Starting Earlier Than I Planned

Our tradition is to begin school after this little dude's birthday at the end of August:

 He'll be four this year.  I love using his birthday as a marker of a new beginning and I love holding off on school until we've celebrated one more important day.

I was also looking forward to a couple more weeks of summer to finish all the projects I said I'd get to and haven't finished yet.  I was looking forward to a couple weeks of no running around.  I wanted to set up some coffee dates with various ladies in my life.  But, B & S have both said, "We want to start school NOW!"  I know enough to realize that in two weeks, reality will set in and B will tire of school. But I also know that if they are enthused I should go with that momentum.

So, we're beginning on Wednesday. 

Here's the plan:
Fun (Shhh, actually "review") Days:  August 18-20th & August 23rd-25th.










Plus: 

• Games:  I'll bring out Games for Learning: Ten Minutes a Day to Help Your Child Do Well in School-From Kindergarten to Third Grade and Games With Books: Twenty-eight of the Best Children's books and How to Use Them to Help Your Child Learn-From Preschool to Third Grade to add some activity to our days.  There's a lot of ways to use games that we already have so we'll pull them out.

• Notebook Review:  We'll also go through B's notebook from last year and skim it again (because he says he doesn't remember anything.  *sigh*) and I'm thinking we'll pick an activity/game/craft to do in relation to what he learned last year. 

• Phoneme Cards:  I went to a great workshop this summer and learned a basic way of re-enforcing phonemes to my struggling reader while teaching them to my preschooler for the first time.

Hopefully they'll love these first six days and then we'll move into our first unit of study with just as much enthusiasm.  Hopefully.  But, you know...

Intentional Summer, Part 2

Spiritual Discussion (Park Group) for Moms

Beginning Friday, June 12, 2009

Being intentional about our hearts and relationships is tough as busy moms. If you have a hard time hearing God above the noise of daily life, join other TNL moms for this intentional summer park group.

Bring your children with you and any gear or snacks that you think they will need. Feel free to get up from the group discussion to help or play with them at any point. We will meet every other Friday from 10-12 beginning June 12.

We'll process through Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence by Ruth Haley Barton. The book is available at TNL’s information table for $12.

Intentional Summer, Part 1

My post is up at Heart of the Matter today.

"I have always held that summer is a great time for learning and while we stop our academics my kids continue in their social, physical and delight directed learning. But what about me? I have found that I become a bit of a taxi driver in the summer taking them from camp to playdate to lesson. At the end of the summer I look at my half-checked to-do list and think, “Where did my time go?” “What did I accomplish?” “Who did I become?”

This summer I’m..."

read the rest here.

Summer Reading 2009

I make an ambitious reading list every year. I never get through the whole thing but you have to have goals. Here's what's on tap for me this summer:

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris. I experienced a bit of Norris when I checked out Amazing Grace from the library early this year. I didn't get to finish that one, but I bought this one so...

Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. When he talks about walking through Laurelhurst Park it makes me long for Portland.

Invitation to Solitude and Silence by Ruth Haley Barton. I'm thinking of leading another "theology park" -- only not theology this time. This book may be a good fit. (TNL moms... take note!)

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. I need a good shot of him every year. He's good like crack.

The Religious Potential of the Child ages 6-12 by Sofia Cavaletti. My 10 year old isn't getting any younger and I still haven't read this one. It will be my schooling inspiration for this summer.

Faith Matters: Faith Mentoring in the Faith Community by Sondra Higgins Matthaei. This is one of the few seminary texts I kept. I plan to put it to good use this year in our new community.

Right Brained Children in a Left Brained World by Jeffrey Freed and Laurie Parsons. I've already read most of this but I skipped the academic application chapters because I knew I'd want to digest them while I was considering curriculum for the next school year.

Eat, Pray, Love: one woman's search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. Because I need to read more biographies.

I only got through three books last summer, but I have a head start on two of these already so I'm aiming high...again.

The Rest of our Year

We are going to spend most of the rest of the year walking through U.S. History (from 1865 on) through the lives of the Presidents. We had previously studied the first portion of our history and I suspect that it will come up time and again through the years. But the later part is something that I don't remember walking through very often...especially the 1960's through to current events. Personally, I'm excited to tell my kids all about the 70's, 80's and 90's. At least I can speak from experience at that point.

Here's what the plans look like so far:
Week 22: Lincoln (review), Johnson, Grant
Week 23: Hayes and several days on Electricity.
Week 24: Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland
Week 25: Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt
Week 26: The Automobile
Week 27: Taft, Wilson and maybe some Harlem Jazz too.
BREAK
Week 28: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover
Week 29: FDR
Week 30: Truman, Eisenhower and something to be determined.
Week 31 - 33: Space Exploration
Week 34: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford
Week 35: Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton
Week 36: Bush, Obama and wrap up.

J wanted to study electricity and B wanted to study space so I put those in the appropriate places in the timeline of our study.

We'll continue the boys' Monday Classes in Art and Sports at least through March so those will be half days at home. They...er... We love that.

We'll make Fridays a Project Day from now through April so that we can park on some of the fun discoveries and inventions during these terms. I'm looking forward to how the boys respond to a reliable and free form day of the week.

I just worked on our attendance record (because I'm just THAT way) and listed our field trips for the year. Surprisingly, we haven't done very many. I'm hoping for a good road trip though on which we can get all of our field trips out of our system. We'll see.

It feels good to be back on my game.

Inauguration Plans

My kids and I watched the election results together and that was a good time of answering their questions and listening to them predict who would win based on their own opinions. I think that Inauguration day will be a fun day for us. Dad has the morning off. We are going to watch it and then we'll do some minimal school items like math and reading.

When I was growing up my mom kept my brother and I home from school to watch Inaugurations and Space Shuttle launches. It was the 70's and space exploration was still pretty fresh. We always had doughnuts for breakfast on those days. I remember going to school later in the morning and telling my friends why I was late and they thought it was the coolest thing ever. Me too.

I want to establish memories like this with my kids. So, I'm going to prep a couple things for tomorrow. Kaboose has some ideas to try. So does Crafty Crow.

And of course we'll include the doughnuts.

China Unit Study

We have about an inch of snow falling tonight again. (I LOVE that) As we worked together to take the trash to the curb, we lingered a little longer to enjoy the falling snow. Then it was inside to put the kids in warm baths and play some Snakes and Ladders with hot chocolate and leftover birthday cake (mine, from yesterday).

They are just now going off to sleep and I'm prepping for the week. Our two weeks of fun and play are over, but I think we're excited about where we're headed with our learning this month.

• Read the YWAM biography of Eric Liddell and focus on China. Write a four line poem each day about what happened in the chapter.
  
• Study Proverbs 22:1, John 13:35, Hebrews 12:1-2, and 1 Timothy 4:8 (word studies, translation comparisons and memory work).
• Begin a new notebook and think about what we already know about China.
• Paint a Chinese character/word daily. We'll begin with "love."
• Map work for all of China in week one.
• Ancient China study for weeks two and three -- they get to pick the daily theme.
  
• View videos of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing and think about Modern China in week four.
• Replace basic penmanship practice with Calligraphy lessons.
• Read some traditional Chinese folktales.
• Spend two weeks getting our feet wet learning to speak and sing Mandarin Chinese.
• Continue in both of their Math studies.
• Continue in J's Latin studies (maybe not... maybe two languages at once is too much?)
• Get back to J's work in his IEW program.
• B will be working on some map skills for the whole month.
• B will be reading some books to me that we picked out of the early reader section at the library. We're going with the Arthur series from Lillian Hoban.
• Give S plenty of play dough and paper and scissors to keep him happy. He's already got a leg up during this unit. We think he speaks Chinese pretty well already. :-)

We have some other fun stuff happening this week too. I just might post every day.

January's Plans

I sat down last night to plan our next unit of study and outlined a few things. Then we went to the library today to get our resources to flesh it all out. I came home with 30 books on China. So, if you're going to study China in the next month, the Midland library in Portland is cleaned out. Just a little heads up.

Next Up

We're going to do a unit on George Muller and the U.K. Here's some of the ideas I have so far:

• Read the YWAM Biography of George Muller aloud.
  
• Make several maps in a variety of ways: labeling the British Isles, flip books of each region of the UK and even the topographical salt dough map that I've never really wanted to do badly enough (and really still don't but it seems like a rite of passage that each student must conquer. How we'll actually do it while S is awake is beyond me).
• Draw the national symbols of each region (I'm learning that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not actually countries -- correct me if I'm wrong. I've been researching it for a while tonight.)
• Read "You Wouldn't Want to be a Victorian Servant" because it looks like an interesting way to broach the subject of child labor and "You Wouldn't Want to Be a 19th Century Coal Miner" because it looks like a kid-friendly way to get a feel for some historical reality.
• Watch a travel DVD of England and Wales.
• Study a little Wordsworth poetry and write some of our own versions.
  
• Read an abridged version of Oliver Twist.
• Visit/volunteer at a local shelter/mission.
• Think about some of the inventions that came out of the U.K.
• Study the Industrial Revolution.
• Learn some of the vocabulary of the Brits.
• Traditional Foods.
  

Are there any other ideas that you can think of? I'm hoping they have fun with it!

Changing Our Process

In mid to late August we all go through this denial process, "Summer can't be over yet." "I didn't accomplish all the things I had hoped." Most of what I had hoped to accomplish was a great deal of school planning AND preparation. The planning you can do on a hammock somewhere with a calendar, a stack of blank lesson plans and the table of contents from your curriculum. I did accomplish that as far out as Thanksgiving.

The preparation is the thing that takes time: finding pages to use, picking projects, gathering supplies, designing the process for the whole shape of the day, etc.

But then I read Holt's book and when I combine his ideas with echoes of some Charlotte Mason philosophy I read two summers ago I decided to let go. This makes preparation somewhat of a struggle. Which projects will they want to do? What if I spend 20 hours designing some cool incentive process that they hate? What if I'm convinced we should do more art but they hate glue and paint? When we study Nate Saint, what if they don't want to spend a week on the Amazon and would rather learn about short wave radios?

I have some things sketched out. I know what B needs to hit in math and language arts and I have some of his reading books (old Ginn readers that I read). I also have his math curriculum and a critical thinking series to do with him. I have curriculm for J to follow in Math, Latin, Typing, Penmanship, and Writing -- three of them are media based. We'll do more reading aloud, less Bible ("Mom's lecture"), but more study of specific verses/passages. This is an even year so we're skipping formal spelling and vocab, but we're going to try notebooking.

But as far as the actual social studies and science lessons, projects, points and details -- I'm leaving that up to them to take us where they want to go. I have suggestions at the ready but I'm forcing myself to keep them suggestions and not turn them into assignments for this whole first four weeks. Giving them more freedom to learn what they want to learn will hopefully provide them with knowledge and applications that will put them on the path toward transformation.

It feels unsettling and chaotic but I'm excited to see what we all end up learning.

The Planning Begins

I’m in the thick of planning and I am letting the boys each pick two topics for us to focus on at some point in our next year. I get to determine the remaining 5 which I’ll pull from our curriculum. Here is what our year looks like so far:

• 18 days of Flight (J’s pick)
• 21 days of Biographies
• 19 days of The Temple/Simple Machines
• 12 days of China (B’s pick)
• 19 days of Last Supper and U.S. History 1865-1920 (I’m not sure what the link is either)
• 12 days of Electricity (J’s pick)
• 20 days of Resurrection and U.S. History 1920 – present (Again, an odd link)
• 12 days of Space (B’s pick)
• 19 days of Art & Music (my pick)

Add to that 16-18 days of Friday School and about 12 field trips or otherwise educational endeavors and you have 180 days to complete the school year IF you live in Washington. However, in Oregon we are not required to do any certain number of days in our school year.

Sweet.

We can kiss those last 12 days good-bye.

• And every Friday in December and February. Because homeschooling in February bites. (I hear that, “amen.”)
• And birthdays.
• And two weeks at Christmas.
• And two weeks at Easter.
• And a week to just get away and do something unexpected.

O.K. now that I've planned all the breaks, I'll get back to planning the content.

Back Into It Again

We begin the last 10 weeks of our school year tomorrow after a two week break. This next unit will take up five of them. I think I have the next two weeks (agriculture and plants) hammered out pretty will with the following three (money and stewardship) in good shape as well. Here's the next two.

Bible Together: Parables of Jesus (he told a lot of stories having to do with agriculture and a lot having to do with money and so that is what this unit will be about) Parables of the sower, the weeds, the mustard seed and leven, growing seed, fig trees and workers in the vineyard.

Science (and the words/concepts to introduce to J):

• Roots (primary, secondary, fibrous)
• Stems (monoctyledon, dicocotyledon, epidermis, cortex, phloem, xylem, pith, bark, cambium, runners, tubers, bulbs)
• Leaves (parallel-veined, net-veined, needles v. scales, stomata, mesophyll)
• Photosynthesis (chlorophyll and glucose)
• Flowers (review -- sepals, petals, stamen, pistil, filament, anther, pollen, stigma)
• Seeds (angiosperm, gymnosperm, cotyledon)

Do nature walks as we can.
Discuss creation care ("A steward only has responsibilities, not rights").
Review biomes and ecosystems and perhaps build a terrarium.
Work in a nature journal each day. Practice drawing what you see.

Math J: Begin Complex Fractions
Math B: Begin First Grade Book (skip the first 29 lessons of review).

Stations -- J: Penmanship (continue Horizons cursive), Language Arts (Practice the craft of oral storytelling), Reading (to mix it up a little he'll read various advanced "picture books" containing stories and information centered on agricultural themes and take a comprehension "quiz" each day), Memory Verse (Psalm 1:1-3 "...he is like a tree planted by a stream of water..."), Vocabulary Activities (primary, secondary, vein, glucose, photosynthesis, flower, parable, forest, agriculture, native), Topical Study (Make a lapbook of the plants and agriculture of either Washington or Oregon -- since we live in both states).

Stations -- B: Creative Drawing (works on his Nature notebook), Phonics (Spectrum Grade 1 workpages...ending blends), Reading (Continue lessons in Phonics for the New Reader and begin set four of the phonics readers by Innovative Kids), Memory Verse (same as J), Vocabulary Activities (tree, crop, land, root, stem, make, draw, bark, seed, weed), Topical Study (same as J on a lesser scale).

Field Trip: Either to the Washington Park Arboretum or the World Forestry Center.

Planning Ahead: If you have suggestions for a good chapter book (5th grade level and above) having something to do with the wise use of money, I'd love to check it out. I'm also on the lookout for a good video that might teach us how to draw/paint trees next week.

Thanks for stopping by, Christmas Break.

Time goes waaay too fast. I'm not ready for the week quite yet. Was up until 1 a.m. getting my ducks in a row last night and will probably do the same tonight, though I hope not because a tired mama is not the best mama.

We'll be tackling How People Grow for the next four weeks.
The Bible Base for our unit is Luke 2:52

• We'll integrate all the gospels together, but for the most part we'll be dealing with Jesus' baptism, temptation, calling the disciples, early Judean ministry, the Samaritan woman, preaching in Galilee and Judea and cleansing the temple.
  

Science: Human body (skin, skeletal, muscular, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, urinary, endocrine, and nervous systems)

Social Studies: Decision making skills (lots of games we can play for this one), making friends, manners and customs.

Math: J- More multiplication with products up to 10,000. B- telling time to the quarter hour, adding and subtracting numbers up to 60, money and fraction reviews.

Language Arts: J - Responding to a scripture journal, using good reasoning, and writing a persuasive paragraph. B- grade 1 phonics activities, drawing pictures related to our study.

Reading: J - Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. B - Continue to work through Phonics for the New Reader by Harriet Fields and reading his phonics readers.

Vocab: J's words for the week -- physical, skeleton, muscle, breathe, nutrition, vitamin, protein, spiritual, mental, social. B's words for the week -- grow, skin, bone, food, lung, leg, arm, head, water, body.

Memory Verses (for the whole unit this time): 2 Peter 1: 3-8

Topical Studies: Nutrition, Meal planning and preparation, critical thinking puzzles, and something to do with friendship that I haven't fleshed out yet.

The boys are at each other today. They were supposed to play with a friend but one decided to tell an untruth about the fact that the other wasn't invited, etc. So, they are both home, and walking around bored as if they didn't just get the world on a stick for Christmas. As if I didn't just spend 5 hours yesterday cleaning and organizing their room so they can FIND all the pieces to all the things they already owned.

So, we will begin tomorrow a.m. -- ready or not. Because kids need structure and they need to sit and read together again, and they need to know what is going to happen next. At least mine do.

Christmas Break Plans

Warning: Rambling ahead

We are taking two weeks off and I love that Christmas came at the beginning of it, so we could incorporate our holiday preparation into our studies… and now we can breathe a bit.

I am in the middle of planning the next three units in order to get us to Easter when we’ll take another two-week break. We are going to be studying Growth for the next four weeks… physical (bodies and nutrition), mental (decision making and problem solving), spiritual (hopefully trying some new Bible study tactics), and social (manners and friendships). It’s really slow going because there is so much wrapped up in this topic.

In February we’ll do a unit on the miracles of Jesus and I’m really looking forward to it. We’ll explore the principles behind the miracles, not to take the mystery out of them, but to gain more understanding and perhaps instill a greater sense of awe in all of us. So, we’ll be looking at nature (water, fish, weather, blindness, fig trees, ears, etc.), distance, disease (all those healings…) death (and resuscitation!), and the spirit world (all those demon possessions). Looking at that list makes me think it’s going to be a crazy ride.

I can’t recall what the next unit will be after that. I obviously still have some work to do.

I’m also starting to think through the next class I’ll teach at our co-op. Waaaayy too many options here. I love teaching academic stuff with a lot of tactile methods, but I also need something that won’t tax me in preparation time. I’m usually up far too late on Thursday nights before class the next day. Some ideas: dinosaurs, ancient Rome, journaling, world religions…nothing’s really screaming at me. Give me suggestions.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a field trip to OMSI. We haven’t been for a while and we received a membership for Christmas. I’m hoping the holiday light show at the planetarium is worth going to. We’ll find out. Next week the older boys are going to Winter Break Basketball Camp here in town Wednesday through Friday. That will count toward p.e. attendance as well. (In WA we have to account for 180 days of schooling, so I get those days in anyway I can, even when we are on break).

Just 10 days left. I’d better get on it.