Homeschool Friday

Before I forget, we voted as a family, and Monique won the giveaway hands down with her comment about the skiing photo: “Dad?  I said I like your goatee.  Not I’d like to go out to ski!”  We laughed our socks off.  Since she is a good friend who I have met in real life before we were both obsessive crafters, moved away from, and then ironically met again on the internet via diaper sewing, and most of all, because she’s an AMAZING designer, I’d like to give a shout out to her site: www.sewmeagarden.com.  Not only does she design sewing patterns, she designs fabric.  Fabric!  How cool is that!The rainbow dress on her site is made from fabric that she designed herself.  Sorry to be all dorky and name drop, but I know her!

Now to get back on task…

This week, school-wise, went pretty well.  I feel like we’re completely back on track, in routine, on schedule again.  We weren’t behind, of course.  Silje?  Behind?  That doesn’t apply to her type A personality.  Still, I felt like we were back in the groove.  The hardest part was getting the kids weaned off of the television which they got so used to during break.  When the household goes into “survival mode” the television somehow gets left on.

I found it interesting that Silje has no problem with prepositional phrases, identifying a subject/noun, adverb, adjective, object of a preposition, or verb in a sentence, but she has had trouble telling the difference between a common and proper noun.  That was the new grammar skill this week.  She did get the hang of it enough to know that proper ones are capitalized, but I don’t know if she knows why.

We can’t seem to find her journal, so she started a new one and spent her journal time this week completing her Christmas wish list for next year.

I’m sure the journal is somewhere in the homeschool “stuff” pile on top of the drawers in the living room.  The disorganized mountain is teetering to the point where no one wants to touch it for fear that it will crumble into a paper mass on the floor.  Now that most of the house is getting back in order, that’s the next on the to do list.

Instead of giving her the next reader this week, I gave her the poetry book that we read earlier this year during read aloud time.  She’s eating it up cover to cover and is already memorizing some of them voluntarily.  Who knew she loved poetry so much?

I’m finding that the more my kids have structured lessons, the more they play during the day.  The more t.v. they watch, the more they whine that they’re bored.  The love watching t.v. but the lessons and activities, I’ve noticed even more this week, have been merely a spark to their play.  When they watch a movie, and I turn it off, they whine and say everything is boring.  Silje’s already started asking about summer break, and how she can’t wait for it, but I don’t buy it.  When she is in the last hour of school, she’s dying to finish so that she can play.  Then she and David make the most involved play scenes.  Yesterday it was this restaurant in the basement where Silje wrote out directions on how to get to the basement for Knut and I.  Then there was the sign at the entrance to the basement, saying that all kids eat free, get dessert, and a free toy.  Knut and I were each shone a menu, and I have to say, the service was excellent.

We didn’t study restaurants or anything, but her brain had to work all morning, instead of been fed chewed up educational programing, there is sooooo much imaginative play when school is done.  I’ve been amazed at the difference.  It reminded me of a facebook status I read a few weeks ago: “You know you’re a homeschooling family when you overhear your kids playing hide and seek with each other in Latin.”

The hard part has been keeping track of  Elias during school time lately, but I think I’ll vent on that on a different post.  It deserves its own.

We’re studying the 12 Olympian Greek gods and I’m happy with how the Sonlight curriculum presents this so far.  It compares mythology more to fairy tales than our religious beliefs.  We’ve both had a tough time keeping them all straight so I went to the internet and found Greek mythology coloring pages that help organize the different gods with their own symbols, animal associates, and lineage. Who knew you actually can find everything on the internet.  Although she is a fan of the Greek mythology, she appears not to be as much of a fan with the Greek history, which I need to work on.  The Greek history books so far haven’t grabbed her attention, so we’ll see if we can’t spice it up a bit next week.