I teach a Bible Study on Thursday mornings, so Wednesday they play in the play area while Mommy gets to go over her study again and put together the class discussion guide.  It’s a good bargain all around.

But on this particular Wednesday, between bites of chicken nuggets, KTRose asks, “Why do some Mommy’s go to work during the day like Daddy does?”

At least it wasn’t “Do you get in trouble if you play the waiting game with the police?”  I still have no idea what she’s asking with that one.

So I told her that in some families the Mommies have to go to work to earn money with the Daddies.  So she asked who takes care of the little girls then?  I told her the girls go to school or to a babysitter while the Mommy and Daddy are at work.  She asks why I don’t go to work like other Mommies.  I told her it was because Daddy and Mommy thought it was more important that she and her sister spend their days with Mommy than with anyone else – even if it means we don’t have as much money.

There’s a pause and I’m waiting to hear what is going to be said.  She’s recently discovered how nice it is to have money to buy things… She recently started doing chores around the house to earn money for the skateboard she wants.  So I think it’s very possible she will want me to go to work so she can buy more things.

Instead she pipes up with, “I’m glad Mommy because I love you very much and I would miss you.”

Awww… exactly the right answer. 

Of course then she went on with “And I don’t ever, ever want you to die.  Except I know when I grow up you will die.  But that’s ok because you’ll go to Heaven.  And then I’ll die after that and go to Heaven and be with you.  So that’ll be ok.”

“That’s ok honey, I don’t think you need to worry about that for a very long time though.”  I say.

LOL.  Big thoughts for Burger King.

Let me inject an important detail.  This child LOVES to do worksheets.  I have to keep an eye and throw in instructions now and then because she’ll just whip through pages doing whatever she thinks should be done.

 Anyway, I turn the page of the wal-mart book and the next page is subtraction word problems – the first answer is Zero.  This child has never done word problems (directly as math anyway), dealt with subtraction, or the concept of Zero, execept on the numberline we use as reference. 

The punchline?  What the heck, I read “Mike had 4 beetles in a jar.  The lid came off and 4 beetle got out.  How many beetles were left in the jar?”  No hesitation and she throws both arms up announcing, “Zero!”

LOL.  What a hoot.  There you go, no problem.  She seems to have no problem with subtraction.

Later we were at Target, getting lunch in the little cafe.  We get our food, sit at a little table.  KTRose pipes up with “there are 4 seats at our table, but only 3 people.”  Yep, I say.  That’s true.  Eat your pizza.

Then, she pauses a moment and starts, “If the table has 4 seats…”  Ok.  There were some hesitations, stumbling over the way to say it, but in the end after editing what she said was, “If the table has 4 seats and 3 people are sitting at the table, how many more people need to sit at the table to take all the seats?”  And she proudly announced the right answer.

I was just very amused at her making up math word problems spontaneously over her personal pan pizza.    Makes me think we may actually be creating a learning lifestyle for her! 

Yay!! It really is worth it even if I think I may go insane some days!  Hehe. 

What’s been going on in the almost year since I’ve written?  Ugh.  The big thing is that we moved last October.  That nationwide housing slump actually hit Northern Virginia and we jumped at the chance to buy a house – after renting here for almost 6 years.  We’ve watched the prices – which we thought were so outlandish when we moved here in 2001 - as they DOUBLED by the end of 2005.  Craziness!  Then this slow down hit and finally people weren’t forced to put in an asking-price-bid-with-an-escalation-clause on the first day a house was on the market in order to buy a house.  There was once again negociation, and we were able to leap.

We worked with a great realtor and found our house on the first day we did a realtor-house visit day, as opposed to our usual wander from open-house to open-house on weekends.  We still looked several more times in the same area before realizing we were still comparing everything to this house, so we put in a bid.  There was haggling, but we got it. 

So now, we have a privacy-fenced 1/3 of an acre!!  For those of you not living on/near the DC Beltway system, 1/3 acre is really nice!  Of course we moved to an area still in Fairfax County, but described most succinctly by a beltway friend as, “oh yeah, isn’t that just before the edge of the Earth??”  :-/  It’s really not far!

The people who owned the house before us did lots of landscaping – in fact had a landscaping company come regularly for upkeep.  We have 5 flowering trees around the house as well as a few evergreens, a japanese maple, and lots of other things I can’t identify.  It’s Cherry-blossom time as I write and we have one flowering in our front yard.  It looks really beautiful.  In fact hubby was commenting on how beautiful all the trees were the other day, and what a shame it will be when he is forced, in a fit of allergy-induced hysteria, to burn them all to the ground. 

We both have TERRIBLE allergies.

I decided (at the direction of a friend who knows such things) to cut down the dead decorative grass in our front yard so the new patch can grow this spring.  I had a rash up both arms for hours.  Yes, that’s with taking a Claritin.  Hehe.  This is going to be interesting.

However, it has been SO NICE to have days where School is done by lunch and afterward the girls go out and play in the back yard for 4 hours!!  They are stinkin filthy when they come in, but they have a blast and I like that so much better than cooping them up all day – or waiting til I’m done with whatever else I’m trying to accomplish so they can walk down to the little park for an hour on a good day.

There’s more, but it will have to wait for another day.  It’s time to go sit on the couch with hubby.  Later all!

Scott and I went to HEAV (unfortunate acronym isn’t it) which stands for Home Educator’s Association of Virginia.  I was there last year, but this was Scott’s first time. 

The first thing you have to know is, this thing is HUGE!!  The vendors and Used Book exchange take up the whole large convention hall.  Then we use all the individual rooms in the main building, and many rooms in the 2nd building for speakers.  There are 3 time-blocks of speakers on Friday and 4 time-blocks on Saturday – not including the key note speakers – and there are 18 different sessions in each block!  So that’s roughly 54 sessions on Friday and 72 on Saturday.  Yipes!! 

In the end we ordered the whole conference on MP3 and should get it in about 2 weeks – there were too many conflicts where we couldn’t go to everything we wanted.  Plus, by the end we were a little brain dead.  It’s like getting information from a fire hose during some of the sessions – and inbetween we’re debating “does this science curriculum look indepth enough to keep her interest – but still on a 1st grade level?  Is this “Christian” to the detriment of hard science?  Or “Hard Science” to the detriment of honesty about the unknowns and doubts of some of our knowledge?  Ok, next is math…  timelines… maps…  whew!

I went to one session I thought was really interesting.  It was by Andrew Pudewa and was titled “Spelling and the Brain”.  I was not (and am not) the best speller and so have laughed a little at the idea of me teaching my daughter to spell.  He is a very good speaker and excellent at giving example of what he means so you understand.  The big take home point is that spelling is the sequential retrieval of virtually random information (his own definition).  It is very tough to teach spelling in a read/write format because when you look at a work you don’t take in the individual letters in sequence to store in your brain, you take in the whole word.  (Have you seen that email that goes around where all of the words have all the right letters, but not in the right order – but you can still read it?  Same idea.)  So then it doesn’t reinforce the order of the individual letters in the child’s brain – especially since their brains are still developing and they have more trouble than adults with seeing proper letter order anyway.  SOOOO… teach spelling like the old-fashioned spelling bees.  It’s Auditory/Verbal.  You HAVE to spell a word out loud in an order – so if you do it in the right order, it is stored in the child’s brain IN ORDER.  Practice like this with them.  That’s my poor condensing of the seminar.  You gotta google him, it was interesting.

I tried to be very kind to my dear hubby.  He hates to shop.  He hates to shop like I hate stupid party games – which has lead to a marriage saving compromise in our home.  I don’t make him shop.  He doesn’t make me do stupid party games.

But this is one of those cases where I need his input, so he went into the lions den with me – being the vendor fair!  I had done a fair amount of research, so I knew I either wanted to continue with Horizons Math or switch to Math-U-See.  We watched the Math-U-See demo DVD a few nights before the fair and were impressed (he used these blocks to demonstrate factoring trinomials – I think it’s the first time I understood what that was doing!) but had a few questions about the long-term use of the curriculum.  Plus, I planned to do our own Life Science course this year – but then heard about Apologia’s Exploring Creation through Zoology I.  It’s the study of all winged-creatures – being Birds, Bats & Bugs.  This is only her absolute 3 favorite catagories of animals!  So we wanted to check that out. 

Hubby went with me when the doors opened on Saturday morning.  We made a bee-line to the Math-U-See and asked questions, then went to Apologia to go through the book and ask questions.  Then his responsibilities for shopping for the day were done.  Ok, Actually I also made him come with me to the Miller Pads and Paper table just long enough to take a huge stack of construction paper out to the car.  But besides that I would do the work of tracking down what we needed and comparison shopping.  He did come back in with me on Saturday to help me decide on a timeline and maps for History/Geography.  We got the timeline, we nixed the maps to see if we could find something closer to what I want.  Who ever heard of an “Ancient Times” map (this was wall sized we were looking for) that didn’t include ROME!!  Italy was completely bumped off the left side of the map.

Can I just say that I LOVE Rainbow Resource??  If they had a book that I needed, they had the consistantly lowest price.  They also have a really wide variety of products, so I got science, handwriting, history, Bible & Art materials from them.  AND if they didn’t have something on hand that was in their catalog, you could place an order at the fair and pay no shipping.  Whoo-hoo!

In the end I got our Math and Science curricula.  I got the last Draw Write Now book I was looking for as well as lots of practice paper.  I was able to get a lot of our history books, but still have to search down a few of the readers. 

I got First Language Lessons of the Well Trained Mind, the Big Picture Bible Timeline, Greek and Roman times “newspapers”, DK phonetic readers still shrink wrapped, and a book that is like an Usborne book of Bible History – but another publisher – all at the Used Book Swap!!  I was very excited.

And I found a really cool series of books called Art in History.  They are 30+ pages each, medium-large print and are each a different culture’s art.  So I got Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese Art.  They take you through examples of the cultures Art, talk about materials and methods used, changes that occurred, and even have at least one “try it yourself” project in each book – all on Elementary level.  Exactly what I was hoping for!  Of course this was through Rainbow Resource – who also had a “make your own Papyrus” kit I bought too!  I had fun. 

Overall it was a really good trip.  We ran into 4-5 couples from our church there, and we had only known 2 would be there.  Maybe the funniest was running into a woman and her husband who are in the Thursday morning Bible Study I teach, and I hadn’t known she would be there!

That’s all for our weekend.  Hope you all had fun too!!

Meg.

So now, I’m back to planning it out for next year.

Those words from a 5 year old will stop you dead in your tracks in the middle of the kitchen, washed grapes dripping a puddle on the kitchen floor.  They were complete with teary eyes and a dramatic reenactment of how fervently she asks God to take away all of her sins.  Yes, she had just come out of the corner for pestering her sister at the dinner table.

There are moments I feel like God just peels open the soul of my daughter and lets me see what is really going on.  When He does, I see there are deeper thoughts than I expect.  That she wrestles in her mind and heart with things that seem out of place in a 5-year-old.  This is a question not to be answered flippantly or with a stern reminder that she still has dinner to eat.  So many things tumble over each other in my mind.

Oh honey, this is just the beginning of this struggle.  It brings tears of joy to my eyes to know that you are already desiring to rid your self of sin.  That you have been doing something about it – and the right thing – in talking to God and asking Him to take them away. Your heart is broken by your inability to try and try and by your actions live a life fully pleasing to God.  Just that it bothers you is so beautiful.  But that’s a little too big to try to explain to you at the moment. 

At the same time I’m sorry you see this struggle already, because this is going to be life long.  I don’t want you to be frustrated or overwhelmed by the battle.  Defeated by your own nature.  I know I’ve felt that way some times.  Are you starting this road so young?  Can’t we take big thoughts like this from you for a little while longer?  Your little ears aren’t quite ready to hear this yet either, I suppose.

It was last summer that she said the “official” prayer asking Jesus to forgive her sins (no-nos) so she could go to heaven (and give Him big hugs and say thank you very much).  It was sparked by her questions about a funeral at our church (we weren’t even attending, we were just in the parking lot!).  She asked if the man was going to rise from the dead… which led to asking what happens when we die… which led to asking if we would all be in heaven together… etc.  In the end she asked if she could ask God right now to have Jesus take away all her no-nos.  Since she is a child who asks many, many, many (did I mention many?) questions without necessarily intending to do anything with the information immediately, I was suprised she wanted to do this right now.  I was again surprised (and amused, and touched, and teary-eyed) when she didn’t see any need for my involvement, but bowed her head and prayed out loud and fervently on the spot.  Right there in the carseat as I was driving down the road.

I know there is doubt about how much a four-year-old can understand at that age.  But given her five-year-old questions I’m not about to question her understanding to much.

Her bedtime prayers are sometimes rote, and sometimes laughter-supressingly long, specific and outlandish.  Several times, mostly because of very tough-on-both-of-us discipline days, she has prayed in the evening for God to keep her from doing wrong things.  I have smiled at this and loved that she thought of it.  It was never a specific request or suggestion of mine that she do it.  I never realized she really expects to get up the next morning sin-free and perfect.  And that she hurts when she is not.  Why would God entrust such a beautiful little soul to me?!  He knows me, I would think He would think twice about that.  And yet He did.

I beckoned her over to me for another hug (the first coming after her apology for disobeying).  Then I held her little face in my hands.  “Mommy struggles with that to, sweetie.  I haven’t stopped sinning either.  It’s frustrating, huh?”  She nods in agreement.  “And you know what?  You are probably going to keep sinning even when you don’t want to.  When you asked God to forgive your sins, He forgave them.  And that means He will never, ever be mad at you for them again.  It doesn’t mean you will just stop sinning now.  But – the important thing is that when you do, you go to God and tell him that you did.  You say you’re sorry and ask Him to help you do better.  If you need to apologize to Mommy, or Daddy or Lydia you do that to.  And you know that God forgives you for every sin you ever do and loves you very much.  And so does Mommy.”

That’s as close as I can come to exactly what I said.  I want to go back and refine it.  I want to deal with the forgiving and God being mad thing more clearly.  I want to clarify that God does already know what she did, it’s just good for her to acknowledge it to God.  I want to tell her I still struggle with it – and the struggle is good.  Resigning yourself to it and giving up is not.  I want to hold her there and talk about it more.  Keep her in that moment so I can soothe her heart, address every concern and perfect every doctrinal point.  Alas, that is not how these moments work.

I got one shot.  I had only the moments contained within a 5-year-old’s mid-dinner attention span to do justice to this topic.  Maybe that’s why God gives us as long as he does with them under our roof.  And maybe that’s why one mentor of mine told me of waking up in the middle of the night thinking of one more thing she had to tell her son in the 12 months before he went off to college.

Afterward as I stood there watching her finish her organic fruit bar I was again amazed at how much God has taught me about Him through my girls.  How many ways I see my relationship to Him reflected in their relationship to my husband and I.  How much He must want to hold me on the couch with my Bible and pen, but my Mommy-sized attention span has already moved on to dishes, dust and diapers.  And all the times He uses my daughters questions to gently remind me of how I am to handle my sin - or to use my own words to remind me of His total forgiveness and how much He loves me.

All that in just moments this evening.

I have to admit I was a little taken aback by this – because this is the girl who announces to everyone she meets, “I’m a girl who really likes bugs.”  Seriously, this is how she introduces herself to people.  So I said, “I thought you were going to be an entomologist and study bugs.”

“Well, I can do that, too.”

She has a point there.  Silly me.

When I pulled out The Well Trained Mind recently I was reminded of the work it recommends for retention.  Starting out with prompting questions to get your child to tell you something from the story s/he just heard.  Then working toward being able to just say “tell me about the story we read” and get an accurate plot line back. 

When I started doing this I was both amused and frustrated by the responses I got back.  Inevitably someone (from the story or not, it didn’t matter) turned into a bug, or grew wings, flew, had an adventure… all basically having nothing to do with the actual story we read.  When I tried to prompt with major plot elements I got “I don’t know”.  I realized that she liked the sound of my voice, but often tuned out from me and tuned into the running narrative that seems to be in her head.

However, after practicing this – and it really seems to need practice – she is doing much better.  I had to explain what we were doing and that I expected her to remember something from the story.  At first I was going for anything from the story.  Then we worked on having her close her eyes and listen to what Mommy said and make a sleep-story in her head of what I’m reading to help her remember.  THIS seemed to be the jackpot. 

Just this week I started getting paragraphs of accurate narrative back from her.  Whoo-hoo! 

I take whatever she has told me from the story and print it carefully on a sheet of her manuscript paper.  We read it, then she copies it to practice her handwriting.  Quite simple actually – but it puts a lot of skills to work.

This week when I wrote down what she said, I would only write one main sentence.  She got upset with me telling me, “No, no Mommy, you forgot to write…” and repeating her narrative back again.    I told her that was all a bit much for her to have to recopy – wasn’t it?  So we compromised on two sentences and she re-copied them both.

I need to remember next time to take down her narrative on the back of the paper, then we can choose part of it to use for handwriting practice.  I want to encourage getting as much back from her as possible!

It’s nice to see progress.

I can see it at the end of the evening as we put dishes in the kitchen, start turning off lights in the family room.  He’s ready to go to bed now.  We’ve put the girls to bed, had dinner, put those dishes… well… in the kitchen at least, maybe watched a DVD of a favorite Scifi show… it is now time to go to bed.  It says so right here beside his freakishly impeccable internal chronometer. 

However, I know that I have some of the neighborhood women & kids coming over tomorrow, so I should really clean up those dishes in the kitchen.  Maybe find the coffee table… I could swear it was in here somewhere earlier today.

So I start doing those things and hubby will keep himself busy for a few minutes with something.  Then he’ll usually stalk me for a few minutes, judging how long I’ll be.  At some point he’ll go upstairs and get ready for bed.  Then, often about 10 minutes later, he’ll appear at the bottom of the steps to see if I’m coming yet.  And he does this even on nights he’s not looking for… well, we’re all grown-ups here.  You know what I mean. 

But of course, I’m still puttering around.

He just doesn’t understand why I do this to myself.  After all, I HATE morning.  Mornings are evil and should be avoided at all costs.  I can barely breathe and brush my teeth at the same time when I first get up in the morning.  Interestingly God gave me daughters that wake up mid-sentence with smiles and hopping and narrating complete run-on epics of dreams that must be recounted in minute detail with much exuberance and little breathing.  I’ve told God this was an error and He really should check His records.  I’m sure the replacement part is in the mail.

And yet, baffling as it is, I sit here at 11:10pm writing to all of you.  The necessary spaces half cleaned up from my meandering straightening.  I LOVE this time.  In college, this is when I did my best work.  I once wrote an entire final paper analyzing a Supreme Court Employment Law case starting at 11pm the night before.  I had done all the research, but wrote the whole paper starting at 11pm and finishing around 4:30am.  I got an A.

FINALLY my brain is quiet.  My house is quiet.  No one has any expectations of me for the next 8 hours – and I’m supposed to miss the whole thing??  Are you kidding!

I have framed 6 pictures that have been sitting around in various corners of my house.  I cleaned off most of the dining room table.  I did find half the coffee table and I have strong suspicions as to where the other half went.  And that stack of stuff that’s been accumulating beside my desk?  I know what’s in it now.  Did you really think I was going to say I went through it and put it away – the poor thing is only in it’s infancy!  It has a good 18 inches growth yet before it reaches it’s full potential – and we’re strong supporters of exploring and reaching for maximum potential in this house.  We’re homeschoolers.

I still have within my sight a random large piece of cardboard, Grandma’s Attic book, KTRose’s writing paper, a brush, husband’s sneakers, 4 picture frames, empty paper bag, screwdriver, plastic dinosaur, rubber light-up squishy dinosaur, “magic” marker, teddy bear shaped blank paper book and mini-karioke machine to put away.  And that’s not even counting the steps – which I can also unfortunately see.  BUT I get to pick all that up with no mention of pee-pee, anyone kicking anyone else, no joyful “watch the birdie’s wings move!” (it was real and it was dead – AcK!) or really any noise except the faint highway noises coming in from the open windows.

I may stay up all night. 

Planning starts early since all the homeschool fairs get underway as early as mid-May.  So for me, that means I want to have a good idea of what I am doing next year before going to a fair.  What I did this year was decide what I was going to do for History, Science, Fine Art, Read Aloud, Grammar (simple as we are keeping that), and Bible.  I am debating between two Math programs and I think I’m going to be pretty unstructrured about KTRose learning to read.  I just had a vague idea of what I was going to do for spelling, no idea on handwriting.

I know we don’t need to cover all these bases in 1st grade – but we’re going to give it a shot.  Anything overwhelming will be put aside.

For History I am doing Biblioplan for families (Check it out at www.biblioplan.net).  I like them because they follow the classical model and teach Ancient Times in First grade.  They focus on a few key children’s encyclopedia/atlas type texts along with Susan Wise-Bauer’s The Story of The World.  Then they have Family Read Aloud from the Bible & from excellent children’s fiction that is very historically accurate and designed to get the children into the culture while reading.  They also have readers, which at first grade level are read to the child, and then a list of other age-appropriate reading related to the time for the child who really likes to read.

They also incorporate the building of a time-line and working maps thoughout the course.  On top of all of that, they incorporate Biblical History in with world history.  So you learn about the Cradle of Civilization, then the Flood, Tower of Babel, Mesopotamia and Sumer.  Then Abraham, early Sumerians & early Babylonians.  Then Joseph and Early Egypt.  You get the idea.  I am really excited about getting *context* around these biblical people!

This History programs makes it really easy to have our Bible reading & devotionals track right along with it, so that’s what I’ll do, often combining some aspects.

Some parts of Language arts will also track along with History.  Most, but of course not all, of our read aloud work will be with the history program.  Which means that much of our practice writing – which will often come from our read aloud.  I’ll have KTRose tell me what happened in the story today, I’ll write it out and have her transcribe part of it as practice writing.

Art will also track.  I found a reference book that I hope to find discounted or used at one of the fairs called The History of Art for Young People by Janson & Janson.  Also a good one would be Usborne’s Book of Art.  They break down art by historical period making it easy for me to pull out the art that is current with what we are studying.  We’ll do two different things with art.  First, we’ll look at pics of relevant art, have KTRose look at it, then talk to me about what she sees.  At first I will prompt her a lot, but work on getting to where I don’t have to.  This is to build observational skills.  The second thing we will do is art projects related to some art we’ve seen or something we’ve studied in history.  I have ideas like making our own Papyrus one day – I know I ran across a how-to on that at some point.

So that’s History, Bible, some Language Arts & Art. 

Our other key subject that will relate to some others is, of course, Science.  We following The Well-Trained Mind’s recommendation to do Life Science in First Grade.  This is somewhat repeated material from last year, but she loves it and I hope to be a little more catering to her interests that Sonlight’s K program.  It was good, but not as much science as she wanted to do, so we finished the program way early and it seemed a little light.

For Life Science I am going to spend the first week on Creation and Stewardship – which is my answer to the LOADS of life science material out there that spends most of their curriculum on endangered species and the importance of saving the planet.  I’m not against saving the planet, I just think it isn’t the entire thrust of studying life science.  Anyway, after that first week we will spend 19 weeks on Animals, 10 weeks on the human body and 6 weeks on plants.  Which all adds up to 36 weeks – a full school year.  The 19 weeks on Animals will be broken up between invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.  Learning the defining characteristics of each and choosing a few from each catagory to learn about in more depth – focusing on KTRose’s favorite animals. 

The Human body will be an overview of systems – since we did much of those before on our own – and the senses.  I have no idea how we will do plants, I still have to find a good reference book to use to map that out for us.

*** After I wrote the above about Science a friend reccommended Apologia to me for KTRose.  They have an elementary course called “Exploring Creation through Zoology” that focuses on the study of Birds, Bats & Insects.  Just that sounds so perfect for her that I’m going to look at the materials at HEAV.  Maybe we’ll switch! ***

I had all of the above fairly well mapped out when I went to the CHAP homeschool fair this past Friday – and I’m so glad.  Because even knowing all that – and having my preferred resources researched for on-line prices – I still felt overwhelmed at the fair and didn’t see a number of things I wanted to!  Those things are just huge!

But I did make some progress.  I am debating between two Math programs right now.  I am working through Horizons K right now with KTRose and will continue through the summer.  She seems to like it and is doing well, so it may very well be our choice for First grade.  If so, we will still be finishing up the K program at the beginning of the 1st grade year, but that’s fine with me.  Horizons is actually a bit advanced, so thats somewhat common with them.  The other program I am looking at is Math-U-See.  It has good reviews all over the place, so I picked up their Demo DVD and some literature for Scott and I to look at.  KTR would be ready to start their 1st grade program now, so we can make that call sometime this summer.

I also found Draw Write Now at the fair.  I had heard others talk about it, but never looked at it.  It is a program to practice writing (printing) that also teaches the child to draw.  KTRose is really into learning to draw things, mostly animals, right now so I thought it would be a good strategy.  The books teach you to draw something – all the books I picked up are related to animals so this will tie into Life Science – and have you draw the animals and color a picture around it.  Then they have a few short sentences about the animal that you read to your child/have them read depending, and they copy the sentences below the picture they have created.  It’s kind of a way to practice handwriting without calling it that outright to the child.  I don’t have enough animals to do one each day of Invertebrates for example, but I can work with it.  Have her draw another picture of something she already learned to draw and give her a new couple of sentences based on what we are learning?  Something like that.

For grammar we are going to use Jessie Wise’s First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind.  It’s super simple to start out with so I think it will be good.  Just the basics.

Spelling.  I picked up Modern Curriculum Press’s Spelling Workout.  I picked it up because it’s recommended by TWTM and I had no other guidance on the issue.  I looked at several other programs at the fair and didn’t see a huge amount of difference, so I thought this was a good place to start.  Not sure if we will start spelling right away in 1st grade or hold off until she is reading better.  We’ll see!

Last thing is music.  There’s not much of a way to tie Music into anything that I can tell at this point, so I think I’m going to take Ken’s plan that he already gave me and stretch it over a year. Do something similar to what I am doing with art in trying to build KTR’s observational skills – have her listen and then tell me something about it.  But also just have music playing in the background when she is working on something independantly.

I think that’s everything.  Whew!  I’m still being obsessive and perfecting my spreadsheet of matierials with on-line prices so I can go the the HEAV convention in June fully armed and ready to shop!  I keep revising as I get to look at the books, and as always am fighting my urge to build the best library of Ancient Times Materials known to the first grade.  There IS a budget to work with here!

A common fear of homeschoolers, and I’m no exception, is the fear of skipping something.  One friend shared with me how her daughter had qualified for a special essay writing program.  She took her daughter the first day and watched as her daughter struggled to keep up.  It wasn’t because she couldn’t do the work – it was because it had never occurred to her mom to teach her Manuscript writing!  She couldn’t write fast enough to keep up!

One of the best things for me to remember as I go through this process is a quote from Debra Bell in her book The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling…

“Let’s address this universal fear right now.  You ARE going to skip something.  Further, it will probably be something REALLY IMPORTANT.”  This made me laugh out loud when reading the book.  But she goes on to say…  “We’re in the midst of an information explosion.  Much of what we learn today will be irrelevant tomorrow.  How will you figure out what will be applicable?  You won’t.  Here’s the solution:

“Instead of wasting one sleepless moment worrying about “Skipping something,” all you have to do is teach your child HOW TO LEARN.  If you’ll just focus on the latter, then when your kid inevitably finds himself in a situation where he doesn’t know how to do something, he is not rendered immobile… stunted for life… no longer employable… ultimately a panhandler on the corner… a sign around his neck begging “Please feed me.  My mother homeschooled me.”   Your worst fear realized.

… “I often told my kids, “It’s your job to learn, not my job to teach.”  I am a facilitator, a mentor, a fellow lifelong learner, a guidance counselor, a coach – and only occasionally the teacher.”

  That works for me!  So besides all that stuff above, I really hope to foster a love of learning in both kids this year.

Oh!  And if you’re worried about Lydia – don’t be.  She sits right there with us.  Listening to all the stories, pretending to sound thing out with her sister.  Doing the phonics drills.  This may actually be a good strategy for the girl whose favorite words are “I do it!”

I suppose that’s enough for now!  I’m working on a separate page that is going to contain an outline of our 1st grade program including resources, so one day soon it will appear.

Later!

On Sunday morning I had gotten fed up with our Lydia’s (age 3.5) lack of potty training.  I had taken to telling her, as I changed her diaper, “You know, Mommy thought I would be done changing these stinky diapers by now.”  She unfailingly said, “No Potty!  I want Diapers!”  or something to that effect.  A few times when I had tried to put her in panties to encourage potty activities, she would wail in a heartbroken tone, “Pleeeeease gimme diaper, pleeeeeeease gimme diaper.  I don’t like the potty!”

So we would go back to diapers.  Is that weak of me?  Tough.  I Just couldn’t see we would get anything productive done with that kind of stress.

There was one time about 3 months ago that I sat her down and explained, “This is really important to Mommy.  I really, really, really want you to go on the potty.  Mommy goes on the potty, Daddy goes on the potty, KTRose goes on the potty – and it would make me sooooo happy if you would go on the potty too.”  So she trooped downstairs.  Sat on the little potty, went, stood up announcing, “I did it!”  And she hasn’t done it again since.

Unfair, I know – but one of my issues with all of this is that KTRose potty trained a few months before her 3rd birthday – and we did that potty-training-in-a-day.  It worked wonderfully after just one false start day.  She only had one accident the first week – and they were incredibly rare (like maybe only 2 times) in the first 6 months.  So, I admit, I was thinking Lydia should be able to do the same thing.

Anyway.  After arriving at church and having to run to the bathroom to change another stinky diaper before even dropping her off at her Sunday school class, I started talking to some women in my church about it.  Mostly I was just venting.  There were many suggestions, but most of them not anything we hadn’t tried before.

Then Sunday afternoon Lydia developed terrible diarrhea – sorry if you are eating.  After talking to a neighbor I remembered that Lydia had had several glasses of straight apple juice at a friends on Saturday – something I have never let her do before.  She got awful diaper rash with blisters and much screaming and crying at diaper change time.  I felt so bad, but also told her that if she went in the potty instead of in the diaper it wouldn’t hurt her little bum so much.  Nothing doing. 

She got up on Monday morning and ran into my bathroom (where I was showering of course) declaring, “I have to do pee-pee on the potty!”  I almost fainted.  Then KTROse came racing in behind her with the little potty, helped Lydia get her pants down and diaper off and sat her on the potty – and she went!  YAYYYY!!!!  (And YAY!! for big sisters!) The rest of the day she went on the potty!  We had a couple misses with the pull-ups on, so I went to panties and she was quite careful about keeping them dry.

Added excitement on the day was that KTRose developed a stye in her right eyelid.  This meant a trip to the doctor.  Doc gave us meds and said it wasn’t contagious, so we then went to the girls art class (at KTRose’s request).  Picked them up afterward and went to the drug store for cream for KTRose’s eye.  Lydia did all this and kept a DRY pull-up!

I told our pediatrician (who we love, by the way) and he laughed.  He said, “I tell parents all the time, just wait until the child WANTS to potty train.  If they don’t WANT to, you are wasting your time.  If they want to, you can hardly stop them.  If you start trying at age two, and this child isn’t going to potty train until age 4, you are just setting yourself up for 2 years of frustration.”

Of course he had told me this before with Lydia, but I’m a Mom and I wanted things different.  *sigh*  Will I ever learn??

KTRose’s eye is ok.  We have to do the antibiotic cream 3xday and give her tylenol if her fever kicks in, but it doesn’t have her feeling bad today.  Hopefully it will resolve itself in 2 weeks or so – surgery doesn’t sound like a fun option!

With all that we didn’t get all our homeschooling done yesterday.  When I said that to my husband he just shook his head at me.  He reminded me we did plenty yesterday that was more important than math!  I’m glad I married him.

Hope you all are having a joyous homeschool day!

Meg.