This blog thing....

This blog thing is harder than I thought it'd be. We're a little busy...just since the last time I wrote, we've had viola lessons, tap class, ballet class, karate, and a trip to Seattle for my mom's birthday (which turned in to a whole weekend), and chess club.

Between Friday and the weekend, Elli was able to get caught up on math. We decided if she could do 8 pages a day of mathh M-Th, then she could take Friday off this week. Just 15 minutes per page (which she can do if I sit next to her and encourage her), 4 pages per hour, 2 hours. That was a fun division problem. The most fun I've ever seen Elli have with a math textbook was this weekend's Invent-Your-Own story problems. If you have "354,900 people and 90 lightbulbs and everyone is divided into equal teams, how many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" Or how about "235,897 guys and 70 bbq grills. How many guys per grill?" It was entertaining, even if it took several hours because she was being so creative and had to think of just the right thing. Couldn't be just any answer. She had to make each one a joke. I'm so glad she found something in math she could enjoy this week. And she's starting to get the process of thinking in groups of numbers, estimating, etc.
*Instead of the traditional 7 goes into 23 how many times? where you start (for 235,897 divided by 70) with traditional math, this book emphasizing thinking bigger (70 goes into 235 how many times), and then rounding your number to the nearest ten for the best ballpark figure- I don't know, I certainly don't remember doing that in math. But I hated division. I just remember covering my scratch paper with multiplication and finally ending up with the closest answer and doing it that way...But this book is good about teaching you to think mathematically.

Well anyway, she got all of Monday's math done, and yesterday got 5 or 6 pages done. We also reviewed Ch. 1 of Rod and Staff grammar (grade 6), and are moving on to Ch. 2 today. She's worked on Latin, on the Fall of Rome folder and her Colisseum model. So since she was pretty much where she's supposed to be, she went to middle school group last night. She loves it. She's making new friends that are her age. I'm glad she's doing this instead of Girl Scouts this year. She needs to be able to unwind and have hang time that isn't so structured.
Grace is looking forward to Brownies starting next week. So it'll be kind of crazy on Tuesday afternoon/evenings. This is why we aren't driving 30 minutes to the other town for ballet anymore. If Elli wants to switch back, she'll have to drop viola and tap. Grace is actually really enjoying her math; she's almost done with next week's math in fact! Of course, the material is really easy. But I don't want to skip because they are emphasizing the thought process and it's really good! Instead of counting balloons and that kind of addition, it's teaching names of concepts like "comparitive sentences" and "order sentences". There's addition in the book, too, but right now we just moved onto greater than/less than/equal to. And it's not just for the numbers, but weight, area, height...it's cool. I recommend Making Math Meaningful from the beginning. Paired with Addition the Fun Way, Grace is really loving math.
Friday is our big Roman Feast. Today we have to finish getting fabric for our costumes. The girls and I are making tunicas and I don't remember the name of the wrap for ladies but we're making that too. And a good ole toga. We have mosaic art and brooches to finish, too, because tomorrow we decorate.
So! Good times. Busy. But school is good I think.

Thursday History Day

This morning started out very rocky. Today was the morning Dad woke up the girls early so they would finish cleaning their rooms before school because they chose not to the night before. Apparently, however, Elli woke up with a bad cold. So when I went down the hall fully expecting them to be awake and organizing, they were sleeping. Martin had left, I had showered and dressed, and they had gone back to sleep. Sheesh. I didn't know Elli didn't feel well, she didn't say anything to me and both girls just said "okay Mom, I'm up, I'll do it." I went downstairs to start breakfast and checked on them about 8:30, expecting them to come eat. They were not cleaning their rooms. They had until 9. Were they just procrastinating? Still no communication from Elli about not feeling well. After checking in with Marty, we docked them a week's allowance when they indeed missed their 9:00 deadline. I gave an extra half hour (started as 15 min but since their rooms were really trashed, I made it 30 min) and said if it wasn't done, they'd be docked another week's allowance. It wasn't done. Good grief! Finally another 30 minutes later and they finally came down to a breakfast of baked apples with cream and a special dried fruit/nut filling made from Trader Joe's confetti trail mix, and hot tea. That's when I noticed Elli looking terrible. Couldn't tell if it was from crying (someone was upstairs) or a cold....Anyway. They did their morning work, and after cutting out the morning break from the schedule, we weren't really that behind.
For History, Grace and I worked on the timeline, while Elli looked up informational maps about the Roman Empire. We made a salt dough map of Europe/The Middle East and colored in a paper map according to topography. We will be marking important cities on it tomorrow, label the terrain as best as possible, and on one of them maybe map out the spread of Christianity...This was all from a question in the book..."How did these different terrains and climates affect the ability of the Roman Empire to conquer and control the native people groups?" I think we need to do more reporting. Hands on is fun but I need to see Elli doing more.... She'll probably blow us away next week with some incredible epic poem that synthesizes all this information. If so, I'll lighten up and not stress. But until then, I get all panicky: what if we're just having fun and they're not actually learning anything????
But the salt dough map is really cool. Humongous! It's about the size of the oven rack. It's just on foil. And it's still not cooked all the way! Grace liked it "really fine. It was really fun." Elli thought it was pretty cool and learned how to use an index better as she looked up various maps for us to model after. Overall, we survived the day.

Science Day a Success...

Wednesday Science Day went well. After the morning daily work stuff, we had plenty of time for fun with science. We're working on the building blocks of chemistry right now. First we reviewed states of matter. Then we explored atoms and molecules and made paper models of Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and Oxygen. We combined them to make water, carbon dioxide and ammonia (NH3). The girls really got into it. I think Grace really just liked playing with glue and paper. But Elli really enjoyed it and worked independently in her Atoms and Molecules workbook afterwards. She has a chemistry set and the plan was for her to do that, too, but she ran out of juice I guess and didn't get to it. We took a break from Chemistry and reviewed Geology. I rented a video about the Grand Canyon called Marty's Grand Adventure. It was produced by Creation Scientists so I was interested to see what kind of credible information it contained. It was mostly entertaining (which is debatable, actually; it was incredibly cheesy and overacted), but it did contain some interesting arguments. I think we need a more seriously produced dvd from the same perspective. (Finding evolution scientists perspective is so embedded in everything, it would be ridiculous to get a one-sided education.) Grace liked the movie anyway, and Elli thought it could have been better. Maybe that's because one child is a first grader and the other is a middle schooler. Hmm....
In summary, science day was fun. The girls liked the project and actually learned something. We'll be moving into the carbon cycle and the water cycle, but first it was good to give Elli a fun introduction to the periodic table since she'll be studying it seriously in her workbook.
We also rented a video called Astronomy 101, which Grace really enjoyed. The Girl Scout troop is going to be having a night sky watch on Friday night, so it was coincidental preparation. She's really excited about it. She definately enjoys her science!!

One Main Lesson Subject a Day

So this week we're trying out the one subject a day approach. In the morning, they're starting out with practicing their musical instruments, then Color the Classics music/biography coloring time. Then they have a checklist of basic every day practice to get through: spelling, math drill (a multiplication table or skip counting), Latin vocabulary practice, and handwriting. I'm "scheduling" this for 9-9:45. Then it's snack, followed by half an hour of outdoor time (rollerskates, scooter, chalk, whatever). Then it's an hour and a half of the main lesson subject. Then lunch and read aloud, then more of the main lesson subject until we're done with the days assignments.
Yesterday was Math Day. So a week's worth of work for 6th grade was 31 pages. That did NOT happen. Got maybe 8 pages done, and that was 3 hours worth of work. We played math games (board game for 1st grade, then Chips for both kids). We did Line Art with colored pencils and rulers for art.
Today is Science Day. The kids are still busy with their basics checklist, then we're doing chemistry today, watching a science video about the Grand Canyon, having a Nature Walk, and finishing the travel portfolders about the Utah/Arizona trip.
We talked about the math thing yesterday and decided that breaking up the math into daily chunks was a good thing, and putting them into the daily math drill time would also be a good thing. Maybe still have math "day" where there would be more instruction and emphasis. 1st grade wasn't really a problem whipping through the 3 days of math with Making Math Meaningful. But the other 2 days a week she did Addition the Fun Way and there was no way we were going to sit down and do that, too. We reviewed those stories a little when we were playing the math games. And it was a fun math day. Absolutely! So maybe in that sense it was a success.

But I don't know. We have so much to do and so little time. I want them to have FUN, too, not be slaves to a schedule. But I think the one day a week thing is not going to work for us. I agree on paper that it makes sense that mornings should be the tough schedule, and then after lunch have read aloud, 15 minute clean up time, then History, Unit Study, Science or Art projects. But I don't want to! I'd like to start the day with art in the morning- it just seems like we'd spend to much time on it and math would still not get done. But it might help awaken the brain, destress, and just be fun. Which would help us get the work done in a timely fashion. So that'll probably be next week's experiment. First music, then art, then the "schedule". I want the freedom and flexibility of not having a "schedule", but we also have a lot of subjects we're studying and my fear is that we'll know a little bit of nothing about everything.
Still giving the "one subject a day" thing a try for the rest of this week. I'll let you know how today ended up.

Back from the road trip...!

We're back from the road and struggling to get into a groove with homeschooling with the textbooks again. There has to be balance. As nice as it was to explore the states, learn about and record what we spy in nature, math and grammar still have to get done. Math in the form of estimating and computing mileage didn't exactly get done. But we had that one day's worth of angles. So the last two days have felt long as we try to get into the least favorite subject textbooks.
Today we broke it up by having a blue jello war that reenacted the Romans invading the Celts in Britain. Two of the boys came as Romans with really authentic looking costumes and things. We got together with two other families and cooked over an open pit. We haven't really studied the boy war stuff in our house though so I couldn't tell you what they were. We've studied different emperors and how the people lived at home and general things about Rome and the fall of Rome. Later in the month we'll have an official Roman Feast with 5 other families.
Now it's back to the math and grammar books before going off to ballet. We had a school meeting and decided that starting NEXT week, we're going to do things differently. Instead of cramming so much into each day, we're going to do one main subject per day (plus short daily practices and penmanship). So for example, a week's worth of math in a day....with math games in between "assignments". I'm skeptical because I can just envision one assignment taking the whole day. But if that happens, math will just be tacked on as "homework" every evening the rest of the week until it's done. At least one of the kids loves her math book this year. In fact, she loves everything with school this year. Phew.

In Moab

Arches National Park was gorgeous and wonderful! We loved it. The girls learned a lot in the Junior Ranger Program. Elli enjoyed learning that cyanobacteria used to be called blue-green algae and then they realized it wasn't actually an algae but a bacteria. So cyano means blue-green and they renamed it cyanobacteria. Thrilling, isn't it? Grace loved"the landscape" of red rocks and learning about erosion by rubbing 2 rocks together to make sand.

Today Elli and I spent time reading and swimming, and she actually worked on her Lord of the Rings study (classicalacademicpress.com) and Italic Handwriting. We had a funny application of math today. The table in the RV wasn't put together right and we lost half our breakfast in the fall....So when we finally called Grandpa about how to do it right, we learned to put it at a 30 degree angle. We reviewed 90 and 45 degree angles. Then at dinner several hours later, the plates had compass markings on them with degree marks so she was measuring angles and comparing them....I'll take it as a math lesson. It'll be good when we actually get to that in geometry in the book.

Grace spent the day in the Jeep off-roading in Moab and observing nature. She identified several plants (Juniper, Pinon tree, Prickly Pear cactus, Yucca). In fact, she saw flowering cacti, something we didn't see at Arches. She had a good time but doesn't want to do it tomorrow. Which is a blessing since Elli wants to have her turn tomorrow.

There was a thunderstorm today! The girls were a little upset when we left the pool 2 minutes after arriving there this afternoon, because I spotted lightening. It was hard to hear the thunder with all the 4x4s going by. But by the time we got to the RV, it downpoured! We all listened to history lessons (dianawaring.com) for a short time before looking at the digital pictures from the trail ride. It stopped raining, but stayed yucky out so we didn't make it back to the pool. We stayed busy though and it's been fun anyway.

I'm personally looking forward to Phoenix, but this is okay. I would like Moab better if we were river rafting I think. The two person hang-gliding looks fun, too. Or some more short hikes in the parks. It's definately beautiful out here but the girls and I are not interested in living here. At all.

On the way....on the way....

We've been on the road for 2 days now and we've finally made it somewhere. We're in Moab, UT. Tomorrow we explore Arches National Park (and their Junior Ranger program). "How was the trip here, girls?" .........pause........"Mundanian," says Elli. "Good!!" says Grace. (Yesterday was good but today was long for me!) What schoolwork did we complete? Some music appreciation (Color the Classics), lesson 1 of Latin, reading....consumer math......and LOTS of observing the geography change from state to state, following the maps, etc. Grandpa even gave some lessons with topography software and geology/rock identification. Then there was 30 minutes of swimming today. Grace spotted some tracks along the side of the road and based on her notes which she recorded from a library book to her nature journal, she's convinced it was a bighorn sheep!
How exciting! So it's been quite a trip so far. We've only called Daddy at least twice a day. Can't wait for him to join us next week!
I wonder how much "school" we'll actually get done. We may drop plans and just wing it most of the time, but it's good to have some focus work, too.