Got to Make the Doughnuts

We recently completed Homer Price as our lunch time reader. One of the favorite Homer stories is when the doughnut making machine goes haywire. In honor of finishing the book, we made doughnuts. The girls helped cut them out, I fried them and then I glazed half of them. The other half, we covered with chocolate sauce and the girls decorated with sprinkles! What a fun way to end a book!

Wrap Up--Week of November 2-8

Wow, I'm actually getting a wrap up done within a couple days of the completed week. What a concept!

We had a great week this week. It started on Sunday, when our family presented about our recent mission trip to Romania. (You can read more here, there are five posts in total) German and I led the service, Jewel and Flower sang with the praise band and then we hosted a typical Romanian meal afterwards. We had over eighty people stay for the meal and it was amazing. It was great to see the girls talking about the trip, remembering different aspects and placing things into context for others.

Monday began week six of our Sonlight year. We are nearing the more "meaty" part of the history and social studies in the curriculum. I'm so ready to get to ancient civilaztions! I would move quicker through what I consider tedious, but Jewel loves Usborne books and doesn't want to rush. Child led, MiPa, child led!

Monday night we went to visit friends who had their first baby on Friday evening. Flower, especially, was enthralled by the tiny hands and feet. He slept the whole time we were their, but I was able to enjoy the cuddles.

Reading is going well. She really loves that she is able to read the Bible to me. So cool! Flower is half-way through her first "Get Ready for the Code" book and is doing great. She has learned to write most of her letters and now we are beginning to work on more consistency.

Math is going so much smoother now that we have begun the Math*U*See curriculum. Jewel is finally getting to grips with basics such as place value and she now says that she loves math. We haven't heard that in a long time!

We finished reading Homer Price last night. The girls loved it. We will make doughnuts sometime next week to complete the experience. In Science this week in addition to continuing our study of flowers we completed a few water experiments that we had not been able to do before. We created a syphon to make water flow upwards. The girls were convinced that I would not be able to do it, but I did. Yay me! We are also changing the color of white carnations. Jewel's carnations in red food color are a beautiful pink color. Flower's in blue food color are beginning to tinge blue. Mine in green food color are still white. ;-( Oh well! Next week we will do similar experiments with celery to see how the water is taken up the stalk.

It should be a quiet weekend around here. Tomorrow the girls will present their current memory verse to someone at church. They have spent the last six weeks learning all of Psalm One. There is a young man at church that they love to tell their verses to, and he is so encouraging of them! Then we have our house group Bible Study. One of the families has two year old twins so the the girls love that.

Hmmmm...nine months without an update

Maybe that is a little excessive. Nine months! You know what they say about good intentions...

Well, here is the update! Today, we finished Kindergarten!!! It has been such a great year!

When we started, Jewel was reading letters and sounds, but not doing much in terms of words. Today she is reading fairly fluidly, even learning to read in her head. She loves to read! I find her reading to Flower all the time. Her favorite books to read are a book of fairy tales and a Disney princesses book. Neither are "beginner" books. Both were bought as read-alouds, but she has taken them over. Today, for her last beginning to read story for K, she read the story of Balto the dog to me. She did great! There were several words she had never seen before, and she sounded them out without any issue. I have not worked intentionally at all with Flower, but she has learned her alphabet and all the sounds just by being with Jewel. She has taken over Jewel's Barbie computer and does a great job recognizing the letters and the sounds. She is so ready to start school. As much as I'd planned to wait until after her fourth birthday, I've relented and will start her in October as well.

Back in September, Jewel had learned how to write all of her letters. This year, her handwriting has improved immensely and she loves to sit and spell out words on her magnetic drawing board. She has been teaching Flower how to write the letters and she can now write her own name without any help, and the rest of the family's names with spelling help. Jewel has written all of her own thank you notes this year. The proof is in the pudding, and a few weeks ago a substitute Sunday School teacher, who is skeptical about home ed, came to me afterwards to tell me that they had never seen such neat and precise handwriting in a child before. Yay! (He was even more shocked when Flower wrote her name on her paper--his son is one month older than Flower and doesn't even know his letters yet.) To me, it is just verification that it is working.

Reading together has been great fun this year. Sonlight has some amazing books to read. We've read:
*The Boxcar Children (books 1 and 2)
*James Herriot's Treasury for Children
*The Apple and the Arrow
*My Father's Dragon
*The Hundred Dresses
*Johnny Appleseed
*The Light at Tern Rock
*Five True Dog Stories
*The Family Under the Bridge (Jewel's favorite)
*Twenty and Ten
*Mary on Horseback
*Dolphin Adventure and Dolphin Treasure
*The Story About Ping
*The Story of Doctor Dolittle
*In Grandma's Attic
*The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Flower's favorite)
*The House at Pooh Corner
*A Grain of Rice
*Richard Scarry's Please and Thank you Book
*Capybobby

We have also really enjoyed the reading about missionaries as part of history. Granny Han's Breakfast amazed them both. It is so great to be able to use the stories we read to enhance their love of God. The Bible readings coupled with coloring sheets from Calvary Chapel have made this a rich year in terms of learning about God.

Science may be where we have had the most fun. Although we have not done all of the experiments, we have done several. They loved growing beans,


and watching caterpillars become chrysalids then become butterflies that we released.





Plus we have learned lots from watching the peachicks from last summer grow up and now one of the females has a set of chicks of her own. They bring us hours of entertainment and education in our own back garden. That coupled with the cygnets and ducklings have given them a good sense of the growth of birds.




If Science is where we have had the most fun, math has definitely been the least. Jewel is just not conceptualizing what she needs to be able to do. She is adding and subtracting double digits, but it is hard work and rote. She has no idea why it works or how to make it work outside one presentation. I have decided that the problem is really three-fold: she is only 5 and in the States none of this would be started until first grade!; Singapore Math is just not a good fit for her in how it is presented; and her math major parents have a very difficult time communicating math to her in simple terms. The first problem will correct with age, and I'm trying not to sweat it. As far as the latter two, I am changing her curriculum next year to something a little more visual and that has a dvd "teacher" to help explain the concepts in simpler terms. I hope that helps her learn to enjoy and not dread math!

PE has been all about learning to swim. Last week Jewel was the only one in her class to achieve Level 2 badge (breast stroke, back stroke, front crawl plus other water skills) and has achieved her 5m distance badge. She is just slightly off achieving her 10m distance badge. Flower has already achieved her Level 1 badge (front crawl, able to swim pool length on her back--no stroke requirement, able to get out of pool on her own, able to jump in and get on her back safely, able to collect something off the pool floor) and she also has her 5m distance badge. She is just starting to learn the breast stroke and should start back stroke next week. They both love their swimming teacher and he is really incredible in how far he has taken them in a short time. Jewel started just over a year ago with lessons and Flower started in January!




Finally we have incorporated school into as much travel as we could. We have been to an old textile mill where they demonstrated how the machines actually worked, we have gone to a horse rescue center and saw them caring for the horses and the veterinarian's work area, we explored a Sherlock Holmes museum and worked on deductive logic, we have visited several castles and gardens in stately homes, we have been to a planetarium (in addition to getting our own telescope out on a few occassions), we have had a demonstration of Krispy Kreme donuts being made, we have walked on a proper Roman walls in York and Chester as well as a real Roman Road in Rome (and so many more sites in Rome), we have visited the Egyptian room at the British Museum and saw mummies, we learned about Hadrian and his wall (and even *met* him to ask him questions about the Pantheon), we have learned about dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum and about Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, we have gone to the ballet (Angelina dances Sleeping Beauty) and the theatre (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), we have learned about the early days of Rock'n'Roll at the Beatles museum and so much more. How could we not love home education? I won't show you pictures of all of that, but here is a couple of my favorites from the Media Museum where they were learning to interact with a blue screen. Jewel did some weather presenting (but she couldn't find where we lived on the map) and then they played with the tellytubbies. Too funny!



It has been a great year. We will be taking the rest of August off for Holiday Bible Club (VBS) and then a mission trip to Romania. When we return, I plan to use September as down time and preparation. We will start back the first of October! Wow!

A long overdue recap

I really thought that I could keep up with my regular blog and a homeschool blog, but I think I was wrong. 8 months without a post. Shame on me! I am determined to get more disciplined in how I maintain info about school.

For the recap:
We completed our first year of home ed at the end of June. We used Sonlight Pre-K curriculum with Singapore Early Bird Kindergarten Math, Handwriting without Tears, and Get Ready for the Code. Overall I was happy with our curriculum choice. I was not always happy with the stories for read-alouds from Sonlight (sometimes I did not think the subject matter was age appopriate) but the joy of HS is that you can ditch it if it isn't right for you. And we occassionally did that. The only thing Jewel absolutely did not enjoy was the Mother Goose book. We did use it, as I think it is important to hear rhyme and meter. But more often than not I would read it while she was doing her worksheets. So she *heard* it without really having to listen to it, kwim? We did some fun field trips during the year--went to a few museusm, went to Legoland, visited Beatrix Potter world and Beatrix Potter's home, explored castles, watched a glass sculptor at work, went to the Sonoran outdoor museum/zoo, saw dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum and walked along the Thames River. We built our own scale, did lots and lots of drawing and played with play dough. We've played dominoes, and Candyland (more for Flower's color learning) and Scrabble. Nature walks happened regularly. We watched the swan eggs and enjoyed watching the cygnets grow. We have watched goslings turn into full-size geese. We are currently watching the peachicks grow. But most of all we had a great time. She also participated in a weekly class at church with other 4-7 year olds which has dramatically increased her confidence. And she has had weekly play dates with a friend while her mommy/teacher has had adult conversation with other ladies. It has been a busy year!

My goals for the first year were simple and not so simple:
Simple: Have fun, see that learning is part of everyday, read lots of books. We accomplished all of that.
Not-so-simple: Have a beginning reader at the end of the school year, introduce math in simple ways, learn to tell time (Jewel's personal goal not mine), and feel confident that yes I can homeschool. She was so close to reading at the end of June, but did not feel she was able to read. She loves math and begs to do more and more. I really did not intend to finish Kindergarten math, but we have. She is constantly adding and subtracting and describing things in math terms. YAY! She is close to telling time, but not quite there. She is having difficulty counting by 5's which is kind of essential in time telling. But she consistently gets the hour correct and is beginning to get "half-past" consistently correct as well. For the most part I do feel confident that we can homeschool. I am more and more confident in putting the book aside and doing it a different way if the book is not helping. I am enjoying myself and I know she loves it so I guess it is working.

What since June? I wanted some time off. Jewel wanted to keep doing school. She won. Our summer program is Geography (a combination of A Child's Geography by Ann Voskamp, Usborne's Child Atlas, Australia to Zimbabwee Child's Alphabet, and lots of playing on Google Earth), German (Rosetta Stone) and Swimming lessons. We are having so much fun. The whole family is learning German together. We practice at meal times and on walks and where ever we are. It is actually beginning to make sense to me. And when Jewel was adding in German this week I realized that both language and math were melding. Real education! How cool! She has completed her first badge level (#2) in swimming and is in her second round of classes. She is doing really well. Her main drawback is not wanting to put her face in the water--but she will get past that. Although I thought three things were enough for a summer session--she was bored. Her church class and regular play dates also ended during the summer so we needed something else. I picked up Usborne's A Child's Art book and we have been looking at a painter or genre a day, using the internet to find other paintings by that artist and then drawing or coloring similar themes. Both Jewel and Flower love it--and I see a real interest in art emerging. Next week we hope to go to a Rembrandt exhibit near here to reinforce what we have talked about.

But the biggest news is.....Thursday quite out of the blue, all on her own, while playing Starfall on the computer she started sounding out the words and actually reading the stories herself. And Friday night she helped me read the Dr. Seuss book we were reading for bedtime. And last night....she read an entire beginner book by herself to me. Yes, Jewel is reading!!! I am as excited as she is. Her daddy is traveling this week, and she can't wait for him to be home tomorrow so she can read to him. After months of saying, "I'm not big enough" she now knows she can. YIPPEE!!

So there is our home school year in a nutshell. I am hoping to be more diligent to update this once a week. I think it will help me to see what we are doing. Thanks for reading the epic.