It feels like all I’m doing any more is trying to catch up. This blog has certainly suffered because of it. I’m not actually prepared to write much today, either. I did finally upload 800 photos off of the camera, though, so I thought I’d at least throw up some highlights.
Filed under: Bubba, baby, christmas, mimi, preschool, rocks, school, science, vacation, winter
We’ve been super busy around here with all of the holiday activities going on. There has been a ton of holiday baking as well as holiday parties and gatherings with friends and family. The girls are giddy for Christmas. Tonight was their Christmas program at church. Mimi and Baby chose to be angels. Bubba was asked to be one of the 3 Wise Women. It was a beautiful evening with the dim lights and all of the children dressed up and excited.
In school we have continued on with geology. We did some easy experiments using Bubba’s rock collection.
We’ve also started to talk about next year. She is thinking about going back to public school. She’s very divided on the issue, though. So, I’m going to work hard on the areas that I feel she’s not as strong in so that she can be ready to re-inter the school in the fall if that’s what she decides. I don’t love the idea and would be happy to keep homeschooling her forever. But, we’ve always said that this was a choice for the kids after first grade. We’ll see what she ends up deciding for certain as it changes hourly.
This coming week will be our final week before taking a holiday break. We’re all looking forward to sleeping in and spending time with our extended families and friends.
Filed under: Bubba, baby, christmas, craft, math, mimi, reading, science, spelling, writing
I usually buy a small cheapie advent calendar for each of the girls every year. I have wanted something more permanent, but most of the nice ones that you can buy won’t hold a treat for three kids at once. Most of the ideas I saw for making one had the same problem or they just didn’t look like they would hold up to many years of use. Until I saw this idea. It looked perfect as it was completely customizable and could be made whatever size I needed. So Bubba and I set to creating them with some $1 wrapping paper that we found at Target. They turned out great and it has been a great motivator for the girls to get up and ready in the mornings.
I used a tiny kitchen curtain tension rod to hang them across the doorway off of the living room. They look really festive there and are easily accessibly to only dad or I. (Which is important because last year a certain two-year-old snuck into the advent calendars and wiped out a couple of weeks in one sitting.)
Mimi has become a reader lately. She brings home books to read to us. She sounds out every word that she finds and spells things to us incessantly. It’s so fun to watch her with this new skill. She has wanted to be able to read for a long time and has surprised us all with how quickly she has picked it up. She is the youngest in her class, so we expected it to be a slow process, but she keeps making these great bursts of progress. There are a lot of phonics games played in the car. She will instigate one by calling out, “Ok, give me a word that starts with the ‘ch’ sound,” and we all have to go around and around until we exhaust our vocabulary. Some of the family got to play a few rounds of this over Thanksgiving.
Bubba is currently studying the Ancient Aztecs, geology, writing a book report, Rosa Parks, regrouping and (x,y) coordinates in math, and is working on an embroidery project for her Secret Santa in Brownies. Between those subjects, reading, spelling and guitar, and all of the holiday baking and wrapping that we have planned, we have a full three weeks ahead of us.
Baby is… Baby. I think she has gotten sassier with the new haircut. She successfully wrote a couple of letter “A”s at preschool yesterday and was really proud of herself. She is gearing up for Christmas and is doing better at leaving the ornaments on the tree than she did last year. Within a week of putting it up last year, the tree was bare on the bottom third due to her little curious hands grabbing them every time she walked past.
We began with some creative writing today. Bubba had to choose two words from a list randomly and then write a story about them. She chose “bird” and “love”. The story goes like this:
Once upon a time ther was a bird and a evil villain and a girl named hannah. So one day the evil villain was in his lair bilding an evil machine. When he had finish bilding his evil machine ther was a panel and on the panel ther wher two level’s and the level’s on the panel wher evil and love. the evil villain put the switch on evil and he aimed the machine at a bird but right wen he was about to shoot his mother called him to eat soup so wen he was eating soup hannah swicht it to love. So wen he shot it the bird wa full of love. The End
(We began and finished with creative writing today, as a certain someone was not a fan of the project and she drug it out all. day. long.)
After Mimi got home from school, the kids took a look at Baby’s Thankful Placemat from preschool and decided to make their own pages of things they are thankful for. I drug out a bunch of old magazines and all of the scissors, glue sticks, crayons and markers.
It was a fun project and the kids were having a ball with it. I want you to notice something in that photo. Look really closely. See this part?
Looks great, right? So, I thought it would be fine to go around the corner into the kitchen and whip up some banana bread. All of a sudden the older kids all begin yelling that…
It’s the first self-inflicted mullet at our house. She was awfully proud of herself. I don’t think she’s going to be as happy about it when we remove the “party in the back”. The good news is that we just had some great school photos taken of her. The less good news is that we have a family portrait scheduled for Saturday. I’m not sure yet if we will get her hair fixed before then or just run with a bad hair day theme with the photo shoot.
Filed under: Bubba, baby, fall, girlies, halloween, holiday, math, mimi, party
We had a light school week last week as we were busy preparing for Halloween and our costume party. The girls had a blast trick-or-treating in the neighborhood and all of them wore their costumes to school or Brownie parties earlier in the week. On Saturday we had our costume party at the house. It was a very full weekend, but we had a great time with all of our friends and family. Today it was back to the grind and Bubba and I began working on graphing (x,y) coordinates.
We took a long long stroll around today to soak up the last few moments of summer. The girls did all kinds of exploring.
Don’t look at the next one, Grandma R.
But my favorite “discovery” is when Baby looked across the lake and said, “Look, mom, it’s Wall-E!”
I have been so swamped with school, work and birthdays lately that I haven’t been updating here. I’m currently trying to decide if I should play catch up or just plow forward. We’ll see.
Filed under: Bubba, art, baby, curriculum, guitar, history, math, music, phonics, preschool, reading, schedule, science, sewing, spelling, writing
Spelling – a list without a pretest. Bubba was struggling with the pretests last year as she’s such a perfectionist and there’s really no point in testing her on things that she hasn’t been taught yet. I almost feel like we should let our spelling instruction come naturally through our writing tasks. When I thought about that more, though, I really want the writing tasks to focus on content and structure and I don’t want to point out every misspelled word and distract from the actual writing. So, structured spelling lists it is. There are supplementing pages that are actually kind of fun and a little bit challenging, so she doesn’t HATE spelling this year. (four days per week)
Phonics – I detest this subject as I think it is super super boring. So does she. I think we’re going to nix phonics or at least skip to the few items in the book that would be instructional and useful to her. I’m going to have to look through our book a little more to weed out the busy work. (once per week, but maybe not at all.)
Science – We’re doing a unit on the human body with lots of activities thrown in. She’s also doing quite a bit of writing by logging our daily tasks and making little booklets and stuff. We’ve checked out a bunch of human body books from the library and she has been reading them with and to her little sisters and taking them in the car when we go pick up Mimi from school. The other day she was reading about the heart and we ended up having a great conversation about the relationship between the size of an animal and how quickly its heart beats. We’re planning on a trip down to the Science Museum to see the human body exhibit before it leaves next month. (twice a week)
Math – Right now we’re doing mostly review of addition and subtraction of multiple numbers. I’ve found lots of fun activities that incorporate these. I’m going to work with her on a sewing project to work on our measuring skills (and estimating skills, as I am a laaaaazy sewer). We’ve also done some cooking and we practice our fractions. I expect that the cooking will increase as the holiday season gets nearer and we’ll do a lot of practical math like doubling recipes and figuring out the metric system and equivalencies. She really wants to move on in math and get to multiplication and stuff, but I am feeling that we should ease back into the subject. (three times per week)
History – We tried to do an entire year of history over the summer, but burned out on it. We got about a third of the way through it before we shelved it until the school year. We are still in ancient history, but Bubba loves it. She really gets into most of the stories and we have some fun discussions after reading them. It is always amazing to me the details and names she remembers after reading. There are some that I have to go back and look up that she rattles off really quickly. This is one of our favorite subjects as we always learn something new and there is always some sort of fun project to go with it and reinforce the lesson. (twice a week)
Writing – Most of our writing is done within our other subjects as Bubba balks at having to sit down and write just for the sake of writing. One day per week we do do some sort of writing task. Lately we have been working on different brainstorming techniques. At first she was lazy and bored with it until she ended up coming up with a really fun and creative story based on some of her brainstorming. Every Friday is poetry day and we do something different. Last week we had a book from the library about rocks (her current passion) and it was a long poem about different types. We read it and then she chose her favorite type of rock from the poem and copied out that page in her best writing. We have a book of Roald Dahl poems for tomorrow that I’m very excited about.
Reading – Every day I read a chapter of The Wizard of Oz outloud to her. When we’re finished with the book we’re going to watch the movie and compare and contrast it to the book. I think we’ll do it orally or I’ll have her write down the main points and present it to Dad or something. I’ve been thinking about all of the different books we could read and then watch the movie to compare and the options are huge. I think it will give her a better idea of how much better the books typically are, too, and promote more reading. She also reads for half an hour to herself or to her sisters outloud.
Music – She practices her guitar every day except for lesson days. She was given two new songs to practice at her last lesson. We were also informed of her first recital coming up in October. I can’t wait to watch her play in front of everyone.
Art – At the beginning of every week we start a new art project. She then has the entire week to work on it and refine it in order to have a very thoughtfully and thoroughly finished piece. The first few projects in each unit are more technical, exploring each element (line, texture, etc.). Then there are a few really creative projects that incorporate the techniques previously studied.
(On a side note, Baby started preschool today, but I haven’t had time to get the photos off of the camera yet. I’ll write about it when I have them on the computer. Suffice it to say that she had a blast and it sounds like the day went really well.)
We lost my grandfather last Thursday. We went up to be with family, dig through old photos, reminisce and attend the memorial service. It was beautiful and simple and sweet and full of loving memories. The girls were amazing through the whole thing.
Instead of gifts, we asked the guests to bring or make special cards for the birthday girls. We loved the results…
