science fair

I just realized that I never posted anything further about Alex's science fair project after my initial post. Life got crazy and we barely got the thing done and presented before he left for camp.

Because he was going to be at camp during the actual science fair, the museum was very kind in letting him present early. So, a couple days before we left to take him to camp, he gave his presentation...
His experiment went well. It was really interesting to see how things turned out. Alex's hypothesis was that salt would make the best desiccant... but according to his experiment, the natron mixture did indeed make the best desiccant. I have quite a few photos of the end of the experiment but I'm being lazy at the moment.

Alex's presentation also went well. He was excited and knowledgeable about his subject.

What didn't go well was his paper. A couple of things were working against him here.... one, he hasn't done a lot of writing (something to work on for next year) and two, he was already mentally at camp when he set down to write the report. Oh well.

So, needless to say, Alex did not place at the science fair.... but he had a great time doing his project and learned a great deal from it. He's excited to work on a project for next year's science fair. Hopefully he'll take what he learned from this year's science fair and apply it to his new project.

testing, testing.... 1.2.3....

It was testing week in our house. In Illinois we're not required to do testing, but I do it just for our own records each year. We use the CAT/5 test... just because (I really don't have a good reason). :-)

I really wonder some times why I do this each year. I'm not exactly sure how much stock I put in a standardized test as a measure of what my children know. But I feel compelled to do this every spring.... something that will give me some form of "official documentation" that we're doing okay. It is incredibly exciting and extremely frustrating to administer these tests. You sit there and watch them get questions right that you expected them to miss and miss some you expected them to get. It's hard to keep quiet... but I do. I even managed to complete the crossword puzzle from the Trib the other day... something I hadn't done in months!

We finished today. I just have to mark my back-up answer sheet and send it off tomorrow.



It's funny to see how the general school population's scope and sequence for science and history/social studies varies from what we have covered. Even Alex's test was mainly about the community, with the only history really being the pilgrims, Christopher Columbus (which he's not so sure about after reading a book he just got at the library) and George Washington. The science seemed to have a lot about good nutrition and pollution/environmental issues. It's just interesting.

I've been saving this part until the last because I wasn't sure if I was even going to blog about it. But, in the interest of being open and honest, I will.

Taking this test brought to light some issues with this one...
... that have been plaguing me for a while. She's different... she's an "unconventional learner". She has flashes of brilliance that will utterly amaze you at times.... and then other times she'll be completely stumped by the simplest of concepts.

On her subtraction portion of her test today she aced it.... however I cannot make heads or tails out of HOW she got her answers. I watched her work on her scratch paper and what she did makes no sense to me.... but somehow it does for her.

She learned to write and read early.... but has completely stalled out. I'm not sure either is any better than it was this time last year. Although, last year she was ahead of her peers, this year she's on par.

I have to tell you, after we spent entirely too much time arguing about what it means to "fill in the circle" and what they meant by "dark" in regards to the marks she was supposed to make.... I found it rather therapeutic to spend the rest of the day researching schools to send her to next year. It was eyeopening.

I came to the conclusion that she will not be going to school next year. She doesn't want to go, she wants to be homeschooled and each spring we give them each the choice about the upcoming school year. I also can't send the message to her that "the good child" gets to stay home with me all day, while I'm sending her, "the problem child" away. I need to do this the right way.

So armed with the cost of the private school we would most likely send her to (if we were to send her)... I started researching tutors. Right off the bat, I began communicating with an occupational therapist who is a handwriting specialist. Clara will have an evaluation with her in about two weeks, then we'll go from there. I'm also looking to have a learning assessment done. I have heard that we can have this done through the neighborhood school, even if we are not enrolled in the public school system. If not, I have found another place that will do it and they take our insurance. Pricing out tutors and such, we can still come in well under what the private school tuition would be, still allowing her to be home with us but getting the help she needs.

It's been an emotional week... but after hitting the bottom, I've bounced back and I'm excited that we have a plan.... a plan that's on the path to figuring out what makes her tick and will help her unlock her potential (that sounded a little cheesy didn't it... but you know what I mean).

pond study

Yesterday we went on a really great field trip with some friends (big thank you to Jennifer for hauling us out there!).

We went out to the Environmental Learning Center in Mokena, IL. The kids had a great time, I think mainly because they left to explore and make discoveries on their own.

Here are the girls bringing up their net....
and checking out what they found...
After they had a nice collection of specimens in their buckets, everyone went to the lab to get a better look at what they had caught....

They had guide books and identification sheets lying around for the kids to use.... but again they left them to make their own discoveries instead of it being an over structured "educational experience". The kids really seemed to delight in figuring it out themselves and then excitedly showing the other kids.

Next was lunch. It's funny.... whenever a group of homeschoolers get together we joke about their lack of social skills since they're not in school (since that seems to be a main concern to random people we all come across). Immediately after eating, the kids (most of whom had never met each other before) came together to play tag... running and laughing around the picnic area. It really is too bad that they don't know how to interact with others :-)

After lunch they went animal tracking through the woods. They were to keep their eyes open for any signs of animals. Once we started to look we saw all kinds of signs... tracks, scat, gnawed off trees, woodpecker holes, etc. We also learned how to identify quite a few native plants along the way (and the kids even sampled a few of the edible ones).

It was a beautiful day to spend outdoors!!

a cool birthday present....

Yesterday Alex decided to get back out the science kit he had gotten as a birthday present...
We had already played with the glass prism and hung up our prism chain in the window. But yesterday they wanted to play with the UV activated beads. The beads start out a frosted white color (or a very, very pale pastel color) and then turn bright colors in sunlight.

They started out by setting them up on our window sill (please, please ignore my dirty windows)...
then they sorted them by color once they changed color...
The kit came with a square of clear plastic. They then put a small sample of sunscreen on the square and put it over a set of beads that had not be exposed to the sun to see if they would change color. They washed off the sunscreen and tried again with different SPF's. It was a pretty cool exercise for them. Of course the SPF 50 we had worked the best :-)

ancient china

As I have mentioned before... we're taking our own sweet time working our way through Story of the World Volume 1. This week we spent some time studying Ancient China.

We watched a couple of Netflix movies.

The first one was...

China - The Panda Adventure (IMAX)

This was had no real tie to Ancient China other than the movie was set in China. We had watched it years before when we studied China when we used Galloping the Globe. As soon as the kids heard we were studying China, they requested that I get this movie again. It's a good movie in the sense that it has amazing footage of the beauty of natural China and the rivers mentioned in Story of the World. The panda bears are pretty cute too (Clara's favorite part). But the basic story is that of a race between a woman (whose husband died in China while studying pandas) and a hunter set on killing pandas. One cub will go missing and the hunter kills the mother panda (Clara was traumatized... briefly). But in the end the woman adopts the remaining cub and takes it back to the US. Footage of the adorable cub cheered Clara up again.

The second movie we got was...

Ancient China: A Journey Back in Time (Lost Treasures of the Ancient World)

Hmmmm.... what to say about this one. It has good information... but, it was DULL! At least to me. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't. The kids lasted all of the way through it but maybe that had more to do with the fact that they rarely watch TV and they weren't going to give up the opportunity easily than it did with actually liking the thing.

We didn't do so good with movies this go around but we did get some cool books at the library.

Two favorites were....

The Warlord's Puzzle
and
Grandfather Tang's Story

We started out by reading The Warlord's Puzzle. I mistakenly thought that our shapes tub had tangram pieces in it so I dumped them all out in the floor before I realized that it didn't. I ended up tracing the tangram pieces in the back of the book and cutting a set out for each child. They really enjoyed the book and constantly recite the boy's story about the fish in order to make the pieces into the tile again.

But, I have to say, that the favorite of the two books was Grandfather Tang's Story. The story was about two fox fairies who could change shape.

Here are the two foxes at the beginning of the book...
(side note: this book is great for two kids as there are two foxes who change shape... each child can be one of the characters and rearrange their tangram pieces to make the shape of the animal their fox changes into)

Here is Clara's fox changing into a squirrel (I think)....

Midway through the story, Clara remembered that we had tangrams in our Classic Tangoesgame.... so she got those out so they could use those instead....
Crazy thing is, that night while Clara was at swim, Alex and I walked to the thrift store nearby and found this....

The Fun with Tangrams Kit

We got it, two other math books and an I Spy computer game for $2.40 (you've got to love thrift stores!). It even had the punch out tangram pieces still in the book... however, we just used our plastic ones from the game again.

They've been playing with the book quite a bit.

Here's their favorite one so far....

... I'm not sure who exactly it is supposed to be (since it's just under the heading "faces") but the kids have decided that it looks like Abraham Lincoln and I couldn't agree more.

We read one other library book aloud... The Warlord's Messengers. The kids really enjoyed that book. To be technical, this book is set quite a while after the time period covered in SOTW but it was still a good read. We're going to read The Warlord's Alarmtomorrow.


I checked out a few other library books for the kids to choose from for free reading.

Here are those books:
The Jade Stone: A Chinese Folktale
The Emperor and the Kite
The Sons of the Dragon King: A Chinese Legend
See Inside an Ancient Chinese Town

All About Spelling

Okay... I think I'm finally ready to type up my thoughts on All About Spelling. :-)

For the past month or so, we've been using All About Spelling Level 1....
After our track record with other spelling programs I was both reluctant and desperate to start something new. At least now I had a better idea about what worked for us and what didn't work. I thought AAS was a good way to go because it seemed to use the basic concepts that I liked about Spell to Write and Read but in a much more user friendly manner (at least for me). I really liked the emphasis on learning the phonograms first and the fact that you actually learn spelling rules along the way.

Okay... Alex is in third grade but I decided to start him on Level 1 anyway. I figured that if this was the right program for us, it would benefit us to start at the beginning (especially with the emphasis on phonograms and rules). Also AAS is written in a way that makes it EXTREMELY easy to go at your own pace. Clara will sometimes take a few days per lesson, while Alex will do more than one a day. I'm finding it very easy to modify for each child. Finally, Alex was not a strong speller (at grade level according to the test in the back of Spell to Write and Read) and needed to build some confidence with spelling... breezing through Level 1 has really helped his confidence level. I'm not planning on retesting him after this book as I don't really expect that his spelling level has increased. What he has gained from this level is a good solid foundation to build on and a boost to his confidence level and I don't think those will translate to a higher spelling score (yet).

Now, on to the program. I ordered one level one packet (teacher's manual and student material packet) plus one extra student packet. I did this because I am using this program with both kids at the same time. Nothing in this level is consumable (except for the progress chart) so you could use one set for multiple kids if you were not using the same level at the same time. The set really has everything and I was so impressed by the quality of the items!

Here is a look at Clara's card set....
I can tell this set is Clara's because she imediately tried to shut the lid of the box and mashed her first tab. Every set of cards is divided into three sections - Review, Mastered, and Future Lessons. For someone like me who is organizationally challenged... this has been wonderful! With each kid having their own box of cards, I never have to think about where Alex is versus Clara.... I just pull out the cards from the Review section of their box and start with the lesson. I love that the program has lots of review built in.... but that review is customized according to your child's own needs.

Oh... back to the cards themselves.... they are made from bright, heavy paper and came perforated (very well perforated I might add). No cutting or anything so getting started was very easy.

To get started, we practiced the basic phonograms over and over. I sometimes didn't even say we were doing "spelling", it was a game we played at meal times (the cards seem to always be on the dining room table). I also purchased the Phonogram CD-ROM so I could make sure we were pronouncing the sounds correctly. We have used this some, but not that much.... we'll see if we use it more in the future.

Once we got going good on the phonogram cards, we moved on to the sound cards. With these I would say the sounds a letter made and they would have to write down the appropriate letter. Clara really struggles with her fine motor skills and needs extra help with her handwriting so I just typed up the alphabet in StartWrite and let her find the appropriate letter to trace.
Now moving on to the parts that really sold me on this program... the "hands on" parts. Writing is the last step if you do the program as outlined which is great for Clara. With the concentration it takes for her to write, it frustrates her to be learning spelling at the same time. With this program she really knows the word by the time it comes to writing it and she can focus on the writing and not as much on spelling.

First of all, they use tokens to separate each word out into the sounds in the word. They pull a token down for each sound....
This sets the stage for the next step, using the letter tiles....
They start by putting the letters in order and then when given a word, they pull the letters down by sound, the same way they did with the tokens. We do this a lot with Clara. Alex, not so much. Clara needs the "hands on" plus she's just now really learning to spell. Alex doesn't need the hands on as much plus he already knows these words. I just let him go straight to writing the words on paper which is why we can go through a couple of lessons at one sitting. We do, however, get out the tiles with Alex for any new concepts and to illustrate the spelling rules. I love, love, love that this program has the spelling rules. I know it sounds crazy... but I was practically giddy the other day when we learned when to use c and when to use k when the /k/ sound is at the beginning of a word. Not one single program we had used in the past had explained that! (okay... Spell to Write and Read would have explained it if I had been able to figure it out)

Another note about the letter tiles - they are made of a laminated cardstock and are of a really nice quality. You do have to cut them out yourself, but that's not a big deal. They give you the option of ordering magnet backing to put on each tile, but we didn't get the magnets.

So, since I was pleased with Level 1, I placed another order the other day...
I got Level 2 for Alex and the Beehive Reader Level 1 for Clara. Alex hasn't started Level 2 yet (almost done with Level 1) but Clara has started with the reader. Clara is a good reader... she's been reading since she was 4 BUT she has always been a sight reader (she can be very competitive at times and started "reading" Dick and Jane books in order to keep up with Alex who was beginning to read at the time). I thought a good basic phonetic reader would be good for her... especially one that went along with our spelling program. She immediately took it to her room and read it in bed at night. I am, however, having her read it aloud to me. Most of it comes very easy to her but when she does stumble, it has been a good way to show her that the sounds and rules she is learning through spelling apply to reading as well. Since she is a good reader, she really doesn't need a separate reading program.... but this is a really nice supplement to our spelling program that helps her read better. Does that make sense?

Okay, to sum this all up....

I have found All About Spelling to be a good fit for us. The price is reasonable, the materials are reusuable, and the materials are of really good quality for the price. The program makes sense (to me) as far as the word lists and the progression of the program (many of the other programs seemed random to me). The teacher's manual is extremely easy to follow and requires no prep work on my part... I just open it up and get going at spelling time. The program is very easy to modify to your child's individual needs.... spelling with AAS looks very different for each of mine at this point - Clara does lots of tile work with little writing and Alex does very little tile work but lots of writing. It is also easy to choose your own pace without feeling "behind". I can't really tell that it is set up to be a school year program, if you know what I mean.

The biggest downside seems to be that it requires total "teacher" involvement. I will be honest here... I would love a program that I could just hand to my child in workbook form and have them work quietly on their own and then magically know how to spell without any tears! That's just not going to happen... we need this type of program. It really does not take up that much time (actually less time than our old workbook programs when you count in the time I spent dealing with meltdowns...sigh). I was scared about all of the review built in - phonogram cards, sound cards, key cards, word cards. But then I realized the point of the "review" and "mastered" dividers. We were only reviewing what we needed to review each time.... not the whole stack of cards.

Okay.... I think I'm done rambling! I hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions!

favorite thing - globes

I will start off by saying that I stink at geography... but I am getting better! :-)

Perhaps because I stink at geography, I have an obsession with collecting globes. One is always within a few feet for a quick check when I need to know where something is.

Almost every globe in our collection was purchased at a antique store for around $20 or less. At first I was concerned about having "out of date" globes in our house when using them for school, but it actually has been a plus.

For example... today Alex wanted to know about the USSR versus today's Russia (he got the Beatles white album yesterday for his birthday and had been listening to Back in the USSR)... we talked about it a bit and then went to the globes to look at the geographical differences.

This particular globe (which sits on top of my desk cabinet) is from the period of the USSR...
We got it down and took a look.

We then took a look at this globe, which was after the break-up of the USSR....
We played a little game of "spot the difference".

That globe above is my favorite. I almost didn't buy it. It was the last globe I purchased. It wobbles a bit and the stand wasn't a favorite.... I wasn't sure what I would do with a globe on such a tall stand... but it was a globe and it was only $25. Now it sits near the dining room table where we do our school work and eat our meals. We refer to this globes multiple times a week.... either because of something in our school work, something we've read in the paper over breakfast, something from our read aloud or just out of curiosity.

In addition to the two globes above, we have several more sprinkled around the house.

This little metal globe bank is tucked away on a shelf by the kitchen....
(it's twin is waiting to find a home in my new office.... if we ever get it done)

This is our one modern globe...
Alex got it as a Christmas present from his aunt and uncle one year. It's especially cool because when you plug it in... you see all of the constellations. This one usually lives in Alex's room, I'm not sure why he brought it upstairs, but he did and it's still here.

This is yet another globe in Alex's room...

I have the itch now to acquire more :-)

Oh.... I found a site one time that gave you the info to date your globes based on country borders and names. I need to find that again... I think that would be a fun "school" activity one day.

And yes.... the rest of my spelling ramblings is coming soon.

****

Kez - The inflatable globe!!! I totally forgot about that one! We have one bouncing around here someplace too! And yes... the little tin globe is a piggy bank. I think they're adorable... you should see if you still have yours!