Planning

I admit I am not a very good planner. At least I don't do a whole lot of written, detailed plans until I have to. I don't usually plan out an entire school year week by week. I don't even use a lesson plan book or planner. I guess I rely on my memory and a lot of luck to keep things running smoothly.

This week has been a busy week while we get ready for the next school year. I know... we don't really start or end school because we just keep learning and "doing school" all year long. But we will be starting co-op in a few weeks and we have some outside of the house type classes that my kids are going to be starting soon.  I have had to research, plan and go to meetings for each of these things. My kids are getting excited about making changes to the schedule and doing some new things.

Starting in September the kids will be starting piano lessons. For the last few months I have had the kids spend 15 min practicing piano each day. They have been working through the Teaching Little Fingers to play book as well as a five finger movie theme book. Henry is very good at the Harry Potter song and plays it every time he has access to a piano. So if we stop by your house for what ever reason and Henry sees your piano he will ask to play Hedwig's Theme. I guess I should be happy it isn't the Darth Vader music he used to play all the time. We will see how lessons go with each of the kids.

I have also signed them up for a science class. It is an anatomy class for the boys and a genetics class for Sophie. It is done by the same people that we have done science classes with before so I already know the kids will love these.

At co-op the kids will be doing Art once a month, a Lego class (My kids will LOVE this one!), and all the normal singing, sharing and game playing, as well as a new Geography class we are starting. It is more of a world cultures class. We plan to highlight one country every week and have one of the children prepare a little presentation about that country including any food, culture, customs and language from that country. It should be fun. I am in charge of the book club for the 6-12 year olds. It is a somewhat difficult class to pick books for since there are kids who are still newer readers and the older ones in the group are needing to be challenged. So I just picked some books from the middle of that age range and I am hoping for the best. The Lemonade War is my pick for September's meeting. The Saturdays is for October, Where the Mountain meets the Moon for November and Nim's Island is for December.  I hope these are challenging and interesting enough for the older kids without being too difficult for the younger ones in the group.

I still wish I could find some sort of gymnastics or swimming class for the kids but I think for now we are booked up pretty tight. I don't know how we are going to fit in all these outside things in while still getting the usual school work done.

 As for the usual.....

History will be Story of the World again. We are starting over with Ancients and my kids are SOO excited to get to mummify a chicken this year. I picked up a little cornish hen a week or so ago for us to use for this project and the kids keep asking when we are going to start it. We are going to just work our way through the book and read through as many of the suggested readings as we can. This week we have been reading about Adam and Eve and the Creation of the world in our scriptures and also story books in preparation to starting chapter one on Monday.

Math will be Singapore Math. My kids were tired of Math Mammoth and were eager to go back to Signapore. Henry is going to be starting 1B, Ian will be in 3A, and Sophie is already half way through 5A. She needs review of Multiplication tables because they aren't quick in her head and it is hard to make the connections between numbers without having those down.

Science - We made it through about 7 of the lessons in the Apologia Zoology book. I think when we finish the section on birds we will switch to Anatomy and then go back and do bats and insects in the spring.

Language Arts - I really like Writing with Ease and will continue to use it with all the kids. I have rushed Sophie through the 2nd and now the 3rd and will start the 4th workbook in the series. We haven't done all the lessons in the workbooks. I have skipped around making sure she is comfortable doing the reading and writing before pushing on. So far it has been pretty easy so I hope the 4th one will challenge her a little more.
Ian is going to start workbook 2 on Monday. We will be working slowly through the book with him. He is doing well but I don't feel like we need to push him at all. He is right where he should be.
Henry is still plugging away at Explode the Code. He is finishing up the 3 1/2 book. I don't know how much more he is going to do. We may switch him to Writing with Ease 1 and drop Explode the Code.  I haven't decided yet. He isn't quite as proficient in his reading yet but things could change quickly. They did for Ian and now Ian is reading really well.

They all read aloud to me each day from a book of their choosing or their McGuffy Reader and then Narrate what they have read. They also daily work on memorization of scriptures and poetry.

Artist/Musician - I am going to really make an effort to do our artist and musician each month. In September we will study the artwork of Audubon (since science is all about birds I thought this would be a good way to incorporate the two) while we listen to Vivaldi. We are starting with people we have already studied. It has been awhile though so the review will be good for us and I know the boys didn't pay all that much attention first time.

Latin - Plugging away the Getting Started with Latin. We may need to switch to something else because I never seem to remember to do this. But would something different suddenly make me fit it in? We will see. I really need to set a more defined schedule to make sure Latin makes it into the mix.

P.E. - I am required by law to teach P.E. but haven't ever done anything more than take walks, ride bikes and play some basketball in the driveway. I guess swimming once or twice a week at the YMCA counts. Maybe I need to think about this one some more.

Anyway.. these are the plans for the near future. We will see how well it all fits in. I know we don't cover nearly as many subjects as others seem to. We don't do any formal grammar or spelling but I hope those things will come along as we write more. I just don't know how to fit it all in without burning my kids and me out. So for now we do what we can do and the rest will just have to find its way.

Getting a Good Start

Sunday night I wrote my last post about how I wasn't ready to start school yet. Monday morning my kids decided we had to start anyway. Henry busted out his explode the code book and Ian grabbed his Singapore Math book. Sophie is just enamored with Life of Fred Fractions (she calls him the "Nevada man". I guess his head does sort of look like the shape of Nevada.) So, they jumped in before I could pull back on the reigns. We didn't do a whole lot on Monday since we also had an orthodontist appointment which always seem to eat up our morning.

By afternoon,  one or two pages of work and a book read aloud they were done and just wanted to play. I let them, while I did a little more prep work in order to make me feel more ready to officially start another school year.  I hung a map of the world on the wall. I really want to do FIAR with Henry and Ian and plan to do the story disks on that map just like I did with Sophie a few years back. I also printed out and laminated some passports for their FIAR travels. Sophie wanted a new one because hers is out of date now.  So I guess I am committed to doing at least a few Five in a Row books this year.

I was also really happy to just let them play all afternoon because I was finishing a book, Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. I was just to the really interesting climax and just didn't want to stop reading. If anyone needs a good book to read Elizabeth Gaskell is great. I have read several of her books and they are all good and have made me think and ponder.  This one even had a bit of a murder mystery thrown in.  So I finished it and now can focus on something else for a bit.

I woke up this morning and started the day by reading a conference talk from April's conference. It really is good for me to start the day with scripture rather than a novel. Yesterday I had gotten up early to read my novel (I was hooked!) and I think it affected my entire day because I was a bit more fractious than I was today. I need to make sure I am up early enough for me to get a little personal scripture study first thing in the morning. It just doesn't do as much good when I do it later in the day.

My kids begged me to do Story of the World this morning. I find that so funny that they were asking to do school and I actually told them no. I wasn't ready yet. They continued to beg so I gave in. I guess we could have just read the first chapter of Story of the World but instead we read about Queen Victoria from Our Island Story.  We also looked at a book we have of castles and palaces and saw where she lived and even a few paintings of her and Albert.

But the best thing we did today was set our schedule for each day. I sat down with the kids and we drew in our daily schedule for a week blocking out the time for each event and such during the day. I explained that we can't eat except at assigned times during the day. We have had a problem with continual grazing throughout the day and the kitchen always seemed open. So we blocked in our meals and snacks as well as our chore and study times. I think this will help us a lot! I need it and it is good for the kids to know exactly what to expect and when. I didn't get specific enough as to block out each subject and when we would do them. I just put chores, school, study, or free time. I just hope we can stick to it for awhile.

So we have sort of "started school" but I can't say we are really going yet.  We will see how we fit it all in. Our schedule already looks so packed. 

Not ready yet!

The other day I was sitting in the front room of my parents house looking out the big picture window that looks out the front yard and down the hill to the road. As I sat there I noticed the big yellow school bus stop at the bottom of the driveway. I couldn't believe it. School had already started?

The bus brought back a lot of memories.  It was nice to have the bus stop right at the bottom of our hill and driveway. We never missed the bus because we could see it come and while it turned around we could race down to meet it. I remember running down our long driveway to catch the bus on morning when I was running late and tripping and falling, skidding across the pavement leaving me with scratched up palms and even a bit of my face.  All my stuff went flying and I ended up making everyone wait while I collected it. Riding the school bus wasn't always fun but it was just part of going to school.

Kids in our area don't ride a bus to school. I guess because the school districts are so small the kids either get walked to school by their parents or dropped off. It makes for a hectic half hour each morning I am sure! My mom had it easy since we didn't even have to go far for the bus stop.
The kids in our area are starting back to school tomorrow. I honestly as am not ready yet. But then I don't know if I ever really feel ready. I don't sit and plan out each subject completely and write out lesson plans for the year. I tend to just go with the flow and see where it takes us. I plan a few weeks in advance and have a general idea of where the subjects are going but I don't follow any one curriculum exactly and don't follow their lesson plans either. I sometimes wish I could, and I have tried it with some subjects, but it just never seems to work out for us.

Scripture -  We are reading through the Book of Mormon and memorizing all the Articles of Faith at the moment and will see what we decide to do next. We have Scripture Study for LDS families and I need to get it out more often to help us make scripture reading a little more interesting.

Science - We are doing physics this year. I am planning to follow Elemental Science Physics for the Grammar stage along with a bunch of other books from the library including a number of biographies of scientists. These will most likely correspond to our history lessons too.

My kids are really excited because I bought a Knex simple machines kit that they can't wait to dig into. We already have a bunch of Knex but I wanted something that would let us build and use all the different types of machines. I hope this works. I didn't spend as much as that link to Amazon says. I bought mine on Ebay.

History - I am a little at a loss about history. I need to think about this subject some more. The last few years we have just followed Story of the World and read a bunch of books and did some of the projects from the activity book. When I finally got around to looking at the activity book a few days ago, I decided it looks way over my kids head.  I think we will use ideas from it but I just don't see us using it like we have in the past.
I have some work to do here!

Math  - Singapore Math is working for us so we will continue. Our library has the Life of Fred books so Sophie is going to start with the Fractions and see if she likes it. (I think she will love it. She picked it up today and started reading it already.) Ian will start the 2A book and Henry will start the 1A book some time this year. I think with Henry we will work more on reading than math to start with.

Language arts - We are going to give Simply Grammar a try. I may even go back to First Language Lessons and try it with Ian. He has a very different learning style than Sophie so it may work well for him.

Art - I really want to do artist study again. I think I will pull out artists from the time periods we are studying. Since it is the Modern era it should be fun. Again... not planned yet.... but easy enough to throw together as they come up.

Music - Musician study hopefully?! not planned yet. But it never is. I want to start teaching Ian to play the piano. I think he might let me do lessons with him. Sophie never wants me to do it. She has to teach herself. So Sophie is getting a recorder and a teach yourself to play the recorder book for her birthday. Hopefully she can teach herself a little music since she wont let me. Perhaps if she sees her brother playing piano she will finally desire to play it too. We will see. She has such a hard time being taught anything.

Physical Education - We will continue to do yoga together, take walks and hikes, play basketball and jump rope. Hopefully Sophie, Ian and Henry will get back to their Karate class. The boys may take a soccer class at the YMCA.

Nature Study - We loved our outdoor hour challenges but haven't done them in about a year. I will see how it goes this Fall. Otherwise we will just get out as much as we can and break out our Handbook of Nature Study and do it ourselves.

As you can tell I am really not ready yet for the school year to start. I don't have everything planned out and don't really know how I am going to manage a 4th, 1st, and Kindergarder as well as deal with a running around one year old.  It should be interesting. I am almost tempted to just scrap it all and just do Five in a Row again. Life was so simple then.  Ian and Henry would love FIAR. I really should do it. It is just so hard to do different things for each child.

Tomorrow while all of those other kids are heading to their first day of school.... we aren't. Sophie has an orthodontist appointment and that is all we have planned for tomorrow.  I think I need to find the time to really think about what we are going to do.... I am starting to feel like such a slacker!

Workbooks

Usually we don't have a whole lot to do with workbooks. Sophie has never enjoyed them and fights them every time they come out. But the last week or so I have been gathering the brood to the table (when I can actually get it cleared off and wiped clean) to do workbooks. Sophie does a math exercise or two.
I can tell we are out of practice. It is not that the math is hard. She is just fighting it again. So I know we need to do this more often. Back to math everyday again! She has had it easy too long.Ian has his own workbook where he practices writing letters or numbers and all sorts of preschool skills. Ian is doing a lot better with his pencil. He had a hard time holding it and writing but is now starting to write much easier and clearly.
And then there is Henry. He loves to join us at the table to do work. I don't have an official workbook for him. He usually gets a coloring book and will color or a maze book and try to make it through them. Usually it ends up something like this.
At least the coloring books are old ones that have already been colored and are from the dollar store or something. But it is a lovely mess to clean up each time. But what else does mom do but clean up messes.