and we're off!

I know, I've been talking about it for nearly a year now... but we're finally off and running with Story of the World!

The Story of the World: Volume 1

The biggest reason I hadn't started was that I wasn't sure how to fit it in to our schedule.  There are so many cool books out there and so many great ideas in the corresponding activity book...

The Story of the World: Activity Book 1

I was a bit overwhelmed... I wasn't sure how to do it justice without reading aloud ALL DAY LONG.  

So, I held off on starting Story of the World in favor of Ambleside Online for Alex.  I organized it for Alex in the form of weekly reading lists.  He really enjoyed it and would go through multiple weeks' worth of reading each week.  Clara wanted a book list too so I started rounding up books at the library to make a list for her.

I still loved Ambleside but I didn't have that feeling of actually "studying something"... you know... that question that random people ask your kids... "so what are you studying in school" (btw... the question makes me crazy at times).  We really didn't have an answer part of the time.  So... I decided to take Alex down to one week's worth of Ambleside a week and supplement with other books relating to Story of the World.  Clara's book list has the same basic formula that I gave a week or so ago, but I've added in reading level appropriate SOTW books too.  Oh... and I'll be adding audio books for those that are a bit above her reading level.

So far, so good.  We're all very happy this week with the new arrangement.  We had toyed with SOTW a bit off and on so we were ready to start Ancient Egypt this week.  I grabbed a big stack of books from the library and then sorted them.... some for Alex, some for Clara and some that just needed to go back to the library.  The fun part is that Alex usually reads all of the books on Clara's list as well as his own.  

Here are some that we've enjoyed this week...

The Story of the Nile

Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Ancient Egypt
The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
Egyptian gods & goddesses (All Aboard Reading)
Croco'nile
Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile
Egypt: In Spectacular Cross-section

Alex is also reading this book...

Casting the Gods Adrift: A Tale of Ancient Egypt

Clara is listening to Peeps at Many Lands:  Ancient Egypt by James Baikie from Librivox.org on the iPod.

And they are both listening to...

Egyptian Treasures: Mummies and Myths

They are both thoroughly enjoying this CD.  Clara is especially enjoying it.  She got completely caught up in the story of Osiris and Set.  I'm glad a I bought this one and I'm excited that I had bought several other of Jim Weiss's CDs to go with other sections in SOTW.

We also watched this....

Mysteries of Egypt

The subject of this movie (we got it from Netflix) was a little ahead of where we are in SOTW but it did give great views of the Nile (which was a current topic).  HOWEVER, I cannot watch an Imax movie without getting a bit of motion sickness!  My goodness!  The views of the Nile were amazing but did we really need to fly down the river and over waterfalls?  :-)

I had been dreading adding more writing into our school.... but the kids really seem to enjoy doing their narrations to go along with each section of SOTW.  Alex writes his own and they can sometimes be quite.... ummmm.... interesting.  One he wrote the other day was written entirely as dialog between a nomad and a farmer using a shaduf.  We've been studying quotation marks in grammar and decided to put them to use.  Clara dictates her narrations to me and I type them up in StartWrite for her.

Anyway... we're off to a good start with what I feel is a reasonable and manageable plan.  And the kids are loving that we're actually "studying something"!  :-)

mealtime mental math

Who knew it would be this fun?  :-)

Seriously, so many things that work well with our homeschooling were really not my idea at all.  Okay... maybe at first it was my idea.... or at least my excuse to buy yet another book.... but how some of these things have been used (successfully) rarely comes directly from me.

For example... mental math.  I liked the sound of it when reading the posts to the living math yahoo group.  A special book that people buy to use for mental math?  Sure... let me add one to my cart.  Ohhh... it's a little vintage looking book with a copyright date of 1877?  Let me hit "buy" right now!

Then it came... I looked at it... it was adorable (still is actually)... but what to do with it.  So, I added it to my shelf labeled "math" back in August and never touched it again until this week.

I'm really not sure what made me get this book out... oh, I know.  The other night the kids (wait, it was just Alex the night Clara had dinner at her friend's house... I think... sad that I can't remember two days ago) wanted to show off their math around dinner time.  My brain was shutting down (much like now apparently) and I couldn't think up questions fast enough.  So, I ran down and picked up this book...

Ray's new primary arithmetic

Alex and I did a few and then I got busy doing something else.  Last night they wanted to show off for their dad at dinner so I got out the book again.  They wouldn't let me put it down!  We had such a good time at dinner last night doing problems from this book.  The book is not difficult math... honestly, Alex is doing harder stuff in his regular curriculum BUT it was a challenge to him because he had to do it mentally.  The first thing he did was grab a pencil and start writing on his napkin.  But I asked him to try doing it in his head instead.  They both really got into it and kept begging for more.  To stay sane, we went back and forth between the two so one wasn't yelling over the other one (I did this for Clara's sake, but I was surprised how she was getting some of the addition ones faster than Alex before we started taking turns).  Eventually I ended up asking Clara questions from the addition section and Alex from the multiplication (with addition and subtraction thrown in occasionally  for fun).

A lot of the book is words problems... but they're pretty uncomplicated word problems that are easy to keep track of in your head.  The book was written in 1877 so the problems have to do with marbles, carriages, spools of thread and buying yards of calico.  

It's shocking to me how much they enjoyed this.  They grumbled at breakfast and lunch today because I told them that we would wait to do the book again at dinner.  Clara has been bouncing around saying that she can't wait until dinner because she's hungry AND because we get to do math again.  

It's really crazy.... but a very good crazy!  :-)

continuing our tree study - fall

This afternoon we decided that we needed to do our fall entry for our continuing tree study before all of the leaves were gone!  :-)

So, even thought it was a cold rainy day, we decided to brave the elements and take a walk outside.

Here is a shot of the leaves that are still hanging on...

Alex managed to find another leaf as big as his head...
A pretty tree we passed on our walk...
Alex's favorite leaf...
Clara's favorite...
A shot of some of the leaves on the ground...
They look so sad in the photo above... last week they were still bright and cheery.  Now they've been on the ground a while, they've been trampled on and they're wet... sigh.

Clara inspecting her leaf collection...
One last shot of the tree we're studying for the year....
And then it was back inside to work in our nature journals.  I read aloud from the Handbook of Nature Studywhile they worked on their drawings.  I read the section on pages 620-622 about The Way a Tree Grows.  I love how it compares the leaves to factories, that mental image worked well with my two.  

The autumn leaf which is so beautiful has completed its work.

Here is Alex's entry....
and Clara's...
The labeling was still to be done when I took these, but I loved how hard they worked on capturing the bright colors of the leaves.  However, I noticed that even though we were supposed to be studying "our tree", neither one of them used leaves from "our tree" for their journal entry.  Oh well!  :-)

a small experiment...

I know I've mentioned here before that I'm totally in love with the concept of living math.  Well... I've decided to try to do the same with language arts.  See... I'm not a huge fan of language arts (which I'm sure you all can tell from my writing on my blog... lol).  I was a math and science girl in school... I did my language arts stuff... but it never really "clicked".  So, it goes without saying that grammar/language arts has been my hardest subject to wrap my head around with homeschooling.  It's hard teaching something or even just encouraging your child to do something that you, personally, do not like to do.  So, we've done just what we've had to (and sometimes a little less).  

After really getting into living math, I wondered about a living language arts program.  Some way to make grammar more fun and accessible for us.  We're still doing our formal program (albeit slowly) but I wanted more.

Enter my attempt at putting together a living language arts program for Alex.  For the spine of our experiment this year, I'm using this book...

Woe is I Jr.: The Younger Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English

I pre-read it this summer and enjoyed it.  It was fun and it made sense to me.  I also liked that it had cute little poems in each section to help you remember what you had learned.

I started assigning Alex sections out of this book a week or so ago.  Right now he is currently still in the beginning section on pronouns.

Also this summer I went through Amazon and the library's online catalog to find as many grammar related story books as I could.  I have a big huge list, but I hesitate to post it before I actually see the books in person to see if they really apply.

I checked out a couple of pronoun story books for Alex to read....

I And You And Don't Forget Who: What Is a Pronoun? (Words Are Categorical)

Mine, All Mine: A Book About Pronouns (World of Language)

I will say that my favorite of the two was the second one... Mine, All Mine.  The first one may have had good content... but the crazy fonts and page filling illustrations were too much for me.  Mine, All Mine is a great, straight forward book on  the different types of pronouns and how to use them.

This approach has also given me the excuse to get out...

Schoolhouse Rock!

I love Schoolhouse Rock!  To go along with what we we're reading in Woe is I, we watched this...

You've just got to love Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla!  :-)

We're just beginning our little experiment here, so I'm not sure how it will all go... but so far, we're having fun doing it!

language arts for clara

The photo above has nothing to do with this post in particular... I just wanted to post it :-)

I hadn't really planned much in the language arts department for Clara this year.  The program I use for Alex doesn't officially begin as its own subject until second grade (prior to that, it's combined with their reading program which we don't use).  So, I figured that I would just wait until then.  Clara had other plans though.  She is insisting on being at the table... working... for the entire time Alex is working.  This means I've had to do some scrambling to find her work to do that has benefit and isn't just busy work.

She's been doing the Explode the Code workbooks.  Honestly, I could take or leave them.  I don't mind them, but I, personally, have not seen any great benefit from using them.  They both enjoy them, so we keep doing them... I'm sure they don't hurt anything.

I had originally started her in Sequential Spelling with Alex... but that went downhill fast.  It is grade appropriate for her and for Alex BUT given their grade differences... even though she was hanging in there, she wasn't doing as well at it as Alex so things got ugly.  I continued with Alex and stopped with her.  I was just going to take some time off and then start the book again with her later in the year.  Again, she had other ideas.  She wanted a spelling program of her own.  So, she's working her way through the word lists in the McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book.  I actually downloaded it for free here.  It's not a fancy program for her, but so far so good.  She actually works on her small white board when we do spelling.  I've got the itch to add something like the Evan Moor Daily Spelling Skills book.  I'm not sure about that yet though.

Something I did just add is this...

Evan Moor's Daily Language Review for First Grade

She was intrigued by Alex's Daily Paragraph Editing book, so thought I would find her a "daily" book too.  We just started it last week, but so far so good.  She likes having her daily sheet to do too, like Alex.  The daily assignments are short and I use them as more of a brief little language lesson rather than an assignment to do on her own.

Starting this week, I'm adding more writing for both of them.  I haven't worked out the details of my plan yet though.  I've always had them do oral narrations on what they've read or something we've read aloud... but I had avoided having them write out their narration.  Today they wrote.  Alex was on his own.  Clara gave her narration to me orally and I typed it up in Startwrite for her to trace.  Soon, I'll type it up for her to copy instead.

Not a huge amount of stuff that we have going on for LA with Clara.... but it sure is different than what I had in mind just a couple of months ago!  :-)

levers

Today, by the request of the kids, we got out this book again...
The New Way Things Work

So we could work on the next unit... Levers...

I even had the DVD already checked out from the library.

We also got out this kit as well...K'NEX EDUCATION Intro to Simple Machines: Levers and Pulleys-178 pcs

First we read the intro out of the book and then watched the DVD. After that the kids started to work on building the see-saw....
Once it was built... the mini figs went for a ride :-)
and then they did the experiments from the teachers' guide...
They moved the load and the fulcrum to see how the amount of force needed to do the work changed. Then they just "played" with it for quite a while... mostly using it as a balance.

This kit has a ton of different levers to build. The kids can't wait to move on to the next lever.... I think it's another first class lever, a balance scale, I think. I love how this little study we're doing using The Way Things Work book has really taken off with both kids. Alex had already read a lot of the book... but between the kits and the movies, things are really sinking in for him!

a book list for Clara

FYI: This is the first a several posts I'm working on about the changes in our "school" so far this school year... not terribly interesting reading, but I needed to document our changes since my blog seems to be where I do most of my planning record keeping. :-)

Clara is in first grade this year. My plan was rather light for her, as I felt it should be for her first grade year (well, at least compared with Alex's plan for this year). However, she has insisted on keeping pace with the amount of work I'm assigning to Alex. One thing she was adamant about was that she wanted a book list like Alex's Ambleside list. See, I had been typing each week up for him and having him manage his own reading schedule for the week. His Ambleside time was after our seat work was done and while I was fixing lunch. Clara was not content to do free reading while he worked on this, she wanted her own list.

I wasn't sure where to start. So, I ended up on Amazon in listmania and found the following lists to get me started...

Ambleside Yr 0 Fall Books List 1
Ambleside Year 0 Fall Books List 2

Next trip to the library, I located several of the books from these lists that I thought were readable for Clara (thankfully, she's a stronger reader than Alex was at this age) and supplemented them with some readers from the seasonal shelf.

Oh, and I also added a couple level 1 math readers from the Mathstart Series.

That was great, but she finished that week's list in TWO days!!! And she also specifically requested some stories to listen to on my iPod like Alex has. So, back to checking out books and looking through Librivox.

My list for her now consists of this basic formula:

Math Readers
Seasonal Books
Ready for Chapter Books Readers assigned by Chapter
A Science Related Book on iPod
A Story Book on iPod
Poetry Book assigned by poem

She is currently really enjoying having her own list and has surprised me with what she has picked up from her reading (and listening). And the thing is... this is all bonus as far as school is concerned. I had planned on this just being free reading time, but instead she's added more math, science, history, etc. to her school schedule! You've got to love it when things work out this way. :-)

So, I think we've finally hit the right number of books for Clara to comfortably read a week during our reading time.

Here's her list for this week...

Math Readers:
Circus Shapes (MathStart 1)
Mighty Maddie (MathStart 1)
Addition Annie (Rookie Readers)

Seasonal Books:
The Best Fall of All
DK Readers: The Secret Life of Trees (Level 2)
Johnny Appleseed (Ready-to-Read. Level 1)
Leaf Jumpers
Autumn Leaves

Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon:
Together in the Fall
Under the Yellow Moon
Thanksgiving Guest

Reading Rainbow Readers: Scary Stories to Read When it's Dark (Reading Rainbow):
Henry's Bedtime Story
Bloody Fingers
Something at the Window

Wild Life in Woods and Fields (iPod):
Peter's Cat
The Greedy Stranger
The Mole and His Home

Birds of the Air (iPod):
Birds' Eggs
Baby Birds
Birds Feeding their Young

The House at Pooh Corner (iPod):
Side 1
Side 2
Side 3
Side 4

Where the Sidewalk Ends:
Flag
Colors
The Loser
Joey
Listen to the Mustn'ts
Jimmy Jet and His TV Set

Okay... enough rambling about this... we're off to swimming and then I'll ramble on about something else! :-)