Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Making a note to myself. =)

I plan on using the CM memory system. I just need to find the time to put it all together. =) I actually had forgotten about it until I read a post on WTM forums.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Week review

Nathan-
math-competed another chapter (an easy one...mostly a review for him)

la-flying through English with one or two lessons a day, doing well with WW, the phonics workbook is a little tricky this week for him

science-doing a small unit study on human anatomy with the littles

reading-struggling a bit with his reading comp workbook a bit. He has been busy devouring The Charlie Bone books as well as reading several books on the American revolution.

history-see above. We will also start charting the different battles of the war soon.

geography-doing well. We have recently added state cards to the list. He simply has an index card to fill out about each state. I have an example card in the pile with all of the questions I want answered, five interesting facts that he can find himself, and on the back, a drawing of the state and one of the flag. Fun!!

religion-we stopped doing Seton's Religion 5. It was too much, I think. We have since found a gentler religion curriculum and are having better sucess with it. It is called We Believe. I think it is mostly used in a private school setting, but is working for us.

Kaleb-
He is plugging along with ETC. He really likes it!!! (so glad)
Anatomy mini unit study
Working with the morning board and morning folder every morning!! love it!
We will start a weekly letter unit study next week. I started a seperate blog for that. It is mostly for Gabriel as Kaleb already knows the alphabet, but there are a lot of fun crafty things that he will want to do too.

Gabriel-
Loving the morning board and folder too!! Last night he said that he couldn't wait to get up in the morning and do more school work!
He will also be participating in the letter unit study.

Good week!! My husband has out of town on business this week so its been a bit of a challenge for me. We accomplished a lot though!!

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Breakfast board!!!

I LOVE this idea!!!! (Thank you, blog mama!!)

I haven't finished the 100 chart on the bottom left side or the weather part on the bottom right side. Also in that black spot on the bottom middle, I'm going to add some shapes for Gabriel.

That little skinny area on the right is for birthdays. I covered that area in contact paper so we can use dry erase markers. The dates are little post its.


The bagged cards in the middle are add/subtract fact cards. I velcro'ed the bags to the board. Actually I velcro'ed everything except the yellow straw holder in the middle and the calendar. That way I can change out anything that gets messed up. I also velcro-ed the clock to the page protector in case I decide to use it later in the day. The yellow weather chart below will eventually say at the top "Today's weather is..." with a box for them to stick a laminated picture of whatever the day's weather is. Then the month box will show the month's weather as we go so we can see how things progress.


The bag of cards here are phonics cards. The 100 chart at the bottom isn't finished yet either.



Saturday, February 14, 2009

Human Body study

To involve my littles more, we do short two-three week studies on different things. Just something fun and engaging to get them to love learning as much as I do.

So far we've done mini-studies on ocean life and volcanoes. We are now starting on the human body. Our county library system is small but offers a HUGE variety of books on the human body, from the easy collection to the older children....something for everybody. I just wish they had more visual or hands-on materials. After reserving several books on the library's website, I started googling fun, interactive websites that teach about the human body.

Here are a few of what I found. Now I haven't had a chance to really look into any of these websites yet. I just marked them as faves until I have time to actually go through them.

http://www.alfy.com/teachers/teach/thematic_units/Human_Body/HB_1.asp
http://www.cellsalive.com/
http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/htbw_main_page.html
http://www.rainbowraccoons.com/index.html

We also use enchantedlearning.com for a lot of our printouts. It has been well worth the $20/year membership fee!!
I am now searching for some fun hand-on offline activities to complete our study.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Weekly report

Well this week has been kind of slow. We're recovering from the horrible last week. My littlest man got a stomach bug....a BAD stomach bug. I was giving half an ounce of pedialyte every 20 minutes around the clock to beat the dehydration. On top of that, my husband had an unexpected out of town work-related trip. Yeah, fun times. lol We did manage to keep up with our school work and only got one day behind in math. A lot of school time was spent on the bed as I held Drake and Nathan did most of his work orally.

Drake is all better now and so we eased into our week.

Last Friday the older three and I went to a Valentine's party at the skating rink with a local homeschool group. Daddy came home in time to stay with Drake. The boys had a blast!!!
Nathan

Kaleb
Gabriel. They didn't have skates in his size. :( He hung out with me and we visited the yummy desert table as often as he wanted! Plus he got to help put all the valentines we brought into the other children's bags. He also helped put the candy everyone brought into the bags. He really enjoyed that!!!
The boys with their Valentine sacks. We made these quickly the morning of since Drake was so sick and we didn't have time earlier in the week.

Nathan finished up another chapter in math and took his test. He did very well. All of his missed answers were just careless mistakes. I'm not sure how to handle that. He isn't on adhd meds so just keeping him focus isn't always the easiest.

We also started our new science, Apologia's Astronomy. The boys LOVE it and so do I! It is so easy to read and I love the thinking questions and notebooking included at the end of a section, as well as the experiements.
We finished up our study on volcanoes. I had planned for us to make our own volcano this week and two days ago there was a show on the science channel all about volcanoes. We decided it would be perfect to do our own eruption after the show. All three boys really enjoyed the show and I can't believe how much MORE than learned!! Kaleb has been quoting volcano facts ever since! Our volcano was very simple...play doh formed around a chemisty set beaker. Our first eruption didn't go as well as planned. It was also the only eruption that was red (tinted with food coloring). We just decided to streamline the process and get to the good stuff...the explosion! Nobody really cared if it was red or not! =) It was a lot of fun and a GREAT little hands-on treat for the boys!




The rest of our week has been pretty laid back. We did English and a lot of book reading but not much else. We're all trying to recover from last week's lack of sleep.
We'll hit the ground running again on Monday!!
Happy Valentine's Day!!