So it finally happened

Another non homeschooling post, but I figure it's fair to keep up with what's happening with Eden too. So today Eden finally had a dose of not liking school very much. Her homework took longer tonight than usual and she got irritated. She was tired and just not having it. The questions came up about why she needs to take Pre AP courses if that is not going to be her career goal. Of course we answered her with the best answer we could and it wasn't good enough because at that point she wanted to hear that she wouldn't need them so she could stop working so hard. The thing is she can do these classes! She really can! If she was in normal English, Geometry and Biology she would end up getting bored and in trouble for talking etc. Both her grades and her bahavior will sit on her transcripts. College is not an option....it's a requirement. She wants to go to an arts college, but that's what she wants right now. How do we know she'll feel the same by the end of Junior or Senior year? She very well may still want arts school, but Jerod and I want her to think seriously about taking some business courses in college so she will have that backgroud to go with her arts degree. Also, it's something she can fall back on if her first option doesn't pan out. I'm not thinking negatively, just practically. Our daughter has talent in art, movie writing, directing, acting etc. She's only 13 and she really has a knack for it, but it's a tough world out there and even if she makes something of her art we want her to know how to manage herself. We want her to be smart enough to spot a bad deal. Yes, these classes are more difficult. Do I like having to sit with her and explain her homework to her? Do I like that I feel stupid that I don't understand what she is learning in Geometry? No! Actually I do like doing homework with her. It's time for us to spend together since she's so busy and I feel like we have fun with it. Especially when I do figure out what she's doing with Geometry and I feel victorious! I really do. Then I have an easier time explaining it to her. I think Eden expects that it will all come easy to her. The point is that she's learning and that's what it's about. It's not going to come as easily to her now because she's finally in a class that challenges her mind unlike any other time in school. Before she would get bored. It also doesn't help that this is a far cry from our homeschooling days. We have it easy here at home. The work is the same, but we are done mid-day, so it feels like less.

So that's what we are facing right now. It'll get better in a week or two and she'll be used to the schedule. She still likes school just fine, so we haven't lost ground there. Thank God!

Eden's First Day of School

So I know it isn't part of the actual homeschool journey, but it does play into our daily life. Eden started her first day of high school yesterday. It was her first day back to regular school after three wonderful years of homeschooling her. All day long I worried for her. I wanted her experience to be wonderful and all she had hoped it would be. It was.

Our day started out rocky. We had backpack issues because the brand new one she had gotten didn't fit her things and we knew she'd need more room by days end. So we had to dig out an old one and of course it was pink. It used to be one of her favorite colors, but as she's gotten older she had decided she doesn't like it anymore. So here she is her first day of school coming in with a backpack she hates. That's not really a big deal in the scheme of things and she was a great sport about it as she usually is. Then her ride was late and I wasn't sure she was coming at all, so we had to rely on Grandpa to get her there and she ended up being late anyway. Thankfully they were understanding about it since it was the first day of school, so no tardy on her record. As Grandpa pulled away from the curb my friend Tiffany arrived apologizing for being late. She had hit that morning school traffic and didn't anticipate how long it would take to drop off her son and get to our house to pick up Eden. But it turned out it was God's doing since Eden accidentally left her report on the table that was due on the first day. So Tiffany loaded us all into her car to take me to school to drop off her report. God works in great ways.

All day I thought about my oldest baby on her first day of high school. I reflected on many of her firsts. I still cannot believe she's old enough to be a freshman. It just blows my mind. She's such a beautiful young lady inside and out. But I wasn't only nervous for how she'd do socially, but academically as well. I taught her for three years and now it was time to prove it was a job well done. I had decided several months ago to put her in Pre-Advanced Placement classes because I know Eden can do them. She has the brains to do them. It will help her immensely with college when she gets there. I finally had to tell myself that if she doesn't do well in those classes that it's OK. It doesn't mean I was a bad teacher. She learned so much more than just what books could teacher her while home with me. Her self esteem was mended. She was pulled out of school after 5th grade having stomach cramps from nerves and having gnawed off the skin on her fingertips. Kids had brutally teased her and yet she still made Principal's Honor Roll. At home she was able to relax and really absorb all she was learning. I feel she learned enough to take on the challenges high school offers.

When she came home and told me about her day I was so proud of her. She kept to herself some, but not to the point of being a loner. She listened to what her teachers had to say in each class and didn't get distracted. She had made a friend at a BBQ before school started who was in her Spanish class. They were to meet for lunch, but Eden couldn't find her in the sea of people in the cafeteria. Eden say a boy eating his lunch alone, so she walked up and asked to sit with him. They talked all through lunch. When I was a kid I don't think I would have had the guts to do that. When I told Eden that I was so proud of her for it her response was "I know what it's like to sit and eat lunch alone. It isn't fun." Wow! She told me all about her classes and teachers and she's so excited. She wants so badly to do well. Getting good grades is so important to her and I'm so happy about that.

I really think she's going to be just fine this year. Of course I'll always worry about my kids, but she did great yesterday. I'm so happy and proud.

Getting Ready

Well we've been working hard on getting our school room ready for our first day of school. Instead of a school table we are going to use individual desks. I found an old desk at a shop here in town that has the top that opens and closes with the chair that's attached. It's painted like a white cow with black spots. It's so neat! That will be Joey's desk this year. We found a cute wooden table and chair at a garage sale that's just perfect for Jade. Eden's aunt Lisa and aunt Heather found another desk that they purchased for us. I'm just waiting on Jerod to make arrangements to pick it up. We did quite a bit of rearranging in our school room. It's going to be a fun room to teach and learn in this year.

I have two preschoolers and my 5th grader. This year I will be using the 4th year Waldorf curriculum for my son. We get to study all about the Norse myths this year and I'm so looking forward to all the wonderful stories. With my preschoolers I'm using Waldorf too except that I'm using a mixture of preschool methods along with some 1st year lessons. I'm only doing so because I have a boy I'm teaching who will enter a main stream school for kindergarten and I want him to be prepared. So we aren't putting a lot of pressure on learning the letters and numbers, but we are going to tell stories about them and get to know them some. We will also do a lot of playing, cooking, cleaning, coloring, painting and fun things. It's going to be a fun year.

My oldest got registered for high school on Wednesday. She received her student ID and she's very proud of it. She has her PE uniform, so she set. We received her schedule too and it's in perfect order. She has all of her core classes interwoven into her electives. It's great! She ends her day with drama class. What a great way to end the day!

So now all I have to do is finish up the school room and plan our days out and we are ready to roll. I'm so looking forward to getting back into the rhythm of school.

Where have I been?

I almost forgot I even had a blog here. I started out great last school year writing about our journey and then then journey got busy and the blog had to go to the wayside. But I'm back a little here and there. School went great last year and this has been a busy fun filled summer. My oldest, Eden will start high school next year and instead of homeschooling she wishes to attend school. So she'll be off on her own adventures next year while my son, Joey homeschools for 5th grade and I start preschool with Jade, our three year old, and her friend Jaeger. Preschool in the am and Joey in the pm. It's going to be a busy year but I expect it's going to be great fun with lots to talk about. Hopefully I'll be able to keep our blog up this next year.

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.