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.

Up to Week 23 in MFW 1st

Well, we're in the middle of Week 23 in MFW 1st (that's day 110). Tigger is doing really well with his reading and math. The math part surprised me, but he really seems to get the concepts. Pooh is a bit weaker in the reading (but does fine with the math, although he does it slowly). I have added All About Spelling for both of them, and it seems to be helping Pooh some, and he likes it, so I'm going to stick with it. But, if his dyslexia turns out to be more severe, I might have to turn to Barton's Reading.

What the boys enjoy most is science. They've been doing Astronomy in RTR with Rabbit. I've been using Jeannie Fulbright's free Astronomy notebook for the boys. They love drawing the pictures, and then they tell me a little narration and I write it on the pages for them.

We've been doing all the experiments we can from the 1st grade program too. Today's subject was "Making Water Work." The demonstration (or experiment) was to build a water wheel. One of the items called for was a styrofoam egg carton (or two). Well, we don't have any. I was trying to think of what to use, and then I remembered the left-over plastic Easter eggs from last year. So, we took the "larger" half of those eggs, and used a hot glue gun and glued them on like this:

Then I glued the other side on (again, with a hot glue gun). We didn't have any spools, but we do have lots of K'nex, so we used a K'nex rod and two wheels from that in place of the spool and pencil like this:

We taped the wheels to craft sticks rather than the rulers, and then rested the craft sticks on rulers so, it looked like this:

Then we tried it to see if it would really work, and it did! (Make sure you do this near a sink, as water does splash off the wheel.)

So, anyway, definitely try to be creative with building the models and doing the science experiments, even if your days end up long.

Up to Week 23 in RTR

Sigh. Five weeks since my last update. Let's see if I can get caught up.

In RTR, Rabbit and I have been cruising along just fine. We got up to about 1400 or so in Europe, and the curriculum backtracks a bit to cover the same time period in China, Japan and Australia (I think we hit Russia next week). It has been interesting to note how a feudal system developed in both China and Japan, without having any contact with the West.

One of our fun projects was to build the model of a medieval castle (it comes with the curriculum). It's a lot of work, and I did most of it, but once I got into a rhythm, it wasn't bad. I bought a 1/4 inch thick poster board and we built it on that. We tried some different craft glues and Elmer's. Different glues worked better in different situations. Rabbit did a presentation at our homeschool group on castles after we made it (she cut out and glued on all the figures):

In science we finished up the Human Body and began Astronomy 2 weeks ago. The last unit in the Human Body was the reproductive system. Don't miss The Wonderful Way Babies are Made. I didn't read it to my 6 year olds, but it was perfect for Rabbit. Now that we've switched to Astronomy, we had another great "line-up." We're studying Mercury this week, and Mercury is visible in the sky just after sunset, along with Jupiter. We hope to get out tonight to be able to see it. (This website has details.) I've been trying to do all the experiments and projects. It's tough, because our days go longer, but the kids really enjoy them. Here is our model of the solar system:

We used a bead for Mars because it was so small. We should have used a bead for Mercury too. But it looks great and the kids really got a feel for how things compared in size.

We finished up memorizing 1 Corinthians 13 and are now on to Philippians 2. These are great verses for a family to "rememberize" to remind us how to love and how to treat each other. In Luke we're up to Passion Week, which I think is perfect as we approach Easter.

We haven't been doing as many of the Art lessons from God and the History of Art these days, but we are reading the History. And, if there is a lesson that she finds interesting, we do that. We have been listening to the music and really enjoying Mozart. We recognize lots of the movements.

We are now in Singapore 4B in math. I really like the way they've been teaching fraction to decimal (and back) conversions, and wish I would have learned it that way when I was in school. I will say that the reviews, in both the workbook and textbook seem WAY longer than in 4A.

English and Writing Strands continue to step up, but Rabbit is usually up to the challenge. Our latest Writing Strands assignment was to write a description of our home. I don't think we did as great a job as he implied we should do in the lesson. But, we have a rather large house, and it would have taken us many more days to complete the lesson. I told Rabbit I'd like for us to try again with it this summer, now that we have more of a feel for the lesson.

We're still in Level 5 in All About Spelling. I'm not sure if she is going to finish it this year. More of the tricky words ("If the sound is /long-e/ then it's i before e except after c") are in this level, and they are giving her trouble. She is recognizing more and more when she misspells, but still can't always figure out the correct spelling.

School has been going pretty well. We added in piano last week, so that is also adding to our days. Rabbit has taken right to it, and practiced every day.

RTR Week 17 - Lefse

Well, we tried making "Lefse" today, since we were studying the Vikings. We followed the recipe in the TM, except we only had 6 potatoes to use. This still made 10 "Lefse." I'm not sure I made them thick enough, but if I made them any thinner, they would stick to the counter, even after flouring the counter and my rolling pin.

We topped ours with cinnamon, sugar, and honey. Warning: they are VERY filling. These would be better for breakfast or lunch, not for desert!

School has been going well. Rabbit doesn't like the stuff about wars, so she had a really hard time with drawing the Bayeux Tapestry this week. (Follow that link, and you can see the whole tapestry with a description. Someone posted it on the MFW boards.)

Rabbit is about to finish Singapore 4A. These Review pages are taking a long time. We spent an hour on the first review, and still didn't finish.

Tigger and Pooh are progressing through 1st. I was really proud of Pooh this last week. He had dictated me a summary, I wrote it and he said, "I can copy it by myself, Mom." So I let him, and he did a pretty good job! He did misspell 3 words even though he was copying. But, he remember to put a space between each word and worked very hard at writing neatly for him. And, when we went to the grocery store he actually read "Jet-Puffed" off the marshmallow bag by himself.

Tigger plows along. We got fortune cookies from the grocery store, and he even tries to read his fortune to himself.

They LOVE exploration day and insist I start with the science reading and do the experiments. We're on the water book, and those are fun experiments. If you can, make sure you go to the hardware store and get some clear, flexible rubber tubing for some of the water experiments. We haven't been able to do a couple of experiments because we haven't any.