Oh, school.  We’ve been at it for several weeks now.  6 maybe?  I think we’re on our 6th week.  It has been so long since I’ve written about school, how and what we do.  I don’t think I wrote about it at all last school year once the Summer Mom-school fizzled out.  Why, might you ask?  Well, I guess my confidence has been a bit shaky.  In my heart of hearts I know that this homeschooling thing is what I am supposed to do with the children God has blessed me with.  It is certainly not for the faint of heart, though, and since Hunter was born and Brenna has entered double digits I have been trying to get my bearings.

Last year I decided I needed some help finding books and creating some structure and after lots of searching and praying we decided to give Sonlight a try.  After starting Core 3 with Brenna and Jonah I decided the reading was too easy for them, sent it back, and got Core 3/4.  Because the kids go to public school one day a week and we often go on homeschool group field trips on Thursdays we are still working through it.  I love the literature and history part of it.  Not so sure about the language arts program, and though the science books are lovely, my kids are tired of electricity and the worksheets are a little beyond Jonah’s interest and ability level.  I make Brenna do them.  Probably because I feel like I need to get my money’s worth.  With Jonah and Logan I’ve actually started using a borrowed Apologia zoology book and so far we’re loving it.  It is written in a way that it makes Charlotte Mason style learning so easy– with prompts to narrate, or tell back what they’ve read, experiments, and notebooking assignments in each lesson.

Brenna just reads and reads and reads encyclopedias.  Here she is writing a compare and contrast essay on snails and slugs.  Did you know many types of slugs actually have tiny shells inside their bodies?  Did you know that slugs actually have a gender, but snails are hermaphrodite?  Well, now you do because my little biology encyclopedia typed it up.

For math we are using Math-U-See, partly because we get it free through our homeschool/public school, and because I like blocks.  Math time is tolerable as long as I have realistic expectations that we will spend at least an hour doing math rather than the 30 minutes I had originally set aside for it.

For scripture study we’re using these workbooks and my little drawers love them.

My littles are a bit tricky.  My house usually looks just like Jessica’s because they will get out every game and empty every box, or every puzzle, or both.

I wish I had time and energy to put together Montessori activities for them every day.  Ian loves the sandpaper (well, felt) letters I made for him, and any sorting activity.  He sorted those pom poms for at least half an hour of quiet concentration a day for an entire week.  I would love to get him a wooden movable alphabet and the Pink series work.  The Michael Olaf catalogs are full of great ideas for toddlers too.  I know that my little guys would really concentrate if I put together and presented things for just them.  I also know they get a lot out of the drawing and reading aloud and counting and all that goes on here too just how it is.

So that’s what we’re doing now.  And it is ridiculously late, so you’ll just have to be okay with this ending.

{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.  Joining in with soulemama today.

I have been buying Bare Books by the dozen.  My kids love to fill them up, especially Logan.  He has a series about a character named Mr. Bob who has all sorts of adventures with aliens that I have yet to take pictures of.  This book, however, was given away, so Barry snapped some pictures quick (and made a photo copy) before it was gone forever.  His very favorite neighbor friend had a birthday (his BFF as he calls her).  Such a special occasion called for some book making.

“Yum cake.  Bob opens his present…Look suuper (the 2 u’s make it extra super, no?) fun!”  Can you see how clever his illustrations are?  The candles smoke, the people lick their lips and their eyes look toward the cake.  I can’t stand how much I love his drawings.  I need to share more of them here, but I worry about the fairness of it.  You know, giving my kids equal time.

The first present can turn into all sorts of things.  Here they march to another present.  They’re marching!  And he knows to make their eyes all squinting and half-moony because they’re all so happy.  I tell ya, my 6 year old is an artist.

I think all the intense study of Calvin and Hobbes and Tin Tin that my kids do has lent to all the action and sequence they get into their story making.  They really fill up a lot of their non-school time drawing comics and making books.  (Ssshhhhhhh! Don’t tell them we call this kind of thing Language Arts.)

(Can you see where he gets the idea for the squinty half-moon eyes?)

I’ve been really fascinated by the Colorado sky this summer.  It is so big and expansive that you can see so much variety.  From where we live we can watch the clouds congregate on the mountains and make their way toward the plains, and in the evening light they are quite a site to behold.  There are so many times I’m driving around on errands wishing I had my camera to document the towering layers, but I never have it.  I can stand on my back porch, though.  Here are some of the heavenly sites from right outside my window.

These high clouds are altocumulus.  There are 3 basic types of clouds.  Cirrus clouds are high and wispy, cumulus clouds are the mid sky cotton balls, and stratus clouds cover the sky low and like a blanket.  It gets a bit complicated for me from there because from those 3 divisions they’re categorized into 10 basic kinds of clouds because most clouds are some kind of combination of the 3 basics.

These are cumulostratus– kind of cottony, kind of blankety.

Our very favorite library book on clouds has been Tomie dePaola’s Cloud Book.  You just can’t help but love Tomie’s illustrations and humor along with real, sound information.  The Man who Named the Clouds is about Luke Howard, the man who first devised the way to categorize and name clouds.  It starts with his childhood and shows how following your passion and studying hard can really affect the world.  I also need to get myself my own copy of The Cloud Book by Richard Hamblyn.  It’s a nature guide for naming clouds full of lovely photos and explanations of why clouds are called what they are.

Have you been looking up lately?

Here are the kids at work at their new favorite pastime– making stop animation videos.  Last Sunday Barry downloaded a trial version of boinx iStopMotion onto the old lap top, gave the kids a few instructions, and they’ve been at it all week.  They started with paper cut outs, then moved on to animating their toys.  I can’t even tell you how amazing it is to watch their creations.  I am so surprised by how fun and creative their little movies are– all without any adult help or input.  Today Barry sat down with them and used iMovie to add sound to one of Brenna’s favorites.  Here it is, I hope it makes you think my kids are as cool as I think they are!

Around the new year I saw this tutorial for making a calendar using paint chips.  I thought it would fill my need for a cute new calendar, but I thought it needed a partner. 

I got the calendar done the last week of January, had to rearrange it for February, then March.  That’s when I got the clock finished– sometime during this crazy month of March which is nearly over.  I’ve got to squeak this post in before the month is out.  I did take pictures of the whole clock making process, but I think I’ll leave that for another post.

These projects came about as part of our rearranging and trying to get our family room and learning spaces organized and beautiful and useful for how are family lives and learns.

We’re definitely getting there.

We’ve had small tables with little chairs for years and years, but this is a new addition.  Since getting a new dining table (which I will show you soon) we’ve been able to move our old beat up table in here for the bigger kids to use, work, and create out of reach of little grabbing climbers.  And, I’ve finally got a  place to keep library books separate from all of our books.  One or two inevitably got shelved with all of our books and racked up fines before I could find them.  Hopefully keeping them accessible in a different room will save us a little headache, and money.

Here’s a bigger view of the kids’ creating, learning, and mess making area.  Now that everything has a place, clutter is much easier to control and clean up goes pretty fast.  We actually get it to look (almost) like this on a daily basis!  (If you click on the picture you can see all the notes I put on it in flickr.)

We used the built in shelved alcove on the left of the fireplace for school binders, math toys, science supplies, with the wooden blocks down low for Hunter and Ian to play with.  To the right we’ve made it our “office” with the computer, printer, small filing cabinet, and camera stuff.

(I just have to add that I hate the mauve paint above the fireplace and in our kitchen, but we are renters and the landlords don’t want us to change paint colors.  Apparently, they’re in love with the mauve.)

I took an idea from Wildflowers and Marbles learning spaces and rigged a map hanging system.  I taped my world map and US map together and just use some 3m hooks and binder clips to hang them over the fake fireplace.  This is SO much better than rolling out maps on the floor!!  I wish I had thought of this years ago.  It gets used constantly as we read and play.  If we ever do want to use the fireplace we can just roll it up and put in it a closet for a little bit.

Just had to stick this last photo in.  I love 5 year old hand writing.  I’ll probably keep these label sticks forever.

I am on a mission to rearrange, declutter, and inspirify (you know, to make inspiring) my school area. My muse is this blog I stumbled upon this week, and more specifically this post that gives the in depth tour of her family’s learning space.  Oh, it is so great– full of beautiful and meaningful toys, tools, books, supplies so beautifully presented with much thought into the needs of each individual child.  As organizationally challenged as I am, I am taking baby steps on this mission of mine.  I decided to start in the area I feel like I do a pretty good job at providing supplies and creative motivation for my kids.  To the art area I went to inventory supplies, sort, purge etc. etc. etc.  As I was doing this I realized that the vast majority of the crayons we have came with me from my childhood home, to college, and now here.  That’s 12 years old, give or take.  They were broken and dry– so I did a little Googling and found a bazillion tutorials for melting and recycling crayons.  (Was that introduction long winded enough?)

So, little hands helped me peel away all the old wrappers and sort them into warm and cool jars.  I did most of the peeling, Ian did most of the sorting.  They peered over my shoulder while I researched and saw crayons made in car shaped candy molds.  The crayon users were very adamant that we make car shaped crayons because how fun would that be to drive your car and color at the same time?  I made a trip to the craft store to find them and all I could find were pretzel molds.  They were shaped like cars though, so I brought them home.

The car molds worked– kind of.  I should have thought through the implications of the part of the mold made for the pretzel stick to be inserted into the candy before I started pouring hot wax into them…

Most of it just went onto the counter.  Then I had the brilliant idea to fill the pretzel places in with hot glue– um.  Not a good idea with a baby underfoot or on your hip.  With all the distractions that 5 kids around hot glue can cause I picked up the tray and put my thumb right in a big pool of hot glue.  Needless to say, at that point I was done trying to figure out the whole pre-melting crayons to pour in molds with big escape routes for hot wax.

So, onto the much simpler method of filling up mini muffin tins with crayons, melting them in the oven, letting them cool, then popping them out.

It was a much better way to go about this whole project while having all 5 kids involved in some way or another.

They turned out okay.  The heating and cooling does funny things to the wax and pigments, so they don’t color as well, but they’re fun.  I can say I’ve done it.

And now I have an excuse to buy new crayons and display them all pretty and inspiring like:)

My 7 year old likes to rank things.  He likes to know what’s best, what’s worst, who’s best, who’s worst.  He constantly asking about our favorites.  So, when he asked what my favorite things are about Christmas I immediately turned the question back on him.  I thought, without a doubt, in that split second that I was waiting for his answer, it would be presents.  He surprised me, though.His favorite thing about Christmastime is the music.That made my heart smile.Every morning, after breakfast is eaten and cleaned up, after everyone (or at least the majority of us) is clothed, we gather around the piano and sing.  I love to sing.  My kids love to sing.  It brings a happy tone to each day– which is especially needed after a morning of nagging to get the dishwasher unloaded.  Usually we pick a song from the Primary Children’s Songbook (if you click through to the song book you can click on songs to hear them).  Now that it’s Christmas we get to branch out a bit.  This is our favorite:

Tomie dePaola’s Book of Chrsitmas Carols.   We found it at a library sale when we lived in Ohio and it has become a much loved favorite.  It has all the standards, Angels we have Heard on High, Away in a Manger, Joy to the World, Silent Night, but it also has some that are less familiar like Oh, How a Rose ‘Ere Blooming, and The Friendly Beasts.  It’s all these song coupled with the illustrations that make it so special.

We can never sing just one song.  I think the shortest morning singing session we’ve had this month has been 20 minutes.  Everyone has to pick a song, then remembers that they really wanted to sing another.  We Three Kings is on regular rotation.

This morning I decided to it was time to make our morning music time a bit more interactive.  I broke out the pipe chimes

and the bells.

There was much dinging and donging.  We did get through several songs without too much silliness.  Ian was actually really good at watching for me to point to his color usually dinged right in time.  It’s alway fun and festive to have the bells out.  Well, it’s fun as long as I pretend no one is fighting over who gets the light blue bell and I keep the yelling of  ”Do not bang your bells together!” to a minimum.  It seems that the best and most worthwhile things take the most effort.  It certainly would have been easier to just leave the bells on the shelf in the basement.

But, it’s their favorite part of Christmas!

There will be much more dinging and donging over here during the next few weeks.

To top off this musical day, Brenna had her Christmas piano recital and did a fabulous job.  She has become quite the performer– singing solos in church, singing with the Colorado Mormon Chorale’s children’s choir, and tonight playing Greensleeves beautifully from memory.

I think the music is my favorite thing about Christmas too.

Our homeschool group took a trip up to an organic farm in Platteville CO to get a taste of what it is really like to harvest your own veggies. (Most of these pics were taken by Brenna.)

We rode in the trailer behind that tractor up there.  They took us from field to field where we stooped down in search of potatoes, cabbages, beets, turnips, artichokes, carrots, onions, corn, pumpkins, celery, squash…

It was hot, sweaty work, but we came home with quite a load!

And Hunter had another cozy day of hours spent in a Sweet Pod. (The pattern writing is coming along nicely, just have to finish some illustrations and I’ll be ready for some testers!)

There was also some crazy fun things for the kids to play on back at the home base.

The weather has been beautiful, but too hot to just play outside without something cool and refreshing, so we declared this week Creek School.

We’ve journeyed down to the open space with buckets and intentions to stay all day.

Logan had the camera for a while.  There were lots of pictures of feet

because shoes were too big of a hassle.

I think my very favorite thing I heard was, “Mom, let me introduce you to Grandpa Tweezers.”

Grandpa Tweezers!  Well, can you think of any better name for a crayfish?  Grandpa Tweezers is the embodiment of everything whiskery and pinchy.  I guess there was a Great Grandpa Tweezers, but he was way to fast and tweezery.

But someone’s littered socks did a lot of finger protecting.

Hence the bucket full of grandchildren.

Hope you have a great long weekend and squeeze every last drop out of what is left of summer!