So far the kids have continued to be excited about school and homework!

Reagan has completed reading the Jr. classics of Moby Dick (in under an hour), and The Wizard of Oz, and also read Charlotte's Web.  She's a good portion of the way though another E.B. White book now, The Trumpet of the Swan, and is also concurrently re-reading the Bunnicula series.  I believe she finished up Howliday in on Saturday.  I still can't get over how fast that kid reads!!

This weekend we took the kids for a special trip down to Phoenix.  We spend Saturday evening, and Sunday morning at the water park of the Arizona Grand Resort, but Saturday morning and afternoon were spend at the Challenger Space Museum!  This was a great experience for all!  The trip to the museum was all planned by Daddy, who also found out on the museum website that there was an opportunity to earn a special Girl Scout patch there for Reagan.  They have a Boy Scout patch program as well, but Adam isn't old enough to join the organization until next year.  (He can't wait!)  There is a mobile planetarium that they have at the museum on certain dates, which is why Reagan was able to do the program.  We attended a showing and all the kids loved it.

Soccer, Homework, and Grandma Cookies

One of the things that I love about doing a home school/ Montessori blend with my kids is that I don't have to stress about making sure that they are getting all the "necessary" stuff from what I am teaching them.  We do a lot of traditional style learning at home as well as doing lots of practical stuff, hands on, and teachable moments.  Basically we can just have fun and learn as we go.  There are some who continue this kind of approach full time with their kids while home schooling, but that just isn't for us.  And when I say that, I mean both for me, and for the kids.

My kids are total academic workaholics!  They work on grade workbooks for fun and LOVE to read.  They were really disappointed last week that they weren't getting any homework from school until Friday!  When they came home yesterday with their first homework of the school year, they each munched a celebratory Nerds rope and spread themselves out on my bed to get started right away.  My Kindergartener was done in under 10 minutes with his entire packet for the week, and my 2nd grader completed all of her spelling homework, including a practice spelling test and writing spelling word sentences.  Boy is 2nd grade homework different from the Kindergarten homework of last year!

While they were in school yesterday, the 2 year old and I had some fun preschool time drawing pictures with marker (a special treat).  She did several, including one of a dolphin, one of herself, and one of her Christmas list (the kids are getting an early start this year).  She also helped make Jello.  We did some counting practice, and though she gets mixed up after 5, she can get to 10 with only a little help now.

This morning I took the older 2 kids to a pre-season soccer clinic put on through the kids' soccer league by the  soccer team from my college.  We ran into some friends there, and the kids had a great time getting back out on the field, and brushing up on their skills.  After a quick lunch, and stop at Sam's Club, we came home and it was nap time for the younger two, so the older ones were looking for some fun quiet time activities.  Reagan started with her daily reading time for her school homework.  There's a minimum of 20 minutes a day.  Right now she is reading The Wizard of Oz specifically for this so we can track it per the teacher's requirements for reporting pages read, title, author, and synopsis, but she reads plenty of other things still too!  Adam sat down with a Disney math workbook and did 4 pages with me.  Two were addition, with which he is familiar, and two were subtraction, which has sounded scary to him.  It's amazing what a picture of Lightning McQueen on the page can do for a daunting new math topic.  He was thrilled to do it, and found that with the assistance of pictures representing the subtraction, that it was easy for him to do! :)  Those "I knew you could do it, and now you know too," moments are awesome.

So, after some more traditional school work, we headed for the kitchen and the kids baked up a batch of cookies from a "cookies in a jar" mix their grandmother made and gave them for Christmas.  Admittedly, there wasn't as much measuring math as there usually is for these kinds of projects since the mix was pre-made, but they had a ton of fun mixing the dough and rolling the balls for the cookies.  And I bet after dinner tonight they will have a great time eating them too!

While the cookies were in the oven, the kids sat down in the library for a game of Word Shout, but Adam was tired, so it wasn't a very long one.  He headed off for a nap, so once the cookies were done, I helped Reagan set up for some time on Vocabulary Spelling City.  Her teacher set it up for all the kids in the class so that they can practice writing and spelling with their weekly spelling words at home if they have home or library Internet access.  So far, I would really recommend it, especially for home schoolers.  In our case the teacher is providing the lists we work with, and if you sign up for a paid account, you can set up your own lists, and track your child's work without having to actually sit with them while they do it.  But even if you don't have your own word lists they give you grade appropriate general ones that you can work with.  There are also many of their game features that are free for your child to work with.  Certainly worth checking out! Reagan spent a LOT of time on there, which gave Adam a chance to work on his Web Ranger program through the NPS once he got up from his nap too.

I will be starting back to school myself in just over a week and a half, so who knows if I will manage to keep up with the blogging.. but since I am trying to plan on actually having more planned activities ready to do with the kids, and need to have things for Catie to do on a daily basis now that the older two are back in school.. I should at least hopefully have something to write about and be on a better schedule to share those things as well.

So it's been almost a year since I posted on here.. I've been a little busy though...

Today is the kids first day of school for the year at the Montessori School.  It may seem somewhat confusing that this is a home schooling blog, and that I have children who attend a public school.  I get that.  We do home schooling as well as the regular school.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  The most important reason is that the kids LOVE it.  Another big reason is that I really believe in teachable moments and that almost everything in life is a learning experience.  So today my oldest starts 2nd grade and my second is starting Kindergarten!

Today in their lunches I'm sending along a note for each of them to let them know that we're thinking about them, and how proud we are of them.  I got these card last year and love them for kids for all kinds of events at school.. spelling test, student of the week, end of the school year, or just because!  They're made just for kids and are really great quality because they're done by Hallmark, but not too pricey (2/ $1.00 if I remember correctly), and are smaller so they are prefect for little hands and fitting in lunch bags.  Of course if you're crafty, you can make them too!

Raisins

This week's Saturday School we studied raisins. First let's take a look at what you'll need to get together to do these projects.


Reading:
How Do You Raise a Raisin? by Craig Brown
ISBN: 1-57091-397-8
The Sunmaid Raisins Play Book by Alison Weir
ISBN: 0-689-83230-7



Recipes:
Ants on a Log (celery, whipped cream cheese, raisins)
Tasty Sweet Potatoes (2 large sweet potatoes, 1-2 oranges, 1/2-3/4 c. raisins)

For lots more tasty raisin recipes check out the Sun Maid Raisin website where they are offering free downloads of cookbooks they have put out over the last 100 years. For children, I recommend the 1990 My Favorite Baking Book, 2001 book, Kids are Cookin', and 2002 Get Cookin' Together Kit. You can also find fun snack ideas for kids and a word scramble for older kids on the California Raisin Growers website.




We started out the say by sitting down together and reading How Do You Raise a Raisin? It was a really fun book for the kids that smoothly integrates fun rhyming poetry with lots of good facts about raisins, how they are grown and used etc. The information was good and teaches a lot about grape history, how grapes are grown, how raisins are harvested and dried, the packaging process and different uses of rains products. I even learned some things about raisins from reading the book, which is always a plus!

After reading the book we talked about what we had read. The kids were able to relate to where raisins are grown because we have driven through the San Juaqine Valley on trips to visit family in California. We also took a mini field trip to the back yard to visit our own Thompson's Seedless grape vine. We talked about when we planted ours and how old it is, and how much longer we would have to wait to have grapes on our vines. They were very excited when they realized per the book, that if grapes bear in the 3rd year, and we planted ours last year, that we might have grapes next year! You can have this conversation even if you don;t have your own grape vines, but I'm sure it contributes a lot to the enthusiasm. It was a great way to integrate math into things before even getting to the cooking part. One thing mentioned in the book is how many pounds of fresh grapes are required to produce 1 pound of raisins. We talked about the scientific process of evaporation and how that made the grapes weigh less.

While I was getting things ready for the kids to make Ants on a Log for part of their lunch, my oldest decided that she needed to do a raisin craft. She cut a giant raisin out of purple construction paper, then on a separate paper she drew a raisin box from memory, complete with the red bonneted Sun Maid girl, and next to it, a bunch of Thompson's Seedless grapes. Then she glued the raisin on and it was time to make some logs! I had looked for some printable activity pages to go along with this week's raisin theme, but didn't find any that were specifically grape or raisin oriented. So I was glad that the kids were so enthusiastic in coming up with their own activity to do.




Ants on a Log

What you'll need: Celery ribs, whipped cream cheese, raisins, sharp knife, butter knife, cutting board.

Wash celery ribs and trim. Using sharp knife, cut into manageable pieces (we like about 1/3s of a rib) and use butter knife to fill with cream cheese. (Raisin bread was identified as a use of raisins, so of course we had to add a raisin bread English muffin to the plate.)


Now comes the fun part of the kids getting to put their ants onto their logs. This is a great time to integrate some counting or basic addition into your project. Ask your child to put a certain number of ants on their logs. For counters you can say put 3 ants on the first log. Now put 5 ants on the second log. This covers both counting and ordering. For adders you can say put 3 plus 2 ants on your log. You can even do this with some basic multiplication to tie older children into the snack fun.

My somewhat OCD children insisted that there must be exactly 4 ants on each log.


Looks good! Time to eat!!

The kids later enjoyed a raisin snack while working with The Sun Maid Raisin Play Book. It's a fun interactive book and always popular with the kids. (We also have a couple of Cheerios ones that they enjoy immensely.) This book provides some good early reader material that you can read to your child, or if they are a beginning reader, you can help them to read on their own. The raisin interative play on each page provides a nice break for them from the reading if they are having to sound words out. IT provides a nice instant reward when they are done reading the page and allows them some recovery time before tackling the next one!

The interactive portion of the book is fabulous to copying patterns, counting and following directions. And eating the raisins after makes for a healthy and delicious snack!

We also made the Tasty Sweet Potato Recipe, but I'm going to post that part as a second blog post because this one is already so lengthy and with this all being so picture heavy it makes it easier to get through to break it up some. So look for that soon!

Saturday School

Since my oldest two will be starting regular school next Monday, I've been working on coming up with a good scheduled time to continue our home schooling adventures around their school schedule, and my crazy 2 kids still at home schedule. My oldest will be in school 5 days a week, and the second will be in pre-K 3 days a week. Daddy is usually home from work on Sundays, so it makes sense to do our intensive home schooling stuff on Saturdays. Soccer games will be starting on Saturdays next month, but that's only the mornings, so hopefully we can continue with projects in the afternoons them. My plan is to post a weekly post here that covers what we have done and how my kids have been doing at school as well as at home, as well as a second weekly post that covers our major study activities so that others can do soem of the same things that we are. I'm a big believer in learning everyday skills, especially cooking, and think they are a great way to incorporate math and science into our children's daily learning diet. It is for this reason that I am planning to start out our Saturday schooling with learning in the kitchen. I'll be posting recommended reading along with activities and at least one recipe. I hope that our learning is fun, and that some of you find it helpful for yourselves as well! (I'm hoping to do our first activities this Saturday, so look for a posting Sunday, or the beginning of next week with all the details!)

January- Feb 2, 2011

The past week and a half we've been working on osmosis, evaporation, contractions and syllabication.

Adam has had a chance to participate in the experiments, but doesn't "Get it" like Reagan does. She got some science kits for her birthday, so we have been putting them to good use. First we did a "crystal growing" one, where tiny squares are places in water and absorb water until they grow into larger "crystals." It was a lot of fun for the kids to watch them grow, and then to watch them shrink back over time as the absorbed water evaporated. The other osmosis and evaporation experiment involved adding solution to a tray below a tag board tree. The children loved watching the osmosis process as the water was absorbed up the tree. Then as the water evaporated it created crystal branches on the tree from deposited salt. Very exciting!

Reagan also started learning how to make and break down contractions, and seemed to catch on right away. We've also started doing some syllabication games where we clap out the syllables of all kind of words. The favorite seems to be doing this with words read on signs while we are driving in the car. It's great because the names of businesses often have words that are not as familiar.

Yesterday for Groundhog Day we read a funny children's book "It's Groundhog Day." The night before we had read Bear Shadow in preparation as well. We've done some talk about shadows as well. It's a familiar topic for Reagan, but one that we haven't really covered with Adam yet. I'd like to do shadow pictures, but the weather has been way too cold. Hopefully we'll have a chance to go out and do it soon though. (Tracing around each others shadows in the morning, and then again in the afternoon and looking at the changes.)

We have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which absolutely fascinate Reagan. She's had an interest in Pioneers for well over a year now, and is loving seeing that life through the eyes of another little girl. Recently for her birthday we went to a museum with Pioneer things, including some frontier homes, and she absolutely loved it. She also asked to work on a pioneer style patch work quilt, and has already completed a 4 patch, and a patience 9 patch for her project. She insists on being authentic and has been sewing it all by hand. She seriously amazes me!

We also continue to play board games, from which the kids learn a lot! Crocodile Hunter (reptile facts), Addition War (addition), and Pizza Palace (listening skills, and memory) have been some recent favorites!

We've been keeping busy with all kinds of things recently.

Here's a picture of our tornado fun from before:


More recently we've been doing some holiday related activities. I took the kids to the dollar store, and each at $10 to get gifts for their family members. They did a great job thinking about what things their family members would like, and doing the counting/math to figure out how much they had left to spend. We've also cleaned out the pantry, and donated food to the food bank, and gotten together some brand new toys that were sitting unused and donated them to toy drives. I'm a big believer in community service, and caring for others, and think the best way for kids to learn about these kinds of things is through hands on experience. (Last year they went to the dollar store with some money specifically to buy toys top donate.) And today they each has some special time with mommy to wrap their gifts. They were so excited and proud to wrap them up and put them under the tree.

Reagan has been keeping up with her workbook work on days off of school, and wrote her own letter to Santa that she put in a special Letters to Santa ornament on our tree. She did a great job writing it all by herself!

We've also been practicing counting backwards as we count down to Christmas with our advent garland. I'll have to post a picture of it... but it has a tiny knit mitten or hat or sock for each day counting down, so you can fill them with whatever goodies you wish. I got a pack of heart and star chain links in the party section of the dollar store to fill about half of them, and the kids have had a great time adding to their chains each day. They have a very tangible way to count up how many days we have counted down. Hooray for math practice!

Another math activity we have been doing is a hands on dice game that I came up with. Inspired by giant foam dice at the dollar store, I came up with a fun math game that we can play and work on math at different levels. I got each child their own set of dice (each child has a different color). We started out by rolling one die each, and counting how many dots each rolled. Then we moved on to comparing the numbers (more and less) with the one getting the desired result being the winner. Then we moved on to two die, and adding them together. And again the more and less game with the dice sums. Writing it down really gets across the educational aspect, but makes it sound a lot less fun than it is. lol