Week 10- Our Busy Week

This week has been ridiculously busy and has made me extraordinarily thankful for our flexible schedule.  This week included my birthday, work craziness and meetings, plus preparations for the wedding of some dear friends.  I am pretty sure that we haven't stopped moving since Tuesday morning. 

Science
On Monday, we needed out of the house.  For some reason, everyone was getting on each other's nerves, so we loaded into the van and went to our favorite park.  We walked about a mile around the park gathering and examining different leaves, acorns, nuts, and berries.  The boys ran everywhere trying to find different and interesting leaves to put into their baggies.  It was a great field trip and was refreshing both physically and emotionally.  After we walked our mile, we spent some time at the park before coming home for a nap.

Our science readings have been about rivers, canals, tide pools, and waves.  We found some great YouTube videos about the Panama Canal, tide pools on the California coast, and (Luke's favorite) surfing.  The videos have become a constant in our science and history studies.  Luke loves having extra screen time and I love the little nuggets of information that sneak into his little brain.

History
We started into a new book called, "Living Long Ago" that has been describing clothes that people wore in different times and places in history.  Luke has loved the book and drew this really cute picture of a cave person.

He also tried paper weaving.

Phonics
Luke finished his Explode the Code book and is ready to move to his next book.  Since we have had such a busy week and because he works almost completely on his own in his book, he had to do "car school" a couple times this week!

Field Trip
Our highlight of the week was visiting my cousin during his Fire Station Open House.  The boys thought it was so cool that Andrew is a firefighter.  He helped Ben with the fire hose, lifted them in and out of the rescue boats and fire trucks, and showed them all of the tools used by fireman.  We even watched him in a demonstration of the use of the jaws of life while he helped dismantle a wrecked car.  Luke was so amazed that he came home and made videos explaining how to be a firefighter!

Ben
Ben didn't have a chance to do a ton of school this week, however, he is officially an Awana Cubby.  Isn't he cute in his little vest?

Homeschool Perks
Because my sister-in-law was the wedding coordinator for the wedding this weekend, we had my nephews over for the afternoon/evening on Thursday.  Luke worked hard during the morning so that he wouldn't have to work while they were here.  He finished most of his work before they arrived and within 20-30 minutes of their arrival, he had finished and was ready to play.  They spent most of their time playing in the dirt outside.

On Friday, my dad picked up the boys at 8:30 in the morning to watch the recorded Tigers game from Thursday night.  Luke was up at 7:00, so he crawled into our bed and managed to complete his math assignment, recite his Bible verses, take a spelling test, and listen to his Literature story before they left.  We had to scatter other assignments in throughout the weekend, but time spent with Yogi is worth it!

My birthday was earlier this week.  We had co-op in the morning, but Aaron managed to have time to make us a big breakfast.  I also enjoyed beautiful cards made by my sweet boys.

Week 9 - A Clarification and Our Progress

I have always loved to reflect and evaluate how something is going.  I know I come by it honestly.  I come from a long line of evaluators.  I've been thinking about my blog a lot lately.  When most people think of blogs, they think of people describing day to day life along with all of the ups and downs they experience.  This website is not a blog, but rather our online scrapbook.  A scrapbook is for recording your favorite memories.  No one includes a sink full of dishes, World War III between siblings, potty training accidents on the carpet, or details about rebellious kids in a scrapbook.  Why?  You record the things you want to remember, and what you record influences how you remember it.   When my kids and I look back on our homeschool experience, I don't want all of us to remember my frustration with getting Luke to actually work when he's doing math, Ben's fits when his brother gets the boys' favorite plastic cup, or Olivia banging on the computer while we try to watch an educational video.   I want all of us to remember the fun projects, field trips, and family time.  I want to remember why we're doing this and how it has drawn our family a little closer together. 


Here are some highlights from our week.

Geography
Our book has finished the last three continents this week.  We read short descriptions of Australia, Antarctica and Europe.  The highlight, however, was watching YouTube travel videos about various places on each continent.  We watched videos about the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney, Rome and Antarctica.  My favorite was a video about an Antarctic cruise through National Geographic.  The kids (all three of them) watched scientists tag killer whales, penguins playing, whale bones on the shore, seals swimming, and ice falling off a glacier.  They were completely enamored.  I was curious to see what the cost of the cruise was.  It would only cost about $90,000-100,000 for our family of five.  Luke brought the change jar over and asked if we could save it towards the cost of a cruise!  Luke's favorite video was probably Rome (which really surprised me), although he was really disappointed at how difficult it was to draw pictures of the amazing sculptures from the video!

He eventually gave up on the sculptures and tried drawing an open air market instead.

The Arts
After about 2 months of requesting to paint, I finally took out the watercolors for the boys.  They will definitely be coming out again soon.  I managed to have almost an hour and a half of silence as they painted and painted.  The watercolors came with really, really small brushes, so they worked much slower than I expected on their stack of paintings.

I managed to plan a week's worth of lessons and clean the kitchen while they worked.  I was so proud of myself until I remembered  . . . .

I left a toddler alone with a cup of yogurt.

This week, I also started a new season of teaching piano.  Luke is going to be taking his first year of piano with me, but at a very slow speed and only taking lessons when he is ready and focused.  He needs a little more time to mature and develop a sense of focus before we work consistently on lessons.

Writing
We worked a lot on both creative writing and handwriting this week.  I think Language Arts is one of Luke's favorite subjects, so we've been devoting a little additional time to helping him improve his skills. 

Creative writing - Luke is continuing to work on his pirate story a little each week.  It has been a great, practical way to learn capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar while not having to work out of a workbook.


Handwriting- Draw Write Now has been a wonderful alternative to traditional copywork.  Luke has to write his sentences before he draws his picture.  He gave this picture to my parents as a gift.

Letter Writing - My cousin, Andrew, received a Life Saving commendation from the Fire Department and was in our local paper.  The boys were excited and wrote congratulations notes for him

Dear AJ, I am glad you are a firefighter!  I like firefighters.  Luke

Dear AJ, You get to be a firefighter.  Ben

(Ben's picture of AJ fighting a house fire)

Ben School
Ben has been working on the letter I.  I had great intentions to do an "I is for icky" project, but never got around to it.  Hmmm... , maybe I'll attempt it this weekend. 

Writing the letter I on the whiteboard

Number work

Week 8 - Our Week of Productivity

This week was extremely productive.  Yeah!  Luckily, we seemed to work hard enough to get a little bit ahead of our planned schedule.  I have a busy work week next week, so we will probably be taking full advantage of our head start.  I think much of our productivity has been due to our new organizational system.  I've been making a list on the whiteboard for each day and for each person.  The boys love to erase their tasks and I am less likely to skip something if it is written down and in my face.

Olivia was our star of the week.  She has been a potty training superstar!

 

 

History/Geography

Our lessons have been very brief readings on North America, South America, Africa and Asia.  The pictures in the books are very cartoonish, so we've been watching tourism videos on major landmarks (mostly from Asia).  We watched a video about rice fields in China, the Great Wall of China, St. Basil's in Moscow, Angel Falls in Venezuela, and (our favorite) climbing Mount Everest.

 

Luke used his map to help reassemble the Africa puzzle.  My in-laws got it for him from South Africa.  It is handmade and each piece is a different country.

Language Arts & Spelling

Although spelling is not Luke's favorite subject, it is probably one of his best.  I pulled out our old whiteboard so that he could do some of his writing on it.  In Language Arts, he worked on possessives and using an apostrophe. 

When working on his possessives, Luke added a little extra note :)
 

Co-op

We love our co-op!  All three kids are meeting new friends and love their teachers.  By the time we head home, all four of us are exhausted.  My engineering class had a fun competition this week.  We have a paramedic/fire fighter coming to our next class, so we discussed the definition of safety.  For our project, we divided into two teams and designed safety devices for water balloons.  Once they were done, we went outside and threw them against a brick wall to see how well they worked.  Luke was very happy to rub in the fact that his team beat my team!  He is also taking a history class titled "Story of the World".  They are learning about different explorers right now.  He came home and went on a treasure hunt with his map he made it class.

 

My group of 5,6 and 7 year olds designed this device together.  Inside each cup is a wad of newspaper.  Part of their requirements was to leave the face exposed so their balloon could breathe.
 

He said each of the shapes was a different continent.  In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is a ship of explorers.

Ben School

Ben worked on the letter H this week. 

H is for Horse!

 

I love his excitement for doing anything school related.  He really wants to be like his big brother.  I made a uppercase/lowercase matching set with clothespins and index cards.  I liked that he could work independently in his room on a lesson while I helped Luke with his math and Olivia played in her room.

Each clothespin has a lowercase letter on it.

He is also working on learning more sight words.  We started on "at" this week.  He really can't wait to learn to read!

 

Ben's caterpillar is growing!

 

Ben was "reading" a bedtime story to Olivia.

Ben's big accomplishment this week was learning to spell our last name.  He practiced writing it on the white board and soon had it memorized! 

 

 

 

Family Fun

We had lots of family fun activities this week.  On Sunday, we made a big pot of chili in the slow cooker and bought real hot dogs (all beef from the deli) to make chili dogs.  When we came home from church, we ate them and watched the football game.  Eating in front of the TV is a big treat in our house, so the kids were really excited.

I had to add oranges to salvage the nutrition of the meal!

  On Friday, Aaron was off so we met my sister and niece at the zoo.  Because the weather was cooler, the animals were much more active and entertaining.  Everyone came home completely exhausted and took nice, long naps.  Ahhhh!

Up close with a crocodile

Cousins!

The polar bear swam right over our heads!  It was really beautiful!
 

On Saturday, we went to a block party celebration and saw Paws.  The boys suddenly clammed up as they gaped in awe.

 

 

That evening, we went up to Aaron's office to watch a movie on the big screen of the conference room.  We brought food from our favorite Mexican restaurant and lined up the recliners like a movie theatre. 

 

 



Week 7-Back in the Groove

This week felt especially short because we arrived home from vacation on Monday.  On Tuesday, we barely managed to pull ourselves together to make it to co-op, so it felt like our week didn't even really begin until Wednesday.  Most of our school week was pretty much status quo.

Co-op this week was a little crazy to say the least.  My little engineering students were going to learn to use a stopwatch, so I found a project in which they would make a timer using empty water bottles and sugar (somewhat like an hourglass).  Their task was to make their timer last as close to one minute as possible.  Great, right?  It turns out that if you allow twelve 5-7 year olds to work with cups of sugar, masking tape, and funnels you will have a mess within 8.5 minutes.  They ended up learning the concepts (how to use a stopwatch, the number of seconds in a minute, engineers have to do many trials to get their project to work), and we now have a new class rule - No one is allowed to eat their experiment unless given permission.


History/Geography
This week our readings were about rivers, lakes, waterfalls, and seas.  We found a Planet Earth clip on YouTube about the tallest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls in Venezuela.  The boys watched the clip at least 5 times.  They drew pictures of the falls and decided a trip to South America would have to be our next field trip.  

Ben loved the rainbows created by the water.

Spelling
This was only our second week of spelling.  I had delayed it because his phonics includes so much spelling, plus I thought it would be a source of contention.  It has actually turned out to be one of Luke's favorite subjects and he loved taking his spelling test on Friday.  Go figure!

Writing his spelling words as large as possible on the driveway.
 

Reading
Luke's reading is really progressing.  Now that his confidence is building, he has started to read a little on his own and to his siblings.  We're making really good use of the readers from our local library and so far have a season high of 16 books checked out at one time.  I've been reading "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" to Luke and I think we'll watch the movie soon so that we can compare and contrast the movie and book.

Reading to Ben during his breathing treatment

Bible
Our curriculum includes a verse per week to memorize.  We usually try to create a song or watch a YouTube music video with the verse to help.  Every Friday, Luke recites all the verses.  Each one progresses through the alphabet, so this week the verse started with G - Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.  This week, he created a puzzle of his verse.

The Arts
The boys had quite the cultural weekend.  Some family friends were in a play on Friday night, so the boys were able to go to their very first play.  Luke loved it and is now expressing an interest in trying a play with a children's theatre.  We also attended our local high school's marching band competition.  We watched bands for almost 1.5 hours and the boys were entranced.  The bands put on really entertaining shows, and the boys thought the stories they told were really fun.

Life Skills
Luke learned how to make macaroni and cheese this week.  He was so proud of himself.  Ben was then in charge of plating our lunch.  It wasn't a healthy meal, but I didn't have to make it!

Olivia had a banner week.  She began potty training!  It was much earlier than I expected, but she initiated it, so we're giving it a shot. 

Baby girl was so proud to go shopping for training pants!