It's all coming together!

Warning... this is a lot... but I want to make sure I have this written down for myself :)

Jayden will finish up our unit studies next week (we will end with Thanksgiving unless she just WANTS to do Christmas), will finish up her math review this week, and finish her reading program (Drawn Into the Heart of Reading) biography (including the project) before Thanksgiving! After Thanksgiving, she's going to finish the last three verses in A Reason For Handwriting 'A' just so we can have that book completed, and I'm going to start her in the next book for DITHOR and that's IT! until we start Bigger Hearts for His Glory (3rd grade curriculum) half speed sometime in January.... I have to order it after the first of January, so who knows when I'll start it. We'll take a break when Grace gets to a break point.

Grace will finish up unit 3 in Little Hearts For His Glory (K and/or 1st grade curriculum) and will be finished with the right side (basic - 3 R's) K options completely by Christmas.... we'll pick up 1st grade options after the new year. I'll start her back about a week or maybe two before I start Jayden in Bigger and catch her up by doing left side (starting in Unit 4) one day and then two days of basics (starting at the beginning) so she'll be caught up even at the end of unit 6, which will take 10 weeks.... then we'll take a break for a week or two, and start back at traditional half speed (history/science/Bible one day, basics the next) for 3 or 4 units, which should take us to the beginning of the term on our attendance chart for the state, at which point she'll be technically 1st grade and we'll go full speed, probably starting in unit 12 or so. She'll also be doing the Emerging Readers set from Beyond Little Hearts For His Glory half speed, taking breaks as needed.... it's a pre-cursor to the reading program Jayden is doing.

Julianna is going to finish up her preschool workbook by Christmas and we'll get her another preschool workbook to do after that. I'm still undecided if we will start Little Hands To Heaven at the beginning or in the middle. Either way she'll start LHFHG half speed in September. She will technically still be preschool age, but she will be more than ready for K level work by then. We will go half speed all the way through LHFHG with her. She will finish it around Christmas 2012 and we'll start Beyond and do it half speed all the way through.

I haven't decided yet when Evie will start preschool. Not any time this year... I might start her next fall doing LHTH one or two days a week, depending on when/if she actually wants to do school work like her sisters. Right now she's content just to mess up all the big girls' work! :)

So just a recap, when the new school term starts next summer (July 1st) Jayden will be about 1/3 of the way through 3rd grade work, Grace will be about 1/3 through 1st grade work, Julianna will be finishing up preschool, and Evie will be 2. If they were in public school starting next fall Jayden would be starting 3rd, Grace would be starting 1st, Julianna would just be starting preschool, and Evie would still be 2 ;)

When did they grow up?

Autumn Unit Study

We FINALLY finished our Autumn/Leaves unit study today. I was supposed to finish last week, but I forgot about a few things I had intended for her to do until this week :) She made a lap book, which I will post pictures of later today. It contains definitions of words, poems she copied, poems she wrote, a mini-book on leaves and leaf structure and an essay on fall she wrote :) She also learned about six different types of trees we have on our property, wrote an essay on elephants (following a zoo trip) and learned how to alphabetize.

We will start a short unit study on Halloween things (bats, pumpkins, more poetry) Monday and it will include a lot of crafts and decorations :)

We also began a reading program this past week (Drawn Into the Heart of Reading). She's reading "Squanto: Friend of the Pilgrims" right now. She had her first assignment other than reading yesterday... it was a vocabulary assignment teaching her how to use hints and clues in the reading to figure out the meaning of a word. It really helped her understand how that works because there wasn't really a word so far in the book that she didn't know. So she picked 'village' and was able to see how the context pointed her to knowing what it means. She also began learning how to use a dictionary to find the meaning of a word.

Grace is moving ahead with her reading and will be starting the Emerging Readers portion of Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory in January. She is still working through Little Hearts For His Glory at a good pace.

Julianna is having fun working in her workbooks for now, and we'll pick back up with Little Hands to Heaven in February.

Evie is absolutely driving me insane! :) She is so busy and into everything and FAST! She is the main reason I'm not doing preschool with Julianna until February and not doing school every day with Grace right now. I'm hoping she is more easily entertained and for longer amounts of time 4 months from now :)

I'll be back to post some pictures from our learning adventures a little later on...

Where Did September Go?

I cannot believe it, but it's already October! School is going so well that I don't want to jinx it.

Jayden is really enjoying the unit study. We added in another part of her school for the fall. Climate study. She will record the high and low temperature and precipitation type and amount every day this month. I also ordered the reading program that goes along with her curriculum that we will start in January. The program is called Drawn Into the Heart of Reading. Depending on how fast you go, you study nine genres of literature in either one or two years. We'll see how she does, but we probably will do the two year plan for 2nd and 3rd grade. I wanted to go ahead and get at least one genre done before we start the rest of the curriculum (Heart of Dakota's Bigger Hearts For His Glory) so that it will be old hat when we introduce the new harder work and more writing. We haven't gotten very far with the cooking, but it'll come. She's watching me more, and that counts for something, right?

Grace is still doing great with her school work. At this point I'm able to get about 2-3 days worth of school in with her each week... I'm happy with that for now, then we'll start going 4-5 days a week in January.

Julianna is doing much better. She's really growing up and maturing.... she's screaming less when things don't go her way and using her voice more.

Evie is almost 18 months now and her vocabulary is just exploding. She's also the most affectionate of all our children and will just randomly give hugs and kisses and smile at you. She's also on the last legs of potty training. We have a couple more weeks I would say before I'm comfortable with her going diaperless out and about.

So that's been our days lately. Lots and lots of outside time as well... daily walks even for all the girls. And very very good days even on the bad ones!

The Best Laid Plans....

After much deliberation a few months ago, I had our homeschool journey for the next couple of years all planned out. Well, leave kids alone for a couple of months and they'll blow those plans to bits.

Jayden is still loving our unit studies. I can't say at this point how much she's learning, but the focus academically was to get her reading and writing more.... it's working! On the household side of things.... she made bread the other day and it turned out really good! We haven't done much more with that yet because Evie has been exceptionally clingy, and when she's not clingy she's into everything!!!

Julianna is having a hard time lately.... the responsibilities of being almost 4 are taxing to a little mind ;) But as far as school goes she's having a blast! Right on target for my plans!

Grace however, during the past couple of months when I was really focusing on Jayden, decided to just blossom! She's reading quite well, listening and comprehending super, and being quite bored with what I was doing with her. So I told her the new plan was to start Little Hearts For His Glory (Heart of Dakota) slowly in a few weeks. She said she wanted to start now, so I told her we could do a little bit today. I was thinking we might get halfway through one day of plans.... NOPE... in about 45 minutes, including an interruption, she had completed the whole day plus her awana verses. So, even my well thought out NEW plans have been upended and she'll progress full speed with LHFHG starting today.

Autumn/Leaves

We have finally started. I picked this week to "start back" at school. Of course Evie picked this week to be majorly clingy and have a fever :) So Jayden started back, Grace and Julianna had a little bit each day, and I survived!

Since Evie wasn't letting me put her down, we didn't get to do much cooking or cleaning. Jayden made bread one time, but that was it... we'll do more of that as the fall moves along!

Jayden has done a great amount of copywork, about 10 pages of math, and identified three leaves/trees from our yard. I had her pick three different leaves, do a rubbing of each one, write down the type of tree it was from along with three sentences about each one.

She also has done an acronym poem (beginner, it doesn't really make a poem) and a poem about Autumn. Here are her poems:

Little
Evergreen
Apple tree
Free to fall

Autumn

Hello falling leaves
Goodbye green leaves
Hello brown grass
Goodbye green grass
Hello cool
Goodbye hot sun
Hello hot fire
Goodbye air conditioner

She also finished reading the last two chapters in The Courage of Sarah Noble and I let her have a "break" in reading by just letting her read a Junie B Jones book for fun.

We are making a lapbook with the autumn/leaves theme. We will be working on this theme until about the middle of October. I'll post a picture of her lapbook when she is through with it. She still has a little fact book about leaves, alphabetical order work, some poems to memorize, and an essay to write on fall, as well as defining some vocabulary words and a few more poems to write.

It's awesome to have her begging to do school and having absolutely no complaining... I might schedule breaks for unit studies at different points in our curriculum for her....

Home Stretch...

As of today, we have about two weeks left of school for Jayden before we take our break from curriculum. So we'll finish up this week, go to the beach next week, do the last week of school the week after the beach, and then head to Birmingham on the way to Mississippi State! Then when we return I'll introduce Jayden to our plans for the fall. Grace and Julianna are right on track for finishing up around November or so. I love it when everything comes together just right!

This week, we are still trying to read Romeo and Juliet and Charlotte's Web... I might just turn them in and start again with the two of them after we get back from Birmingham. We just aren't having the time to read chapters right now. We are also taking a small break from memorizing right now... we'll start that back up pretty soon with Awana verses instead of poems and hymns. Jayden and Grace are both in Sparks and Julianna is in Cubbies now, which means she has one verse per week she is supposed to learn.

As far as other books, here's the docket for this week...

Owl Moon
Stone Soup
Papa Piccolo
Follow the Drinking Gourd
and they convinced me to get Little Babaji again :)

When we get back from the beach we'll start our science notebook on leaves/trees. And I may or may not take a notebook for them to fill in during our beach trip... maybe one thing per day... we'll see :)

Job Cards...

I've had several people ask me to put up a blog post about our new found way to do chores that works and gives the children an opportunity to serve others and earn money at the same time.

We call it "Pick a card, any card" here... I have no idea what else you could label it as... ask your kids, they'll know! :)

I made a list of all the rooms/areas in the house, and then other jobs that I wanted done (dust, wash windows, feed dogs, etc.) and wrote each one on a separate index card. I then made envelopes out of construction paper of the child's choosing and put their names on them and also made a larger envelope for myself. This was so that I could see who had what job, and so I could know what I had to do. Then I sat down with the three big girls and explained to them what was to happen with each card. I still have to tell them occasionally, but we've been doing it about two weeks now, and they pretty well know.






































Each morning, after I've had my coffee, each of the three big girls picks three cards at random. They cannot see what they are choosing until after they've picked. I read all of them out loud so everyone knows what jobs are to be done by whom, and then they have an opportunity to trade with each other. I help them figure out what order they want to do the jobs and I lay out their cards in that order under their envelopes. As they finish a job, they put the card in their envelope.

After they have completed their three cards, then they are allowed to pick one of my cards (the leftover ones) if they want to and do it for a quarter. It's not much money, but they have the opportunity for 7 extra jobs/day, so that would add up to us paying out 1.75/day if they did all of my jobs. We've averaged about a quarter/day for them.

At the end of the day, before supper, I'll check their envelopes and mentally go over what those rooms looked like the last time I was in there. If someone hasn't done something properly, they get a do-over. If they still don't do it to their abilities, they have to pay me a quarter for having to do their job. So far we haven't had this crop up.... I pretty much expect Jayden (7) to do just about as good of a job as I do, Grace (5.5) is given a LITTLE leeway, but not too much, and Julianna (3.5) pretty much has to do her best at this point... working diligently and not complaining.

As of right now, Evie does not pick a card... she'd just eat it. But she does shadow me when I'm doing my jobs and she helps (put the toy in the box, put this in the garbage, take this to Jayden, etc.) so I consider her in training. I can see her picking a card herself by the time she's two.

My house has not been this clean since we moved in 4.5 years ago! It's so nice to not be concerned about someone dropping by, or having to run around like a mad-woman if we are having out of town guests.