First week DONE!

This has been a lot of fun! Not too difficult to adjust to doing school - even with a newborn. :-) We had a break yesterday to visit with our family from out of town. Today we just picked up and did what we planned to do yesterday. Thankfully I have only a 4 day week planned this year, so that I can have a day to catch-up or let life take over.

Superkid is still working on that project I was talking about. I think his daddy is going to have to help with that one, since it's not my style thing. It will probably be done this weekend - I'll post a picture when it's complete.

Today went well. I love that this curriculum doesn't take long to finish each day - yet you accomplish so much within that small amount of time. It's so cool not to drag out the day doing school work, but knowing that we actually learned that day!

He's really having a hard time with spelling. Poor kid beats himself up whenever he gets any wrong. So, I made him cut out the "motto" for spelling and put it in his notebook. What is the motto you ask? I got it from the spelling curriculum itself: "Mistakes are opportunities to learn." I also make him say it whenever I find that he is discouraged. Hopefully he lightens up a little. Thankfully there is only just a few words per day and there are always a few very easy ones for him, to give him a little boost.

Still need to make copies, so we'll be behind a little in art. Looking at the first few lessons, I think we should be able to catch up easily.

Math is going well. I didn't realize he needed to practice counting backwards. I can see that this will really help him when he practices that a little more.

Ok. Enough of the boring stuff...

We did a fun experiment today!!

Our question was:

If you put an egg in salty water would it float better than in regular water?

So...we got out two cups, filled each with water.
Added salt to one.

Then added the eggs.

See, only the salty water with the egg floats!

It was hard to get a side picture because the salty water cup looked really cloudy. But, you can see that the egg floated to the top since there was salt in the water. Superkid really liked doing this. So much so, he decided to go beyond and asked if he could add salt to the other one just to see if it would float up right away. We found that we needed to make sure that the salt was really mixed in before it would actually float. He put the lid on and shook it a little, then it finally rose up. Now we're off to eat some hard boiled eggs! Yum. :-)

We finished up our day reading about Leif Ericsson and adding our timeline picture.

Day two.

Well, I didn't realize I checked out the wrong video. This was a two hour documentary on Vikings with about a 5 minute blurb about Leif Ericson. Oh well. It was interesting. And, I found this great site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vikings/ with lots of fun things to do.

Today went super again. One thing I am finding is that this year is turning out to be much more "independent" than I had expected. What I think is going to work is meeting with Superkid in the morning, giving him his math and art lessons then allowing him to work on his own. Sometimes that works for his english as well. Spelling just takes a few very short minutes of my time. Daddy is doing Bible. So really the big things I need to be available for is history and science. It all seems to work out really well.

When pickles saw that we were doing a United States worksheet, she wanted to get right in on the lesson. In fact, she did a really good job - coloring our state, the US and the oceans. She especially enjoys having her very own school notebook. By the way grandma - She LOVES the puzzle! It has been played with it every day since you gave it to her. I tried it today for the first time - it's hard! And she's really very good at putting it together. She's a smarty pants. :-)

So far school is going good. Tomorrow is a little busy. I added a fun project that might take a little longer than one day. I can't wait to see it done and show it here. I think it's going to be cool.

I'll check in later.
Probably not tomorrow, but I'll be back soon.

Red, White and Blue

So, what's the first thing YOU think of when the thought "red, white and blue snack" appears?

How about...
QUASADILLAS?




















Uh Huh.
Hey, it works.

First Day of School

Yes, I know I'm crazy.

In the middle of the excitement of adding a new member to our family, I've decided to just keep trucking on ahead. We started our first day of school today.

Don't be alarmed. We stopped PLENTY to cuddle, talk to, take picture of and just admire our new little guy. But, I have to say it felt good to keep some sort of order in the midst of all the newness.

God has been giving me a very quick recovery and I promise I am taking care to get rest. I just know there are a few concerned readers out there. Alright, now that that minds are at ease...

We had a very nice day today!

Started the day out with The Pledge of Allegiance, which we plan to do each morning. Superkid LOVES anything to do with America and the flag, so he's really enjoying this. From there I introduced his new math, which I explained is super easy right now, but there are certain concepts I want him to understand before moving on. He took it better than I expected. In fact he worked on his skip counting skills, just to "challenge himself" he said. Afterword we started on spelling. He did stress a little on the sentence he was supposed to try, but I assured him that he just needed to try his hardest. He liked that it was so quick and easy. After contemplating for awhile, I have decided to go ahead and copy the first 26 lessons in his art book. We are going to have to wait to start art for a little while. So, we just skipped that and went on to learn a little more about the meaning of The Pledge of Allegiance and began our timeline. I printed out pictures of each of the kids to put into our notebook. Don't know if I've mentioned it or not, but we already had a Wonders Of Old Timeline so I plan to just use that for the year. It was fun to put Baby Boy's new picture in there. :-) The last thing we did was our "character study" that I had added - The Ethics book. Since it is written in the late 1800's the vocabulary is much larger than we are used to, so we had a dictionary handy. Even still, I think it went well. It gave us some things to chew on. Superkid mentioned it later on, so even though it seemed a little bit above him, he heard something that kept his mind turning.

Don't think I mentioned this, but Daddy has decided he wants to try to do the bible with the kids each day. He's planning to begin tonight. He's also bringing home our Red, White and Blue snack. We might have to cuddle up and watch our viking movie we checked out from the library tonight too, just to end the day right. ;-)

Altogether today was very enjoyable.
I'll keep you updated as we go along.