Week Four

This week was a little different than normal because Daddy was out of town for the week. This naturally resulted in a week a little more difficult than usual. Grace had at least one major breakdown about a math problem that she has solved many times before--but apparently it eluded her this week!

Math: Both girls progressed in this area. Hannah continues to enjoy her math curriculum and has been regularly scoring well (it even grades her work for me, how great is that?!). I love to see how enthusiastic she gets about what she is learning. Believe me, that never happened before this. Grace struggled a bit at the beginning of the week but regained her confidence as we went along. I realized that it was the way they were presenting the problem that was confusing her. For example they would use 1+_=3 and she struggled to figure out that middle number. We'll continue to work on that. But with Grace it is always best to tread carefully--I have learned that if she becomes frustrated she becomes emotional and then it is usually best to return to the subject another day because after that she'll cry left and right!

Reading: Hannah has been reading The Mayflower Adventure for a couple weeks now.

 

When she finishes reading this book she will write out a report to show me that she comprehended the book. To be sure that we are addressing concepts like "main idea" and "order of events" we also do Reading Comprehension on Fridays which is a workbook that focuses on those ideas.

Grace continues to work on her beginning readers and really is improving. She eagerly gets out her book and reads it with confidence which is so heartwarming. She says that her favorite subject is reading so she must be feeling better about this.

Science: We continued with our Sassafras Science this week. We studied the camel and the cobra as we are now studying the desert habitat. Hannah is starting to get excited for anatomy. Though she loves studying animals she finds the human body more exciting and always has. She saw a anatomy kit at Hobby Lobby and has been asking for it ever since! 

The girls had a field trip to the Green Bay Botanical Gardens this week, too, where they studied various aspects of plants. Hannah was in a different group than me but Grace's group explored the garden with their five senses. It was a really well done field trip.

History: This week we continued to study the Pilgrims and their flight from England. This is history that I didn't actually know that well myself. I knew that the Pilgrims had come from Holland to America and that they were originally English but I don't think I realize that they had fled England amidst persecution. They were against the Church of England but it was illegal to go to any other church. Because they wanted to worship God in their own way, they actually had to leave in secret and then were caught and arrested--more than once! In the end the men managed to successfully leave England but the women and children got left behind because the ship's captain saw the English soldiers, panicked, and left before they could board the women. The women were subsequently arrested. Eventually, though, they were released and allowed to join their husbands in Holland. 

We also had a history field trip this week. We met Grandma and Papa for a tour of Pinecrest Historical Village. I thought this was a very interesting place and the girls seemed to enjoy the experience.

Aboard the caboose.

Hannah and Sean pretending to make lye soap from ashes and pig fat!

 Grace and Elaina enjoying a meal with wooden everything!

 Ready to go to school.

 Sean teaching arithmetic.

 Enjoying her lessons.

 Grandma and Farmer Sean.

 Elaina's turn to teach.

 Sean driving the play train.

 Grace checking out the rope bed in the play house.

 Elaina cooking a gourmet pioneer meal in the play house.

 Cutest firemen!

 Driving their wagon!

 

Considering that Eric was gone for the week it was a pretty full and interesting week. Next week, week 5, we are having a "light" week because we are going camping. The girls will be responsible for doing math and reading but get a break from science and math.

Week Three

A little late for this week and not even one picture to show for it! I noticed my camera in a basket in the dining room tonight--I guess I put it there to remind me to take pictures. heh. Whoops. I think I ended up hiding it from myself!

This was a challenging week. Mostly just with time management. We got a late start almost everyday which really puts a rush on things. I'm still having a hard time switching full-on into "homeschool mindset". I volunteered to find a curriculum for our church's Sunday school and so I spent most of my free time researching that all week. I ended up having a hard time switching gears.

Hannah continued to thrive in her new math. Best money ever spent! She told me she loves that her lessons go so fast--she says she sits down and does a few problems and before she realizes it she's gone through all the problems and she's done! Not at all the story we heard last year!!

Grace's big break through was discovering that reading can be fun. She has been gaining confidence as she reads through her Bob books and I love to see her sitting down to read with enthusiasm. We still have a long way to go but at least she isn't dreading this time.

History was exciting this week! We started studying the Pilgrims, beginning with William Brewster's family. This is particularly fun for our family because we have the paperwork that shows how we descend from William Brewster. After we read our history lesson the first day I showed them the family tree that I had made up. I helped them trace themselves up the tree to William Brewster. They were so excited that the person that they had just read about in history was their ancestor! Talk about living history!

 Our new science curriculum is going well. I'm really glad that we bought this. When we started it the first week I wondered if we would find it to be too much reading but it really has settled into a great balance. And it is a good, interesting curriculum. I love Heart of Dakota but the science in the early guides is just so here and there...one day we are studying blubber, the next oceans, then light, and it goes up and down. They try too hard to connect it to the history story we are studying. I'd prefer it if they were two different subjects. Sometimes the attempt to make everything connect just weakens it. So the Sassafras Zoology has been filling in the gaps without being overly time consuming.

We are now heading into week four...will be a busy one!

Week Two

Week two, as expected, was much better. We're not there yet but we're starting to find our rhythm and figure out what works best for us. What we discover now will probably change throughout the year as the kids get older, but for now I think we're at a sustainable pace!

Monday we took our first "field trip" if you will classify it as such. Downtown there is a fountain designed to be a replica of our lock system. They close it up in the fall and so we took advantage of our lingering summer weather and took a bike ride down to visit the fountain. Good thing, too, since fall quickly arrived. Believe it or not, two days later we were all wearing jeans and sweaters!

 

 Hannah really struggled the first couple days of school this week. She's decided that she hates grammar. This is particularly frustrating for me because I spent a good deal of time researching several different grammar programs trying to find the one that would work the best. I passed up on one because I thought it would be too much busywork and the other one I had the chance to peruse at a book sale and found it confusing. Growing With Grammar, what I ultimately chose, is student-led and the lessons each day are brief. But they are writing intensive which Hannah hates. She was dragging her lessons out until late in the afternoon each day. Finally on Wednesday she decided, on her own, that if she got her Grammar done first thing in the morning and saved her more pleasant subjects (reading and history) until she was done, she'd probably move faster. And it made a huge difference.

 Writing her first book report of the year.

Spelling was also a struggle but for somewhat different reasons. We just started it this week. When I looked at her curriculum and realized that on Day 2 they wanted her to copy her entire list (20 words) twice, I saw that going badly. Here is this girl who hates to do writing and they want her to copy 40 words? Monotony. So I've ordered a spelling software that I hope will help with that...we'll see how that goes.

 Doing her reading worksheet.

Grace is working on her Bob books this week. She really likes them and seems to be making progress. I struggle to know if there is more that I should be doing with her to help reading really "click". She gets it she just labors over it. Every word is a drawn out sound. At least this week she told me when she didn't understand what she was reading. I've wondered about that before (how much she actually retains of what she reads) and that she's starting to realize that the story is supposed to make sense was a step forward. Next week we continue to practice and confidence build...I think we're on the right track.

Math and Thinking Skills are her two other independent (separate from Hannah) subjects and she thrives in both of those. Definitely her favorite for the time being.

Working With Daddy

Elaina got to start some of her own work this week. She's so eager it is hard to tell her no so we've been making a point to set aside time for her. Eric even took a few moments out of his day to sit down with her this week. She soaks it all in. I hope she keeps that attitude!

Science was the highlight of this week, I think. Last week I was a bit uncertain about our supplement Sassafras science. Grace seemed bored by it. Hannah was over the moon but that's typical for her and anything related to animals and Sassafras is studying Zoology. But this week they began projects that go alongside the reading. Hannah chose to work on a food chain chart (she is keeping track of what animals are carnivores, herbivores, or omnivores). Grace chose to make a habitat poster. They each picked a different project and I think that's a good thing. There will be less comparison if they are each absorbed in there own tasks. 

For history we studied Jamestown and followed the story of a little girl's life in Jamestown. The girl was 8 years old and already had to regularly watch her baby brother while making supper, knitting, and helping her mother with the laundry and making soap. Puts into perspective just how easy our girls have it now!!

We also finished up our storytime book. We were reading about Amelia Earhart and even I learned a few things about her. Next week we'll begin a biography on Sacajawea. Should be interesting!

Week One

As expected, this week was a rough one. In my experience the first week always is. There will always be one moment where I'm ready to quit. Usually it is just the chaos of implementing new curriculum, getting everyone adjusted to doing school instead of playing, and just managing time! Usually by the second week things have somewhat smoothed out. But boy does Mommy need a break after the first week!!

I decided to start something new this year and we did an "all about me" sheet. The idea being that we can see how they've changed as each year goes by. Questions were things like favorite food, favorite color, what I want to be when I grow up, etc...not everyone had as detailed of a business plan as Hannah's idea for opening a dog kennel complete with gift shop!

                                               Our "back to school" pictures
                      

 Elaina will be doing some preschool.

 Sean will be doing lots of playing!

 Grace is in 1st.

 Hannah is in 3rd.

This week we studied the settlement of St. Augustine, FL. We also studied the continents, oceans and how currents work. We got to do a fun activity where we drew a giant world in our driveway (complete with mom's terrible artwork as I attempted to draw continents!). We labeled each continent and the oceans and the girls took turns jumping to whichever continent/ocean I called out. They enjoyed it and they really had to stop and think about where to jump.

Hannah's new favorite subject is math. At least for the time being! She loves her new curriculum that she gets to do on the computer. I love that she's finally excited to do math and that I have the reassurance of knowing that she's getting a solid lesson each day. She's also enjoying her extra history readings, this week she is reading the fictitious diary of a little girl who traveled to Jamestown. She's speeding through it and I suspect she'll finish it before her allotted 3 weeks which is fine because then she can start on book #2!

Grace has also been loving her math. It is a lot more review for the time being. We'll see how she feels in a couple weeks! Reading continues to be a struggle for her. Rather than keep dragging her forward I've decided to slow down and review some of the basics hoping that if she grows in confidence she won't find the forward movement so emotionally challenging!

I'm hoping to start working a bit more with Elaina next week. She's certainly eager and ready. I've had her work along some with Grace this week but she's wanting more formal one-on-one time. Which was just impossible this week with trying to sort everyone else out. But hopefully soon...I want to take advantage of her eagerness!!

Our Curriculum

It is hard to believe that the school year is quickly approaching...this summer seemed shorter for some reason. I usually start our school year closer to mid-August but this year I just couldn't bear ending our summer vacation any earlier than it needed to be. We were all enjoying the outside activities and freedom of a Wisconsin summer.

We are entering our 3rd year of homeschooling (which is also hard to believe!). This year I'm going to try to document our journey just a little bit...if for no other purpose than for me to remember what we did!

A little bit of history...Our first year we did Heart of Dakota which I loved and found to be the perfect beginning place for our homeschooling adventure. Everything was very much "open and go" and there wasn't much planning involved--perfect for a newbie. But for our second year I wanted Grace to be able to tag along with whatever Hannah was doing, and if I continued to the next guide in HOD Grace would have eventually been left behind. HOD's method is to teach to the youngest child and then "beef it up" for the older children rather than starting harder and "watering it down" for the younger. I actually love this approach.

Last year we chose My Father's World Adventures just as a stand-in year until we could get back to Heart of Dakota. It worked really well as a way to combine the two kids. I had Hannah do the writing assignments and more advanced things and Grace just listened. They each do their own age-appropriate language arts and math, but they share science, history, art, etc.

But this we are back to Heart of Dakota. We chose to start with a guide that, on its own, would be too easy for Hannah. This year we are doing Beyond Little Hearts For His Glory and it is a guide meant for ages 6-8, which our kids current ages but I do think most people use this guide for grades 1st or 2nd, and Hannah will be in 3rd. I was a little nervous about it not being hard enough for Hannah but felt like if we could just make it through this guide going forward would be a lot easier for our family. Following this guide HOD includes built in "extensions" for upper grades. So this year I decided to make my own "extensions" to make the curriculum more appropriate for Hannah while Grace just does it "as written". And now I'm actually more excited about the curriculum because I think Hannah will just love the extra books she gets to read.

    

Beyond covers early American History and focuses a great deal of time on the Pilgrims and colonial period. We'll be reading Stories of the Pilgrims, Boys and Girls of Colonial Days, American Pioneers & Patriots, and IO also added in Life in Colonial America which is essentially a history/coloring book.

  

To be sure that Hannah gets in depth enough with her history we've added a slew of "living books" for her to read. Most of them are from the "My America" series which are the "diaries" of children who lived in that era. She's also going to be doing additional history notebook pages that I found online.

Science was another area I was nervous about. I wanted to make sure that she gets plenty of science. I think that is probably one of the weaker areas of the early HOD guides. The science it a little light. So we decided to add Sassafras Science Adventures to go along with the Liberty Press God's Wonderful Works that is included within Beyond. We'll do that for two days a week. I also added some notebooking pages to accompany the HOD science.

 

Other than those subjects, Beyond will also cover art, poetry, Bible, and geography within their guides. We're adding a Map Skills workbook for Hannah to do in addition to the geography in the guide.

We chose our own phonics, math, and language arts (other than what HOD suggested). Grace will be doing Modern Curriculum Press math for this year. We've found this to be an affordable, fairly basic curriculum that works pretty well for us.

 

We've decided to try something different for Hannah this year, though. She has never been a big fan of MCP and so this year we decided to try Teaching Textbooks which is a computer-based math curriculum. She's very excited to try this and I'm hoping maybe she'll dread math a little less this way!

 Grace is doing a mishmash of language arts. Last year she completed her kindergarten phonics program and still just need a bit more and so we started First Start Reading. We need to complete this program before we can move on to the next. Once she's finished that we will begin Hooked on Phonics for 1st grade accompanied by MCP's Phonics. We'll be reading through some BOB books, too, just so that we can work on fluency.

 

 She also gets to do Handwriting and Thinking Skills this year. We opted to go with Pentime Handwriting and are going to use Rod & Staff's thinking skills books as recommended by HOD. She's very excited to do these books!

Hannah's Language Arts program is a little more complicated. She will be doing Growing With Grammar, Cheerful Cursive, Building Spelling Skills, and also Comprehension Plus. These are all new this year (with the exception of Comprehension Plus) so I'm hopeful that they'll work out well. For reading I will be choose some good literature for her to read and she'll write out a report when she completes them. 

,

And finally, this year we decided to add in a Spanish class! As I have zero experience with Spanish this isn't a subject I can teach, but we are going to do La Clase Divertida which is a DVD curriculum that they are very excited to do.

 

That about sums up our curriculum for this year! School starts next Tuesday and though not all of my students are as excited as others, I'm starting to feel like I'm ready for things to get started again!

Camp

Life has made a full circle for me, it would seem. I still remember, so many years ago, my very first week at Lake Lundgren Bible Camp. For me it was actually a mixed experience...while I had tons of fun I was also very homesick and didn't make many friends. My counselor, although not the best that I recall, did do one thing right...she pointed me to the One who would never leave me and I made the step to entrust my life into God's keeping.

That first time didn't keep me from coming back and over the years LLBC has come to mean a great deal to me. It is one of my very favorite places to be. This week we dropped off Hannah for her first week at camp.

It is hard to imagine that I am old enough to have a daughter who can now start having her own camp experiences. I'm so excited for her and I know that the things she'll learn and the friendships she'll make will impact who she becomes as a young woman someday.

This has been so encouraging for me in a different way, as well. Since Hannah had never been to LLBC before and the friend she had hoped to take could no longer make it, we were concerned that she'd show up Day 1 with no friends and no knowledge of camp and have a bad first experience. I made a few connections for her beforehand within our homeschool community, but ultimately we decided to attend Family Camp the weekend before her camp began so that she'd at least be familiar with the facilities.

I've never regretted our decision to homeschool, but watching her this past weekend was an affirmation to me that we made the right decision. When we sent Hannah to kindergarten we watched our social, confident little girl turn into a child who was regularly excluded by her peers and who often wondered why one child was her friend one day and not the next...her "social" experiences were not good and she had a hard time with friendships.

Over the last two years we've worked hard to establish relationships within our homeschool community and so I've seen Hannah (and our other kids, too) build good relationships. But those were kids that I've arranged for her to play with and have time to make friendships with. This past weekend, all on her own, I watched Hannah go and meet kids and make her own friendships. Socialization? Not a problem.

When I left Hannah yesterday she was, by God's grace, in a cabin with three other homeschooled kids she knew (something that I couldn't have controlled but God provided for her), ready to rock her first week at camp. I'm guessing her first experience will not be as lonely as mine. And I can't wait to her all about her own experiences!

Fall Happenings

Time passes too quickly. I knew it had been awhile since I had updated but couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that my last post was when we were heading out of winter...and here we are heading into it!

What a full summer we had. Perhaps the fullest I can remember...and yet we went nowhere. The kids and I enjoyed a couple months off of structured time...I had originally intended to do "light school" throughout the summer but instead chose to toss that idea. This mama needed a break. I do think in future we will try to do a little better about it, but it is so nice to have some days to get some non-school related things done.

Probably the most time-consuming activity was the planting of a new church. Amidst a good deal of turmoil and hardship at our previous church, Eric and I were not sure where to go or what to do. We took our time about making a decision, looked at a few other churches, assessing and reassessing the condition of the church we were attending, and eventually decided that we would try to do what we could to heal that church since there was nowhere else we felt God was leading us to be.

Almost as soon as we made that decision a new opportunity presented itself. It was amazing to both of us how clear the answer was. And so we spent most of our summer immersed in planning sessions, prayer meetings, and preview services. Our new church is now fully launched and life has settled down...but only a little bit. We are still plenty busy with the details a new church entails.

Also over the summer I finally finished my book. It has been in the works for at least two years now. Although truthfully longer than that since it was actually a book I had started in high school...I completely revised it but I did take the original idea. I am now in the editing stage...and finding it quite difficult to focus on since my mind has already skittered on to book number two!!

Eric and I also got to go away for our ten year anniversary. Ten years! I don't feel old enough to have been married that long. We escaped to Mackinac Island. And while it was a much needed get away, we were both happy to get back to the family :-)

 

We are off and running with our school year. We began mid-August and are now in week eight. Hannah is a regular bookworm and I can barely pry her head out of her books to get her schoolwork done most days! She is doing very well in all her subjects, though, and our curriculum this year is very hands-on project-orientated so she is in her element. She really enjoys reading to her sisters (and Sean) and is a really good helper. She loves to teach Grace all the things she's learned. She's taking an art and gymnastics class this semester and so far she says that gymnastics is her favorite.

Grace is doing very well in her kindergarten year. She started out behind where I'd like her to be and that's my own fault. Grace was pretty resistant to bookwork previously and since I was learning how to do this homeschool thing and fairly overwhelmed, I let her do her own thing. She's catching up quickly, though. She's a very sensitive soul and doesn't like to make mistakes. It has been wonderful to see her gaining in both confidence and ability. She reaffirms why I love homeschooling. When we started her first week I wanted to bang my head against the dining table!! But now she's filled with excitement and pride in her accomplishments.

 Elaina tags along with most of our activities. As she's only three I'm not doing anything formal with her, but I may start soon. She seems very interested in working on her alphabet and counting skills. In the meantime she enjoys doing "stickers" while her sisters work on math and reading. She happily participates in the projects and sits and listens well to the history and read alouds. Learning is a family activity :-)

Sean is beginning to walk. He's nearly 18 months old so it is about time! He still isn't doing it full-time but he will walk across the room to get to something he wants. He's gaining confidence and balance, and so we'll just wait and let him get there at his speed. Sean has always done everything very much at his own pace. He often needs a nudge to get him going anywhere developmentally!!

And that about brings us up to date...what are the chances I will keep up with it this time?