Learning Goals ~ 2013-2014

Our family has been homeschooling for the last 15 years! Wow, that number amazes me. We have evolved from a unit study approach ~ to Charlotte Mason ~ then Charlotte Mason/Unit Study ~ a few years using the Classical approach with unit studies ~ and a year of way too many workbooks and drudgery. This year, we are going full circle back to relaxed unit study literature approach with an emphasis on the 3 R's. Our children being schooled this year are 9, 11 and 12. We also will be doing learning time differently for our 9 year old and 11 year old children than for the 12 year old. In addition, we have a grown son who is disabled and lives at home with us. He was our first homeschool student and has graduated.

Goldilocks (12) ~ I will talk about her learning goals first. Our dd who is 12 prefers to work alone in her room and do workbooks, listen to books on tape, and learn without any instruction from me. This is partly because of her personality and partly because she has attachment and adoption issues and is struggling right now with being a member of our family. It seems best to give her a bit of space so that the moments she is with us can be more nurturing. This is a huge leap of faith for me, since she also has Fetal Alcohol Effect and is very behind in grade level. However, I need to try something different with her and this is it for the first quarter, at least.

Math ~ 

• Tutoring one to two times a week
• Her Special Ed teacher/tutor will be sending her home with a few math projects for the week.
• Using www.xtramath.org
• Practice "real world" math -- shopping, cooking, measuring, gardening

Language Arts ~ 

• Writing a book report every week ~ draft and final
• Lots of workbook pages from spelling, grammar, and vocabulary workbooks
• Lap books for different mini-unit studies
• Written reports of any education videos she watches
• She is going to read one to two Magic Tree House books every week.
• She will be having a reading tutor to begin in the fall.

Fortunately, she likes to write a great deal. I just need to keep giving her the resources that will guide her to improve her spelling, grammar, and writing.

Literature ~ 

• Listen to high quality books on tape picked out by me
• She is starting with the Narnia series.
• She is going to watch worthwhile literature-based movies, using the curriculum To Kill A Mockingbird and 24 Other Movies.

Art/Music ~ 

• Doing crafts at the Arts for Life table that we visit once a week when her brother is getting physical therapy at the hospital
• Squilt Lessons with siblings
• Crafts with our American Girl Doll Club that I am organizing this year
• I will keep my eye out for other opportunities.

Physical Education ~ 

• Gymnastics with the Special Olympics
• If we have time, she will also be doing Special Olympic cheer leading and/or a running club for girls.

History/Science ~ 

• She will be learning science and history through field trips, easy readers, books on tape and lap books. We are focusing on the 1900's this year for both history and science. I know my plans for her seem weak, but she really is not interested in learning in general. Academic learning is not the most critical goal for her this year.

Tom Sawyer (11) and Little Red Riding Hood (9) ~ These two are often two peas in a pod. They both love science and math. They love hands-on activities and lots of field trips. Tom Sawyer is a strong reader, but doesn't adore reading. Little Red Riding Hood needs to become a stronger reader. They both dislike writing and need to become better at expressing themselves through the written word. We will be focusing heavily on language arts this year because they need it and on science/math because they love it.

Math ~ 

• Teaching Textbooks 4 and 5
• Using www.xtramath.org
• Life of Fred ~ We are on Edgewood and plan to do as many books as we can this year.
• Lots of living books and hands-on activities

Language Arts ~ 

• All About Spelling levels 2 and 3
• Explode the Code a new level each quarter for Little Red Riding Hood
• Beyond Explode the Code for Tom Sawyer
• Lots of book reports
• They will read at least one chapter book a week.
• Vocabulary workbooks
• Many writing projects
• A research paper with presentation to friends and family

Literature ~ 

• Unit Studies with Beyond Five In A Row (FIAR)
• Thomas Edison Young Inventor Beyond FIAR
• Helen Keller Beyond FIAR
• Marie Curie Beyond FIAR
• The Saturdays Beyond FIAR
• Cricket In Times Square Beyond FIAR
• Homer Price Beyond FIAR
• Number the Stars
• Snow Treasures
• Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
• Neil Armstrong
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963
• Great books on tape found at the library

Art ~ I love art all the time, but the kids go through phases of loving art and then getting tired of it. This is my plan if they enjoy art this year. If they are not enjoying it this year, we will do fewer artists.

• Unit study on Architecture
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Harlem Rennaissance
• Jacob Lawrence (Meet The Masters)
• Dorothea Lange
• Jackson Pollock
• Georgia O'Keefe (Meet the Masters)
• Frida Kahlo (Meet the Masters)
• Joan Miro (Meet The Masters)
• Alexander Calder (Meet the Masters)

Music ~ 

• Squilt lessons Baroque Period
• Jazz unit study ~ Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong
• Rodger and Hammerstein Musicals unit study
• Rock and Roll unit study ~ Elvis and The Beatles
• Folk Music ~ Simon and Garfunkel, Peter Paul and Mary

History ~ I am not going to list everything here. However, we are doing the time period of 1900 to the 1960's (I hope). There will be tons of hands-on activities and field trips. Here is a list of our resources.

• Living picture books
• The Story of Us DVD series
• The Century book on tape by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster
• The Century for Kids by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster
• Chapter books from our literature unit studies
• American Girl Doll Club ~ We will be using Rebecca 1914, Kit 1934, Molly 1944 and Julie 1974 as study guides.
• Tom Sawyer will be learning about a famous man for each of the same general time periods as the dolls we'll be studying in the American Girl Doll club ~ Teddy Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Science ~ 

• Thomas Edison
• Marie Curie
• Snap Circuits
• Robotics ~ We are buying the next generation of Lego Mindstorm when it is released this fall. This will be our first Mindstorm set. Tom Sawyer is so excited, he is ready to burst.
• Astronomy Real Science 4 Kids middle school
• If we need more ~ Einstein and Physics with Toys

Out of the Home Classes ~

• Little Red Riding Hood has been accepted into Tween Company at our dance studio. This is a big step for her. She loves to dance and would like to do something with dance as a career. She will be in dance classes 4 hours a week and at least two different theater performances with multiple shows.
• Tom Sawyer will be taking a class in boy theater and dance again this year. He will also be in two theater performances with multiple shows.
• Tom Sawyer has a few more months of physical therapy.
• Both will be taking classes in gymnastics.

Home Economics ~ We will be doing lots of cooking for everyone this year. I am planning on letting them plan the menu and prepare the meals several times a month.

Wow! Thanks for hanging in there. We may not get to all of this, but these are our goals.

Blessings, Dawn

Week 1 ~ Back to School

Well, we started back to school on Monday. We never completely stopped this year, but we are now officially recording all that we do for our 2013-2014 school year. We will be increasing our workload until we are doing our full load over the next week. I just wasn't organized enough to pull off any fanfare for the first day of school. We didn't have box day ~ since I haven't ordered our new loot yet. Also, we skipped getting any back-to-school photos (no fresh haircuts) or buying back-to-school shoes (because there are more pressing things to spend money on). Also, I just want to change the kids feelings about "school". I want them to think about life being a learning experience ... not school time being the only time when we learn. I think we lost sight of that fact with all of the medical/emotional issues among my special needs kids. In the last two or three years, there has been way too much of a push to get school time done. I spent a bit of time this summer reading my young adult Timothy's homeschool lesson plans from his childhood and found them refreshing. I also found reading the book, Weapons of Mass Instruction, to be a timely reminder and very encouraging. I would really like to get back to a more relaxed approach. That doesn't mean less education, but it does mean more hands on, taking advantage of opportunities, and taking into account what is important to the children versus relying on what I think they need to learn. To my surprise, no one seemed to even notice that there was a lack of fanfare. They are just excited about having learning time centered more around their specific desires.

Vacation Bible Camp ~ Goldilocks attended an all day Musical Bible Camp this week. It was a unique camp because some of the staff knew about her special issues and she had a few younger friends who were attending. One of the most amazing things about this camp was the staff/camper ratio. They had 57 teen and adult volunteers and 61 campers. Yes, you read that right. She was very motivated to behave herself since it gave her a break from us. She was really relieved to be out in the world without family around her. We really enjoyed a calm week of school without the chaos that often occurs when she has had enough of family/sibling relationships (she has sometimes had enough within an hour of being awake). She finds it so much easier to deal with superficial relationships that just require a bit of casual conversation. I had her do math every day before she went to camp and 20 minutes of reading in the evening. With all of the great activities they did at camp, she completed a full day of "school" each day. This is what they did:

• many hours of choir practice
• practiced her two spoken sentences to be performed in the play tonight
• a science project each day
• a craft each day
• Bible stories and verse memorization
• set design and set up

Tom Sawyer and Little Red Riding Hood's Learning Time ~ We got off to a great start this week. We started building a city out of food boxes for our study of architecture. We are specifically learning about skyscrapers and city planning during this week and next. There will be lots of photos of our city and the experiments we are doing with it next week. Here is the rest of what we did.

• 10 chapters of The Life of Fred Edgewood
• The Story of Us DVD episodes "Cities" and "Boom" (1895 -1930)
• Reading every day
• www.Xtramath.org
• Teaching Textbooks three times
• Read six chapters of Landmark book, The Wright Brothers
• Built and flew a styrofoam plane
• Lesson one of Explode the Code 4 1/2  (9 pages) Little Red Riding Hood
• Five pages in a vocabulary building book ~ Tom Sawyer
• Building our city
• Physical therapy ~ Tom Sawyer
• Craft time at the hospital ~ Little Red Riding Hood
• Nature study of geese and ducks (we hope to study these same geese and ducks throughout the year)
• Making Pizza from scratch and setting up a pizza parlor for the family

Here they are testing out their plane. It does more loops than flying straight. We hope Daddy can help us out with it this weekend (not that loops aren't really cool as long as it doesn't happen in a real plane). This Mom is very afraid of flying.

Blessings, Dawn

A Mini-Vacation ~ Richmond and Raleigh/Durham

We took Goldilocks to see a neurologist at Duke last week. The appointment was disappointing (as expected). They really didn't have much insight into what is going on with her. They did see that her heart rate changes rather drastically when she stands from a sitting position. They think that is what is causing her dizziness. I wish they had done an EEG to confirm that she is not having seizures, especially since many of her more alarming dizzy spells have come after standing for a little while. However, I am going to just let it go for now and know that I did what I could. I am starting to get the feeling that the medical world thinks she is faking. I don't think she is faking, but I do wonder about psychological issues affecting her physical state.

Raleigh and Durham
Since we thought this appointment might be a wild goose chase, we decided to make the trip into a little vacation so that it would not be a complete waste of time. We attended family night at the Nasher Museum which was free to Ronald McDonald House guests. It was lots of fun. The kids did crafts and toured the museum. We did a study on the art piece, "Scramble for Africa". I was very pleased how well the children were able to pick up the mood of each manikin by studying the body language.


We also made it to the homeschool store. This was a delight for me more than for the kids. LOL! They really thought we should hurry along to Pullen Park. We did visit Pullen Park and enjoyed the carousel and train rides.

Richmond
We decide to drive a few more hours to visit my husband's sister and brother-in-law. We had never visited them in Richmond and it was great to see their home. They were wonderful hosts and really made us feel at home. I'm afraid the kids ate them out of house and home, but I think they enjoyed feeding a crowd. They have no children of their own and seemed to enjoy the excitement of a few kids cartwheeling around. We made several trips to the James River and the kids loved swimming with their uncle. We did not have any swim suits, so the kids just went in with their clothes on. We also visited the science museum. It was a great museum. Tom Sawyer loved the Robotics exhibit. We also saw the Imax movie, "The Hubble". What an amazing film.

David and his sister

Science is fun!

Blessings, Dawn

Swimming, Baseball and False Alarms

Making it through our summer bucket list has been challenging this year. The almost daily non-stop rain has put a real damper on outdoor plans. We are entering the last week of our summer vacation and we are trying harder to fit in activities around the raindrops. We never made it to the free movie camp at the theater or to a single library program. We had a good summer, anyway. The kids loved theater camp and they did two rounds of swimming lessons (two weeks each round). It has rained on them during lessons three times (no lighting). We are just about done with our Around the World in 80 Days summer unit study. It turned into primarily cooking and DVD documentaries over the last few weeks.

This week we ~

Baseball ~ The kids really wanted to see a baseball game at our local field. Our baseball team is a "Class A" team and are doing well this year. Many of their games have been cancelled and postponed due to rain, but we finally got to attend one Monday night. Baseball is my favorite spectator sport. I enjoy the atmosphere of the stadium and I actually understand what is going on most of the time. I also appreciate that baseball teaches patience to kids. Patience is one of those big character flaws lacking in American society so I am often on the look out for how to increase it in my crew. They scheduled a seven inning game because they are trying to do so many make up games. It was just the perfect length for my kids. Our team won; the weather was delightful for a change; and the kids got to stay up late (but not too late). It was a win-win evening.

Swimming ~ The water is much warmer this second round of swimming. That is a huge relief to the kids. Tom Sawyer is managing to stay in the pool for the whole hour. Due to his cerebral palsy, being able to stay in the water for the full lesson is a first for him. I love how much the physical therapy is helping him. He hates doing the exercises, but now that I know what is wrong with his musculature, it is easier to trick him into doing activities that help his core muscles. Goldilocks is doing really well in Level 5. The non-stop lap swimming is great for her. Helping her use up her energy is a big challenge for me every day. They are all making great progress this summer.

A Birthday Party ~ We attended a party for a nine year old friend, whom we have known since he was in diapers. There is nothing like a birthday party to remind you of the quick passage of time. I am so glad to have these years with my kids. I feel so blessed and privileged to be able to stay home with them. So many mom's actually are craving the sight of the yellow school bus right now. I am not one of them!

False Alarms ~ For the last few months we have been awoken by our smoke alarms going off between 2 am and 4 am. Sometimes it happens several times in a week and other weeks we get a break from the nuisance alarms. They are all wired together and it is really deafening when they go off. The electrician, our contractor, the power company and the fire chief have all been baffled. My Mother (who is a research queen) thinks it might be a condensation issue. Condensation buildup takes place mostly during the night. We know our home is too moist due to the endless rain and lack of air conditioning. In fact, the humidity in our house is almost unbearable as I sit here typing at 8 in the morning. With my Mom's suggestion, we ran a dehumidifier in the hallway all last night. It did improve the humidity, but put out a giant amount of heat and ran our sleeping areas up into the 90s!! That is not going to work to solve our problem. It did keep the smoke alarms from going off, though. I think we are going to have to break down and figure out where we can put an A/C unit or two (even if it is not the ideal location in the house). The ideal place for one to be located does not have adequate wiring to accommodate it, and it is not in the budget to make such wiring happen.

Last But Not Least ~ The kids all earned their books from the library and Barnes & Noble reading programs this week. They also started planning their goals for what they want to learn during the first month or two of school. Little Red Riding Hood wants to learn to cook breakfast food, so she made fried bread with eggs in the middle this week. Yum! Tim is really enjoying his day program for adults with brain injuries. He went four days this week and enjoyed three field trips with the program. I think we've finally found a good place for him.

Blessings, Dawn

Our Math Plans for 2013 - 2014

This year I have three students to teach. I will be taking a different approach with two of them. Little Red Riding Hood (4th grade) and Tom Sawyer (6th grade) will be using the same learning style. They will be using Teaching Textbooks Levels 4 and 5 this year. One is halfway done with Teaching Textbooks Level 4 while the other is almost done with that level. My kids really like Teaching Textbooks and look forward to doing math.

We will also be working our way through the last of the elementary Life of Fred books. We are currently reading Edgewood. These are a wonderful reinforcement of math skills and are very funny books. The kids love them.

We will also be doing many living math books. We will be doing some of the Sir Cumference series and the Warlord's series this year. The kids really enjoy hands-on activities and math makes more sense in the context of everyday life.

My plans for Goldilocks (supposed to be a 7th grader) is another story. If you are new here, Goldilocks has Reactive Attachment Disorder and Fetal Alcohol Disorder. She is also struggling mightily this year with adoption issues. She is not even sure she wants to live with us right now, because the structure of a family is so hard for her to handle. I am baffled when it comes to this child's education this year. I can't even decide what grade she belongs to. She can add most of the time, rarely subtract, barely multiple and kinda sorta divide. Remembering to borrow? Forget it... She is completely against my teaching her any subject. This year I am taking a hands-off approach with this child. She will still be learning ~ just not directly from me. She will be going to a math tutor one to two times a week as long as I see a benefit from it. She will also be working with free math sites around the Web. One site that I like, so far, is XtraMath.org. This site only takes 10 minutes a day and it emails a report to the parents once a week. 

I am joining this linkup:

Blessings, Dawn

Lots of Field Trips

This week Goldilocks was at Mayan Princess Day Camp. It was a fun adventure for her. She played many games that involved patience, teamwork and silence. She also learned more aerial arts and some gymnastics. She made a club, cape and headpiece. They did lots of mini acting skits and learned about Mayan culture. On the last day, they went to the camp director's home for a cookout and pool party. It was a busy week with loads of social skills work.  She did a good job. Now comes the tough part ~ will she fall apart over the next week? Sometimes the time after a big event is very hard on her.

Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer, Little Red Riding Hood and I had a field trip week.

Monday ~ We stood in a long line to sign up for free Red Cross swimming lessons (they start next week). We rewarded ourselves by going out to our favorite ice cream parlor (one that serves ice cream that has no high fructose corn syrup). We stayed awhile to enjoy their air conditioning and played PacMan.

Tuesday ~ We took a trolley ride around our city. You can read more about it here. This was a wonderful introduction to our study of architecture. We also enjoyed having lunch at our city's food truck gathering. Instead of hot dog stands, in our city we have a parking lot where a variety of vans are gathered together to sell ethnic food. They serve delicious, restaurant quality meals for a fraction of the cost (because they have such low overhead). Many of them have skilled chefs who cannot afford to open a restaurant.

Wednesday ~ We went to Splashville. This is a free waterpark right in front of city hall. It is a great place to cool off. We got there early and the kids had it all to themselves for about an hour.

Thursday ~ We had a calm morning at home to catch up on chores and phone calls. The kids also did lots of reading for their reading logs as well as some writing. Then in the afternoon, the kids loved having some friends over for a double play date.

Friday ~ Since the weather was finally behaving, we got to go to the pool. We had a lovely time for about 1.5 hours before Tom Sawyer was worn out and it was time to go. In the evening, we went to Chick-Fil-A dressed up as cows for our free dinner. Everyone enjoyed this one ~ even Daddy.

The Weather ~ While we saw some daytime sun this past week, we got lots more rain almost every night. The flooding in our area is bad and some of it is in different places than usual, so there is more damage than in the past. Many people have needed to be rescued from their homes, and a few homes have slid down the slopes. There have been dozens of mudslides. We have sink holes all over the county. One of our fire stations was caught up in a flash flood when a river came over its banks. No one was hurt, but lots of equipment was ruined. It amazes me that all of this is going on within 6 miles of us. We are blessed to be mostly unaffected right where we live.

This is a local park completely under water.

Blessings, Dawn

Easing into Our New School Year with a Field Trip

There has been much planning going on around here. I am filled with thoughts for next school year, but I am not completely ready to share them just yet. One thing felt certain as I started firming up our plans...we had too much to do! I decided that we needed to start one subject early and asked Tom Sawyer and Little Red Riding Hood which they would like to concentrate on first. They wanted to start with art. Our first quarter of art this year will be concentrated on architecture. We will be touring our own downtown and studying the many historic buildings. We are blessed to have coloring books of many of the more famous buildings in our little city that was put out many years ago by our preservation society. Plus, we will be studying Frank Lloyd Wright, because he is of great interest to my budding architect. Tom Sawyer. Since Goldilocks is at day camp this week and will not be doing the same lessons as Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Sawyer, it was an ideal day for a field trip.

We decided to take the historic trolley tour in our city to have an overview of all of the great architecture. We had never done the tour before and it far exceeded our expectations. A huge part of the tour was all about architecture. What a perfect introduction to our art lessons! Of course, we have seen these buildings and homes many times but didn't know much of the history behind them. I had trouble catching good pictures in a moving trolley so forgive me ~

We saw a row of Sears Roebuck kit homes.

Then there were the lovely Queen Anne homes in our most historic neighborhood. Our city became known as an ideal location to heal from tuberculosis and by the 1920's boasted 25 clinics that specialized in healing patients. Many homes in this historic neighborhood were converted into boarding homes to accommodate the families of patients at the clinics.

We learned about the first skyscraper in our city (and still the second tallest building). The neoclassical Jackson Building comes complete with gargoyles. I've been in the law office at the top of this building and the views are stunning. It is also considered the most haunted building in our city, because 13 men jumped from this building when the Great Depression started. Much to our horror, we learned that, when the brickwork was redone years ago, a bull's eye was placed to mark the spot where the men fell. I think that is a bit sick and gross. I copied the picture of the bull's eye from another website.

We also saw a modern building designed by the internationally famous architect, I. M. Pei. When this huge building was built in our city square, many residents were upset. However, it gained popularity when everyone realized that the famous Jackson Building was reflected in its windows (as you can see in the picture). The windows reflect the sky and remind visitors that our city is nicknamed the "Land of the Sky".

The beautiful home shown below was once part of the Highland Mental Health Hospital complex. Tragically, Zelda, known as the Jazz Age High Priestess and wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald, plus eight other women were killed in a fire that engulfed the hospital in 1948.    

We rode past several examples of French chateaus. The photo below once was a very large private home but is now many condominiums.

We also saw one of the two "castles" that our fair city claims. This one was built by the owner of that famous insane asylum I mentioned above.

The tour guide told us about different kinds of building materials used in the various buildings. I hadn't heard before about pebbledash, which consists of plaster mixed with either pebbles, sand, gravel or shells. The photo below depicts a pebbledash building.

The tour also went by the famous Grove Park Inn. This hotel was fashioned after a western hunting lodge and has hosted many well-known people. While I had heard of the many important people, including presidents, who have stayed at this inn, our informative tour guide told us of two people that the children and I hadn't hard about -- Al Capone and Albert Einstein.

The kids learned lots and enjoyed their first day of art. We will be going back to study these buildings again, plus many more over the next few weeks. There are so many wonderful details to discover!

Blessings, Dawn