I Really Have No Idea Why I Asked...

Me: Nate, why is there cherry juice stains on your bellybutton?

Nate: Because I'm not gonna eat cheerios again!

Me: WHAT?!?!?!

Nate: Cheerios are just plain. I don't want to eat them any more.

And he runs off to leave me wondering... how long is it going to take them to drive me totally insane?

While I still have hair left...

So here's the question/problem that I currently have. I am teaching four, (sometimes five) kids at the same time every day. I try to organize the big kids' work so that they are able to carry on independently for most of the morning. And sometimes it works. Sometimes, oh ok, most times, it doesn't. The little kids both want to do something (different things, of course) that need my help. And as soon as I begin that juggling act, invariably, one or both of the big kids needs a question answered, or a work explained, or need something set up, taken down, or fixed, or there is an argument over a game because someone feels an urgent need to win. every. single. game. no matter what it takes to do so. And on the really good days, this is when the phone rings.

How do I minimize this frustration? (Short of selling a kid or two?)

Weekly Wrap-up

What we have been up to in school...

Penguins, of course.

Spelling, in various forms, as suited to our ages, abilities, and interests.

Drawing snowmen.

Finding the 13 colonies. Kaytie enjoyed this, it was torture for Nate, who just wanted to put the whole puzzle together!

Matching letters.

Fractions.

Flannelgraph fun.

And making ice-cream with our snow playdough.

Although I did NOT get pictures of it, the highlight of our week was when the cousins came over to learn about penguins with us. And this time, we were also joined by some new friends, a 5 year old girl, 3 year old boy, and 1 year old girl. We were having too much fun for me to get pictures!

For more weekly wrap-ups, go to those weird unsocialized homeschoolers over here.

Stepping Stones

So I've talked a bit about a couple of the math games that didn't work for us so well. But here is one that was a definite hit! It's called Stepping Stones and I found it here. The basic gist of it is that you take flashcards (I used ones that I made last year with index cards) of the skill that you are working on, and lay them out in a path. Then you choose two game-pieces that are sure to please your child. Can you guess who is who? :) They roll the dice and move their piece that number of flashcards. If they can give the correct answer, they get to move forward. If they don't, they move backwards. We are using addition flashcards and we play it this way, if they give the correct answer right-away-off-the-top-of-their-heads, they get to move forward TWO spaces. If they use their fingers, or think about it, they move forward one space. If they get it wrong, they only move back one space. If they get it wrong, but then suddenly remember and yell out the correct answer, they stay where they are.

This is always a fun, giddy sort of game. And it's easily adaptable for any skill that you are trying to drill. We've played it three times, and they are already able to play it themselves except for the judgement call of moving forward one or two spaces.

Just trying to breathe, here..

We are half-way through the school year, and things are going well. Our schedule/routine is working fine and everyone seems to be getting enough one-on-one time. Daniel is in preK (as you know) and is right on target, showing no signs of accelerating any time soon. So, why exactly is it that I am thinking about Kindergarten and freaking out? HOW am I going to teach 3rd grade, 2nd grade and Kindergarten AND "real" preK all at the same time?????

Daybook: Jan 18, 2010

Out my window: a sunny winter day and little kids playing in the sunshine. Around here, we get days like this in the middle of winter, I don't know if it is Indian Summer or a false spring. Whatever you call it, it is wonderful to have when you have a houseful of small children with unlimited amounts of energy!

I am listening to: the kids yelling outside, and Sam the bird tweeting at them. He is trying to get attention by singing and banging around in his cage.

I am thankful for: daily bread

From the kitchen: oh dear, I haven't thought about that yet... so probably taquitoes or spaghetti.

I am creating: penguin plans for tomorrow. The cousins are coming over!

I am reading: the fourth book in the Ranger's Apprentice series; Before Green Gables; Grace-Based Parenting; and Games for Math, well, re-reading, actually, since I have to take it back soon.

I am praying for: my sister-in-law and her family, the people of Haiti, and for a job for my husband.

Around the house: cleaning and cleaning and more cleaning. sigh. If it weren't for laundry and dishes and cleaning up kid-messes, I would be soooooo bored!

One of my favorite things: Abbie singing to herself. On the way home from church yesterday she was singing: "Jesus, Christ, the Lord!".

A few plans for the rest of the week: the cousins over tomorrow, which will definitely be the highlight! Hopefully a date with my husband, thanks to my sweet nephew. :) And lots of schoolwork.

I am thinking: about contentment and waiting to hear the voice of God

From the learning rooms: the shelves are full of penguins and snowman and abcs. The big kids are learning about the American colonies, Vietnam, birds, action verbs, physics and chemistry, and lots and lots of math.

A picture thought I am sharing:

Yut-nori... Texas-style

As a part of our study of South Korea, Kaytie and Nate made the game Yut-nori. It was very cool because I just printed off the directions, and they made it all on their own. The only thing I did was take pictures, quench arguments, and repeat, at regular intervals: "What's the NEXT step in your directions?"

In their workbox, they found the directions, a blank piece of cardstock, circle stickers, four craft sticks, and markers.

First, they made their game-board by putting stickers around the edges of the cardstock. I gave them an additional sticker of a crown to mark their Start sticker. But they could just as easily decorated the Start with a marker to designate it. (Only, that might have started a discussion on WHO got to decorate the sticker, and voices might have been raised. Using the sticker kept the fragile peace.)

Then, they used the markers to decorate the craft sticks. ONE side only.

Then they played the game. But I just now realized I forgot to take pictures of that part. Oops! :) If you are interested in playing this quick and easy game, click on the link above and it will give you all the information you need!

PS. It's supposed to be a New Year's game, but we ruthlessly ignored that bit.

PPS. Having the sunlight pouring through the windows in the afternoon makes for a lovely room, but it wreaks havoc with my pictures!

A Whole New World

Oh. My. Word. At some point in the past, I was surfing the WWW and crossed paths with a science store. I don't remember doing it, but I must have clicked something or signed something that told them I wanted a catalog, because somehow one came to my house today in the mail. And my 5 year old son has it practically memorized already. He has discovered a whole new world! Rock tumblers, snap circuits, animals to dissect, how to build a volcano kits, telescopes... He is reading and drooling and asking, "Can we afford this? This? How about THIS?" Every now and then he explodes into cries of "That's so COOL!" I'm not quite sure, but I think I might have a science geek on my hands!

Playdough

I finally broke down and made our own playdough. We have never really needed to, before, because we were always given plenty of storebought dough. But that had all gotten old, or Daddy had let them mix the colors ((shudder)), and I was kind of wanting some for school. Then 10 Kids and a Dog made glittery snow playdough, and I could resist no longer. I was really surprised at how quick and easy it was to make. (although I would suggest not letting your oil get so hot that when you add the water it boils up and scares everyone in the house and even sets the smoke alarm off! (our smoke alarms are very sensitive) )

I doubled her batch, and there was plenty of dough for five small kids. And they absolutely loved the texture! After they were done with the first play-time, I put most of it in a bowl with a tight lid, then put a handful in a smaller bowl for the school-shelf.

We were given a HUGE bag of cookie cutters once upon a time, and we use those with our playdough fun a lot. So Abbie and Daniel made ice-cream with our snow playdough.

Want to Help?

Pray for the people of Haiti. And if you would like to do more, click here. This is an adoption agency that has an orphanage in Haiti. So donations here will go directly to people in need.

Penguin grid

Here's a penguin grid game that Abbie enjoys playing. I printed the grid from Prekinders which is an awesome place if you are looking for preschool or even early elementary ideas or free printables. The penguin markers I made myself. The game is easy. You roll the die (it is behind Abbie's hand in the picture) and then cover that many penguins with your markers.

Here is a closer look at the penguin markers. I used wooden beads I found at Hobby Lobby. There were 22 in the package and it cost me about a dollar. Then I just painted them black. That was the hard part. First I had to mix my own because I thought I had some until I got home from the store. Then I had to stop and wash up Kaytie because I turned away for 3.6 seconds to pick up the beads and I heard Kaytie say, "I'll keep Abbie from touching them." I turned back to tell her to leave Abbie alone, and Kaytie had two black hands. Then it took several coats and even more touchups to get the black the way I liked it.

But after the black was on and dry, I just dabbled the rest of it on with toothpicks, and drew the wings on with a black sharpie.

Penguins Part One

The theme for the little kids this month is penguins/winter/snowmen. Naturally, we are heavy on the penguin part. So far, this is their favorite game. We call it Penguin Path. I printed the game-board from here. And we play with these rules.

Well, maybe not

We were trudging through afternoon school today when I stopped to look over my plans to see what we had finished and what we still needed to do.

"We've done that, and that, and that..." I murmured to myself.
"And we done Grammar!" Kaytie interjected, helpfully.

But not very well, apparently.

Math and Ladybugs

So far, after two days of it, the math games thing is a hit with the kids. I like it because there are no tears, no threats, and we have tons of time to dink around with other things and STILL get done with school on time. For two days in a row we have spent less than (fewer than? I can never remember!) five hours total (per day) in school, counting both Circle Times, and have gotten EVERYTHING on my list completed. Plus they have had Free Choice time. That is amazing to me.

However, I have to confess to being a little, ummmm... let down... disconcerted... taken aback... even a mite disappointed, in our math the last two days. Because the unexpected happened. Nearly half of the games I had were too easy for them. My clocks game, which I had gloated over forever because it was to help with telling time, (and those games are a little hard to come by) was the worst flop. Turns out that it is to acquaint them with where the numbers are on a clock, and they already knew that part!

But not all of the games have been that easy. Today, they played a ladybug game designed to teach and reinforce odd and even. I was a little dubious because I thought they knew this concept well. We've talked about it often enough.

Then, when I went to stick it in their box I realized that although I had thought I had printed it off when they were in Kindergarten, I was mistaken. I found the dots and leaves printed on paper. White paper, no color. And no ladybugs to be found. Unfortunately, I was also out of printer paper. So I drew my own ladybugs. I thought they looked rather frighteningly evil (there is a reason I print, not draw) but the kids didn't seem to mind.

And I was quite surprised to discover that even though they knew you found the even numbers by "counting by 2s", they wrongly assumed they needed to start with 1. So we had quite a chat about evens having friends and the odd man out. I am glad that I drew those ladybugs, because we will be playing this game again!

History: A Unit Study (I think) of Colonial America

Have I talked about History yet? I don't think so. My original plan for History was to follow the Classical idea of four year history cycles. It is a method that appeals to my linear thinking. Start at the beginning, go until you get to the end, repeat. I even bought the first book and activity books of Story of the World. Then I read it. And I realized that the belief systems of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans was not something I wanted my nearly 5 and 6 year olds to learn about. Yes, they should learn it, and yes, they will learn it. But I wanted to be sure that they were grounded enough in the Truth to be able to handle learning about myths.

So we opted for a year of American History instead. Only I couldn't find one that I liked. Everything was either too expensive, too in-depth, or not in-depth enough. I am just enough of a education snob that I can not give my kids workbooks for History. So, like I always do when I can't find what I want, I attempted to make my own.

I bought The Light and the Glory for Children to read aloud, and added in a bunch of library books, crafts, activities, and coloring pages to bring it to life for them. It all worked wonderfully, too, since we read about Columbus in late September and the Pilgrims in November. It makes me smile to think about how well it all worked out. :)

Then, I started working on next terms' plans and realized the second half of the book is much more about ideals and principles and abstracts than about individual people and events that I could flesh out with my free resources of library and Internet. Sigh.

So, for the next three months we will embark on a new adventure of Unit Studies. Now mind you, I still have only a fairly vague idea of what exactly a Unit Study means, and I am probably way off the mark. Again, I could not find a Unit Study for free that I liked. I did find an awesome one that was more than I could afford. :( So I had to surf around and dredge up the info I needed to make my own.

So here is what we are going to do. A quick four weeks on Colonial America.

We will be reading:

Felicity (re-reading, for Kaytie)

Welcome to Felicity's World

The Thirteen Colonies A New True Book by Dennis Fradin

Kids in Colonial Times by Lisa Wroble

Colonial Life by Bobbie Kalman

Sarah Morton's Day by Kate Waters

Colonial Times by Joy Masoff

(I read on my own Growing Up in Colonial America, by Tracy Barrett, which gave me lots of information about what to look for and what direction to go when I surfed the Web and planned things out)

I mostly wanted to just give them an idea of what life was like in those days, with just enough politics thrown in to explain the Revolution, which we will learn about next. So I divided all my ideas up into three different categories: school; clothes and food; work and play. For the first week, we will be talking about the 13 colonies as a general overview and do some map work.

So the first week we will:

1. Look at a map of the 13 colonies
2. Discuss where and what they were
3. Play here
4. Talk about the three different geographical sections of the colonies, and how they were different from each other.
5. Read books (this includes finishing reading The Light and the Glory)
6. Label this map

The second week, we will:

1. Talk about one-room school houses and how kids learned
2. Make a horn-book (this might get tricky, we'll have to see how it goes)
3. Have a "recitation" and a spelling bee (This will be interesting, since spelling is not something any of the kids excel at. I'm hoping it will be fun, though.)
4. Read more books
5. Play with some paper dolls
6. Explore the American Girls website and play here some more

The third week: (clothes and food)

1. Make johnny cake and corn pudding
2. Make butter
3. Make a pomander
4. Weave with a cardboard loom
5. Set aside some time just to play "a day in a Colonist's life" (if I initiate this, they will play this again on their own)
6. Color some pictures
7. Read more books
8. Play here some more

The fourth week: (work and play)

1. Play games like: jacks; hopscotch; blind man's bluff; frog in the middle; marbles (they know most of these games, so I will point out how long they have lasted as fun games, and that these were the only games they had... they didn't have a room full of toys, they had to make or pretend their own
2. Make a bilbo-catcher and a whirly-gig
3. Discuss the different jobs available, and talk about apprentices. Pretend a town, and act out the different jobs
4. Set up a bucket brigade
5. Play here of course
6. Read books

Then we will plunge into the Revolution!

P.S. One of the reasons I posted all of this is that I was hoping that if anyone had some ideas or suggestions to add, they would slip them into the comments! (hint hint)

New Year's Resolutions

Well, the kids all made it to midnight. It was a fun evening of snacks and games. They colored a clock and, on the back, "wrote" their resolutions. Here they are:

(I know who is getting the favorite grandchild award this year!)

Kaytie: To finish reading my Bible so I can pass it on to Nate.

Nate: To visit Papa and Nana.

Daniel: To obey Mom.

Abbie: To be a princess.