Oct. 21-25: Mammals

Monday

This morning for devotional we read a story called "Please" by Alicia Aspinwall; out of "The Book of Virtues." It's a really cute story and the kids loved it.  

Today was our cleaning day.  I am so loving this arrangement.  It's nice to be able to focus on teaching and encouraging the kids to clean up after themselves.  The kids helped me move our bookshelf into the living room, along with many books.  

We rediscovered our growth chart on the side of our bookshelf.  So of course we had to measure ourselves, along with several teddy bears.

I'm thinking about knocking a wall out and building a bookshelf in the wall.  That should be a fun project for us!

We also pulled the oven out and cleaned and scrubbed behind it.  It needed it!  

We took a break after lunch and went out back to play baseball.  I taught the kids the rules and we played and had a great time.  I had to alter it slightly because there was just the three of us, but it was great hand-eye coordination practice for them. They are so fun. 

Tuesday

We began our day with a poem from our Book of Virtues.  It was kind of wierd.  I should have read it before I told it to the kids.  It was about a girl who always slammed the door, and one day because she slammed the door so hard a statue fell on her and killed her.  Ok.  Moving on...

We began our unit on Bats today.  Bats are the only mammal that can fly.  I found some cute little activities for the kids to do here. 

We started out reading an informational book we got from the library about bats, and watching a couple short movie clips.  Then we read and colored these cute books.  

Annabelle read the book very well with a little support.

The kids wanted to pretend to be bats so we went out back and they hung upside down.  We got side tracked and began harvesting carrots from our garden.  We had some huge ones!

The kids dug in the dirt until lunchtime.  After lunch we worked on our IXL quizzes.  The kids are doing so well.  Evan is practicing counting to 10, and Annabelle is practicing counting to 100.

Annabelle began a first grade beginning of the year pretest for math I wanted her to work on.    

We discussed ideas for a bookshelf I want to build in my living room.  I also asked if the kids would rather we begin construction on the bookshelf, or save up for a car.  They chose start construction on book shelf.  That really surprised me.  You know, I think I agree.  After going three years without a car, I'm getting used to it.  And...I've noticed that I can be perfectly content and happy being home.  We focus more on what we can do to improve our home, our relationships, and our education.  I just need to have the right perspective, instead of feeling trapped.  Life is good!  And I'm learning that when I'm grateful for what I have and where I am right now, I realize that I have all I need.  

It is always good to get out of the house though!  A friend of Annabelle's is taking a dance class and I'm going to try and get her in it, so she'll have a ride.  I hope it works out!  She is one active little girlie, and I think she'd love dance.

Wednesday

We checked on our crystal garden today.  Wow...it's out of control.  We decided to throw it away because it was just making a mess everywhere.  It was a cool experiment though!

These are our milk jug monsters we made with our co-op last Friday.  They turned out so cute!

And...my girls just being cute together.  I love these moments!

So, Wednesday has evolved into "game day," where we've committed to just have fun playing educational games.  This one here I got from teachersPayteachers.  The cards the kids draw are different pictures and the kids have to identify how many syllables the word is, and that is how many spaces they can move.

 We tried to play twister.  Ha!

This was a fun activity we did, where we'd spin the wheel and add different prefixes to the suffix -at, to make different words.

Thursday

Today we hit hard on getting some of our workbook sheets done.  There were some on patterns, word combinations, 

Friday

Today we had our group co-op at the Bowler farm.  We were a little late because we had lunch with daddy, but we still got to play with the pigs and goats; chase the cattle, see the greenhouses, and jump on their trampoline.  The kids had a great time.  We even got to try some raw milk.  It was very different, and awesome.  I was fascinating learning about it.  They have a little store, Utah Natural Meat, a really nice place.  I'm planning on making a trip back there soon.  

Saturday

We've realized that every day is a school day when you home school.  Today we took a field trip to Hogle Zoo.  It was fabulous and there was a lot of classifying being done by the kids as to which animals were mammals and which were not. 

Oct.14-18: Mammals

Monday

Clean the house day!  The kids were amazing, and cleaned their entire room (I should have gotten before and after pictures, because you would be astonished).  Evan also swept the kitchen floor and Annabelle emptied the dishwasher, and Katelyn fed the dog and cleaned the toilet (with supervision).  

Small and simple things.

(unpleasant note: the kids destroyed their room the next day.  After all that hard work!)

Tuesday

Today we decided to move our calendar and everything upstairs.  I don't really know why.  I think it's just more pleasant than being down in the man cave. 

We had our morning routine.  The kids were very wiggly.  We began our unit on Mammals, and we pretended we were different animals while we listened to music.  We watched a couple short movie clips about mammals.  We talked about how to categorize animals based on certain characteristics, such as having hair and giving birth to live young.  

We then read some books about mammals, and watched a Reading Rainbow movie about Manatees, which are marine mammals.  They're strangly cute.  And fat. 

I worked on making some educational games for the kids from a book I found at the library, "101 Great Classroom Games."  It's such a good book.

We checked out our crystal garden experiment and it has done awesome!

Wednesday

Today we decided to have a game day using the games I made up yesterday.  It's great when they can be learning and practicing skills without even knowing it.  There is one game called "bean soup" that the kids loved and played over and over.  Each kid has a stack of cards with a number from 1-10.  They both flip a card at the same time.  Whoever has the smaller card takes beans from a jar to equal the number on the other person's card.  So if Evan had a 3, and Annabelle had a 7; Evan would count out 4 beans and give to Annabelle.  The person with the most beans at the end wins.  They loved it! 

We also played this awesome candy corn alphabet matching game I got off of the TeachersPayTeachers website.

Next we played with blocks, and the kids made some awesome castles.

And crowns out of these little things...I forget the name

Thursday

We didn't technically have school today.  

Friday

We went to Steve's sisters wedding and reception today.  It was great!  The kids loved hanging out with family!

Oct. 7-11: Rocks, Minerals, Volcanoes & Earthquakes

Monday

Today was kind of a joke.  The kids were having a hard time just getting through lessons, as was I.

Science was fun as usual though.  We talked about plate tectonics.  We did this little peanut butter and crackers demonstration to show how the plates rub or slide along each other.  When one plate slides under the other plate it becomes magma and can create a volcano.  When the plates slide side to side it creates an earthquake, and when the plates spread apart from each other the magma is exposed and makes more land.  When two plates push against each other it can create a mountain.  The kids liked using their crackers to make mountains.

Then we used a sander to make vibrations on a piece of wood.  The kids got some of their little toys and we made earthquakes for the poor little toys.  They were getting tossed all over the place, and of course the kids thought that was the funniest thing in the world.  We also attempted to demonstrate how a seismograph works.  Annabelle would try and make a line with a pencil down the wood, and we'd turn on the sander and see how the line became wiggly.  I explained that is how scientists measure how big an earthquake is.

Tuesday

I had a heart to heart with myself and realized that things are a little out of whack.  I've been focusing so much of my time to teaching that I've let my house become a wreck.  (I'd so much rather have fun with the kids, then do my houseworlk!) So, I've decided once a week we'll do a house work day where we will focus intensely on our chores and responsibility toward keeping our house in order.  So that's what we did today.  I am pleased to say that it went fabulously.  The kids were surprisingly cooperative and did all their chores without hardly grumbling.  The house looked much better and we were all in a better mood.  I rewarded them by letting them watch a fun movie and have ice cream.

So, to make up for lack of school work once a week I'm planning on going on with school into the summer.  We'll take about a two week summer break.  Honestly I think it'll be ok though.  Everyone knows that kids get bored in the summer anyways, why not just spread school out a bit?  I like it!

In the afternoon Annabelle's friend Leah and her brothers came to play at our house.  Leah's mom and I had a great time chatting while the kids played.  She also brought us a bunch of awesome school stuff.  Thanks Angela!  

Wednesday

Today we had our morning routine, did a bunch of reading (from our new cool books).  Annabelle was so motivated to read all her new readers.  They are just at the right reading level for her and she just cruised through 12 or so books.  We then went to the store (I've got to take advantage of the car when I have it).  But I did make it educational!  We inspected price tags, compared prices, and practiced writing our numbers. We bought all the ingredients we needed for our science experiment, crystal gardens; and also our Halloween craft day coming up on Friday.  We came home and did our experiment.  It is looking like it's going to be a success.  I can see little crystals trying to form!

Thursday

Today we had our morning routine; for devotional we talked about not wanting to get revenge.  If someone hurts us, pray for them.  If someone takes a toy away, give them another toy too.  It was funny watching the kids' faces in utter astonishment.  We came up with the conclusion that if we do these things, that love will abound and we'll not be as contentious.  Hopefully that will sink in a bit.  

We then did some reading and our sound of the day.  Then I took turns with one child at a time with their Math, while the other played on the starfall website.  We used M&M's with the worksheets and they each did 5 or 6 pages!  

Katelyn was just having fun playing with toys and such.  She has been letting me know when she needs to poop, and I took her to the toilet when she was ready.  She doesn't want to stay on it long enough to "do her duty" but it's fun seeing her so excited about the toilet.

After lunch we watched a couple videos about what to do during an earthquake.  We went through the house and demonstrated where we would go.  We talked about staying away from windows or things that could fall on us.  We then began compiling a list of things we should have in a 72 hour kit.  The power actually went out later in the evening and it was good to know where a flashlight was!  The kids then had some fun playing outside in the rain and the mud, and then having showers.  

Then some of the kids' friends came over to play and their mom came and chatted with me.  It was great!

Friday

What a fun day!  We had our home school group meet at our house for art.  We started out reading "Maddie's Monster Dad" by Scott Gibala-Broxholm.  We ate green glob cookies, that turned out so good!  Then the kids created these adorable monsters (thanks to all the people in our ward for saving milk cartons for us):

I love our home school group!

Sept. 30-Oct. 4: Rocks, Minerals, Volcanoes & Earthquakes

Monday

Well I introduced the new topic to the kids today and they were ecstatic, especially Annabelle who is particularly interested in rocks right now.  We had our morning routine: prayer, scripture, calendar, weather,  & sound of the day, math page, and then spent some time pouring over all our cool new books from the library about rocks, minerals, earthquakes and volcanoes.  We went outside and cracked open our Geodes. 

We also looked up some videos about rocks where we learned about sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks.  Then we took a trip to Wal-Mart to get some jelly beans.  That's right!  

Here's what we did with them:

We mixed some jelly beans with sugar, honey and cornstarch and squished them into balls.  

This represents Sedimentary Rock

 Then we took all but one of the balls and pressed them in wax paper and tinfoil.  

We stepped on them to squish them down and placed them in the oven for 10 minutes.  

These are our metamorphic rocks.

Then we took one of our metamorphic rocks and boiled it with a little water until the water was evaporated and the jelly beans were all melted together.  The end product represented our igneous rock.

Tuesday

To celebrate the first of October today I let the kids dress up in a costume, and we cleaned the house and decorated for Halloween a little bit. Then after our morning routine I finally logged into our IXL program I'd purchased with the home school group (major discounts when you purchase within a group) and let me just say I am impressed.  They've done a good job with the website.  It's got quizzes from every topic children are expected to know each grade and it gives the kids a reward (a virtual metal, and a game) when they've mastered a concept.  Annabelle didn't want to stop.  She was scoring very well.  So far I've only done the math, but they also have language arts quizzes as well.

After that we began construction on our very own volcano, Mt. Wannahockaloogie.  It's coming along great.  Annabelle got down and dirty with the paper mache, while Evan was more then content staying clean and playing on the computer.

Wednesday

Well I made a mistake today and didn't start the day off with the regular routine and it threw the kids into chaos.  Won't do that again!

We ended up watching the video, "Wind in the Willows" which we've been reading.  We talked about comparing, and the kids picked out several things that were different in the movie.  

We then went back and did our morning routine, except...the kids were all riled up, and it didn't go well.  We did our sound of the day and a little reading, and then the kids took turns playing Starfall on the computer.  

We also had a great time painting our volcano.  It looks pretty cool.  The kids wanted to wait until Daddy got home to watch it erupt.  

Ok, so I guess the eruption video must have been too large to upload.  Shucks.  Maybe we'll have to erupt it again and make a shorter video.

Thursday

We did the morning routine today, and the kids behaved fabulous all day.  It really does make all the difference.  For our devotional we read Ephesians 6: 11-18 and the kids colored their own shield of faith, then I pretended to be the adversary and threw popsicle sticks at them and said discouraging words.  They had to fend off the "fiery darts" with their shields of faith.  Here are their shields.  I was so amazed at some of the things Annabelle said about this scripture. She drew her shield with a yellow heart around the word faith, and said that was Heavenly Father protecting her faith from the darkness that surrounded it.  Wow...deep!  Evan wrote faith and then drew marker around it so the darkness wouldn't be able to find it :)

The kids did their sound of the day, and reading.  Then we took turns with our Math XL quizzes, which they still love.  I was impressed by Annabelle's determination to finish a level even though it took her about a half hour to master it!  They both did awesome on their quizzes.  It's so fun to see them excited to do math!

After lunch we did a writing activity where I read "Dr. Suess ABC's" and talked about Alliterations.  We then chose a letter of the Alphabet to do an alliteration on.  Of course they chose the first letter of their names.  It was a fun activity for them.

For science we looked at and read informational books.

Friday

We had our co-op today.  They did a math adventure.  I wasn't able to stay, but it sounds like it was fun.  The kids had a good time playing together.  After that we had to take our car in for an oil change, and then take Annabelle in for an ultrasound at Primary Children's Hospital in Riverton.  At Annabelle's last doctor appointment they thought she might have a hernia, but the ultrasound checked out clear.  No hernia, thankfully.  Then we came home and watched "Reading Rainbow."  The kids love that show.  Classic!