School's Out For Summer!!

We wrapped up our first year of homeschooling last week. I was really hoping to go out with a bang, but life got the best of us and it sort of just fizzled out instead. We finished up science and bible study the previous week, and completed our study of the countries with a final "test" and I'm proud to say that Annabelle scored 100%! Alivia had a little bit harder time with it, but the way I see it, even if she can't recall the capital of each country or the continent they are in, her view of the world around her was still expanded. I am proud of her too for her efforts! Honestly, I couldn't remember them all myself either without a little bit of help!

As far as math goes, I feel like the girls need some more guidance and study in this subject. Neither one of them really enjoy it, and find it difficult to learn. And to top it off, Annabelle gets really upset when she can't do something perfectly so she'd just rather not do it at all. I have decided that we will take off the month of June, but I would really like to start working on this subject again in July. I am afraid that if they don't truly get the hang of it now while it is just simple, basic concepts, they will have an even more difficult time in the future. And since I'm the teacher I can do that!

We also wrapped our first year of co-op with our wonderful homeschool friends! What a blessing it has been to have them and be part of their circle! It is amazing what encouragement just spending a few hours with others who understand exactly what you are going through can bring. I don't think I could have survived this first year if it had not been for their support! On a sad note, our friends, Jenn and Evan will not be here with us next year. They moved to Kentucky shortly after our last play date. They will be missed more than words can say, but they will also be a true blessing to everyone they meet in their new home state!

Our amazing homeschool friends! The Scotts, the Dana's, the Romans and us!

Over all it has been a great year though. There were times when I truly questioned my sanity, but I am so thankful that I made this choice for myself and my children. I believe that it has brought us and them even closer.  I am already looking forward to what blessings are in store for us next year! I can hardly wait to get started!!

Happy Summer Friends! Thanks for traveling this amazing journey with us!!

In The Home Stretch

We are down to two weeks left before we finish up for the summer! The kids and I are so excited!! April wasn't a great month for us as we weren't really on top of our game so to say.  May has been pretty good so far though. Here is where we are in each subject:

Geography:This past week we finished up our Italy studies. We have also been reviewing the Countries we've learned so far including their capitals and the continents they are in. I was surprised at how much they remembered as we were going over it for the first time. Next week we are "traveling" onto Australia! It sure has been fun watching our "passports" fill up this year!

Math: Annabelle has been working on multiplying double or triple digits by double digits. She was having a really hard time with them at first, but she's got the hang of it now! I'm so proud of her for sticking with it. Alivia is learning her multiplication facts right now. I think we will continue working on our math facts throughout the summer. The kids aren't really happy about that but I think in the end it will be for the best.

Science: We will be finishing up our science book next week. There are only two chapters left but they are both short so I am just going to combine them.

Bible: We have 7 lessons left so we will be finished with that next Monday.

Language Arts: This week we did something a little different. The girls were doing independent study in their workbooks I bought a few months ago, but I felt like they weren't really learning it. Just doing the work as fast as they could. So, I decided that we'd go over some basic stuff this last few weeks. I found some neat books at the library to use. This week we studied verbs then we will move onto adverbs and adjectives to finish up the year. I am also considering working on them with these skills throughout the summer as well.

I can't believe that we only have two weeks left, but more than that, I can't believe that we survived our first year homeschooling! I was going through all the work we had done this year because the kids wanted a "report card" and I am pleasantly surprised to see that they actually accomplished a lot! Sometimes I felt like they really weren't doing much and that I was probably ruining their education. That doesn't seem to be the case though! As far as the "report cards" go it's kind of hard to give accurate grades because the majority of the work we did together. I did grade all the papers they did on their own though and found the averages scores. So with the the combined score I gave them for our group work and the scores they earned on their own they will

Publish Post

still both end up with all A's! Not bad if I do say so myself.

The Past Month

Ugh...so it's been a month since I posted last. My bad. There are just only so many hours in the day. My 'to-do" list is always longer and this blog just happens to be towards then end of the list unfortunately.

As far as school goes, it's been an on again, off again type of relationship. I think we are just getting burnt out being stuck in the house day after day. The weather has not been nice enough to spend much time outside (until very recently anyway) And with gas as high as it is, we don't go anywhere unless absolutely necessary. Not that any of that is a good excuse but the truth is we haven't been as diligent about doing our school work as I feel like we should be.

We have still been studying our countries, but mostly we are just reading books about them, not really doing much paper work. In the past month we have studied Russia, Greece, and Italy. I will be making up a review "test" for the kids shortly after we finish up the next couple of countries which include Australia and Antarctica. It will cover the continents, the countries we've studied, their flags and capitals. It will be interesting to see how much the kids actually learned (retained) as we review for the test.

We are also still working on our bible studies and science. Those should be completed within the next week or so depending on how much time we put into them. Annabelle has been learning how to multiply double digits by double digits. We've been hung up on that for awhile though. She finally learned the technique, but now she needs to concentrate on just doing the actual math part correctly. Carrying numbers over has really confused her. So needless to say we are not moving on until she gets that mastered. Alivia is working on learning her multiplication facts.

Sammy is another story. We have not been doing much with him. At the beginning of the year he was doing pretty well, but then we hit a wall. Finally I just decided to put his school work away for awhile for both our sakes. I've tried it again a few different times, but it just seems like he's not getting it. The thing that frustrates me the most is he went to preschool for 2 years and never even learned his alphabet, he still does not know it! And as much as I try to work with him he's still not able to say it completely on his own. So I am thinking that we will be spending most of the summer working on learning his letters, being able to say the alphabet on his own and recognize letters out of order.


It's hard to believe that we've almost completed our first year of homeschooling. What a journey it has been! I pretty much have all our books for next year already and I can't wait to get started. I never imagined that I would be a homeschool mom, but now I can't imagine it any other way!

Spring Break

In my life this week:
We were supposed to be on Spring Break. I was planning to do some fun stuff with the kids but unfortunately it did not work out that way. First of all, the weather was not that great. It was cold/rainy/snowy. Then, when it did finally start to warm up Sydney ended up being sick. I finally took her to the Urgent Care on Wednesday only to find out that she had pneumonia! So, needless to say we didn't do any more than we absolutely had to. The weirdest thing is though we still had a busy week. I made some baby gifts for my friend and my SIL, I made the girls' Easter outfits, and made Sydney her birthday dress. We also had to take our car to the shop to be repaired, and I had to prepare for Sydney's 2nd birthday party.  So, the only "spring breakish" thing we did was skip out on school work. I decided to extend our "vacation" by one more day so I can catch up on some things that I wasn't able to accomplish last week. Tomorrow we will be back in business.
In our homeschool this week:
Before Spring Break we started on Russia. We will be continuing that country this week. I'm also planning on doing a little bit of review through each subject just to make sure the girls are understanding and retaining everything they've been learning.


I don't have much more to report than that. I have been slowly collecting our books for next year and I think I have just about everything we need! The best part is I was able to sell most of the books we used this year and buy next years curriculum with the profits! I am very excited about that!! I am also very excited that we only have about 6 more weeks of school left for this year! I am planning on finishing up around the second or third week of May...summer vacation, here we come!

The Homeschool Mother's Journal....better late than never, right?

In my life this last week....
After some frustrations we were finally able to  trade in our 13 year old mini van and become the proud new owners of a 2005 GMC Envoy XL! It wasn't exactly the vehicle we had hoped for, but it was difficult to find exactly what we wanted within our price range. We are falling in love with it though...and in any case, it is 100% better than our old mini-van.
In our homeschool this last week....
Ironically I had planned Japan for this week a long time ago. So when I heard about the devastating news on tv it almost seemed fitting that we were preparing to learn about this country. Of course I didn't have any library books on Japan because I had failed at the said 'preparing' part, so I just Googled information. I figured all I'd find was about the earthquake and tsunami, but we actually found some fun fact pages. I also let the kids watch the news a few times so they could see what was currently going on. Brought tears to my eyes every time, but I think they liked the reality of it...not just reading about some far off country in a book. Not that they like what they were seeing, but you know what I mean....The same thing happened right after we studied Egypt.
In science we studies oceans...again, how fitting, right? The girls made an ocean display using a shoe box. We also made an ocean dessert...blue jello and gummy fish!
My favorite thing about this last week...
Of course, I was really happy to get our new car, but my favorite thing this week was the three day weekend we had! We spent the day Friday together as a family shopping for some home project supplies. Then Saturday the kids stayed with Grandma and Grandpa. Andy and I had a much needed date night. Of course we could have stayed out as late as we wanted, but ended up going to bed just after the 11:00 news! Such party animals I tell ya!
Pictures from this week....yes, they are from this week, today actually...some things just don't go as planned. That's all I have to say about that!

The girls worked on this ocean display together and had lots of fun!

Our homemade oceans...yummy!

Sydney loved the Ocean treat too!

The Homeschool Mother's Journal

In my life this week...

This week has had it's ups and downs. We are in the process of purchasing a new (to us) vehicle and it hasn't been as easy of a process as we had hoped it would be. Hopefully tomorrow we will have it all settled and be the proud new owners of a 2005 Envoy XL.
In our homeschool this week....
The girls are still doing their language arts and math in their work books. It seems to be working out quite well for them....I would almost dare say they enjoy it.

 In geography we learned about China. We read books about ancient china and panda bears. China is the only place in the world where Pandas live in the wild. We also did a few fun Chinese crafts. We made tangrams which is a Chinese game, puzzle, arts, crafts, and math lesson all rolled into one. We started out with a 4x4 square, cut that into 5 triangles, 2 squares and a rhomboid. Then we tried making different objects using those 7 shapes. The book showed us how to make a bird and a dog, then the girls came up with these two on their own. Can you guess what they are?

 

 We also learned about the Chinese New Year and made paper lanterns.

My favorite thing this week...

We received our first shipment of next years school books! I love new books! And I love that the kids were so excited about the new books too!

Whats working/not working for us...

This week went pretty smoothly. My husband went back to work last week, so I think that has really helped us to focus on our school work. Like I said earlier, the girls are doing pretty well with their work books. I went through them and figured out how much they would need to do each day in order to complete them by the end of the school year (which will be May 13th for us). I will have to redo a few of the subjects though because it just ended up being to much for them each day.

The Homeschool Mother's Journal - 5

This week wasn't very exciting but I did stumble upon this home school blog that hosts a blog hop once a week. I thought it might be fun to give it a whirl so here goes...


In my life this week...
On Monday my sweet mother in law had us over to her house for a Valentine's Day Tea Party. My SIL, who also homeschools was there with her two girls as well. The kids had a great time serving treats and apple juice "tea" to each other. I think it was the best Valentine's "class" party I've ever attended! In other news, our hot water heater broke. My darling husband spent an entire day trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Finally, he decided he had it figured out which part needed to be replaced and made a few phone calls. Unfortunately he was informed that the specific piece was no longer available separately and would cost $500 for the entire unit. Thankfully we have this wonderful thing called EBay where we found it for only $30! Now, we just have to wait for the part to arrive....so yes, that means we have not had hot water all week. I've had to heat water on the stove for dishes and to wash my hair. It's funny the things we take for granted until we no longer have their conveniences.

In our homeschool this week...
First, as I mentioned last week the girls decided for sure they no longer wanted to use the Time4Learning program online. I did end up canceling it and found some work books from Barnes and Nobles to replace it. I know it's not the most conventional way to go about homeschooling, but really math is math no matter what book it comes from, right? The books include reading, writing, math, language arts, and spelling. I think they will work out fine for the rest of our school year. The kids did manage to work in their books every day, but we did not do any Bible or geography this week...totally my fault!
 
Places we're going and people we're seeing...
My husband went with a friend up north for the weekend so I made some big plans for the kids and I. Cabin fever has really been setting in for all of us so I thought it would be fun to stay the night at a local hotel. We'll go swimming, order pizza and watch movies. Just something to get out of the house! I've pretty much kept it a surprise...they know we are going away and that we need our bathing suits but they don't know where we are staying. I am super excited!
 
My favorite thing this week was...
Definitely the Valentine's Tea Party! I got some really great pictures and it was nice that even though the kids aren't in public school this year they didn't miss out on a class party!
 
What's working/not working for us...
My schedule...or rather, lack of a schedule. It's hard to start at the same time every day and stay on track when I have two little babies to care for. Plus, my husband is still laid off and is home most of the day which just really throws my whole schedule off...well, what schedule I had anyway. Don't get me wrong, I love having him here, it just really messes with me! I am working on writing a "schedule" down because I know I tend to do better when I see something on paper. Who knows how long it will be before I actually get it done...

Homeschool questions/thoughts I have...
Right now I am really thinking about and researching the curriculum that I want to use for next year. When I started this year I chose My Father's World and really thought it was going to be perfect for us. It is a really great program, but for whatever reason it just wasn't meeting our needs. So, as I'm considering next years program I am very nervous. 
 
A photo, video, link, or quote to share... 
Here's a picture (or three) from our Valentine's party

Mrs. Bovee's class: Sammy, Annabelle and Alivia (Sydney is in the picture below)

Mrs. Campbell's class: Ariana and Adalyn.

Hey...the teacher deserves a valentine treat too...right??