Needs to Know

I have tossed and turned a lot thus far.  We have used the same things since we started our school year but I have had a hard time keeping our focus the way I had it laid out.  This has lead to lots of spits and sputters and stops and stalls.  I have struggled to keep any kind of momentum going.  Thanks to some recent discussions on the Well-Trained Mind forums, I have decided that I needed to quit fighting what I felt was the right direction for us.

I'm going to allow the Core Knowledge Sequence to be our guiding light.  Thanks to the What Your x Grader Needs to Know books this is really easily done.  I will still be using the Intellego Unit Studies, but they will now become something I turn to looking for extras to go with our NTK books.  I am using lots of Let's Read and Find Out and Magic School Bus books for adding to science and a variety of books for social studies.  BrainpopJR and Magic School Bus videos are also a regular here and we will add in other videos that I find fit in well with our studies.  

We have begun making pages to put together a journal that is inspired by Waldorf's main lesson book.

Bumpy and Crazy...

If our life was anything other than bumpy and crazy, I'm not sure I would know what to do!

We started our school year last Monday as planned.  Tired from truck show we were determined to plug along.  Then Wednesday we hit a bump.  I babysat my nephew who is just a few months younger than The Cuddler.. so he is almost 3.  We attempted school, but it was just too much of a distraction having an extra kid around.  He was here Thursday too, I didn't even attempt to do school.  I knew it wouldn't happen.

Friday, I just said forget it I need to finish recovering from it all.

Welcome New Week... or so we think.  Yesterday, I was all set to pick up where we left off, we made it halfway through our lessons and noticed our dog, who was very heavy with a belly full of puppies was acting strange.  Not even 10 minutes later she delivered puppy number 1.  Within 35 minutes she had delivered 7 puppies.. and ended up a while later with a final count of 9.

Today, I'm all out of sorts... so we covered the basics for school and called the day good.  I need to get my content subjects back into order so we can get back into a full swing of the game.

I really think if our life was smooth I would be lost, but at the same time... maybe if it was smooth I would be able to accomplish everything I think we should.

Not the smoothest start to our new year...

But not entirely bad either!

I mentioned in my previous post that we were spending this past weekend at a huge truck show.  It is a super fun weekend, but it is also very tiring going from 5am till 10-12pm in the July heat and sun for 3 days in a row.  My family really had loads of fun, but we are all feeling the effects today. 

I did learn that the money I spent on Ooka Island and Reading Eggs is paying off.  I had left The Scientist have a break in reading.  He was very reluctant and got really frustrated easily.  Today he flew through his story, and we started where we left off, so some of the words were completely new to him.  The Artist also did very good with her reading.  It's great that they play both of these games willingly.  I am kind of sad that I spent money on Click N Read, because it's not as fun and animated and my kids just don't get into it at all.

Math was pretty great, both got to play a game with their lessons.  We are finishing up last years books before we move on, and it did kind of upset The Scientist that he was in the K book still.  He is mathy and I'm thinking maybe I could move him up to 1st but McRuffy Color Math is ahead of the game in my honest opinion. 

We finished the day with our BCP geography lesson for the week. We read in the NTK book and took an imaginary trip to the moon, which lead to us exploring the composition of our Earth.  Finishing up by coloring the land and water on a simple Earth picture. (This went with K Geography lesson 3).

All in all, not a bad day, but I think it may have been a bit more fun for us all had we not been so sleepy.

On Your Mark, Get Set....... We are about ready to GO

Since my original start date I planned has come and gone, and I wasn't ready, we will be starting our school year on Monday, July 16th.  I have no doubt it will be a hard day for all of us.  This weekend is a HUGE truck show in Bloomsburg, PA.  We will be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, getting our fill of the awesome rigs that people build, mud drags, tough trucks and of course MONSTER TRUCKS!  My family lives for this weekend!  I should be busy right now getting things together so I don't have to get up before the sun tomorrow to do it, but I just can't!

What on earth could take my mind off of getting ready for my favorite weekend of the year?  School.  Crazy, huh? 

I have to be honest here, as much as I love Intellego Unit Studies, I was having a very hard time getting myself ready to use them as my spine.  For me, they have a disjointed feeling.  I think it's the fact that they aren't written in a narritive style that we read to our children, they are written in a way that we should read it, find our own words and then present the material.  I just felt like I was stumbling over my own thoughts trying to figure out how to relay them to the kids.

Now, I have been really impressed with Baltimore Curriculum Project's Lesson Plans since I found them.  They are written to fit a classroom, but I'm ok with tweeking.  I'm not sure why when I tried them we didn't stay with them.  I think I tried them at the start of my horrible grass is greener kind of year that I wasted last year.  My kids really loved the activities that we did, I need to learn to listen to their hints more.  They also like some of the activities in the Intellego (they do not care for the "go read at this site" links, and I do not care for the links that lead to another lesson plan that I have to sort out).

I decided that I would make it the best of both worlds.  I am using this monthly lesson layout as my spine instead of the Intellego Unit Studies.  I will then line the IUS and the What Your __ Grader Needs to Know books up with them, add in some BrainpopJR, some Magic School Bus, and some of what ever other videos I find that will fit.  I will omit things we do not care for when we come to them when we are going through all the different activities.

I have lined up our first week (actually I have the first 6 done now).  I think we are ready to go on Monday, tired or not.  Maybe sitting around on the sofa with the laptop plugged into the TV will be just what we need come Monday morning ;)

Grass is Greener Effect

A recent post on a homschool board I visit really hit home with me.  It was about the time and money we waste when we get the "grass is greener" frame of mind.  I know for a fact I am very guilty of this!

I have to take a trip down memory lane, and think about when I first started homeschooling.  It's been 6 full years since I started.  I remember the still wet behind the ears feelings.  I was terrified to say the least!!  In retrospect, I shouldn't have been.  I  had it all under control, even if I didn't know exactly what that looked like then.  In fact, I think I was in more control then than I am now as a homeschooling mom.

Back then, I didn't know about probably about 90% of the resources that are available to homeschoolers.  I knew about the "The Complete Book of...." books that were cheap and available at Sam's Club and I knew that there was a world of knowledge in books.  I knew my state laws and the subjects they said I had to cover. 

I picked from things that I pretty much knew existed.  We used a Comprehensive Curriculum book (basically a condensed version of several of the "The Complete Book of...." books), The Complete Book of United States History, an old set of books from Southwestern Publishing called "My Fun with Learning" (this covered science and more history plus much more), we read real books (many of which I later learned are called "living books" amongst the homeschool community), I searched online for activities to go with books we read.  One of my favorite memories is making green slime after reading Horrible Harry and the Green Slime.  Our year that year was so relaxed. The Test and I both enjoyed it.

What happened to that life?  What happened that changed our whole homeschooling experience?  What ruined the good thing we had?  The Grass is Greener Effect!!! In bouncing around online looking for book ideas, craft ideas, etc, I discovered this whole HUGE online community of homeschoolers.  We live in an area where it seems there aren't tons of homeschoolers, I have bumped into a few, but not a great number (which is ok, I'm an introvert most of the time). There are no groups that would have brought to light all these "wonderful" resources.  But this huge community online opened my eyes to all the wonders of the homeschooling world.

I learned about this math and that, and why this grammar is the best one.  I learned about this method of teaching and that one and yet another.  I then ran into those homeschoolers.  The ones using 3 maths, 2 grammars, 4 writing programs and spending countless hours a day doing science and history.  I read why this math was great, but you needed to suppliment with that one because this one is lacking, and then combined this and that one need to be supplimented with yet another because together they still are lacking rocket science.

I quickly began to doubt myself.. well first I thought easier, already prepared curricula would be wonderful.  I then began to doubt myself... was I really able to put my own stuff together?  Was I really hitting on everything we needed to be hitting on?  Was my son on the verge of becoming a nuclear pysicist? 

Now I know, I don't really care if my kids grow up to be garbage collectors or if they grow up to be president, but it's hard to keep that in mind when you are faced with "this is the next great curricula".  The whole "The Grass is Greener" did more than cost me tons of money, it sucked a lot of the love out of homeschooling for us.  It totally changed the dynamics of what we were doing.

The moral of the story.... If is isn't broke, don't try to fix it.  Just because someone else says they are doing x, y, and z does not mean that you have to do it too.  Don't doubt yourself!!  By being involved enough of a parent to want to homeschool your children, you are doing the greatest thing for them.  If something isn't working, by all means then you need to change it, but you need to decide before you go looking if it isn't working and just why it isn't.

Sweet Pickles... or What Are We Using for Preschool

So, I know I'm not the only one who grew up in the Sweet Pickles era.  I pink fluffy heart loved Sweet Pickles!!!  I think my early years could have revolved around it.  I had the books, I had a wonderful membership to "The Bus".  I couldn't wait for a new shipment to come from them loaded with tons of actvities: games, stories, crafts, puzzles, etc.  Need a refresher? 

Well I had kind of forgotten about "The Bus", but I remembered loving the books, so when my oldest was born I started hunting the books.  I found a decent size stack of VERY well loved books once at a thrift store and snatched them up for a song:

Then about 2 years ago, while out yardsaling I ran spotted something that instantly brought back warm fuzzies.  Sitting in a box I spot these:

I try hard to control my excitement when I see them.  I pick one up expecting it to be empty but much to my surprise it weighs a good amount... it is full of something, but these things are almost as old as I am, there is NO WAY they have the orginal cards in them.  I open the box and about jump out of my skin.  It is jam packed full!  I open the other, holding my breath... FULL, over flowing full!!!  I can see that they were well taken care of back in their time.  The cards that went together had been wrapped in rubber bands that had long since lost their elasticity and were more of a brittle plastic.  I think I paid $12 for both of them.  I had this gut feeling that there was no way they were all there, after all, these had belonged to a little kid at one time, they for sure had lost a card or ten.

This was after I had gone through them, but you can see those boxes were way overflowing.

I brought the boxes home, having no clue how to figure if every card was there.  I noticed a code on each card, so I went from there.  I sorted them out in stacks by their code, the code would be a 4 digit number, a dash, then a 2 digit number.  A pattern started appearing.  The first 4 numbers seemed to be like a packet code and the 2 digit number seemed to be the card number from that packet.  On card 01 of each packet listed the packet number (example card 7710-01 says Packet 1 on it), there are 19 cards in each "packet" and there are 36 packets. Every single card was there!!! I was so estatic.

Also in there were game pieces, the parents guides and a really cool skills progress poster:

Some of the cards get cut into game pieces or puzzles, some are stories, each packet has a board game, there are cards that teach colors, numbers, letters, thinking skills, science skills and wonderful social skills.  There are arts and crafts, "stick puppets" and finger plays.

This is one of the packets all spread out.

I decided to make each packet into a, well, packet.  I took construction paper and foldeded it into an envelope of sorts, stapled or taped the edges closed and loaded each of the packets into it's own envelope: 

I noted on each one what supplies I may need to buy.

Each week or maybe every other week since he has 2 preschool years yet, The Cuddler will get an envelope.  The other kids are chomping at the bit to have these come out as well.  They got to play with them a little bit when we first got them, but they have not seen all the great wonders that are inside these envelopes.  They will all delight in playing the games and doing the crafts. 

Anyway, this is what The Cuddler's Preschool will look like. 

What We Are Using 2012-2013

I think I have almost everything picked out/purchased for Rylee and Reagan this coming year.  We will be starting July 16th.  The kids will be using mostly the same things.  Their readers will be different and the grade levels for their Math and Language Arts will reflect their own personal level, but the curricula will be from the same publisher.

Math: McRuffy

Language Arts: Total Reading (I decided to drop the GWG, WWW, and not even start the SWS, they just take too much time,  Rylee hates them and I want our work to be something they don't hate.  TR covers everything they need to at this level, it's colorful and fun, and I think they will like it much better)

Spelling:  Zaner-Bloser Spelling Connections

Social Studies: Core Knowledge and Intellego

Science: Core Knowledge and Intellego

Art: Artistic Pursuits level 1 book 1

Music: Core Knowledge and we just might start learning the recorder, if I can find it in myself to put up with hearing it..lol

I think this covers the basics.  Other stuff will be thrown in, and we will most likely do Spanish this year from Discovery Education (Elementry Spanish), but I'm not 100% set on that.