Moonjelly Fun!

These flaps reveal some pictures of this week's vocabulary words

It's fun to see what the kids will choose when they have a choice before them. The task was to arrange three pictures of vocabulary words on a page with definitions. R7 chose to use the pictures themselves as the flap with the word on it. She narrated each definition to me and wanted it to be put under each picture.

They had three vocabulary words and I-5 chose to do the flap book. On the inside of each flap is the defintion of each word and thanks to google images I found some very cool pictures to match! He was very succinct and totally accurate for each meaning.

I-5's ocean invertebrate page

I-5 decorated his menu so nicely and even added some moonjellies. Can you see them? This was at our waterfront dinner on the first day of school last week.

R7's pages on ocean invertebrates

I-5's list of foods he could remember from the book

I-5's ocean invertebrate sorting page

This is R7's lesson on sorting ocean invertebrates on the left. I used an activity from Evan Moor's teacher filebox. The kids sorted out animals into echinoderms, mollusks, arthropods, and cnidarians (which jellyfish belong to). On the right is the list of food she could remember from the book.

I-5 dictated his first person point of view paragraph to me. He is in Kindergarten of course and is still working on letter formation. However, he sure can tell a tale and narrating to me is a valuable skill. It lets him give details he would normally avoid in his written word at this point. He narrated very well the experience we had visiting the marina at the end of the first day of school.

R7 decided to combine two language arts lessons into one. I had even given her the choice writing a paragraph in first person point of view or writing one that made use of contrast. She chose to do both. She declared, "I will do both- a first person paragraph using contrast. Good for her! She began with just a few sentences and was worried she didn't have enough, but we had an excellent lesson on adding detail and editing until she arrived at the final product. You can click any of these pictures to see her stories close up. Way to R!

Not to be out done, R7 makes two pattern block lobsters (see her brother's below). Her twist was to make two- one that was big enough to keep and one that needed to be thrown back. She even had the ruler to be sure.

I-5 really loves the new pattern blocks we bought for school this year. Today he had some free time in the afternoon to match the pattern cards and then made this free form "lobster" shape.

Night of the Moonjellies- read alouds!

We start each morning of school after breakfast by sitting on the sofa and reading books together. The littlest boys sometimes get toys and listen quietly while they play. Other times they crawl up for an extra lap time. This week we are "rowing" Night of the Moonjellies and we've been having fun learning about fishing villages and beach towns, creatures that glow in the dark in the water, and lobstering! Some of our books are pictured here. Creatures that Glow is so cool because each animal really does glow once it's been exposed to the light. And of course there is a moonjelly in there! Once our reading time is over, we head downstairs to do some written work and other fun things with our topics of the day. Yesterday the kids wrote some paragraphs for language arts using the first person point of view. I-5 narrated his short story to me using just the right pronouns. R7 wrote her own and we had a delightful time editing it and adding detail. She was given a choice to either write a paragraph in first person point of view or to write a paragraph using contrast to create different feelings in what she wrote. She chose to write a contrasting piece in the first person point of view! She chose to contrast the brightness of the marina with the darkness of the restaurant once we went inside. I'll be sure to share the end product because she did such a nice job on it. We also listed as many foods mentioned in the book as we could think of from memory and tomorrow we'll formally record that somehow to share in the notebooks.

Our go along read alouds:

Going Lobstering by Jerry Palotta is one of our favorite "go along" stories.

Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey and L is for Lobster by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds

Fishing Village by Gail Gibbons

Creatures that Glow

(I'll add pictures of these books soon!)

What a vocabulary!!

Today marked I-5's second day of kindergarten and his second official day of reading instruction using Reading Made Easy by Valerie Bendt.

Today he did a lesson on the aaaa sound as in cat. He had several oral/listening exercises including one that required him to name a word that starts with the aaa sound.

I was waiting on the edge of my seat for apple. What did I get??

Example 1: Aslan (as in the great Lion from the Narnia series)

Example 2: Asmodeus (as in the serpent from the Redwall series)

Only this little guy!! Lots of reading aloud pays off!!

I think he is off to a GREAT start!!

First Day of School!

We started school yesterday- Monday, August 13th. It's early for us, but with our travel schedule I thought it best to get a solid start before September. Everyone is excited to begin a new year of studies. How fun is that??

We started off by setting up a small weather station. We have some things to work out, but each day the kids will head outdoors to measure wind speed, temperature, and wind direction. There's also a rain gauge and a snow gauge. We've determined we'll need to invest in a yard stick to measure our snow accurately. My goal is to keep a weather calendar and talk about it each day eventually leading up to the kids predicting the kind of weather we'll see for the day. We can also compare the readings to those at the elementary school just down the road. They have an official weather station on the roof which is accessible by internet. These instruments are portable and require that we take them out each day to do the readings. I would LOVE to have a permanent station in the backyard at some point with sturdier instruments.

The middle kids began with Night of the Moonjellies by Mark Shasha. One of our all time favorites, we like to do this in the summer. It will be followed by Gramma's Walk and a trip to the ocean AND to see who else? Grandma! (and Grandpa too...). I'm excited to take a trip to the ocean while there and an aquarium too just to tie up all those loose ends. Love it when a plan like that comes together!

I-5's notebook page. We did a map of New England learned about cardinal directions using a compass rose.

At the end of the day, we went to a local waterfront to a restaurant and to see the marina which we had talked about during the story. We had a wonderful first day of school 2007-2008!

Meteor Shower...We Made a Memory!

This weekend was supposed to be the perfect weekend for seeing the Perseid meteor shower. Clear skies and a new moon...but with all the activity of Friday night we figured we'd skip it. As we were making dinner, friends of ours called and asked what we were up to. When I replied that we were getting dinner together she was excited and said, "Then it's not too late." When all was said and done they came on over with a big stack of freshly picked sweet corn and marinated chicken. We grilled up the chicken and boiled up the sweet corn and when dinner was all over it was already 9pm! Well...they didn't call until 6pm.

As we all ate, we mentioned the shower and began to make plans to go ahead and sit out and take a look. Our friends decided to leave and we decided we should make it a night too. While I bathed J2, the others were outside just in case they could catch a glimpse of a shooting star. With J2 snug as a bug snoozing, I asked how the star watching was going. Well...they had seen some in a short amount of time. Typically the best time for this is very early in the morning say 4am before the sun rises. I gathered up some blankets and warm clothes (it was clear and cold last night) and we laid out for almost an hour watching the heavens above. We got to observe about a dozen shooting stars! I-5 fell to sleep somewhere in there and we had a great time answering the kids' questions about meteors, space, the atmosphere, and comets. Every so often we'd all shout out that we'd seen a falling star.

Just as it was approaching 11pm, there was a great smell from nearby. Can you guess? Let's just say if you took a satellite photo of our neighborhood at this very moment, you'd probably see small mammals that like trash coming from miles around all making a pilgrimage to our street to visit what I'll call the "great opportunity". The opportunity is our nasty trash left to fester one week more because they are too heavy. This information should actually be an addendum to my previous post on the $100 trash can, but I can't bring myself to describe it in full just yet. The most important piece of information to note is that our trash company completely let us down and did not take our copious amounts of horrible trash, leaving a husband and wife to bicker about said trash and what to do about it and how to handle the trash company along with home owners and neighbors alike to give our property easement a wide berth.

Where was I? So...suddenly there was a very strong skunk odor surrounding us on every side. We were loud out there under the sky so if this critter was checking out our new trash can and its community of flies and got scared, I'm going to blame the neighbor's cat. He must have known we were there the whole time. The odor was so strong it ended our star party abruptly. We scrambled for blankets and Dan took the sleeping boy and we ran into the house!

The kids were so excited to have stayed up a second night and really, really excited to have seen so many shooting stars! We added to the memory with our skunk incident. Once inside, Dan told I-5 to use the bathroom so he could get in bed and he left the room. When he went back to check on I-5, he found him lying on the bathroom floor sound asleep! What a sight!!

This morning we had a great time going over our evening of discovery from the night before. The kids all decided they loved it until the skunk came to which I-5 made the comment, "What skunk?" Peels of laughter filled the room at breakfast as we remembered that I-5 had slept through the whole incident!

We sure did make a memory!!

We Survived!

What was supposed to be our only slow weekend at home this month turned out to be pretty busy. We ended up having another impromptu sleepover birthday party a month early for E8 on Friday night. R7 had hers a month early back in May. Everyone seems to be so busy these days and one good friend will be out of the country most of September. So, we had three extra boys at the house on Friday night.

We put out a "make your own pizza" bar for the kids and had brownie sundaes for dessert. There was a lot of missile launching with the 50 cent pump guns we found at Target for everyone. There was a lot of Crash NitroKart on Playstation and finally there was an all night game of Settlers of Catan for the boys. Saturday morning they continued the game until it was time for everyone to leave. Admittedly, there was also more missile launching! We did interrupt the morning game session for some yummo thick, buttermilk blueberry pancakes. It was quiet then for only the second time since they had arrived- lots of eating going on!

In case you are wondering...the girl sleepover involved a lot more giggling, they actually all changed into pajamas before going to sleep, they went to bed earlier, and it was a lot quieter!! We crafted and watched a movie too.

So, it is official. We have entered a new zone with our kids. The era of sleepovers and lots of friendly fun and food. How did they get so old so fast?

Our Journey with Beyond Five in a Row

E8 (almost 9) will be in 4th grade. He's been working through the Beyond FIAR volumes. This year he'll be focusing on some world travel and some famous scientists.

August

Complete Baseball Study

September/October

Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium

November/December

The Cricket in Times Square

January/February

Neil Armstrong Young Flyer

March/April

Sarah, Plain and Tall

May

Ocean Unit Study by Amanda Bennett

He may have time for a Christmas Unit Study during the holidays. E8 will also continue work on his Presidents notebook/study throughout the year. I've also promised him some sort of unit study on college football that he'll be able to tear through once his regular work is done each day- during the season.

Our Itinerary!

Well, I'm ready to unveil our studies for the year using Five in a Row as our core curriculum. FIAR is a literature based unit study program we've been using nearly as long as we've been homeschooling. Dan (the school principal and benefactor) and I (teacher and curriculum specialist) decided to have the kids leave the US a little this year to focus on world geography and cultures. Last year we spent settling the western US and it is time to see the world! FIAR has many wonderful titles to choose from using volumes 1-3 and this year I added volume 4 to the collection. Volume 4 titles are meant to be studied longer so when you look at our month by month itinerary you may notice some months have fewer destinations. We'll have R7 who will be in 2nd grade and I5 who will in kindergarten studying these together at their own level. I may decide to insert a different title in for I5 when R7 does a volume 4 title. How can he miss doing Katy and the Big Snow for example??

One thing that took me some time to decide was how to organize the time. Do we go by continent and/or country? Travel to Europe and stay there until we've done each title we can there? We'll be using Galloping the Globe and Trail Guide to World Geography to add some extra challenges and fun with our geography studies and these are organized by continent. In the end I'm pleased to announce that I decided against those plans. Instead, in true FIAR style, we will be skipping all over the world and each time we come back to a particular continent I will use it as a review for our young kids. Do you remember what other country we studied the last time we came to Europe? Tell me about it. Or...we visited France a few weeks ago. Show me which country that is on this map. Toward the spring we'll turn a little ethnocentric again (remember what that word means??) and we'll be having some fun with nature.

And now...our travel plans!

August

Night of the Moonjellies (CT)
Arabella (out of print so I may have to abandon this one for now)
Gramma's Walk (a sub for Arabella)

September

Mirette on the Highwire (France)
Duchess Bakes a Cake (Austria)
Ferdinand (Spain)

October

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World
Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car (Great Britain)
The Giraffe that Walked to Paris (France)
Pumpkin Runner (Australia)

November

Wee Gillis (Scotland)
Grass Sandals (Japan)
Cranberry Thanksgiving (northeast US)

December

Paul Revere's Ride (MA)
Gullywasher (Mexico)
Clown of God (Italy)

January

The Story about Ping (China)
Another Celebrated Dancing Bear (Russia)
A Pair of Red Clogs (Japan)
Angelo (Italy)

February

Snoflake Bentley (Vermont)
Higgins Bend Song and Dance (River Setting)

March

A New Coat for Anna (France)
Grandfather's Journey (Japan)
Henry the Castaway (Explorers)
Mrs. Katz and Tush (Isreal)

April

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Great Britain)
Make Way for Ducklings (Boston)
The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar (Nantucket)
All Those Secrets of the World (Chesapeake Region)

May

Truman's Aunt Farm
The Salamander Room
Harold and the Purple Crayon
The Raft (Wisconsin)

This is the first time I've planned out a whole year of FIAR titles at one time. I'm so excited about the journey we'll take this year! I've got about half or more of the titles labeled on a folder and each time I come across an activity or sheet for it, I copy enough and put it in the folder. I'm hoping to avoid the paper jungle I've had in the past. Soon each book title will be done. Some of the journey may change if titles cannot be found. Each child will have a passport that we'll stamp each time we study a new place. What a year we will have! We begin rowing on Monday, August 13th. Bon Voyage!!

More Progress...

It's what you've all been waiting for...well sort of! I have some home school improvement photos to share, but the desk though it looks way better than it did is still not done. It's been a holding spot as I work through other clutter spots in the room. I'll post as soon as it is done. I promise! Next stop is the desk so stay tuned!

This is it! The shelf! This one has been with us a long time...it's an IKEA crate shelf that once upon a time was in our condo kitchen when we first married and then it was in our craft/office room in our last house. Then it landed in our playroom when we moved here. It was the only shelf in the room then. Now it is an old standby that I try to put to good use.

The goal? To make sure whatever the kids need to have on hand can be grabbed easily from the shelf without knocking anything over! What's there? Pattern blocks, all the funtastic frogs and the cards that go with them (the books are up), crayons (used infrequently), dinosaur counters and cards, glue, playdough(for J2 during school but not the full collection), markers, lacing hands, vocabulary boxes for the three oldest, file folder games, and old wildlife magazines for cutting. Well that's what the kids need to get at anyway. There are a few things in the back. I think I'll add the balance to the shelf somehow as well- goes with the frogs!

The bookcase was straightened out and organized. This is where a lot of displaced books ended up after we put up the gutter shelves. Somehow we will rotate titles up to the gutters as time goes on.

Dress up hooks (I took apart the old huge box and replaced it with a smaller one) and we use these hooks to hold bags of other themed dress up- prairie is just hanging because it's so popular

I Can't Believe I Just Bought a $100 Trash Can...

Yes, it is true. That would make it roughly $1.00 per gallon since the can is 96 gallons and that is what I paid for it yesterday.

Why on earth would anyone buy a hundred dollar trash can? Excellent question.

It all started with a small, consistent noise I heard while relaxing by the computer last Sunday night. We had just arrived home from our long camping weekend and I followed the sound to our large, upright freezer in the basement. That is when I made the horrific discovery. The freezer door was partially open. Now I have to tell you that I let out a great shout even though the children were all soundly sleeping. Frankly, I think I nearly had a stroke. I ranted for a good ten minutes. There was quite a bit of stomping, slamming, and lamenting going on. My husband wisely just listened and apologized and promised he'd clean up the mess.

What mess?

Well that would be the mess that melted, uncooked bunches of food makes when a freezer thaws out and you are blissfully unaware. We were gone four days and most of the food was a loss.

What did I lose?

Meat- a turkey, some roasts, chicken- all uncooked and either marinated or not...
Fun Stuff- ice cream, ice sticks for the kids (which could probably take a million thaws and freezes)
Fruit- probably 12 gallons of apples sliced for pies and crisps, at least 5 or more containers of homemade applesauce (both harvested and processed last fall), 30 lbs of strawberries- painstakingly hulled and sliced or made into jam, and of course the aforementioned 17 qts of blueberries we harvested and froze only a week or so ago.

We shut the door so it would all freeze again and we waited. This past weekend my husband graciously began the task of defrosting the freezer and throwing out all that stuff. I will admit that I am attempting to save the recently frozen fruit. What's the worst that can happen? Wait. Don't tell me.

Oh yes...the trash can. When all this food was hauled outside in the very warm weather you can imagine how much the flies loved it. You can imagine how much the trash guys are going to love us by Wednesday. If we weren't going to host every animal in the next three counties, we needed to circle the wagons!

The solution...a honkin' huge trash can (as I5 would say). We set out on a mission after church to find said trash can and after three stops on the way home we were empty handed. Then we found one online that would suit nicely...sure we could get away with 64 gallons, but no. Our current trash can (which is my husband's arch nemesis) was already close to that. No, we needed the BIG one. We unhitched the seats out of our van and headed for Lowe's.

I think the most fun were the comments by the sales girl.

Sales girl: "That is the biggest trash can I've ever seen. Do you have a daycare or something?"
Me: "I've got a lot of trash. Family of six."
Sales girl: "Wow I can't believe it costs that much!"
Me: "Yeah...I can't wait to tell my friends about my $100 trash can."
Sales Girl (this is where it gets funny and I start to wonder): "Do they even make trash bags this big?"
Me: " Uh...no, but I sure can fit a lot of bags in there."
Sales Girl: "My can was $5 at walmart, but I do have to empty it everyday."
Me: "Uh-Huh, well I've got a lot of stinko trash and this will hold it all."

It occurred to me later as I played the dialogue through in my head that this girl perhaps thought this can was going into my kitchen or something. I guess she's got the luxury of a dumpster nearby 'cause she obviously didn't get the whole "put trash out and take it to the curb once a week" philosophy.

Before you start to wonder how we as a family could produce that much landfill mass, please let me allay your fears. Where we live you pay for trash by the bag... $1 a bag plus we pay quarterly for the fine gentleman to come by each week and take away our tagged ($1 a tag) bags. So, we recycle a lot!

Composting is another story, but let's not get carried away. My husband already rides a bus to work each day. We are a one car family who recycles a lot. That's about as green as I'm comfortable with for now. If we get any greener, they may take my husband's registered Republican status away.

PS- Go Hokies!

Big, Green Pocket Book

This summer we've been doing some school work together in the mornings. Everyone has been doing math to prepare for the coming school year. Ethan has been working on his baseball study and it's been slow going. His real passion of course is Virginia Tech football so I made a deal with him that I would write him a unit study on college football IF he got a little more motivated on the baseball deal. I5, R7, and J2 have done some summer "rowing" of a few Before Five in a Row titles.

Of course I had to get in The Big, Green Pocketbook with my only girl before it was too late. I'll make sure you see a picture of her notebook too. This is the story of a little girl who goes on a day of errands with her mother and brings a huge purse that is empty. R7 never leaves home with an empty purse, but this day she did leave it in her room instead! I took her out for the afternoon to hit a bunch of places. We covered a lot of ground! R7 loves to shop with me and we got a photo outside of each store. That was the day we brought home the Creation Station from Walmart. We made copies of patterns for our puppets. We stopped and picked up birthday presents from our local science center and finally we made it to the mall to share an Auntie Anne's strawberry dutch ice and some time in Target and bookstore. We could have stayed on, but the boys needed something for dinner and we didn't want to miss it ourselves, so we went on home. Next time we'll be sure to hit "the smelly store" as R7 calls it. Any guesses? Bath and Body works! She's such a girl!

Now she is working on her own story about a day out with mom and it will be illustrated with photographs. She's been embellishing the pages with portions of the Fold n' Learn from FIAR.

Lego Artist

I5 is a huge lego maniac. E8 is too, but he is a massive kit builder while I5 likes to modify the kits to make his own creations. Both of them can play with legos for hours on end and believe me when I say sometimes the floor is entirely constructed of them.

I5 got a Batman airplane set for his birthday which made a Bat plane and Joker's helicopter. I5 doesn't exactly care about producing the same ships more than once, but I just have to share his expertise in ship building and creating racing cars too. He used to the same thing with wooden train track...you'd build him one and he'd modify for hours.