Weekly Round up Sept. 24-28

Well, only my 5th week of homeschooling and it was a very difficult one for me.  I went head to head with a host of doubts and a dark cloud over my mind and spirit.  Schooling was at a minimum, but we did manage to muddle through and get some stuff done.  A bright spot was that we received our Cathechism book that I had to order twice as the first one was lost in the mail, Chat's with God's Little Ones.  It's a lovely book and very handy guide to teaching the Faith to the kids, broken down in daily "chats" of about 5 -10 minutes each.  Again, a big thanks to my mentor-friend for bringing this book to my attention.  After a dreary Monday, I decided to completely do something different on Tuesday, so I went to the fountain of information and goodness that is Pinterest, and found a great and free farm unit preschool printable pack from 1plus1plus1equals1.  Wow, that is a great site, you should check it out, tons of great printables and information.  I printed out a lapbook and the girls and I spent the morning putting it together.  It was a wonderful change of pace for all of us, Gabriela loves crafting and they both got a lot of cutting, coloring, and glueing practice as well as some phonics, matching, sorting, and game playing.  Annalise and Gabriela truly enjoyed it and I will definitely be doing some more lapbooking as it really combines the girls love of crafts with learning.  We reviewed the phonic sounds of the letters Qu, R, and S this week and read once from our seashore book.  We learned about the birth of Moses in our Bible studies.  Gabriela did one quick sandpaper grading activity.  Overall it was a super light week, we only schooled 3 days.

 

Golden beads: learning how denominations or made up of groups of 10

 

 

Grading sandpaper

 

 

Beginning sounds clipping

 

 

 

Coloring

 

 

 

 

 

 

Animal nomenclature cards

 

 

 

 

We finished the week by going to St. Ann's art class and learned about angels and St. Michael the Archangel, just in time for his feast day.  The girls made a crafty angel.

 

 

 

Weekly Review, Sept. 17-21

This week proved to be the beginning of a couple of really hard weeks for me in homeschooling.  I don't know if I had just poured everything into reading and planning and the first month that I was already feeling burnt out, if the honeymoon period was over or if I just have really overextended myself in both my expectations and abilities.  I presume it was a bit of it all.  I have managed to keep up the basic phonics work, handwriting, bible study and a tiny bit of math.  In Bible, the girls learned about Joseph and his coat and his time in Egypt.  We went through the sounds of K, L, M, and N and did some word building.  I introduced the Golden Bead Material to Gabriela.  She really enjoyed manipulating it, but then wanted to play with it.  I did not let her play with it for fun, and I'm a bit confused on how to proceed with this aspect of the montessori materials.   The girls collected some leaves and did leaf rubbings and we threaded and colored pasta necklaces as well.  I read some chapters from our Seashore book and the girls watched some more Salsa episodes. 

 

Coloring Pasta Necklaces

 

 

Open-ended crafting, Annalise put that little triangle together on her own

 

 

Gabriela playing with the Golden Bead Material

 

 

Annalise word building.  She begs to do it like her sister.  It requires a lot of active involvement on my part but she is definitely learning her phonics and well on her way to reading. 

 

 

 

 

 

Number writing practice with sandpaper numbers.  The use of sandpaper numbers and letters has really been fruitful for Gabriela's penmanship learning.

 

 

Julienne doing a litte practical life bottle opening practice (no she hasn't mastered it, yet!)

 

 

I took some pictures on our weekly library outing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consignment Score

A couple of weeks ago I went Mommy and Me consigment store in Ballantyne.  It is a boutique style consigment store, but they were clearancing their summer selections for 70% off.  And where there is clearance, I shall go!  I totally scored two gorgeous smocked dresses for the older girls at $4.50 each!  What a steal, especially when you consider Gabriela's dress is 100% cotton and hand smocked.  I love this old-fashioned (and modest!) style of dress for the girls, but they are very pricey.  I was tickled with my purchases!  The girls donned their dresses right away as we went out to dinner right after we purchased them, it was lovely. 

 

 

Cousins at Play

I am very lucky to live near my family and have my kids grow up with their cousins.   I try to get together once a week for a park play date with the cousins. 

 

 

 

Spiritual Reading

Whenever I need to learn about something, I take it to the books.  A bookworm at heart, I love to read, to learn.  So naturally, as I am exploring my Faith more deeply, I have taken to spiritual reading.  My parish has a wonderful lending library FULL of wonderful books.  I just walk in and let the Holy Spirit guide my hands and eyes and I peruse the shelves.  The first book I picked up was The Holy Longing by Ronald Rolheiser.  This book is written by a Catholic priest but it is written for a larger Christian audience and especially for those who may be floundering in their faith.  As I feel I am green in my spiritual understanding, it really appealed to.  He does make some statements that will make my traditional friends balk.  However, I felt that it adhered to Catholic theology faithfully but most importantly, he reached out and made some pretty deep theological concepts very simple and straight forward to understand.  I gained an understanding of the Incarnation, the Paschal Mystery, our sexuality, and a spirituality in general that frankly I had never understood.  To think that all this time I did not realize what the Body of Christ meant, only on a very superficial level!

Another great book I just read is A Mother's Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot, recommended by a friend.  This book is about developing a Rule of Life much in the same way that those in religious orders live their life.  It is an organizational book but also very inspirational and helps you on your quest to not only order your home, but your soul as well.  I found it very inspiring as she truly spoke to my core; how difficult it is to live out the vocation of marriage and motherhood and how we can live out God's will and become holy in the process.  Definitely a very Catholic book but just what I needed to read this past week as I faced down the barrel of the hardships of mothering and homeschooling. 

Gabi loses her teeth

Ok, so this happened a couple of weeks ago, but Gabriela lost her first tooth!  Well, she has actually lost both of her two bottom teeth now, the second one just a couple of days ago.

I'm a crappy blogger

Well, here it is two weeks later and I haven't blogged a thing!  I have these wonderful blog posts ideas that pop up in my head throughout the course of any given day, but the practicality of it is that I don't get to it.  I have my pre-set internet routines that consist of checking email, catching up on facebook, checking out certain blogs, and going to my mommy-friends board that I frequent.  Fact is, I am not giving blogging the online priority and time that I want to.  Another reason is that homeschooling is kicking my ever-loving booty, I am perservering, but I won't lie; its a lot. of. hard. work.  Along with my regular homemaking duties, I am swamped.  But I do want to continue, and I'm going to try to catch up on some old posts I've been meaning to get up.

Artwork

 

Speaking of art, I was very pleased with Gabriela' artwork this week,

 

 

 

as well as Annalise's

 

 

this past summer Annalise became quite proficient at drawing stick figures with faces and beautiful long locks like Rapunzel.  I have really enjoyed her smiling faces and I found this art viewing on our shelves during the past week.

 



Gabi dresses Annalise

 

Annalise has very much been into being neatly dressed and combed lately, and she came in pleased as punch because Gabriela had dressed and brushed her.  

Weekly Review Sept. 10-14

This, only our 3rd week of homeschool, I have to admit I felt a little tired.  I had gone full speed the first two weeks and I was already feeling it!  Mainly my montessori activities suffered, but we got through a fair bit of schoolwork   We did daily phonics, studied the Story of Noah and the Ark, which culminated nicely and unexpectadly with the art class at St. Ann's at the end of the week.  We practiced pouring and explored tactile opposites.  I went over some basic addition with the number rods and explored evens and odds.  I've come to realize that Gabriela likes worksheets a whole lot more than I was planning on using them, but I've been letting her work through some workbooks, and she really enjoys that.  Finally, we discovered  SALSA episodes thanks to a friend.  There is an accompanying curriculum that I am going to start, but last week the whole Salsa thing translated into a whole lot of watching that I need to curb this week coming up and actually make lessons out of.  We did a fair bit of painting and read more in our history book and a lovely book on Abraham Lincoln.  We also continued reading stories in our seashore book.   That culminates nicely into this weekend because we came to the coast to visit our family. 

 

Flicker Paint

 

 

 

 

 

Exploring Tactile Opposites

 

 

 Making words

 

 

Painting

 



 

Handwriting with sandpaper letters

 

 

 

Glueing and letter practice

 

 

 

 

New Montessori Materials!

We finally received the materials I ordered from adenamontessori.us/  last week!  The price was right but the delivery took a while.   They were pretty busy though, because I ordered right at the time everybody else was ordering materials as well.  Anyway, I'm really happy with the quality of the materials.  Gabriela has been eyeing the Golden Bead Material, but I have not been ready to present them yet.  I wanted to make sure that she had a firm grasp of the numbers 1-10, but she clearly does and I definitely think that we are ready.  We are getting started with them this upcoming week.

Golden Bead Material

 

 

 

Sandpaper numbers and letters

 



Date with Gabi

Now that Julienne is nearing 1, I'm finally at a point where I can get away for a couple of hours once she goes down for the night.  (She's finally accepting her dad at night for some comfort).  Gabriela has been requesting an outing with me, so we went to get some ice cream, then we browsed Michaels.  It was so nice to get out with just her!  The best part?  She brought our seashore book for a read-loud!

Homeschool is not "School-at-Home"

Despite reading that statement over and over in books and blogs while I researched homeschooling, I still had idealistic views on how my homeschooling would go.  Specially pertaining to the Montessori method, I pictured perfect children silently moving about our home, choosing activities while I explained and presented them, each patiently waiting their turn.  Well, that little dream lasted for about a day!  Firstly, I will never be able to have a Montessori school at home, I don't have either the resources, both monetary or time-wise, to buy or make all the beautiful materials that would entail.  As I enviously peruse Montessori blogs, with their beautiful school rooms stacked with materials, I have to come to terms that will not happen here,  I don't have the space for a school room, and my baby-soon-to-be-toddler will quickly put an end to even being able to prepare the enviroment on the low shelves that we have in the living room. 
Beyond Montessori, other little details spoil the school-at-home scenario.  Like the 3 year old who insists on acting her age, and the baby of course, that needs to be fed, changed and put to sleep. 
On the positive side though, I'm embracing the many ways that homeschool is not like school-at-home, mainly in the flexibility.  My plan was pretty rigid, I had a vision of efficient use of time in the morning and "hitting the books" early on.  But that was entailing a change from our normal procedure of fairly slow mornings, and it was feeling stressful and contrived.  So I decided to relax on that.  I still want the children dressed before school, but learning can and does happen in our pajamas.  Some morning the children see a material out and want to explore it before we get done with the morning official duties.  And so what?  Isn't that the beauty of it all?  Can't I do what I want?  The work gets done and it happens more organically throughout the day than I first originally imagined.
Finally, I'm accepting the fact that my children and I are not going to essentially change because I am homeschooling.  I still need a clean house to function and I'm still going to be the one that does that throughout the day even though being at home means more messes than thought imaginable.  Both my children and I go stir crazy being at home all day and outings are going to have to be more of a regularity than originally intended.  I had read that you must remain at home to get the work done, but we are just not homebodies.  So my goal now is one day in and one day out of the house.  Be it the park, the store, or a friend's house, we have to get out and socialize lest we wilt. 
So those are just a few lessons learned so far.

Curriculum 2012- 2013

I thought I would go ahead and write out what our curriculum is, especially so grandparents and family can know what we are doing.


Religion:  We are reading Bible stories from The Golden Children's Bible, one per week, and then I am having Gabriela narrate and draw what she remembers from the story in a Bible journal.  Also we are reading short stories from Leading the Little Ones to Mary to begin instilling a Marian devotion.  Cathechism will be from Chat's with God's Little Ones although unfortunately, the book got lost in the mail and I have to order another one!  A big thanks to my friend Katherine who helped me greatly with my curriculum and is a great inspiration in my life!  Oh, and both the girls will be going to Sunday school once a week.


Reading: Ordinary Guide to Teaching Reading.  It's a phonics primer that goes through and drills phonics using flashcards and memory poems.  We are also memorizing poems from A Child's Garden of Verses.  It's amazing how the children soak up the poems, they are better at it than I!
Finally, we are also doing phonics/letters using Montessori based exercises.  I bought sandpaper letters which I am using with Annalise more than Gabriela, since Gabriela already knows how to form letters, although I am having her practice on them as well.

Literature:  Too many books to write, but I'm working on getting rid of twaddle in our lives!  Twaddle is a term coined by Charlotte Mason for fluff children's book.  I'm trying hard to research and check out books from the library with care and purpose instead of doing a free for all like we usually do.  I want the girls ears to be used to listening to the complexities of fine literature.

Handwriting:  Delightful Handwriting from the Simply Charlotte Mason website.

Mathematics:  I have decided to go full Montessori for math this year instead of buying a prepackaged curricula.  Montessori math is completely manipulative based using the Golden Bead Material.  I have bought a starter set and will have to make most of the material myself, but I'm excited about it and up to the challenge.

Spanish:  Oy vey, I have to teach my children Spanish!!!! I'm so bad about talking in Spanish to my kids, the English just flows so easily.  And two weeks in, I have yet to start.  But I have some Usborne Spanish books and am planning to teach vocabulary by talking and using flashcards, wish me luck!

Science:  Science will be taught by reading "living science" books, basically good nature based literature.  I'm using Outdoor Secrets, Christian Liberty Nature Reader 1, and The Burgess Books: Animals, and Seashore.  I also want to go on nature walks (haven't really started this yet).  I also bought the Outdoor Secrets Companion (again, from simplycharlottemason.com) which also suggests other books to read and science experiments.  I don't think I'll go through this as heartily though. 

Geography and History:  I have an Usborne Atlas and I want to get a world map to identify countries for our geography.  I bough Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans and plan to read a story out of there once a week.  Also, a friend introduced me to books from D'Aulaire's like Benjamin Franklin so I plan to read as many of those as I can check out from the library.  Mainly just stories and I'm focusing on American History.  I would like to start a timeline notebook as well, haven't done that yet though.

Arts and Crafts:  I bought How to Use Child size masterpieces for Art Appreciation, its a Montessori based program that uses art postcards to match and sort, and eventually the children will learn to distinguish paintings from famous artists.  I haven't started this yet either.  I need to get some good postcards.
Crafts are Gabi's favorite, so art is almost a daily occurrence here.  I'm using a books called

Preschool Art- It’s the Process, Not the product by MaryAnn Knoll.  I'm trying to steer away from cookie cutter art crafts more towards free hand drawing and painting and this book is good for that.  We will still do fun crafts and I'm excited because I joined an art co-op at St. Ann's Church.  I am looking forward to expanding our cathechism with art and meeting some more Catholic homeschooling moms.

 

Music:  I want to do piano lessons, but for now I am using our old keyboard and some books and trying to teach some basic music reading and playing.  We are also listening to classical music cd's I've checked out from the library, especially the Classical Kids series.

Both the girls also take dance, Gabriela is starting ballet technique this year.  I need to get out and have them play more, I do feel like I am lacking in the physical fitness arena.

 

PHEW, that sounds like a lot and it IS a lot and most likely, we won't do it all.  The thing to remember is that we spend 5-10 minutes on each subject.  The school day including art and kitchen activities is about 3 hours long.  The 4 R's, Religion, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic take only about an hour to an hour an half. 

Montessori Baby

 

 

I read Montessori from the start and am trying to incorporate some of its ideas with Julienne.  While I certainly don't agree with a few of their points as I don't believe in sleep training babies and love to babywear (they believe in baby sleeping in their bed from day 1 and letting the baby alone on the floor from the beginning to allow the baby to explore and develop), I really liked the idea of teaching your baby to use a regular cup from the get go.  So that's what we're doing.  With a shotglass.  Perfect size for a baby!  It has to be real materials, plastics are strongly discouraged.  This allows the child to develop a sensitivity and respect for materials, even if you do have to replace a couple of shot glasses.

 

First Two Weeks

After a summer of reading, reading, reading, and with a general plan, we started our homeschool week.  What can I say?  It was both exciting and scary, with successes and dissapointments.  Actually, I've had much trepidation leading up to the start, and some of my fears were not unfounded.   As most children are starting the school year, riding buses, buying backpacks and toting lunches, we stay at home.  I felt some fears that I was keeping Gabriela from something wonderful and grand, but in the end I know that being home with me is a rare and special treat as well.  I can tell Gabriela is soaking up all the attention.  Of course its shared with her siblings, but mommy is now dedicating at least 3 hours to activities and teaching in a day and I can tell she loves it.   (I obviously have been doing things with her all her life, but this feels different) It wasn't all sunshine and daisies mind you, and some lessons were learned on my part that will continue to help me evolve my execution of our home school. 

Since I'm trying to do the full range of montessori exercises with Annalise, Gabriela is also getting to do practical life, sensory, and numeracy activities that she finds a bit easy, but that is good for her confidence.  We will move into the harder stuff in due time.

 

Washing Hands

                                                                          Sorting

 

 

Number rods and Numerals

 

 

 

 

 

Tying Shoes

 

 

Making Cupcakes

 

 

Washing Dishes

 

 

Polishing shoes, this was a favorite activity, they have asked to do it again.

 

 

Sewing

 

                                                        Fine Motor skills and sensory play

 

I inadvertantly made a sensory bin, it was actually Gabriela's idea.  We have been using a pan of rice for Annalise to practice writing, and Gabriela asked if we could add beans to sort, scoop and pour into our jars.  They had a blast with it, I am going to make a proper sensory bin soon.

Practical Life:  Helping to clean up the beany mess!

 

 

 

 

Cutting and gluing practice for Annalise

 

 

Prepared environment

 

 

Choosing their work

 

 

 

 

 

Word building with our homemade movable alphabet.  I bought the foam letters at the The Homeschool Room and bought a plastic container at Walmart.  Its a bit rigged though, because W and X and Y and Z share a compartment, but it works for us!

 

Little Julienne playing on our rice container as a drum.

 

 

I've showcased most all of the Montessori stuff, I also do a lot of reading aloud, we are reading "living science" books, The Burgess Seashore Book for Children has been a favorite.  I knew it would be since the girls love going to the beach when we visit Grandma and Grandpa's.  I'm reading Bible stories, and we are doing phonics lessons/drills.  Lots of free hand drawing and painting as well.