Chess,

Spent hours with Andrew on chess kids academy site 

learning the game of chess.  And so far we've completed lesson one with it's quizzes and are in lesson two.  :-)  Then we found the Chess Kid (non-plural) site below -

And then got distracted by Fenius and Ferb.

My kids are visual learners.

Hence we use the computer and internet as learning tools.

A while ago Sarah old told me she wanted to learn multiplication.  So I purchased from itunes "Multiplication by Heart".  And the songs worked, as I've posted previously, she's been singing her facts for a couple of days now.

Yup, pretty much every day she's singing the multiplications . . .

So today I showed her how to use her "songs" in multiplication problems . . .First on Fish Shop where she completed all three levels of "easy" and then we switched to Farm Freak Out.  I think she enjoyed Fish shop better, but Farm Freak out let her pick which multiplication fact she wanted to work on.  We chose 1, 2, 4, and 5.

Andrew was hovering around all this while so I set him up on the other computer with a little bit of "Action Fraction" but it was above his level, so we switched after a game to "Cannon Math" which was much more his level.  He loved it.

His dad pointed out to Andrew how he didn't have to start from 1 each time but how to "count on" from the big number.




Sometimes we had to get our "songs" right to get the right answer and often Sarah would need to sing her facts our; but if it wasn't timed, Sarah did SUPER.

It was kinda funny to be telling grandma . . . "Grandma, would you turn the TV down . . we're trying to do *MATH* in here!"

Princesses, Roblox, Dentist and Mud.

On Thursday we had Health Education and Career Exploration day with a visit to the . . . . *drum roll* DENTIST with Andrew.  Who left this kid-friendly place with a new t-shirt and certificate for have 3 visits without cavities!  Woot Woot!

Meanwhile, on Friday I introduced Builder Boy (a.k.a. Andrew) to Roblox!  Which is wonderful for his building mind, but I am useless on it and had to watch some youtube "how to" to figure out how to play.  Well, once he got the hang of it his enthusiasm caught to his sister - and so I let her set up an account and play on my computer while he played on the home computer and there they were building their worlds pretty much all day!

Yesterday Sarah had a "Polite as a Princess" class on etiquette given by Princess by Design - the teacher being a former Disney princess character (Belle) and Pageant winner. (also on Facebook)

walking/posture lessons

Special guest, Miss Teen California-World crowned each princess with a crown and a rose

On the drive there we listened and tried to sing along with all the songs on Multiplication by Heart - and she did well with all her skip counting song up to 6.  I think that is wonderful, considering it's nothing we "sat down and taught".  . . it's been entirely fun and easy!  We laughed and laughed the whole time.


Today, Andrew was working on a list of "Things to do that are fun" in response to his question/whine about what he could do.  Having him make out a list was so good - even though I had to prohibit him putting "Fighting with brother" on it, but we finally came to the point where he listed "do science experiment".  Well! that was all the encouragement that I needed because I *had* an experiment  that I've been waiting to do with them.  The idea came from Janet's post, so out we went to "play" with baking soda and vinegar.  Andrew decided that he wanted to make a volcano.  It's still drying, and we think tomorrow we will be able to make the "lava" flow.

What fun it's been!

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 - 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 . . .

:-)