Rainbows, Hamsters and Birthdays. Oh, My!

In my life this week:

This week started off with a court appearance.  It  was just over a speeding ticket. While we were waiting there we saw the most beautiful rainbow.

We had Emily with us.  I really feel like this was a great learning experience for her.  After I saw her looking up the requirements it takes to be a judge.

Tuesday night was fun. My husband and I don’t get much time together.  Since he was home that night, we decided to have a midnight snack.  Our typical go to midnight snack is BLTs .  We made the bacon and cut the tomatoes (that we picked from our garden).  We went to get our bread to toast and we were out of bread.

Paul had his on a hotdog bun and I daringly tried mine on Blueberry Eggos.  It was actually really good!

The rest of the week was filled with volleyball games, birthday parties and music lessons.

Katey had a friends birthday party at the pool. 

We also had a bon fire birthday party for Emily.  It was a fun teen party.  We even played night games like kick the can.

 

In my homeschool this week:

My 10th grader began his co-op class.  The only outside class he is in right now is Foundations. It’s a Dave Ramsey personal finance class for teens. He also works part time and has been hunting. He is keeping up in all his other subjects.  He did figure out how to hack a game and put in a cheat code so he has unlimited money.  He said it was similar to when he was using Small Basic.

 

My 8th grader has been slightly falling behind in her schoolwork.  She is my busy child.  She attends 4 co-op classes as well as private music lessons for guitar and piano. She is also active in 4H.  We have put in place a plan for her to get “caught back up” over our week off in a few weeks.  This makes me so glad we are trying this new homeschool schedule.

My 4th grader has done amazingly well at keeping up with her schoolwork.  We learned all about Urban Habitats in science this week.  I made the mistake of checking out some pet books from the library and she has read tons of them.  She has now decided that she wants a hamster.  She has read and researched them at the library and online.  She has even been watching how to talk your parents into letting you get a hamster video on You Tube. She had me take her to the pet store to price out her shopping list she made.  Then she came up with a plan to earn the money for a hamster.  As of now we have said not right now.  It’s just not something I have a place for.  Maybe when we move in a few months.  I am very proud of all the effort she has put into this and really her heart was only broken for a few days.  She’s moved on…

My Kindergartener has been doing his daily workbook that I made every day.  It is almost to a point where he can do it all on his own. We have decided to add in Explode the Code book Get Ready for The Code.  He has also been loving science with The Magic School Bus.  This week we made bird feeders and he loves looking out the window to see birds eating off of his. 

He also got his first very own library card. 

 

Books we read:

I’m reading Looking for Me by Beth Hoffman and Parenting the Ephraim’s Child by Deborah Talmadge.  I finished reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. 

Tommy and Emily are both reading in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson for Literature.

Emily is also still reading Hunger by Michael Grant.

Tommy has done all his personal reading in magazines like Backpacker and Field and Stream. This works for both of us.  He has a hard time getting into books but really enjoys magazines.  Hey, reading is reading.

Katey has read a ton of Blast off Readers on Backyard Wildlife and Caring for your pets.

Tyler has just been read to by us.  His favorite book this week was No, David.

 

Resources we used:

Video Text Math

Teaching Textbooks

Math U See

All About Spelling

Lightning Lit

Bridgeway Grammar

Apologia 

Moving Beyond the Page

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. There are also freebies. There are also just links to products without affiliate links. I'm trying to show what we did and where you can find it, not to sell you a product...although if you decide to buy one of them, please feel free to use the links and support a fellow homeschooler.

3rd Week of School:

 

 

In my life this week:

This week started off a lot better than last week, other than the fact that sickness keeps trying to creep in. My oldest was diagnosed with strep throat on Saturday.  I decided to treat it naturally while I waited for the culture to come back. Which meant Tuesday since it was a holiday weekend here.  It worked!  The strep was gone by Tuesday and he never had to be on antibiotics.  I also oiled up the rest of my family with some On Guard and no one else got it.

I spent some time make some of my mom’s famous homemade chicken noodle soup. She taught me to make it in big batches since it is so good people will eat the leftovers for days.  

So I did.

Mine was a flop. 

I must have done something terribly wrong.

At least it looked good, right?

Something that did go right was canning!  I canned about 10 quarts of peaches and my husband canned 2 half pints of jalapeños and 5 pints of pickles.

We decided to go fishing on Monday.  NO ONE CAUGHT A FISH! 

Well, I did.  

We all still had fun though.  We completed our ice bucket challenges using lake water. 

We came home from that day and decided to have a camp fire.  That is one of my favorite things about fall, campfires.  It gets dark early enough and is cool enough that we can do a fire in our backyard fire pit.  This is nice because we all just sit around the fire, no electronics (except to take this picture), and talk.  We play campfire games and hang out together.  It is so much fun!

One last thing about me for this week is we had a ton of leftovers this week so I decided to have a leftover lunch.  I put all the leftovers out on the counter and each child had to get approval to use something not on the counter.  Things like condiments were approved, but otherwise, NO.   This worked out extremely well and I plan on doing it again.

The younger kids had a 4H day camp on Saturday.  They did many activities that had to do with rockets. They both loved it!

 

In my homeschool this week:

My 10th grader has been the sick one this week.   The beauty of this is that he didn’t have to miss anything academically.  He was able to not only keep up on school work, but he worked ahead so that he could take some days of to go hunting when he began feeling better.

My 8th graders schedule fills up quickly.  In addition to her regular schoolwork, her music classes and her Handmaidens of Virtue co-op class she started an art journaling class specific for teen girls and volleyball season started.  Next week (Well this week we add even more into her schedule.)

My 4th grader

Daddy came home from a few weeks away and so Katey wanted to make him a welcome home cake.   She did everything by herself, from reading the directions to getting the supplies out, to making it, to decorating it, to eating it.  It was perfect!

I AM PROUD!

She also spent a lot of time reading books.  This week I realized SHE CAN READ!  I feel like we have been doing reading lessons and that they were never going to end.  She has only read one chapter book this week, but she has read about 7 smaller non fiction books this week.

My Kindergartener has been working through his daily book that I made him.  His favorite part is singing the days of the week song and the months of the years songs.  We pulled up our favorite ones on YouTube and I saved them to my favorites. 

One of the pages is handwriting.  He is supposed to write his name each day.  He got real whiney and said it was just to hard.  Since I haven’t ever had him do any writing and he hasn’t done much coloring until this year, I decided to lay off slightly and each day he just writes a letter 5 times. He is still building up the dexterity in his hand to write. 

He did enjoy writing letters on the white board with Emily.

While the girls were in their class at the library I took him to story time.  They read a story and do a craft as a group. He loved it. I think we will continue to do this.

Together school. 

Each Monday we have been having a family meeting.  Something special that I decided to incorporated is a fun family activity.  This week we played a gamed called Guesstures.  It’s a quick charades game.  We all had a lot of fun and played for much longer than I thought we would.

For science the 4th and K have been learning about wetlands, naturally, they made an edible wetlands diorama, naturally. 

I know I should go through and link up my resources, but I am struggling to write this post.  My weekend was extremely full and I am tired.  Maybe next time.  At least I stuck to it and got it written.  In fact I am being so lazy about it that I am not even going to link it up anywhere I usually do…. There’s always next week!

How our homeschool is organized.

 

I live in a smaller house and we do not have the luxury of having a dedicated school room.  Here is how we have organized for this year.

Each child has a container for their books and work.  This is where any book they are using on a regular basis goes.  Next to it is our library basket.

Most schoolwork is either done at our kitchen table.

Our counter, or on the couch.

We have one main bookshelf downstairs and each of the kids has one or more bookshelves in their room.  I also have a large closet with our curriculum books. I have this small bookshelf next to our big one which is really a catch all, so my counters don’t get cluttered.

Around the corner from that is a 9 cubby shelf.  I have it organized from left to right, top to bottom; mail, random mom books and a pen caddy, my purse, books the older kids share for curriculum, crayons etc., our out the door basket (it has things like a lint roller, a hairbrush, sunscreen, bug spray, kids sunglasses, etc.), nothing, curriculum that we are using but not daily, our science kits from Physics Quest.

On top of the shelf I have my household binder. and some random things that need to be put away.  I have a family calendar hanging on the wall as well as the library calendar and a community even calendar on a clipboard.  The dry erase board I use for lists of all kinds.

Living in a small house and homeschooling so many proves to be challenging at times. So I have resorted to using our hallway to teach All About Spelling.  Sometimes we use the hallway to teach other things as well.

What can I say we learn everywhere! 

Habitat Science Saturday

 

I am going to try and post what we did for our science theme unit for Kindergarten/4th grade mix on Saturdays.  Realistically I may not get to it, but I am going to give it a try.

This past week Tyler has been learning all about Habitats.  We will be diving into specific habitats starting next week.

We started off this week by watching Hops Home on The Magic School Bus series.  We also read a picture book about different environments and discussed what we think would live there.  Then we created these habitat posters.

The next day we drew a picture of a habitat of our choice.  We discussed different types of habitats even more.

Another day we did a habitat matching game.  They had to cut out the habitat names and match them to the habitat pictures.  (Obviously, I need to work on cutting skills with Tyler).

We also created our Wild Self and watched some habitat videos on YouTube.

We couldn’t find very many habitat books at our library that weren’t for a specific type of habitat that we will be learning about more in depth in the coming weeks, so this week was mostly discussion.

It was also a stressful week around here, so I am glad we got done what we did.

All of the resources we used and more can be found on my Pinterest Board.

 

 

 

Let’s wrap this week up ~ Week 2

 

In my life this week:

This week started off with bad attitudes all around.

Monday was a stereotypical Monday.  I had an archery training class to go to in the morning.  I am signing up to have an archery team with NASP. Even though they are generally a public school program I am putting a team together under a charter school. When I got home the kids had done nothing but make a mess.  Then everyone had grumpy attitudes when I made them get up and clean up after themselves and made them get to work on school work.

Tuesday was another day of fighting and disrespect.  Grumpy kids, grumpy mom.  I woke up late, the kids woke up late and we just got off to a bad start.

Wednesday was better.  The girls and I went to their Handmaidens of Virtue class at the library, they did a service project for The Ronald McDonald House.

It began to rain while we were there and 30 minutes later when we left the town was flooding.  (We have had major flooding for the past 2 weeks.) 

 

I also got my blood results back this day.  (A few weeks ago we did a family blood draw for research since my daughter was born with a cleft lip, they sent me my CBC).  After studying up on what everything meant I realized how anemic I really am.  Every doctor has told me I am, and sometimes I have tried to do things to “fix it” like iron supplements and cooking in cast iron pans.  I have now decided to try a desiccated calf liver pill.  I have taken it 3 times every day since Wednesday and I already feel a difference.  I am still tired often, but notice a difference of how much better I feel.

Thursday was actually a good day.  Everyone got along and there was no disrespect. (One of my kids tries to disrespect often, and it doesn’t fly around here, but it makes for some fights and struggles)  That is why I am reading some of the books in my reading list. If you have any you recommend for this kind of behavior.  Please let me know.  I also took the boys for haircuts.

Friday I actually woke up on time and woke the kids up.  We started school on time.  We even got everything done before noon so we were able to pack a picnic and spend a relaxing day at the park.

Books I have read this week for me are:

I finished Have a New Kid by Friday and The Millionaire Next Door.  I am in the middle of reading Teaching Self Government.  I checked out Raising Ephraim’s Child and I am planning on starting that over the weekend.

In my homeschool this week:

As a family we have began to watch CNN Student News, I like that we can stream it right through YouTube on my TV.  We have done 4 lessons in Promises of the Constitution.  So far we are enjoying both of these things.  We are having a family meeting weekly now, on Mondays.  (Well for the past 2 weeks anyways).  We created some glowing screen rules and chore sticks. (Hopefully a future post)

My 10th grader painted some abstract art on the cover of his planner, which I created from many resources.  (hopefully a future post).

Tommy and Emily are lab partners for science and they have to do the labs together.  Here they are working on a concentration experiment.

Tommy has also completed:

• Week 3 of Lightning Literature in which he had a read- a- thon with snacks and drinks to read 12 chapters of Treasure Island in one day.  It only took him about 2 hours. 
• He is still working his way through Bridgeway Grammar. He finished Pak 5. (Which is a Unit)
• He finished and tested in module 1 of Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Physical Science.
• He finished up Unit 2 part B in Video Text Algebra
• He completed Lesson 8 in Moving Beyond the Page WWI & II.

Emily, my 8th grader, got a knack to make some No Bake Cookies.  She made a batch and was so proud of herself.  She tasted one and spit it out.  She quickly realized she forgot to put sugar in them.   She tried to re-melt them and add the sugar.  That did not work, so she threw them out and made a new batch carefully following the directions and they were great!

She also decided to become creative and decorate the front and back covers of her planner.  (It is one I made with resources from a few places but it is working great.  I hope to post about it soon.) She dipped her hands and feet in paint and pressed them on.  All of my kids have been playing daily with Smart Mass.   It is a magnetic putty.  They have been getting very creative with it. This is something Emily made with Smart Mass.

She also finished up

• Chapter 5 in Teaching Textbooks 7
• Week 2 in Lighting Lit 8th Grade
• Lessons 6 & 7 in Moving Beyond the Page WWI & II.
• Module 1 and test in Apologia Exploring Creation with Physical Science.
• Lesson 01 Images in The Art of Poetry from Classical Academic Press.

The book she is reading is Hunger by Michael Grant (the 2nd book in the Gone Series)

Katey, my 4th grader, has been using the My Student Logbook planner.  (Review coming soon).  So far this has been perfect for both of us!  

She has been working great in Math U See Gamma. Really she should have done this book last year, but I decided to give her a year of relaxed math.  She is working at a quick pace through it.  We did work on it a few times during the summer. 

Her and Tyler have been doing science together and learning about Habitats this week. (Hopefully a future post).

She has also worked through lesson 19 on All About Spelling Level 1.   We worked on this in the summer also.  She ahs been moving quickly though this and will start level 2 soon.

She has been reading quite a bit this week.  She finished 3 books in the Billie B. Brown series.  These books are perfect with her interests and her reading ability.  They are not too challenging for her.  I am really working with her on a love of reading.

My Kindergartener learned a lot about habitats and he worked in his daily book.  He has our address and phone number mostly memorized.  He has been building a lot with Lego and wooden blocks.

He made a rocket going to a water planet that looked like a fish, and it turns into a submarine when it gets there.  Very creative if you ask me.

He also made Blueberry Muffins all by himself. (with major supervision).  He did very well and they were good.

When Emily got out the paint to create her planner covers Tyler decided he wanted to paint as well.  He used vegetables from our garden as his paintbrush.

He had to do a habitat matching game and I thought he could handle the scissor skills. and……. that is something we will be working on. 

This post got way longer than I expected, thanks for sticking around.

Resources we used:

Video Text Math

Teaching Textbooks

Math U See

All About Spelling

Lightning Lit

This post is linked up to Weekly Wrap Up, The Homeschool Mother’s Journal and My Week In Review.

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. There are also freebies. There are also just links to products without affiliate links. I'm trying to show what we did and where you can find it, not to sell you a product...although if you decide to buy one of them, please feel free to use the links and support a fellow homeschooler.