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.
Filed under: holiday
In honor of the holiday, we have taken the day off of school. Enjoy the holiday, everyone, and we’ll be back to school again on Monday.
These are the things we learned over the holiday weekend:
We should always keep a swimsuit or at least a change of clothes in the car. (I know, I know, Mom 101, right? I think I was absent that day.)
hot dogs + sand + water + trampoline + juice + sprinklers =
It is easier to put clothes on the dog than to take them off.
Fireworks. Are. Awesome.
Three days of non-stop celebrating with friends and family =
I had some great photos of our extended holiday weekend, but our camera has been misplaced. Suffice it to say, we had a great time with friends and family, ate tons of good food and blew up our entire arsenal.
In other news, I realized that summer is hitting the half-way point, so I need to start organizing for the upcoming year. I’ve been going through a bunch of the items I’d like to use this year and making notes about other resources that correlate. I think this will help our days flow better, instead of searching through the bookshelves and online for the items I need that day, I will be able to get them all ready for the week and have them at our fingertips. I wasn’t very excited about the work involved with this project, but as I’m going through different books, I found myself getting excited about the different things we get to learn about this year.
Bubba has started a book exchange with her friend that lives around the corner. What I love about it is that she is even more driven to read because she has a weekly “deadline” to exchange the books. Also, the girls came up with this on their own out of their love of certain books and their desire to share them with each other.
Bubba and Mimi started summer art classes today. They worked with clay. Bubba made a few different items while Mimi made a really big… thing. I wish so much that I had my camera. Next week is painting, so hopefully it will surface before then.
As of tomorrow afternoon, we will be on Spring Break! It doesn’t coincide with public school’s break, but since our schooling only takes a couple of hours per day, it doesn’t matter – Bubba will still have lots of time to play with all of her friends when they’re out. It does, however, coincide with the week that her Dad is taking off of work, so our whole family will be home for the whole week. We are very excited about this. We will be attacking the basement and purging out everything that is unnecessary so that we can sell it at our garage sale and/or donate it to one of the local organizations that takes second hand goods. We will also be cleaning up the back yard, filling the garden bed, and setting up the secret garden area. It’s still too early to plant anything outside, but we’ll be starting our peppers inside on Monday. Bubba’s art project for tomorrow is to make toothpick flags for all of the different starts so we can tell them apart. We’re doing a bunch of other little home improvement things, like touching up paint, over the week. We’ll also be doing a big Spring Clean, getting the baseboards and vents and ceiling fans and windows and all of the other areas that don’t get weekly attention. The week will culminate with a big St. Patrick’s Day party with friends and family coming from out of town. Dad is pushing for a day trip somewhere, too, but we haven’t been able to figure out a good place to go at this time of year, so that may or may not happen. I have big hopes for this coming week, which likely means we will accomplish about half of what we’ve planned and end the week a little let down, but the intentions are there.
Partly due to the issues that Bubba and I have been having as teacher/student, and partly because I needed to clean the house before this afternoon’s event, we did no schooling today. Instead, we prepped for the little neighborhood Valentine party that we were having. The party itself was madness, 17 children, 1 infant and 7 adults. (I’ll just say that our house is not huge and we were well past capacity.) There were sugary snacks, a messy craft, many spilled cups of punch and some fun games that, thankfully, didn’t get too rowdy or crazy. The kids had a lot of fun and all went home with some simple goody bags and Valentines signed by my girls. It was an exhausting couple of hours, but well worth all of the effort and prep that we went through.
Mmmmmmm… cupcakes. Unfortunately, there are a few of these left on the counter, calling my name.
We had a wonderful Christmas and New Year and Bubba has been enjoying her winter break from school. (honestly, so am I.) We have had lots of time to visit with family and friends and get things accomplished around the house. But, starting next week we’ll be back to the old grind. I thought I should make some homeschool resolutions for us.
1. Integrate more science into our daily school life. This will be much easier once Spring makes its appearance, but I have plenty of resources for engaging indoor activities since Bubba is not all that keen on reading about scientific topics in general.
2. Plan a garden with the girls. (This is an overlap to one of my personal resolutions.) The garden will be small this first year so that we don’t overwhelm ourselves, but I want the two oldest to pick one thing to plan that will be theirs to care for (with help from me, of course). It will be a learning experience for us all and I just hope things grow because I have a notoriously un-green thumb.
3. Start a photography unit with Bubba. We have an old digital camera that takes decent photos. I want to start talking about photography as an art form and give shooting assignments. Then, at the end of the school year, I want to have an open house for family and friends that showcases her work. I think we will make it informal because while she loves being the center of attention, it has to happen on her terms, not because I put her on the spot and make her talk about her work to everyone.
4. Play more games. We have so many games that will encourage lots of different skills, yet it rarely occurs to any of us to pull one out. I don’t know why that is, but I want to start doing it more and including the younger girls, too. Playing Go Fish and Crazy 8s is how Bubba learned her numbers when she was younger, but I haven’t done that with the little two.
I don’t think those goals are too difficult, just stuff that I wanted to consciously put out there so that I can refer back to it when I forget what my focus is.
Seriously, what better way to learn the parts of speech than with Mad Libs? The girls have always loved doing them, we’ve just always asked them for “an action word” or “a thing, anything at all”. This time, I had Bubba read me the first page of the Mad Libs book which describes the different types of words that they would ask for. We discussed them until she felt comfortable and then dove in. We happened to have a book about different holiday songs, so it was timely, too. I read one to her and had her fill in the words, but I would only ask for exactly what they called for (verb, adjective, etc.). If she forgot what one was, we talked about it until she figured it out. The next time around, she filled it out for me, but I made her describe what kind of word she was asking for (if she asked for an adverb, she had to tell me that it was a word that described an action, usually ending in ly). We had a lot of fun reading them back to each other, even if poop and poopy were used predominantly throughout some Christmas classics.
I hadn’t planned on doing anything with the holiday for homeschool this year. Basically, I wanted to give a factual portrayal of the first Thanksgiving, but we got really busy and then all of a sudden the holiday was almost here. I didn’t feel I had time to research it and weed out the facts from all of the fiction that exists about this holiday. So, I was just going to let it go. We talk casually about the holiday and how it’s a time to be with our loved ones and be thankful for all of our blessings. Yesterday, though, someone pointed me to this site. I looked at it and it is exactly what I was wanting. Plus, it’s interactive on the computer, which makes it 10 times better in Bubba’s book. I like that is is based solely on fact and they talk about the parts where the infer more information based on those facts. There is a section on myth-busting a lot of the things I was taught in school. Plus, there’s no agenda to the information, other than trying to get a truly balanced representation of that first harvest festival. It was at a level very appropriate for my seven-year-old, and I learned some new things, too. So, we sat down and went through the whole site this morning instead of continuing on our weather unit. After we finished, we discussed a lot of what we had read and heard and talked about the new things we had learned and the items that had surprised us. Then she wrote a letter to her grandparents telling them about some of the things on the site. I think the site did a better job than I would have, because I would have had a hard time keeping my opinions out of it all. Those are discussions that she and I can have when she’s older. For now, it was a great way to get some really good information and we enjoyed exploring the site together.
Here are some of the fun crafts that we worked on for Halloween. Sorry in advance for the blurriness of a couple of these. I was in a hurry and didn’t take time to set up the shots very well.
We also carved five other pumpkins and decorated the house with creepy spiderwebs, skulls and tombstones. Bubba, Mimi, Baby and I had a lot of fun with all of the crafting. I saved all of it (except the jack-o-lanterns, of course) for reuse next year. I’ll have to think of new crafts for next year to add to our collection. The homemade decorations are by far my favorite.
