Weekly Report - Week 9

Tornado Boy

Math: We are almost finished with chapter 2 of MM 2A. We studied clocks and calendar this week. Several people on the WTM forum had said their children got stuck on this chapter, so I was mentally prepared for it to be difficult, but he never hit anything he wasn't able to do. Go figure. He learned to tell time to the nearest 5 minutes, learned the terms "half past", "x past y", and "x till y". He also learned how to calculate how many hours span between two times, even if one is AM and one is PM. Some of the word problems were very useful, like if a mother wants to get 7 hours of sleep and needs to wake up at 6AM, what time should she go to bed? He did very well with these types of questions. All we need to do now is the chapter test and the cumulative review. Then we'll move into chapter 3 next week.

Reading: Still plugging away at Charlotte's Web. :)

Grammar: This week, we did 3 lessons per day of FLL1. Several of the lessons at this point talk about common vs proper nouns, which he pretty well understands, so we are quickly going through those, but still hitting them just to reinforce the concepts. We have done one picture narration and a couple story narrations (which are similar to what we do in WWE, but the whole story is presented instead of just a passage of a larger book, so I think it ends up being a bit easier). For nouns, we've talked about family relationships ("My grandmother is my mother's mother or my father's mother.") and some places (city, kitchen, living room, etc.... capitalizing city and state and learning to write the city/state combo we live in). Once we get past the review of nouns, nouns, and more nouns, we'll do 1 lesson per day. I'd like to breeze through FLL1 and then next year do FLL2 at regular pace (3 lessons per week).

Independent Reading: Still plugging through the same books he had last week.

Writing: This week we had passages from Charlotte's Web. How appropriate! :) Copywork was a little sloppy, after not doing any writing since Wednesday of last week, but the narrations were pretty good.

Handwriting: We didn't do any separate handwriting this week.

Spelling: We did step 6 of AAS level 2, learning about syllable division. This should especially help his reading of those bigger words he's encountering now.

Read-Aloud: I got James Herriot's Treasury for Children from the library, and the kids LOVE IT. They love it so much that I have decided to put this on my "to buy" list. It's that good. Sweet stories about animals, written in language that is a little more difficult yet still understandable, great illustrations. The kids keep asking me if we can read the next story.

Bible: The Israelites got their first king this week - King Saul!

History: This week we learned about the New Kingdom of Egypt and the Israelites leaving Egypt. The boys love hearing about the plagues. :) During play yesterday, Tornado Boy started playing "Hyksos Army", so he is getting something out of history!

Science: We talked a bit about clouds this week. Tuesday involved lots of rain, and there were plenty of clouds to look at. We decided they were probably stratocumulus clouds (strato = layer). We also estimated the wind speed based on what was being affected by the wind (small tree branches were moving). We used Considering God's Creation to guide our studies. I copied some of the workbook pages, but didn't really end up writing on them. I did use them to help learn about the clouds and the wind speed.

Art: We drew turkeys this week! The Brute had a nap that day, due to attitude issues.

I had to discuss with Tornado Boy that art is his idea of what something should look like, not the book's. So it's ok if his turkey doesn't look like my turkey or the book's turkey. He can draw it however he wants! He had been having a little bit of a meltdown over the red part that goes over the beak. He's a bit of a perfectionist and doesn't have a lot of art experience. We're working on that. ;)

The Brute

Math: We didn't do any formal math this week, but Tornado Boy has been teaching him some. He now knows 2 x 2 = 4. Sigh. Tornado Boy tried to teach him negative numbers. He's really not quite ready for that. He can, however, add 1 + 3 = 4, 3 + 1 = 4, and 2 + 2 = 4. He's pretty good with sums of 4. :)

Reading: We didn't do anything reading-wise until Friday. I decided to give Webster's Speller a try. Yes, this child is a guinea pig. We did our first lesson: BA BE BI BO BU BY. He actually did quite well! I'm hoping this might get him over that hump of having to sound out every single word, even if he knows the word. We'll probably do the D's version of the above today. We are skipping C's until we have some other letters under our belt, since C says two different things in this progression. Tornado Boy sat in on our lesson. Working the syllabary should be good for him too. :)

Memphis Homeschool Convention

Last weekend, we went to the big homeschool convention in Memphis. It was my first time to go to one, and it was pretty cool!

When I got there Friday evening, planning to hear Jessie Wise do a lecture on First Language Lessons (which we just switched to), I found this huge line of people across the lobby area. It was crazy! I finally managed to make my way to the registration booth to pick up my bracelet. Then I learned what the line was for - Tim Hawkins. Ok, phew! I was afraid that was a line for lectures or something!

The next issue was finding where the East Mezzanine was. They really didn't have clear maps, or if they did, I didn't get one. :P I asked the ladies working the entrance to the exhibit hall, and they said it was downstairs. Well, they didn't say WHICH downstairs. I went downstairs the way I'd come, and didn't see anything resembling where I needed to be. Then I found a fellow attendee and asked her where it was. She said it was up 2 floors. So I went back upstairs, and didn't see a way to get up another floor. So confused!

Finally, I asked the guy at the registration area. He gave me directions to a DIFFERENT set of stairs to go down. I easily found the room now. Phew! Now I had 30 minutes until start of lecture, so I went back upstairs and perused the exhibit hall for a bit... Oh the curriculum! :)

I mainly walked around to see what was where, taking mental note of which places I'd want to stop the next day. When 5:30 was getting close, I headed back downstairs to the lecture room. I eagerly awaited Jessie Wise, but she wasn't there. Finally, the guy from the registration area came in and said she wasn't coming. Her husband had had emergency surgery. :( Hopefully he is ok now.

I went back upstairs to the exhibit hall to check things out a little closer, purchased Considering God's Creation used, then got picked up by hubby and the kids, who had been off doing something fun. :)

Saturday morning, DH dropped me off in time to get to Susan Wise Bauer's first lecture of the morning. This one was on Teaching the Real (Distractable, Impatient, Argumentative, Unenthusiastic, Non-Book-Loving, Inattentive, Poky, Vague) Child. This was an excellent lecture! She said it would be available on the Peace Hill Press site soon, though I haven't seen it there yet. She gave several ideas for how to do deal with symptoms of having a real child. She even has 4 of them herself. It was so neat to hear her describe some of her children that were not perfect little scholars that learned everything right away as she taught it. :)

In this lecture, she outlined how to solve the problem of homeschooling a real child. The first thing to look at was yourself, and she listed some questions to ask yourself. Next, she suggested looking beyond the symptoms of your child to find out the actual character of the child. For example, a purposeful child might be argumentative, unenthusiastic, etc. She listed various character types and which symptoms tended to be associated with that type. These types often had good qualities, especially as adults. She then listed some ideas to use for various types of children, including "Nibbled to death by ducks", "System of rewards (aka bribery)", and several other ideas. She also reminded us to remember that our child is a human being, and human beings don't act like robots.

That's a brief overview of the lecture without giving away too much. ;) I highly encourage purchasing the audio when it is made available!

After that lecture, I hung out in the exhibit hall for a bit more. I needed to replace the lecture that Jessie Wise was supposed to do next. I decided to go to Ed Zaccaro's lecture on Five Real Life Math Investigations That Will Astound Teachers and Students. It actually ended up being 7 investigations, which I found amusing. :) The first investigation was on pay day loans and how awful they are. If you borrowed $100 and didn't pay it back, in 6 years, I think you would owe around $6 billion, if I recall correctly. He also talked about bad math used by journalists all the time (that's easy to find!), how cost effective (or not) ethanol is, the importance of math when flying an airplane, etc. It was an interesting lecture.

Following the Zaccaro lecture, I went back to the exhibit hall to window shop some more. I bought Apologia Zoology 3 since we're planning on doing a study on horses soon, and I had wanted to use that as one of our references. I'm quite impressed with the quality of this book! It's hard back, thick pages, etc. This will be a nice collection to have on my shelf. I'll just skip over some of the bits where we have theological differences. ;)

Finally, I went to the next Susan Wise Bauer lecture on teaching writing in the K-12 years. I have the audio lecture for the elementary years, but it's nice to see her in person, even if some of the material is stuff I've already heard. :) She once again reinforced the idea that I'm heading in the right direction with writing for Tornado Boy - focusing on copywork and narration this year, next year adding in dictation, then in 3rd grade we'll start putting these skills together. No assigned creative writing, no journaling required. If he wants to do that stuff (which he doesn't), he can. But that type of writing won't really help him with expository writing, which is the type of writing most people use in real life. Instead, we work on the skills that make a good writer - first being able to put words onto paper (copywork), then being able to come up with a complete thought (oral narration), then being able to write down a thought held in their head (dictation). Once these skills are worked on separately for a couple years, you then start putting them together, and the child can start coming up with a complete thought and writing that thought down onto paper. In grades 5-8, the child learns to outline what they've read and write from an outline, learning paragraph skills and such. Then in high school, they work on style and the art of rhetoric.

After this lecture, it was time for me to be picked up so we could get back home. I'm so glad I didn't have my kids with me. I wouldn't have been able to sit through a lecture with Mischief. Thankfully, I have a wonderful hubby who entertained the children at various museums in Memphis while I had my homeschool encouragement fix. :)

This was a great trip! Oh, and we also did putt-putt, the zoo, a Japanese restaurant where the chef prepares the food in front of you, and a tack shop so I could get a helmet and gloves (which I found both quickly and easily - hooray!).

Tornado Boy was actually pretty good at putt-putt!

Mischief playing the drums at Benihanas

Weekly Report - Week 8

This is a late update, so this weekly report is for LAST week. We had a 3 day school week, as we went to Memphis for a family vacation (so I could go to the homeschool convention!). We did our normal 5 days' worth of work, but just doubled up some things each day to get it done in 3 days. It wasn't that hard, and we somehow still managed to finish around the same time as normal each day. Weird.

Tornado Boy

Math: We worked through more of MM2A Chapter 1, doing ordinal numbers, fact families, and learning some simple fractions (fourths and halves).

Reading: Still working on Charlotte's Web. I have him read about a page out loud, then he reads the rest on his own. He's needing help with very few words now, often none at all.

Grammar: We switched our grammar curriculum to First Language Lessons 1 this week! I had some issues with Rod & Staff, and I'm VERY happy with our change. We did the first 3 lessons, which were very simple, but we were introduced to poem memorization, which we had not been doing. I think this will be a good change for us. :)

Independent Reading: We borrowed several good books from a friend of mine, and during the trip to Memphis, most of them were read. I am often finding Tornado Boy with his nose in a book these days. So refreshing to see!

Writing: This week's passages were from Caddie Woodlawn. Narrations are slowly but surely getting better.

Handwriting: No separate handwriting this week. He still had to write neatly for WWE's copywork, however.

Spelling: We did one step of AAS level 2 this week. He's definitely retaining rules, as he notices when he's able to apply a previously used rule to what he's doing now. Very cool to see!

Read-Aloud: No read-alouds this week.

Bible: We learned the story of Ruth this week. Ruth followed Naomi (her mother-in-law) from Moab to Judah. Ruth picked up the leftover grain from the fields as they were being harvested. She was noticed by Boaz, and he had his men leave more grain leftovers for her. Eventually, they married and had a son named Obed. This continued the lineage of Christ.

History: We learned about the old and middle kingdoms of Egypt, along with the history of Joseph, from being sold into slavery on up to being reunited with his brothers and father.

Science: We made an anemometer. Unfortunately, our paper plate was too heavy (it was the good, thick kind), and our cups were too small (dinky bathroom drinking cups), so it didn't really work very well. It took a lot of wind to get it to turn at all. Oh well. We tried. :)

Art: We skipped art this week.

The Brute

The Brute didn't have school this week.

Weekly Report - Week 7

Tornado Boy

Math: We started Math Mammoth 2B this week. Since we just had a week long break, I only assigned one page each day. Pretty easy. I was surprised that this "review" was actually more challenging in some spots than 1B had been. Interesting! We had to go over 2 of the 4 word problems again, and talk about showing our work. He tries to do things in his head, and is very good at it, but these word problems had multiple steps and it started to catch up with him (though his issues were actually that he didn't read the problems fully).

Reading: Still reading Charlotte's Web. Charlotte has now made her first special web for Wilbur. :)

Grammar: We talked about nouns this week.

Independent Reading: We had a variety of books from the library - several science books (snakes, blizzards, cats, horses), Amelia Bedilia, and some other good books. He finished Grievous Attacks! (Clone Wars), which was a pretty advanced book for him!

Writing: This week's passages were from Peter Rabbit. I had to laugh when Tornado Boy did an excellent (for him) narration, complete with a comma. Then I said "Ok, now your turn to copy it.", and he had forgotten that it was narration & copywork day. I think he would have made a shorter sentence if he had remembered that. :P

Handwriting: The first copywork of the week was "Pencils are for writing, not poking holes." :) The other copywork was the 12 sons of Jacob, split over 2 days.

Spelling: We did 2 steps of level 2 this week. We only did spelling 3 days. So far, so good!

Read-Aloud: We listened to The Tale of Desperauex in the van. I also read several Clifford books today, chosen by Tornado Boy. The Brute liked them. :)

Bible: We studied about the birth and early life of Samuel, right up to Eli's death. We went over all the judges of Israel as memory work. He knows them all like the back of his hand. I'm still learning them.

History: We studied the Assyrians and the story of Gilgamesh. We also learned about Jacob and Esau, Jacob finding a wife, and Jacob and Esau meeting again later.

Science: We started our weather unit this week, using R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey's Earth & Space section on weather. The first weather lab was taking temperature in the shade, in the sun, and inside the house. There was a good 10 degree difference between sun and shade. Tuesday was a perfect day for this particular lab! Nice and sunny and warm, but cool in the shade. On Thursday, we built a rain gauge, just in time for a severe thunderstorm that night! Our rain gauge collected 1/4". I had to place it such that it wouldn't get blown over, so it probably didn't get quite as much rain as it normally would have, but it was close enough. :)

Rain gauge propped up for support during storm

Results!

I had to cut the tip off due to the shape of the bottle, but it still worked!

Art: This week, we drew horses! It was good timing, since we are getting a horse soon, and this horse we drew was the same color. The Brute kept saying we were drawing Final (the name of our horse). He's quite excited. :) I was impressed that The Brute tried to do copywork. See the 'H', 'f', and 'L'? Tornado Boy's copywork is not his best writing, but he did better copywork the rest of the week. I am trying out Getty-Dubay Italics style writing this week in my copywork, and I liked the results. :)

The Brute

I started The Brute on "school" this week, though it's very relaxed and on his terms still. I plan to do math and reading Monday, Wednesday, and Friday... IF he wants to. This week, he didn't want to on Friday, and that was fine! I told him that he can choose at this age, but when he's 5, he'll have to do school. ;)

Math: We started RightStart level A this week. We did lesson 1 on Monday and half of lesson 2 on Wednesday. Both lessons went very well. They were working on recognizing the objects of 1, 2, 3, and 4 without counting the objects. We also added and took away one object at a time, showing a little bit how addition and subtraction will work, though not naming those yet.

Reading: We started All About Spelling level 1, using it for reading. We did step 1 Monday, where you learn all the phonograms. He did very well with this! On Wednesday, we did step 2, where you say the first sound of several different words, and then later in the step you say the last sound of several different words. The Brute had trouble with this because he wanted to say the name of the letter instead of the sound, and being 4, it's like pulling teeth to get him to understand the directions and what I'm really asking for. But that's ok. He was clearly hearing the sounds and understanding those. It's an exercise we might come back to later if we need to. I moved on to pulling down tokens for each sound in a word, and this he did VERY well with. I was actually surprised. At the end, he went to the white board and spelled "cat" and "rat", just because he can. That wasn't part of AAS yet. :)

Weekly Report - Break 1

We took a break this week! Though it was actually one of our busier weeks. Weird. We got a lot of cleaning done the first couple days, then went to see a horse Wednesday, then had a babywearing meeting Thursday, then went to the library and came back home to frantically clean Friday.

We did, however, "do science" this week... Twice, actually! At Grandma and Grandpa's house, The Brute found a pine cone and wanted to take it home. Tornado Boy said that when it rains, the pine cone closes up. He had read that in a book (the Dr. Seuss book about weather). Then the boys decided they wanted to try washing the pine cone to see if it would close up. I said that was a great idea! So as soon as we got home, they filled up the sink and put the pine cone in. Sure enough, it closed up! I didn't think it would do it when not attached to the tree. Neato. We were at Grandma and Grandpa's house twice this week, and the second time, The Brute picked up another pine cone and said "We do science!", so here he is, once again, doing his science experiment:

"We're making science!"

Now part of this week was supposed to be homeschool planning. I had intended to plan science for the rest of the year and next year, and also get everything prepared (all subjects) for the next 6 weeks. Well, I did plan science mostly. I need to post about that separately. I think I have a workable plan... We will be doing planned, interest-led. :) I am trying to encourage more discovery type science, where they come up with their own experiments to do on their own. This week was a perfect example of them doing just that!

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll finish printing things out for the next 6 weeks. I needed 2 weeks of break!

Oh, and the horse... He will likely be coming home in a few weeks:

That would be me, after not riding for 10+ years! I did better than I expected, even though I weigh more and have had 3 kids since I last rode. ;)

Chicken Mummy - Part 2

Just an update on the chicken mummy: I haven't changed his salt as often as I should, but he still doesn't smell horrible. He smells a bit like a pet store rodent section, but just a bit stronger, I guess. Inside the bowl, you can't smell him at all. The bowl is keeping all smells inside very well!

Here are some pictures...

Pouring salt out the pencil hole

Chicken drying out

Pretty mummification bowl :)

Wordless Wednesday: We'll Be Studying Horses Soon :)