tonyandkirsten.org

It’s already time for the last Menu Plan Monday for February.   February always goes by quickly since it is the shortest month, but with Kai’s birthday and Valentines Day to celebrate and the Olympics to watch, it feels even shorter than usual.  Here’s what I have on the menu this week.  I am once again able to make most of my meals from what’s in my fridge/freezer/pantry.  I am really enjoying having most of what I need already on hand when the week begins, then looking forward to the next week as I do my grocery shopping mid-week.

Monday: Chicken and dumplings (recipe from crockpot365.blogspot.com)

Tuesday: Italian Pasta Bake with ground turkey (essentially pasta tomato or spaghetti sauce, ground turkey, cheese and seasonings)

Wednesday: Homemade Pizza

Thursday: ground beef Tacos

Friday: Broccoli Cheese soup and homemade bread

Saturday: Date Night!

Sunday: Chinese beef and broccoli and maybe homemade cream cheese wontons or another Chinese appetizer.

For more great menu ideas, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com!

Today, these were the faces of homeschooling in the Gold House:

There should also be a picture of a Kindergartener with a frustrated look on her face, but I figured she might be even more unhappy with me if I took a picture of her in that state.

I usually try and stay positive in my homeschooling week-in-review posts.  Sure, I note what didn’t go so well, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the fact that we have some bad days.  Sometimes more than one of them in the same week.

This is going to be a short school week for us as it is — we took the day off on Monday since Tony had a work holiday for President’s Day and my mom also stopped by for a couple of hours.  And we had our co-op on Wednesday.  That left Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for school.

Tuesday started off okay with Bible reading and reading about Abraham Lincoln (a belated choice of reading material for President’s Day).  Then Madeline really struggled with her attitude while we were working on phonics.  I thought maybe the problem was the materials I was using — we were trying out a book from the library to see if it might work well in tandem with Explode the Code.  We never got any other school work done after that.

Fast forward to today.  I decided we would return to Explode the Code.  So, after Bible reading and a book about China (which Madeline acted much more bored about than usual) we pulled out the ETC workbooks, which Madeline has for the most part enjoyed the last two weeks.  Not so much today.  I think it took us over an hour to get through some material that should have taken about 15 minutes.  It wasn’t even a new concept — just reinforcing words we’ve already been working on.  But attitude is everything and hers was just not helpful today.  Luckily, she pulled through it and we did move on to working on Math for the first time this week.

Meanwhile, Kai did a bunch of screaming, as you can see in his picture above.  He did take a nap in the middle of our school time this morning (thank God for that!), but was still crabby whether in my arms or playing on the floor when he woke up again.  Erik, on the other hand, was making things difficult in his own way.  He wasn’t too interested in Tot School or participating with Madeline and I today.  For the most part he just played.  But he is supposed to be working on using the potty without needing “company”.  He says he needs help, but really the “helper” just sits and talks with him.  I did talk him into going to the potty a couple times without me needing to sit next to him the whole time.  But getting him to put his pants back on was another story.   As much as I didn’t want to take my focus off Madeline while she was having such a hard time, I had to spend time training Erik in what completing the process of using the potty means — a.k.a putting one’s clothes back on afterwords.

We finally made it through our morning of school.  The kids played sweetly together while I made lunch and then after lunch, including a nice tea party and playing house (for some reason Erik’s “house” was in the bathroom, and they were having a slumber party):

~Erik is 34 Months Old~

We’ve had some fun Tot School times the past couple of weeks! I think we’re finding a balance that works for us of Erik sometimes joining in to the best of his ability with what Madeline is doing, sometimes doing his own “tot school work” alongside Madeline and other times just playing and doing his own thing during our school time.  And every now and then while Madeline is taking a break or doing work independently, I can work one-on-one with Erik.  While I would love to do more of this, it just doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards right now.

Math is still Erik’s favorite subject to “join in” with.  And why not? Math manipulatives are so much fun, and he loves exploring numbers and counting:

Art is another favorite activity we have not done as much of lately, and Erik requested coloring (and then cutting) and painting this past week:

Erik and I did get a chance for just the two of us to play Cariboo this week:

We had our “Game Day” on Friday, and Erik participated whole-heartedly…even in games he didn’t fully know how to play, like sight word bingo.

It’s hard to believe, but it won’t be long before I am thinking up “tot school” activities for Kai.  Even now, I am realizing that the reason he has been whining more frequently during school time is that he gets bored! I am working on setting aside a few toys that I will only get out for him during school time.  He really likes manipulating the pieces of these jumbo-sized puzzles:

To see what other families are doing for Tot School, visit the weekly tot school link-up at 1+1+1=1!

We had a really fun week doing school this past week…here’s what we’ve been up to:

Bible: Last week I mentioned that I missed some of the other Bible materials we read last semester since we have been focusing on the take home lessons from 252 basics this semester.  Well, I “got my wish” this week.  I stayed home from church with the boys a week ago Sunday since Erik was sick…and the 252 basics take home lessons never made it into my hands.  So, we read a couple chapters from “Leading Little Ones to God”  and we did some lessons out of “My See, Point, and Learn Bible book“.  This book is more on Erik’s level, but Madeline enjoys it too…so it is fun to do with them together.

Math: We worked on lessons 13-16 in RightStart Math this week.  Besides practicing abacus skills, the main new concept we practiced was even and odd numbers.  While i had briefly mentioned this concept before, it was really fairly new to Madeline. We used math tiles and “dot cards” to help visualize whether each number between one and ten was even or odd:

Madeline also really enjoyed the games in this week’s lesson, including dot card memory, a “comes after” game that was similar to “war”, and dot card bingo.

Reading/Phonics: We continued using Explode the Code (ETC) books 1.5 and 2 this week.  I am still really happy with my choice on these books.  Since starting the explode the code books we covered double letter word endings (words that end in combos like -dd, -ss, and so on) and we’ve started covering some two letter beginning blends.  I’ve also been trying to find simple “easy reader” books from the library for Madeline to read.  She still needs some help here and there, but I can definitely see improvement in her abilities.  Here she is hard at work on one of her ETC pages:

Geography: We completed our study of India this week.  We did all of our planned reading (I linked to the titles in last week’s wrap up post) on Monday, then worked on our lapbook on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  Madeline and I decided to do a double lapbook to cover the continent of Asia — with one folder each for China and India.   We got the India section of the lapbook about 95% finished.  We just need to add some pictures of the animals we learned about from India (elephants, tigers, monkeys, etc) and a picture for the title flap.  I didn’t take pictures yet — I’ll post pictures of the whole thing once we do the China section.

Science: We finally started “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding” (BFSU)!  I seriously considered skipping lesson A/B-1, since the topic of organizing and classifying sounded so basic.  But, upon further reflection, I thought that it would be a good subject to discuss and be able to refer back to in the future.  Both Madeline and Erik really enjoyed an “observation skills” activity that demonstrated how it was easier to remember the contents of a tray filled with objects when the contents were sorted into various categories, versus when they were scattered on the tray randomly.

We also started discussing lesson A-2, which is on the states of matter (solid, liquid and gas).  This is a review for Madeline to some extent because we covered this topic last fall.   We’ll do a little bit more with lesson A-2 this coming week and possibly start lesson A-3 (on the topic of Air) as well.  Once we get past lesson A-3 I think we will try out the weekly schedule rotation I wrote about in my post introducing BFSU.

“Game Day”: Since we had neither a field trip or our co-op this week, I planned a “game day” for us on Friday.  We worked on educational games like those in our math curriculum and some sight word games, and we played a couple of board games from our game cabinet.  I also gave Madeline and Erik each a chance to make up their own game.  Erik’s game was called crown soccer and involved playing soccer in the playroom and living room with a tiny soft soccer ball:

And Madeline’s game involved some homemade paper dolls playing soccer:

“Game Day” was super fun and I think it’s something we will do again in the future!

It’s time for another Menu Plan Monday! Here’s what I have planned this week.  I’m again trying to work mostly off of what I have purchased on sale previous weeks, then adding a few things here and there to complete each meal (plus buying new sale items to use in future weeks).  I am hoping this will lead to lower overall costs:

Monday: Shrimp & pork stir fry and egg rolls (pork leftover from last week’s tenderloin; shrimp on sale at cub this week)

Tuesday: baked Chicken (leg quarters bought on sale last week for 39 cents/lb!), mashed potatoes, and a veggie or salad.

Wednesday: Beef roast (bought on sale + coupon at Target a week or so ago) with Broccoli Rice casserole

Thursday: Chicken Tetrazzini  and a veggie or salad (menu item held over from last week — we had pizza at the Children’s museum one night last week instead of eating dinner at home). I’ve posted my Tetrazzini recipe in a previous MPM entry.

Friday: Date night! Yeah for another date! Kids will eat pizza or mac and cheese.

Saturday: Black Bean soup and quesidillas

Sunday: Meatloaf (I make mine approximately like this) and baked potatoes and a veggie or salad

For lots more great menu ideas, visit this week’s Menu Plan Monday link-up at orgjunkie.com!

I wrote a couple posts earlier about two curriculum changes we’re making for science and phonics.  Here’s what Madeline and I have been up to in general for the past couple of weeks during her Kindergarten studies.

Bible: We’re continuing to work on the memory verses from church and read through the take-home devotionals from the 252 Basics.  Since there are four of those per week and we usually only do 4 days of school per week, this hasn’t left a lot of time for other Bible readings, like “Leading Little Ones to God” (which I have missed the last two weeks when we haven’t read it).  I’m still pondering what to do about this.  The 252 Basics devotionals are short, but Madeline usually seems ready to move on to other subjects after we have finished one.

Math: We’re now through (I think) the first 12 lessons of Right Start Math level A. Madeline is improving at using the Abacus and being able to quickly enter or identify any number from 1-10.  Most of the other material in the lessons is still review for her, so we are able to get through one (or sometimes even a bit more than one) lesson per day.  She is really looking forward to getting past the review section and getting on to something other than just the Abacus being new and challenging.  But since using the abacus and visualizing quantities is so important to this curriculum, I don’t want to skip any lessons.  She’ll just have to be patient a bit longer. 

Phonics/Reading: As I mentioned in my other entry, Madeline finished Level 1 of Alphabet Island.  Yeah! We’ll be moving on to using Explode the Code books 1 1/2 and 2…and you can read more about that in my recent entry on the subject.

Geography: We started studying the continent of Asia, and specifically the country of India the last two weeks.  I had hoped to spend no more than two weeks per country that we plan to study. But due to only having seven days of school in the past two weeks with Madeline visiting Grandma during week #17 and restarting our co-op this past week (and some other distractions on days we did do school), we didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to. So, we’ll continue to work on India this week as well.  So far for our India study we have read the chapters in Hero Tales about Amy Carmichael (a missionary to India), a folktale and a couple of non-fiction books about what India is like today.  This week we will read another folktale (from this book), a picture book story, and a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in India.  We’ll also make a couple of lapbook pieces for a lapbook about the whole continent of Asia.

Science: Okay, so I slacked and we didn’t get science done.    I had planned to not do science during week #17 since we only did three days of school that week.  Then I held off preparing for science this past week until late in the week, and then by Friday we had other distractions and we just did the basics, skipping the science lesson.  We’ll remedy that this week and start having a block for science planned in earlier in the week!

For fun: Madeline (and Erik) really enjoyed making valentines almost every day this week!:

I never got around to posting a Menu Plan last week…partly due to busyness and partly due to feeling uncertain about how some of my menu choices were going to work out.  And sure enough, I did make more last minute changes in my menu last week than normal.

This past week we ended up having Creamy Beef and Noodles, Leftover soup, Chicken Fajitas, Spaghetti (well, the kids had this while we ate at a church meeting), homemade pizza, Curried Chickpeas & Curried Cauliflower and Potatoes w/rice…and then today we had slow cooker pulled pork for lunch (family lunch to celebrate Kai’s birthday) and the traditional Superbowl meal of Chili for dinner.

Here’s what I have on the schedule for this week.  I am mainly planning to use ingredients I have gotten on sale previous weeks (like ground beef and potatoes), as well as taking advantage of the sale on chicken at Cub Foods and the sale on Pork Loins at Rainbow.  At least I hope I can make it out to both those stores this week!

Monday: Shepherd’s Pie

Tuesday: Chicken, Bean and Rice tacos/burritos with guacamole! (using up cheap avacados from my trip to Aldi last week)

Wednesday: Chili Bake using leftover Superbowl Chili

Thursday: Chicken Tettrazini

Friday: Pork loin, with (I think) some kind of a rice side dish (details are still fuzzy on this meal and exactly how I am going to prepare these two items…I’ll be looking at recipes and perhaps deciding based on what kind of deals I find this week!).

Saturday: Baked Potato Soup and bread

Sunday: Something that doesn’t involve me cooking.    Hopefully a date night!

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

I realized soon after the new year started that Madeline was very close to finishing Level 1 of Alphabet Island.  We began this curriculum last spring and completed the first section (learning/reviewing letter sounds and practicing writing lower case letters) before we beginning Kindergarten this fall.   We then began the second half of Level 1 this fall (learning 3 letter “consonant-vowel-consonant” or “CVC” words and practicing writing upper case letters).

Level 1 of Alphabet Island was very well suited to Madeline.  She likes the characters and the songs.  There is some writing, but not too much.  The approach to learning the CVC words (using word families) really clicked with her.  She enjoyed the games when we find time to play them.  So, naturally, I was really looking forward to starting level 2A this month after we finished level 1.

A week or so ago I pulled out out Level 2A to start reading through the lessons and seeing what we would be working on.   I was quite surprised to find out that Level 2A is much more difficult than level 1!

After a handful of review pages, Level 2A moves quickly into marking short/long vowels on long lists of words, long stories to help learn complex phonics/spelling rules, and page-long spelling tests.  Whoa! Madeline is definitely not ready for that as not-yet-six-year-old Kindergartener.

I found this informative quote in the Teacher’s Guide: “The majority of this program is directed toward the phonics rules for spelling. But this approach alone can slow down the reading process. To help develop reading skills, some reading instructions and material has been included.  However, reading will not happen by chance. It takes lots of practice…Another reading program…or books from the library are sources of reading materials…Most students will want to read above their spelling ability.  This is good. Work with the student on two levels–one in reading and one in spelling.”

Reading this section confirmed to me that Level 2A of Alphabet Island was not what Madeline needed right about now.  I am not super concerned at the moment with developing her spelling skills.  She is still struggling with having the patience and perseverance to write more than a few words at a time — usually words that she has right in front of her (aka copying them from a text or from something I wrote).    I think a great deal of this is developmental.  Once she is six or seven, I would anticipate her fine motor skills will catch up, writing will not be such a challenge, and memorizing complex rules and long spelling lists will not seem so daunting.

I still think that Alphabet Island is a great program and I fully intend to pick it up again later.  I may even read some of the spelling/phonics rule stories to her so they can start percolating around in her brain (and so I can refer to them as we work on her reading skills).   But that means we need something else to use right now.  Madeline is eager to move beyond the three letter CVC words and learn new things about reading, so she can read more complex books.

I decided we would switch to Explode the Code for the rest of her Kindergarten year and possibly beyond.  Explode the Code is a simple workbook-based phonics program with 8 main levels and a “half level” in between each one for further review (there’s also an online version of Explode the Code, but it looks a bit expensive…so we’ll be sticking to the paper version!).  I ordered levels 1 1/2 and 2:

Level 1 1/2 will give Madeline additional practice in the skills she learned this year in Alphabet Island level 1, while book 2 will move into new skills like beginning and ending blends. My plan is to do one or two pages in each book per day.   This still may be a bit much writing for Madeline (some pages just involve circling or “x”-ing a correct answer, but other pages require writing quite a few whole words).  I may do some of the writing for her (as she dictates to me what letters to write) or I may get her an alphabet stamp set as  a fun way for her to get her answers on paper.   I’ll also add additional cards to her phonics flip chart, and we’ll use that for additional practice or for me to introduce new concepts. (files for the flip chart available here, here and here).

After quite a bit of research and thought (and Tony almost deciding to write his own science curriculum), we found a curriculum we thought would meet our needs: “Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2″ by Bernard Nebel (BFSU).  You can also read more about the book on Dr. Nebel’s website.

We really wanted to find a curriculum that didn’t just package a bunch of facts with fun little experiments that may or may not teach much of anything.   Instead, we hope to guide our kids to discover “why we know what we know” when it comes to scientific principles.

Dr. Nebel’s curriculum is not set up in a traditional manner with daily or weekly lessons to be followed in a specific order each year.  Instead, 4 strands of scientific learning (The Nature of Matter, Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth/Space Science) are to be pursued simultaneously with some degree of freedom as to the exact order of the lessons left up to the parent/teacher.  There are seven to twelve lessons in each strand, and these “lessons” can easily be stretched into a week or two (or maybe even more) of learning as extra library books and experiments are added in.  Since much scientific knowledge builds upon earlier foundations, there is a suggested order within each thread of which lessons should come before the others.

If it sounds confusing…it’s probably because it is a bit confusing, and very different than most curriculum products.  A flow chart is provided of some suggested order to this buffet of learning and some research reveals that other users of the text have made up lists of the order in which they  plan to pursue the lessons.

I plan to take one of the suggested orderings I found on the web, and modify it a bit to give us a road-map of where we plan to go…while being willing to change that up as seems appropriate of course!

If we want the book to last for a couple years (and not rush through the concepts presented), it seems like one lesson every two weeks is about the right pace.  About once a month in between the lessons from BFSU,  I hope to add in another piece of science learning:  studying the history of science.   If Tony were to write his own elementary science curriculum (and who knows, maybe he still will someday), learning about the history of science would be integrated into it.  This is more than just learning a few facts about what scientists lived when and what they studied–it is learning about some of the foundational experiments in the history of science and what was learned through these experiments.   It’s another aspect of “learning why we know what we know.”   I’m not sure how much Madeline will retain or understand of this type of study at her current age, but we’ll give it a try.   As a tool to facilitate this, I purchased Janis VanCleave’s “Scientists Through the Ages”:

If these lessons turn out to be worthwhile, they should last us for about two years at the rate of doing them once a month.

I’m planning on attempting to set aside one longer block of time for science each week (though some reading of supplementary materials like library books would probably still happen on other days).  Our four-week cycle would look something like this:

Week 1: Lesson from BFSU

Week 2: Lesson from Scientists through the Ages (and continue to read supplementary books on Week 1 BFSU topic)

Week 3: Lesson from BFSU

Week 4: Another science or “health class” type of topic (I’m thinking things like nature study, studies of various animals and habitats, and maybe someday what ever one is supposed to teach elementary age kids for “health” — I haven’t quite figured that out yet!)…along, again, with supplementary reading on the previous week’s BFSU topic.

I wanted to start with our first BFSU topic this past week, and it didn’t quite happen.  We’ll do it this coming week for sure!

~Erik is 34 months old~

We’ve had three full weeks of school now since our three-and-a-half week Christmas break, but we are still looking to find our groove when it comes to Tot School…but we did have some fun times together this past month!

Before Christmas break, I was experimenting with either having some dedicated time for Tot School before starting school with Madeline for the day, or having some Tot School time after lunch.  We tried the “before Kindergarten” route a couple more times in the last few weeks, and I don’t think this routine will work for us.  There is a great deal of temptation to skip it all together and in the end it seems to reduce the overall time that Madeline is able to stay focused on her school work.

After lunch still holds potential, but usually both mom and kids are ready for some casual playtime and relaxation after lunch, there are chores to be done, Madeline wants free-choice read aloud time (as opposed to read-aloud time during our school routine, when I pick the books), and nap time comes around quickly.

So, I am back to attempting a dual-focus most days, at least for the time being.  I am finding that Erik is more and more interested in doing school “just like Madeline.”  That means including him in whatever way possible in what she is doing, or finding an activity that is equivalent in some way.

So, if Madeline is working on her phonics or handwriting, Erik likes having a something to write on too, whether it is a worksheet he just ends up scribbling on, or a pre-writing activity.  Madeline really enjoyed the Kumon “My First Book of Tracing” when she was about the same age, so I went ahead and got one for Erik. He really enjoys it, and it has been a good opportunity for me to help him learn to develop a proper writing utensil grip.   My only regret is not pulling out the handful of sports-related pages, laminating them, and then having him use the washable dry erase marker on those.  As it should be unsurprising to anyone who knows him, he has already covered over his lines several times on those pages!

Erik enjoys sitting in as we read our books for science and social studies as well (at least until he wanders off to play again), and asked for coloring and cutting to do while Madeline was doing her Antarctica lapbook. This portion of our school day is also when I’ve been encouraging Erik to do his other “old favorites” among our Tot School activities — preschool activity bags, puzzles, magnet scenes, board games, and so on.  One thing that is really perplexing is that he now refuses to use the Lauri stacking pegs/foam…this after we just got a large box of additional such pieces for Christmas! Here’s Erik enjoying a lakeshore learning “race car” math set, where he tries to sort the cars by wheel color:

Math is really the subject in which Erik has gotten the most involved with what Madeline and I are doing.  He is fascinated by the Right Start math program we just began with Madeline.  The first few lessons are on a really basic level, so he is able to follow along to some extent with what we are doing.  He asks to do math with us, and sits happily for at least half the amount of time that Madeline will spend at doing math.  The teaching method of the program relies quite a bit on the teacher asking the student(s) many questions as the concepts are presented, so I’ve been trying to ask the easy questions to Erik and the harder questions to Madeline.

During week #15 we did a unit on measuring, and this brought Erik’s favorite activity of the past few weeks: practicing pouring and transferring with rice:

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but never got around to it.  It easily kept him busy for 45 minutes straight! I think we’ll have to do it again sometime soon.

To see what other families are doing for Tot School, visit the weekly round up 1+1+1=1!