Blog Changeover

I decided to move my blog from homeschoolblogger.com to here. Not that the other site isn't any good. But, I like having all my stuff in one place. Since google has my e-mail, my calendar, and now my blog, it is nice having only one place to "go" for all this. I'll leave the old blog up for a couple of weeks, point people over here.

It's probably taken me, oh, 5 or 6 days to move all the old posts and photos. But it has been a good thing. It's been good to go back and see where Rabbit was last year in things, and see where she has improved this year. The improvements in spelling. The progress in math. The improvement in attitude. The bad thing is I am now a couple of weeks behind on my school posts.

Week 22 in CTG

Bible time this week focuses on Saul going after David up to the first time David spares Saul. It is interesting. David says he doesn't want to take the life of God's anointed (Saul), and make it look like he killed him in order to be king sooner. But yet, he's willing to go after Nabal just because he refused him food. Just an interesting contrast. Not sure what to make of it. We also took a look at a few of the Psalms.

We read a chapter a day in The Children's Homer. Rabbit still doesn't quiet get all of it. I think I need to perhaps discuss it more with her. This is kind of our Greek History right now.

In Science, we did a couple of the experiments. The first one was Fishy Moves. The idea was to see how the shape of the fish and the fins and tail helped the fish move. So, first we made a fin-less fish like this:

Then we set up our tub of water in the bathtub (too cold for outdoors). I used one of those shoebox-sized plastic bins. It is propped up on some other bath toys, so the water will flow out the other end of the box. It is also convenient that we have the shower head on a hose. (Water restrictions due to arid climate means we don't just run the water into the tub for 20 minutes to try an experiment.) Here's the tub all set up:

Then we made the head bigger like this:

Rabbit didn't think it really felt that different in the tub. Next, we added fins. She said it made a big difference on how it felt to go up and down:

Then we bent the tail like this:

Rabbit said it really made the fish seem like it wanted to turn in circles.

The other experiment we did was the Sink or Float. This is one of the things that bothers me in Genesis for Kids - they don't always give 100% clear instructions. For example, in the lesson, it said to make your foil like a "duck-bottomed boat." Well, I don't know what a duck-bottomed boat is. So, I assumed that meant a "flat-bottomed boat," but I don't know if that's really what they wanted, and the picture for that lesson wasn't clear. Anyway, like mfwrocks, the first time we dropped the ball of foil into the water, it didn't float. My guess was that there was still too much air in the ball of foil. So, I found a large flat object and pressed and pressed and pressed, and then we had a very small cube of foil. That did sink:

The other part of the experiment was to measure how much water was displaced by each foil object -whether or not it would be the same. So, we put our dish into a baking pan and topped off our bowl. Then I dropped in the boat. We had some overflow. Problem was, the bowl with all the water was too heavy for me to lift off the pan without spilling the water that was left in the bowl. Even if it had been a very small bowl, I don't know that I could have lifted a small bowl up and not spilled any, because not that much water overflowed.

The next problem with this part of the experiment is how to know if I've filled up my bowl with the exact same amount of water that I used the first time? I used a large bowl (actually a baking dish) and didn't think to try to measure exactly how much water I put in for the first piece of foil. Anyway, we refilled, and dropped in the little squashed square - no overflow. Anyway, if you do this second part of the experiment, use a very small bowl and measure how much water you put in.

We didn't do any of the bug experiments. I don't think we have fruit flies here in the dead of winter anyway. And bugs are pretty much non-existent with 4 inches of snow on the ground. That's alright, though.

We didn't do God and the History of Art this week. Oh, we read through the lessons, and talked about the Art Journal lesson. I actually bought all the kids a sketch book a couple of weeks ago, and they've really been getting into drawing in those.

The rest of school is going well. We're almost done writing our short story for Writing Strands. It has been a lot of me giving Rabbit starter ideas and such. Math is going well for now. And even Spelling is going pretty smoothly. My only thing against All About Spelling is that it is hard to stop at 15 minutes. Just doing the review section with Rabbit can take 7 minutes, and there is usually at least 7 more minutes of instruction, plus dictation and writing station. So, Spelling is usually going 20 to 30 minutes a day. But, I feel like it is something worth devoting that much time to.

All in all, not a bad week.

Week 21 in CTG

This week's Bible covers Saul's sacrifice to David and Jonathan. It is interesting how quickly Saul's character flaws start emerging. He doesn't follow God's commands. Then, David is anointed secretly, and yet God works it out so Saul needs David to play his harp for him.

In History we learned some of the early Russians and Scythians.

We tried two of the science experiments. The first was "Designed for Living Underwater." I found an old medicine eye-dropper, but, it was plastic, so it didn't float in the water the way it showed in the book. However, when we squeezed the bottle, we could see the water moving up the dropper towards the bulb, and when we released, the water moved back out of the dropper. The other experiment we tried was "Motion: Things That Oppose It." This one was kind of neat. First, make sure you have 3 or 4 sections of your newspaper. If you don't, the newspaper will fall to the floor more slowly than the penny. (The Sunday paper would be real good for this one.) So, that was the first interesting thing - the paper and the penny hit the floor at just about the same time. Next, we dropped the toilet paper and the penny. That one was obvious - that the penny was going to hit the floor first. The last thing was to drop the newpaper with the toilet paper square on top. Rabbit thought that it would separate from the newspaper and drift down slowly. But that's not what happened! So, that was a good learning experience.

In Spelling, we finished step one and went on to step two. Rabbit is still having to re-master some of the phonograms, but it has been a good review.

We're making steady progress in everything else, and really enjoying Bach. Rabbit dances around the kitchen when we listen to Bach.

(I'm still catching up my blog, so this is from memory, which is why it is so short.)

Week 20 in CTG

This week for Bible we studied about King Saul. First, you have the Israelites asking for a King. Samuel balks, and says, "No way!" But God encourages Samuel and tells him who to choose. I guess, somehow, it is always easier to follow a person you can see with your eyes as king, than following a King you can only see with the eyes of your heart. Rabbit did a great job memorizing Psalm 23. She probably had it memorized a couple of weeks ago.

In History, we studied the Greek dark ages and some Greek mythology. Mostly it was just covering the different Gods. Rabbit loved reading The Trojan Horse. In fact, she was so excited about it, she read it to her dad at bed time. I bought the audio book version of The Children's Homer and have been listening to it while we follow along in the book. Those old Greek names can be quite intimidating to pronounce, so it is nice to just follow along in the book. This story has been harder for Rabbit to narrate. She will often summarize, but get confused about who did what. I have been having to help with the narrations a lot more with this story.

We started All About Spelling Level 4. The first step is review. I have a feeling it is going to take us a while to review all the previous phonographs and such.

All our other topics have gone pretty well.

(P.S. - I'm writing this about 3 weeks late, so it's pretty short. But, my previous post on the science for this week is the bigger highlight.)

Science of Week 20 in CTG

After feeling like a failure so much with science, this weeks science went better. Since there were so many experiments in one day, I thought I would do a separate entry.

We did not do the "It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's SUPER Feather" experiment (no feather handy) or the "Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem...Rubbery Bones?" experiment (no bones - we only buy boneless chicken breasts).

The "Up, Up, and Away" experiment was probably the most challenging, but we were finally able to get it to balance. We tried plastic forks, but they were too light compared to the weight of the clay. So, here is what you will need:

Then we followed the instructions in the book. I had to tweak the forks quite a bit, but we did finally get it to balance. Here is one of me holding the cup:

Here it is setting down. You can see the fork on the right is just barely above the counter-top. So, it was close:

The weight of the forks would pull down in the clay and the weight of the clay and forks on the toothpick would make it move in the clay as it balanced on the edge of the glass so, you had to be kind of quick. Several times I had to pull all the stuff out of the clay and reform the ball. Here is a view from the top - you can see how the forks were starting to pull down and stretch the clay; you can also see how close I had to put the ball of clay to the edge of the glass:

The "Glide and Lift" experiment was relatively easy. It helped to get a yard stick to draw a line along the diagonal of the paper to be able to fold it better. Here is our glider:

Here is Rabbit making an attempt to toss it off our balcony:

You can see that with this toss, the glider looped up. It did take some practice to get it going out rather than up. We are fortunate to have an open floor plan so we had a "balcony" to toss the glider off. If you don't have a balcony, standing up on a chair would probably give the same effect.

I tossed the glider a couple of times from the balcony, and one time it landed right on the hook of our coat rack! We probably laughed for 5 minutes over this!

The final experiment was called "Winging It." From the instructions we couldn't tell if we should tape the edges together so they lined up, or if we should tape the shorter side down to the longer side. We tried both, and decided taping the edges together so they lined up was what they wanted, so it looked like this:

The only bad part about this experiment was getting dizzy from all that spinning. Here is our wing in action:

So, 3 fun experiments. It probably took us a good 45 minutes or so to do them, but well worth it for the laughter and fun.

Week 19 in CTG

Not a bad week, overall. More history this week. For Bible we have studied Ruth and Samuel. Those have been neat readings and discussions. Ruth's obedience to and trust of her mother-in-law is inspirational. It was fun to talk about Boaz redeeming Ruth, and compare that to Jesus redeeming us. Then, reading 1 Samuel and how God answered Hannah's prayer for a child, and then she willingly gave him back to the Lord! I have so much respect for that having lost a child of my own and knowing how hard that was.

For History, the main focus has been the Minoans and Myceneans. It has been interesting reading the information about those cultures and trying to figure out who the "sea people" were referenced in Hittite Warrior.

Science. Sigh. I was a bad mom. We didn't do any of it. We read it. We talked about it. We didn't even do the fish model. I told Rabbit that I had to do several dissections in 7th grade biology, and the inside of the animal never looked like the pictures in the book. About the only thing I ever successfully identified in a dissection was the heart. So, I wasn't that motivated.

In Spelling we finished Level 3 of All-About-Spelling today! The last two lessons - contractions and homophones were super easy for Rabbit. The fun part was we just covered contractions last week in English, so it all came together perfectly. Contractions she gets - writing less is very cool to her.

We finished off the "What I see out my window" lesson from Writing Strands this week. Rabbit only wrote about 2 items. Today she said, "But Mom! It's winter. It's boring outside. There are no birds no flowers and the grass is all covered with snow. I don't want to write about it." So, I let it go. She wrote one very good paragraph and one decent one. We'll move on.

In Math we finished Unit 11 in Delta today. Hmmm. At this rate, I don't think we'll finish by the end of our school year. I see math continuing over the summer. She gets how to do averages, her math just doesn't always add up (pun intended!).

Art has been going well. We often modify the lessons a little because of the weather or she's not interested in drawing exactly what the author has suggested. But, even then, sometimes she'll be doing her own free art, and then incorporate those ideas. So, overall, I think it has been good to at least read the book and see what he suggests.

I realized today that we start Week 20 tomorrow. We only have 14 weeks left of school! That just doesn't seem all that long. The CHEC Conference is in June. We'll have to see if we want to start early again this year, or just do school-lite over the summer.

Trusting God for the End Result

You know, this home school journey can be quite stressful. Am I doing enough? Is this the right method to teach this kid? What about this one - the right-brained one - how am I ever going to get through to her? Should I use Math-U-See or Singapore? Do I want textbooks or literature-based? Ahhhhhh!

Then you just start. And you head down the road. And you realized that these traditional flashcards don't work for child number 1, but these cool right-brained ones work terrific. Child number 2 looks at a multiplication table one time and has them memorized. But nothing seems to work with child number 3. So you pray, and ask God for guidance. And you know what is so cool? He answers. Every time. Without fail.

We can't guarantee the end result. Oh, we can do things - lots of good things. We can follow so-and-so's parenting methods. And the such-and-such teaching method. We can be there with our kids through the up's and down's of everyday life, admitting our failures, being an example of how to turn to God and ask for His help. We can get tutors, and right-brained flashcards, and sign up for extra-curricular activities. We put God before them every way we can so they can know Him and what He has done for us.

But in the end, we have to trust God for the results. They're His kids. He has a plan for them. He gave them to us as part of that plan. But, they're His.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;

In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6