Weekly Wrap Up

Several homeschool blogs I read do a Friday "Weekly Wrap Up" summarizing their homeschool week. I may try to post on Fridays as a regular thing, more as a recording of our school year. I hope you enjoy it.

We kicked off our school year this week and also Amelia's potty training. Both endeavors are going very well. Caley did two math lessons per school day (Monday and Friday) in the K12 Kindergarten curriculum book. The first 10 lessons had been torn out because we got the book used, so I made makeshift testing sheets to record what she learned for the day. I did the teaching on a little whiteboard and Caley found it very interesting and fun to write on a whiteboard.

We also started the phonic "100 lessons" book again and Caley is on lesson 20. At the end of last year she was around lesson 35, but since we haven't done those lessons all summer, she needed a little review. It's going better though since she can say some letters a bit better. Specifically the "th" sound is very difficult for her, probably because of her underbite.

A new development in this school year is Amelia's involvement. She wants to be more involved and likes watching Caley do her math sheets and such. Often I will give her a puzzle or blocks to play with.

We are including a Bible lesson on each school day and today we talked about Jesus, the cross and John the Baptist using Bible cards.

Today we also did a bubblegum craft (idea borrowed from Rachael). Both their crafts turned out nice.

On Tuesday we went to bible study and Caley played with some friends, she is the oldest in the group. On Wednesday we went to another bible study and she played with some other friends, more boys, which is good for her. We also went grocery shopping and brought a new mom and meal. Caley and Amelia enjoyed looking at a new tiny baby. We also had a visit from Uncle David who filmed the girls for a small part in his new movie. They wore clown noses.

Thursday we went to the library and got a lot of Tana Hoban books. She is a talented photographer and her books are mostly photos highlighting specific attributes like shapes and colors. They make for good math practice. We also went to Haven for Life, a teen pregnancy foster home, and Caley played with some friends. We hope to volunteer at the ministry in the future.

It was a good week and hopefully this year will be fun!

Telling Stories

Lately Caley has started telling stories. Nana Gerlach gave the girls some nursery tale puzzles like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Little Pigs." I got a book from the library telling those stories so Caley knows how they go, and now she acts them out with the puzzle pieces. Telling stories is a huge building block of literacy because through it the child demonstrates the understanding of a story, not just reading a string of letters but fully comprehending what those letters and words mean. Caley has also taken to "reading" to Amelia and, to my surprise, the stories are fairly coherent and close to the original story. Here she is reading "Jack and the Beanstalk" to Amelia while they play "night-night."

Back to School

Labor Day is super late this year, so we started school this week. We are following a similar schedule to last year, fully expecting to slow things down when the baby arrives in January or February who's (by the way) gender will be revealed next Wednesday. Woohoo!!! Look to the right for a rundown of the subjects and curricula we are using, which may be adapted as things progress.

Today we did a fun Noah's Ark project. I bought this brand new at Value Village for $3!

We also tested the waters for Amelia's potty training abilities. She did great! She wore training pants all day (except at naptime) and only had one accident and stayed dry during her nap. Go Amelia!

We're looking forward to another year of school, and updating the blog! Enjoy.

VBS 2009

We just finished a week of fun in the sun, I mean mud, at VBS. The curriculum was "Upward Bound" and it was a camping/outdoors theme, which was fitting because it was held in a park behind some apartments in Mountlake Terrace partly as an outreach to the residents there, but there were mostly Mars Hill families. I served in the nursery and Caley and Amelia were in their own classes without me. It was wonderful to see them be part of a group without my being there every second. I especially liked watching Caley. Now that we're going to scrap homeschooling and enroll her in a preschool, but it was extremely helpful to see her in a group of peers with teachers. I observed that Caley sometimes "dilly-dallys" instead of being on task. To her credit though, there were at least 20 kids in her class and there's only so many adults. She was singing the songs and always did her craft and proudly showed it to me at the end of the day. She always waved hello when walking past my class, and sometimes even while she was in another station like storytime. She had her friends that she played with, and I was very thankful she played well with one particular friend Lenora. Caley was also very excited every day to see "The Hiker" who, in her words, is "the guy who was at our house for a long long time." She means Pastor Dick from our church who recently did some work on our back deck.

VBS was fun, exhausting, but well-worth every minute.

Little House

I've been looking for a good chapter book to read to Caley, one that encourages the right characteristics, isn't too scary, and has some pictures. We were reading "Henry Huggins" but every time we read it I got a sour taste in my mouth. Especially for Caley, who's only 4, Henry isn't really the kind of role model I think she needs right now. He's was always trying to make money and there was a lot of competition between him and his neighbor friends. I remember reading those books in grade school, so maybe they'll be more appropriate for her in a few years.
So we tried reading "Little House in the Big Woods" by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it, and more importantly, so does Caley. The narrative is simple and the values mirror what I hope to encourage in Caley, a strong love for family and working together. I have literally had this book in my personal library since I was a little girl and I have never read it. I don't think it was even assigned while I was in school. The topics are ones I wouldn't even think about, but for Laura were a part of daily life. So far we have read about "Butcherin' Time" in which Ma makes head cheese from a pig head and Laura and Mary play with the bladder as a ball, in-depth description of how Pa cleans his gun every evening, churning butter, and the simplicity of Christmas.

I know a lot of the content may be hard for Caley to really understand, but I also know that this book and the others in this series are ones we can read over and over, each time delving deeper and bringing in other subjects as part of her schooling. I can already think of many projects and subjects to research and we've only read 80 pages in the first of 6-7 books.