Static Electricity

We have been having fun rubbing our socks on the carpet, shocking one another, and finding out why the shock happens.
We don't watch the ones that have Bill Nye's ungodly evolution . My boys know that stuff is not true. But some of his videos are great...

Flyers for trips to the New World

One of Justin and Jonathan's assignments for history today was to pretend that they were making flyers/brochures to entice people to take trips to the New World.

I thought what they came up with was cute:

Justin's said:
"We've got great ships. Free Food! Contact John Smith at the ship yard."

Jonathan's said:
"Come to the New World and be rewarded with gold and treasure! Trade with the Indians.
Contact London Company"

The Character Journal

We are using "The Character Journal" to study character qualities. Currently we are going through the study about obedience. There are also studies about humility, responsibility, self control, punctuality (which I desperately need myself), etc...

This is a free service offered by "Home Life Ministries". I print each study and put it in a binder and Michael and I both go over it with them at different times.
characterjournal.com

I put the link on my sidebar as well.

Learning the Books of the Bible

The boys are learning the books of the Old Testament in song format. I am not for sure what the original tune would be called, but it is very familiar. I remember learning them this same way, and it is very effective.

We are also doing sword drills. Since sword drills aren't extremely familiar to them yet, I am starting out by just calling out the name of the book of the Bible. Once they get used to finding the books, we will go to chapter and verse. They really enjoyed this, and asked to keep doing it.

Poetry Memory

Papa and Grammy gave the boysa poetry coloring book for Christmas. It has some great poetry, so I decided to use it for memory work.



We just finished learning "Who Has Seen the Wind" by Christina Rossetti.







We are currently working on "The Caterpillar", also by Christina Rossetti. They seem to enjoy this one quite a bit since they spent a lot of time this past fall picking up caterpillars. :-)

Routine - Update

Yes, we are back to day shift around here. Yippee! I am happy to have an early morning routine instead of later.


Here is an update on some of the things we are studying:

Have I mentioned how thankful I am to have this blog? It is so nice to be able to document our home education activities with pictures... and with this type of ease! This looks so much nicer than my mundane handwritten journals!

• Science: We are still reading the huge book The Bee People (which I started for our bee unit study). Yesterday, we did an experiment about matter and watched videos that teach the concept.

Everything is made of matter. When you add energy to it, it changes forms. So, of course to begin with, we did the old frying of ice experiment.

Ice - solid

Add energy/ heat

Ice/ solid turns to water/ liquid

Continue the energy/heat and it changes into a gas

• History - we are studying about the early explorers who came to America. Columbus, Hudson, Estevanico, etc...

We are re-creating our time-line:

Last year, we tried posting it on cardstock onto the walls. Sticky tack doesn't always work well on walls, and I discovered a new way of doing it using brown craft paper. The boys love to draw, so I am letting them do the artwork. They drew the explorer's ships :-). The nice thing about the craft paper is that you can roll it up and put it in the corner!

The history book we use has a lot of fun activities. In the last lesson, it explained that the explorers likely used certain types of kn0t-tying techniques for survival (as most sailors do). Justin demonstrates the square knot:

• Language Arts: (Phonics, Writing, Language, Reading, & Spelling) is coming along well. The boys enjoy typing out their spelling words on the computer, and I think by using the computer they are learning 2 things at once (how to type and how to spell!). I have enough Swagbucks to get Justin's new Writing book free! Woo hoo!

The boys are also reading library books about their favorite subjects these days in their leisure time. Justin got a few Garfield comics and a book about vikings. Jonathan is interested in knights and enjoys reading to Ryan.


I am still plodding through Ryan's reading lessons. He is coming along very well. Maybe one of these days I can sneak a video of him reading without him knowing it.

• Math is mostly workbook style. We use supplemental workbooks and we try to do the supplemental lessons that they have in the back of their books.

Jonathan is working through Twin Sisters Addition at this point and Justin is also going through some supplemental exercises in the back of his math.

Math is a good subject for both of them. They do not seem to have any trouble understanding concepts.

• As far as social activities, we still meet with friend/s on Mondays. We either meet in our home, our friend's home or the library (and the park on warm days). One week there were nine kids running through my house. Lots of fun!

Socialization Article

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/13/home-schooling-socialization-not-problem/

Let them be Little

Object Lessons

One fun thing I have learned since coming home to teach my own children is that you can use the same things to teach your own children at home as you would in children's church! Wow, isn't that a revelation?! What kills me about all this is that I didn't think much about it before. I had my separate Sunday School/Children's church ideas in their very own box. Why in the world didn't I try that creativity on my own children?!

I love object lessons. My friend Pam gave me a great book with short object lesson devotionals. I have been doing these and the boys love them. The first one I did, I came into the room wearing mismatched socks. The lesson had a Scripture verse and then a devotional about how our lives need to match what we say. Really cute, really fun, and I hope it will be really memorable to them!

Update

With the move to our new house, the holidays (and all the craziness involved), it has been a little more difficult to update my blogs.

But I thought I'd take just a minute to update.

First of all I want to say how much I treasure the opportunity to home educate my children. To me, it is worth every minute of the time it takes. I treasure the time I have with my boys.

Even on the most trying days, I feel that those are opportunities for character development and relationship building.

Michael is doing a daily Character study with the family at lunch-time every day. It has been such a joy to sit back and watch him teach and lead our family!

The boys are still learning Scripture memory from the book of Proverbs.

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Justin is working with double digit divisors and long division, fractions, simple algebra, and converting English measures. In Language Arts, he just moved from learning about comma placement to possesive nouns.

Jonathan is focusing on improving his addition skills by going through Twin Sisters Addition workbook & CD. He is doing well; I just felt that it would help him move through his ABeka math more quickly if he can master addition. There is a CD with the workbook that is great for reviewing at bedtime.
In Language Arts, he is separating syllables and recognizing special phonics sounds.

Ryan is learning to read. We take it slowly and patiently. The patience is paying off because he is really starting to blend the sounds together. I don't want to rush through this. I want him to get it without regretting speeding through it.
He is not "there" yet, but he is getting there. I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to teach Ryan to read. I would not trade these memories we are making together!
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For Science, we are learning everything from insects to Creation Science (Debunking Darwinism).

The boys read history separately to themselves and then we also do unit studies. In our unit study, we just talked about the Indian mounds (burial grounds). One interesting mound that we talked about today was the "Serpent Mound". The picture in the book we are using is much better than this one:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/serpent.html


I had forgotten, but studying that reminded me of the place in Alabama called Moundville (near Tuscaloosa) that we visited on field trips when I was in school. We may just have to go there for a field trip sometime ourselves. There are surely a lot of Indian themed historical places around here as well. I am looking forward to finding them!

We haven't done many messy Science projects lately because of the holiday stuff. We are still meeting with Stacie and Anna weekly.
Sometimes we play board games. Other times we do easy crafts. Another week I had several children over. They ran around in the fields, got muddy, and then came inside and baked cookies. I plan on having more children over soon to do some Christmas cookies. I am also hoping to get back into regularly visiting the nursing homes. We have several from our church in the same nursing home (as well as Nana), so I am hoping that we can make that a more regular activity again.

Well that's it for now. I hope I can do better updating from now on.