Week 15 and 16 Report

Week 15:

This was a great week! We used The Art Lesson, by Tomie DePaola and these lessons from Homeschool Share to learn more about art in addition to our regular schoolwork. Madison loved it! I have long known that art is her favorite part of school, but she really really loved this. Now she is excited because she thinks that adding fun back into homeschooling means doing art every day, so we’ll see how it goes this week…

Some of the fun things we did:

• Made sugar cookies and painted them with edible paint (egg yolks and food coloring)
• Made our own paints with food coloring and water
• Made our own chalk
• Used puff paints
• Played grocery store
• Read about famous artists
• Sculpted with model magic

UPDATED – Here are the pictures

We also went to the Oklahoma City Art Museum - we live across the street from it, so I was glad we made the trip before we moved. It would be kind of sad to live so close and never make it over there. Madison loved the museum, especially the interactive art that made noise and stuff. We also have a great blown glass exhibit by Dale Chihuly – it is amazing. I think glass blowing is going to be one of our unit study because Madison loved it so much. She tells me she is going to be an artist or a photographer when she grows up, and I believe it.

This picture is from the art museum, and the multicolored glass thing in the background is by Chihuly. It is 4 stories high!

The rest of our days were the same old, same old. I’m planning on a Headsprout update later in the week, so stay tuned for that…

Week 16:

I actually planned to have a little bit of school this week, so I am still counting it as a week, even though we did absolutely nothing. Literally. She stayed the week with my mother in law and Kansas and had a great time.

I also had a great time, although I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish and I accomplished very little. That’s ok. My DH did not have to work very much, so we enjoyed have time together with out being interrupted every other breath. We went to the movies (Leatherheads… I liked it, he didn’t), and slept in quite a bit. I went grocery shopping by myself. It is amazing the things you appreciate. But I did miss her a lot, and was very glad when she decided to come home on Friday instead of Sunday

I had planned to make several blog posts (including this one), make a new memory CD, finish up the human body unit we are doing this week, along with some deep cleaning. I did manage to clean the homeschool shelf, and I also made amazing progress on my reading list – and those of you who know me now understand why nothing else got done…

Today:

We skipped school again and went to Red Rocks Canyon State Park with DH, who had the day off – more on that tomorrow.

Have a great night!

Weekly report for the last 4 weeks!

I guess that would be called a monthly report.

I am a bad blogger.  I really wanted to stay on top of weekly reports – you know, keep my family informed, hold my self accountable, blah, blah, blah…  I don’t know if I am ever going to get around to doing that for the past few weeks.  Acutally, yeah, I feel guilted into to it.  That is the main reason I started this blog.  I will do it now.

Bible is moving steadily along.  We are on Lesson 50ish and I think we will be able to finish Unit 1 before we move.  I am happy about that.  We added Hymn Study since Madison keeps asking me to “tell me all the words” at church when we are singing, so I would really like her to know the words because I like to sing   Scripture memory is also going good, although we have not made a lot of progress because we are out of town more than we are home (and it looks like that trend will continue for April and May and probably June.  Ok, probably until we leave for Japan…)

We are making decent progress with reading.  Madison is more than halfway through Headsprout, but still just reads ok.  I think I had this great expectation that she would be reading easily and fluently when she finished the program, and now I am starting to see that that was not realistic.  One problem I notice is she is not carrying what she learns in the program anywhere else.  She will read the Headsprout books or other readers I get from the library, but she is not motivated to sound out words anywhere else.  She stills asks me what stuff says, even when I know she has the tools to figure it out herself.  My solution to that is more practice reading. Her first books are now really easy for her, which I guess I should take as a sign to chill out and it will come to her, but that is not really in my nature.

We finished ETC books A, B, and C about a month ago and are now working on ETC Book 1.  Madison does not love it, but is so good at it!  She is now reading and spelling almost all CVC words – she is really great with spelling (so far).  The only words she has trouble with are words with short e, and that is because we haven’t really learned to use that sound yet.  In Headsprout, they teach the long ee sound first, and I didn’t want to confuse her (until I had too).

We are moving along in math too, but I am afraid she is not retaining as much information as I would like her too.  Sometime in the next few weeks, I am planning to order Singapore 1A/B and add some of those pages in as 1) reinforcement and 2) a way to slow us down a little.  I really don’t want to move too far ahead of grade level in math, which is something I didn’t consider when I started schooling her.  But, I don’t want to stop and have her forget what we have already learned, so we will slow down. (Also, anyone using Horizons math – we are in the 50′s and are already working on adding with 20′s.  At some point, it will come back to adding one digit numbers and doing drill?  Or is that something you add in yourself later?)

Of course, with all our traveling, you know we haven’t been doing science or art or violin or Japanese.  I am hoping to get back on with that this week (we did good yesterday).  We are going to start the Green Hour Challenge tomorrow, so we will be way behind, but that’s ok with me.  It looks like a great, fun science activity and I am looking forward to it.  Although I am still not sure where we will walk to since we live in downtown OKC.  Also, we have been sorta doing Sketch Tuesday.  Last week, Madison’s something blue was a car.  She draws pretty good cars.

side note: as I am sitting here blogging, which I should not be doing right now – I should be getting Madison ready for the day, taking my dog for a walk, getting dressed,doing the dishes I left in the sink last night so I could read, I could go on and on – Madison is standing here talking to me, and it occurs to me that she is so big!  Long legs and a skinny body, she looks just like her dad.  Sometimes I wish she would stay this age forever – and sometimes I can’t wait for her to grow up

So that is pretty much our month.  Among other activites we did, we went to Virginia (I posted about that earlier), my brother got married, we went to Storytime when we were in town, went to the Museum of World Treasures in Wichita (which, by the way, that place is pretty awesome, especially for homeschoolers.  If we were going to be in OKC semi permanently – and by that, I mean for more than 6 months – I would buy a season pass.  There is so much cool stuff there about everything.  Although it is organized a little… well, lets just say it is not very well organized.  I’m sure we did other stuff, I just can’t think of it right now.

And I have so much more to blog about! I have been thinking about stuff I want to write down for the past month, and I never seem to be near a computer.  Now that the weight of this weekly report is off my shoulders, maybe I can get back to doing some regular blogging.

Week Off Report

In my last weekly report, I ended with these famous last words “Have a great week – I know mine is going to be better!

Not so much.  Taking a week off was a great decision, because we ending up having a very long week.  But, regardless of the negative things, we did manage quite a few positives as well. 

Even though we were taking a week off, Madison still did Headsprout.  She had such a great rythym going with that; I didn’t want to mess it up.  We are on track to finish the first half on Thursday!  And it is still going great.

We didn’t get to take as many field trips as I hoped this week, but we did have a few.  On Tuesday, we went to see the Bee Movie.  It was pretty cute – definitely worth the 50 cents I paid, but I don’t think we’ll be buying the DVD.  Madison did like it.

On Thursday, we went to the Oklahoma State Capitol.  Did you know we are the only state to have an active oil well on capitol grounds?  We had a good time – it always surprises me how much Madison loves these trips.  You would think there is nothing for a 4 year old to do at the capitol, but she looks around, listens to me read the plaques, takes pictures – and she never wants to leave.  Here are a few pictures from our trip…

My mom and dad came up to visit for the weekend and on Saturday we went to the Oklahoma National Memorial.  It was a very interesting experience – educational, but very somber.  Here are a few pictures from that as well…

Anyway, we are back to the grind this week, refreshed and ready to start up again.  We are going to try to add some hymn study this week, ala Charlotte Mason, as well as participating in the Green Hour Challenge and Sketch Tuesday, both located at Harmony Art Mom’s blog.  Look for an early weekly report from me – if I post one at all, it will be on Thursday night.  We are flying to Virginia on Friday morning to visit my grandma.