Weekly Recap

This week, Titus learned that B is for Bible. He completed all of his worksheets and games happily. He loves playing the "Spinner Winner" game. He also loves using the Preschool Mom's Bible ABC curriculum! We practiced matching the uppercase A and B with the lowercase a and b using flashcards made from index cards. He used play-dough and some alphabet play-dough mats I have to make A's and B's, as well as pattern blocks and alphabet cards.

He also reviewed the numbers 1-4. He put the correct number of craft sticks on each flashcard. I love how he sorted them by color, too! He knows all of his colors {although he frequently gets red and green mixed up} and most of his shapes. He can count to 14, and then he goes crazy spouting off random numbers. :-)

Silas learned the -ag word family this week, along with the sight words "can" and "we". He practiced all of his flashcards from the previous 3 weeks as well as this week. We are very pleased with the Kindergarten Mom's "I Can R.E.A.D." curriculum! He really loves all of the worksheets, games, and cut and glue activities.

Included in the "I Can R.E.A.D." program is an interactive grammar notebook twice a week. I don't really think formal grammar is necessary in kindergarten, but we are still completing the lessons. He has learned what a noun, pronoun, verb and adjective is.

In math, we reviewed the numbers 0-20 using our place value village. He had to write his numbers almost every day, as well as review patterns and shapes. We use flashcards to review, also. I have him put them in order as well as make the number with the place value village. He absolutely loves Math Lessons for a Living Education. He calls it his "pig book" because of the pig on the cover. He will say, "Is it time for my pig book yet?" :-)

Mercie continued reading "Charlotte's Web" this week and completed the book study I've created for her {simple vocabulary and comprehension questions}. She has also been reading about spiders in a Nature Reader from Christian Liberty Press.

She started working in a Critical Thinking Language Smarts workbook this week {a review item that we are loving}. She is learning about syllables and how to break words down, which helps with learning to decode {spell} words.

She is also using Math Lessons for a Living Education. This week, she worked on subtracting with borrowing from the tens and hundreds place. She also reviewed reading and writing temperatures and simple addition and subtraction facts.

She completed a few worksheets on common, proper, singular and plural nouns. She also had ten spelling words this week. She wrote them each day - once in colored markers, once in sentences she made up, and a few times she just wrote them.

Eli learned how to find the least common multiple and add and subtract and multiply fractions in math. He worked on capitalization, adjectives, and synonyms in language arts. He read about Samuel Morse and the Morse Code, John Tyler, the Mississippi River, and Natchez, Mississippi in America the Beautiful.

Mikaela reviewed her chapter in math this week and had a test. In language arts, she learned about gerunds, categories, synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms. In America the Beautiful, she read about John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, the Great Salt Lake and Salt Lake City.

They both worked on Rosetta Stone Spanish this week. They had to write an essay and peer edit each other's essays. We learned about proofreading and editing in our Writing Workshop. We read about the Dominion Mandate and Biblical Stewardship in Ecology. We also read about the Puritans and Separatists, the trip to America on the Mayflower, and the Mayflower Compact as part of our Homeschool Legacy "Thanksgiving" unit study {review coming soon}.

{playing Bingo with sight word flashcards}

Mikaela started piano lessons this week. We bought her an 88-key piano keyboard to practice on since we don't have a piano in our home. Silas and Eli had karate twice this week, and they have been practicing for their tournament in Shreveport the first weekend in November. Mercie had gymnastics Thursday night, and Mikaela has AcTeens on Tuesday nights. We have a pretty busy week, but I'm glad my children can be involved in activities they love.

{working hard to write his letters}

I'm linking up with Kym and Homeschool Highlights.

How was your week?

Homeschooling Without a School Room

I've always wanted a school room - a room dedicated to all of the books, pencils, marker-boards, encyclopedias, posters, and arts and crafts projects we use daily.  We don't have a school room, though. When we aren't living in a travel trailer {traveling with my husband's job}, we live in a 2000 square foot home {which isn't that big when you have five children}.

Our school is done at our dining room table. Until recently, we had a small table and four chairs, with two extra chairs at our kitchen bar {which is table-height and I love it!}. Now, we have a huge table with eight chairs, and two more at the kitchen bar. We finally have plenty of room for everyone to eat and spread out!

This is our dining room/school room! Most of work is done at this table. I love how we can all sit here and have plenty of space to spread out our books and pencils and crayons. In the china cabinet, on the bottom shelf, you might can see where I keep our encyclopedia set. This is an old set that belonged to Rod's grandmother. I think it's from the 1970's! It is still relevant - after all, history is history - but I would love a newer version with current events and modern history.{I'm sure you noticed his antler collection on top of the china cabinet.} And, yes, when school is over, the table is always this clean. It's imperative to me that our dining room table be cleared off each day after lunch. I don't like clutter, especially on my table!

This is a view from the other side of the dining room. The shelf to the left holds all of our manipulatives - pattern blocks, Cuisenaire rods, place value village, letter and number tiles, counters, dice, flashcards...you get the idea! I like having all of our manipulatives in one place. It makes it much easier to grab what I need and put things away where they go. The polka-dot bag holds our library books. {Notice my husband's arrowhead collection in the top left corner. He found most of those himself!}

Here is a close-up of the storage shelf. I thought about taking pictures of the inside of the storage cubes, but I decided to spare you the details!

These two shelves hold our reference and education books {like dictionaries}, as well as books the kids will be reading for school, my teacher binders, my blog binder, and a few more manipulatives. The shelf to the left holds our pencils, markers, colored pencils, glue sticks and scissors. In the brown basket, I keep extra scissors and white glue, do-a-dot markers, crayons, staplers, and things like that. Our pencil sharpeners, hole punch, and paper clips are to the left of the basket. On the top of the right shelf, I have a tray with all of our stickers {and apparently a tube of paint today}. I also have a white basket with random things that I may need for the week. It gets cleaned out each Saturday. In the very right corner, we have a basket of coloring books.

To the right of our fireplace, I have three bins. {These bins came from Wal Mart for less than $6 each!} I have Mercie's, Silas's, and Titus's school work in their own bins.

To the left of the fireplace, I have two bins with Mikaela and Eli's schoolwork in them. The plastic draw has paper - printer paper and construction paper. I like to have it handy! On top, in the blue bin, I have loose papers we are using and other things like that. I keep my printer on this little table. Under the table, in the orange basket, is my laminator and laminating sheets. I have our two laptops on top of the printer, along with the headset we use for Rosetta Stone. I like having everything in a central location. Our computers share a charger, so it's convenient to keep them in the same place.

I may not have the fanciest, cleanest or best-decorated home, but we love it. It feels very cozy and comfortable to our family {and my husband is proud of his deer and his collection of antlers and arrowheads}. Sometimes, I worry that our dining room will lose the "dining room" feel {does that even make sense?} and feel too much like a classroom. I try to keep it clutter-free and as organized as possible to keep it "dining room-y". {I'm making up words now, ha.}

I showed these pictures because some people feel like they can't homeschool because they don't have a school room or a big enough house. This is not true! With a little organizing and creativity, you can make any room a "school room" without losing the homey feel. That's what I hope I've done to our dining room!

Where do you do school? How do you organize? What would you change about my dining room if you were me? Hey - I'm always looking for ideas!

Craft Sticks Place Value Village

Silas has been using Math Lessons for a Living Education {Book One} this year. It is a fantastic math book that he has been flying through! You may remember the trouble he was having last year with recognizing his numbers 6 to 10. This year, he is having no trouble at all recognizing numbers! When we started the chapter on place value and numbers in the teens, I was a little nervous. However, he knows all of his numbers now, 1 to 20!

Math Lessons for a Living Education has you make a Place Value Village for your child to demonstrate the ones, tens, and hundreds place values. I have never done this before with my older children, but I knew it would help Silas. The book instructs you to use a small, medium and large container for the ones, tens, and hundreds, along with dry beans and zip lock bags to represent the numbers. It also provides templates for the containers, which I printed on colored paper, laminated, cut out and taped to our containers. We are using small, clear plastic containers from Miracle Whip and coffee. We did it this way the first day.

Then, I saw what my friend at a Beauty Full Slow uses to count their school days - craft sticks. Aaah! Why didn't I think of this before? We have bags upon bags of craft sticks, and I knew the multi-colored ones would look so fun and be much easier to work with than the small beans! I "stole" her idea, and bundled a few groups of ten craft sticks with elastic bands, and left 9 craft sticks loose in the ones container.

I would show Silas a flashcard of a number, like 14. He knew there was a "ten" in the tens container, and he would put 4 craft sticks in the ones container. We did this with several numbers, and he enjoyed it! This really helped him to visualize the numbers and will be such a great tool to use when we begin addition with two digit numbers.

How do you teach place value?

Middle Schoolers Need Mom's Help, Too

My goal this year for our homeschool is NOT to change curriculum until we have finished a certain book or program. Changing curriculum is not always a bad thing, and sometimes it's necessary,  but the past year or so I have been too quick to change things.

I don't want to get into that habit.

Mikaela, my 8th grader, is about 3/4 of the way through with Principals of Mathematics- Book One. She started last year and after a short summer break, she picked it back up where she left off.

I like this curriculum. Really, I do. In fact, I ordered the exact same set for my 6th grader, Eli. He has been using it since August.

Mikaela has been struggling with it, though. I kept thinking "If I just get her something else...she'll get it." However, I remembered my resolve and restrained from purchasing anything different.

I asked her if she liked the program. She said she did, but she just couldn't "get" it. I kept thinking of what would help, I scoured Pinterest for fun math ideas, and I kept toying with the idea of buying something like Teaching Textbooks that would show her how to do the problems.

Finally, one day out of sheer frustration that she didn't understand what she doing and kept missing literally all of the problems in each lesson, I did something drastic.

No, not really. I did what any good homeschool mom should have done in the first place. I read the lesson aloud to her, did the practice problems on the whiteboard, and had her complete the first few problems in her lesson. And, guess what? She didn't miss any.

The next day, she asked me to please teach her again. She told me how much it helped to have the lesson read and explained to her and to have problems worked out on the board in front of her.

We have been doing this for two weeks now, and I have noticed a huge improvement in her math. She made 100% on both quizzes she had and she rarely misses a problem in her lesson. She is enjoying math and she "gets" it.

I have even started doing this with Eli some. He was having trouble with factor trees, so I did a few on the board for him. Now, he totally understands how to do it.

Why do we think our middle schoolers don't need us anymore? I was trying so hard to make them independent that I was making things too difficult for them. I didn't think I had time to teach them, too, what with teaching a preschooler, kindergartner, and 3rd grader. It takes me 15 minutes or so to teach Mikaela her math everyday, which is less time than it took to grade her lesson, have her correct {and re-correct} the problems she missed, and try to show her where she went wrong each day.

Plus, now that I've been teaching {and learning} her math lessons, I am very impressed with this book and so glad I didn't switch to something else!

So, my little piece of advice today is this: Don't be too quick to change curriculum. Sometimes, you just need to change the way you do things.

Also, don't be too quick to think your pre-teens and teens don't need you to teach them. Sometimes, that's exactly what they {and you} need.

What subjects do you teach your middle schoolers? What do they do on their own?

MyFreezEasy {TOS Review}

Homeschooling five kids, keeping up with the laundry for seven people, cleaning the house numerous times a day, taking kids to karate and gymnastics three times a week, and going back and forth to church activities keeps my family busy! Cooking has always been something that I love to do, but it's hard finding time to cook healthy meals, not to mention cleaning up afterwards, when we have a particularly busy day - one full of doctor or dentist appointments, sick kids, or several activities.

That's why I was so excited to review the MyFreezEasy.com Freezer Meal Plan Membership from MyFreezEasy. I received a Premium Annual Membership to MyFreezEasy in exchange for my honest review.

What is MyFreezEasy? How does it work?

I had never heard of MyFreezEasy specifically, but I had heard of freezer cooking. Freezer cooking is something that has interested me, but I never knew where to start. MyFreezEasy has made it simple!

MyFreezEasy is a freezer cooking strategy that teaches you how to make and freeze 10-12 meals in less than an hour. Sounds too good to be true? That's what I thought, too! How could you cook or prepare 10 -12 meals in one hour?

With a Basic Membership {$7 a month, or $77 a year} to MyFreezEasy, you have access to 8 new meal plans each month. The different meal plan types are:

• Traditional Meal Plan
• Gluten-Free Meal Plan
• Slow Cooker Meal Plan
• Clean Eats Meal Plan
• 20 Meals Meal Plan
• All Chicken Meal Plan
• All Ground Beef Meal Plan
• All Pork Chops Meal Plan

With a Premium Membership {$10 a month, or $95 a year}, you are free to customize existing meal plans, create your own meal plans, and adjust the serving sizes. I highly recommend the Premium Membership over the Basic Membership. The ability to adjust the serving sizes is great, and I enjoyed being able to create my own meal plan.

How did I use MyFreezEasy?

I created a meal plan from the Slow Cooker Meals. The five meals I chose were:

• Slow Cooker Beef Stroganoff
• Slow Cooker Cheeseburger Soup
• Slow Cooker Creamy Ranch Chicken
• Slow Cooker Italian Chicken and Potatoes
• Slow Cooker Teriyaki Chicken

I chose to make one meal for each recipe instead of the two meals it suggests; that way, if we didn't like a certain meal, we wouldn't have to eat it again! {I'm glad I did this, as the Teriyaki Chicken wasn't a family favorite.}

When I printed out my meal plan, I was pleasantly surprised at how organized the lists were! I had a:

• Complete Shopping List by Recipe
• Complete Shopping List by Store Section/Category
• Freezer Meal Prep Day Shopping List by Recipe
• Freezer Meal Prep Day Shopping List by Store Section/Category
• Assembly Prep Instructions
• Meal Assembly Instructions

I took the Shopping List by Store Section to my grocery store and bought everything I needed, including the 10 freezer bags and the side dishes. I spent about $160, which seemed a little high to me. Since I was cooking 5 meals instead of 10, that comes out to about $32 a meal. I don't usually spend that much money on a meal for my family, unless we are cooking steaks!

When we got home, all of my kids wanted to help prep the meals! Yes, six people in a kitchen can be crowded, but it was a lot of fun. It took us less than an hour to prep the five meals and stick them in the freezer.

 

 

We have tried several of the meals. It is so simple to take the freezer bag out of the freezer, thaw it for half an hour, and throw it in the crockpot to cook all day on high {or all night on low}. It makes Sunday lunch after church much simpler!

What did I think of MyFreezEasy?

There are pros and con to this program.

PROS:

• it's nice having a meal ready to go into the crockpot or oven, especially when we've had a really busy day
• it does save time to have the meals prepped, even if it's just going into the crockpot
• it does save time because I don't have to wash dishes and clean up after cooking {except the crockpot}
• the shopping lists and assembly directions are very organized, making it super easy to know just what to buy

CONS:

• it seemed expensive to me, but it could have been the meals I chose
• we weren't crazy about the meals, although some were better than others
• I don't want to spend my Saturday prepping meals and cleaning up afterwards

Overall, it's a nice thing to have meals waiting for you in the freezer. I do think we will use MyFreezEasy again, but probably not every week. This may be a once a month thing I do to have a freezer with 5-6 meals ready for an emergency or a crazy day.

Check out MyFreezEasy on Facebook!

   

Back to School Pictures and Interviews

I don't normally do "back to school" pictures, because we pretty much school year-round, but the weather has been beautiful down here in Louisiana the past few days, so I decided to take some pictures. I added an short interview with each child.

Mikaela: 8th grade

What's your favorite subject?
Language Arts

What's your least favorite subject?
History, America the Beautiful

What do you want to be when you grow up?
an ER doctor

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
learning to drive

What is your favorite animal?
horses

What is your favorite Bible verse?
Colossians 4:2 "Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart."

Eli: 6th grade

What's your favorite subject?
History

What's your least favorite subject?
Math

What do you want to be when you grow up?
architect

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
playing baseball

What is your favorite animal?
deer

What is your favorite Bible verse?
Psalm 1:1 "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful."

Mercie: 3rd grade

What's your favorite subject?
writing in my journal

What's your least favorite subject?
Language Arts

What do you want to be when you grow up?
 doctor

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
going to gymnastics

What is your favorite animal?
cheetah

What is your favorite Bible verse?
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life."

Silas: Kindergarten

What's your favorite subject?
crafts

What's your least favorite subject?
math

What do you want to be when you grow up?
a fireman

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
riding my bike and doing the ramp

What is your favorite animal?
tiger

What is your favorite Bible verse?
John 1:1 "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God."

Titus: Preschool

What's your favorite subject?
doing school

What's your least favorite subject?
get eaten {I don't know where that came from}

What do you want to be when you grow up?
a cop

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
go the field with Daddy and ride my bike

What is your favorite animal?
a lion

What is your favorite Bible verse?
"God said Let Us make man in Our image" Genesis 1:26 {he didn't know the reference}

Weekly Recap

This week wasn't as busy as last week, thankfully. Silas and Eli had karate on Monday and Wednesday, and Mercie had gymnastics on Thursday. We have to drive 12 miles to "town" to get to gymnastics, so we went ahead and made a library trip and Wal*Mart run while we were there. Karate is right next door to us at the church gym, which is so nice!

Titus {preschool} has been asking to do schoolwork "like Silas". Silas has been using the Preschool Mom's R.E.A.D. curriculum, and I remembered I had bought and downloaded the "Bible ABC" curriculum some time ago and never used it with Silas. I printed out the first week, and Titus learned about the letter A {which he already knew} and lowercase a, which he didn't know. I'm glad we started back with "Aa", because it will give him a week or two of "easy" worksheets before he starts learning letters he doesn't know yet.

I love how the Bible lessons are intertwined with the letter of the week. We learned that A is for Adam and Eve, read about them in our Bible, and talked about God  being the Creator. He learned what the word "image" means, and can recite his Bible verse. He enjoyed the copy-work {which was tracing} and loved all of the coloring {you can see where he wanted me to help out!}.

You can see how fun all of these worksheets are! He had to find the "A"s and "a"s and circle them, color and cut out A and a for his "Alphabet Quilt", use dot markers to dot the A, along with an A maze, count and graph the pictures that start with "a", trace and write his A's and a's, and played the Spinner Winner game. He was really excited about this, because Silas has a Spinner Winner game each week with his words. We used a pencil and a paper clip to make a spinner. He would spin the paper clip, and then trace the A or the a. The letter to make it to the top first, wins! {For the record, the capital A won.}

In math, he played with pattern blocks, and we reviewed the numbers 1 and 2.

Silas {kindergarten} is using the R.E.A.D. curriculum, and has completed three weeks so far. It teaches word families and sight words, which has been working really well for him. So far, he knows the -at, -am, and -ab word families, and is working of the sight words "the", "and", "my" and "is".

He has a Spinner Winner game each week, and instead of tracing the words, he wanted to color the boxes. He also loves the word search each week {top left} and has gotten quite good at them. He writes his words almost every day, so his handwriting has been improving a lot.

 

He has sight word practice pages each week, a comic-book style reader to read with his word families and sight words, and plenty of practice pages! He hasn't complained once about the worksheets because they are all fun! He loves using the dot markers to decorate his word family letters.

 

They were so proud that they both got to make a crown today!

 

In math, Silas learned his numbers 11-19. We used a Place Value Village and beans to show the tens and ones place value. He used flashcards and put them in order from 11-19. He can recognize each number, which is truly amazing. He had plenty of practice writing them, too. Math Lessons for a Living Education includes lots of number copywork!

 

 

Mercie{3rd grade} has been reading "Charlotte's Web" and completing a simple book unit that I'm creating for her. I'm reading each chapter, writing 2 or 3 vocabulary words for her to define, and writing a few questions to test her comprehension and get her thinking more deeply. She also had a "label the spider's body parts" page to complete.

 

She had ten spelling words this week, with a word search to complete and a word search she had to create for me to complete. She also learned about plural nouns, regular and irregular.

 

In math, she reviewed column addition, reading and writing temperatures and clocks, and addition and subtraction facts.

 

That's it for the elementary kiddos!

 

Mikaela {8th grade} learned about exponents, scientific notation and how to use exponents on a calculator this week in math. Eli {6th grade} learned about prime numbers and factors, including how to make a factor tree.

 

They both completed a unit in America the Beautiful and a Lesson in Learning Language Arts Through Literature. In our writing workshop, they learned about the author's tone and diction. We read about the water cycle in Ecology, and they had a chapter test today. Mikaela has been reading "Adam and His Kin", and Eli is reading some Big Nate books from the library. They both worked on Rosetta Stone Spanish this week.

 

How was your week?