A few more reasons I love homeschool

I love that when it is 50 degrees in January, we can have lessons outside and enjoy every moment of warm sunshine.

I love that my kids are each other's best friends and playmates.

I love that when I send the kids outside for "recess" they are playing in real dirt and grass (as opposed to plastic playground equipment).  They explore the "woods", play with our dog and cats, and dig holes with a shovel.

I love that I have the freedom to decide what our lessons will look like and their pace.  I love that when Adeline says, "I want to learn about ______." we can make that our next unit.  I love that because of this flexibility, Adeline is developing a hunger for learning.

I love that we can have school in our pajamas.  And that we can start at whatever time we are ready.  We don't usually wear pj's past 8 a.m. and we usually start school by 9, but the fact that it's ok to do otherwise is wonderful.

I absolutely love watching the kids learn and grow and progress.  Seeing the lightbulb turn on is worth all the effort.

Happy First Day Back From Christmas Break!  Can't wait to see what 2012 brings.

We made it to Christmas Break!!

Whew!!  We made it to Christmas break.  We're halfway through the year.  Wow!  Part of me feels like saying, "What? It's only December?" and part of me wonders how it is already December.  We are taking the next week off - I think I'm as excited as the kids! - so here are some highlights of the past month.

We spent a week talking about insects, then wrapped up the unit with an ant craft.  Braxton didn't seem to understand he was to cut out pictures of *food* to put on his plate.  Guess his ants were hungry enough to eat anything!  haha

Adeline worked on sorting words according to their vowel.

In math, we spent a good portion of the month with addition to 5.  Adeline loved this mouse game.  She had to "feed" each mouse the correct amount of cheese cubes, then find the total amount of cheese the mice ate.  By the end of the month, she was writing addition sentences from word problems I read to her.  

And since it was December, we had Cookie Day!!  Great Grandma D and Grammy H came for the weekend.  Grammy H provided childcare while Great Grandma and I baked - with the assistance of some little helpers, of course!

Dipping Gingersnaps

Putting the chocolate chips in the poppyseed cookies.

Learning to use a cookie press.

Look!  There are cookies in there!!

 Sadie's favorite hang out...

...until she discovered a bowl of hardened almond bark and a spatula!  She sat with this stuff for a solid 15 minutes.  She'd scrape a little and eat a little, scrape a little, eat a little.  She was in Heaven!

Ta Da!  Eleven hours later, we were done!  So pretty!  

If we look tired, we were!  We made 14 tins of cookies that I delivered to friends and family the next day - plus some extra for the kids' Christmas program on Sunday.

Giving Grandpa N a hug after the Christmas program.

And Grandma N gets one, too!  Somehow these are the only pictures I managed.  I'm sorry to everyone else who was there!

Our lessons in Animal Science continue on a daily basis.  We've watched Mama Cat bring her kittens a mouse and a bird.  They loved both!  On a nice day, she took her kittens out on a bird adventure.  They came back covered in feathers and exhausted!  How tired must one be to sleep in a bike helmet?

These are the two kittens we are keeping.  Tuffy is in the helmet and Midnight is in my arms.  Midnight LOVES people and being held.  She would happily be a house cat.  Nathan says no.

Adeline received her very own glockenspiel a couple weeks ago.  She is doing an excellent job with her music lessons (or so Jessica tells me!).  Right now we're continuing to work on rhythm with her sticks, reading quarter notes, eighth notes and rests, and accuracy and using proper form when playing the glockenspiel.

Adeline apparently decided to try her hand at composition.  I found this in a pile of papers yesterday.  

We wrapped up December talking about animal footprints.  We had a fun day making prints with plastic animals and dinosaurs, then we took a walk and looked for real animal prints in the mud.  We found bird, dog and cat footprints.

Sadie enjoyed the play-doh.

Adeline thought she'd try making some tail prints from the dinosaurs.  She discovered they made neat textures in the play-doh.

Of course we had to look at our own footprints!

During Sadie's nap time, the kids and I made 6 sets of these cute ornaments for gifts.  Adeline made the girls and Braxton and I made the boys.

Adeline is making big leaps in reading!  She has two readers to share with grandparents this weekend.

 Today we played a memory game.  I put the letters in a line, then the kids closed their eyes while I switched two letters.  Then they had to figure out which ones I switched.  They did better than I expected!

And here is wild-haired Sadie saying, "Give me the camera!!"

Now with tomorrow being Christmas Eve, I better get busy.  I still have presents to wrap, Chex Mix to make and a house that is sorely neglected.  I think next year we'll take TWO weeks off at Christmas!  :)

What we've been up to...

We have been busy growing little brains this past month!  Braxton has a renewed interest in school and asks to do work.  He's been working hard learning shapes (circle, triangle, square), colors (red, blue, green, white), letters A-E, recognizing his name, learning mom's and dad's phone numbers and counting to 20.  He really enjoys participating in calendar time and sings along with our Days of the Week and Months of the Year songs.  It's fun to see him so eager to learn.

We finally finished decorating the alphabet.

Adeline is a reader!!  When I think back on all she has learned in the past 3 1/2 months, I'm truly amazed.  We have made it through all the short vowel sounds and blended them with consonants to make 28 word families that she can sound out - although most she knows by sight.  She has also learned 18 sight words that she can't sound out yet - things like mother, father, Jesus, help, here, are, for, good, come etc.  She has 12 readers from our curriculum that she can easily read and she is constantly finding words that she knows in books .  We've discovered she can read a lot of The Cat in the Hat.  I can't wait until she can read it alone to her siblings!  :)  Yesterday in church, she spent most of the hour flipping through the hymnal picking out words.  

Some sentences she wrote:

She has been working hard in math, too.  She has learned to tell time to the hour, to read and write numbers through 40, and the concept of place value with tens and ones.  I have to say that Unifix cubes are a priceless manipulative!

In art, we made turkey cookies for Thanksgiving.  I wish I would have taken a picture of them.  We used rice krispie bars to form the turkey body, then attached fudge striped cookies for the tail and base.  Candy corn and gum drops made the feathers and the beak was another piece of candy corn.  They were really cute!  We also disguised paper turkeys so they wouldn't be eaten on Thanksgiving!

Last week we learned the primary colors and painted hand pictures using primary colors for the hands and secondary colors for the background.  

It's not school-related, but we are also doing an Advent Activity Tree this year.  Each day the kids turn over an ornament on the tree to find a special activity for the day.  So far we have made paper snowflakes, watched The Polar Express, went to a special event at a local church where we decorated sugar cookies, listened to stories, made crafts and had a family picture taken, went to an amazing Christmas concert, and had root beer floats with supper.  Whew!  And it's only December 5!

 Snowflakes with a lovely snow background:

Craft 1 at the church:

 Craft 2:

Our Advent Activity Tree: 

This week we are making pinch pots with air-dry clay and tempera paint.  They are in the process of drying. 

    

Adeline is also learning about missionaries.  She sent an email to our church's missionary family today asking questions about what they do and where they are working.  She is excited to hear back from them!

And now Sadie is making her presence known, so I better wrap this up!  She, by the way, is learning lots, too!  She says daddy, mama, kitty, up, book, no, nuh-nuh (nurse), nigh-nigh (night night), cheese, buh-buh (bye bye), baby and maybe a few other words I can't remember right now.  She is part monkey climbing on EVERYTHING!  She adores her brother and sister, following them everywhere.  She loves animals, outside, books and Mommy - but prefers Daddy when she goes to sleep.  She is learning to use a fork, but it's not a very efficient way of eating yet.  Doesn't she just look like trouble?  :)

A month of updates! Part 4

And the fun continues!  We made a special day trip to a farther-than-normal children's museum.  It was definitely worth the drive!

Adeline experimented with a giant instrument.  She plunked out Mary Had a Little Lamb.

 This was a crazy ball and tube room.  You could put the balls in lots of different holes and then help move them around with gears, air power, gravity, pulleys, etc.

 Poor Sadie.  All day we were fighting keeping her pants up.  The elastic that tightens them broke.

 The kids could raise and lower themselves with this chair.

 Another activity in the ball/tube room.

At this station, you put balls into a giant blower and they bounced around in midair.  

There was a neat dinosaur exhibit.  The dinosaur's moved and roared.  Scared the pants off Sadie! (hahaha, get it?)  :)  

Adeline created a dinosaur model.

 Then she flipped some steaks at the Dino Cafe.  Half of the cafe was for carnivores and the other half for herbivores.

 This isn't a great picture, but Sadie cracks me up.

Walk like a dinosaur!

 The kids did a scratch art craft.  Adeline didn't understand that she was scratching off the black to reveal the color underneath.  She excitedly told me about how when one girl used her stick it made red, but when Adeline used that stick, it made yellow.  She had a whole pile of sticks next to her trying each one.

 This was the bubble lady!  What a neat show!  She experimented with creating bubbles that weren't round (which, of course, she couldn't do), then made this square bubble inside the "skeleton."  She also made a slinky-type bubble that went from one side of the table to the other, then sucked into itself slinky style.  She wrapped a kid in a bubble and made hundreds of tiny bubbles with a tennis racket.  I want her job!
 

 We can't escape a children's museum without a little face paint.

And for the fun of it, Happy Halloween!

Adeline's bag had a cute cookie design on the other side.  You'll just have to take my word for it.  :)

Sadie-bug loves to read!

And Adeline loves to ride her bike!  She rides in circles in the driveway before we start schoolwork.  She tells me she is riding her bike to school.

One more lesson that naturally appeared - this time in the laundry room!

Adeline thought the kittens needed their house decorated.

And that's a wrap!  We've done a lot of not-as-exciting schoolwork in between all the photos.  Adeline's reading has really taken off.  She's always bringing me things she finds that she can read.  I'm not sure who is more proud, Adeline or me.

We spent this morning doing some applied schoolwork.  The kids helped bake chocolate mint cookies and spinach lasagna rolls for a friend of mine who is in need of some TLC.  We got in math with the measuring and counting, science with the baking, reading with the instructions and a whole lot of teamwork!  Not to mention a dose of character building as we talked about the importance of loving and helping others.  Our regular lessons followed in the afternoon, but mornings like this make me so happy we have chosen to homeschool.

Well, I have procrastinated cleaning up the kitchen long enough.  Hopefully the next post isn't a month from now!  :)