100 Days of School

Since we have some time off for the summer (even though the kids are already whining that we have the shortest summer of anyone they know) I thought I'd catch up on some of the activities from the last few months.

We celebrated the 100th day of school on January 20. We did lots of fun activities. This is Lucy Clare and Molly making necklaces out of 100 fruit loops.





Bram REALLY liked this project when it was finished.



We all worked on a poster with 100 people we knew. The girls took turns naming and then writing a person down. There wasn't much rhyme and reason to how they thought up people so we'd have to regroup frequently to remember family members in order or "sets." They kept skipping around between the different families and then friends.

Catching Up With Connie

Hiya! It's me Connie! Well, I have not written in a LONG time. (I blame Mom) Since I wrote last, life has been good, nothing to complain about. We went on a trip but Belle already wrote about that so I get to talk about school.
School has been OK. My grades did dip at one point. I was not doing well at school, I was on very thin ice with Mom. Every day after school I would get the same lecture. It went a little like this,
"Connie, if grades don't get better you will go back to school!" said Mom.
"But I don't want to go to school!" I said.
"Then improve your grades!" Mom said.
Every day I would get that lecture. Some days it went longer and it always ended with, "Improve your grades"
Then we discovered two things, if I work upstairs and listen to my music I do pretty well at school, or at least better than I was. I have not been threatened with public school in quite at bit. The one thing that is not so great about listening to my music is that I have to listen to Mom always saying how much she doesn't like me working with music. She does NOT like the music I listen to. I like rap and she hates in SO much but my grades are doing pretty well so she puts up with it.

Biltmore with Belle

Hey. This is Belle. I know we have not posted in awhile, but you can blame my mom for that.
A few weeks ago, for my Grandmother's birthday, we went to, The Biltmore House! It was so exciting!
We woke up that morning around seven 'o clock and got ready to leave. We went with our Aunt Lisa, our cousin Jillian and of course our Grandma ( and all of us ). Connie and I rode with Aunt Lisa and Jillian. It took about 3 and a half hours to get there.
When we finally got there, we took a few minutes to take pictures of the house from the outside. You are not allowed to take pictures inside the house ( even though we snuck a few ). We also took one BIG family picture in front of the house.
When we went inside, it looked amazing! The furniture was so perfect and there were paintings everywhere!!!!! The dinning room look fit for a king! The library was so big. I have never seen so many books at once in my life!! After a few more rooms we went upstairs. The stairs were very curvy and there were a lot of them.
There were so many bedrooms. Of course for the family, then a lot of guest rooms. After we were done upstairs we went to the.......... basement! It looked like a dungeon. There was a room with paintings on the walls. My favorite of the whole house was the swimming pool! It had no water in it, but it looked like it was 20 feet deep!
After we looked at the house we went to get a snack then looked at the gardens. We all posed with statues. It was so funny. Even Grandma posed!
After that, we went to a little village. It was so cute. We went to a petting zoo. Bram thought it was so funny that he could touch the animals. We walked a little more then went to eat at a place called " Cedric's Tavern ". The Vanderbilt's dog was Cedric. I ate fish and chips and tried new things! When we finished eating, we headed home. We got there around 9 'o clock. It was such an awesome trip!

Thanks for listening! This is Belle, signing off! :)

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.