Our curriculum break is over!

What have I learned this week... Well, with Math, it is good to have Tigger and Pooh doing Math Drill and Rosetta Stone while Rabbit does Math with me. That gives them more time on those. They probably only take 15 minutes each when it comes to Math time, so that shortens the time on Rosetta Stone and Math Drill for Rabbit. Still not sure that's the best way to do things. The TM implies that you're doing math with all your kids at the same time, going from one to the other, but with my two dyslexic kids, that doesn't work well. I need to watch them do their math and make sure they write their numbers correctly. Hmmm. Not 100% sure there what I should really do.

Rabbit really enjoyed Dance Camp this week. (I'll have to post some videos later of the dances they learned.) We got to go today and see what they learned. It is funny to watch her facial expressions while she is dancing.

Tigger is really reading well. He enjoys doing the pages from The Complete Book of Animals, and will even fill in some of the blanks himself. I think Pooh likes them too, because they are fact based and not "stories" like is reader is. Pooh is slowly but surely making progress. I can't wait to add spelling back in for him.

I think having a little more laid back week was good before we dive into week 2 and start memorizing the Book of James. Now, to prep for next week.

I also learned I need to buckle down on getting school started and getting it done. One thing that will be different, since Rabbit has decided to take dance classes at Dance Scene Studios this fall, I won't have to have our light days be Wednesday. Her classes are all in the evening hours, so that doesn't interrupt our "school" time. I think that will make the year feel very different than previous years. We'll still have P.E. class for the boys (unless they both decide to do Hip Hop at the dance studio) on Wednesday, but that's not quite as big a deal as having P.E. and dance on the same day.

Working around dance camp, day two

Okay, so today we got Math and Reading done before taking Rabbit off to dance camp class. Whew.

[Side note: While there, I talked to the owner of Dance Scene Studios to find out how their regular ballet and worship dance classes worked. So, now we have to make a decision. Do we do Celebration Ministry of Arts or Dance Scene Studios? Dance Scene Studios would be a full year, August through May, of traditional ballet with a recital at the end of the year. Then Rabbit could be on the Worship Dance team, and they go and visit hospitals and nursing homes monthly and put on a performance. Celebration Ministry of Arts would be 3 months of Worship Dance and Ballet in the Fall and Spring each. She would have two Worship Dance recitals, but no recital for the Ballet class.]

Then, while Rabbit was at dance camp, the boys did a Science page each from the Complete Book of Animals, notes drill, a math football game, and a little bit of Scrabble (that's spelling, right?) before we had to go pick Rabbit back up. Then, after lunch, we listened the music lesson we missed from last week and did piano lessons. To wrap up, we went to the Smokey Hill Library and picked up their prizes for completing the Arapahoe Library District's summer reading program.

Overall, not a bad 4 hours.

When God has other plans...

Well, Rabbit had dance camp this morning, and the dog (perhaps we'll call her Piglet - she's about as timid, but can be "brave" as she deems necessary, but she's not pudgy) had a vet appointment for a recurring ear-infection. So, the boys and I only got Math and Reading in before we needed to pick up Rabbit. Then, the teacher said only 2 of the 4 girls who signed up showed up. This evening we got a call and they're offering a 1.5 hour class for the rest of the week, and they'll only charge us half the original cost. I'm good with that, but it means I need to come up with other work for Rabbit for the remainder of the week.

So, she can do Math Drill, Rosetta Stone, Reading, Book Basket, Piano, Math, and maybe some Spelling if I can figure out how to work it all out.

But, whatever my plans were doesn't matter. I'm sure God has a better idea on how this week should go.

EXP1850 Week 1 in Review

Okay, we've started early. I can tell you what NOT to do. Don't decide to enter bread into the county fair the same day you're starting your school year. Though my bread did well (one 1st place and one 2nd place), it added way too much stress to the day. The day went well, but it was a very long day. I decided to try going in the order things are listed in the TM. I had activities for each of the kids for the times I needed to do one-on-one work (English and Spelling). Still hopping around and helping the kids a lot. Especially the little guys getting started on Rosetta Stone. Plus, the dog had an accident in the house. So, we had a bit of an interruption. It took 5.5 hours to do all our school. But, for the most part the kids enjoyed it.

For day two, we did school in the morning, so I decided to do the core subjects (Bible, History, and Science) first, and then get as much done beyond that as we could. The judging for the bread was at 1:00 and I wanted to take the kids to that (field trip!). We did the boats as described in the TM, and the kids loved that. Here's a picture of each of them behind their boats.

And here they are all floating. Since we have water restrictions here, I didn't put them in the tub, but the did each try to blow their boat across the sink. Rabbit's boat spun in circles. Pooh and Tigger's boats did go across the sink, but they were hard to control. We talked about how the boats could only run on wind power.

And we got Handwriting and English done before running off to the judging.

So, for day three, I decided to do the core first, again, and then Language Arts and Math. That seemed to just work better for us. I think doing all the together stuff first (except Art/Music and the Read Aloud) just makes things go smoother. We can get English and Handwriting done before lunch, and then that leaves Math, Reading, Music/Art, and Piano for after lunch. The day just seems to run smoother for us.

For day four we did core first and then language arts again. That worked much better. I am having trouble getting the 2nd/3rd Grade Supplemental science in from the Complete Book of Animals. Sometimes it actually seems like there is more work for the 2nd/3rd Grade Supplement than there is for the regular part. The boys really enjoy the science, so it's not that much of a big deal to do the World of Animals books.

Day five was lighter, but we tried to catch up on some things we missed earlier in the week. That was good. I still need to figure out work for the kids to do for Reading and Math times, but we're making progress.

Next week Rabbit has dance camp for 3 hours every morning. I'm going to count that as school time (Fine Arts, you know), and then do Math, Spelling and piano for an hour with her after lunch. For the boys we're going to work on Reading, Math, Science (pages that we didn't do last week), Rosetta Stone, Math Drill, Spelling, Piano, Handwriting, AWANA verses, etc. I should have a good 4 hours worth of stuff for them to do, too. This should give me a week to come up with better ways to run our regular curriculum days.

The other thing we are thinking about is dance. Celebration Ministry Arts is a great program. Rabbit loves it and the dancing is wonderful. But, it is pretty expensive. There is a new dance studio that has opened up near-by. It is less expensive and closer. But, I need to see what days Ballet classes will be to see if it will work for us or not.

Winnie the Pooh Movie

We took the kids to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie this afternoon. I give it 2 thumbs up. Pooh values his friends over his tummy. Tigger feels bad for Eeyore being left out, and in his Tigger-y way, tries to include him. Piglet has to be brave when he doesn't want to be. Owl and Rabbit are their usual selves, but there are even lessons to be learned from them. You'll laugh-out-loud at all the antics.

And the reason we went to the movie: we start school up tomorrow. Maybe I'll remember to post about our first day of school.

Starting Early This Year (Explorers to 1850)

I'm really thinking about starting our school week next Monday! That way, I would do a full week with all 3 kids and see how it goes. Then the next week, Rabbit has Ballet camp in the mornings. So that week I would probably do the 3 R's with the boys while she's at camp (maybe throw in Rosetta Stone, Spelling and anything else that doesn't matter on the grid), then do another hour of school with her in the afternoon and get one more hour for our 4 hours. That would give a week to think about and tweak things. Then start back up on a full Explorers to 1850.

I think I really want to see how things go before we add in Dance and P.E. class in the school year. It will help me feel more confident. They both start in September, so that would give me a full month to see ow it goes.

I'm pretty well ready to start. I've copied James from Bible Gateway (an 1984 NIV version) to a Word document, increased the font for the boys, and then put it in those folders that have the 3 prongs. So we'll use that for our James study. I've got notebooks ready. I've got all my data entered in HST+, I think.

Really, the only things left are copying from George Washington's World and taking last year's work to FedEx Office and having it spiral bound for keepsakes.

Year 2010-2011 Finshed

Well, we finished a while ago, actually. I've not been very good about keeping up my blog this year. Too much going on. Let's see if I can give a good summary. (Perhaps later this summer I can go through and find some fun pictures to post.)

The boys finished MFW 1st grade. They are reading pretty well. Tigger has really taken off. He loves Calvin and Hobbes right now. Pooh is a little slower. We've found a couple of good motivators for him: a Lego comic story book (I found it at Sam's Club) and fortune cookies. He's actually starting to read signs on the road, too. We're still working through the Abeka 1st grader readers, and will continue to do so this summer and into next year. I basically just have them read 10 minutes a day to me. Tigger gets through 10-12 pages each time, but Pooh only gets through about 6 (he just reads a bit slower). So, Tigger is now a book-and-a-half ahead of Pooh.

We enjoyed doing the MFW 1st grade science. We just moved it all to our "light" day. The only thing I wish I had done for the science was go to Home Depot or Lowes and get some clear, flexible tubing to do some of the water experiments - there were several that needed it and we never did them. The boys also joined in on Exploring Creation through Astronomy that big sister was doing in RTR. We even made notebook pages. I did duty as scribe for them, but they drew and colored pictures.

The boys weren't always big on drawing pictures in their Bible notebooks. We always did double dictation for those, too, so as not to reinforce bad spelling. They really liked their Bible readers. One thing I started doing was going through the story before they read it and picking out any words they might have trouble with. I would write them on the whiteboard and we would work on sounding them out before reading them in the Bible reader.

At the end of the year, we already had our 172 days in but I still had 2 weeks of curriculum left in RTR. So, we condensed the History and Science portions and fit them into one week. So we dropped all other subjects and just finished those off. I don't think I required any notebook pages for History, but I think we did a couple of science things. The "Is Pluto a Planet" debate was hard for Rabbit. She really tried, but after she tried to convince herself that it is still a planet she was more convinced it wasn't!

NASA has lots of pages on the planets that went perfectly with studying Astronomy. And their Sun page is awesome! I still go and look at that about once a week. The spacecraft MESSENGER got to Mercury either just before or just after we studied Mercury, so that was a great coincidence (or Providence, as the case probably is). It seems like there were some interesting events on Saturn, too, when we studied Saturn. So, I highly recommend keeping up with NASA's site.

A couple of weeks later Rabbit finished Singapore 4B! Hooray, she is caught up and on track to finish 5A/5B by the end of next year. Perfect! We didn't quite finish Writing Strands 4. We only have to do half of 5 next year, so I think we'll just continue where we left off in 4. She did finish her Latin Roots and English for the year. She's about halfway through Level 5 of All About Spelling. There were lots of weeks where we only got in 3 days of spelling.

In the second half of the year we added Piano lessons. That added quite a bit of work to my day, as I need to at least sit with the boys as they do their lessons. I usually only need to sit with Rabbit once, but the boys need a lot more assistance. I really like our piano teacher. She really tries to tailor the lessons to their interests. For example, Pooh is pretty good at memorizing the lessons, so she has him memorize them and then has him add rhythm to it. For Tigger, he is really into contemporary Christian music, so she has him work a little in the book, but also lets him pick a song to work on chords. And Rabbit is just flying through the music books.

The year went amazingly well doing the two programs. I'm pleased with how it turned out. I need to be more disciplined on somethings (like staying off the computer (meaning the Internet) until we're done with our day), but I think we did well. We've had to work on attitudes some days.

We just recently added a dog to the family, so we'll see how that affects our school days next year.