Homeschool pictures Weeks 1-3!

I finally downloaded a few pictures of the girls and our homeschooling antics. :) Enjoy!

 

 

Mommy and Katherine: 1st Attempt at making Gluten Free Pizza!

Caroline finally woke up and got in on the action.

Sweet Caroline  :)

Turned out really well!!  Chris said "it's the best pizza I've ever tasted!" 

Sweet sisters on the 1st day of Homeschool Group.  Kindergarten for Katherine and Preschool for Caroline. (It's pretty much impossible to get a good picture of BOTH at the same time...this was the best we got that morning...)

 

Big Girl Caroline all ready for 3 year old preschool homeschool!

Katherine all ready for her first day of Kindergarten Homeschool Group!

What homeschool looks like when your table hasn't arrived yet...

Katherine was quite proud of the pattern shape she made.

Then she made a rocket!  (Hard to see since it blends in with the couch)

Both girls working on making patterns with pattern blocks.

Katherine and the counting bears.  She had to sort them by color and then line them up.

Caroline working on the same thing...notice the precision involved!

Both girls working on a graph of the girls and boys in our family!

Caroline's favorite part...GLUE!

All done!  We have four girls (Katherine insisted on putting Avery on there) and 2 boys (including baby brother) in our family!  Katherine drew the faces and names on the circles.

Caroline working on graphing teddy bears.  Notice how perfect and straight her lines of teddy bears are...perfectionist seems to be one of her traits...let's hope that doesn't turn into obsession!  :)

Katherine graphing pictures of family and friends by hair color.  Blonde won!

Both girls busy at work...what a mess we make!

Katherine still working on her graph.

Caroline looking at her worksheet.  She was working on writing preparedness...i.e. the different shapes required for writing her letters.  ;)

Katherine using the linking cubes to make a bar graph of the hair colors we had.  She learned the difference between a bar graph and a pictograph.

 

Bar graph all finished!

After we finished our lessons, she could play with the linking cubes.  She made a "super power gun." 

The side view...Daddy would be proud.  ;)

Mom's Learning a LOT!

Well we have officially been at this homeschooling thing now for 2 weeks and 2 days.  I can say with 100% certainty that Mom is DEFINITELY learning a TON!  Ha!  I know that the girls are learning a lot as well, but I'm pretty surprised at home much I am learning/re-learning!  This is Kindergarten!  I thought, oh, Kindergarten will be a breeze...NOT!  :)  So far this is what we have learned about:

Math:
Patterns, Shapes, Colors, Sorting, Graphing, Counting and making Designs with Pattern Blocks.  Amazingly this is all VERY easy for Katherine as she should probably be in 1st Grade Math, but at the rate we are moving, we will probably be purchasing 1st Grade Math Curriculum shortly after our Christmas break.  She's SUPER excited about that.  Also stunning to me is that amount of knowledge Caroline has with this!  She sits in on our math lessons most days of her own choice and does pretty much exactly what Katherine does.  Now her patterns aren't quite as sophisticated, but she definitely gets it!  I have a feeling we will speed through K math with her as well when it's time to "officially" begin with her.  Good thing these girls like Math so much!  ;)  That's one subject I can handle...till we get to Calculus...then I hand off to Daddy!  Good thing he's an engineer!  ;)

Language Arts:
The Phonograms o,c,a,d,qu,s,b,e,f,h    Basically that means we have learned how to write the properly (Katherine already knew how to do that, but it's good review) and what sound or sounds each phonogram makes in a word.  Then we learned all about beginning, middle and ending sounds and have learned to spell a bunch of words such as bed, bad, bud, bid, bog, bag, bug, fog, had, etc.  Katherine can now read and spell these words in her head...amazing!  We are also reading a bunch of different books.  We read the Bob books which Katherine does the reading from on her own, then we incorporate harder books which I read to her while she looks on.  Some of the harder books we have read are "Green Eggs and Ham", "The Cat in the Hat", and all of the Felicity books from the American Girl Series.  We just went to the library today and picked up the Josephina collection.  We are reading them in order of date and talking about the history referenced in the books as we read them.  FUN!   Caroline is working on her alphabet and learning to write her letters properly.  She's super excited to finally be able to write her full name.  She has known how to spell it for quite a while verbally, and she recognizes it on paper, but writing it herself is a whole 'nother issue!  Luckily she's a LEFTY!!  I can teach her how to write!!  YIPPEE!!  Teaching Katherine was pure torture for both of us because I'm a lefty and she's a righty!

Classical Conversations:
Well let's see...this is where I am REALLY learning!  Because Classical Conversations is all about memorizing the "grammar" or basic knowledge and vocabulary of each subject we are focusing heavily on memorization.  Katherine memorizes a bunch of "grammar" each week for all of the subjects listed below and then stores it away in her brain for a time that she will actually delve into that subject in detail.  I love the idea of this!  Most of it is pretty self explanatory, but sometimes she will have questions about what she is memorizing and then we dig deeper into that particular subject to satisfy her curiosity.  She doesn't have to dig deeper if she doesn't want to, so this is really led by her.  Very cool! 

Here's what we have learned in two weeks...and yes she can actually rattle this stuff off from memory...shocks the socks off of me too!

History:  We have memorized the 10 Commandments (there are some big words in here too!)
English:  We have memorized the definition of a preposition and examples of 5 prepositions (we will get to more, but we do them 5 at a time) about, above, across, after, against.
Latin:  We have learned the Latin Noun Cases.  For example in Latin Nominative is the Subject, Genitive is the Possessive, etc.  I think this one and math are probably Katherine's favorites.  :)
Geography:  We have learned to identify the following areas on a map: Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean Sea, Mesopotamia, Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, Sumer, The Assyrian Empire, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and Babylon.  It was very neat to learn about this area since this is where Chris was stationed in Iraq!  Katherine enjoyed knowing that! :) 
Timeline: We have learned the following events Creation and the Fall, The Flood and the Tower of Babel, Mesopotamia and Sumer, The Egyptians, The Indus River Valley Civilization, The Minoans and Mycenaeans, 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, Patriarchs of Israel, Hittites, Canaanites, Kush, Assyrians, Babylonians, and China's Shang Dynasty.  Now for this Katherine really just memorizes the event names, because she will really dig in and learn more about this history later when we do this cycle again in 3rd Grade.  She does occasionally ask about them and we then look up information on them and are also starting to read "The Story of the World" which incorporates a lot of this history in more detail.  :)
Math: We have learned how to skip count the by 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s!  She LOVES this. 
Science: We have memorized the 7 Classifications of Living Things and the 5 Kingdoms of Living Things. 

Phew!  That makes me tired just thinking about cramming all of that knowledge into our little heads! 

The Timeline, History and Math (counting by 3s and 4s specifically) are definitely new memory work and even sometimes new information to me!  SAD! 

Caroline is picking up a lot of the memory work as well, although she's not as interested as Katherine.  :)  She will start on her own memory work next year, so she's got time.  :)  She already knows how to count by 2s!  She sort of floats in and out while we work on this and half does work with us and half plays with some other toys.  I have a feeling she's going to shock me one day and just start rattling stuff off when I thought she wasn't listening.  ;)

Well that about sums up our first two plus weeks!  I feel pretty good about what we have accomplished, especially considering in this time Chris has been hospitalized with kidney stones and I was hospitalized with pre-term contractions!  Nothing like a little life getting in the way.  ;) 

Until next time!!  Keep praying for us!  :)  I just keep reminding myself...it's a marathon, not a race!  :)

Homeschool Week 1

Well we have almost survived one full week of homeschooling!  Praise the Lord!  Tomorrow we have a light day and then we are done for the week.  I have to admit, I'm ready for a small break this weekend...but not because the homeschooling has been difficult.  I am just exhausted.  Chris says that is due to the fact that we have been battling a slew of random illnesses in him for the past 9 weeks, I am almost 9 months pregnant and I have a sinus infection.  He's probably right..he usually is...darnit!  ;)  So here's a roundup of our week. 

Background information:

So I spent most of my summer getting things ready, planning and trying to prepare as much as possible before the actual home school year started.  This included selecting curriculum, purchasing home school furniture (a big "industrial school" table, little people chairs and a huge white board for all of our lessons), planning lessons, reorganizing the playroom to fit the home school stuff and learning how to teach!  Yeah...so since I'm the uber planner of COURSE all of my planning has been stifled by various interruptions or delays.  For example, I tired to order our home school furniture the week before July 4.  The lady that I was working with was out of the office for 2 full weeks with kidney stones...doh!  So we waited.  I was finally able to order my furniture around the 3 week in July...no big deal, we don't start home school until the 13th of August!  The table came in about 6 days later...SCORE!!  Oh...but it was damaged.  DOH!  We sent that back.  The second table arrived...DAMAGED!  So here we are starting home school on Monday and we have NO table.  You might think, well where are the chairs and whiteboard?!  My question exactly!  The chairs were "lost in shipping" but did finally arrive on Tuesday of this week...and they are not damaged!!  Wahoo!!  The whiteboard was "returned to the manufacturer" by UPS because it was "rejected by the recipient."  Only...we never RECEIVED the whiteboard!  The manufacturer shipped it again and it will *hopefully* arrive today or early next week.  No one knows exactly what happened to it...  Then yesterday afternoon my third table arrived.  The box was pretty beat up...again, but it didn't look like there was any damage.  So we brought it home and unwrapped it...guess what?!  The corner is busted and jagged!!!  Talk about frustrating!  So we are now waiting to see what the company is going to do, while the lady we worked with locally will be investigating another vendor for us to purchase the table from.  GGRR!!!  So we have finished our first full week of home school sitting on the floor with a tiny little easel and no table to work with.  It worked, but definitely drove my Type A, planner personality NUTS this week.  Add in the fact that I'm majorly pregnant and hormonal and I was a mess.  :)  But that's ok, I am reminded that in order to gain the Fruit of the Spirit, we must be tested.  So I'm thinking I was learning about peace, self control, kindness and gentleness this week...  :)

Aside from all of that chaos with the furniture, Christopher has been battling kidney stones!  The poor man was in the ER 12 days ago and just FINALLY passed his stone last night!  PRAISE THE LORD!  So needless to say he has been fairly miserable for the past 12 days and not sleeping well at night...which means that I don't sleep well either, so that added to my tiredness a bit.  Then Katherine managed to share her cold with me that I think has turned into a full blown sinus infection.  Definitely not fun while pregnant since I cannot take anything!  :(  Bummer!!  Heating pads on my sinuses and salt water gargles are my best friends right now.  :)  I sure hope that we can get over these ailments for good this weekend and move forward with staying well!!  Christopher also discovered in the past 2 weeks that he is Gluten Intolerant.  I am SO thankful that he has finally figured out the cause of a lot of his digestive issues, but now comes the hard part of learning to cook with gluten!  My goodness is gluten in EVERYTHING!  I have become a fanatic label reader at the grocery store.  haha!  Luckily I have found some pretty good resources for gluten-free cooking and foods, so once I get the hang of it, I think it will be pretty simple.  I'm so excited to see how good we all feel once we are all healthy and running at full tilt again!  Just in time for little boy to arrive.  :) 

Home school:  Week 1

So since all of that was going on in the background, I was pretty tired starting out the week with home school.  But luckily God's grace is sufficient and He gave me just enough energy to get through the mornings and then veg in the afternoons.  :)  Monday, we went to our home school group orientation and Katherine met her tutor and all of the little kids in her class. She is so excited to actually start her Classical Conversations Memory Work next week with her classmates!!  We will go every Monday from 9-12.  The rest of the week we will work on the Memory work at home and add in our math and language arts lessons.  The Memory Work includes, history, science, Latin, English, Fine Arts, Math and Bible verses.  We then use our own curriculum at home for Language Arts and Math.  We are using "The Writing Road to Reading" or the Spalding Method for Language Arts, which includes, phonograms, reading, handwriting, writing, and spelling.  We are also using "Saxon Kindergarten Math."  So far we are about 2 lessons ahead in Language Arts and a full week ahead in Math.  Getting ahead was not intended, but as we were in the lessons I would follow along with questions Katherine asked and as we delved further into that information we ended up covering the next day's lesson by accident!  I have a feeling she is going to move through the curriculum at a rapid pace.  So far our Math and Lang. Arts lessons have taken about 60 - 75  minutes each day.  Caroline kind of comes and goes from the lessons and is actually picking up quite a bit from the lessons.  Next week the memory work will be added in after our Lang. Arts and Math.  That will take about an hour each day and we will also add in some Bible Study before our lessons begin, which will take about 30 minutes.  So in total without counting breaks our home school day will average about 3 hours.  This will vary as the math and language arts get tougher, but for now that's our plan.  Not too bad! 

I can definitely say that the week has gone much smoother than I anticipated.  We have had a few moments of testing from Katherine.  She did not want to listen and would rather be swimming or watching a movie or playing with her toys, but overall, she has done very well!  I am so proud of her!  And she is SO incredibly smart!  I knew she picked things up quickly, but she has really surprised me this week. 

Well I'm off to get a few things done around the house and then to sit with my heating pad on my sinuses for a while.  The girls are doing what they do best.  Katherine is watching He Man and Caroline is content to be playing all by herself with her baby dolls.  They are so sweet.  I am definitely one blessed Momma!! 

Until next time!