First day of 5th grade and new school "room"

Today was the first day of 5th grade! I can't believe we've gotten to 5th grade so quickly. It seems like just yesterday we started 1st grade.

We started the day off with the breakfast of Indy's choice, which has always been waffles, and then jumped right into it.  On the first day of each school year we take a photo and he does an "All About Me" page which has the photo, his age, grade, weight, height and his favorite book, movie, subject in school, game, color, and what he wants to be when he grows up (5 years running he's put archaeologist), and then we put it in the front of his history notebook.  It's fun to look back and see how things have changed.  After he finished we started on Greek. It took a while for him to get back into the swing, but once he did we started zipping through the work. 

In our previous home, before Han Solo came along, we had a dedicated school room.  When we moved at the end of last year, Han Solo got the 3rd bedroom (he had been sleeping in our room until the move), so we had to find a new area to do school.  I don't like the idea of doing it at the kitchen table as we are constantly having to move our stuff. 

The living room in our new home is really long and L's out into our dining area. We would have a lot of wasted space in the living room area unless we wanted to spread all the furniture out and yell at each other across the room and strain our eyes to see TV.  I decided to use the bookcases we had in our dining area and school room in our previous home to "build" a school area.  It has worked out really well as the bookcases block all of our mess on the school stuff and keeps Indy from being distracted by what's going on in the other rooms.  I bought several of the black cloth bins to fill the white bookcase to make it even more private.  There are still open shelves too.


Looking at it from the kitchen.  The front door is at the far right.  That's an intercom system to the outside door next to it in case you were wondering, and a coat closet.  We just butted the brown bookcase up to the coat closet.  The living room faces the white bookcase and the dining area faces the brown bookcase.

Looking from the living room.  The balcony door is to the left.

Looking into the "room."  I put a wipe board and map on the back of the coat closet you can see in the top photo near the front door.  Indy sits in the chair facing these and my chair is on the other side.  I had originally planned it the other way, with the wipe board on the wall next to the balcony door, but the I thought Indy might spend much of his day looking outside and daydreaming.

This is taken from the black and white chair.  You can see into the living room just to the right of the white book case.  You can see the baby gates we use to keep Han Solo in.

So, that's our new school area.  I preferred having a dedicates school room and hope in our next home we will have 4 bedrooms so we can go back to that, but for now this works.

2012-2013 Curriculum

I bet you thought I fell off the edge of the earth didn't you?  Well, I promise I'm still here.  I've just been on a blog hiatus.

We wrapped up 4th grade a few weeks ago and now I'm working on prepping for 5th grade.  5th grade!  How is my baby going into 5th grade?????

This year we cycle back to our absolute favorite time period in history: the ancients.  Since Indy plans to be Indiana Jones when he grows up, this is really exciting.  We have loads of cool stuff planned for history, but the best will be another ultimate filed trip.  We are taking a 12 day cruise in September leaving from Civitevecchia (the port closest to Rome) and going to Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Greece and stopping in Naples, before heading back to Civitevecchia.   We port in Alexandria, Egypt, but are taking the overnight excursion to Cairo where we will see the pyramids, sphinx, King Tut exhibit at the Egyptian Museum and many other exciting places.  With the trip being overnight we won't get to explore Alexandria, but maybe another time.  In Israel we will visit Jerusalem and possibly Bethlehem.  In Turkey we'll be going to Ephesus, in Greece we'll go to Athens and when we go to Naples we will head back to Pompeii.  I'd also like to visit Herculaneum, but the last time we were in Pompeii we had to drag Indy away, so I don't know that we'll make it.  We're also spending 3 days in Rome (2 before and 1 after the cruise) where we will visit the Coliseum and Forum again, but I'm also hoping for the Vatican and their museum.  We'll see.

So, onto curriculum.  We will be using a couple of the same programs from last year, but also changing a few things.  Despite really liking Latin, Indy is still struggling, so we're going to stay at the beginning level until he becomes more proficient.  He's really excited to start on ancient Greek.  We did the Greek Alphabet Code Cracker at the end of 4th grade to ease into it and he absolutely loved it.  I was really concerned given his dyslexia, but for some reason Greek clicked with him. Weird, eh?  The following is a list of what we have scheduled for next year.  I do try to be fluid and if something doesn't work we find something that does to replace it.  After 4 years though, I'm hoping that I've figured out what style works best for us and won't have to change much. 

History Odyssey Ancients Level 2 with Human Odyssey for the spine.
Teaching Textbooks 5
Growing with Grammar 5 (still  ♥♥♥♥ it!)
CPO Earth Science
Phonetics Zoo Spelling
SYRWTL Latin Prep 1 and Minimus Latin
SYRWTL Greek (when it comes out in Nov) and Greek to GCSE
Building Thinking Skills (Logic)
One Hour Mysteries (Logic)
Philosophy for Kids
30 minutes of independent chapter book reading 4 days a week.


I know it seems like an awful lot, but Indy is moving into the logic stage this year and we have to ramp it up a notch.  Again, we won't be doing every subject every day.  Most subjects will be done 3-4 times a week and our lessons are relatively short.  We try to start school around 9am with a 15 minute break around 10:30, stop for lunch at noon, then get back to work around 1pm and finish by 2:30.  It may seem short compared to the amount of time public schools are in session, but we don't have to wait for other kids to do things, line up, wait in line for lunch, etc.  We pack a lot into 4-4.5 hours. 
When does school start this year?  Well, I haven't decided yet, but it will be either August 7 or August 14, neither of which is very far away!  Yikes.  We just finished school June 15, so it's a pretty short summer, but we like to take several breaks (like a 2 week cruise!) during the year, which keeps us from burning out.
Most of the first 8 weeks are planned out (I only plan 8 weeks at a time), but I still have a few things to gather up between now and August.   I guess I should get busy!

JacKris Publishing Giveaway!

JacKris Publishing, the makers of the absolutely amazing Growing With Grammar program, is having a giveaway over on secularhomeschool.com.  They are giving away one set of each of their 3 programs, Growing With Grammar, Soaring With Spelling and Vocabulary and Winning With Writing.  All you need to do is leave a comment here telling which program you'd pick.  Easy, right?  Of course it is!

After using 3 grammar programs that made us both miserable and longing to run the other way screaming, we found GWG and it was like the heavens had opened and light poured down on us.  There might have even been a bit of the Hallelujah chorus too, but I was so happy with the program I can't recall.  Seriously though, this is a great program.  The lessons are short, to the point and well laid out.  With dyslexia, the short and to the point part is super important.  With each lesson there are 2 workbook pages that have exercises on  that lesson and  on previous lessons to help reinforce them.

We did try WWW, but with dyslexia it was a bit too much for Indy so we put it away.  We might try it again next year as it is a solid program.  I'm also considering SWS.  It looks like a great and even fun (Spelling?  Fun?  Possibly!) program.

Anyway, if you're interested, hop yourself on over there and enter. 

History Notebook

I haven't updated in quite a while, but to be perfectly honest, I haven't really had a reason to. I mean, we do school, he learns, blah, blah, blah. Dull for blogging.  I did think though that you might find our history notebook interesting.
We are doing an abbreviated version of early modern and modern history this year so we can get back on the correct year in the 4 year history cycle next year.

You can find loads of free notebook covers on the internet from awesome homeschool moms who have done all the work for you and print them off.  The covers I used can be found at barefootmeandering.com (scroll to the bottom for the freebies).  This is the front of our notebook:

This is the back:

At the beginning of every year we have an "All About Me" page that goes in the front of the history notebook.  After all, it will be history!

Behind that there are several lined pages that he writes history words from each section of the history book we're reading.  He adds to it every week.  Sometimes there is only one word, sometimes there are 2-3.  I think he's up to 31 words so far (we're in week 22).  Last week's words were archipelago and canal.

Then we start the notebooking pages.  There are free notebooking pages out there on the web (mostly from those homeschool moms who do the covers), but I wanted a different layout and I wanted to incorporate some lapbooking elements into a few of them.  I use Power Point to create my pages.  I print them off on heavy weight paper so they will hold up well and be able to withstand the weight of the lapbook components.

The first page was on Mary, Queen of Scots.  Indy wrote out information about her and then we added some photos in a small booklet.

When we learned about Louis XIV (he wrote the roman numerals wrong the first time), we did a page about Versailles since we went there last year.  I included photos I took of Indy on our trip.

Here is some coloring he did when we studied Prussia (they came from The Story of the Word 3 Activity Guide).  He just glued them down.

When it came to the American Revolution, there was just so much stuff, I decided that he could just do a bunch of lapbook components.  He wrote in most of these (some I let him glue down the information instead of writing-there was a lot!) and then he glued them down to a piece of paper that I put a title on in Power Point.

For the Lewis and Clark Expedition, I just put a compass as a background photo.  Oddly, this is one of his favorites.  Well, I guess since he plans to grow up to be Indiana Jones, it kind of makes sense that he liked the compass, doesn't it?

The Civil Was was just as involved as the American Revolution!  Good heavens.  I took a slightly different approach to it though.  Before adding the lapbook components, I had him fill out a timeline.  This was very labor intensive.  This is the front page.

This is the back of the timeline and some of the lapbook components.  Some he wrote in, others he pasted down information.

This is the back of the second Civil War page and the page on Thomas Edison.

There are of course many more pages, but I didn't want to overload blogger with a million photos.


Most of the lapbook components come from either dynamic2moms.webs.com or homeschoolshare.com.  These are all free! 

I hope you enjoyed seeing a little slice of our year.

More Lapbooks

While I'm unpacking the 3 million boxes from our move (Indy IS doing school though!), I thought I'd share 2 other lapbooks we did this past year.

After the earthquake lapbook inspired by the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, we moved on to volcanoes.  This was a very involved lapbook that took about 2 weeks.  There was a lot to learn!

Cover

First fold opening:

Second fold opening showing the bottom flap (it folds down):

Inside with the flap down:

Close up of inside a volcano:

 The Ring of Fire:

Tsunami spin insert and vocab words:

When we studied Renaissance Italy, Indy became fascinated with Leonardo Da Vinci.  We took an entire week off school and learned solely about him and his fascinating life.  This too was a very involved and HUGE lapbook because there was so much to pack in.  I think we used 3 file folders stapled together.  It's quite bulky.

Cover: 

Inside the first flap opening:

Inside the second flap opening:

Inside the third flap opening:

Close up of his Renaissance drawing.  Inside this booklet was information that he wrote about the architecture of  the Renaissance.

Info about Leo's life:

Indy's writing backwards experiment:

I couldn't get a good photo of it, but we also included a Euro coin minted in Italy that had Leo's Vetruvian Man on the reverse of it.  In case you don't know, while Euros are all the same on the front, and accepted in any country that it part of the EU, each country mints Euros and puts something representing that particular country.   The €1 in Italy has the Vetruvian Man.  Every time we get one Indy swipes it and adds it to his stash.

2011-2012 Curriculum

I meant to do this post a long time ago, but I've been busy homeschooling. This year is a bit different as we got off the 4 year history cycle one year (stupid, shiny boxed curriculum!), so we're playing catch up this year and doing an abbreviated version of Early Modern and Modern history so we can get back on track next year.
This is our curriculum this year (4th grade):

SOTW 3 and 4 (abbreviated!)
SOTW Geography
Growing With Grammar 4 (♥♥♥)
Singapore My Pals Are Here Science 3/4
Teaching Textbooks 4 Math
Latin For Children Primer A
Instant Immersion German
Winter Promise Chess
100 Great Poems for Boys
SuperTeacherWorksheets.com Spelling 4
Violin

We are also reading a lot of fun books this year.  Indy reads to me almost every day from the Pirate School series and each week we have a book that I read that ties into what we're learning about in history.
We've already changed a few things up this year.  We were using Writing With Ease (made by the same company as GWG), but both disliked it immensely.  
We're in week 7 (out of 36) and had a scheduled break after week 8, but since we're doing a big move in a few weeks, we're going to wait until that happens for our break.

4th Grade

It's hard to believe that the summer flew by so quickly.  Well, to be fair ours was only 7 weeks, but it was a very short 7 weeks.  On Aug 8th we started back and Indy entered 4th grade!  How did my baby get to the 4th grade already?
Here is is 1st day photo:

Every year on the first day we have the breakfast of his choice (chocolate chip waffles this year) and then we do an "All About Me" page.  I paste his first day photo into my template and then print it off and he fills in the answers.

Age: 9
Grade: 4
Year: 2011
Height: 58"
Weight: 82 pounds
Favorite Food: Pizza, Chicken Broccoli Casserole
Favorite Color: Blue
Favorite TV Show: Phineas and Ferb
Favorite Movie: Harry Potter
Favorite Subject in School: History and Science
When I Grow up I want to be: An Archaeologist

We put the paper in the front of his history notebook and then I put them in the archives at the end of the year. They'll be great to look at when he's older.

As I type this, we've been in school for 4 weeks already. He's doing great in his reading, which is a huge deal since he's dyslexic. He still stumbles a lot, but he tries so hard and is so proud of what he's accomplished.
In history we've studied from Mary, Queen of Scots to the Jamestown colony to the Mayflower and the 30 Years War (and loads of stuff in between). We've read loads of books for each subject and learned a lot. Tomorrow we start learning about Louis XIV and then on to the French Revolution. He's really excited about this as we just went to Versailles in June.
In science we've learned about classification of things and animals. He finds this really interesting.
He's doing excellent in grammar, math, Latin and German. He still enjoys Latin more than anything.
I'm so proud of how much he's retaining and how he thinks things through.
This year is a bit of a challenge due to having to take care of Han Solo, but we're making it work.

And we're done!!!

We are finished with 3rd grade!  Woohoo!!!  It was quite a year, what with the pregnancy and baby and all, but we managed to get through it without losing our minds and we even finished on time!  Halleluiah! 
We actually had a good year.  We learned all about the middle ages and Renaissance and Indy's reading improved by leaps and bounds.  This was the most exciting part of the year for both of us.  The day after we finished, we took off for Paris for 4 days.  I'll be posting more about that on my main blog though.  We now have 7 weeks off before we start 4th grade.  Actually a week has already passed, so really, we just have 6 left.  Today I started pulling all the 3rd grade material out of my binders in preparation for all the new stuff.  Next year we'll be doing a condensed version of early modern and modern history so we can be back on cycle by the time we hit 5th grade and the logic stage.  While we're both anticipating a nice summer break.  We'll keep up on reading and I'll ask him questions about what we learned this past year, but for the most part, we'll just be taking it easy.

Homeschooling with a new baby

If you aren't a reader of my regular blog, you may not know that 6 weeks ago, I had a baby!  Yep, a big old surprise baby who is absolutely adorable.  Indy is in love with him and gave him the blog name "Han Solo."  This is them 3 days after Han Solo was born.  Aren't they precious?

I have been trying to get as much school work done as we possibly could before Han Solo was born, but of course we didn't finish the year.  Since Han Solo has been home we've done easy school, but still working hard.  It's not exactly easy considering I'm seriously lacking in sleep (I totally forgot what it was like to have to get up at night with a baby-NOT fun) and Han Solo requires so much attention.  Sadly he's not quite as easy a baby as Indy was and needs much more holding and face time.  Because of all this, our school days have changed.  Indy doesn't seem to mind though.  Our days have been starting later because after Han Solo eats around 6 or 7am, he goes back to sleep and so do I.  Indy gets up and plays in his room with Legos or his Indiana Jones action figures and usually fixes his own breakfast (man, I love that kid). I'm usually up by 9:30 and I'll give Indy some independent work to do while I hop on the treadmill (not every day, but I'm working on it) and shower.  Han Solo is generally up by the time I'm done and ready for a bottle. Indy LOVES to give him his bottle, so I set them up with the Boppy pillow (I sit next to them) and read to Indy.   Once Han Solo is done eating, I take him and burp him (Indy really wants to burp him, but I won't allow that) and then Indy reads to me. HE reads to ME!  He's reading level 4 readers, which is amazing considering he could barely read at all this time last year.   After we're done reading, I usually try to do some work that requires my assistance while Han Solo dozes in my arms.  This is hard!  Once he's asleep though, I can lay him down for a nap and Indy and I can get to the meat of his work before a late lunch (around 1pm).  After lunch Indy does his math (which is on the computer and does not require me!) and then we're done for the day.  We don't do quite as much as we did pre-Han Solo, but since we pushed so much before and it's nearly the end of our school year I'm not all that concerned.  In fact, last week we read about the Renaissance and Indy was so intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci (we read Leonardo's Horse, which is a great, short book). that we took the week off from our regular studies to spend this week reading about him.  Indy's working on a (FREE) lapbook from homeschoolshare.com on Leonardo's Horse (it includes other stuff about the Renaisance too) and today experimented with writing backwards.  He thought this was loads of fun.
So, homeschooling with a new baby is challenging, but totally doable.    We'll see how doable it is when Han Solo is a toddler.  ;)

Earthquake lapbook

In my previous post I mentioned that with all the media coverage of the Japan earthquake, we would start a unit study of them.  We opted to make a lapbook with our study.  Indy really enjoys making lapbooks and I do too, I just forget about them.  Homeschoolshare.com  has loads of FREE lapbook components and information on a wealth of subjects (we started on their HUGE volcano unit week).  All of the parts of this lapbook came from them.

Cover:

Inside:

We didn't have enough room in the basic folder for all the components, so I added another sheet of heavy card stock to make a flap that opens and give him more room to put things.   Here it is open:

Area under the flap.  We made booklets with info on the Haiti and Japan earthquakes:

Close up of one of the components (notice the neat handwriting!):

Indy really enjoyed learning about the earthquakes and has been riveted to the news to get the latest information on what's going on in Japan.

Natural Disasters and Science

Ugh, poor Japan.  I don't know what else to say.  Every day it seems to get worse and worse.  Indy has been glued to the NEWS watching what's going on over there and started asking questions about the earthquake and tsunamis and all that they encompass.  We've been really slacking in science, so I got the bright idea to study earthquakes and volcanoes.  Is that wrong? 
We started working on an earthquake lapbook (it also includes tsunamis) this week (FREE from homeschoolshare.com!) and when it is completed, we we will move on to the volcano lapbook (also FREE!).  Some part of me feels kind of weird to use a horrible event like this to kick start our sadly lacking science, but I figured we're getting loads of information on it via the news and Indy seems really interested in learning about it, so why not?

Latin!

Wow, two posts in less than a week?  What's going on?  I don't know!
In my previous post, I mentioned I was thinking of changing our Latin program and that evening I bit the bullet (or debit card as the case may be) and bought the Big Book of Lively Latin 1 download.  Holy cow!  When they say big book, they mean it.   It's seriously huge.  I've barely printed off half of it and my 1" binder is bulging.  We started working on it the next day, and guess what?  IT IS FABULOUS!  Indy loved it.  He begged to do more!  He begged to do Latin the next morning!  I have to say, it is rather fun, though I can't really pinpoint why.  I'm learning right along with him and enjoying it too.  Indy likes the worksheets (who knew?) and the audio vocabulary.  He actually asked to do the audio vocab a second time to make sure he got it.  Huzzah!  The format is engaging and not too much to handle at one time, which I think he really likes.  I only wish we'd been using this from the beginning!  The only issue we're having seems to be technical.  For some reason, on two different computer, trying 3 different browsers, the video lessons won't work.  It's very frustrating, because that's one of the reasons I wanted Lively Latin, but the company is trying to see if they can figure out why and I have to say I'm impressed with their customer service.  If you're looking for a Latin program, be sure to check this one out.  You won't be sorry.

Back in the saddle and griping about books and maybe some changes

Whew, we've had an entire month off school and now we're back!  I was worried it would be hard to get back into the routine, but we fell right back into it.  Huzzah!  This week we're learning about Robin Hood and Richard the Lion Heart (who was not a great king if you want to know the truth).  Our book of the week is Robin Hood (A Stepping Stone Book).  We've read several of the Stepping Stone Books and the more of them I read, the less I like them.  I know they are aimed at children reading them to themselves, but Indy's not at that point yet, so I have to read them to him.  They are sooooo basic in their writing and grammar.  I find it insulting to be honest.  Some of the sentences aren't even complete, but fragments.  This drives me insane.  I'm not even sure I want Indy reading them once he gets to that point.  The stories are also pretty much dumbed down and that's really irritating too.  I think I only purchased 2 other Stepping Stone Books that we haven't read yet and I'm not sure we will.  I may get different books to replace them.  Sigh.
I'm also thinking of replacing our Latin program.  Indy really, really likes Minimus (mostly because of the comic strip at the beginning of each lesson and the fact that it's based on a real family who lived in Roman Britain), and I think it's cute, but I don't have a Latin background and find it hard to teach.  I've heard a lot of good stuff about Lively Latin and like the samples I've seen online, so we may switch to this and use Minimus as a supplement once our Latin knowledge has increased.   Indy really enjoys finding words in English that are actually Latin or Latin based.  It's become like a game.  I'm glad I decided to introduce it this year.  If we can keep it up, one day he'll rock the SAT's.  :)

The Ultimate Field Trip: Warwick Castle, England

At the end of September, Indy and I flew to England for a few days to visit Warwick Castle in Warwickshire, England. We had just learned about castles and their uses and construction. It was the perfect time to take a field trip to one of the best preserved Medieval castles in Europe.

Indy was fascinated by this HUGE tree in the castle entrance.

The original outer bailey walls and towers.

This is what happens when you don't listen to your mom!

The castle gate.  Indy was fascinated when a lady explained to him about the "murder holes."

Of course he loved all the weapons and armor.

This is up at the oldest part of the original castle on top of the motte, founded in the late 900's.

We climbed over 550 very tight spiraling stairs.

A view from the top of the battlements looking to the bailey and the motte.

This archer was amazing!  He demonstrated the long bow and a crossbow with amazing accuracy.

The birds of prey show was amazing.  This is Sid, a type of vulture.

We had a great time and learned a lot about Medieval castles.  Indy had a great time and came home with loads of stories about things that had gone on at the castle he'd been told by costumed workers.  It was the "best field trip ever."