My Daughter's Brain

On Friday, our homeschool group meets for co-op (I plan to discuss our co-op in a future post).

During the winter session, my girls attended classes on the Iditarod and the Human Body. It was a funny moment when we got in the van today and DD(10) yelled, "Wait, I forgot my brain!" They made a model of a brain and she had left it behind.

Slow week

It's been a very slow week around here. At the beginning of the week, we started reading Fairy-Land Science, The Princess and the Goblin, and Anne of Green Gables. The girls also worked on their math in the beginning of the week.
On Tuesday, I went to Wal Mart to make prints of Rembrandt and Van Gogh for our artist studies and got into a confrontation with the Wal Mart photo center manager about copyright. It seems her only understanding of copyritght law was what Wal Mart told her. She had never read or studied the law herself. She refused to sell the pictures to me and was rude to me by yelling at me, being sarcastic asking if I got permission from Van Gogh to print the pictures and telling me that she didn't care if I was a customer there. It was a very ugly scene and I left extremely upset. There are many more details that I won't go into here, but her ignorance of the law is a shame. If it were me in that position, I would research the law before spouting it off to customers.
So that threw my entire Tuesday off.
Later that day, dd(9) had a fever. She was still feverish Wednesday morning, but seemed better in the afternoon. Thursday morning she woke up with a fever again. Then little brother age 3 developed a fever of over 103. So Thursday was spent tending to him.
Today I am supposed to go out of town for a scrapbooking weekend with my mom. We are under a winter storm warning all day today. So I am a little nervous about driving an hour away. I hope the roads clear up. This is something my mom and I do every year and we look so forward to it. It's time we get to spend together by ourselves.
So this week, life happened. We didn't get much done academically. Yet, I'm okay with that.
According to Pa Homeschool Law, we have to get 180 academic days in each year. So we sometimes get cretive.
On Tuesday, we discussed human psychology, public speaking skills and copyright law (civics).
On Wednesday, we covered health - what is a normal body temperature and what it means to take care of yourself when you are ill. We also covered math with taking temperatures. DD(9) is very math minded and she kept figuring out the difference of her current temperature with a normal temperature. It snowed on Wednesday, too. So we got to do some nature study. We didn't record anything in our nature notebooks, but we observed and discussed nontheless.
On Thursday, we continued our health studies to include proper nutrition and "fun food" (our mild word for junk). We also took out the Legos and built towers and houses and such. I think that may be art.
Who knows what today will hold.

"This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." -Psalm 118:24

Mom's Night Out: Personality Assessment

Apparently I am part Beaver and part Lion. At our Mom's Night out last night I learned (or it was confirmed for me) that I am a leader, am organized, a task master, and am introverted. This part doesn't make sense to me. I want to be around people, am dying to make friends but have difficulty making friends because I am introverted. For a few years now, I have been working on being more extroverted, but it is so hard. I can organize and run a homeschool support group complete with a small co-op,but when I am invited to someone's house for dinner, I have a tendency to freeze up.
The visual that came to mind last night is that I am sitting on a park bench alone and am waiting to meet that friend who can sit with me and just observe the world with me while we talk about deep things that make us think. Someone who will talk with me and is interested in giving her point of view but is open to hearing others. Someone who would enjoy going to a bookstore with me or for lunch in a park. Oh yeah, if this someone has kids, she likes my kids and I like hers and they aren't interrupting us a million times as we try to talk.
The other part of the personality assessment is that I am a perfectionist. Could be why I'm so lonely all the time.
Hmmmm....

Building Relationships

Okay, this is spooky! On Monday we started reading Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by Charles and Mary Lamb. I was worried that it would be too much for dd(10) and dd(9). On the interenet I found (I believe at the recommendation of somebody on Ambleside Online), pictures of costumes for a play of Twelfth Night. I printed out a set for each child and they cut them out and laid them in front of them.
I started to read. They rearranged the characters according to the story and we discussed the story as we went. I planned to read just small portions each day and take two weeks to read it.
Here's the spooky part - Each day when it was time for me to stop reading, my children begged me to keep reading. They startled me the first day with their screams of "No, no. Read more!!!!"
What's that? Read MORE????
We finished the story in 3 days and they said they can't wait for the next story.
In her blog, Happy Heart talked about building relationships in the New Year. It inspired me and here we are. Building relationships with Shakespeare of all people. Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU!

Allowances - Habits with money

Making Children Mind Without Loosing Yours by Kevin Leman suggests giving the children weekly allowance to match their age. A 10 year old gets $10. A 5 year old gets $5. This is a good model since the older children usually get more responsibility and are capable of doing more. A workplace comparison would be that a person with more seniority gets a higher pay for the same reasons.
This works well for our family. Receiving an allowance comes with responsibilities. I teach my children that the Bible tells us to tithe 10% and that it's between them and God. They don't have to report to me when they tithe or the amount they tithe.
They also have to put 20% into savings. This savings is for their first car or their first apartment or books for college. It is for the future. Just as adults, we should be saving for retirement.
The rest of the money is for them to do with as they like. If they want McDonald's, they have to use their money. If they go to the skating rink and want to play video games, they must use their own money.
A couple of years ago, my younger daughter wanted a "Nursery Bear" from Boyd's Bear Country. The thing cost $50 and of course they had additional accessories that you could buy for another $25. I told her that I would not spend $50 on a teddy bear, I don't care if it is a "Boyd's". She had to save her allowance and had to keep in mind that there would be 6% sales tax. To my surprise, she did it. She was able to save it in a couple of months. On the day she got her bear, we made a big deal of it by taking pictures and making a little album of the event. 3 years later, she still treasures that bear. So there is value in the child saving for something they really want like a bear or a car, etc.
It is our responsibility to teach our children good habits in all aspects of life.

Here are pictures from our Boyd's Bear Experience:

Hmmmmm....So many! Which one do I choose?

Filling out adoption papers.

Using the money she saved to pay the "adoption fee".

Proud new mommy!

A typical homeschool day???

A typical homeschool day? Hmmmm. Let's see. Nope, no such thing. One of the Many beautiful parts of homeschooling is that you can adjust to your family's natural rhythm. In Pennsylvania, there is no set time for kids to be homeschooling. (Yes, there are states out there where the law says that school must take place during certain hours. If a child is out in public during those hours, he could be considered truant.)

So a typical day? What does that look like? If you were to come to my house on any given day, this might be what you see....
The children usually arouse between 8:30 and 10. No bus to catch so why push it?

On a typical day, there are things we do together. Right now, we are reading Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable. That's a fun one to do in the mornings with my ds(3) at the table. I will read, the girls will narrate to my son. While I am reading, they are allowed to draw pictures of the story I am reading. My son loves to draw and color, so this is right up his alley. He especially loved the story of Perseus slaying the sea monster to save the beautiful girl. His favorite part was the sword going into the monster's shoulder.

In the mornings, the only other things we do on a regular basis are math, copywork, dictation and poetry reading.

For Latin, we are doing Latin roots. Once they have the meaning of the root and the definitions of a few vocabulary words, we may play a card game after dinner in the evenings.

We do artist studies that usually carry on throughout the day since I tape the pictures on the wall and let the kids look at them all day for several days.

My dd(9) loves her guinea pig and she just completed a unit study on that. She and I will read together library books and other assignments while her older sister is off reading independantly.

My dd(10) just loves to read at bedtime. Once in a while she will "sneak" her math book to bed and get her assignment finished for the next day or she will take her history reading assignment and narrate for me the next morning.

We usually start going to bed around 10 and lights are usually (not always) out by 11.
There are many other parts of our day like chores, but I'll leave that for another post on habits. I love this schedule and our "typical day" and wouldn't trade it for anything.

Back on Track

I can hardly believe I'm going to say this, but we had a great week. We started using Spelling Wisdom found on http://www.simplycharlottemason.com/ and Greek and Latin Roots found on http://www.homeschoolestore.com/ .
The copywork is definitely something we needed instead of a text book. The Spelling Wisdom helped to walk me through how to do copywork appropriately. I mean, I knew how to do it before, but this really simplified it for me.
So far as the Latin and Greek goes, my kids love it. It is set up so you have a different root each week. Each day you do a different activity with that root and vocabulary words that use that root. On Thursday, when I started taking out the activity for Latin, both of my daughters lit up and said they couldn't wait.
We also went back to Ambleside Online and I am sooooo glad. I am doing Year 5 with dd(10). Dd(9) had to finish up a Guinea Pig unit (also found on http://www.homeschoolestore.com/) this week and next week she will start Year 3. I am so relieved that we went back to this.
Maybe next week, I'll be pulling my hair out again. For today, all seems right. Praise God!