Week 27: Spring is here!

This was one of those weeks in which the weather was truly the star. Spring does not always last long here in Chicagoland, or it can be suddenly replaced by unexpected winter weather (as happened last Saturday--snow appeared after several days in the 60s!) so we tried to take advantage of it when we could! We spent tons of time outdoors, even eating meals outdoors, and just soaked in so much sunlight. I have read that due to parents' worries about exposure to UV light, kids are actually becoming deficient in Vitamin D and developing rickets in some cases. Well, at least for this week, we didn't have that problem!

Schoolwise, some of our highlights were...

• Harry participated in an online class about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Homeschoolers from all over the country sign on and participate in a group discussion, facilitated by a teacher, and this was Harry's second time doing so. He is the youngest in the group but hasn't hesitated to "raise his hand" and make comments, which is great to see. I was always the kid in class who never wanted to raise my hand, and so I have tried to encourage our kids never to be afraid to participate. The result has been almost the opposite problem, that my kids will be the ones to raise their hands even if they don't know the answer! So we're still working on learning when to raise hands...but at least they're not afraid to speak up!

• In science, we focused on solids, liquids and gases, and did a little experiment to determine what happens to substances when they are put in the freezer. Both boys were surprised to see how little oil changed after a few hours in the freezer and how milk and juice became something entirely different!

• In the hopes that we find our digital camera soon, I won't go into great detail about this here, but we found out that whole peanuts are the way to lure blue jays into our backyard and we saw more of them this week than we had all year. The boys were thrilled by this large, colorful, and noisy bird, even if our smaller feathered friends flee at the first (loud!) sound of the blue jay. Hope to be able to capture them in a photo soon!

• Speaking of birds, we are still enjoying watching the live feed of Molly the Barn Owl. It's been amazing to watch her transform from nesting owl to mother owl, with now four out of her five owlets out of the shells. The boys have been amazed at how carnivorous owls are and how they swallow their prey, fur, bones and all! I think the educational value has been unbelievable. You'd never get to see this in a zoo, the kind of live biology lesson we've been experiencing over the past couple of weeks. The owlets will be in the nest for a couple more weeks yet before Molly teaches her owlets to hunt and they leave the nest to make their own way into the world. Here is a photo with at least a couple of her owlets visible:

• This Sunday, in addition to celebrating Easter, we will also celebrate Ron's 5th birthday! He is adamant that he wants to do school at home instead of going to kindergarten in the local school. So, this coming fall should be interesting, if I continue to use My Father's World's Exploring Countries and Cultures and also a separate kindergarten curriculum. It's already feels tough to fit everything in as is, so looking ahead, the coming fall will be quite the challenge! I marvel at veteran homeschoolers who manage way more kids than I do in their homeschool. Right now, I mostly hope that I'm not completely messing up my children's educational future. Thankfully, I know God is bigger than any of my mistakes. =)

Thanks for visiting, and have a happy Easter!

Week 26...and our 100th Day of School!

Well, I couldn't keep my own secret. I let the boys know on Monday that we'd celebrate our 100th day of homeschooling on Thursday, and needless to say, they were thrilled. I can't even remember what else we did this week...all the usual subjects...but this report will be all about our day of celebration! (Sadly, we have somehow lost our digital camera so I had to take these with a cell phone...apologies for the quality!)

I had star-shaped Post-Its leftover from another event, so late Wednesday night, I spread those all over the walls of our first floor and labeled them from 1-100 in random order. The boys' first task on Thursday morning, which they began while I was making breakfast, was to work together as a team, find all 100 stars, and place them in the correct order. They had a blast! And although perhaps they didn't figure out the most efficient way to go about the task, they did split up the work and demonstrated teamwork, which I was happy to see.


And of course, we had to eat something related to the number 100:


We read Psalm 100 during breakfast, a suggestion from another homeschooling mom whose blog had so many great ideas for celebrating the day. After breakfast, the boys finished the finding the 100 Stars, then we started working on our "100th Day of School" book, an idea I also borrowed from aforementioned blog! (Thank goodness for the Internet!) Aidan also got into the action by wanting to work with the older boys at the kitchen table:


Then it was our 100 P.E. Activities--the boys did the following to make 100 total:

• 10 jumping jacks
• 10 laps around the first floor
• 10 stairs
• 10 push ups
• 10 baskets in the basketball hoop
• 10 putts

• 10 hopping on one foot
  
• 10 air punches
• 10 touching toes
• 10 jump ropes
  

Then it was snack time! Of course, we had to have 100 snacks...10 each of the following healthy and nutritious goodies (hahaha....)

• 10 honey-roasted peanuts
• 10 Jelly Bellies
• 10 Goldfish crackers
• 10 pieces of ginger cookies (broken up because they were big)
• 10 Pringles
• 10 raisins
• 10 Nerds
• 10 organic chocolate bunny graham crackers
• 10 mini-marshmallows
• 10 Fruity Cheerios

After which, we attempted to do a craft with 100 craft sticks. This turned out to be an abysmal failure, which is probably a reflection on my total ineptitude with crafty activities! I wanted to give them the chance to use their imagination and make something together out of the craft sticks and glue--I even brought out a glue gun for the occasion!--but not having enough direction stymied the boys so I just scrapped that idea!

I had all these crazy idea for incorporating the number 100 into lunch, but I ran out of time so that will have to wait for next year. We kept to our normal Quiet Reading Time after lunch, during which I asked the boys if they thought they could read 100 pages total, which they each did, then in the afternoon, the boys had the 100 Blocks and 100 Cars project, which was to count out a total of 100 of each and then build something together. At first they were each taking their own set of blocks and doing something individually, but I intervened to encourage them to build something together. And here is what they came up with:

Harry had the clever idea to use the blocks to make the number "100":


And while they were working on this project, I threw some cupcakes into the oven and our last activity was to decorate 10 cupcakes, each with 10 sprinkles, to celebrate the end of our 100th day! The boys enjoyed this project the best, I think. =)

It's amazing to think that we have actually made it through 100 Days of Homeschooling; I never would have imagined doing so even a year ago! We've had our challenges and our struggles, as I imagine all homeschooling families do, but God has been faithful and an ever-present help. Hopefully by his grace we will make it to another 100 Day Celebration next year!

Spring Break! And, Week 25!

Last week was our Spring Break, which actually coincided with my husband's Spring Break for the first time since having school-aged children. This meant that he had the chance to spend LOTS of time with the boys! =) I used the time to work on my book about motherhood and found my new home-away-from-home, the McDonald's closest to our house. I know, it doesn't sound that appealing, but with free Wi-Fi and a lovely, quiet atmosphere between 9 a.m.-12 p.m., it was the perfect place to spend time thinking, reading and writing! (I even managed to avoid the temptation of buying anything unhealthy to eat there...no small feat once they started making french fries and the odor filled the place!)

Due to my writing obligations, we didn't go anywhere for the break, but DH did take the boys to a fun mini-golf outing...

...then later in the week, we visited a local farm to see maple sugaring in action as has been described in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books we've been reading this year. Sadly, the temperature was not cold enough to get the sap to run, but the boys had fun pretending to tap trees nonetheless!

The visitor's center also had a life-size model of a cow, complete with a rubber udder filled with water for kids to try their hand at milking (sorry for the poor picture quality below!):

The boys had a blast visiting all the animals at the farm, including some newly-born baby lambs...

One of my sons took the photo below. We all found it pretty hilarious. Guess these sheep were not in the mood to socialize with us!

We also saw horses, a chicken coop, and a number of cows. This one shocked Harry with the size of its tongue!

The farm also maintains an 1890s-era farmhouse, so we enjoyed the tour; we were only allowed to take a photo of the kitchen, with its stove and the bathtub hung on the wall. It was a great day at the farm!

As for school this past week....I think our highlight was doing our science activity of making water molecules. First we made some out of grapes:

(Dobby prefers to just eat the materials!)

Then we made a whole glassful out of marshmallows and the boys gave their dad the "water" when he came home:

As for other aspects of school, I've continued my more relaxed attitude this week, not worrying if we haven't completed everything as I have before. So we have fallen a little behind in our Classical Writing Primer, for example. I've decided that there is no reason we can't continue into the summer anything we didn't finish in the school year. But I also feel like we've made up for it by emphasizing math more of late; Harry started Singapore 2A but we've also continued working on word problems from 1B to give him more practice in that area. In the end, it doesn't really matter that he can add and subtract if he doesn't know when to use which operation! The word problems really help with understanding how to apply the operations so we keep working through those.

I've also learned that I know very little about phonics. I have no idea how I learned how to read; I was an early reader and probably learned mostly by sight, which is how Harry learned to read, largely on his own before kindergarten. (I'm a little concerned that this will all catch up to him with his spelling and that we'll soon have to do some remedial phonics work with him, too!) I've been more deliberate with Ron, using Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and as a result I've discovered all kinds of phonetic rules I never knew before. We're a little more than halfway through and things are getting confusing even for me--i.e, sometimes -ow sounds like "ow!" and sometimes it sounds like "oh!" Sometimes I wonder if Ron is able to keep all this straight as I barely can myself! I think we'll be starting to build in more review of the different possible sounds soon. This makes me wonder, how exactly do they teach reaching in the public schools?

Lastly, one of the states we covered this week was Iowa, Harry's birthstate nearly 8 years ago! Here we are just before our move away from Iowa, in front of the hospital where he was born. And the next shot is basically what we saw all around us for miles on end. One day we'll have to take him back there to see it all in person for himself. The town he was born was so small that they announced every baby birth over the radio, and as we were one of the very few Asians there, random strangers would easily spot us and know exactly who Harry was. Life in a small town!

Next week...we celebrate our 100th day of school! I need to start gathering ideas to make it fun. Technically, we've done more than 100 days including co-op days, but to keep it simple I've just counted M-Th days so we've reached this point later in the school year than others. I haven't told the boys yet so shhhhhh.....let's keep it a secret from them! =)

(P.S. I forgot to mention that we've been enjoying this live online feed of a nesting barn owl named Molly...she has been incubating 5 eggs this past months and one hatched today! Fun to check out to see all kinds of animal behavior, including the amazing way owls consume rodents and their unique mating calls and rituals!)

Weeks 23 and 24--Tweaking, Here and There...

So much for my grand plans to update the blog each week! Last week, the whole family was hit by a virus, one strong enough to get all five of us. Usually one of us can manage to stay healthy, but not this time. We took it easy, had one complete sick day, and just chugged along where we could. If Harry had still been in school, I probably would have had him go if he didn't have a fever, but at home, we could just take our time and he could nap if he needed to, a flexibility I'm sure he enjoyed.

Instead of writing out subject by subject what we did, which is a little more tedious and probably not very interesting to read, I'll just hit the highlights of the past two weeks:

Grace: Not a topic to study, per se, but something I feel like I've learned the hard way this year is to give more grace both to the kids and to myself in this homeschooling journey. Sometimes I feel compelled to just push push push to get things done, instead of enjoying one of the prime benefits of homeschooling, which is its flexibility. I guess that part of me worries that if we don't push to get our objectives done for the day, we'll fall behind, and that is certainly a possibility if we completely slack off. Other times I feel I've been too hard on the boys and not encouraging enough. In those moments, I tend to wonder, "would a real public school teacher be better for them????"

So, this week I have been thinking about how to inject more joy and grace into our homeschooling life. Today, everyone woke up grumpy due to middle-of-the-night nosebleeds for two of the boys; no one was in a good mood this morning! But the sun was out and it was a balmy (for Chicagoland) 40-ish degree day. I decided that after morning music practice and math, we'd have an extended outdoor recess together and then just do science experiments in the afternoon. Let's just say this decision was a hit with the boys. They had a chance to bask in some sun and slide in the muddy piles around our house from all the melting snow:

Harry later said that "this was the best day I've ever had!" Well, maybe it was an exaggeration, but it's definitely making me think more about how I can increase the fun factor in our homeschooling life. Something to dwell on further in the future!

Math: One thing I learned after our Singapore Math assessment last post is that I really need to build in more review of the concepts for Harry. I've been doing math fact drills several times a week, but what he really needed was more problems to practice concepts such as double-digit addition and subtraction. So last week and this week, that is what we've been doing. I've tried to let go of comparing what he is doing with other kids, either other homeschoolers or his peers in public school, and instead just take the time we need to reach a point in which Harry really demonstrates mastery of the concept. Today, he scored 17/18 on his work in addition and subtraction within 100, which was a great score for him and I was really happy with his progress.

Science: I wouldn't say that science comes completely naturally to me (this from the woman who was pre-med and spend half her college academic life in a laboratory of some sort or another), so sometimes when time is tight I will gloss over those activities. But today, I decided we would have fun with our assigned experiments in Science in the Kitchen and Science in Air. The kids had a blast with discovering how big their lung capacity was by blowing air into a bottle full of water as seen here...

(The amount of air in the bottle represents their lung capacity!)

We also had fun testing different substances to see if they were acidic or not. When you pour boiling water onto red cabbage leaves, the liquid becomes a lovely shade of purple:

Then, if you put something acidic into the liquid, it changes the color to a pinkish-purple. We tested out a number of substances--lemon juice, milk, salt, sugar, vinegar--but the two most interesting ones were Coke Zero...

And, perhaps best of all, kimchi (which is the national side dish of Korea...pickled/fermented, spicy cabbage, which sounds unappealing but which most Koreans cannot live without!) Anyway, it was clearly acidic, as Harry expresses below:

Future questions...Looking ahead, I'm realizing that it's already time to start thinking about the coming fall! Ron wants to do kindergarten at home, so it looks like I may be dealing with two different curricula for him and for Harry, which is a little daunting. I'm not sure what to do about Latin for Harry...I'm not sure if we should continue with Classical Writing or switch to something like Institute for Excellence in Writing...I wonder, I wonder, I wonder! Well, experienced homeschoolers say that it takes a good three years to hit one's stride when it comes to these kinds of decisions and routines. I guess it's all right for me to experiment for another year! =)

Spring break for us next week, DH gets the boys and I get to research and write, so I'll post again in a couple of weeks. Thanks for visiting!

(P.S. On another note, there was a fascinating article in the New York Times yesterday on the topic of building better teachers. One of the main people profiled in the article was Doug Lemov, someone I knew in high school, who I haven't heard anything about in 20+ years! I'm glad to see he is doing something so valuable and interesting with his life. He has a book coming out soon called Teach Like a Champion, and I got in touch with him via Facebook to see whether he thought the book would have content applicable for homeschooling parents. He says that a good portion of the content is more about classroom management in largely urban school settings, but that the academic content is definitely relevant to homeschoolers. Check it out!)

Week 22: First Big Test and Auto Show!

In an effort to be more consistent with blogging about our efforts, I'll try to be more succinct this week! Our Adventures/MFW-related topics of the week were:

• Jesus the Head of the Body
• History/Geography: Going West by Wagon Train; Illinois, Alabama
• Science: The Human Body

(MFW again nicely tying together its Bible and Science topics!)

I don't actually have much to share about the above, and unfortunately, I didn't take too many photos last week. It felt as though our week went by very fast, and we weren't able to finish some of the activities planned for the week, so we'll save them for this week and hope we can get through them all. I've noticed that our homeschooling day is creeping to a later starting time, which sometimes results in our not getting everything done in time, so I think I have to start being a little more diligent on my end to get downstairs and have breakfast ready earlier. Of course this means I need to go to bed earlier, too! Easier said than done when I enjoy the quiet of the nighttimes, with all the kiddos sound asleep.

In other subjects....

Math: This week we did our Singapore Math 1B evaluation. Harry had 90+ questions to answer based on his work over the past many months on this book, and he achieved our goal of at least 80% correct, although I was hoping to see something higher, truth be told. But, the test showed me several areas in which we have to go back and focus attention (namely double-digit subtraction!), so we'll go ahead and do that this coming week, making sure we shore up any area that seems shaky, before we proceed. I do love Singapore Math overall, but this shows me that we could use some more practice time on the concepts, which I'll start to try building in. Although it is sobering to recognize that I bear most of the responsibility for how he is doing academically, at the same time I'm glad to be aware of the areas of both Harry's strengths and weaknesses so that I can spend time focusing on those areas that need it. Ron continues cruising through Singapore Earlybird A, which is now doing a unit on shapes; after he's done with the day's assignment he keeps asking me, "when do I do math?" I both find it funny that he only thinks of math as numbers and algorithms and also relate; that's how I often think of math when it is actually much, much more!

Latin and Chinese: I discovered last week when listening to Harry doing his Prima Latina lesson that he had been forgetting more than I realized. So, this past week we did a lot of Latin review instead of forging ahead. We also met with a new Chinese tutor to help Harry with his pronunciation and conversational speaking; our progress in Mandarin has slowed this year as a result of not being a part of the Chinese school we were in last year, but on the other hand our stress level has decreased significantly and we're still making forward progress overall, so I'm still happy with our decision to do Chinese on our own. It's difficult but so long as we have regular time with a native speaker, I think we will be okay.

Handwriting: Harry's cursive is really coming along nicely. I gave him some "Fruits of the Spirit" stickers to play with last week, and he did this on his own initiative:

We still have a way to go, of course, but I'm pleased with how things are going thus far with our New American cursive program. As for brother Ron, I switched him to the more traditional Zaner-Bloser font this past week, per last week's post about the downsides of italicized fonts and pencil tracing. Some people I know actually start right off with teaching cursive but I'm not sure I'm that brave! It feels challenging enough to help my 7 year old with it!

Lastly, we took a day off from our weekly homeschool co-op so that my husband could take Harry and Ron to the annual Chicago Auto Show. Thought I'd share a couple of photos from their outing. There weren't too many kids there on a school day so they had the run of the place in the morning! Ah, the fringe benefits of homeschooling. =)

Back to reality now with a new week. Hopefully I'll get the next report up sooner! Have a great week.

Light Week and Week 21

Last week was our "light week", although in some ways the phrase is a bit of a misnomer. Not having the full load of schoolwork means that I have to instead find other things to fill the time! But, for the kids, especially Harry, it feels like a welcome break away from some of the things they typically do. I usually have Harry do a few math drills during a light week, just to keep those muscles flexing; we stick with our daily "quiet reading time" but I give him more flexibility to choose what he wants to read; I usually also incorporate some videos that relate to topics we've been studying. So for example, as last week we studied the story behind the "Star Spangled Banner", I let him watch a history video about the U.S. flag and he also watched some of the Liberty Kids video series, which he has been enjoying. Ron gets a break from his usual daily dose of reading, math and handwriting, and the kids have fun playing more than usual. When the weather gets nicer, I'm sure light weeks will equate to much more outside time, which I'm looking forward to for them.

We also started on our first lapbooking project, as I mentioned last week. I have no idea if lapbooks are something our kids will enjoy or not; they look like fun to me but I've learned that my idea of fun and their idea of fun don't always match! Harry worked on a project related to the Winter Olympic Games and seemed to enjoy the process, but I'm not sure he really fell in love with the idea. Still, I'm glad we tried one and I hope he'll be open to doing more in the future.

And last week was also our first week for the spring semester of our homeschool co-op. This semester, I've included Ron in the fun, and the boys are each taking three classes; Harry takes a gym class in the first hour while Ron takes a class on Dr. Seuss books, then both take karate and art together. Meanwhile, I take along my netbook and take advantage of the free wireless to get work done (and update blogs!) Here the boys pose in their art shirts at the church where co-op is held:
In fact, it was at this very location, on a Friday morning nearly a year ago, that I first felt God nudging me to consider homeschooling. I was interviewing the senior pastor's wife for the book I'm working on, she was telling me about her own experiences homeschooling, and as I watched the kids milling around at this co-op I felt the unmistakable sense of God telling me, "You need to look into this." Lo and behold, here we are! I will always have fond feelings sitting here in this church, knowing that this is where our homeschooling journey began.

As for this week, #21, here is what we accomplished:

Math: Harry is almost done with Singapore 1B. We will review everything in 1B next week and make sure we have all the concepts down, perhaps spending some more time on double-digit addition and subtraction, which we haven't practiced doing mentally much yet. The Singapore way is different from the way I have done it in the past so we could both probably use some practice with it! Ron is continuing through Singapore Earlybird A and so far the material is pretty basic, but it seems a good foundation for what is to come. I understand that Earlybird B becomes more "mathy", but we're in no rush, so we'll just ease through the A book and have fun with it.

History and Geography: Robert Fulton was our main focus this week, along with the states Indiana and Mississippi. We didn't really have any activities this past week that were history-related; Harry mainly learned about Fulton through his reading time as he enjoyed the Fulton biography recommended by My Father's World. I asked Harry this week what his favorite subject was, and he chose history, which I found interesting because I have never personally enjoyed history! But I think a big reason for this is because he is experiencing history through "living books", which means historical fiction and literature that helps the history come alive, as opposed to just reading through a dry textbook and stuffing facts into his head (which is how I remember history when I was a kid). I consider it one of the huge gaps in my own college-level education that I never took a history (or art history, for that matter) course, busy as I was with pre-med classes that have actually never been put into use in my adult life! Well, maybe all that biology I took will help me if I ever have to teach it to my boys. Nothing is wasted in God's economy, as they say.

Language Arts: We are doing the usuals in our LA...the only new thing I have to report is that I read an interesting study by an organization that teaches handwriting, claiming that you shouldn't have your students learn handwriting by tracing letters, that fluency comes from either finger tracing in the air or by just attempting to write the letters or words without tracing. (You can see the presentation here.) I also recently read this article about why you shouldn't use D'Nealian script as opposed to a more standard block handwriting font such as Zaner-Bloser. I had been using D'Nealian with Ron because it is the standard in our school district, and it is all that Harry ever learned himself from preschool through 1st grade! But the kindergarten curriculum I am considering (Memoria Press's program) uses a copybook that is not in D'Nealian, so I am planning to switch Ron to Zaner-Bloser from this point on. Hopefully this won't completely throw off his muscle memory! We'll see how it all goes!

This is both the positive and negative about homeschooling--you have to make all these decisions yourself and trust they are the right ones, or change things if you feel they're not working. It never would have occurred to me before to even question the handwriting font that our city uses with its students. Now, I have to evaluate every decision for every aspect of their education. Daunting, absolutely. But also freeing, too. Now I know why they are learning what they are learning because I've made the choices rather than relying on someone else to make those determinations for me.

Science: This week, with our concurrent emphasis on Jesus as the Vine for another week, the science topic was, fittingly, juice. I saved all the science activities for Friday and had my DH handle the fun with the boys, a new experience for all three of them. Here are photos they took from their afternoon together, squeezing different kinds of fruit and using the juice for a variety of activities:



Languages: This year we've had a bit of setback by not having Harry attend Chinese school. It's definitely harder to keep up, especially since I know no Chinese whatsoever myself! We've tried to have a high schooler fluent in the language come to tutor Harry, but we haven't had much consistency with any tutor in particular. But, we keep regularly using the Better Chinese curriculum to get used to the sounds of the language and to hear stories and songs in Mandarin, to the point that even my youngest enjoys the "I love my family" tune we (attempt) to sing in Mandarin.

As for Latin, we are continuing through Prima Latina, but on a recent review I discovered how many vocabulary words and phrases Harry has forgotten from previous chapters. I need to start instilling more regular review of our past work, I realize now. On the flip side, it's fun to hear Harry use Latin phrases mixed up with English, such as when he told me that "you are a stupor mundi." (Wonder of the world! LOL!)

I may have forgotten things here and there but that's generally what we've been up to this week and last. My other question that I'm wrestling with is how to give our boys more time with other kids, because they just haven't had much chance to hang out with children other than themselves. That's largely my fault, because I haven't been very proactive about setting up playdates and such, or the times we have tried to set things up we have been hampered by illnesses. Going forward, I am going to try to be more proactive in this area, and we'll see if I make any progress in the weeks to come!

I also am deeply grateful for online homeschooling communities, as I derive a great deal of support from the ones I participate in, particular the forum boards of The Well Trained Mind. I cannot even imagine doing homeschooling without the Internet and without a virtual community of support! I posted a question about challenges I experience as a homeschooling mom, and I get plenty of responses in minutes. I love the Internet!

And this has nothing to do with homeschooling, but as I am watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I thought it was fitting to end with a last photo. Enjoy the Games!

(with thanks to Nono on the Well Trained Mind forum boards for the torch idea!!)

Weeks 17-20...Back to Blogging!

I can't believe the last time I wrote, it was in 2009! Well, it's been a busy month since then. We took a lovely two weeks off of school to celebrate the Christmas holidays with family visiting for a good part of that time. We eased back into school the week of January 4th and have been plugging away for a month! Next week will be a "light week" during which my plans are to finally start a lapbooking project, so we'll see how that goes. But now for a summary of a month's work of work! I will try to be succinct!


Bible: We've been continuing our tour through the various names of Jesus, including "Immanuel", "Lamb of God", and currently "the Vine". Adventures in My Father's World continues to find clever ways to connect a variety of disciplines; for example, the week we studied the idea of Jesus being the Lamb of God, we created a lamb out of cotton, then studied Eli Whitney in history and did several other activities related to cotton. We glued tiny bits of green paper to a fluffed-up cotton ball to illustrate what cotton really looks like, with all its seeds; then, the boys had to try to remove all the "seeds" in order to comprehend how difficult a job this was, and why Whitney's cotton gin was so important.


History/Geography: In addition to Eli Whitney, we've learned about...

• The life of the pioneers who floated westward on the Ohio River
• The Louisiana Purchase (a bargain at a grand price of $15 million!)
  
• The War of 1812 and the Star Spangled Banner
• Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Louisiana (I never knew that "Cajun" originally referred to Canadians displaced by the British during the French and Indian War!)
  

Math: Harry is on his last unit in Singapore 1B, having spent the last couple of weeks adding and subtracting two-digit numbers. Next up: currency, which is perfectly timed with the upcoming fundraising activity at our church called "Change for Haiti", to encourage kids to find all the spare change they can to donate to Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Ron is working through Singapore EarlyBird and seems to be missing RightStart math, which I'm a little surprised about. I thought he'd enjoy the kid-friendly format of EarlyBird, but I may end up combining the two programs. I'm having him review some basic concepts in Singapore EB, and I think he's getting tired of my asking questions like, "what comes after 5? Before 5? What numbers are missing in this list?" etc. But, I just want to make sure he has the right foundation before we plow forward.

Science: The boys have been studying weather, living things/cells, animals, and plants. Some of the activities we enjoyed were creating a jello model of a cell and discovering how important water is for plants, illustrated by comparing popcorn kernels covered by a napkin soaked with water with dry popcorn kernels over five days. Although the conclusion sounds so obvious to an adult, the kids marveled at the transformation of the seeds over five days.



Language Arts: Harry continues to make progress through all our normal LA activities--spelling, handwriting, Classical Writing Primer, First Language Lessons--while Ron is continuing with his work in Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading, as well as practicing his handwriting through the use of D'Nealian practice sheets.

Crossroads and Questions: Looking ahead, now that we are already on the second half of our school year, I find myself asking a number of questions to which there are no easy answers. For example...

• Should Ron go to kindergarten at the local PS? Or should he just stay home and continue his progress? Ron is probably our most extroverted child and would probably enjoy being in a class with other kids. But after having him home for most of the week thus far, it's hard to imagine him being in a school setting five days a week.
• If Ron does stay home, I have to figure out which curriculum to use for him...not easy given the hundreds and hundreds of choices out there. I'm looking at Memoria Press's new kindergarten program, as well as My Father's World kindergarten curriculum; both look like they would have elements I'd like, if not for the phonics/reading and math, for which I'll continue what I'm already doing, then for the other activities and subjects. It feels impossibly difficult right now to have to choose...praying for wisdom to know what to do here.
  
• Similarly for Harry, I'm pretty sure we'll keep the homeschooling "experiment" going for another year. But I am asking all sorts of questions about what the best way is to teach subjects such as writing and handwriting; whether our approach is really helping Harry develop a love of learning--most days he is just happy to be done with school! Maybe all kids are like this, but I wonder if there is more that I can do to make our learning experiences memorable and fun? It's hard to find a balance between doing so and still requiring the work that needs to be done, work that perhaps is less enjoyable--reviewing math fact, learning new math concepts, practicing handwriting, etc. I also find myself asking on occasion, would Harry hold himself to a higher standard if he were in school? Perhaps being around peers would motivate him to excel in a way that doesn't happen when at home. And how can I tell if the work is giving me his best for what is to be expected at his age and ability? Questions, questions, questions!

So, light week comes at a good time for us. I'm feeling the need for a little break to ponder some of these questions! But overall, we are continuing to forge ahead and make progress, and even if there are gaps in some areas, we trust that the Lord who has led us down this path will not forsake either our efforts or our kids. Thank goodness! =)