Got A Yearning For Some Learning

The Dough Sphinx

2008-11-13T21:47:00.000-08:00

Our history lessons are sinking in. We've been noticing pyramids and the Sphinx in our scripture story books (Moses & Joseph in Egypt). We borrowed the movie, the Prince of Egypt from the library and pointed out those things again as we saw them. The kids pointed out the Egyptian jewelry and the hieroglyphs on the walls. Then, Tuesday night as I was making bread, Miss K asked to help knead it. When I turned my attention back to her THIS is what I saw. The Dough Sphinx! Note the human head, body of a lion, complete with tail (I haven't been able to determine if the real Sphinx has a tail. I haven't found a rear view to figure that out. It's been a burning question in our home this past week, and we've come to the conclusion that OF COURSE the Sphinx has a tail.)
Later it was made into bread, and we've been eating PB & J Sphinx for the past 2 days.

The great and not so great

2008-11-06T14:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was probably our best school day yet. It was simple and there were no special picture moments, but it was just nice. We got all our lessons done. Mom was feeling on top of things (and was even able to get bathrooms cleaned and 2 loads of laundry done). The boys were happy. No tears today! Miss K joined us for history -- our very favorite subject -- and we learned more about mummies and ancient Egyptian beliefs. There was time to play with friends, go sledding on our neighbor's lawn, and have a huge snowball fight. Good day!

Today--not so good. Struggling to get through lessons. When it was time to get Miss K from school we'd just finished math--the only subject we'd touched so far. Hard. We met Miss K's friends and joined them for lunch at McDonalds so all the kids could play. That's the good part of homeschool. If it's not going well you can just take a break. We came home and started history, phonics, and Language arts. It's been a long day. Still good, but there have been tears.

Election Day

2008-11-05T14:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday our friends invited us to join their family in a lesson about elections. We made pigs and wolf puppets to go along with the stories we heard about the 3 Little Pigs, and an alternate version of that story told by the wolf's point of view.

(I really wanted to post the photo with all the kids and their puppets, but someone was wearing a shirt that had our state's name written on it. You can find the photo on our family blog instead.)

After listening to the story we each got to vote on which story we liked the best. Aly made this really cute ballot box and tally sheet.

The kids took turns tallying the votes on this bar graph.

The pigs version won, but just barely. Aly explained that every vote counts and if anyone had decided not to vote the results would have been different.

Afterwards, we voted on which kind of cookies to eat. The sugar cookies won!

Cheaters!

2008-11-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Mom had to run upstairs to quickly help Dad for a second. She told the boys they could play. A minute later, when she came back downstairs, she found the boys still seated and laughing together. They had gone through all the subtraction flashcards, copied them down, and thought they were so clever and funny for copying the answer off the backs of the cards. What funny boys!

Goals and Deadlines

2008-11-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

We got an email from our teacher this week saying that the first trimester is coming to an end. We should now be approximately 35% done with our lessons. YIKES!!! We're no where near that. In our defense we did start a month later than most. We had some serious kinks to work out. We've had some major distractions (almost daily). And of course, we're dealing with some pretty serious learning disabilities. There's our excuses. Now that those have been recorded I can stop whimpering about how behind we are and we can move on to the solution!

The official school year ends May 22. We need to be 80% done before then so we can get our 2nd grade curriculum ordered and work on that over the summer. So here's the plan:

We are just starting week 12 of school (even though it's really only our week 9--again, since we started late). In order to hit 100% by May 22, and ensuring we'll be able to order next year's materials before next year, we need to do 6 lessons per week.

No big deal. That was our plan before anyway, we just weren't getting it done. But now the heat is on and we have to.