August 17-21, 2009

We brought the chickens (who usually stay in the backyard) into the front yard for a field trip last weekend. They were completely freaked out to find themselves on grass. Eek! Grass! (the chickens said to themselves). The backyard is completely wooded and nothing much grows there (well, except trees). Our chickens are not very adventurous. Flannery and Nedcy are pictured above. Mostly I just put a picture up there because of my continuing difficulties dealing with pictures here. I can't figure out how to post a picture and then type above the first one.

So anyway. The week! I have little photo documentation of it, but we had a pretty good week. On Monday we succeeded in doing some school before leaving for big out of the house day. Then we took off for Spanish, had the very long break, and then our second Odyssey of the Mind meeting. My assistant coach job is doing the spontaneous problem practice every week, so this was my first try at that. It went pretty well. We did two verbal problems (naming different kinds of trees and then thinking of a special ability and saying why they would want it). Then for the hands-on problem I gave them a few things (play-doh, a washcloth, toothpicks, shoelaces, and pennies), and they had to work together to come up with an invention and then tell what it was, how it worked, and how it would help the world. As soon as I described the problem, L said excitedly, "a world-helping dragon!" and that's what they wound up with. It was a frost dragon who helped the world by freezing intruders, if I remember right. Right now the kids are off working on their homework for OOTM--they're supposed to bring in some kind of aircraft that they make themselves. I think someone's working on a parachute and someone's working on a paper airplane.

We're settling into something resembling a routine for schoolwork. We do "circle time" all together, which usually consists of a page from Are They Thinking?, 2 words from an Evan Moor vocabulary book, a Bible story (often with a drawing and narration page), and then some combination of our states study, folklore that goes along with our history, or some poems.

After that we split up...what I've been doing is letting Gus and Milo play while I do Latin with Ari and set him up with his math. Then he does math and independent reading while I do whatever's on the agenda for the day with Milo and Gus . Gus follows along with whatever Milo's doing, and I try to make sure there are a few minutes left to do something special just for him. Then when Ari finishes reading I do writing and grammar with him. By then it's usually almost lunchtime, because we never really start as early as I mean to unless we have a lot of outside the house plans that day. If the weather's nice, I shove them outside for awhile while I check e-mail and make lunch. And then, depending on what afternoon plans we have, we either go right to work on history and/or science or we take a break for awhile first and play or get some housework done or whatever.

I've just complicated things further, however, by signing the kids up for more classes. There's a new homeschool co-op starting up near us on Tuesday. I tried to resist, but then I looked at the class descriptions and caved. What did me in was the filmmaking class; Ari's been very interested in making movies for the past month or so, so the timing was perfect. The deal is that as long as a parent volunteers in some way or other, kids can take as many classes as they want for $149 for a 12 week semester. The kids' friend L is going to classes all day, but I decided we'd better start with just the afternoon so we could actually get stuff done at home in the morning. So Ari's taking chorus and geography in addition to filmmaking. The only class for Milo's age in the afternoon is a science class, so I signed him up for that and then volunteered to run a board game club for the time slot after that class. There's also a preK class that Gus can go to while I do the board game class if he wants to. Gus keeps asking what class he can take, but he doesn't like the sound of anything that's actually appropriate for 3 year olds. I think he wants to take stuff like geography and science instead. Poor littlest brother. Anyway, I'm hoping things go well with this co-op; it seems like it will be a great resource to have around going forward.
Here are the narration pages the kids made for Delaware. Ari's is a map with assorted Delaware...stuff around the sides. Both Milo and Gus were most interested in the fact that the first log cabins in America were built in Delaware. Gus' drawing doesn't exactly look like a log cabin, but, apparently, it is. Now that all my books are here, we'll finally move on to the next two states (New Jersey and Georgia) next week.
Here Ari is working on our history project for the week, with Gus looking on. We made a lantern out of a soup can, hammering out a design for the light to show through. This was from The Last Safe House--a lantern like houses on the Underground Railroad might put in their windows as a signal. We finished that book this week and are almost finished with If You Lived When There was Slavery in America... so we'll be starting on the Civil War next week and continuing with our Lincoln biography.
These are the covers for our human body books in science. I still need to go to Michaels and get some nice paper to glue these on to finish up. Ari didn't like the preprinted cover, so he made up his own.

And those are the highlights of the week. Ari finished up the first lesson in Lively Latin, so I need to print out more of that. He was NOT HAPPY at the idea of doing his own history of Rome book, so I'm letting him skip that. He's doing really well with narrations this year, which is a first, so I'm not going to push it. He's still enjoying the Latin a lot. We're being very relaxed about Song School Latin with Milo and Gus. I haven't been doing any of the written exercises in the book with them--just going over things orally. We have been listening to the CD over and over and OVER again, though, so they're definitely picking things up.

Milo's reading is really taking off; I'm very excited at the prospect that soon he'll be able to go off and read chapter books by himself, too. I think the Right Start math is a great fit for him. We learned about pennies and nickels this week. Last year when we tried to do money in Singapore, he completely didn't get it. But he's totally catching on now. There was one part where I was supposed to give him some pennies and nickels and ask him to make 10 cents. The idea was he would find one way and then I would prompt him, "is there another way?" and then again. But as soon as I asked him to make 10 cents he looked at the coins for a second and said, "Oh! there are 3 different ways I can do it!" And he did them all no problem.