the Platypus instead. You can call him Agent P.

Excuses, Excuses

I was just looking back on my recent weekly reports and if you just read those you would probably think we never did any lessons or schoolwork. We have had some things come up lately. Some things have been good (the Grand Canyon) and some not so good (multiple doctor appointments). In general I try to keep our mornings completely clear so we have good blocks of time to work. However, that doesn't always work as well as I'd like it to. And we made the Grand Canyon plans a year ago, so we knew it was coming up.

I did a few things before school started because I knew we were going to have some breaks before the end of the calendar year. I started lessons earlier than I would have normally, even before the public school kids went back. This was a major source of contention with my kids. They couldn't figure out why they had school every day when their friends didn't. We took it pretty easy and stuck to the basics, but it still gave me a little bit of wiggle room when I needed it. Right now we are working through the day. This won't last forever and it's not true of all of my kids, but we are schooling all day right now. My first grader obviously isn't and even my third grader doesn't spend the same amount of time as my fifth grader. But we are still working longer than we would have without the breaks. Of course the kids have recess and snack time and lunch. It's not like they wake up, start working and then go to bed. And since we have already taken a lot of breaks, our holiday breaks won't be nearly as long as they would have otherwise been. We're taking three instead of five at Thanksgiving and probably not two full weeks at Christmas.

I don't want to burn us out or anything and eventually we'll get back to a more relaxed feel around here, but for now, this is how it is around here. We've had a good few months of playing and taking trips and now it's time to make sure we are on schedule to accomplish what we need to.

What a Difference a Week Makes

This is part of the family last Friday. My two daughters stayed home in the sunshine with their Grandma while the boys, my husband and I hiked down into the Grand Canyon and then back out. There were some moments when we weren't sure if the "back out" part would actually happen, but it did and we all made it back to the Rim. Where it snowed. It's only a couple of inches but that seems like a lot when you live where it doesn't usually now at all. (Hence, the shorts on Sam.)

Anyway, we took the week of Halloween off for the trip (not saying the boys didn't learn anything, it just wasn't official) and then tried to get back to things Tuesday of this week after Grandma left. To say that things went slowly would be an understatement. Because of the Big Trip and Grandma's visit, I think it was okay.

We'll get back to things for real next week and I'm sure I'll write something truly enjoyable about how wonderful our week was!

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.