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It’s time for another Menu Plan Monday! Here’s what we have on the menu this week:

Monday: Meatloaf, sweet potatoes and salad

Tuesday: Fish Tacos (haven’t decided on which recipe to use — suggestions are welcome!)

Wendesday: Buffalo chicken spaghetti and a veggie or salad

Thursday: Tamale Casserole.  This is a bit of a freezer/pantry experiment. I have tamale filling that has been in the freezer a long time that I want to use up.  I still have corn masa left from the last time I made “real” tamales.  But I have no corn husks, and I don’t even have a lot of extra paper coffee filters I want to spare to do it the “cheater” way.  So, I think I will try and invent something where they don’t need to be individually wrapped.  We’ll see how that goes…or maybe I will just break down and buy something to wrap them in individually.

Friday: Egg, Shrimp and Rice casserole and a veggie or salad (search for this recipe in a previous blog post)

Saturday: Beef roast and either a pasta side dish or mashed potatoes, with a veggie or salad

Sunday: We have potlucks at both lunch and dinner! I think for the one at dinner time I will be making some Cheeseburger Soup ((I make it similar to this recipe, except without the spicy ingredients).

For hundreds of other menu ideas, visit Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com!

After our three-and-a-half week break for Christmas, we resumed our regular school schedule the week of January 11th.  I think the break was good for both teacher and student, and now we’re both excited to be doing school again.

Here’s what we’ve been  up to the past two weeks:

Bible: Our church started a new children’s curriculum called “252 Basics“.  The kids get take-home materials each week with 4 additional short lessons to do at home, so we did those and worked on her memory verse.  We also read a couple  chapters out of “leading little ones to God.”

Reading/Phonics/Writing: We resumed our Alphabet Island lessons, working on some of the “U” word families and starting the short “O” families.  Madeline’s handwriting practice was primarily working in her Alphabet Island workbook.  I was very pleased that Madeline retained (and even possibly improved) in her reading skills over our break!

At the end of this past week I looked to see how many lessons we have left in Book 1 of Alphabet Island, and we only have nine left! So, we’ll definitely be starting Book 2a this semester.  I am pondering taking a short break in between books to focus more on sight words for a few weeks, since I don’t think we have been giving them the attention they deserve as Madeline has been eager to study all the short vowel word families.

Math: As I mentioned in my post about our Kindergarten plans for our new “semester”, we decided to switch to RightStart as our new math program.  While waiting for it to arrive, we did a short unit on measuring.  During week #15 we used a small workbook on measuring with non-standard units that I picked up for a buck last year.  Since I don’t have a balance scale, we just did the pages on measuring length and perimeter. Madeline did a great job with this and really enjoyed it.

At the beginning of week #16 we worked on volume measurements, as in the type that are used for cooking:

This was super fun and great practice for Madeline (who wants to be working more independently in the kitchen).  Then on Tuesday we worked a little bit on measuring with “standard” units, a.k.a. inches on a ruler.

Right start arrived mid-week and we were able to work through about five of the lessons.  The early lessons are very basic material, so most of it was review for Madeline — she just needs to get familiar with the terminology, tools and other things unique to this program.  A neat by-product of starting with these very basic lessons is that Erik has been eager to sit in with us and “do math with mommy and Madeline.”  I’m sure it will be over his head soon, but for right now learning how to recognize groups of three or four objects, count out two beads on the abacus, or make a triangle with “tally sticks” is right up his ally.

Social Studies/Science: We’re studying the continents this semester, and we began with a two week study on Antarctica.  This worked out very conveniently since a study of Antarctica is as much as science study as anything else, and at the beginning of week #15 I still hadn’t decided on a science curriculum for this semester. (I did end up picking something — it will either get it’s own blog post or I will write about it next week).

For the literature portion of our study we read “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” This book was thoroughly enjoyed by all, including me.  It’s very funny! We also read a stack of non-fiction books about Antarctica.  Most of our reading was done during the first week of the study, then we worked on our lapbook project during the second week of the study (see my previous post for more on that).

The next stop in our world tour of the continents will be Asia.  We’ll focus for 2-3 weeks each on two different countries — first India, and then China.

Lapbooking is something I’ve been curious to try out for a while, and I finally decided we would take the plunge and try it out with our Antarctica unit.  I’m not sure I can say it any more clearly myself, so here is a quote from the Cathy Duffy Reviews site explaining what a Lapbook is:

“Lap Books offer creative ways for children to record information they are learning and create attractive presentations of that information, as well as use the information to study. A Lap Book is essentially a creatively folded manila file folder with lots of smaller creatively cut and folded pieces of paper that are attached in different ways. This loose definition reflects the realm of creative options that might be used to create lap books.”

Madeline really enjoys crafty projects and I have to admit that I enjoy it too…so lapbooking seemed like it might be a good fit for us.

There are many free resources out there to download various pieces for making your own lapbooks.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a whole one about Antarctica that encompassed exactly what I was looking for.  I definitely didn’t want to start from scratch on my very first go-around with lapbooking, so I used printables from three different sources:

The Penguin lapbook at Lapbooking Lessons (free registration required to download)

A Penguin Lapbook by Angela Frampton

Various mini-books found on the Polar Animals lapbook page at HomeschoolShare

We also selected from creative-commons licensed photos on flickr to include, and use a map of Antarctica cut out from an old atlas I got for free recently.

And, here’s how it turned out:

We accomplished the entire project this week.  It turned out to be quite an undertaking to do the mini book on Penguins within the larger book on Antarctica. But, all told, we probably spent no more than 4 or 5 hours on the project, including my research and printing time.

Madeline really enjoyed helping with some of the cutting, nearly all of the pasting, some coloring and doing some of the writing.  She also dictated a fictional story to me (a mini-book that pulls out of the yellow pocket in the penguin folder) and helped me decide what to write in several of the flaps where some decision-making was required on our part.

This project was a great way to review what we learned about penguins and Antarctica from all the library books we read over the past two weeks, as well as learning new facts.  Madeline seemed to be retaining quite a bit of information as we discussed what was in each mini-book of our lapbook.

Madeline enjoyed this experience enough that she would like to do lapbooks for the other countries/continents we study this semester.  I would like to think we could do at least one for each continent! Hopefully by making these lapbooks, Madeline will have something to refer back to later and review or remind herself of what we have learned.

I think I can reduce my prep-time for future lapbooks having now done it once, and I can be better organized by being able to work on some of the mini-books as we read our library books (rather than starting the lapbook after reading most of the books, and having to pour back over the books to find answers to some questions we had). Maybe some of the places we study will even have “ready to use” free lapbooks already available…which would definitely decrease my prep time by not having to sort out and keep track of possible printables from a variety of sources.

If you want to learn more about lapbooking, a great place to start is this Squidoo lens on the subject.

I’m finally ready to get back on the “Menu Plan Monday” bandwagon, having finally made it through both the holidays and my quarterly editing deadline.  Here’s what we’re having this week:

Monday: Lasagna Roll-ups with salad and bread

Tuesday: Whole chicken in the crock pot, mashed potatoes and a veggie du jour

Wednesday: Hearty Bean and Rice casserole (recipe in this post) and a salad or veggie

Thursday: Chicken Tortilla soup…probably with quesidillas on the side

Friday: Heavenly Ham and Potatoes with a veggie du jour

Saturday: Cabbage Augratin Casserole (recipe in this post) and honey glazed carrots.

Sunday: Tony thinks we should have a “hot dish vs. cajun” potuluck (casserole vs. cajun for the alliteration?) in honor of the Vikings vs. Saints game.  We’ll see if we pull that off!

For many more great menu ideas, visit Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com!

We’re only perhaps about 40-45% done with our school year, but the Christmas break makes it feel like the half-way point.   We finally got “back to school” this week after taking about three and a half weeks off for Christmas.

We’re also changing gears at our homeschool co-op for the new semester, swapping main subjects from science to social studies.  Since my plan has been for us to study co-op subjects in more depth at home, we’ll be switching gears in both of those subjects as well.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been doing in the various subject areas, and what direction we’ll take for winter/spring 2010.

Math: We worked through about 75% of the material in Kindermath during our first 14 weeks of school.  I knew this would be a temporary program for us, lasting through the school year at most, and possibly only through the first half of the year.

After a lot of research and discussion with Tony, we decided on RightStart math.  It’s more expensive than a lot of programs, but I think it will be worth the investment (and like our phonics curriculum, most of the items are reusable…so assuming we’ve made a good choice, investments made now will pay off over time as we use the materials for at least three kids).  Since RightStart uses somewhat novel methods of teaching adding, subtracting and so on, I thought it would be best to drop Kindermath before I got too far into teaching Madeline one way of doing math, only to have to unlearn it with RightStart.  I ordered RightStart today, and so hopefully it won’t be long before we start using it!

Phonics/Reading: Alphabet Island is still proving to be a good fit for us (which I am very glad of, since that was my big curriculum investment in 2009).  It’s looking like we may finish Book 1 before the end of the year, in which case we will move on to book 2A.  Madeline is definitely making progress in her reading ability!

Handwriting: We’ve done a mish-mash of things, from name-writing practice to short copywork to a few lessons of “Draw, Write, Now” and various “real life” writing activities like writing notes and cards to send.  Between these things and the handwriting practice contained within Alphabet Island, I haven’t felt the need for any other formal handwriting programs.  I think we’ll continue along this same path in 2010.

Science: We spent our fall semester in co-op exploring science topics inspired by the days of creation in the Bible.  At home, we read along in a corresponding text book, as well as reading some library books and doing a handful of projects and experiments.   I was disappointed by the textbook component of our study.  It just wasn’t very “science-y”.   While I had at first liked the idea of linking in the study of the Biblical creation account directly with science, I think the textbook we used was too heavy on describing what the Bible talks about, and too light on teaching scientific principles.

Despite the fact that we are “back to school”, I don’t have a firm plan for our science studies for the rest of our school year.  I am intriguied by R.E.A.L. science.   Today I discovered “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2“.  And Tony has been talking about just writing his own elementary science lessons for us to use.  It should be an interesting adventure no matter which route we choose!

Madeline also received a microscope and a telescope for Christmas, so we may wing it a bit and try and incorporate using those two tools into our science study this semester.   Madeline loves experiments and we didn’t do nearly as many as I hoped we would in the fall, so doing more experiments would certainly be a winner with my student.

Social Studies: As we move to geography studies in our co-op, we will also move to studying geography at home. This fall we our focus was on history (mostly early US history).  We used parts of  “History For Little Pilgrims” and also read fiction and non-fiction from the library.  Using that textbook cemented in my mind the idea that using literature to teach history is a much better idea than using a dull textbook.  Madeline really enjoyed listening to me read historical fiction or biographies written by the D’Aulaire’s, while she got bored of me reading from the textbook after a very short period of time.  I think more literature-based history study is in our future!

This winter/spring, our co-op will study the seven continents, focusing on one or two countries on each continent and learning a bit about those countries as well as missionaries that traveled there.  I purchased Galloping the Globe to use as a tool to further our study of each continent at home.  We’ll plan to read books from the library, try cooking various foods from around the world, and maybe do some other hands-on projects to help Madeline learn about world geography and culture.  We may do some kind of semester-long project like making a notebook or binder with maps and other pages about the various countries we study. I think the trick for me will be to not let us get overwhelmed by too much detail and activity.  I’m sure we’ll revisit world geography and cultures various times through elementary school, so I need to remind myself to save some of my great ideas for when Madeline is a bit older. 

Bible: We’ll continue reading “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as doing the take-home lessons/activities from the new Sunday School curriculum our church started this month called “252 Basics”.

I’m excited to see what our semester holds as we continue with Madeline’s Kindergarten year!