As it will surprise no one who knows me well, I forgot my camera today. However here are pictures from the week and the rest of the day that we were at home. We ended up having an abbreviated school day today. DH and I found a deal on some Living Scriptures DVDs that we've been looking for for a while, so I drove down to pick them up today. Tomorrow we will make up a lot of our schoolwork. We will also go to tour the Conference Center tomorrow. It is always a lot of fun to actually be in the Conference Center.
Religion - We did not get to our religion today at all. We were supposed to read Mosiah 2 and talk about turning our houses toward the temple. Math - The kids were able to get their stuff done on their own today. I checked Racer's decimal division and he got them all correct. I still have to check Chicklette's division. Turtle did most of his math lesson, but he got interrupted by Sunshine pushing a wrong button and then dinnertime. History - We picked up the DVD "Secrets of the Lost Canyon" and watched it on the way down to pick up our DVDs. The kids did not like it a whole lot, but I thought it was pretty interesting. They talked about the struggle between preserving archaeological sites and educating the public. Chicklette and Racer also did their spelling sentences and Racer and I did his piano lesson. Between our long drive today and the twins not really napping, we didn't get a lot more done. Tomorrow we will play a bit of catch-up, but I always leave Fridays for any extensive catch-up. In a strange reversal of personalities, Chicklette got her work done and was on task today, while Racer got lost in a book and didn't get his chores or his schoolwork done in a timely manner.
Religion - We practiced our songs and did our memorization. We talked about how we could prepare for General Conference both individually and as a family. We had a nice discussion during the day and that night, we got to show DH what we decided to do. Turtle was pretty funny. He said, to prepare for General Conference, we should put away the Superhero books so we don't get distracted. We should not eat too many snacks so we don't get sick. We need to make sure we go to the bathroom before conference starts and be ready to sit and listen. They do make sense, but it was pretty funny to sit there and listen to him seriously telling me what we should do to be ready for conference. Math - Turtle is continuing his Funnix Math and is doing a great job with it. Racer is learning how to divide with decimals. He is going up to two decimal places now. Chicklette is practicing her fives division. She finds the fives to be simpler than the other numbers so far. Physics - Magnets! We got to play with magnets today. We experimented with finding things around the house that are magnetic. I knew the kids would enjoy this activity and they did. Spelling - Chicklette had a lesson on vowel-consonant-e words and we reviewed the syllable rules we've learned so far. Racer studied words spelled with oe. Turtle reviewed his phonogram cards and passed off two more sounds. Let's hope Chicklette finally figures out how to spell skin correctly this week. Grammar - Racer worked on his poem "The Height of the Ridiculous". It's a funny little poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. We also compared prepositions and adverbs. A word only functions as a preposition if it is part of a prepositional phrase, otherwise it is an adverb that tells when, how, or where. Chicklette reviewed the titles of respect and I quizzed her on their spelling and abbreviations. She didn't do as well as I think she should so we will review them again tomorrow. History - We finished up our last state today - Wyoming. For the next week or so we will do some review and go over the whole of the United States. I haven't picked up the DVD we were supposed to watch yet, so we will watch it tomorrow when we get it from the library. Daily 6-trait Writing - We are still studying organization, but today we introduced the topic of different ways to organize your paragraph. We also talked about signal words. Man, I had a whole post written about our day and the website lost it. That's the first time that's happened to me and it is frustrating. Okay, here we go again.
Religion - We can almost do the whole Apostles song and the whole "Latter-day Prophets" song by ourselves. I always get stuck after Harold B. Lee in the prophets song. It never seems to make sense that Joseph Fielding Smith comes after him. It always seems as though Joseph Fielding Smith should come earlier in the chronology. We made and flew paper airplanes too to remember President Uchtdorf who was a pilot and loves to work in plane analogies whenever he can. Math - Somehow Chicklette got ahead in her math so she has been able to do some of the Mental Math pages from the Home Instructor's Guide. She also got up to 63 in her Xtramath. Hooray for progress! Racer continues to amaze me in how well he understands math. He was doing his math in the car on the way to co-op and he asks, "They want me to divide 3 by 5. How do you do that?" I said, "It's a decimal," thinking that I would have to explain further. Then he says, "Oh, I got it. It's 0.6." Um, yeah, actually it is. He's amazing in the way that the solutions just make sense to him. Turtle is still loving his Funnix Math. They are still working on counting and one-to-one correspondence so it's pretty easy for him. It's really funny to watch Sunshine do it with him and even get some of the answers right. History - We have finished our very brief overview of American History for the year. I know there is a lot that I didn't cover and didn't even touch on. I told the kids that and let them know that we should still keep learning about history. We can read books, watch documentaries, and learn from other teachers. However, we will now be continuing on to our unit on Utah History. We'll be using a website for our spine - I love History. It has a little section to read about Utah History, some fun quizzes, and lots of famous characters. We will be supplementing with living books from the library as well. The section we read today had to do with Utah's history before written history. We read about the Puebloan people and the Fremont people. Some of these people were cliff-dwellers so we talked about visiting some cliff dwellings in Arizona with Grammy and Papa. We did a little fun quiz about them as well. The kids loved it so much they wanted to do all the quizzes but I promised we would come back and do them all eventually. Turtle, Racer and Chicklette also learned about Colorado and Hawaii in our co-op today. Daily 6-trait Writing - We are still working on organizing our ideas this week. Today we compared and contrasted two characters in a Venn diagram. Racer was struggling until I realized that he was trying to compare characters in two different series. He wanted to compare Harry Potter from the Harry Potter series, but then he also wanted to compare all the main characters from the I Survived. . . series. Well, Harry Potter is the same character all the way through, but the characters in the other series are all different people since it takes place in lots of different time periods. Once I had him pick one book and one character from that book, it went much better. He did an okay job on the diagram, but I hope his lack of effort doesn't come back to bite him tomorrow. Okay, let's see if this post posts. Tonight we had Racer's Pinewood derby. He did a really great job cutting out his car almost by himself. He also did all his painting and wheels himself. DH smoothed out the nails for him so he could get it to go faster. He did better than last year. I think he was a little disappointed that he didn't advance to a second heat, but he got second in all the official races he competed in. I will add pictures when I find the camera. I'm not sure where it ended up. I'll also need to add pictures of our two new trees and two new honeyberry bushes from Stark Brothers. We bought a Sweetheart Apricot, which has edible kernels, and a pear tree with red and yellow varieties grafted on. The honeyberry bushes are promising to be a blueberry substitute since our soil is unsuitable for blueberries. I'm really hoping they take off and are the right taste for DH and the kids. I really hope everyone one likes them because we will be getting two more honeyberries of a different variety as soon as they are ready to ship. So we will have four different varieties of honeyberries and DH was eyeing another 2-n-1 apple tree. I told him we really didn't have any more room for another tree. We had a co-op planning meeting today so nearly all our memorization practice happened in the car. On the way to the meeting we sang our three history songs - Marilyn's song, the President song, and Fifty Nifty United States. Then we also sang the two religion songs we are working on - the Apostles song and "Latter-day Prophets". Racer took us through the timeline events we are memorizing. I was surprised by how many I actually didn't know without the cards. I will plead that I was driving on the freeway while we were doing this. We also reviewed all our states and capitals. He was going a little fast for Chicklette. We got a lot done at our co-op meeting and I'm excited for our geography fair coming up in May. I need to start scheduling in time to work on it so we end up with a good product. We also decided on doing life science through R.E.A.L. Life science and we are debating stretching it over two years. We'll also do art for our second subject. It should be a great year and I'm sad that Racer and Chicklette won't get to participate in it. If we go back with them though, I know we'll be welcomed with open arms. Religion - Um, it didn't happen? I am having a hard time getting it done because I want to do it with all the kids together, but sometimes it's hard to get them all on one subject at a time. I really have to search out the time and opportunity to do it. We did do our songs, just not our scripture memorization and not the activity I had planned. Spelling - Chicklette only missed two words. "Skin" is really giving her problems for some reason. Racer got an A+. Grammar - Racer reviewed adverbs today and practiced diagramming sentences with drawing his own diagrams. He's getting better, although he'll still give me "Where did that come from?" type answers when I ask him the function of a word in a sentence. I think he just isn't thinking through it, but I don't know. Chicklette's grammar focused on titles of respect and their abbreviations, so Mister = Mr., Mrs. = Mistress, and Ms. = None of your business.
Math - Chicklette and Racer just had Xtramath today since they finished all their math for the week. Turtle plugged along on Funnix Math. He had his first two page worksheet today and was pretty surprised by that. Physics - We had a quiz today which they got all the answers right. This was our last week on spin. Road Trip USA - We started on Wyoming today. While it would be fun to have buffalo meat chili, I don't even know a place that sells it here, so I think we'll skip that regional food. Racer asked today how many states we would cross to get to Minnesota. I told him it would depend on how you drove, but I need to remember to look at a map with him tomorrow. Daily 6-trait Writing - As promised Racer had to write a paragraph today. He lost his Venn diagram from yesterday somewhere in the house so he quickly made up another one today. His paragraph didn't end up too badly. I helped him edit the organization a little bit and then we corrected the spelling by looking up the words in the dictionary. Then he rewrote the paragraph with our corrections and it actually ended up a decent paragraph. He told me he never wanted to do that again and I hugged him and thanked him for continuing to work on it even though he didn't want to. I also told him he will be writing a lot of paragraphs for a long time, so he better figure out how to do it even when he doesn't want to . . . which led to me singing , "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down . . ." That ended well! Stay tuned for the pictures. Hopefully I'll get them up tomorrow, but I have to also go through the kids' drawers because it seems like all their clothes have holes and Turtle only has one pair of pants and a bunch of too-casual shorts. So we're off to sort, try on, throw out, and list needs. Library day today! Yeah! This is always one of my favorite days. We had a special library storytime today as well. Some very talented people from the Main Library came and put on a great puppet show. Lots of music and laughter. Religion - Somehow in my lesson planning I only put down the songs that we needed to practice and nothing else. Well, we also did our scripture memorization. It worked out because we had a little bit less time for school today anyways. Math - Chicklette had a practice page in her textbook to do today. I don't think she quite finished it, but I know she was close by the time it was dinnertime. (Nothing too extravagant today - soft scrambled eggs over roasted parmesan asparagus.) She keeps getting distracted by the calculator widget on the tablet when she does her Xtramath. I may have to tell her to do her drills on the computer instead. Racer had word problems again today and he made it a point to tell me that he really did check all his problems after he was done. Physics - We read about the invention of the Aerobie and how the word frisbee came into being. The kids summarized that in their workbook. History - We finished up Washington state today and watched about 20 minutes of a video about the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. We would have watched more of it, but it froze up and we moved on. We read a book that explained the Cold War and how the Berlin Wall went up and how it came down. It ended up being a little bit long of a read, but I thought it was a very good book. I could have broken it into two days. We finished up by discussing Russia's current actions in Crimea. I pointed out to the kids that this was history happening in their lives right now and it would be a very interesting situation to watch.
Chicklette and I had a lot to catch her up on from last week. Of course, I also had laundry to do and I had a nice dinner that I wanted to make. It was a lot to put into one day. We had a great time making dinner though. I told Chicklette she was my sous-chef and I had her chopping up onions and smashing garlic with these plastic knives we bought. Then Turtle came in and he became a sous-chef too, opening the butter and buttering the french bread to make garlic bread. I had already cut up the broccoli and asparagus earlier in the day when I cut up the cauliflower too, but now I needed to julienne the carrots. Racer came in and predictably started to manage Turtle so he got to sweep the floor and set the table. Turtle also kept an eye on the water for the pasta so he could put in the pasta when the water bubbled enough. I was so proud of them for doing a good job and we had fun together working together. Dinner ended up being pasta primavera with carrots, asparagus, onions, garlic, peas, broccoli and red and yellow peppers with made-from-scratch garlic french bread and apple pie for dessert. Yes, I'm bragging a bit, but it was good.
Anyways, we did get a bunch of school done Monday so here's what we learned besides culinary skills, French, working together and laundry/homemaking skills. Religion - We started our General Conference prep. I'm doing it for two weeks this year instead of one because I have so many ideas. Today we started relearning the Apostles song (we learn it every General Conference season) and we started learning "Latter-day Prophets", another song to help us memorize the order of the prophets in the restored church. After we did that the kids played Memory with our Apostle cards. We've misplaced Elder Ballard's match card though so we may have to print his out again or play Old Maid instead. I wouldn't mind reprinting the batch and laminating them nicely. I only put contact paper on them last time and they have bubbles all going through them. Math - Both Chicklette and Racer had word problems. Racer only had three and he got them done quickly. He was stressing all morning about being behind and losing his precious screentime. I finally told him during spelling that if screentime got in the way of actually learning and enjoying the process, he would lose it for good and it would no longer be a reward. He was pretty upset about that, but I'm tired of hearing, "I'm behind. I have to finish so I can play. I don't want to do the experiment because it will take too much time and I won't get extra screentime!" Chicklette's problems all related to the fours multiplication facts. Spelling - As I mentioned, Racer and I had a stern conversation during spelling. He calmed himself down pretty quick, which I was proud of. He's doing much better at self-control. All of his spelling words this week deal with the /u/ sound that o can make so he's got money, monkey, honey, and others. Chicklette managed to do her spelling test from last week and her spelling lesson. She did not do well on her spelling test because she did not practice her words as much as she should have last week. Her spelling words are words like tube and student, focusing on the long u sound. Physics - We're still doing spin this week, so we made a whirler that we could spin over our heads and experience centrifugal force. Racer actually enjoyed it once he got into it and gave up trying to get out of it so he could finish early. Grammar - Racer learned how to diagram more than one predicate adjective, predicate nominative, or direct object. We also learned that when there is a direct address in the sentence, that noun is diagrammed on a floating line above the sentence diagram because it serves no function. Chicklette and I reviewed initials, months of the year, and days of the week. We also practiced subbing in pronouns for nouns. History - Today's history lesson was on Washington state, hence the apple pie for dessert. We talked a bit more about Mount St. Helens and we learned about Washington's flag as well as other facts. The last half of Thursday I was sick with a stomachache and the first half of Friday, Chicklette was sick, so she ended up with a lot of unfinished work we will carry on to next week. Racer managed to get all his work done because he is very motivated by his precious screentime. I don't get it but at least it means that he, superficially at least, gets all his work done. Religion - We did our scripture memorization. The kids can say most of them along with me, but they have the hardest time starting or saying it by themselves. I finished my General Conference packet. I hope it will stay together for at least one session and maybe the whole weekend. The idea is you take whoever is speaking and put them on the podium and then you grab their topics and place them under the "I am learning. . ." box on their velcro or with a glue tab. Like I said, I hope it will stay together. And, yes, I know I have some of the General Authorities in the wrong place.
Math - Racer passed off division in Xtramath! We switched him to a program in Xtramath where he has 2 seconds to pass off all the facts instead of 3. We'll see how long it takes him to blaze through that. Chicklette is still hanging on around 57. She's practicing multiplying by 4's. Turtle is still loving Funnix Math. He's working on counting, one to one correspondence, and identifying shapes and pictures that are the same and different. He's quite motivated by his screentime also. Funnix Reading - Although Funnix Math can be pretty self-directed, Funnix Reading really requires more teacher participation. Turtle doesn't do so well on this but since I am using it more for review and a break from our other reading program, I allow him to skip through without saying much. This really bothered Racer the other day so he took over the role of teacher, making sure Turtle was actually sounding out the words. Daily 6-trait Writing - Racer is doing pretty well on his 6-trait Writing. We worked on making sure all of our ideas within a paragraph related to each other. We ended the week by writing a paragraph describing life in our house. Writing with Ease - It was pretty much the same as last week. If you're looking for an incremental program with lots of practice, this is it. Grammar - Racer's grammar was all about direct and indirect quotations this week. He also got a new poem to start memorizing. Chicklette practiced narrating a story and reviewed nouns, verbs and pronouns. She kind of got them. She needs to think before she answers though. Physics - For physics this week we talked about spin. In this unit we try to build tops and identify other machines that use spinning. Our tops did not succeed very well. History - We read about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon this week as well as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. With Richard Nixon, we talked about how no one remembers the good things that he accomplished. All anyone remembers is the Watergate Scandal. That led us to discuss the importance of our reputations and why we must always try to make good decisions, besides the obvious that we are trying to become like our Heavenly Father. The Mount St. Helens eruption was a fascinating read and we looked at some ash that we bought from the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center. We also studied Utah, so we had Jello, fries, fry sauce, and salad. Road Trip USA also suggests that Utah's special food is honey but I haven't really found that to be the case here. We also finished up Oregon and made a hazelnut cake. I won't make it again. It takes too many nuts and too much effort for a lackluster result. I mean, I tasted alright, but it was just too much. |
Archives
March 2017
Categories
All
|