Growing In Grace

In my life this week…

We had a Bible conference at our church this week, and Dr. Jerry Vines was one of the speakers. At the end of the service, our son wanted to get his picture taken with him.

What a special memory for him!

In our homeschool this week…

Though all the lessons have gone well this week, and I’m really happy with what we have going right now, it has been a more difficult week in the school room. Because of the Bible Conference, we’ve had a lot of late nights. And the result has been a lot of whining and pouting from the little one and a lack of focus from my son. But we’ve pressed through this week, (a little more slowly and casually than normal) and finished for the better.

Filling shape mats with Teddy Bears

The little one has been reviewing the Letter E and her vowels this week. And in Kindergarten, my son has been learning some tough three letter blends: “scr,” “spl,” “squ,” etc. He’s done much better with them than I’d anticipated. We’re still spelling the sounds and words on the chalk board and on the felt board. He loves doing this and it gives him great practice.

Spelling "mash" on the chalk board

He also memorized the countries of West Africa to our fun geography songs. And we played “store” and “bank” with our coins.

My favorite moment…

The little one surprised us this week with a performance of the geography song of the countries of Southern Africa! My three year old has been walking around the house singing: “Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Lesoto, and Swaziland: these are the countries of Southern Africa. Comoros, Seychelles, and Madagascar and Mauritius are islands to the east.“

Most of the time, she doesn’t act like she’s even listening to the songs during our school time. She rarely sings with us, and I’m okay with that. I rarely force her participation. She’s along for the ride, and I’ve figured she’ll pick up what she can along the way. I just had no idea how much that would be!

Upcoming attractions…

My mom is coming to visit this next week! I’m so excited. It’s been nearly a year and a half since we’ve seen her, and it will be the first time she’s seen our house, our church, our school room — and it will be the first time she’s seen me in person with a pregnant belly. So, we’ll be partying at my house this week!

Have a great weekend and thanks for taking a peak at our week.

In my life this week…

I’ll be 16 weeks pregnant on Tuesday, nearly 4 months along in this 9 month journey. And let me just tell you, all I ever think about is food (and Zantac, for the heartburn after the food). It’s so funny to me how, in the first three months or so, the thought of food is extremely repulsive and in the next 6+ months, I’m eating constantly (even in my dreams). Nothing too bizarre really, just Mexican food, chips, and ice cream.

Though with fall in the air, I’m beginning to have pumpkin bread cravings. But I have those even when I’m not pregnant.

I do miss my coffee, though (and all the cream and sugar I use to make it palatable). I forego caffeine while pregnant and nursing, which means I have roughly one more year before my next cup. The home-brewed decaf is far from the real deal, unless I add a considerable amount of chocolate syrup to the cream and sugar. And by then I might as well have chocolate milk, which is the morning routine I’ve swapped for—a big glass of chocolate milk instead of the old friendly mug of coffee.

So, to sum up this section: In my life this week, I’m trying desperately to revamp my voracious appetite and intense cravings to something even slightly resembling my old healthy diet of steamed vegetables, stir-frys, baked salmon, and George Foreman-grilled turkey burgers.

In our homeschool this week…

I’m loving our adjustments to kindergarten. We’ve finally got school to where Mommy is enjoying it, which is important, you know. As far as my once-beautiful-now-grossly-disorganized lesson plans? My new system is to check off with a pencil each page that we do in each subject, then check off the week when every assignment (that I’m going to do) has been completed. The result is that I’m in Summer: Week 12 in Phonics; Fall 2011: Week 1 in Math; Fall 2011: Week 3 in Critical Thinking and Geography; and totally off the cuff for handwriting and art/music. But I couldn’t be more pleased.

The nice thing is, since I decided at the beginning of the year to only schedule 6 weeks worth of school at a time, I only have three more weeks of this mayhem before I reorganize.

• We’ve wrapped up our first week in Nigeria and nearly learned the countries of West Africa.
• We’ve begun our study of Renoir’s “Still Life with a Bouquet” and continued our music theory. (I’ve misplaced my  Vivaldi CD and may have to resort to a youtube.com playlist if I can’t find it soon.)

Picture Study of Renoir's "Still Life with a Bouquet"

• In K5, we are on Abeka  ”I Do Read, Book 3″ and loving the reading journey. He spelled “mash,” “smith,” and “twist” this week as part of our lessons on his phonics sounds. And in math, he’s flying through addition, writing and recognizing his numbers up to 100, and working on counting by 2′s.

Math skills worksheet

• In PreK, the little one is finishing up with the letter D and working on number recognition and counting for 1-10. Along the way, we’ve also had fun with fine motor skills, shapes puzzles, and color recognition.

Size sort and threading buttons

My favorite moment…

Holding my son in my lap for reading time with the little one cuddled beside me to hear his story. He always adds more expression if she’s listening in.

Questions to ask…

Since food is ever on my brain, what are your favorite fall snacks?

In my life this week…

Nothing too exciting here folks, just trying to gradually catch up on things around the house, on my blogs, and throughout the rest of my personal life. I read a fun status on Facebook, one of the “repost this” statuses, but since I do not repost as a rule I decided to share it here. (Of course, you’re welcome to copy and repost it to your Facebook status.)

“Dirty dishes prove I feed my kids, full bins prove I change my baby’s diapers, messy floors prove that I let my kid’s have fun, piles of clothes prove I keep my kids in clean clothes, a messy bathroom proves that I bath my kids!”

What a nice thought! My dirty house actually proves that I am getting things done.

In our homeschool this week…

Things have gone really well. My favorite part of our day is geography; it’s been as exhilarating as I thought it would be. I have made changes to my son’s Abeka work, which I’m posting about later this next week. But one big change that I’m adding is that I’m going to try making Friday an “unschooling” day. In other words, we’ll still “do school” on Fridays, but we’re going to try doing it with more “unschool” activities—cooking, educational games, etc.

Here’s what I’ve discovered. My children wake up on Friday’s without their minds. I’m not sure what happens between Thursday night and Friday morning, but every Friday they come to school having totally forgotten everything from the week. My son can ace a concept all week long and then act like he’s never seen it come Friday. Same with my daughter. I noticed this bewildering phenomenon last year, too.

So, I’m going with it this year, and we are going to do school without doing school. On the docket for today:

1. Make fall-shaped gingerbread cookies. (I was actually going to do this yesterday and then decided to wait a day, upon my husband’s wise advice.)
2. Make a flip book of South Africa’s animals.
3. Play a dice game (for math), and perhaps another game for language enforcement.

I’m not an authority on unschooling, so this might not technically be what unschoolers do. But I thought it would work for our first go at a  ”casual Friday” schedule.
(I’ll post pics later.)

My favorite moment…

My son wants to eat his pop tarts in a pattern. Every morning, the first thing I hear from him is the next color in our pattern of pop tarts. He’ll shout out from his bedroom, “Mom, it’s blue today!” And I know he’s up.

Questions to ask…

What fun activities do you plan for your “off” days of school? I’d love to incorporate any ideas you all may have into our casual Friday scheme.

In my life this week…

I’m officially past the first trimester of my pregnancy, and am gratefully saying goodbye to most of the nausea. It seems as though we’ve got another wiggler on the way. Every ultrasound shows the little one bouncing and moving around, so much so that the  doctor couldn’t find the heartbeat with the doppler this week and had to opt for yet another ultrasound (my third so far). Everything looked good; I’ve just got a very busy baby.

We had our first outing with our homeschool group, visiting a house that was in a skirmish during the Revolutionary War. You could actually see the bullet holes throughout the house. The tour guide mentioned that during the skirmish the family (wife and children ages 6 months to 18) were actually in the house. The children stood inside the chimney for cover from the flying bullets, glass, and splintered wood; and the wife actually worked out the terms of surrender to keep the house from being burned to the ground with them in it.

In our homeschool this week…

Let me just say, that as nice as breaks are, I do love our school routine. It has been so good to be back to school. They both have done exceptional this week, really exceeding my expectations in so many ways. We’ve been studying the country of South Africa, learning the first five books of the Bible, coloring a Renoir picture of “The Girl with the Watering Can,” and dancing the wiggles out to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

The little one has done a great job, too. She joins us for Art/Music and geography, and she has a fifteen minute segment of time with me toward the beginning of the morning. We go over her letters and numbers, sing some review songs, and review some charts and flashcards. Then, the rest of the time she’s pretty content to work through each of her workbox pockets all on her own. Her favorite activity seems to be the Do-a-Dot pages, designed to be used with the Do-a-Dot markers, but we use circle stickers.

My son says that his favorite is “everything.” He’s just thrilled to be back to our normal schedule. As far as his Kindergarten work, it’s gone much better at our new pace, but I’m still not totally happy with it. The party animal in me just isn’t having enough fun. While the little one does colorful clip cards and number puzzles in the floor, my son only has time for flashcards and worksheets. I did include one of her lacing cards in his last pocket of the day yesterday because he has been begging me to let him do one. And I also put in a fun number puzzle. It put him doing school longer than his sister, but he didn’t care. He happily worked on his “fun stuff” while I made lunch.

We did have fun practicing his spelling on the chalkboard, and spelling out his special sounds with our felt letters. I love that look on his face in this picture. Can you see the intensity? He takes his work seriously.

My favorite moment…

Last night at supper, my son was telling Daddy: “Did you know that Lesotho and Swaziland are actually inside South Africa? They’re kind of punched in.” It just seemed so out of place to hear my four year old saying that.

Questions to ask…

What are your favorite websites for free Kindergarten resources? I’ve been playing around with IXL Math (which allows you 20 questions a day for free) and, of course, Starfall.com is a favorite. But any other ideas for online games or free printables?

In my life this week…

We celebrated the little one’s birthday this week. She’s a big three year old, now. And she was quite the “butterfly princess.” Our tradition is to celebrate the birthday first thing in the morning in our pajamas, with presents as soon as everyone is up and birthday cake for breakfast. It’s not a long-standing tradition, one we started about three or four family birthdays ago. But I love it. It’s all they can think about when they first wake up anyway, and it gives them all day long to play with their toys. Besides, who doesn’t want birthday cake for breakfast? 

In our homeschool this week…

We launched our year on Wednesday and have eased into our new school schedule. Next week, we add our Bible lessons and audio stories, continue our study of Renoir and Vivaldi, and head to South Africa in our geography study. Pretty excited about the geography especially, and I was able to pick up some really great books from our library. I’m feeling my way along with Kindergarten phonics and math, but so far so good. I may just drop the lesson plans and plan it myself using the workbook pages, as I did with K4. That’s just a lot more work on my part, so I really want to figure out how to find a good pace without straying too far from the pre-assigned work. But in the end, it might be less stressful for all of us if I just strike out on my own.

And it has been really fun to add the little one back into our school time. I’m trying to incorporate lots of cuddling and lap-sitting while we do her PreK lessons. She wiggles and wallows, so that’s hard sometimes. But she responds so well to learning when she’s in my lap.

Questions to ask…

When do you do your lesson planning and school prep?

I’ve experimented with different times: right after our school day, during “nap times”, and late evening. Each time has had pros and cons for me, and I’d love to hear how and when others are fitting it in amongst things like laundry and cooking dinner.

In my life this week…

I’m going to get to enjoy a couple of precious days with just my husband. Really looking forward to that time, and extremely appreciative to the friends who’ll be keeping the kids. BIG “thank you”!

Then, when we get back, I’ll be in birthday party mode. The Little One is turning three! She has been counting down to this birthday for a year now. The day after she turned two, she announced she wanted a princess party for her third birthday. So, that’s the theme. I’m going to get to make my first princess doll cake. And I have to admit, I’m pretty excited.

Daddy told her the other day, “Only five more days to your birthday.” And she responded, “No, one more OSO till my birthday.” You see, we’ve been counting down the Saturday cartoons until her birthday, a favorite being OSO Special Agent.

In our homeschool this week…

We’re coming to the end of our two week break and will launch into our new year next week. I’ve been learning an important lesson in letting go of the lesson plan and catering to what my children need. So, in preparation for our school year, I’ve been overhauling the school room and am still midway through the process. I have all of our pictures off the wall and new name tags on the desk. But I still have to take down the letters from our Chicka Boom Tree (so that my daughter can add them back on later this year), organize a few supplies, laminate and cut a few charts and cards, etc. Of course, not all of it has to be done before we start, but the more I get done the better I’ll feel.

Links to share…

In my life this week…

We took a few days off and went on a mini-vacation. It was so much fun, and a good time with the kids. We got some grand laughs and some fun memories. The kids learned how to swim in the hotel pool, with arm bands. They absolutely took off across the water! My son has learned to go underwater, and it’s hard to keep him above water now. He’s a fish! And the little one, who has tubes in her ears and really shouldn’t go underwater yet anyway, is perfectly content to paddle along on the surface.

We also had a chance to look at bugs at a nature museum, play and pretend at Discovery Place Kids, ride a carousel, and hit every playground and play area along the way!

Then, after we got back from our little trip, I took the next day to start working on my fall menu rotation. I’ll be posting more on that on my Homekeepers blog in the next several days.

In our homeschool this week…

Though our vacation trip had lots of educational “field trip” material (that I’ll post about after I get the pictures from my husband’s cell phone; I took my camera, but I never remember to use it!), we haven’t done much in the way of homeschooling. And honestly, I don’t intend to. I’m taking the rest of this week and all of next week off. Then, we’ll start in full gear the first full week in September. I figured we could all use a little time off, and it gives me a chance to get a running head start on the housework and menu planning before adding in school.

Links to share…

My favorite meal planning tool: PlantoEat.com

• Want to know what others homeschoolers are up to? Click here and here.

In my life this week…

Well, getting my posts up has been a little more difficult. Morning coffee has had to go (good-bye, old friend). Nausea and exhaustion are more common place. And I had one of those doctor appointments you actually look forward to. That’s right, folks—we’re expecting!

My daughter’s response: “We’re going to have three friends! Baby, brother, and sister—three friends!”

My sons’ announcement to our dinner company the other night: “Mommy has a baby in her tummy, and it’s birthday is in March!”

I’ve actually set up a new page in my blog header to track our progress, more for my distant family but you’re welcome to check on it every now and then. But now you know why posting has been a little different lately.

In our homeschool this week…

I’ve found myself cutting some of the fun extras this last couple of weeks. We’ve pieced together our frog study, randomly. And we’ve had a Van Gogh picture on our desk for awhile, but I’ve really focused on our core subjects primarily and then just sent everyone out to play. I’m assuming that, if this pregnancy is anything like my last two, my energy level will pick up and the nausea will fade away by the time our official school year starts. And then the fun add-ins will just add to the hype of a new year.

I’m also preparing to bring a file cabinet into the school room! My husband is donating it from his office, says he doesn’t use it much anyway. So I am thrilled! But, that has meant that our cozy corner has had to move. And I had to get creative to figure out where it would go. And therefore, under the built-in desk seemed like the perfect spot!

The cozy corner has been transformed into our “hidey hole” instead, and the kids love it! I’ll post details and specifics on the project later on. It was super easy, totally no-sew, and finished in a single afternoon (with morning sickness). I was thrilled.

Questions…

I’d love any tips from you experienced prego homeschoolers. What do I need to know heading into this year? Any advice or cautions? Please fill me with your wisdom.

Thanks for stopping by and checking on our week. This blog hop is always a highlight of the week for me. And to those of you who just started your new year back up, happy homeschooling!

In my life this week…

I attended our first homeschool-meet with some (actually quite a few) local homeschoolers. The kids had a great time, and I’m looking forward to the calendar of events and field trips that are scheduled.

Also, we went as a family to minor league baseball game. We are huge Minnesota Twins fans, and the Twins minor league team (Redwings) were in town playing the Durham Bulls. So, all dressed up in our Twins gear, we attended the Bulls/Redwings game.

We were given free tickets, with seats right behind home plate! It was so much fun, though very hot. But the kids enjoyed meeting the Bulls mascot, and eating cotton candy.

In our homeschool this week…

In addition to breaking out the frog nature study, we’ve also been flying through phonics and math. The pace of A Beka suddenly picked up dramatically. We’re covering 10 new numbers every few days, and have learned 4 new rules in addition to marking long vowels within the last 2 weeks. He’s keeping up okay, but I do feel like I’m holding on for dear life. We’re heading to the summer finish line at turbo speed!

Questions…

For those of you who use A Beka (or any curriculum, really) do you make adjustments to keep the pace steady or do you just buckle up for Full-Speed-Ahead?

If you do make adjustments, do you make them as you go, or do you gauge it as you are planning your lessons and make the adjustments ahead of time?

Links to Share…

I ran across a very cool website that allows your child to write and illustrate his own story! It looks like a really fun idea, and a fantastic way to get kids writing—even if they are typically not  your most enthusiastic writers. The website is Scribblitt.com. There are options to enter completed stories in regular contests, order a printed copy, or publish it to the community or website “library.”