Veteran's Day Hodge Podge

We had a eclectic day of school today, reminding me after some hard days recently, why exactly we decided to do this in the first place.

Since Kevin was off, he took Bram out for the morning, and while we certainly love having the "Little Prince" around, it was a nice change of pace to have a few baby-free hours and we certainly moved faster than usual.

We talked about Veteran's Day and why we celebrated it, talked about the family members we've had that have served and are serving still, and did a couple of coloring sheets and worksheets with patriotic words. And the lesson juxtaposed nicely with the Spanish-American war that we're studying in social studies, and the sacrifices soldiers have had to make throughout history.

We also measured the Mayflower. Lucy Clare and Molly are working on Pilgrims this week and next so we took Daddy's tape measure out to the back yard and measured out the 1,080 inches of the ship and talked about living like that for 9 1/2 weeks. Turns out it would have *just* fit in our back yard.

At various time of the morning, with various kids, I played 5 games of Mancala, 2 games of Dora Candy Land (as if CandyLand wasn't already annoying enough they had to add Swiper??) and 3 games of Mastermind, one of my faves.

Everyone did well on their weekly math tests. We had a day off from spelling and science and we touched on the 25th president, McKinley, which set us up nicely for one of my favorites next week-Teddy R.

But the cherry on the home school ice cream today was that Belle just came downstairs to check some dates for WWII out of the blue. I asked her what in the world she needed them for during rest time and she said she's working on a story and needed to know the exact dates for Germany's invasion of Poland, D-Day, the atomic bombs, etc. Now I have no idea what kind of story she's working on, it certainly wasn't something that was assigned since I only work linear-ly and WWII is still weeks and weeks away in our curriculum, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised that this reluctant writer and reader is using her downtime to work on such an intense project. It was a happy reminder after some serious doubts this week, that they're learning even when I'm not in their faces and that sometimes being left alone to their own devises is better than anything I can plan.

Science

It's no secret that science is one of my weakest subjects so I was happy to find a pretty easy curriculum last year that worked for all 3 girls, despite a few drawbacks. We studied the planets and space all year, at different levels, and really seemed to retain the info and enjoy it along the way. So this year we dove into the same curriculum with a new subject for Belle and Lucy Clare, while Connie moved on to bigger and better (harder) 7th grade Biology.

I'd love to report that we're having as much luck as last year but sadly, that is definitely not the case. Poor Connie has HATED her new stuff and we've had to invite Aunt Karen in for back-up and will most likely need to again soon. Science has consisted of whining, crying, bad grades, confusion and general misery.


Belle and Lucy Clare aren't doing much better, albeit with less tears. They're studying animals, and while that sounded like it would be relatively interesting, the details are mind-numbingly boring after awhile. And the religious draw backs of the curriculum that I was able to work around fairly easily last year, are much more (glaringly) apparent in this text.

The high-point of the year has been 2 experiments. In the first one we used m&m's to show how easy it is for animals to hide in certain environments. For the 2nd one we tested how people's sense of smell and taste is affected by color using jello with food coloring.

Diving for m&m's in a colored construction paper habitat.

Sorting and counting the rescued m&m's.

So today, about to dive into another tedious lesson on primates (and the accompanying lecture on how evolution couldn't possibly be scientific fact) we just quit. I told the girls I just couldn't face one more animal and we found a wonderful book about the human body that we are going to work on instead while I research curriculums again.

Poor Connie has to stick with Biology, though, and we'll be calling Aunt Karen to rescue us again soon.

Back to School-July

I'm embarrassingly behind, obviously, and I can blame it on a thousand different things, but sadly, mostly it's because of the space key. Bram broke it off and now it's so much harder to type on the laptop, and it's hard to watch Bram upstairs to work on the desktop, and I never think to blog once he's asleep, and it's way more expensive than it's worth to fix the laptop...and anyway, you get the idea.

We went back to school in July with a couple of days a week. We started a few subjects and worked lots on the American Revolution and other history to get ready for our trip to Philadelphia and Washington,DC at the end of the month. It really paid off because it allowed us to ease back into a schedule, really got the girls prepared for the sites we saw and socked away some days so we could play hooky later.


Art is one of every one's favorite subjects and I love it when we have something we all do together.

Bram in a brief stop in the playpen. He never lasts long there, and is usually crawling around our feet instead.

Molly loves Kindergarten and is very fun to work with, even though phonics is a little frustrating. I worried about teaching reading all summer and unfortunately, it's been about as hard as I anticipated. She's slowly catching on, but we definitely have more fun with every thing else.

Last Day of School

The year ended on May 13th without much fanfare, although we did get Chinese at our favorite restaurant, Suki, on the last day of school. We finished our states, and are looking forward to starting on the presidents next year. We finished our math, grammar and science books, and even though we're changing a lot of our core for next year, I was happy overall with our curriculum choices this year, especially since it was all so new to us.

We finished another book from our Best Children's Book series, Tuck Everlasting, on the last day. We all agreed it was our favorite from the year, although Connie did ask through her tears at the end, why the books that are considered to be so good all have to be so sad.


The girls convinced me to let them "clean" their desks with shaving cream, insisting it was something they always did on the last day of real school. They had so much fun drawing and writing in the mess that I was glad we borrowed this tradition from school.

I can't believe we've finished our first year. If someone had told me I'd be this happy doing this I would have started years ago. I do think we had to travel a certain path to get here, though, and I wouldn't have wished any of that away (although possibly sped some of it up.)

We're looking forward to a little summer break to relax and play, and then plan to start back with 2-3 days a week in July. We'll have a 7th, 5th and 2nd grader, as well as a kindergartener now, so we have lots of new stuff to organize and plan.

A Late Holy Week Update

What a busy Lent we had this year. It was wonderful to be able to fit in some of the fun crafts and activities that we never seem to find time for. We had standardized testing, also,which worked out great since the girls were rewarded after working hard on tests.

We made Resurrection Eggs that told the story of Easter. The girls colored Seder plates and we talked about what the food represented in the Passover Meal. It was neat that Passover and Holy Week overlapped this year so we could tie it all in together. Kevin had a Seder with the girls while I was out one evening. He had roasted chicken, hard boiled eggs, matzo, parsley, horseradish and made latkes and matzo ball soup (which technically aren't passover foods, but the girls love them.


We decorated eggs the next night and then made deviled eggs with them for Easter-one of Molly's favorite foods. We colored and put together a representation of The Last Supper and talked about the meal as well as da Vinci painting (craft from Catholic Icing blog.)

Connie had her last performance of the Passion Play at the church. She did a wonderful job and really enjoyed the whole process. We were happy that so many friends and family were able to see it. She's looking forward to her Shakespeare play at the end of April and has definitely been bitten by the acting bug.

So after some early grumbling at the beginning of the week about doing school while every one in the world was off for spring break, we enjoyed a thorough study of Easter and Passover, and had a really good time.

Now with only 17 days left to school, we're finishing up our Grammar course, our Math books, about to finish our last Science chapter on stars and constellations (I can't say I'm going to miss the planets and space after a whole year of them) and we're finishing up the states this week (which I will miss.) I'm planning some unit studies for the rest of the year and busily researching curriculum's for next year.

A Long Absence

Sometimes when the house is really messy I tell the kids that it would be easier to move than to clean it. And right now it would be easier to make up a new family and start over on a new blog than to update this one. However, since I like this family and would rather write about them than a pretend one, and I think a synopsis of everything we've done since October 9th (my last post) would bore everyone to tears, I'm going to pick up right here, right now, and just act like I've been updating all along and you haven't missed anything. It's happy here in my little mind.



Bram joins us in the schoolroom every day. He spends some of his time hanging out in the swing or the bouncy seat, but mostly he just wants to be held and talked to and played with and doesn't understand when the sisters are busy with other things. He sleeps in the sling while I carry him around and loves watching everything that's going on.

As I write this, I'm sitting at the kitchen table watching the girls play in the backyard in the snow...again. I just spent 20 minutes getting them buttoned, wrapped and bundled for the cold...again. They've been watching the snow come down all day as we've tried to do school...again. And in a few minutes they'll come inside dripping wet, cold and tired...again. The snow was cute and fun at first but we live in the south for a reason and I'm over winter now. It's snowing harder as I write this like it's just taunting me.

This is a snow family that Connie and Belle made while we were waiting for Kevin to drive home from Philadelphia one weekend (after getting stuck up there because of, naturally, MORE snow.) They used up all the snow in the front yard and had to use buckets to bring more from the back. I especially like Baby Bram Snowman on the end.

We just finished up an Olympic unit and had lots of fun studying the different events in the winter Olympics, famous athletes and the countries participating, but again, MORE snow and cold weather talk. It seems to be our theme right now but here's hoping that with March coming in like a lion, it'll warm up and get pretty in time for it to go out like a lamb.