Summer!

 

Our first week of summer schedule was a success. Whew! It is going to be a great summer....but I will be glad for the in-breath that is autumn! Leaves turning, Michaelmas, cool breezes. My favorite season. In the meantime, though, I will enjoy SUMMER!

 

E was super nervous about the gym schedule change, so I made him a schedule:

Which helped, along with a new bedtime routine to include a guided imagery sort of ongoing story (with the hope that when he's anxious and trying to fall asleep, he can continue the story himself to calm down).

 

During the school year, E's gymnastics does not let out until 8pm. He gets home at 8:15, eats dinner, showers off all the chalk, and.....doesn't wind down until after 10pm. And that's with a loooot of help from us. Luckily E then sleeps in until 8am, but meanwhile C has to be up at 5:30 or earlier for work. After a whole school year of this, we are worn out! e also started sleeping in a bit in the last few months, pushing her bedtime later and later. We needed a new plan!

 

Along came summer. No more late trainings. Woo hoo! I started waking the kids up at 6am, making sure we spent a lot of time outside, and bam! For the most part, no trouble with earlier bedtimes! e is now solidly falling asleep before 8 and waking up on her own at 6. E....well....mostly he's asleep by 9:15. Sometimes 11. I still have to wake him at 6 so I know it isn't internalized yet. Still a fair amount of anxiety at bedtime. But I see improvements. Slow and steady, right? It's only been one week.

 

The 'lessons' block you see on the schedule includes math and spelling for E and piano practice for e. Plenty of exploring and creating, too. And gardening. Our garden has taken off! We have snap peas every day (yum!) and most days a strawberry. Baby watermelon, cucumbers, and peppers. Delicious herbs. E loves to chew on chives.

 

Yesterday we went to see Malificent at the base theater. E had been so anxious about being in a theater- too loud, too big. But on base, the movie theater is in an auditorium where band concerts are also held. The screen is smaller and farther away, the sound not as loud. E came away happy, as did the rest of us. :)

 

Birthdays, closets, gardens...

e turned 7. A rising second grader! She got her donuts, fruit pizza, dinner pizza, ham and cheese, and everything else she requested. She had a little party at the pool. She got very thoughtful gifts. Her friend J even gave her his lucky fishing pole! From family she was given a pool pass (with a promise to use it every Friday, weather pending), a week of day camp at the botanical gardens, and a few garden art lessons. Plus two new dresses- Nana is the supplier of all things pretty- and some art odds and ends for creativity from Grandma. Hard to believe my baby is 7. First grade is over. Onward and upward, right?

C took a week of leave and built E a closet. Built. A. Closet. I'm impressed. I married a musician, not a carpenter! Yet he has risen to the challenge and did a beautiful job. In this picture I haven't quite finished painting. I love E's color choices. Such a happy room.

Our wedding anniversary was at the end of May, but I had to include a picture of the first ever anniversary card we've received from our children. :) 14 years, after 5 years of dating! (I love C's hair in the pic!)

Finishing up school...though to some degree we will school year-round. More on that later.

 

After 6 delicious radishes were harvested and eaten, we opted to leave the last two (which have since bloomed the prettiest purple flowers!) as sacrificial plants. We collected any caterpillars we found and watched them grow. When they emerged....cabbage moths! My apologies to nearby gardeners, but we all learned a lot from watching those little buggers.

We went strawberry picking with our friends A and D and their mom Y- they are teaching us Spanish! But about the strawberries...we left the patch with 2 full buckets. By the time we got home, well, they weren't so full. :)

Our snap peas are producing! Each day we get at least 5. Next year we will plant many more...these are delicious! Our pumpkin and cucumber are flowering, and baby peppers are growing. The basil and chives are very happy. A new batch of strawberries is even ripening!

I love this picture. She continues to be the comic relief on our toughest days.

 

Happy Mathrs Day

I am way, way behind the times. Way. Way, WAY behind. We've been busy with lessons, a birthday, a closet, more lessons- which I'll share soon- a new friend, leave, and the garden. Oh, the garden. Life is good. So here's a few pics from (ahem) weeks ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chorus Concert

Yesterday was e's chorus concert at an assisted living facility. The children sang like angels! It was heart-warming to see their little (big) personalities come out as they sang, and I know it brought joy to the residents. This picture is from their warm-up.

Being May, yard work season is in full swing! The kids and I have full yard duties since C is busy writing papers for his class. We need to get a trellis up for our square-foot garden; everything is growing fast! The lawn needs mowing, weeds need pulling, flower bushes need dead-heading, beds need mulching, seeds need watering...I suspect I may only get assistance from my smallest helper, though. My bigger one is fully immersed in a book!

 

Happy weekending!

 

Spelling Adventures

Day 5 of Sequential Spelling, and E is surprising himself!

The way this program works is by building on a sound. If one can spell 'in' then one can spell 'sin'. From there is 'sinning', 'inning', and 'beginning'. Very little pre-teaching, just a quiz every day in which he corrects each word before moving to the next. Each day adds and subtracts words, building and moving forward. Every day a new quiz. No practice, no memorizing. Patterns and definitions. That's all.

 

I did not teach the 'double the consonant and add ing' rule...the kids are supposed to pick up on the pattern themselves so they can really own it. We had a small argument over not doing that for plural; you can see with 'fins' he really wanted to write 'finnes'.

 

It was pure pride on his face when we got to 'disagree', a new word. First try, he got it. And 'beginning'. Remember, this is day 5. Five! I do believe it is a success.

 

Reading and Whole Lot of Math

These were the books on our table last week!

The People Could Fly is a recommended read-aloud for first grade, but also fit in with E's geography lessons. Good stories, but hard to read! They are written with an accent. e asked me why I was talking like our librarians, lol...

 

Frog and Toad was e's reading for the week. One week of Explode the Code and she's all over books now! Confidence. She now makes a beeline for the Easy Readers and has her nose in a book the whole way home. Love, love, love. She helps me scan book spines in the chapter book section for read-alouds, and actually found a new book of Pooh stories written in the old style of A.A. Milne AND a Paddington book by reading titles. Very proud of herself.

 

House building for Children is for E. We are finally going to start his THIRD GRADE building project. It's going to sit under the fig tree, up near the fence. I'm pretty excited. Math in action.

e's math consolidation main lesson block has come to a close. I am so sad. I love these stories! Best ever. e enjoyed them as much as E did, and produced entirely different and yet similar main lesson book pages. These two children of mine are so different and yet so much alike. :)

 

Subtraction:

Multiplication:

Division:

At this point, e can count forward AND back up to times 12 by 2s, 3s, 5s, 10s, and 100s. She's pretty math savvy. Both of my children have gained wonderful number sense from every day living and observation, so the four processes come almost naturally. Such a different approach from the way I learned math in school.

 

One of those everyday life experiences has been our square-foot garden. e is right beside me every step of the way. E likes to seem indifferent to it...but I know otherwise.

There is so much math to be done in the garden without me trying to create it. The kids naturally start calculating things and announcing their answers!

 

And science. For instance, is this one plant producing two shades of flowers, or two growing close together? We can't tell. E is trying to think up ways to find out.

e's most exciting addition to our garden: strawberries! She got to taste the first fruits of her labors today.

No garden of ours would be complete without a chocolate mint plant, right? The plant on the left is chocolate mint. On the right sits a peppermint. Mmmm.

I hope everything survives the scorching summer. I'm learning as I go!

 

Story of the World

We've started over with Story of the World volume one, this time doing a family lesson book. I made the first page after we read about Nomads. I told them we were creating our own textbook, so we could look back and refresh our memories whenever we wanted. I showed them a textbook I'd checked out from the library and asked if they'd rather learn from one, or make their own. E's view of main lesson books immediately changed! How cool that we are creating our own books! Somehow he hadn't made that connection before.

For chapter two, I drew the map and border. We summarized it together. I asked E if he wanted to write it in. Of course he didn't. I asked e, and she said YES! So of course E wanted to then. Silly boy. e wrote the first two lines, then E wrote the rest. They collaborated on the picture.

Then we created the Nile in a pan. Potting soil, grass seed, and some flood waters. It's growing pretty well.

We enjoy Story of the World. A year or two ago we mummified a game hen for the chapter on Egyptian mummies. It was seriously disgusting....but never did smell bad. Pretty amazing science lesson for all of us. I can't wait to get further in. There are four volumes, from the ancients up to the present day.