New Years Resolution: Blog. or An Overview of the 2010-2011 School Year

 

With the procuring of a digital camera for Christmas, I swear I will blog again.  I really want to have a record of our homeschooling that cannot be destroyed by spills and takes up no space.  To start, here’s a summary of what we’ve done for the first half of the school year.

Zeke – grade 3

Language Arts

MCT Island Level.  Zeke has read Grammar Island and has begun Practice Island, Sentence Island, Building Language, and Music of the Hemispheres.

Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization.  We have memorized the first 8.5 poems.

WWE 2.  Yes, 2 not 3.  I swear we will finish 2 and start 3 this school year and continue working on WWE 3 over the summer.

Writing Skills 3.  Zeke has done 2 units from this book.

Phonetic Zoo.  Zeke recently started this.  He is doing well and enjoying it.  He is on lesson 4 – OUGH.

Evan Moor Daily Language Review and Daily Handwriting Practice: Traditional Cursive.

A Roald Dahl unit comprised of a biography, The BFG with a guide from MBtP, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with a Novel Thinking guide, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and a recycling of part of the Novel Thinking guide to write a paper comparing the book to the movie, and Danny the Champion of the World.

Independent reading.  Zeke read all of the books in the Henry Huggins series.  (He’s actually just now half-way through Ribsy.)

Foreign Language

Song School Latin.  Zeke has done about half of this book.  It is awesome!

Math

Zeke has been doing McRuffy Color Math 3, supplemented by Math Mammoth and Key to Decimals.

Science

Half way through last year Zeke started Noeo Biology 1.  He has spent the first half of this year finishing it.

History

Zeke has been reading and notebooking following the History Odyssey guide for Middle Ages 1.  He also made a cool illuminated Z.

Geography

Zeke has done a few pages from The Complete Book of Maps and Geography.  We started the year trying out Trail Guide to World Geography but decided it wasn’t what I had hoped for.  We got A Child’s Introduction to the World and Zeke has been reading from that and making a sort of Main Lesson Book about it.

Art and Music

We have Music Ace Deluxe and he takes art and music classes at the HSAP.

Ukiah – grade 1

Language Arts

Language Arts 1 and Writing Skills 1 from Harcourt

Daily Handwriting Practice: Modern Manuscript

A Dr. Seuss unit consisting of too many of his books to try to remember

Literature Pockets: Caldecott Winners

A few Nate the Great books

Again, Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization – the first 8 or 9 poems.

Math

McRuffy Color Math 1 supplemented by The Complete Book of Time and Money

Science

Moving Beyond the Page 6-8 Concept 4: Matter and Movement

History

listening in on Zeke’s history books

Art and Music

Again, Music Ace Deluxe and HSAP classes.

Jack

Language Arts

Oak Meadow K.  Jack has listened to fairy tales and drawn pictures for uppercase letters A-P.

SSRW.  Jack has done handwriting practice and phonics practice for letters A-P in his SSRW workbook.

100 EZ Lessons.  We just started this.  Jack has done 4 lessons from this.

Reading BOB Books.

Math

Oak Meadow K.  Jack has listened to stories and drawn pictures for numbers 1-7.

Saxon K.  Unfortunately, Jack has only done about 12 or 13 lessons from this so far.

Science

We started out doing the science stories and activities in Oak Meadow, but after seeing his continued boredom with them I decided to order The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature and read from that instead.  It’s a hit!

Art and Music

Oak Meadow K.  Jack has done some really awesome crafts from Oak Meadow and he sings songs from Wee Sing Fingerplays that came with it.

NOW. What’s to come at our house?

Zeke is starting to use K12 LA.  I decided we don’t get enough of literary terms from MBtP and it is also lacking in short stories, plays and poetry.  It seems so many homeschool curricula focus on novels to the exclusion of the other genres of literature and so I tried to pull that back in with K12.

We will all be sitting down for read-alouds and narration CM style for science, which will be Noeo Chemistry 1 books, History, which will continue to be HO Middle Ages books, and “other.”  The “other” will be my choice.  I’m starting with some Taoist stories and probably some Beatrix Potter.

I will have Ukiah guinea pig a worktext I designed about nouns.

Curriculum Exploration

I know the standard school year began over a month ago, but I am still spending hours looking at blogs, amazon.com listmania lists and various websites getting ideas for topics, books, games and other curriculum pieces, trying to decide what knowledge and abilities we value most, and trying to create a balance of fun activities, and the unfortunately boring and tedious tasks that in theory I despise, but in practice I nervously cling to.  I actually intend to be doing this all year long, buying and borrowing items little by little because

1. I want far more things than I can afford to buy all at once.

2. I don’t know how long we will spend on each topic, and I don’t want to buy things we’ll never get around to using.

So far we have accumulated the following:

*rented or borrowed from local homeschool group

#game or kit

Zeke – grade 2

*Saxon Math 2

#Money Bags

*Open Court Reading 3

Wordly Wise 3000 Book A

#Quiddler

*Addison-Wesley Science 2

#Jurassic Jumble

#Diggin’ Up Dinosaurs – Velociraptor

*#Monopoly Junior Dig’n Dinos

Spanish Now Level 1

a cursive writing book

Ukiah – kindergarten

Sing, Spell, Read and Write

Dr. Maggie’s Phonics Readers

Saxon Math K

Jack – preschool

alphabet puzzles

dot to dots

lacing cards

#The Letter Factory movie and board game

Shared materials (all the kids)

a recorder and instructional books

101 Places You Gotta See Before You’re 12

art materials

various math workbooks, manipulatives, flashcards etc.

Mom

Drawing with Children

The Art of Teaching Art to Children

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

I think my hope is to be a family that trudges through the math, reading and writing, squeezes in some science and history, but clearly values art, music, play and exploration by including them in the curriculum and not always neglecting them in favor of the other subjects when there isn’t enough time for everything.  Do the above lists reflect that?  In my opinion some things are missing, but hopefully those will make their way into my house sometime before May.

Public School Eat Your Heart Out #2

We read the story “Angel Child, Dragon Child” in which the a little girls carries around a matchbox in which she keeps a picture of her mom. Then the kids made their own matchboxes.

One of many pattern block and teddy bear counter designs. I suppose they do this in public schools, but not with Mom there to take pictures.

A day at the park with a friend.

Niabi Zoo

One would think I would have managed a picture that included real animals, but no.  After taking this picture with the lion statue, and a picture with a gorilla statue, I dropped my camera (barely!) and broke it.  Sad face.  But, more importantly, we had a great time at the Niabi Zoo in Illinois.  It is the first zoo I have been to in years, and possibly the first zoo ever for my children.  Among other animals, we were able to see some leopards, elephants (real ones), giraffes, bald eagles, and some very fun monkeys that jumped all over the place on ropes.  As a stroke of luck, we ate a Subway the day before and indulged the boys in kid’s meals.  The toy that came with them was an “adventure journal” so the kids carried them around and wrote things down and drew pictures the whole time.  We also scored some very cool toy snakes at the gift shop.

Habitats

After a long summer of blog negligence, I have returned with some photos of our most recent project.  We are doing a small project on animals, their habitats, and their coverings (fur, feathers etc.) and ability to blend in.  We read What Color is Camouflage?, How the Guinea Fowl Got Her Spots, and I See Animals Hiding about animal coverings and about animal habitats we read Guide to the Planet and Animals at Home.  Then each of the kids picked an animal and habitat with the stipulation being that they would each be doing a different habitat.  We printed out pictures of their animals from the internet and they made models of them using model magic.  Then the kids colored pictures of their habitats which we glued into plastic bins to give their model animals each a home.  In order of the pictures above, Jack made an anteater living in the rainforest, Zeke made a rhinoceros living in the savanna, and Ukiah made a bat living in a cave.  They all made some cute details!  Jack drew a colorful snake hanging from a tree in his rainforest.  Zeke really concentrated on getting the colors right and drew acacia trees, and Ukiah put slime and cave paintings on his cave walls.  It was fun and I’ll follow up shortly with pictures of our trip to the zoo scheduled for tomorrow.

CSA Week 2

Here is the green goodness that I received from the CSA this week. 

a basil plant, a parsley plant, chives, rhubarb, tatsoi, pak choi, green onions, spinach, lettuce

My kids are eating more salad than ever and loving it.  So far they like everything we have gotten from the CSA except for the onions and chives.  They often don’t like spicy foods.  Some things we have eaten that we may not have eaten had we not gotten these vegetables from the CSA: rhubarb crisp, rhubarb cake, lots of salad, stir fry, mozza cheese/ricotta cheese/spinach grilled cheese sandwhiches

Of course I could buy the vegetables without being a part of the CSA, but I think this abundance of vegetables I receieve each week requires me (and/or gives me the opportunity) to try new vegetables, and also prepare more, as I tend to eat vegetables that require little or no preparation, like baby carrots, or frozen peas thrown into mac and cheese.  So, this has benefits beyond the fact that we’re getting as-fresh-as-can-be veggies and are supporting local agriculture, as if it were necessary for anything to be more beneficial than that.

Public School Eat Your Heart Out #1

a day playing in the creek

reading what they want, when they want, because they want to

proof that homeschool kids do indeed get to talk to other kids, and just a picture to brag that Zeke got his yellow belt the other day

Lighthouse Gardens

     Keeping a garden was a common thing for lighthouse keepers and their families to do to save money, have vegetables to eat without going to the potentially far away store, and just for something to do.  However, different lighthouse stations had different terrain conditions.  This experiment is to see how well plants grow in different terrains, and why some people had to get soil elsewhere and bring it to their station for a garden. 

     We have four plastic cups with holes in the bottom to allow water to drain.  The first two are filled with soil, the third with a soil and sand mixture, and the fourth is filled with gravel.  Planted two inches down in each is a bean seed. 

     The boys had a lot of fun filling the cups and planting the seeds.  Now I just have to keep them from playing with the plants and accidentally spilling them or some other disaster, and hopefully next week I’ll be able to post pictures of some sprouts.  We’re also reading Lighthouse Seeds, a story about how a family living at a lighthouse on a rocky Maine island grew a flower garden.

CSA Week 1

     We joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this year for the first time, and for anyone who is interested in what or how much one might expect to get from a CSA, I’ll try to post what I get each week.  I’m so excited to get FRESH, local vegetables every week.  I’m also excited because it should be a good variety of things, most likely including vegetables I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise, thus encouraging me to expand my knowledge about and taste for vegetables, and of course that goes for dh and the kids as well.  Here’s the skinny.  Our CSA offers shares in two sizes, the smaller being for 2 adults, and the larger for a family.  I opted for the smaller share for this year, partially because Ukiah and I are the main veggie eaters in the family, with the other members of the family being sort of iffy on their love of vegetables.  The other reason is that this is our first year, and I’m not sure what to expect, so I’d hate to pay for more of something that I ended up not being happy with. 

     Here’s a list of what you see above:  oregano, garlic chives, a tomato plant, rhubarb, tatsoi, pak choi, lettuce.  There is also one dozen eggs, which we will get every week, but for which we pay extra.

     I am double excited about the tomato plant.  I planted tomatoes for the first time last year, but some thieving animals ate them all.  This year I have put my plant in a pot so that I can bring it inside when there is no one outside to scare away the bunnies.  Hopefully that will work, and I won’t kill it myself.

A Bird in the Hand…

     We had a visitor the other day.  A sweet, little hummingbird flew into our sunroom and couldn’t find its way out, thus giving me a good excuse to catch it (and set it free, of course).  For anyone who is worrying, I got my camera before catching the bird, so it only had to stay in my hand 10 extra seconds for me to take the picture.  I did not catch the bird, and then run all over the house looking for my camera, all the while holding, and scaring the bejesus out of, the poor bird.  Anyway, it was such a pretty bird.  Unfortunately you cannot see it’s beautiful green wings in this picture, but you can see its long beak and how small it must be to fit in my hand.