So it counts as school if all we did was draw pictures and watch three episodes of The Magic Schoolbus, right?

So yesterday, I was reading stories to the girls, when Allison points out that in most of the books, especially the picture books we were reading, the main characters are boys. I asked her how that made her feel and she said it made her feel sad. I expanded on that and asked her if it made her feel insignificant. She agreed that it did :-) Ok, yeah, I doubt she knew what I meant, but it was a very deep conversation regardless.

And yeah, we do read lots of books with female main characters - just finishing up Alice in Wonderland. But I really must find more books with STRONG female characters for my little budding feminist (who enjoys playing her Nintendo game-girl)

Ok, rethinking my whole "LOG" format, lol. I like it, because it makes me a bit accountable, but it is BORING. Boring to read, boring to type, etc., etc., etc., etc. So I dunno.

Kinda waiting for my new MT software to be installed. I am getting sick of deleting porno comments from my site. Even though I have disabled comments, they still have a way in, and I know that they aren't visible on my site, so I could just ignore them, but it really bothers me that they are there. I just deleted 20 or so that popped up today alone. Banning their IPs do no good, since they have multiple IP addresses. So a huge part of me is just waiting for my upgrade, and then I plan to combine my family news/photo blog. May add in the homeschooling blog there as well, and then create another personal blog where I can let my hair down so to speak. Until then, I may not post much. Just too depressing....dealing with this SPAM. Makes me almost want to delete all the blogs and start from scratch, but I have put too much into these. Especially the news and photo blogs. Oh well.

Back to work...

Sorry..

So both today and yesterday were pretty similar. Lets start with yesterday

Allison:
Math-worked with hundreds and communitive property
Language - Lesson 10 in FLL - more on nouns! Super quick, but getting boring :-)
Reading - worked with a poem
Literature - read a chapter from Alice in Wonderland, read several poems
Music - Piano practice - had a dry run for her recital on Saturday. She's "scarified"

Today:
Allison:
Math - introduced thousands, talked about patterns, and naming them - like "ABAB pattern", etc.
Reading - read Green Eggs and Ham. She read most of it herself, but towards the end you could tell she was getting tired, so we buddy-read the rest of the book.
Literature - poems, and I plan to read from Alice and Wonderland before bed
Language Arts - lesson 11 in FLL, she narrated the fable of the Lion and the Mouse, then illustrated it.
Handwriting - copied the moral to the fable in the LA lesson

Right? LOL

Today was SO incredibly busy. We got up, showered, RUSHED out the door to a co-op class. The class was just an arts and crafts free for all. We had a blast. The girls made Groundhog puppets in honor of Groundhog day. Then we RUSHED back home because Allison had piano, and we had left our books at the house. As we were getting to the house, Jess called.. She had run out of gas, so we had to get her some gas, RUSH with her to the gas station so she could get more gas (I had to pay for it), and then RUSH to piano. As we were leaving the parking lot, Jess called to say her car wouldn't start! Urgh. Luckily she got some friends to help her move it to a parking spot, and we RUSHED on to piano while she went to work. Enjoyed a lovely lunch and playdate with our friends (the children of the piano teacher - although because we were so late, the playdate was RUSHED), and then Allison had her lesson while Meredith and I RUSHED to the library to pay some fines, then we RUSHED back to pick up Allison from piano, then we RUSHED to get the girls' hair cut, then we RUSHED to the store to pick up a few things, and then we RUSHED home so I could nurse the baby, for real (the few little nursings throughout the day didn't count, lol). So boom, from breakfast until almost dinner....the theme was...say it with me....RUSHED.

Allison -

Math - did more work with hundreds, including some partitioning of hundreds. Also played around with rectangles.
Language - #9 in FLL, reviewed proper nouns, using her name as an example
Handwriting - copied her whole name, paying attention to the use of capital letters.
Literature - read two poems, read a chapter from Alice in Wonderland
Reading - She read to me several pages from The Gingerbread Man. She loves that book.
Science - Octopuses (or Octopi), she asked how long they live, which led to a whole bunch of other questions, which led to her creating a book about Octopuses. We printed up some coloring sheets, some fact sheets, and she drew some pictures and added her own facts. We saw a video of an octopus stalking and eating a crab. Very cool, and beautiful.

I did the first Lesson in Drawing with Children :-)

Meredith was just grumpy today :-)

Nice Day here..

Allison -

Reading - Read ALL of Little Red Hen, with very little help, and with a great deal of fluency. And then after reading it, she said she wanted to read it to Meredith, so she read it twice, the second time with no help. I am so thrilled to see her excited about reading! We may not go back to 100 EZ lessons for a while :-)

Language Arts - Lesson 9 in FLL, introduced picture study/narration, while reinforcing proper nouns.

Math - introduced the hundreds, reviewed the months (she pretty much has them down), talked about quadralatarals and rectangles...mentioned that a square is a square, a qudralatarel and a rectangle.

Literature - read a RL Stevenson poem. We are going to try to read a poem each morning

Music - practiced piano, listened to classical music during the other lessons (hmm, is that the reason we had such a good day?)

All of this was done in almost exactly one hour. Didn't keep track of the individual subjects today. Oh, and that hour included probably 10 minutes of me being on the phone, and 10 minutes of us putting together math manipulatives...must prepare better for math, lol. I did up a CM type of schedule, but don't know if I will implement it. Even if I don't it is my hopes to add in some history and more literature gradually. We are going to add in nature study once a week this week as well...and some art study either next week or the following week. I want to get some prints that are big enough to really study. Thinking about getting an art calendar for that. But since we haven't been doing 100EZ lessons, the whole thing has been going much smoother :-)

All we did today was go on a field trip! We toured a local grocery store, discussing nutrition as we went. Allison didn't learn much about nutrition (just wasn't into it), but she did learn how to tell a boy lobster from a girl lobster. Very important. I also learned why we have been so sick this year. From Meredith licking shopping carts.

Log closed :-)

Allison:

* Math - reviewed the months, the days, introduced the concept of the quadralateral, reviewed the tens, partitioned the ten-tens (100s), and introduced adding double digits. Allison totally gets this. She is so good at math, it is silly.
* Language - #8 in FLL, reviewed nouns (common and proper), recited Catepillar poem
* Handwriting - did copywork from FLL lesson
* Music - listened to Beethoven's Wig OVER AND OVER AGAIN, lol. Practiced piano.
* Art - did some ink pad stamping.

Meredith
Did a page from HWT for handwriting, listened to Beethoven's Wig, did some ink-pad stamping.

Took a snow day, lol. All we did today was piano, some cleaning of the house, a bit of art, and the girls looked through a stack of cool animal cards, which talked a bit about the animals.

Got an order from Rainbow Resource today. Included was some cool games and some arts and craft stuff. How excited! I also got "How to Start a Spelling Notebook" or something like that. Provides lesson plans so that the Spaulding Method of spelling/reading is more accessible (see Spelling and Writing Road to Reading). Looks really great, and in line with the CM approach I am currently embracing with a vengence. I think we will start spelling notebooks next week!

I also got "Drawing with your Children" earlier in the week, and I am going to embark on my own personal journey through this art program to see if I can improve my own drawing skills. If I like it, I will do the program again with Allison and later with the other girls.

Been reading a LOT on C. Mason approach. I really love it. It really speaks to me. Thinking very hard about using Ambleside Online's schedule/book guide starting when Allison turns 6 in a few months. I might wait until later though..not sure. Right now I am leaning towards starting when she turns six though. Basically it won't be much different from what we are currently doing...just adding in some history and literature read-alouds...OH, and art and music appreciation...etc.

Well I must go...the baby beckons.

quickly

Allison:

*Reading - more w/ The Little Red Hen (15 mins)
*Language - Lesson 7in FLL, review of nouns, talked about how proper nouns start with capital letters (5 mins)
* Handwriting - copied a sentence from FLL, paying special attention to the capitalization of the proper nouns (10 mins)
* Math - Introduded the concept of "tens". Right Start approaches counting in a unique (to the US) way, rather than counting 10, 11, 12 etc. the child learns to say "one-10-one" for 11 and "two-ten-one" for 21. It really does make understanding place values, and tens, etc., almost effortless, and Allison did AMAZING with today's math lesson. Grasped the concept immediately and soared through the lesson (10 mins)

We did thank-you cards today (finally), so that included some art, handwriting, and character building :-)

Meredith sorta played and talked all day, although she did thank you cards too. Man that girl is constantly TALKING!

Allison:

* Reading - well, I read up on some of what Charlotte Mason said about reading instruction and decided to implement her practices, to the best of my understanding, and scrap 100 EZ lessons for this week, at least. Next week I think I will just start doing 100 EZ lessons twice a week, if this works out. Anyway, today we started working with a very old online reading Primer, and we started with the first story, "The Little Red Hen". Basically we took each word from the story and printed them out on small cards, and then used the cards to learn individual words, and then work through the story. It went REALLY well, and Allison proclaimed that she LOVED it. 15 minutes.
* Handwriting, did a lesson in HWOT while I cut out all the little word cards, lol. 5 minutes
* Language Arts - lesson 6 in FLL, reviewed proper nouns and how they start with capital letters, recited Catepillar poem, which she has down PAT! 5 minutes
* Math - odd/even review, equation writing/solving review, reviewed the concept of parallel, and introduced the concept of perpindicular - 25 minutes - but five of those minutes was spent looking for a pencil :-)
* Music - practiced piano - five minutes
* PE - took a walk to the park :-) - 1.5 hours. Rode scooter
* Art - drew a lovely picture of Lydia with her new art set, and did some painting with watercolors - 1 hour or so.

Meredith:
* Did lesson from HWOT 5 minutes
* PE - took a walk to the park - 1.5 hours. Rode tricycle
* Art - experimented with pastels, painted with watercolors...oh and she drew a rainbow on the sidewalk with sidewalk chalk :-)

I also took them to the art store where we bought journals to use for nature journals. We will try our first nature walk sometime this week :-) The girls are excited. Busy day today!

Super quick,

Allison
* Reading, lesson 75 from 100EZ lessons. Again another rough time! All this week. How come it can take her 15 minutes to read the 3-word title of a story, but when I get upset, she can then read the entire story in under 15 minutes??? So frustrating. I am thinking about re-thinking reading lessons...maybe start doing 100EZ lessons only twice a week, and just have her read to me the other three days? Not sure yet..if anyone has any suggestions, email me, lol. Since I can't allow comments on my blogs anymore (STUPID SPAMMERS!). ANYWAY, I digress. After I got upset, and she got focused, she breezed through the reading lesson. (35 minutes - ergh!)
*Language Arts - lesson 5 from FLL, did our first narration....From Aesops, the Turtle and the Hare. Her rendering of the tale was GREAT! It literally blows me away, considering this is the first time we have done this. I will include it below - this is all her words, although I reminded her to add in the moral. I quoted verbatim, she didn't use any fillers or anything!:

One day a rabbit made fun of a turtle. "Your legs are small and you move so slow. How much time are you going to keep me waiting here for breakfast?" said the rabbit. "Lets have a race!" said the turtle. "OK" said the rabbit. "Lets get fox to be our judge." said the rabbit. "Ready, set, go!" said the fox. The rabbit was so tired he took a little rest. The turtle was almost at the finish line when the rabbit woke up! "The winner is Turtle!" said Fox. "Wait, wait" said the rabbit. "He's not the winner! I am the fastest runner!" "Slow and steady wins the race" says fox. The end.

Ok, yeah, there are a LOT of "said the....", but she's five! And this was her first time. And she got in all the relevant information from the story, including a lot of detail. I'm pleased as punch! (20 minutes - but that includes time to illustrate her narration)

* Handwriting - copied the moral to our fable "Slow and steady wins the race"
*Math - reviewed the months, even/odd numbers, introduced the concept of lines being parallel, introduced writing equations. Wrote all the facts of tens (ie. 10=9+1) and all the facts of even numbers up to 10 (ie 6+2=8) (20 mins)
*Music - pracited piano (5mins)

Meredith
Listened to the fable, and drew a picture to illustrate it, also did a page in her handwriting without tears workbook...the letter "s". Helped us find parallel lines around the house for math.