Wednesday, August 31, 2011

I am Thrilled

I didn't encourage it.  I didn't plan it.  I didn't even see it happen, but what happened I HEARD because I was in the office, and they were right outside my door, and I heard Sarah, my Learning Difference-It-Hurts-To-Read girl offer to read to her Daddy.

*eh'hem*  Offer To READ To Her Daddy!


And she did.  She read out of the big red Dick and Jane book we picked up for her.  And she read Better Than I've Heard Her Read before!


I trusted her to read when she wanted to, and do a good job, and not hate it 'cause I wasn't making her . . . AND SHE DID!

If you have super star readers and are unfamiliar with Learning Disabilities and such, I know this seems kinda crazy for you . . .

But for me?

Time to break out the fireworks, baby!!!


Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Tuesday

we did a lot of moving today - moving and shaking

Sarah wanted to make a video of a dance to "All The Single Ladies" and Andrew played and with play clay and playmobil pirates and knights almost all day



They joined in with house chores and Andrew talked to me about the educational value of some TV shows.


Monday, August 29, 2011

Natural Dissasters

Andrew has been on a self instigated interest run of drawing different natural disasters and chasing me around the house with "What other nat'rul dissasters are there?!?!"

That and request to draw people running - anyway here are most of his drawing so far - I think he has hurricane yet to do and another one I forget the name.  Meh, once they are done, I'll upload a picture.
whirlpool

avalanche with trees near the bottom - where one guy got smashed and is dead

I helped with the drawing on the right. 







Lets Play Clay all day!


 As I write, my boy is still creating things with the play clay we made.  Andrew made one batch (with supervision)  and he loved measuring things out, mixing and it "cooked" pretty fast.


first attempt at clay play, a cut out snow man


a bowl

Foot prints to some large dinosaur 

I thought this was creative way to make texture on the eggs


The plot thickens - and *maybe* they should get out o'there!

Sarah's tree


Sarah's cave

Andrew's cave

This, he tells me, is Jesus on the cross

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Billy kicked my butt.

Yesterday, Friday, we did some intentional PE - I put on a "Billy Blanks Boot Camp" and we all worked out together.

We used 6oz tomato pastes cans to be our weights and 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 -ed our way through kicks, punches, squats, and pushups.

Almost immediately my body was mad at me.  And today- this morning- Oy vay!

But back to yesterday - so then we did a google search for Billy Blank kid exercises and only to find that Billy is Dyslexic! Sarah totally related to the different way of thinking.  But, thankfully, she did not relate to people like teachers and such calling her stupid or thinking she was mentally handycap!  We pulled her out of school before that stigma set in.

Second grade she did homeschool just like public school at home and she was going to Mexican public school - and she would start to call herself stupid when she couldn't or struggled with whatever task was set before her.  I hated that.

At 5:23min it talks about their strengths and it is describing Sarah to a 'T'.  Anyway - pretty interesting.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Yesterday and Today

Yesterday not a lot happened.  At least in the regard to the kids day.

I went with my hubby to meetings and then we had to take our sick baby boy (ok, he's 3) to the ER because of a cold triggered asthma attack.

When I asked my mother, a.k.a. the babysitter, what if any learning was done she said  - well no, since 3yr old was so sick they just mostly watched cartoons.  So whatever Dora the Explorer was teaching yesterday.  And Sarah made scrambled eggs in the microwave and toast for herself.  Home economics?
And Andrew spent hours using wooden blocks to create a town. Using cars to drive around.  We didn't get a picture and this morning - by the time my mom tells me about it -it looks like it was hit by Hurricane Irene.

Today we are off and running.  Sarah has been watching videos and talking about orangutan mothers in captivity and them learning to be mothers.  Followed by Anaconda Hunters video and talked about poisonous vs non poisonous boas and snakes.  She likes to study snakes.  She also left me this note:


It's actually an improvement to her spelling and sentence structure.  Her improvements are that the first word is capitalized in the sentence, all the correct letters are in "love" and *almost* in the right order - before it was spelled "lavo" or some such combination.  And "mom" is spelled right and not capitalized - before it was "Mooomy" or something similar.  This is *IMPROVEMENT!*

And then she worked on a "to do" list - she drew boxes and numbered them, then drew the "to do"s for her day.  Let's see what she if we can figure it out . .  .

  1. lift weights  sell magazines
  2. wash car
  3. surgery on teddy bear sell toys
  4. puppet show
  5. walk the dogs (for money)
  6. wash windows
  7. learn something - teach people English
  8. baby sit
  9. ?
So - after asking Sarah she tells me this is her list of ways to earn money!  Good Job!  

Anyone want their dog walked?

Andrew, meanwhile is making a knight. Dressing his knight up with aluminum foil.

Every good Knight needs a well armored steed!

Making final adjustments to the helmet, and VOIALA! 

 Any damsels need rescuing?

Finally we had a great time in PE and aquatic sports playing in the kiddy pool! 

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

It's surprising even me.

Well I was hoping to do some "exploding" science today like they did here, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow.  Today we worked on their chore pockets.  Each kid has 2 magnetic pocket, one is labeled "TO DO" and the other is labeled "Done"
The idea being that as the tasks got done the task cards (colored 3x5's) would move from one pocket to another.  I got the idea from Jenny.  
I wrote out some tasks (wash dishes, make your bed, etc) I explained to the kids what they were and what they would be for, and I was surprised to find that before I was done explaining Sarah was reading what was written on the cards.  
Good!  

  
 Next step they were to draw or search cut and paste pictures that for them would show the task.
 Sarah is showing her "wash dishes"
Andrew working on his task card.

I'm rather surprised by their reading that they are doing here and there.  Both spent time on Secretbuilders.com today and Andrew completed a quest completely by himself - which requires reading.  If I ask him to read something he backs down from it saying he "can't" but I see evidence that he sure can when he's not feeling pressured to perform.

Then Dad took the boys out for some consumer math - having Andrew figure out how much money he had and what he could buy with it.

And finally at the end of the day Andrew learned some anatomy playing a game where you had to fix broken ribs.  Sounds fun, eh?

And all the kids either have sniffles or a low grade fever (99-100) or both, and now so do I.  But mine feel more like severe allergies . . anyway - don't know how much will get done tomorrow.

Monday, August 22, 2011

OK - Here we go!

Big reason I'm keeping my kids home from public school is because I want to teach them what I believe is important - namely about Knowing God.  As Jessica explained the difference in her blog - I want them to Know God not just know About God.  You know?

Today is the first day of public school here and my kids are still in jammies . . . so, aside from reading our Bible and talking about Paul's willingness to die and his fearlessness in the face of danger to talk about Jesus . . . I'm going to go in with my "See Learning" eyes on and see what my kids are learning today

They watched programing on Discovery Kids about animals.

What was really fun is that we found out on coinflation.com that pennies made before 1983 are worth, in their straight up copper, 2.5 cents.  And talked about how that means some of our pennies are worth -you guessed it- more than a penny!  So we pulled out our penny jar and sorted out the ones 1982 or less.

Some of the pennies were corroded bad enough we couldn't read the date, so we pulled out some things that we learned online would clean the pennies for us.  We had one bowl with just vinegar.  Another bowl we mixed lemon juice with baking soda and the last one had just water. (The internet didn't suggest this as a penny cleaning agent - it was mostly for our fingers)

So that was fun to see what cleaned best, how the chemicals reacted with the pennies and with each other . . .

Finally we learned that it's illegal to deface money - so the option of melting down our pennies for copper is out . . . but that is whole lot of learning today that we ALL enjoyed.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Friday - Math and other stuff

We listened to Multiplication by Heart  a couple of times (about 30min), also Andrew helped me make shortbread cookies and we talked about fractions (1/2, 2/3, etc) and exact measurement.  Not to mention using a recipe and bake times vs thickness of cookies.

Together the kids went to the corner store and bought treats with their money (currency) and came back and we talked about sharing a pack of 6 cookies with 3 people or 2 people and asked plenty of  "if so-and-so ate __  how many did so-and-so eat?"

Hand and eye coordination and logic with several games - of strategy or matching.

And last thing that I noticed is Andrew helping his little brother make a book and start a "comic book" by putting stickers on different pages and drawing details . . .

:-)