Moved Blog

Hi~
I merged this blog with my homeschool review and resources blog. One topic all in one place is so much easier for me to keep going. Please join me at WildIris.

WildIris

Homeschool Week in Review 4/15/11~WildIris

Read about homeschool topics...

 

Carnival Of Homeschooling @ home grown mommy 

• My contribution: The True Confessions of a Home School Mom  

• This is the time of year when most homeschool families re-evaluate homeschool plans.Underwhelmed vs Overwhelmed is a terrific post by The Homeschool Coach's Weblog

• If you missed it, free books for kids. Link to Learn and Earn from Scholastic and Kumon.

• Spiral vs Mastery Debate 

• Get your eleven year-old reading 50 books a year. 50 books recommended by The Independent 

Happenings on the home front...

DD~7  Celebrated her 8th birthday last week when we celebrated our spring break. Yah! DD~8 had her day planned. We went ice skating with her one and only homeschool friend, went to the park, ate cake and blew out candles with her big brother and his girl friend, and best of all opened presents. Her big present was to get her ears pierced.

Learning to read has not come easy to DD~8--Too many distractions from techno gadgets--but she has learned to read in earnest since January. To encourage and celebrate this huge jump into reading, I made DD~8 a book bag to tote her library books. DD~8 has made good use of this little bag. I watched her yesterday at the library as she proudly put her books on the check-out counter and placed her library card on top of the stack of books, then put everything into her new little tote. When I looked through her book selection I was pleasantly surprised to find she did a great job choosing books to read that were right at her level. 

 

 

DD~8 and I are currently reading together:

 

Homeschooling highlights ~ a week at a glance...

It has been a sleep-suit  kind of week where everyone wants to get up late and snuggle under the blankets while doing school work. Dad,who works from home, put an end to these shenanigans. DD~13 is reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and now that we are at the end of the school year, she is going to drop the science textbook and read Science Matters, Achieving Scientific Literacy.

 

Our history reading places us at the end of the Civil War. Did you know that the Gettysburg Address is less than 500 words long? What an amazing piece of writing. The girls will be going to Washington D.C. at the beginning of June with their grandparents and may see this document as well as the Constitution at the Archives. The girls are most interested in visiting the Spy Museum.

DD~8 plunged into taking notes for science via Singapore Science. She drew a diagram showing the characteristics of living things. We also spent time on geography learning how to read road maps. This worktext was written before Google Maps.

The best thing that happened this week...

My new glasses came in. They are oh-so European looking and trendy, but the rest of me has some catching up to do.

Good news, bad new, and new in between...

• Good news: DS~18 has finally decided to become serious about school. He took the ACT last weekend and realized where being laid-back about school has put him academically.

• Bad news: Teenage girls and the hormonal roller coaster

• In between news: DH drove off leaving his wallet and cell phone on top of the car. I found both a fair ways up the road unharmed.

Movie of the week...

We've been watching German movies recently, and this movie really speaks to the generation gap between the baby boomers and their progeny. Plus the title appeals to the idealistic person DH and I once were when he wore a T-shirt that said, "Eat the Rich," and I wore a patched jean jacked with a peace sign encircled by the words, "Anarchy Now!" On our car we had a large, ubiquitous decal of Che Guevara.

 

The Edukators

~A good weekend to all~  

"If you don't like the news, go out and make your own"

                                                                                                             ~Scoop Nisker 

Homeschool Week in Review 4/1/11

Read about homeschooling topics...

Carnival Of Homeschooling - The Homeschool Journey Edition

@ Consent of The Governed

An interesting article...

From the NY Times "A Classical Education: Back to the Future" by Stanley Fish

Some helpful...

Homeschool Writing Tips - Animal Farm Study Helps with Links and Lesson Plans

 Happenings on the home front...

An all day affair~A goat mysteriously died at the beginning of the week. Rather than eat her, since why she died remains a mystery, we buried her. Our one goat is lonely. We are searching for more goats, but goats are popular and expensive these days.

After three weeks of stormy weather and all of us suffering from a sever case of cabin fever, spring came quick with record breaking 83 degree heat for the last days of March. DD~7 and I spent time during the week planting seeds for summer flowers.

 

 

 Homeschooling highlights ~ a week at a glance...

It was our week to meet with our independent study teacher, so I spent time at the beginning of the week crafting what we did the month before, collected work samples and crossed my fingers that we did enough to show progress forward. There are times when it seems we make no progress during a month. Then there are day like this past Thursday when the girls got up and started school by 9:30 in the morning. By noon both girls completed math, English, and reading. After lunch which was a scant one hour, we read history together and each girl did their science lesson for the day. I wish everyday were as accomplished. 

The best thing that happened this week..

We have a rural broadband service which has far too many users for the amount of broadband available, so our Internet service took a vacation for a day. Not good for our online business, but great for the body and soul. Without the internet the girls and I sat down and listened to old-time radio Johnny Dollar, Insurance Investigator while each of us worked on an embroidery project that we should have finished two months ago if we (me) had not been distracted by surfing the internet for who knows what tid-bit of extraneous piece of information that couldn't wait to be found.

Good news, bad news, and news in between...

The good news~Spring is here. The bad news~Rain clouds are gathering on the horizon. The news in between~I am looking forward to Spring Break next week. usually I don't take a spring break since I feel we miss so many days of school during the year to unexpected interruptions, but this year I am taking the week off to replant my strawberries, sew, and celebrate DD~7's birthday.

 Have a good weekend!

Homeschool Week in Review 3/25/11

Pondering home school topics...

I came across this blog post written by a person who was homeschooled. I thought it was interesting since most of the homeschooling posts I read are written by moms or dads homeschooling their kids. It is an interesting peek at the other side of the homeschool equation. The College Test: Does Homeschooling Work?

I also posted this on TWTM board, but it got very little response, so I thought I'd re-post the link here. This is a  syndicated editorial I came across in my local newspaper: "Teaching to the Text Message."

Happenings on the home front...

Rain, more rain, a third week of rain with more rain in the forecast. We can't find a rain gauge big enough for the amount of rain we can receive in a single storm or afternoon. Not quite on par with the Olympic Peninsula, our region is one of the wettest in Northern California. We are on track for than 90-100 inches of rain this year. In the twenty years I've live here we once  had a year of 127 inches of rain, but the average rainfall this region is 50-60 inches.

Homeschooling highlights - a week at a glance...

We continued reading K12's The Human Odyssey vol.2, covering the consequences of the Industrial Revolution to London's poor, the timelessness of Karl Marx and Fredric Engels 's Communist Manifesto, and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the beginnings of evolutionary biology. The new Alex Rider book arrived in the mail and DD~13 disappeared for 12 hours to devour the book. DD~7 and I did several Brain Pop modules on tsunamis and earthquakes. I wasn't overly impressed with Brain Pop ,and as DD~7 and I worked through Singapore Science gr.3-4, I felt equally unimpressed. DD~7 and I did look at some cool bacteria and viruses microscope pictures on the internet, but the rest was just ho-hum.

The best thing that happened this week...

Doing well on her music exam lit a fire in DD~7, or maybe because her birthday is in a few weeks, but she is moving forward on all fronts and excelling. We played dominoes a few months ago and I dropped it because she didn't seem ready. Well, now she's ready. It is fun to watch her play. I can see her math skills kick in and hear the wheels of her thinking as she plays. She moved on the more advanced chapter books in her reading. She reads everything and spells out loud. These are jewel-like moments.

I tried to get a photo of the wheel spinning off and hitting the ceiling, but it was too fast for my little camera.

Good news, bad news, and news in between...

Bad news- Living with an unmotivated teen is giving me gray hair.
Good news- The Dear Loved One, the dog, and I went for walks between rain storms.
In between- Sometimes I feel so uninspired to make dinner. To take-out is over an hour away.

Home school photographer at large...

Movie of the week…

 

                                                                 Intimate Strangers

An adult movie where nothing happens but lives change.

In French with subtitles.

Homeschool Week in Review 3/18/11

Happenings on the home front...

The house is a wreck from too many days spent inside. The rain is still coming down. Bulletin: A rainbow has been sighted off the back deck. Joy!  I guess all the rain isn’t so bad after all.

I watched the movie The Road (much too monotone and depressing) only to wake the next morning to photographs of people in Japan walking down a road buckled from the earthquake trailing carts of belongings behind them. The price at the gas pump has me thinking Road Warrior.

  

Movie of the week...
In July--This was a sweet romantic comedy about finding love. In German with English subtitles. Read the Amazon reviews.

Homeschooling highlights - a week at a glance...

Little girl:

DD~7 discovered that we did not kill the frog spawn. In fact, there are a few little tadpoles swimming around in our frog bowl. When we pulled the frog spawn from the mud puddle last week we wondered if we’d killed some of the spawn because the spawn did not look good, kind of scummy and shriveled looking but not smelling bad.

DD~7 is reading more and more book independently.  This week she is reading Star Wars Jedi Quest Series. No girly books for this reader.

 

Big girl:

While not rising any earlier than 9:30 am, DD~13 took more initiative in her school work this week. She completed what she would call some “Boring assignments,” did some Brain Pop modules and quizzes to satisfy our charter school, and read through “Up Front” magazine, a magazine put out by NYT for students. We’ve been getting this magazine since the beginning of the school year, but she remained decidedly uninterested in reading the periodical until this week. She adores reading “The Week” if only for the absurdities reported in tabloid like fashion and of the dream homes found in the real estate section. For some reason I read the obituaries. My father called them the Irish Overnights. He read them daily in three different newspapers.  

The best thing that happened this week...

Both girls passed their music exams last weekend with excellent remarks. DD~13 will play in the MTA branch honors recital this weekend. One of the evaluators wrote on DD~13’s report, “You will no doubt be able to accomplish most anything you choose to do in life--you prepare well.”  Comments like this keep DD~13 moving forward with a desire to play music beyond just a something to put on a college application.

DD~7 received, “Good Work!” For DD~7 taking this test was a major accomplishment. This was her first big test. She felt confident and prepared, and she learned to read the test questions. A few months ago I worried if she would even be able to take the test independently because her reading skills seemed too low, but she did it.   

Home school photographer at large...

Give a seven-year-old a camera on a rainy day.

Recommended Reading: 
Hake Grammar and Writing - Review

My Home Business - The Eye Shop at Soul2Shade