Kindergarten Writing and Full February

Kindergarten is writing stories now in Language Arts.

"play" LOL!

He is reading well and seems to be strong in math. He still cannot get the concept of how days and weeks repeat and so we have our every Monday morning "I can't figure out what day it is" conversation. He can count ordinal numbers pretty consistantly with difficulty transitioning from 20th, 30th, etc...  saying "Twenty-oneth, Thirty-oneth..." instead of "first."  It's kinda funny to me.

7th grade has completed almost all of her units and now has to go back and do corrections and complete some of the essays. She strongly dislikes them and I have allowed her to save them. She is currently reading "The Hiding Place" and seems to really like the story, except the sadness of it being a true story. She is enthralled with Corrie Ten Boom.

3rd grade has started multiplication and he "gets" math in such a weird way it is hard for me to help him sometimes. He works hard in school most of the time and had perfect attendance in January!

We are going to hit the ground running starting tomorrow with Early-On appointments for our 2 year old. I asked for a PT consult as his gait,  he is 29 months old, still seems pretty unstable. Just checking to be sure.  We also have recert. for WIC. Jordan has her girls group thing every other Monday.  Our homeschool group is having the bowling Valentine party again this year. I think we are making our cards unless "The Nana" buys boxed cards. (You know you can't help yourself!) We have food bank and personal needs closet and well child doctor appointments. We are also going to sneek a 4 day weekend get-away in there with a quickie vacation with family friends.

Peace

Free Stuff

I enjoy free stuff. Especially if it has to do with benefiting my kiddos. When I first started homeschooling in 2004 it was the middle of the school year and I was searching the Internet for anything I could get to start up our new shall I say adventure. I found so many things. As I was going through my folder today I found a resource that I had used a great deal of time before I started using a computer based curriculum. Easy Test Maker (ETM) was one of  my favorite tools. It has changed and improved a great deal over the years too. It is free, it saves your test online for you and the options for types of questions meets many kinds of needs. My little people are memorizing Psalm 23 this week for their Children of Light class and i was able to paste the passage into ETM, put brackets around the words for the word box and print them off.

Some other oldies but goodies I have used:

http://www.sfreading.com/resources/ghb.html ( love these grammer worksheets)

http://www.learningpage.com/ (nice collection of printable books)

http://www.dltk-kids.com/ (great source of crafts for any season)

http://donnayoung.org/index.htm  (One of my fav-wits!)

Teaching Cursive

I heard on the news last week that many schools will no longer be teaching cursive handwriting and will replace it with typing/computer skills. We have always tried to incorporate cursive handwriting skills, but I have to admit when time becomes crunched, it is usually the first thing to get chopped from the schedule. It has become even harder to stay on it as 3rd and 7th grade both use Sw*tched On Sch**lhouse, a computer based curriculum. How did/do you work it in? I can't even remember... what grade do they teach it in public schools?

A Good Kind Of Tired

We had a busy day. We did get to sleep in this morning which was a nice treat. Then we worked the food bank. It was pretty quiet when we got there with no orders. One of the coordinators went to check the fax machine which is how we receive our orders and found it to have a paper jam. Once the jam was fixed, 17 orders rolled off of it all at once and it got crazy. People were coming in 3 and 4 at a time. The stocked shelves were bare and as fast as the boys were stocking them and at one point one of the workers said we had run out of boxes. Kindergarten got a chance to do 2 new jobs that he had never done before; Salt the walkway and parking lot and then help customers take their food to their cars. He was ginning so hard, everyone made comments. The kids filled and packed orders for 2 1/2 hours straight! We broke for lunch later than usual and they were so tired they kinda sat at the table and stared into space as they ate.

Later we went to the RV show and then to observe a class on horse and livestock judging. There were about 6 little cattle that were in the arena. At the end of the class when the guys went to load them into the trailer, the 4 oldest jumped right in. There was a really young calf that decided that he was not getting into that truck and gave the staff quite a run. Of course while they were trying to encourage him to get in the truck, 2 other curious ones came out and then the last one decided not to be the only one on the trailer and came out to. It was quite entertaining and a crowd started to gather. When all the cattle were finally loaded into the trailer, the crowd erupted in applause.

We came home and fixed a fancy dinner of rib roast, rice and salad and by 6:30pm, one of the kids was trying to get ready for bed. They are playing Candy Land peacefully right now. We are tired, but it is a good kind of tired.

Looking for Chickenpox?

I am a member of a local homeschool group. One of the services it provides is an online classified ad that you can list stuff freely as well as let people know you are looking for a certain something. I was reading yesterday's post and there was one that said:

Looking for Chickenpox!
"My my kids are young and I'd rather they catch it than have the more risky vaccine"
Please contact....

Maybe it's just me, but I got the biggest smile out of that. I mean how helpful can you be than to share the varicella-zoster virus with your fellow homeschooler. ~Smile~

Ok...maybe it's just me that found this cute and funny

Loose Dog & O's Garden

We had a peaceful weekend. Our dog is now able to be free at night and he loves it so much better than sleeping in his crate. He has been well behaved and the only downside is that he circles my feet as I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But other than that, its nice to have him kinda patrolling the halls.

Our new favorite weekend  meal is s*up, sal*d, and bre*dsticks that we call, "M's Garden" instead of that restaurants garden that starts with the O. I had lots of helpers cutting, chopping for our salad bar and stirring of a great potato soup. Crescent roll dough that is rolled out and cut into strips makes great light and flaky bre*dsticks.

I had to leave church early this Sunday as my eye started swelling shut and I was afraid I would not be able to drive home if I waited any longer. I think I had an allergic reaction to someones lotion or perfume. Sometimes I can be a bit sensitive to them if I shake hand and forget to not rub my eyes or face.

Good school progress is being made. Kindergarten is learning to write sentences with nouns, verbs and adjectives. Very funny and cute. I will have to scan some to share. 3rd grade is finally catching up in math and language arts. We had gotten behind during vacation and just never did catch up. 7th grade was out of school for 1 week, but she is doing better. She still has a bit of a sinus headache, but hopefully she will be well by Wednesday as we open our personal needs closet and then the students have to work the local food bank on Thursday. Busy, fun week.

Impromptu Field Trip

Yesterday I had to drive my mom to a meeting and had planned to just park and read while waiting. As I was driving to look for free parking (we were downtown) we drove by a guy using a backhoe to tear down an old house. The boys went WILD!!! So I circled back and parked directly across from the work site and they had a great time. This guy was very skilled because the house sat very close to a major one-way, 4 lane street and he did not have any cones or lights set up and never dropped a single thing into the road with lots of traffic. As a bonus to us (unbeknownst to the worker) he also tore down the house next to it. The houses were huge and while old, had neat features like beautiful original woodwork, very nice light fixtures and 1 had a very old steel tub. I was very surprised that they had not been stripped of all of that before being torn down. I took great pictures on my cell phone, but it is a new phone and I cannot figure out how to get the picture from the phone to the PC.

(I figured out how to send pics to my e-mail, so here is one.)

Anyway... it turned out to be a nice impromptu field trip that made the time pass easily with out any bickering from the back seat. 7th grade at first found the action to be entertaining, but then she started feeling like the homes could have been fixed up for some homeless person or family. She and my mom really have a heart for the homeless.

Monday Morning

Although one of my kiddos is having a major morning meltdown, we have started back up pretty good. This week we send out our fliers for our Personal Needs Closet which will open for the first time on January 19th. We are excited and hoping to service lots of families.

We will observe the moment of silence today at 11am for the families and injured regarding the shooting in Arizona.


~Sigh~

Wow Ya'll

My kindergartener just asked Jesus to come into his heart.

Yipee!!!

Progress Reports and Fire Drill

Progress reports:

3rd Grade

7th Grade

Kindergarten

Fire Drill:

January 1, 2011. 10:50 pm

Studies have recently said that you have an average of 3 minuets to get out. So that is our base goal. These are our times from when the alarm started to reaching the patio door.

3rd grade: 20 seconds

7th grade: 32 seconds

Kindergarten: 3 mins 45 seconds after having his name called and told, "Fire!" He also stopped to put on his slippers,  so... he gets to practice again.

My public safety message: check your batteries, practice escape routes, stay safe!!

Starting Up

We are starting back to school tomorrow and the kids went to bed early with excitement. I on the other hand cannot get to sleep...again. ~Sigh~

We really had a nice holiday and as always... d*llar st*re Christmas was fantastic! I even splurged this year and bought everyone 2 or 3 things. Woo hoo! Spent $27!

Never did complete progress reports for 1st semester, but everyone is doing well.

Gonna try to go to bed again.

Happy New Year!

(Notice that Jordan is following my habit of covering her baby's eyes. ROFL!!)