Gus is taking a nap for the first time in two or three weeks! It took him forever to fall asleep, but he had just nearly fallen asleep in the car, so I knew he could use the sleep and I waited him out. Now I'll probably have to wake him up when it's time to leave for gymnastics in a little while. But anyway, I don't know what to do with myself now, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to update.

Most all of my books are here for next year's history--think I have enough?


Now I need to go through and make a schedule so that we actually get all these books (or, well, at least most of them) read. For projects/crafts type stuff, I bought several books from the American Kids in History series. There are, as far as I can tell, a total of seven from different periods of history. For next year I bought Civil War Days, Wild West Days, Victorian Days, and World War II Days. The format for each is that it follows a fictional family or two through a year, with recipes, crafts, games, etc. sprinkled throughout. After looking through them, the projects seem to be a good match for my kids' ages and interests. They also mostly have to do with ordinary life in the time period--what the kids might have done--which is what I'm trying to focus on. So I'm tentatively optimistic about those--I went ahead and ordered the Revolutionary War Days book, in fact, to try out this year.

And now I do indeed need to go wake the Guster up to take him to gymnastics (and he missed dinner (such as it was--nachos), so I guess he can stuff himself full of graham crackers on the way). I think I will save and finish later!

Okay, now I'm back. Science: I conquered my fears about needing to do lots of planning and bought Bernard Nebel's Building Foundations for Scientific Understanding. And then I decided to go ahead and start it, rather than waiting until next year...since our science hasn't been super organized anyway and we can keep on doing The Elements at the same time. We did the first lesson (on categorizing and organizing) yesterday, and so far I'm a little bit in love. The kids were very interested and focused the whole time. We talked about how things are organized (our schoolroom, the kitchen, the grocery store) and why (what would happen if things weren't organized into categories at the grocery store?). Then I gave them a basket full of assorted stuff from around the house for them to sort into categories. They spent a long time, worked together beautifully, and came up with one system. Then we talked about other possibilities. Anyway, it all went very well, and I'm excited about it. It's supposed to be a K-2 book (with a 3-5 book planned for later), so Ari's at the top end of that range, but I think it will work well for him--although some of the stuff will be review since we have managed to do some science over the past couple of years ;). The next lesson I'm planning is on solids, liquids, and gases, which we've covered pretty thoroughly this year, so we'll go through that quickly.

And in other science news, we went to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History with Nana and Grandpa when they were here for Thanksgiving, and decided to go ahead and buy a membership. We actually had a membership when we first moved here, but didn't use it much since the kids weren't really old enough. But they loved it this time--we didn't even get to half of the exhibits--so I think it will be a good investment. It's a pretty big hike from our house, but close to our church, so we're going to try to go some Sunday afternoons. Pictures:

November already!

Taking a break from madly getting the house (sort of) ready for the in-laws visit to do some updating.

Language Arts: Ari is a few weeks into Writing With Ease Level 2, and I'm very pleased with it so far. Narration is still a bit of a struggle, but it's gradually getting easier. We finished up First Language Lessons 3 and have started Growing with Grammar 4. Again, so far so good. Right now it's mostly review of stuff we did in FLL (the diagramming is very, very simple so far), but I think he's going to like the format better--there's more writing, less listening, which I think will suit him well as he's a very visual kid.

Milo's moving along nicely with reading. It's getting easier for him, and he's reading simple books much more quickly now. We read Hop on Pop last week. We've pretty much given up on Headsprout, as he was very frustrated with how quickly they expected him to click on stuff. So now he reads an easy reader to me for a few minutes, then does a page or two of Explode the Code and works on his handwriting (we never finished the Handwriting Without Tears preschool book last year, so he's working on that and then I'll get the K one).

Math: same ol' Singapore. I need to get Ari some kind of super fun thing or other for memorizing multiplication tables and Milo something similar for memorizing addition facts, and then things would go a lot more quickly. Ari and Dave are reading The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat together, and are very into it.

History: We're on track to finish up Winterpromise American Story 1 by June, which is perfect. Going well--some of the books are bigger hits than others, but overall they're enjoying the material. It's always a struggle for me to get things ready and actually get some of the crafts and projects done. But we made a bullroarer from More than Moccasins and a 3D map of colonial Boston over the past couple of weeks, so it does get done sometimes. I ordered History Scribe (and Bible Scribe) downloads a few days ago. They have pages where kids can draw pictures and write something go along with all kinds of historical events and people. It's kind of what I had hoped the WP Make Your Own History Book would be like, but it wasn't. I was making some pages on my own, but these are pretty cheap and include pages to use up through high school, so I went ahead and got them. I need to scan in the pages the kids have done--they're liking them so far. There was something else....oh. We're watching Liberty's Kids on United Streaming, and it's a big hit.

Science: still going through Ellen McHenry's The Elements. We made and played the Periodic Table game the other day and are gearing up to make our Periodic Table pillowcases after Thanksgiving. And then we're adding in experiments from various books (last week we did an experiment filling up a cup past the brim with water to show how water molecules attract) and reading. We just started The Mystery of the Periodic Table.

Other stuff: We're finished with co-op until after the new year. The kids really enjoyed the sign language part of it, and Tracey loaned them one of her Signing Times DVDs to get their fix until we start up again.

My friend Di Linh started up an Odyssey of the Mind team, and we're doing that on Thursdays. Here's the description from the website:

Odyssey of the Mind
is an international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college. Team members apply their creativity to solve problems that range from building mechanical devices to presenting their own interpretation of literary classics. They then bring their solutions to competition on the local, state, and World level. Thousands of teams from throughout the U.S. and from about 25 other countries participate in the program.

Our team is my kids, Di Linh's almost 6 year old boy, a 6 year old girl, and 2 7 year old girls (one of whom is Ari and Milo's very good friend, Lula). Their problem for the year, that they'll present at a local tournament in March, is to come up with a little skit about a candy factory where all the candy has at least one healthy ingredient. So at the meetings they work on different problem solving and team building type activities and also plan out the play. The kids are completely loving it so far, and there is a great deal of giggling.

And then--planning! I'm deep in the middle of planning for next year. I'm going to put history together myself, but I want to have it all laid out week by week, because I know that otherwise I'll get bogged down and things won't get done. So I've ordered 8 million books or so from various sources, and they've been pouring in all week. Once they're all here I'll sit down and put them in order and come up with a schedule. We're doing the second half (Civil War and after) of American History, with a focus on kids in history. This is partly just how things winded up happening when I looked at the books I was picking out, but then it became more intentional as I realized that would be a good way to make things more interesting and relevant to my kids and to deal with some of the not so pretty stuff that comes up while keeping it age appropriate. I'm putting a lot of emphasis on social issues--the labor movement, civil rights, suffrage, et. al. And I want to work in poetry (maybe a poem a week? I ordered a couple of American history through poetry type books) and music (I'm going to order a few of the Smithsonian Folkways collections).

I ordered the Sonlight 3/4 year old preschool program for Gus, because he's been itching for "Gussie School." It's mostly story books to read aloud with a checklist instead of a schedule. Books from the library would do just as well, but he's very excited about having his own thing, so I got it as sort of an early birthday present for him.

Science? Up in the air. I'm looking at Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. We'll see.

We've been busy!

Despite the lack of blogging evidence, we've been doing tons o' stuff this fall. We went to Disney World, and then we got back and things got crazy busy. Our homeschool co-op started the Monday after we got home. This year we're doing sign language, Living Math, outdoor survival skills type stuff along with a Lewis and Clark study, and handicrafts. The kids are enjoying all of it, and are especially into the sign language.

I feel like we've got a good rhythm going with stuff at home. We've started doing housework stuff in the morning before we start school, and that's working well. Then we sit down all together and do Spanish, a Bible story, a word of the day, the calendar, read some poetry, sometimes read some folktales that go along with our history studies, and review sign language. After that, I send Ari off to do independent work (some spelling and writing that I get from Teacher's Filebox and his math, if it's something he already knows how to do) while I work with Milo on reading and math. Then we switch off and Milo finishes up a page from Explode the Code on his own while I do First Language Lessons, Spanish, and Writing with Ease with Ari. Gus, you'll notice, is not in the description anywhere, which is why it works much more smoothly on paper than in actual practice. Sometimes he hangs out and colors, sometimes he plays with play-doh, sometimes he plays in the playroom, sometimes I put him on the computer. I may look into a preschool curriculum for him soon, just because I think he'd like to have his own thing and it'd make me feel better about how neglected the poor kid is. I try to read to him as soon as I'm finished with the older kids, but often by then he wants to run off and play with them.

Spanish--after months of hemming and hawing and looking at every curriculum I could find, I finally ordered stuff! We've been using Espanol para los Chiquitos for all the kids and The Fun Spanish for just Ari. Both are going over very well so far. EPLC is very basic and unintimidating....lots of color, games for review, etc--which is what I was looking for. And The Fun Spanish is a very good, slightly more rigorous, companion for Ari.

A few pictures!

We have a hard time getting around to nature journaling in an official way, but I guess we should try to do it more, as it appears that Gus likes it a lot:



Brothers putting a puzzle together:



Science: they're making pennies shiny with vinegar:



And the results:



Co-op stuff--this is everyone riveted by math:



One of the older kids dressed up as Sacajewea and led us a really long way....



....to this creek. Where my kids got very, very wet. And I forgot to bring towels or extra clothes:



And this is what Gus does while the older kids do co-op. A few weeks ago we learned about edible wild plants. Now he scavenges for sour grass like a cow:

Two weeks....

First big news from the week is that Milo lost his first two teeth! 5 years (nearly to the day) after they first came in, when he was not quite 3 months old. He's growing up! This picture is from before he lost the second one.

We're less than 2 weeks away from leaving for Disney World! I need to start packing this week.

The run down...

Math: Ari's working on multiplication in Singapore:



He has the concept down (including the multi-digit stuff) no problem, but doesn't have most of his multiplication facts memorized, so I'm thinking we'll probably be taking a break to work on that for a little while. He did learn a cool trick with his fingers for doing the nine times table last week, though.

Milo has finally gotten the hang of counting to 20 without forgetting about 14 or 15, and he can count by 10s to 100. Singapore has him working with grouping things into 10s and 1s this week:
















Reading: Milo's definitely getting better every week with the reading. He's trying to sound out harder and harder words, and has no problem at all with the CVC words he's doing in Explode the Code. I think I need to start doing some work on sight words with him. For read alouds, Milo and I are reading Ramona the Pest and Ari is listening in, because he adores Ramona. Ari and I just tonight started The Mysterious Benedict Society. We are intrigued thus far, though I'm a little worried about starting in on another really long book right after we spent half the summer on The Wheel on the School.

Writing: We started Writing with Ease a little big ago (still waiting on the workbook), and I can say tentatively that I think it's going to work out well. I started him on level two, even though we're doing level three in FLL, because he has such a lack of confidence about narrations. The dictation and copywork is no problem for him, and he's catching on to the narrations quickly. The first week getting him to do one was like pulling teeth, but the next week he just immediately came up with this one:

"A lion tries to catch bulls, but the bulls make a circle and point out their horns. The bulls had a quarrel and went to separate parts of the field to graze, and the lion caught them easily."

So we'll see what happens this coming week.

History: We're in week 10 of American Story. We got a bit behind next week, so we'll probably mostly be catching up this week. Here are some of the books we're reading right now:

I really like the "If You Lived..." series. I've already ordered a few of them from Paperbackswap to use next year (when I will bravely attempt to go it alone without Winterpromise for the second half of American History). The Time for Kids Ben Franklin bio is going over well, too. And everyone likes The Sign of the Beaver, too. The Colonial Life book? eh.

The kids are kind of weary of endless 3D maps and other papercraft stuff, so we didn't do anything in that department this week. I made a few pages myself for them to work on while I do the readings...nothing particularly intellectually rigorous, but it lets them be creative and, I hope, kind of makes some of the ideas we're reading about stick in their heads a bit. Here's one about Benjamin Franklin. The top reads, "Imagine you are a colonial inventor like Benjamin Franklin. Design an invention to make life easier for your fellow colonists":


Science: We're doing science one day a week, which is working well. I have a hard time getting my stuff together for science, so only needing to get organized once a week is good for me. Our usual format is to read about an element in Elements with Style, read some of How to Think Like a Scientist, do an experiment, then do some of the Ellen McHenry The Elements stuff--usually some reading, an activity, a game or two. This week's experiment was the fabulously simple melting ice cubes on the stove. All three states of matter, right before our eyes!

This all reminds me that tomorrow is supposed to be science day. The long weekend threw me off. Hmm....I better go do some planning!

Weeklyish report:: August 11-15

By the end of the week, I often can't remember what on earth we did all week. Stuff makes me tired.

Reading! I need a sidebar thing with a list. Must work on that. Ari is a frustrating boy to find books for. He will read non-stop when he has a book he likes going, but he has a hard time finding books he likes, and is resistant to suggestions. This week he read Little Eddie by Carolyn Haywood. I was a big fan of her books when I was a kid, largely because my mother gave them to me and told me SHE liked them when she was little. He read a couple of the Betsy books last year, so I got the Eddie book thinking it would go over well, too. But he refused to touch it for months. Finally he picked it up last week and zoomed through it. Now he's on to Eddie and His Big Deals, which I found at the thrift store recently. And as soon as he started that, the next Magic Tree House book arrived in the mail from Nana (he's onto the only available in hardcover ones now, and I refuse to pay $12 for a book he's going to read in 2 hours, so it's the library or Nana these days), so he read half of it this weekend before going back to Eddie.

Ari and I are still working through The Wheel on the School, but Milo and I finished Moomintroll last week and just started Ramona the Pest tonight. Ari's listening in on Ramona, too, even though he's heard the whole series. He likes Ramona. And Dave listens from the other room and laughs aloud from time to time at Ramona's antics. Ramona is fun for the whole family around here.

Ari's still working on multiplication and division in Singapore, and Milo's been doing days of the week.

We finished the first week from year two of Writing With Ease, and then I got an e-mail that the release date has been pushed back on the workbook, and I won't have it until next month. argh! I guess I'll go ahead and do without until then, since I don't want to stop abruptly right after we started. Ari has no problems whatsoever with dictation and copywork, but getting him to do narrations is like pulling teeth. When he's writing on his own, he writes beautifully--long, creative, mostly correctly spelled and punctuated stories. So I know he CAN do a simple two sentence narration...the problem is getting him to see that he can do it. It went okay this week. In the past, I've tried narrations and then backed off when he resists, thinking it'd be easier if we waited awhile. But really I think it's only going to get easier when we just keep doing it until he gets the confidence.

Milo's Headsprout program has taken a weird and frustrating turn. They have all these sections where you have to click on the right word or part of a word, and you have to do it a certain number of times in a set amount of time. Used to be, if you didn't get enough, they'd give you more time. Now suddenly they send you back to the beginning to start over if you don't click fast enough. Milo is very frustrated, and I'm a little annoyed. He's getting the answer right; he's just not that fast with the mouse. It also means I've been needing to sit with him while he does it, which messes up my carefully orchestrated plan to do other stuff while Milo does Headsprout.
History is going well. I'll post a bunch of pictures of projects we've done next week, I hope. The other week the kids decided to put on a play reenacting a scene from Pedro's Journal. Ari made a giant poster for the wall and wrote out a script for me to read as narrator. I'm already trying to decide whether we'll go with Winterpromise again next year or if I'll try to put a schedule together myself. leaning toward option number 2. I know. It's early. But I do want to get stuff up on my paperbackswap wishlist if I'm not going to buy something prepackaged.

I said pictures this week, but this will be the only one. The 13th marked one month until our Disney trip, so we made a countdown calendar to put a Mickey head on every day:

So....where were we?

We didn't exactly take the summer off from school (though we were VERY laid back about it), but I seem to have taken it off from homeschool blogging. So I think when we left off, we were just finishing up Story of the World 2 and space science, getting ready to jump into Winterpromise American history and Chemistry. Jumping in has happened, and now DH is back at work and we're back to being sorta kinda organized and scheduled about things.

A quick rundown of the year's plans:

Ari:
Singapore 3
Writing With Ease (level 2)s
First Language Lessons 3

Milo:
Singapore Earlybird (he's almost finished with this and will start 1a soon)
Headsprout phonics
Explode the Code 1

Both:
Winterpromise American Story 1
Time Travelers Colonial Life CD
The Elements: Ingredients of the Universe
Super Science Concoctions
Elementary Spanish on United Streaming
Memoria Press Christian Studies
Homeschool in the Woods Old Testament

We're about to start week 8 in WP...so I guess we did get something done this summer.

We're also slowly adding back in to our social/extracurricular schedule. Our homeschool coop will be starting up again next month. Looks like we'll be doing sign language, some kind of math, and handicrafts with them. And then there's talk of getting a park nearby to run a wilderness survival skills class, too, so that would be cool. I keep meaning to get to park days with that group, but lately they've mostly been meeting at swimming pools, and I really can't do pools with three non/beginning swimmers and actually get a chance to talk to people, so we skip those. And my mom lives very close to me and has a pool, so the lure of the swim playdate is not strong for me. Milo has started taking Capoeira. I tried to get Ari to take it, too, to streamline things, but he's devoted to his gymnastics class. So I guess we're sticking with that for now, which makes our evenings very crowded (Milo does Capoeira two nights a week, and then gymnastics is a different night for Ari). But our mornings are mostly pretty free, so we'll try to be very efficient at home (which will mean I need to get off my summertime sleep schedule and get things going earlier). Gus is still napping for the time being; once he stops doing that I'll probably start trying to get everything done by noon to leave our afternoons free.

I'll do a quick update for this week, and then try to get back into it, with pictures and all that, next time.

Math: Ari is working on multiplication in Singapore. He's glad to be done (for now) with 4 digit addition and subtraction. Milo's working on telling time (o'clocks and half pasts).

Milo's reading: he's halfway finished with Headsprout now. He's doing well with CVC words and some longer words, but I think we're still waiting for it all to "click." Reading's still a big effort for him, but he's trucking along.

Language Arts: Ari's more than halfway through FLL 3 now, I think. He's memorizing the first stanza of Poe's "The Bells" right now. It's always a proud moment when one's child first learns the word "tintinnabulation." We just got Writing With Ease in the mail this past week and did the first lesson. The workbook won't ship until next week, but I think we're going to go ahead with it without the workbook until it shows up. Too soon to tell whether Ari will like this or not.

History: the tweaking has begun with WP. The Time Travelers Colonial Life CD will serve as evidence of that. We're keeping up with the reading pretty easily (I added in "If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620..." this week, because I happened to have picked it up somewhere). We're just starting reading about the the colonial period. This past week, we made some pop up colonial houses and a little pocket book about what you'd find on a colonial farm (both from the Time Travelers CD). We're reading The Sign of the Beaver which seems to be going over well with both Ari and Milo so far.

Science: We started reading "How to Think Like a Scientist," did some reading and an activity from The Elements, and did an experiment from Super Science Concoctions.

Reading: I'm reading Finn Family Moomintroll with Milo and The Wheel on the School with Ari. Ari's just coming off reading a string of short Roald Dahl books and is having trouble figuring out where he wants to go next. Oh, he read Ted Hughes' The Iron Giant. He's strangely intimidated by long chapter books right now, which is sort of new. I gave him a Hardy Boys book I found at the thrift store, but he only got a few pages into it (he may go back to it; I don't know). The past few nights he's been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I'm hoping he'll get tired of them and return to real books soon.

And now it's midnight, so I'm done!

Cows and carpet tiles

We ended up not doing official school over spring break after all. But we did do a lot of gardening, went on a tour of the dairy farm near us, and started some ambitious home improvement projects. We went to Cagle's Dairy with my friend Maureen and her kids, Margaret and Henry. Cagle's is less than 10 minutes from our house and is where we buy all our milk. I'd taken Ari and Milo on the tour before, but not since they were 3 and 1. They're at a much better age for it now.


Milo feeds a baby cow. After the baby cows, we saw how they milk the cows and the kids got to stick their fingers into the machine to see what it felt like. And then on to the processing place where they pasteurize the milk and put it in cartons. Then we went on a hayride around the farm, and Margaret got very close to a hungry not baby cow.


Next we fed goats and finally, of course, drank some chocolate milk.


My end of the year antsiness is kicking in, so I decided we needed to end the week by completely reorganizing our entire downstairs. The old set up was that our dining room was our schoolroom and what's supposed to be the master bedroom (we sleep upstairs) was the playroom. But I had a vision of one big schoolroom/playroom (or, as we now call it, schlayroom) and then putting the computer and futon (parts of the old playroom) in the dining room. Clear? Anyway, before I could do any of this, I needed to get rid of the nasty carpet in the playroom. We were thinking of cheap laminate, but then a friend told me about these super cheap carpet tiles at a place near us. They came out to 33 cents a square foot and were very easy to install--you just sort of slap 'em down and cut them to fit around the edges. The 33 cents-edness means you can't be picky about colors, but I think it looks pretty good.


Of course, now that that's done, there is much moving of furniture and books still left. We just bought three new shelves at Ikea today and managed to get one of them put together. My house is sort of a disaster. But it's on its way to being fabulously reorganized! So that's my excuse for how non-exciting we've been with school this week--that and the end of the year blah feeling. Oh, we did get test tubes in the mail from Oriental Trading Company, and it seems that that's the most exciting thing that's happened to Ari and Milo in a very long time. We have many scary looking potions in the cabinet now.



Which brings us to last week. Let's see. We did the chapter on the Reformation in SOTW. There's an activity page doing Henry VIII's family tree, which inspired Ari do his own family tree, complete with calls to grandmothers for help remembering some names. We read about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in science...and looked up the latest information on the whole "is Pluto a planet?" raging controversy. Near as I can tell, where it stands right now is that Pluto is a "dwarf planet" along with newcomers Ceres and Eris. I am slacking on the space pocket books lately; I need to look and see what we need to make something for them this week. Ari's getting close to finishing up Singapore 2b...working on volume last week. More adding for Milo in Earlybird. Ari just finished reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing on his own a few days ago. We're reading Ramona's World at bedtime...it was published in 1999, so I didn't read it when I was a kid like most of the Ramona books. It's a lot more focused on "girl" stuff than the others, which I guess is to be expected since Ramona's getting older. Ari doesn't seem to mind so far.

And it's very late, so I'll leave it at that!

Weekly Update: March 31-April 4

This was the last week before DH's spring break. whee! We'll still do school over spring break, I
think...although come to think of it we have plans pretty much every single day, so we'll have to see how it actually shakes down.

We didn't do so well with getting around to Green Hour Challenge (although we did read about dogwoods). But we hung out outside whenever it wasn't raining, and one day the kids decided to bring their sketchbooks out and do some drawing.
First up is Ari sketching the baby dogwood in our front yard (we got it 4 years ago when we took our Christmas tree to Home Depot to be mulched; they were swapping dogwood saplings for xmas trees). I tried to take a cool picture with the tree in focus and Ari blurry in the background, but I didn't have the right lens on the camera for that to work out so well. And here he is with the finished product:








And then we have Milo and Gus drawing. Milo wasn't interested in sketching a tree or a flower or anything like that. He drew two guys in jail. One of them was hanging upside down from the ceiling because he has suction cup hands and could climb up the walls ("but only if they're smooth walls"):












More money and time for Ari and more adding for Milo in math. On Fridays I try to get my stuff together enough to plan "Friday math"--a game or something otherwise different from our ordinary routine. I found a book called Mathemagic (a volume from the old Childcraft encyclopedia) at the thrift store the other day, so this week we looked through it some. It has a bunch of stories and games and puzzles about different math concepts. We did some "toothpick teasers" on Friday. The kids are happy anytime I let them play with toothpicks, so it was a hit. Pictures of it all in the slideshow.

In First Language Lessons, we're getting into the stuff that I never learned the names for in school. Predicate nominative--who knew? Not me, despite my graduate degree in English.

In science, we learned about Saturn and Jupiter (did you know that if you put Saturn in a giant swimming pool, it would float?) and then made these rocket books:

They're supposed to have stories in them, but Ari never wrote his. I assumed he was going to be super into it, so I printed a whole bunch of copies of the lined paper that goes inside for him. But no. Milo narrated a story to me, though: "I went to Io. Gus came with me, and it was his birthday. I saw Jupiter (because Io is one of Jupiter's moons)." It's a bit hard to tell, but most of the stuff on the front of his book is birthday-themed (a cake, a party hat, a balloon, etc.).

Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas in Story of the World. Listening to the CDs in the car is working pretty well. Gus was even asking me to put them on the other day. The "Mayan math" from the Activity Guide was Ari's favorite, as I expected. You know, the Mathemagic book says that zero was probably first used in India, contrary to SOTW's claim that it was the Maya. Quick googling says Mathemagic gets it wrong.

Finally, Ari and Milo have been playing a lot of chess lately. Because Milo is 4, he is neither as good at nor as patient with chess as Ari is. He'll usually play for awhile and then get tired and wander off, which makes Ari really, really angry--no matter how much you warn him beforehand that it's probably going to happen that way. But it makes a lovely vision of brotherly love before the part where Milo stops playing and Ari unleashes his fury:

Two weeks, few pictures

I've been lazy about doing photogenic project-type stuff the past couple of weeks, and I'm not feeling motivated enough to scan in the written work we've done, so I'll be wordy instead. Mostly. And brief, I suspect. Maybe.

Ari has finally left money behind in Singapore, and is zooming through both fractions and time. He loves both things, and they're easy for him, so for the past two weeks I'll tell him to do 2 pages and come back to find he's done 6--that sort of thing. I have the Intensive Practice book, too; we've only used it sporadically, but I think I'll break it out for more fractions and clocks next week (Intensive Practice has more, generally more challenging, problems on the same topics covered in the regular Singapore book). Milo's started in on the last book of Earlybird--more adding so far. He's very much got the concept down, and can do sums up to 5 or 6 in his head, usually.

Ari did the first of the "oral usage" lessons in the back of First Language Lessons 3; it's interesting to see to what extent he correctly conjugates verbs without having actually been taught them formally before. One lesson was on...umm, past progressive is it? I have eaten, etc? He knew most of them already, but not all.

In history we learned about various west African kingdoms last week and then explorers (Columbus, Magellan, et. al.) this week. Africa yielded the only project we got around to--a sad attempt to make salt blocks. In Africa, they made houses out of salt blocks. Our salt blocks were still all mushy and collapsed when we tried to take them out of the ice cube trays after sitting around in the sun for a week, however, and we decided that our humid climate is not at all suited to constructing things out of salt blocks.

I was surprised at how difficult it is to find kid's books on Columbus from anything other than a "what a terrific guy!" perspective. Story of the World does at least point out that Columbus wasn't really the first European to stumble across America, so that's something I guess. We read the Value Tale about Columbus--the Value of Curiosity--in which Native Americans are said to have returned to Spain with Columbus because "they were curious, too!" Sure they were. Anyway, so we talked about other perspectives on it and how history depends on who's telling it and all that, and that will have to do unless someone has a picture book suggestion to offer, because I don't think they're old enough yet for the Columbus chapter from Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Ari's reading a book about the first moon landing to himself, and we're reading A Cricket in Times Square at bedtime. I tried to start Matilda with Milo, but I don't think he's quite there yet. If we could get past the first few chapters, things get a bit more fast-paced, as I recall. But I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach would be a better Roald Dahl introduction for a not yet 5 year old.

I want to try to do the Green Hour Challenge, so this week we went for a walk and found two things we want to learn more about--umm, I think it was our dogwood tree and our creek. Now we have to do the part where we find out more about them. But that brings us to the real reason, or at least the real excuse, why we haven't been very organized the past couple of weeks: it's spring! So we've been doing stuff like this instead:


I forsee a lot of laundry and stain remover in our summer.

Weekly Report: March 10-14

I feel like we did a bunch of running around this week (I think we're coming out of that traditional hibernating time of year, and it's going to be harder to stay home), but we still seem to have done a fair amount here.

I mentioned the moon phases book we made last week, but didn't post a picture, and I just happen to have one, so here it is. And then this week we made sponge painted suns. On the

backs are lists of things we need the sun for. We read about the sun in First Encyclopedia of Space and watched a video on United Streaming about the solar system. We were supposed to go outside and do something with a coin to demonstrate how a solar eclipse works, but we didn't quite get around to it.














We did 2 chapters in Story of the World this week, as I realized we're going to have to pick up the pace a bit if we want to finish by June so we can start the Winterpromise American history stuff (and we do. Or at least I do, because I just ordered it a couple of days ago and I'm bad at waiting). We learned about Joan of Arc and a bunch of other war stuff. I was never a huge fan of history in school because my eyes glaze over and I can't keep things straight when it comes to the war parts. And there are so many war parts. I'm completely fascinated by political history, and I'm interested in daily life kind of stuff (and my best papers in grad school were of a historical criticism bent). But not war stuff. The kids don't care much for it, either, at least not so far. The Joan of Arc parts seem to be what sunk in the most with everyone (including me). There's an absurd game suggested in the SOTW activity guide, wherein kids are supposed to put all their stuffed animals together in a big mob, designate one of them as the Dauphin, and then have someone come in pretending to be Joan of Arc and try to guess which animal is the Dauphin in disguise. The connection between this and the real event seems tenuous at best, since there is no pretense that God is guiding the process, but I suppose it does make an impression. So the kids set everything up and I came in to try to guess the Dauphin (it was the panda), and then I thought that perhaps it was such a great game that the kids would entertain themselves for hours (or at least 20 minutes) doing it themselves. But no. There was some sort of Dauphin-guessing catastrophe with much screaming about 15 seconds after I left the room, and all the fun was over. Alas. They also watched (and very much liked) an animated video about Joan of Arc on United Streaming. And we made pop-up Tower of London cards! About 2 hours after this picture was taken, Gus got ahold of the glue and dumped it all over the back of Ari's card ("me glue it!"). I salvaged the tower itself, but the rest of it's a goner.

Gus woke up early from his nap, so of course he had to make a pop-up Tower of London card, too.














I got ahead of myself on math predictions; turns out Ari has just finished up the money stuff and is about to do a few pages of review before moving on to fractions, and Milo just finished EB 2a on Friday (we tend to only do math a couple of times a week for Milo. Our general pattern is that I'll do stuff with Ari while he does Headsprout (and Gus watches) until he gets bored. Then when Ari's working independently, I read a couple of books to Gus and Milo. Then Ari plays with Gus while I do either math or handwriting or some other workbook for a few minutes with Milo). Math pages in the slide show below.

Ari starts up an art class this coming week. He's not at all looking forward to it, because he doesn't look forward to new things, but I think he'll enjoy it once he gets used to it. That is his general pattern. His friend Lula is in it, too. He and Lula have kind of a weird relationship, which I think is mostly because they both like to be in charge and because Milo has a big crush on Lula, and Ari doesn't like Milo taking orders from someone else. So I think it will be good for the two of them to be in a class where Milo is not and where neither of them is in charge.

Ari and Milo have been planning a "rocket party" for their (4 day apart) birthdays for months now, but now that things are really getting down to the wire (only 3 months to go), the planning has kicked into high gear. Here is the (front of) a sheet Ari carries around with him everywhere for taking notes about the party:

He can't think of anything yet for "Other Important Stuff." hee hee.

Hey--I only skipped a week this time!

So...a two week update. Much better than 4 months, yes?

Ari's still doing money stuff in Singapore 1B this week. Next up is fractions, I believe. He'll be happy to be finished with money. My in-laws were in town last weekend; my father-in-law is a mathematician, so Ari likes to show off in math whenever he's around--making up secret codes for him to solve and stuff like that. Ari and FIL have a historically sort of...weird relationship. Ari is and always has been very shy, but before he got his hearing aid he was very, very, very shy and pretty much didn't speak to anyone outside immediate family. So he would talk to my MIL, but not my FIL. And instead of handling it like the grown-up in the situation, my FIL tended to do stuff like ask Ari one question, then walk off and sulk somewhere when Ari didn't answer him immediately. The dynamic was further complicated by the fact that my FIL speaks very quietly and even people with normal hearing have a tough time understanding him sometimes (and, of course, at the time we had no idea there was a hearing problem). ANYWAY, things have improved dramatically over the past year. Ari talks to Grandpa all the time and is glad to have him around. My FIL does not sulk so much. But I still have minor quibbles with how he interacts with Ari. Ari made a point of hanging out right next to Grandpa and counting by 4s while he was here. He counted by 4s up to 300, I think, while Grandpa said not a single word and acted as if he didn't even notice. Later, after Ari had gone to bed, he started bragging to me and Dave about how Ari had counted for him. Yeah. So tell ARI you think it's great. It's nto a big deal, really. It's just that I know Ari really wants him to be impressed, and I know that Ari's self-esteem can always use a boost; he's never going to ASK for a compliment, but it would mean a lot to him to get one. So, at any rate...more math. He's also working through, on his own, for fun, a multiplication book I picked up at a yard sale or somewhere. And we have Multiplication Rock checked out from the library. It, umm...rocks!

Milo just finished the Singapore EB 2A this week, so he's ready to start the last book of that. It's just getting into adding (with visual help--using a timeline, counting objects). He already had the concept down, so it's all pretty easy/fun for him. He does, however, have this weird block where he can't count to 20. He skips over 15 and 16 every time. I guess he'll get it eventually.

I did some ordering from Rainbow Resource for next year the other week. I mostly bought our math stuff, but I also got a few logic/critical thinking books. These, it turns out, are too fun to save for summer. Ari is doing Logic Safari, which is lots of those little puzzles where you check boxes to tell whether Mary, Sam, or Tom is the one who wore the blue sweater to the zoo. This is about the only thing I remember doing in my 4th and 5th grade gifted program. I'm not sure how useful the whole thing was, but I did do exceptionally well on the now gone analytical thinking section of the GRE. And Ari loves them. Milo is doing Lollipop Logic, with a bunch of different types of puzzles (so far it's mostly stuff like, "X out the things that don't belong" and "Put these steps in order").

Milo's chugging along in Headsprout. He's on lesson 25 now (out of 80)...he gets bored with it fairly quickly, so it often takes him 2 or 3 ten minute sessions to finish one lesson. But he's definitely getting the sounding out thing now, which he never did before, so I'm impressed with it (of course, whether it's Headsprout or just a matter of him being ready now I'll never really know).

History...last week was our first week using the SOTW CDs instead of me reading to them. I think it's going to work well. I play them in the car, and they actually listen intently and retain information! And then we have plenty of time at home to get crafts and projects and readings from the library done! I've stopped trying to do formal narrations for history this year. We're getting Susan Wise Bauer's new writing program for next year, and I'm hoping that will break the process down into manageable steps for Ari and build up his confidence. He has it in his head that doing narrations is much harder than it really is. So for now we're just talking about what we read, and sometimes they ask to get the narration box down (it has lots of different ideas like, "make up a play about what we read" and "write a letter to nana about what we read"). Last week we made Byzantine Icons:

Only we haven't had a chance (because it's always raining when we remember) to take them outside and spray the sealant stuff on them, so they're not quite finished. And then this week....Black Death masks! Because nothing says fun like pretending you're a doctor wearing one of these masks while trying to fend off bubonic plague, right?





In science, we learned about the moon this week, and made a phases of the moon book to go in our super-cool, rocket-shaped pocket book. Last week we made an astronaut with a Manned Manuevering Unit. The astronaut can move up and down and spin around:

















So those are the highlights of the week, I guess. Planning for next year: I ordered a bunch of chemistry stuff the other week from Amazon. I got the Usborne Science Enclyclopedia, and I think we'll mostly use Super Science Concoctions for experiments:

It seems like it will be simple enough for Milo to follow along easily. I thought about buying a prepackaged curriculum for science, but everything I was looking at either seemed like not at all what I wanted or seemed like something I could

easily put together myself. Now I'm waiting for Winterpromise's catalog to come out so I can order history stuff, and then we'll be pretty well set. Ari will still be doing First Language Lessons 3 and he'll start on the writing program. I'll have to wait until Milo finishes Headsprout and decide what Language Arts program would be good for him. All the math stuff is here already. I'm just trying to decide if we can handle adding Latin in or not. They'll probably do Spanish at the homeschool center near us, so maybe we should hold off on Latin. Hmm....I also need to look at money and budgets and whatnot and try to decide what outside activities we can do. Ari's taking a homeschool art class starting in a couple of weeks, so if he likes that we'll probably keep it up. And then either keep doing gymnastics or switch to Capoeira (which we need to try out and see what we think...it's a Brazilian martial arts thing--I have a friend whose son takes it and she highly recommends it. I'm not super impressed with Ari's gymnastics class these days). Milo is probably going to want to play soccer in the fall. And then someday poor Gus is going to need to do something, too. I get all panicky because we're leaving out piano. Panicky is not necessary, though, I think.

Okay! Back next week! I hope!

Trying again!

Goodness, it's been a long time. I really would like to do a weekly update, if only for my own records, so I'll mostly focus on this past week and ignore the 4 month gap since my last update.

Dave was home for winter break, reminding me as always how much easier things are when someone else is chasing after Gus. Tonight I was locked away at the computer while Dave was in charge of the kids. He was reading a story to Ari and Milo and forgot to watch Gus every second as is necessary. Five minutes later, he found Gus in the schoolroom, his hands completely covered with green paint. "Me painting Italy!" he exclaimed, indicating the now much greener salt dough map of Italy that Ari and Milo made last year.

Anyway...we're chugging along with Story of the World 2 and just getting started on space science, which, predictably, is a big hit, especially with Milo. I have a subscription to Evan Moor's Teacher Filebox--they have a lot of their books or at least big sections of their books online to be printed out. I found a space pocket book project there, and we're working on that as we go.

The front of the book is shaped like a rocket, and eventually there will be three pockets with all sorts of little projects tucked in. So far there's a flip book about the planets ("ahh," said DH the teacher, "you're making a graphic organizer." Why yes, that's what we're doing). The other thing is a sun with adding machine tape attached that shows how far each planet is from the sun. Along with that, we're reading the Usborne First Encyclopedia of Space--this week we read about satellites and the possibility of life in outer space. I put Dave in charge of this experiment about satellites from a Janice VanCleave book--umm, something about why things stay in orbit instead of flying off into space? For some reason, Dave dragged us all out onto the cold porch to do it.

And here is Ari watching Dave spinning the "satellite" around. He's dressed like that because he and Milo were in the middle of making up a play about the story we read that day, "Baboushka and the Three Kings." I think he was going to be a king, only they never actually finished planning the play. That's how these things usually work--they spend a great deal of time coming up with costumes, making tickets, sometimes writing scripts and rehearsing...but it's pretty rare that the play actually happens. Getting there is half the fun, though, right?










I just bought Story of the World on CD for the kids; Ari is not so into the books without pictures thing. Well, that's not really true; he listens to chapter books all the time (and reads them). He's not into non-fiction without pictures? I don't know--the boy is difficult to predict and rarely admits to liking anything. At any rate, I thought we'd try it that way so we can listen in the car or wherever and have more time at home for projects and library books. So this coming week will be our first week trying it that way. This week we read about the first Russians and made gingerbread. Word is they were into that in Russia way back when. We made giant, oddly shaped gingerbread people, decorated very generously with sprinkles.



And here's an assortment of Russian folktales from the library:









We still need to read a couple of them, but it's a light week this week, so we should have plenty of time.

Okay, I made a slideshow on photobucket! It's something new! Will this work on Livejournal, I wonder? We shall see. Let's give it a try. Math: Ari was mostly working on money stuff this week, which he adores. On this page, he was supposed to draw lines matching up pictures of money with the pictures of stuff to buy with price tags. Instead, he drew word bubbles, and added commentary like, "59 cents comes in handy when you like apples," and "I will have these (those egg plants don't look yummy."

We've started First Language Lessons, volume 3 now, and Ari's working on sentence diagramming in that. It very much appeals to his concrete little brain with its lust for order. I checked out "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" from the library for him ; it's a children's book spinoff of the grown-up book of the same name--all about commas and how misplacing them or leaving them out can have funny consequences. He LOVES it. I have a little grammar geek on my hands. He's been talking about it and reading it and rereading it for days now. So I think that perhaps settles it about whether we should start Latin next year or not. What else is in my nifty slide show? Ah--I bought Startwrite for the computer to use for printing out copywork and next year for handwriting practice for Milo. It lets you import pictures to make your copywork prettier, so I did. I'm not sure about it for Ari, though, because he really doesn't need the guidelines for writing these days (and he writes really, really small, so he doesn't like them). It's possible I can print lines without the dotted line stuff; I need to fool around more and see. I discovered a few weeks ago that he's teaching himself cursive, so we may start doing copywork in cursive soon, in which case I imagine he'll need the lines again for awhile. And then the last thing is the experiment write up from the previously mentioned satellite experiment. Note Ari's addition of "Gravity whooohoo!" at the end. That boy loves him some gravity.

Looks like I forgot to do Milo's stuff in the slideshow. Next week! He's doing Headsprout on the computer for reading; he's enjoying it and seems to be learning a lot. And he can do it on his own, which is lovely, especially since Gus will often sit and watch him. He's also doing Singapore Earlybird, which was all about fractions this week.

I keep meaning to keep up some sort of log of books we read, but...then I don't. Ari finished up The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on his own a little bit ago, and is now back on Magic Treehouse books. And The Littles. We're reading the second Harry Potter book together at bedtime. Milo's favorite library selection of the week was "Players in Pigtails," which is essentially A League of their Own as a children's book. Gus likes Goodnight Gorilla, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and bringing me books that are much too advanced for him, insisting I read them to him, and wandering off after half a page.

I am thick in the midst of planning for next year and ordering stuff, but that will have to be another post, since I've certainly gone on long enough already.