Homeschool Friday

We had a short week this week, since we were out at the lake on Labor Day. In our little 4 day week, the kids had a tougher time getting “into” school. The permanence of it is starting to sink in, and the novelty has worn off.

As much of our curriculum is read aloud, it was tough with my dry throat and cough that I’ve been dealing with. We took lots of breaks, and I’ve had cup after cup of our homemade hot apple cider.

Silje would probably say the highlight of her week was starting a journal. In science, we learned about the sun, and Silje had to give a speech to the family on why it’s not good to look at the sun. In Bible we continue reading through the book of Mark. In English she learned about antonyms and synonyms (which she calls cinnamon) and added the adverb jingle to her jingle repertoire (she knows a sentence, noun, and verb jingle already). She loves singing or chanting along with her jingles during English a lot! We’ve made up actions to go with them, and she usually can’t wait for her grammar lesson because of it.

The highlight for me was when I handed her the new reader for the week: “Keep the Lights Burning Abbie” which is a story about a girl living at a lighthouse with her family and has to keep the lamps in the lighthouse going during a storm that her father is caught up in.

Silje was dressed in her Snow White costume that day. She told me she wanted to wear it for the whole day because it had a hoop skirt, and we had read a story this last summer about a girl in the 1700s who wore a hoop skirt and had such trouble with it. Silje always giggled when she sat on the couch and her skirt would fly up. She learned she had to sit and sometimes even walk differently to accommodate the hoop skirt. (She’s had this costume for awhile but rarely wore it since it wasn’t pink 😉 )

Anyway, she was wearing her Snow White, hoop-skirt costume, and I handed her the book, and she asked if she could get her doll “Abby” and read it to her. Then there she was, in her costume, holding her favorite doll, and reading her the book. She said to her doll “Abby, this book is about you when you get older. You will be so brave.” It was just adorable. I’m just loving this.

After talking with Knut’s extended family who I consider homeschool veterans, I decided to trim the fluff from each of Silje’s math lessons, and combine 2 lessons a day, until we get to a point where we’re at the level that challenges her. We’re not spending any more time doing math each day, but the “boring baby stuff” is cut out and it’s the more challenging parts of 2 lessons smushed together. We’ll get done with math earlier this year, or start second grade math sooner by doing this. Still, math has been much more enjoyable for her this way, and her bored/sloppy work has so far disappeared.

The one part in her math book that she seems to have trouble with this week was distinguishing between right and left. She knows which hand is right and which is left, but she has trouble with directions that are right and left. Such as: turn left, turn right. I think we’ll do some kind of treasure map or something to work on these directions. See, I’m adding my own ideas into the pre-set lessons now. All together now: OOOOooo, Aaahhhhhh…

In history and geography, we learned about beliefs from all over the world, from tribal customs to the big world religions. I cannot even begin to express how insightful Silje’s questions were during these lessons. Not too much gets past her! We also focused in on our Bible-less people of the week: the Brokpa people who live in the Kingdom of Bhutan. We have friends who have a mission opportunity in that part of the world, so it was fun to show her their picture on our fridge and tell her about their ministry.

Since yaks, sheep, and the Himalayan Mountains are all big parts of that country, we went to the library to check out books on these subjects, but only found one lonely book on Bhutan. I’ll have to plan ahead better and request some books from other libraries for these kinds of studies in the future. We also did some map coloring and other coloring pages along these themes. When we got home from the library, I just let Silje go through the book (which was actually quite good) with a Post-it pad. She read through the things that looked interesting, and marked 10 of the pages with a Post-it. Well, next time I’ll only give her 10 pieces of a Post-it pad. She marked closer to 30 pages and exclaimed “Mommy I couldn’t pick just 10! I had too many favorites!” Then we went through the marked pages together and she had to tell me about what she found so interesting on that page.

We didn’t do any crocheting this week, as I’m wondering if we should do some fun, easy felt sewing instead, and leave the crocheting for a bit later (although Silje would be devastated to know that I’m contemplating this).

I did sign up Silje for the local children’s choir at the Center for the Arts that practices once a week. David will be old enough to join next year. She’ll start this next Tuesday. It will be fun to go to Christmas and springtime concerts this year for her. She’s really looking forward to meeting and seeing other kids. I’m trying to figure out how to get her to the choir practice since it’s right smack in the middle of Elias’ nap. However, I’m willing to resign to the fact that he may just have short naps on Tuesdays so that Silje can do this and we’ll just have to deal with that.

Piano lessons have also been set up, and fortunately, she’ll go straight from choir to her piano lessons so I only have to interrupt naps one day a week. Tuesdays will just be “music overkill day.” I know, I know. We’ve been debating whether or not she’s ready for them this year. It just turned out that the exact right circumstances of the right teacher, the right time slot, and the right price, and the right piano, (PIANO?? You gasp! Tune in tomorrow! Get it? Tune in? Hee Hee.) all appeared before our eyes. How can we say no to all of that? Plus, her asking for lessons has turned into a multiple-times-a-day-plea, so we think she may be ready interest-wise.

Silje lost so much knowledge in just the few weeks that we didn’t have her do Chinese at the end of the summer while we were gone. She’s been spending this whole time doing review and trying to get back to the point she was before. She was so excited when the computer program she does her lesson with finally let her move forward again! (The program won’t let her move forward until she scores high enough to do so. When we got back from vacation her scores were so low that she had to keep doing review until her scores went up. That was tough for her.) Now her scores are back up in the 90s and she can start learning new things. She was jumping up and down over that!

David has still had the desire to learn to read, but his concentration was lacking at the beginning of this week. He now wants to read fast, and has a tough time slowing down his brain and forcing it to look at each letter. He wants so badly for it to come easily. So our lessons have been even shorter, but we keep progressing, although at a slower pace. I’m trying to keep it consistent for him, as in daily, but not worrying so much about how long each day. He’s still 4, still preschool age. I have absolutely no desire to make him sit and stay on the couch and do a solid lesson from beginning to end until he gets it right. I’m still of the belief that 4 year old boys are just not built that way. When he’s Silje age, he’ll have to sit and finish a lesson. Until then, we’re doing this all for fun. The last 2 days of the week he started putting his all into it again, so I think it will just ebb and flow.

However, I might add that we have just finished our 3rd week of school and he has learned to read every single kindergarten level (level 1) book and workbook already with our Hooked on Phonics curriculum. Next week we’re moving on to the 1st grade book and workbook/games, while keeping the kindergarten ones out so he can keep reviewing them. So really…no rush. If the 1st grade material seems to be too challenging, I have plenty of easy BOB books to keep him interested too.

As his reading desire has increased, though, his desire to color/draw/do anything with a writing utensil has ceased. I’ll remind you my two goals for him for the year were to teach him basic reading, and teach him to write his name. One he’s very into right now. The other…not so much.

So David and Elias do a lot of racing of trucks around the house, wrestling and giggling, and building amazing sculptures with Tinkertoys and Legos. It’s amazing to me that Elias, who is not quite 2 can keep up with David, but he does! Although he can be a little annoying to David, David really enjoys playing with him, and having someone who likes to play “boyish” things with him.