Wow what a long break

Here it is 2008! It's been months since I sat down to blog about our fun with school. We've just been so busy around here for so long! Well I'm back for a while since we don't have a lot on the schedule and I'm working less. I should be able to get more posts up each week.

Since October we have done so many fun things in school. We've painted, knitted, done weaving and I've even started planning our backyard garden. I got my hands on some raw wool and we cleaned, carded and needle felted with it. When I opened the box it came it I thought the farm had come to us. We had a lot of fun watching it transform. Joey, ironically, made a sheep out of his and it looked great!

We've done several science projects, but one of our favorites was when we made meringue out of egg white by hand and butter from cream by hand. It was a lot of hard work, but the kids got to see and taste their science projects. Now we make most of our butter from scratch. It's so easy and actually less expensive. Go figure!

Christmas came and we took two whole weeks off and it was wonderful to have some time away from school and prepare ourselves for the new year. I felt renewed and ready. We are now in our second week of grammar, literature, spelling and writing. It's fun to have Eden write stories by the book because she loves to write anyway and it helps put structure to what she loves to do. It makes her writing that much better. Joey is learned about nouns and verbs last week. This week we are moving on to adjectives and adverbs. We are also learning all the silly words that aren't spelled the way they sound. Joey is great at it! We've even written a poem together. I'll post a picture of it once Joey gets it down in his lesson book and illustrates it.

Well, that's all for now. I'm glad to be back and posting again.

School keeps us busy!

Wow I can't believe it's been over a week since I've posted something new. The time just flies by!

Last week I was sick with a cold and Jager got another mysterious fever and didn't feel good for a couple days. Needless to say we didn't get as much done for school as I would have liked, but we did manage to get some learning in every day.

Eden's Algebra is going great! We are flying through her lessons. She's such a wiz. We get to do review problems from past lessons everyday. It's getting fun now because we are farther in the book and I will throw a problem in from a lesson we did in the first week of this block and Eden will say "Hey! We haven't done these in a while!" But she knows just how to do them. She's only gotten stuck in one area and it's mostly just because she needs to memorize measurement conversions to make it easier.

Joey has learned all about the sundial, calendar, we made a water clock last week which was fun because when we originally started we filled up an empty milk container whose top was cut off with water. Then we poked a hole in the bottom front to let the water drip out, but it didn't drip; it streamed! We would never be able to do the lesson like this because in the half an hour we'd need to wait to make the next time mark the water would have been gone! So we taped it up and made a smaller hole. Between that hole and the water we were losing thorugh the tape not sticking well it ended up being just right! It was so fun. Joey learned how to multiply with two digits, three, digits, four digits...He learned about time zones and that his Grandpa Bill lives in West Virginia which is a few thousand miles away from us here in California and that when it is 7pm here and we are just getting done with dinner they are already in bed.

Yesterday we decided to take school on the road and have it at the park. Every Tuesday is "Park Day" for our local homeschooling group, so we figured we'll just hang out there all day. It was a nice change of scenery for us, although the other kids at the park were a bit of a distraction. I wrote a huge multiplication number on the sidewalk in chalk and had Joey solve it. He did well, but needs some work lining up his numbers as he solves. We usually use graph paper for that. All in all our day turned out great and we did manage to have a full school day and a lot of fun! I'll post some pictures later when my camera battery is charged :-)

Math is fun and so are caterpillars!!

Last week we finished off our first math block and I'd say it went very well. It was tough, though, because I was teaching two different subjects to two different kids. The days went a little longer than the block before, but all in all I think the schedule worked out fine.

Eden and I worked mainly on review for Algebra going over fractions, area, obtuse and acute angles etc. I teach her the lesson and then she reviews it the next day by doing several of the problems on scratch paper and then transferring them neatly and decoratively into her main lesson book. She also writes any vocabulary words that come up in our lessons into her lesson book. We cover three algebra lessons a day in her book by teaching it in blocks this way and it really sticks. It never stops amazing me how much better their retention is by teaching this way. This week we have moved onto the total surface area of a right solid and I'm sure many other fun things to figure out. I'm loving the algebra. I was never good at it in school, but I really seem to understand it now and what I don't understand I've had a great time trying to figure it out. It probably helps that I'm not under a deadline to turn in my homework or cram for a test. :-)

Working on the board is so much more fun than doing problems in a notebook any day!

Joey and I finished up his sundial last week during our study of time for our math block. We had school at night last Thursday and talked about how the Egyptians told time back when Moses was alive. We set up our sundial as best we could since we couldn't see the north star. We got up the next day to watch the sun rise. I made homemade hot chocolate with fresh whipped cream. It was chilly, but we had a lot of fun just hanging out in our pj's talking about what our day would be like and our upcoming weekend. Once the sun rose and we were able to get a shadow from the sundial we began marking off the time with a glass stone and I would write the time in chalk so we could look at it again another day and see if the time stayed the same. It didn't.

Here is our sundial. Joey decided to decorate the dough I made to put the stick in with some of the glass stones. Very pretty!

Eden and Joey sit on the little bench sharing a blanket while drinking their hot chocolate as we wait for the sun to rise.

The babies weather the cold wind blowing in the morning. where's our hats Mom!!!

Who needs a hat? Not me!!! I've got my nice soft blanket and my sissy by my side.

Can you say "sleepy"?

The first signs of light!

Up comes the sun!

Even brighter still!

When I got home from work last night I found that we had adopted a furry little critter. He doesn't have a name yet from what I understand so we'll just refer to him as the caterpillar. The kids found him outside while they were playing. At first he was in a plastic storage container with just some grass and one rose petal. I guess we woke him from his slumber when I got home and wanted to see him because while I was looking for ideas on what to feed him Jerod held him and then put him back into his box where he quickly began to munch through the rose petal. Hmmmm, I thought....."Go get some more rose branches and make sure they have flowers on them" I told Jerod "because he has to stay fed and alive until May before we'll see a cocoon out of him."



Here is some information I found about our new friend:

• Ecpantheria scriboni (His formal name) caterpillars, which are densely coated with coarse black setae (hairs) of equal lengths, curl up in a ball when disturbed, revealing bright red inter segmental rings. The small circles surrounding the spiracles are also red.




• Woolly bear or fuzzy bear caterpillars are often found in the fall after they have left their food plants in search of a dark and sheltered spot where they can hibernate as larvae for the winter. When spring brings its warm sunshine, the caterpillars again become active, feeding for a brief time and then fashioning cocoons out of silk and body hairs.
  Tiger moths usually emerge from cocoons two to three weeks later.
• The caterpillars feed on a variety of food plants including forest trees, shrubs and low growing plants. Hibernation is usually over in northern portions of scribonia's range in May. The caterpillars feed briefly, spin their cocoons and then emerge a few weeks later as adult moths.

Very interesting huh? Well I think that this is quite a bit to absorb for one blog and I think I've covered it all. Let's keep our fingers crossed that our furry friend makes it through the winter and we get to see him turn into a beautiful moth.

Many new things....

Wow! It's been a while since I've had a chance to post some really neat things we've been doing.


Last week we finished up our first block which was Hebrew Culture. We made it up to Abraham's birth. We'll probably cover that again since it didn't get full study. We also finished up our study of The Tower of Babel by drawing really neat pictures in our lesson books of the Tower after God decided to confound the languages. They came out great! I'll try to add pictures of them soon.

Friday evening my friend, Karen, and I headed to Sacramento for the fall Waldorf conference. It was my first time going and Karen's been many times before. It was a wonderful trip! The Waldorf School where the conference was held was so beautiful. It's tucked away along the American River and the grounds are so lush with trees, bushes, grass, flowers etc you feel like you are in a hideaway place instead of in a larger metropolis. I had the opportunity to meet so many neat people and heard so many experts speak about our brains and our children's brains I thought my brain was going to explode. I discovered so many new ways to nurture my children to help them learn and grow to be well rounded people and to help their brains develop in a way that is more natural for them. I love the Waldorf curriculum and it was so reassuring to hear one of the speakers state that on average studies have concluded that Waldorf educated students graduate from high school with more knowledge than public/state educated students simply because of the way Waldorf educates. I chose Waldorf for Joey because I knew it would help him dig deeper into subjects he might otherwise reject because he has fun learning it and the lessons are brought to life through the methods of teaching. I chose to block teach Eden the way Waldorf suggests so that each subject can really get into her head because we don't bounce from one thing to another. I feel it is setting up a great foundation for when she enters public high school next year. It really made me feel like I made great decisions for how I home school my kids.

I took several pictures of the campus where the conference was held. It was held at the Sacramento Waldorf school in Fair Oaks, California. Here is the view of one of the buildings on campus from the gymnasium. Remember when viewing these photos this is a K-12 campus. It looks nothing like any school I've ever attended.

Here is a picture of a stained glass window in the gymnasium building.

As you exit the gym and to the left you will find this beautiful area.

Coming and going from the parking lot you will find an interesting Labyrinth made from stones.

Here is another photo of the labyrinth

This week we began our math blocks. Joey is studying time, linear measurement, volume etc. and Eden is beginning Algebra 1. It makes our days longer when they are studying separate lessons, but we are really enjoying math. Joey is currently working on making a calendar of the year. Eden and I do a lesson together on the board to learn it and the next day before our main lesson Eden works independently on assigned problems that she figures out on scrap paper and then copies very neatly into her main lesson book and then takes time to highlight each problem with art. It's so fun figuring out the answers to the problems together. I get to learn all over again!

Paintings

We did some awesome paintings this afternoon. We painted covers for our 7 days Creation main lesson. We did the face of God. They came out simple and beautiful if I do say so myself.

This is Joey's face of God. It's a blue wash with paint pulled out with a dry brush in the shape of a face.

Here is my picture of the face of God. You can sort of make out the face. The pictures I took don't really do them justice.

Here is Eden's

I let Eden free paint and this is the painting she did. It's amazing! She's a great artist.

The Tower of Babel

Today we studied about Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Nimrod did not walk with God and he convinced those who followed him to build a tower to the heavens to reach God. These people were excellent at communication and could pretty much accomplish anything. God saw how far they were getting with the tower and decided to confound their language to make their task impossible because he didn't want them to reach heaven. None of us are worthy to reach heaven especially Nimrod and his followers. With their languages confused God dispersed them about the earth.

Along with this lesson we each had to go into a separate space and draw a picture of something we wanted to build with the various blocks we have in Jade's toy box. I told them to make them fairly simple. Then we all had to work together to build each persons building without looking at the picture and each of us speaking in a different "language". Eden could only speak in "O" (oooo, owww, owe), Joey in "A" (aaaaa, awww, ay) and I in "E" (eeeee, ewe, eh). We had to try to convey to one another how to build each structure. I went first and I had the kids do a basic pyramid of blocks. At first I was trying to tell the kids to pull a certain type of block out of the basket and it took a while to get going. Then I started laying the blocks out and asking them in my language to lay them as I did. We eventually go the structure built, but it took much longer than it would have if I could have simply said "put the blocks like this".

Joey's structure was next and when we did his I kept trying to put different blocks on top instead of the blocks he wanted us to use. We all had a hard time understanding. Again we accomplished building the structure, but it wasn't easy

Eden's was last. In this picture you see Joey trying to place a big block onto Eden's structure and clearly it didn't belong as you can see from Eden's reaction. Hand motions played a huge role in our communication.

Eden's structure was more complicated to build than Joey's or mine. Here is a picture of her structure completed along with her original "blueprint". Hers took us much longer to complete and we couldn't accomplish the steps on the side she had originally wanted. This was an interesting and fun activity and I think both kids really grasped the frustration the residents of Babel must have felt once they couldn't communicate well.

The Rainbow

Today we continued our lesson on Noah and the Ark. We read about the flood waters receeding and about how the dove was sent out several times over several weeks until it did not return meaning there was now dry land on which to live. The legends book has a story that says Noah would not disembark until God promised not to cause such destruction on the earth in such a manner. God stretched a rainbow across the sky as his promise to Noah and the earth that He would never destroy the earth by flooding it completely again. The Bible also tell us that God sent the rainbow for this purpose. So today for our writing exercise we wrote out the Bible verses for God, Noah and the rainbow and then we did a picture of the rainbow while doing a study in color. We only used three colors to make the rainbows you see in the pictures; red, blue and yellow. The wax blocks we have blend so beautifully!

We then read about Noah's sons and the curse that Noah placed upon Canaan because of what his father Ham had done to Noah while Noah was in a drunken state.

This is Joey's picture of the rainbow. Again I'd like to say we only used red, blue and yellow to make these. Really neat!

This is my rainbow picture. This was so fun blending the colors and watching them come together. Not only did we make a beautiful picture for our main lesson books, but we also got to experience a true sense of art by blending two colors to make one.

This is Eden's rainbow. Eden's orange came out so vivid. I really like how well she was able to blend the yellow and red together to produce that bright orange.