Weekly Wrap Up 10/18 to 10/22

THE 3 READS ~
Me ~ Weapons of Mass Instruction & Pride and Prejudice
La ~ Finished Percy Jackson Series- The Lightening Thief & Started Shiloh
Chris ~ The Creature from Jekyll Island
Morning Read Aloud ~ Finished The Horse  & His Boy, Started The Best Worst Halloween Ever
Evening Read Aloud ~ Finished Gulliver's Travels

Around the House ~
No extra projects to speak of this week. I did however set fire to some tortilla chips in the oven. That was fun. ;-) Luckily nothing else caught on fire. I kept the oven door shut & the fire just burned itself out. It was my first kitchen fire.

Out & About Learning ~
This week we had our regular Homeschool class at the Aquatic center. They did team building games.
We had our monthly art class at the Kimball Art Center. We studied this very unique artist,Devorah Sperber, who recreates masterpieces like DaVinci’s Last Supper out of hanging rows of spools of thread. To top that off she creates them upside down and then you look through a small crystal globe and they appear right side up. It was amazing and gave me an opportunity to talk about hoe our eyes work.

Study Time ~
This week was a great study week! Here are some highlights.

• La finished 2 project on India. One about Henna & another about the Hindi Language
• We caught & studied a yellow jacket in a bug jar.
• worked on spelling, cursive, latin, math
• I have been doing Life of Fred: Fractions. La loves to do this with me. The stories are very entertaining & she can do some of the problems. Even if she cannot do the arithmetic (like long division), she can tell me how to figure out the problem (e.g. you need to multiply the hours times 60 minutes). We are on Chapter 10 & it is getting too hard for her. So she asked me to stop doing Life of Fred on my own and help her learn all she needs to know so she can finish the Fractions with me. Now that is the art of inspiring!!!
• I found out that La understand negative numbers & can add and subtract them!

Afternoons ~
Nothing to note out of the ordinary this week. The weather has been great so lots of outside time with the neighbor kids.

Weekly Wrap Up 10.1.10

What we are reading ~

Me ~ Weapons of Mass Instruction

La ~ Percy Jackson Series- The Lightening Thief & Brewster's Courage

Chris ~ The Creature from Jekyll Island

Morning Read Aloud ~ Finished Voyage of the Dawn Treader & Started The Horse  & His Boy

Evening Read Aloud ~ Chris started reading Gulliver's Travels to us.

Around the House ~ This week I made bread for the first time! it came out really good. I might make my grandmother's sticky buns next week.

I also started & am still trying to finish some onsie dresses for a birthday gift. Our pastor's granddaughter is having her first birthday party on Sunday. I will post pictures of these when I get them done.

Out & About Learning ~ Firefly Corps Meeting was Monday. We learned a lot about Greek Gods & made a Greek time line. It was fun. friday was our our Greek fieldtrip to the Olympic Cauldron Park & lunch at Yanni's Greek Express. Yum!

Study Time ~

A few less lessons this week & more organic learning. I let 2 days slip by without official study time. Mind you a lot of other learning was done, but do want to get back to 5 days a week of scheduled study time. The day just goes much smoother when we do this.

• Latin 2 days
• Sequential Spelling 2 days
• Math lesson and practice. I was pleasantly surprised that La understand place value of to one trillion. She is always surprising me with what she knows.
• La on her own
• geoboards, hook & latch, lots of reading, practiced her tin whistle
• In Momschool I  covered the following
• Peloponnesian Wars 
• Odysseus & the Cyclops
• Looked up the species of some trees on our hike

Afternoons ~ We either continued studies or La played outside. She has been collecting and chopping acorns. I love to see her spend a few hours outside everyday. Chores & errands also ate up a few afternoons this week.

See you next Friday!

Weekly Wrap Up 9.26.10

What we are reading ~

Me ~ Weapons of Mass Instruction

La ~ Percy Jackson Series- The Lightening Thief

Chris ~ The Creature from Jekyll Island

Morning Read Aloud ~ Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Around the House ~ Getting back on track for daily chores. La is starting to help me with every household job now. She doesn't like cleaning toilets! Who does? She asked me why she needs to do all this with me. I said, "Because we don't have cows." 

Out & About Learning ~ Art class at the Kimball Art Center & Homeschool PE Class.

Study Time ~

Our scheduled study time is from 9:30 until lunch. La has been wanting to do lots of lessons during this time. This is very different than from years past. In the past we mostly did whatever we felt like during this time, but now she is wanting to make plans and is sticking to them. Here is what we did this week.

• 1-2 Latin Lessons 4 days - one great thing about this Latin book I have is that is covering English grammar by talking about subjects, verbs & conjunctions, etc...
• Sequential Spelling 4 days
• A science experiment about fall leaves
• Lorelei finished 2 Greek projects 
• Olympic fact finding exercise
• Researching how Christmas is celebrated in Greece
• In Momschool I  covered the following
• Ferdinand Magellan
• First Day of Fall
• Thales - Greek mathetician
• Euripides - Greek playwright

Afternoons ~ We either continued studies or La played outside. She has been collecting and chopping acorns. I love to see her spend a few hours outside everyday.

Next week La asked me to plan Math a couple days. WOW! She is asking for math! 

I hope to do a weekly update for every week. Firefly Corps meeting tomorrow. Should be fun!!!!

Our First Official "School Week"

This week was our first week of getting back on track from Summer. In our home we are always learning, but I try to keep a more structured schedule during the traditional school year. I started out with a great schedule but had to tweak it a little bit. Here is how our days are going.

I have set aside the mornings from 9:30 until lunch to be our structured school time. We start this with prayer & read aloud, then start our studies. La makes a goal list for each week. So far we have been studying spelling & Latin everyday, math a couple times a week, a study of Greece almost daily, one science project per week & This Day in History. La is reading Persy Jackson & the Lightening Thief. She has learned so much about Greek mythology from this book!

We have had great weather & been doing a lot of reading on the back porch!

I am pretty happy with the way things are going.  La is actually choosing to do things that look like "school" this year. I think she is realizing there are things she does need to learn & is enjoying it. I am so glad we never forced academics on her at a younger age!

This week's Day in History has some great stuff! The first day of Autumn, birthday of Euripides & Ferdinand Magellan.  Sometimes I think I am having more fun than La!

Gearing Up & Planning for the New Year

Now is the time of planning! La & I have made our list of goals for the coming school year. Books have been ordered and on their way.  School supplies have been bought. We ordered Sequential Spelling this year. La is so excited about this that we started it already.  She was so proud today when she spelled "beginning" correctly on the first try!

I have worked out a schedule that I think will work well for us. I have attempted to embed it below.

Weekly Schedule

You will see a lot of study ideas & topics. That is my study schedule, not La's. They are the things I want to learn about this year. La has her own goals. She will be working on these after our Momschool time until lunch and then in the afternoons.  Each week she will be making some goals based on her yearly goals. Here are her yearly goals for this school year.

• Win 1 ski race on Park City's Farm Team
• Do 2 math lessons a week & memorize all +, - & x facts
• Read at least 10 books over 200 pages each
• Do one science experiment a week- Chemistry & Physics
• Prepare one Firelfy Corps Presentation per month (history, geography or culture) and study more about the countries at home as wished
• Journal writing everyday
• Sequential Spelling every school day
• Continue to study Architecture History with Dad
• Do yoga daily

I was pretty impressed with this list for a 9 year old. These are all her own goals. She will be busy!

I feel really good about this year. I am hoping I will meet some major goals myself!

Right now I am reading "Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens". I am really enjoying it. I realize that my own stage of education somewhere between LOL & Scholar ~ moving back & forth between the two. I want to add all the 13 year old books that I haven't read yet to my reading list this year. 

It's gonna be a BIG, FUN year!

7 Keys of Great Teaching Inventory

The heart of Leadership Education is based on the 7 Keys of Great Teaching. These 7 Keys are principles that can be applied to many education methods.

1. Mentors NOT Professors
2. Classics NOT Textbooks
3. Quality NOT Conformity
4. Inspire NOT Require
5. Structure Time NOT Content
6. Simple NOT Complex
7. You NOT Them

Keys 4-5 apply most readily apply to the Love of Learning Phase. This is the phase that La is in right now. Key 7 applies to me. Every so often I like to take an inventory of how I am applying these ~ so here it goes.

4. Inspire NOT Require

So I do a pretty good job of NOT Require. I try to not put academic demands on La and let her set her own academic goals. Right now she loves reading which makes the "productive mama" in me very happy. This is not easy for me. I LOVE worksheets & projects with defined parameters. La's brain works in just the opposite way, so it a challenge for me to let her go about her own way. But it is paying off ~ she has discovered she loves reading, history & art. I have a tougher time with Inspire. Most of what I do to inspire is interpreted by La as trying to control content. As soon as I see that glazed-over look I can tell she is shutting down to the idea and I know I need to change gears. The last thing I want is for her to develop a "hate of learning" by being is bored and uninterested. So I have found this next Key to be The Key to Inspiring.

7. You NOT Them

This Key is based in the idea that your children will rise to the level of education of the parents. It's about setting an example of a life long learner and getting a great Leadership Education yourself. When I do this I find La getting inspired. When I am setting goals, striving towards those goals, reading, writing, working on memorization, and developing skills, La becomes interested in what I am doing and dapples in it herself. The problem is the When. I am great at structuring this on paper, but mediocre at follow through. It seems there is always something happening ~ a broken washing machine, visitors, field trips, planning our history club~ that I let get in the way of my studying. It's a matter of discipline. I know it! Something to continue to work on.

5. Structure Time NOT Content

I have down NOT Structuring Content. This took a couple years to completely give up, but I have finally done it. I would go back and forth with one foot on the Conveyor Belt. I have stopped looking at State Standards and anything that tries to tell me what La "should" be learning. This has been a very freeing decision. I am with her everyday. I see her work. I know were she is ~ exactly were she should be ~ on her own individual academic and development schedule. Now, Structure Time has been a challenge. Again, I am great about writing out a schedule ~ but not so great in following it. When I do, we have great days. When I don't, our days are fair to worse. Not giving into the urgent, keeping our mornings at home consistent, disciplining myself to follow a schedule when I don't feel like it are challenges for me. It's not that everyday has to follow the same schedule. There are field trips, ski days, days we watch other children for friends, etc.. All of these things have great value and including them in our lives is a big reason why we homeschool. Still, there needs to be a balance between outside opportunities and regular home time. I would be happy with 3 consistent weekdays per week at home on a schedule. I would say this happens in spurts of a couple months at a time and then we get off kilter with something and need to fight our way back.

6. Simple NOT Complex

this Key is to say that learning should be simple. I have this one down. Our studying includes 3 methods.

1. Reading great books ~ together & independently
   
2. Me asking La what she wants to learn about and then we go about learning it through more books, the internet, games and projects which can take many forms
   
3. La coming along side me in what I am studying

I don't think it can get more simple than that.

So, at the end of my inventory I come to two conclusions. You NOT Them is the key to Inspiring and in order to accomplish this, I need to develop more disciple and follow through with Structuring Time. This has been a life long challenge for me. I am so thankful I am not in it alone!

"For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline."
2 Timothy 1:7