Wow, week six already?!

Originally posted on September 22, 2009

I missed two weeks of updates - which included the one month mark of this school year. How did that happen?! Now we're into the sixth week - already! It seems like we just started! I'm taking this as a very, very good sign. If things weren't going well, I would most likely be slashing the days off of the calendar in red marker and keeping a running total in my head...only X more days until my goal is met! But no - we have our routine now and, even though Milly is still irritated sometimes that all the attention isn't focused solely on her, it's mostly a smooth process.

A few things that have happened since my last update...

• We finished Math-U-See Primer (kindergarten). Rachael was terribly excited that we wrapped it up on a Friday afternoon and that the next book in the series hadn't yet arrived. Just as she began rejoicing the fact that she wouldn't have any math to do on the following Monday...the UPS truck arrived with the Alpha book. Them's the breaks, kiddo! (I gave her Monday off from math anyway, just because.) The first few lessons in the new book have been review, but new material (word problems) will commence next week.
• Handwriting is going better - she doesn't mind doing the lessons any more - but we still butt heads on a pretty regular basis. She has apparently decided that she only cares for capital letters, and would be quite happy using nothing but. In what must be a half-hearted attempt to please me, she'll occasionally throw in a lowercase letter or two, so her English workbook is filled with lines such as "THe cAT rAN AWAy FrOM THe DOG." I'm sure most everyone has encountered the teenager who randomly capitalizes things that way online, and how annoying it is. I refuse to let Rachael become one of them! She gets pretty mad at me when I erase the whole thing and demand a re-do, but darnit, lowercase letters are our friends. (Incidentally, we seem to be going through an inordinate number of erasers.)
• Rachael has a spelling test, consisting of eight words, each Friday. She missed one word each on the first three tests, but hasn't missed any on the last two!
• We're still loving our Book of Virtues unit study, although the section on compassion that we just finished up was hard for my soft-hearted girly. It took a good half hour to stop the tears after reading The Little Match Girl. The Gift of the Magi was better received, although Rachael maintains that she's going to grow her hair all the way to the floor and will never cut it all off to buy a gift for any man.  ;)
• Girl Scouts is back in full swing, with the first fundraiser of the 2009-2010 school year starting next week. Expect her to be hitting you up for orders of nuts, toffee popcorn and choclate-covered everything. Thankfully, it's not terribly expensive. We got to sample everything at this week's meeting too, and it's all really, really good.
• Gymnastics is still going well. Rachael flipped over the top bar on the uneven bars this week, without so much as a teacher standing there to spot her. I was so proud!

I asked Rachael what she would like to say on her blog, and here's what I got out of her:
"Homeschool is really cool. The funnest part about homeschool is that Mommy gets to teach me. I like the books that we read for English."

And now, being that it is Tuesday afternoon, we're off to the library for craft time and to re-stock on chapter books. We've begun reading about Kirsten, the pioneer American Girl that Rachael will be for Halloween. She's discovered Cam Jansen books and absolutely loves them, and she's always on the lookout for more, more, more things to read. I have to shove books out of the way to make room for her to sleep at night, but I'm not complaining. If genetics are to be blamed, it's all my fault anyway. :)

Halfway through week three...

 Originally posted on September 1, 2009

...and things are going pretty well! Milly is getting used to the idea of doing something on her own for a few minutes here and there while Rachael and I do schoolwork, and that's a tremendous help. Rachael is learning so much - Bible verses, common and proper nouns, pronouns, syllables, alphabetizing, telling time on an analog clock (she finally got that pesky skip counting by fives thing down pat!), planets, gravity... It's a good thing she loves to learn!

The only thing she isn't enjoying so much is handwriting. She seems to have a generous amount of "don't want to" combined with a dash of "don't care", and that makes it a bit of a struggle some days. We've started the first grade Handwriting Without Tears book, and that's a little easier for her. She still has a tendency to make sloppy letters in an effort to rush through the lesson, continues to mix up her b's and d's, and makes several of her numbers (2, 3, 7 and 9) backward. What to do with her? Everything else is so easy for her - maybe this will just "click" one day as well.

It's been a while since my last update - would you like to see pictures of what we've been up to?

 

Well, we have school outside in our pajamas sometimes. Just another perk of living in the middle of nowhere! Rachael has a nature journal that she draws in every day - anything interesting that she finds outside. In this picture, she's sketching her beloved tomato plant. Going to need quite a few more of those next year, I think.

 

We still have our "pet" turtles in a makeshift pond outside, and Rachael and Milly love to go out and watch them every day. They're in charge of feeding them, and once in a while we get a good action shot of them fighting over their breakfast. In this picture, Ruby is snapping at Felicity. Ruby is quite a bit larger and tends to be a bit of a bully, but Felicity gets her licks in too. We've added one more turtle since this picture was snapped - as with the others, Gene rescued Lilly from the middle of the road. Rachael knows that, with fall approaching, we'll have to set the turtles free soon, and she isn't terribly thrilled at the idea.
 

We play a lot of games, and Math Bingo is one of her favorites. She uses the manipulative blocks from our Math-U-See curriculum to help her add the big numbers, but she's starting to remember a lot of the smaller sums now. The pink card is always, always hers.

Coloring (okay, scribbling) is one of Milly's favorite schooltime activities. Anything with Dora's face on it is a BIG hit with her right now.
 

We finally made the balloon model of the solar system today. They're lined up in order from the sun - the big orange balloon - and even though it was officially stripped of planet status, she wanted Pluto to be included. (That's the little purple speck behind Neptune.) I thought that it would be appropriate to hang her solar system over her WALL-E poster, and she agreed. However, I'm not very happy with the whole thing. Her astronomy book actually outlined this project, using the balloons, and the diameter of several of them were so small that you couldn't even put air into them. Not to mention that NONE of the planets are actually ROUND. It's odd...I feel styrofoam balls and paint in our future.

This little monkey likes to steal the teacher's chair every chance she gets - and if she can grab a pen and scribble in the lesson book, so much the better.
 

We've had two Thursday morning co-ops now, and both have gone well. Rachael loves going to learn with her friends - and play in between lessons, of course. So far, she's made her own personal timeline in history...

...sorted shoes to learn about taxonomy and classification (this was a drawing of the process afterward)...

...and done leaf rubbings while examining the symmetry of several leaves' veins.
 

Naturally, Milly also works very hard while Rachael is in class.
 

After history, science, Bible and art comes lunch - where Rachael can be found at the end of the table with her "boy best friend", Patrick...who she will marry and have a hundred little girls with someday (the first two being named Genevieve and Lacey), but for now, they're just friends. Daddy is only moderately displeased, having seen for himself that Patrick is a very polite young man. :)

Then comes P.E. before heading home. Needless to say, we don't do a lot of other schoolwork at home on co-op days - just reading and math.

So, there's our week three update! We had two weeks to get into a routine without worrying much about outside activities. This week, Girl Scout meetings and craft time at the library resumed, as will gymnastics on Thursday. Thankfully, those are all late afternoon and evening activities, so we can still knock out schoolwork (and Milly's nap - very important) before rushing off to those.

More to come soon...!
 

Our (School) Year to Date

Originally posted on October 24, 2008

Rachael officially started kindergarten on Monday, August 25, 2008. She's a little young - in the state of Virginia, a child must be five years old by September 30 in order to start kindergarten, and Rachael won't be five until February. But she was so ready for kindergarten - and maybe even a little more. Want to hear about what we've done this year? :)

BIBLE
We start our morning with a devotion from the book God and Me, followed by the weekly memory verse and review of the verses she's learned already. We have a list of verses from A to Z - we started with the vowels and now are going back to pick up the other letters. Currently, she knows:

A - All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23
B - Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. Acts 16:31
C - Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Ephesians 6:1
D - Depart from evil, and do good. Psalm 34:14
E - Even a child is known by his doings. Proverbs 20:11
I - If ye shall ask any thing in My name, I will do it. John 14:14
O - O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good. Psalm 118:1
U - Unto Thee, O God, do we give thanks. Psalm 75:1

I'm fascinated by how quickly and easily she learns these verses, and can't wait to hear her rattle off 26 in a row when we finish the alphabet! She's also memorized the Lord's Prayer and, although it isn't Biblical, we do the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time.

We use the A Beka K5 Bible Curriculum - which is okay for this year, but I'll be looking for something more substantial for next year. This curriculum offers a Bible story about every other day (we started with "in the beginning" and are working through Genesis - we're up to Jacob's ladder as of this morning) with lots of time to review and some doctrinal drills in between. In regards to doctrine, we've discussed:

- how God wrote the Bible
- what is sin, and who sins
- the Trinity (and let me tell you, THAT was fun to try to explain!)- God had no beginning and will have no end
- salvation, why Jesus died for us, why we must accept Him as our savior
- Heaven, and who gets to be there, although God wants everyone there

MANNERS
We have a great little book called 365 Manners Kids Should Know, and we read about a new manner each day. Some of these are quite obvious - don't talk with your mouth full, don't interrupt when someone else is talking, how to address adults. But there are also sections on being a good friend, a good guest, gift-giving and holidays, and lots more - all in all, it covers every topic I could think of regarding manners, and more that I never would have come up with on my own (Quaker weddings? Sitting shiva? Private or semiprivate audience with the Pope?)

GEOGRAPHY
She already had a beginning grasp of geography - she had looked at maps and knew that we live in Virginia, Daddy works in North Carolina, Disney World is in Florida, Aunt Annette lives in California, and we want to visit Alaska. So why not learn the rest of the states as well? I printed out a coloring page of the U.S. and we color in one state each day, after reviewing all of the others to be sure that she remembers them all. We have only ten states left to go!

Our only issues with learning the states thus far have come with Alabama (which she called "Obama" for the longest time) and Montana (which she occasionally refuses to identify because of a deep disliking for Hannah Montana. I've explained that the state was not named for the girl, but this makes absolutely no difference to her.)

MATH
After covering all of the above at the breakfast table, it's time to dive into math. We knock this one out of the way early in the day because, to be quite honest, math has never been my favorite subject and I just prefer to get it over with early. We use a curriculum called Math-U-See, which relies heavily on the use of blocks to not only teach, but show the concepts. She likes playing with the blocks, and used them a lot early on, but hasn't used them much recently. I'm sure they'll be used again when we encounter something that's hard for her to understand, but thus far, the Primer book (the first in the series) has been pretty easy for her.

Topics we've covered so far include:

- counting to 20 (those teens are tricky!)
- place value: hundreds, tens and ones
- addition facts: +1 (adding one always results in the next highest number)
- basic facts to memorize: 1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4 and 5+5
- adding horizontally and vertically
- skip counting by 2s and by 10s
- adding tens (20+20, 30+10, etc.)
- adding hundreds (100+100, 300+200, etc.)
- solving for unknown ( __+3 = 9, etc.)

PHONICS & READING
Math and reading are our primary focuses, so they always come first - and sometimes they're the only things we get done in a day. Homeschooling with a baby definitely presents a challenge, and we don't always get to do as much as I'd like in a day! So we knock out these two subjects first, and anything else we get to squeeze in at this point is simply a bonus.

We use a curriculum called Happy Phonics, which uses games (lots and lots of games!) to help a child master everything from identifying capital and lowercase letters through the tricky -augh and -ough sounds. We've been using this curriculum for quite some time now, and Rachael read her first words in January of this year. Now, we have only a couple of lessons to go (those rotten -augh/-ough sounds, some ae/ie things and contractions) and we'll be finished! She's doing very, very well with her reading, and I largely credit Happy Phonics for it, for having made the learning process fun.

For an example of what she can read, this is the last page she read from the curriculum reader:

Dreams and visions
Go on a mission.

What's the confusion?
Do you have a question?End of session.

I have a notion
That if you shake the potion
With a up and down motion
You will make lotion.

I have quite a reaction
To doing my fractions!

Is this the nation
That has a space station?

She doesn't care much for that reader, and you can probably see why - it doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes! Thankfully, we have a pretty hefty library of children's books to fall back on, and we visit our public library each week for even more books. We set aside time for reading each day - for me to read to her, and for her to read to me. Quite often, I catch her alone in her room, sitting in her beanbag with a pile of books nearby, reading to herself - and this thrills me to no end, as I want my girls to love books the way that I do!

Along with the books that she can read on her own, she loves to have me read chapter books to her. We're currently reading the Little House on the Prairie series (we're on book #2), and Roald Dahl's The BFG. (She'll be getting several of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books for Christmas, and I can't wait to revisit those with her!)

Although we obviously don't "do school" with Amelia yet, she has her share of books to choose from as well. There are always board books scattered across the living room floor, and Rachael has kindly moved all of the board books in her room to the bottom shelf of her bookcase for when her sister comes in to play. Like her sister, we often find Amelia sitting quietly in the floor, paging through her own books. (This is always a little scary, because when she gets that quiet, we naturally assume that she's into something she shouldn't be!) Her favorite books thus far are Peek-A-Boo (she loves seeing the other babies) and Goodnight Moon, which she has already gnawed the binding off of, and will be getting a new copy of for Christmas. Interestingly, this is the only book she's ever "eaten" - she's remarkably well-behaved with the others! :)

SOCIAL STUDIES
We do Social Studies once a week - on Tuesdays, since having gymnastics in the middle of the afternoon kind of messes up the rest of our day. We use the A Beka K5 Social Studies book, which is really a bit of a joke. It's covered things so far such as public servants ("color the policeman"), government ("color the White House"), Columbus Day ("color these three boats"), and children around the world ("color Pedro's sombrero"). Notice a theme here?

Needless to say, what she really learns about social studies comes from other sources. We tend to study whatever is relevant at the time - for instance, we're learning about politics right now since there's no escaping from the election anyway. We've talked about what a president does, qualifications that a person must have to run for president, the difference between a democracy and a republic, differences in political parties, and how the donkey and elephant came to resemble the Democratic and Republican parties. Today we'll talk about primaries and conventions, and check out the Silly Speech Makers (I'll post her speech here if it turns out as great as I think it will!) I ask her at the end of each lesson who she would vote for in this election, to give her ample opportunity to change her mind as she learns more. So far, she hasn't wavered in her support of Sarah Palin, "because she's a girl." (We're very careful not to share our personal political views with her, in hopes that she'll form her own. She has no idea which candidates we support.)

With holidays fast approaching, we'll have even more material for our Social Studies lessons - the origins of Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, Christmas around the world...they're going to be fun!

SCIENCE
To be perfectly honest, most of the science we get around to so far comes from PBS's show Sid the Science Kid (which is actually really cute.) This is because, like their Social Studies book, A Beka's K5 science book is pitifully lacking in information that she hasn't been aware of for ages (the five senses, why it's important to eat well and exercise, seasons, weather - all in the same tired coloring book format as the Social Studies book.)

We have several other science books, including The Original Backyard Scientist, which has experiments from items usually found around the house. Only problem is, it takes time and planning to work these into whatever it is we're studying at the time...and I'm generally not up for the task as science is one of those "to be squeezed in" subjects at present anyway. I'm considering one of the Apologia Science texts, which are both written in a Biblical perspective and pretty much lay everything out for people like me who need more direction. It seems like a cool series in that it kind of goes along with Genesis - on the first day, God created the heavens and the earth, so the first book in the series is Astronomy. The second book is Botany, then we get into the animals with Marine Life, Flying Creatures and Land Animals.

HISTORY
We're going to have a lot of fun with this one once we get going...but that's the hard part! We're using The Story of the World: Ancient Times - which starts with asking "what is history?" Rachael's grandparents all got questions about their own histories as part of that introduction, and we loved reading all of the answers! After that, we learned about nomads and the early farmers - which was a little dry, but the next chapter is taking us into ancient Egypt. That will definitely be more exciting, although I'm not sure I want to talk to her about the mummification process just yet...

The whole of this book is in the ancient times, but covers Egypt, Greece, etc. through the fall of Rome. The next book moves into the Middle Ages, the next one covers Early Modern Times, etc.

WHAT ABOUT THE ARTS?
We don't have a formal art or music curriculum, but that doesn't mean they aren't abundant - anyone who's had a 4-year-old before knows that there is always, always art and music!

We intentionally listen to a wide variety of music - from Christian music and hymns to country, oldies, classical, etc. Her favorite music at the moment is "anything by Sugarland"!

And, she loves, loves, loves to draw. Mostly pictures of herself, but occasionally one of herself with someone else. Perhaps I'll have to scan some of her artwork to share here in the future as well.

AND EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES?
 This summer, Rachael made the difficult decision to stop taking dance classes in favor of gymnastics (difficult because she wanted to do both, and we made her choose one!) While I'll miss the shiny costumes and floofy tutus, I have to admit that she's doing really well in gymnastics - she can tumble with the best of them, isn't half bad on the uneven bars, and fearlessly leaps into "the pit" (which is filled with soft foam cubes.) At home, she is constantly leaping from the stairs or off of the furniture, thanks to an interview she saw on television with Shawn Johnson during the summer Olympics. Shawn mentioned that she was leaping from the furniture as a toddler, and Rachael took this as her cue - after all, she maintains that she wants to be just like Shawn Johnson. Also from that interview, Rachael dreams of someday seeing her likeness sculpted in butter.

We try to meet once a week with a small playgroup, made up of ourselves and three other families, two of which also homeschool. We typically meet at the park for lunch, then let the kids run themselves silly.

We also meet with the Henry County homeschool group once a month at Roll-A-Bout. Rachael went with me last month and tried roller skating for the first time - and loved it! She didn't hesitate to get out on the floor while holding hands with an older homeschooled buddy, and she's looking forward to going back.

Oh! And there's story time, once a week at the library. It's a small branch, and we're very much regulars, so she's kind of a pet of the librarians - it's nice walking in and having them greet her by name.

And of course, we can't forget church. I'm remaining hopeful that there will be more children joining our congregation soon, as having my girls be a part of a vital youth group is very important to me. In the meantime, she loves her church family - and being the center of attention.

Rachael is looking forward to playing soccer - maybe next spring, since she'll be five then. You can also join in Girl Scouts at age five. And while we want for her to learn to play the piano, she's adamant that she wants to play the flute. Appropriate, I think, since the flute takes more wind to play than any of the other wind instruments...and goodness knows Rachael has plenty of wind. ;)

I think that adequately - no, more than adequately - sums up our school year to date. There's lots more coming - years and years of material, in fact. I'll do my best to update regularly here on what's happening at Regalia Academy. One thing is for sure - with two princesses in residence and so much to learn, there's never going to be a dull moment.