Preparing for School

Today was our 7th day of school.  Woot!  That is an accomplishment in and of itself.  In the weeks leading up to the start of this school year I took each of the children out for a teacher/student school planning meeting (actually still have a couple to do!).  We went somewhere fun.  With food.

During this meeting I showed each of the children some of their new school books and one of their blank assignment pages for this year.  The work listed on each assignment page is for one week, and they will eventually get a spiral bound notebook with all 36 assignment sheets for the entire year.  We are still a 20th century family when it comes to assignment sheets.... I fill them in with pencil for each upcoming week.  My children do not have their own phones or digital devices, and the old fashioned pencil way still works well for us!

Also during the meeting each child and I discussed goals for this year.  Goals are not a new idea for us, but this year my husband and I challenged the children to come up with three goals for the school year: one academic, one personal, and one spiritual.  To help them with goal setting I showed them this picture:

This eliminated some early goal suggestions such as, "I want to do better in school."  ;)

As each child set goals for themselves, I typed them up in contract form and they, myself (the teacher), and my husband (the principal) all signed the contract.  The contracts will be posted in the school room all year, where the children can see them, remember their goals, and assess how they are doing.

Just the process of setting measurable, realistic goals was such a good exercise for the children!  It is not always easy to do.  I am hopeful this will help to keep us all focused and on track, and give us a sense of accomplishment at the end of the year when we see how we have met our goals.  We may not have done "everything" we wanted to do, or as well as we wanted to, but if we focus on a few things that are important and do those well, that is success!  (something this mama needs to remember too!)

Many thanks to my friend April for the goal graphic and the idea to post the contracts in a visible place!

Our Week in Review

I had such a great week!  It was the perfect blend of play and productivity.  LOVE when that happens!

We enjoyed a fun afternoon swimming with these sweet little friends:

Got a lot of printing done for this upcoming year of school.  All the timeline figures for the entire year, all the maps for Unit 1 of history (9 weeks).  Made, printed, and bound my very own school weekly planner thingie.  That's its official name. ;-)  Planned when to read these lovely gems that I purchased used from another homeschool mom who has just graduated her last child!  sniff, sniff

A couple months ago I went to a warehouse book giveaway and brought all these gems home for free!   The bottom five were all brand new, still in their shrink wrap (all Jane Austen books, except for Crime and Punishment), and will be read by our high schooler.  The top two are literature books for son C to read this year (fifth grade).

Our 10th grader's chemistry book came in the mail.  It looks pretty daunting.  I will be reading/learning it along with her, so it will stretch me!

Also got the half bath cleaned.  Yay!  (votemom, you can use it now)
Load of stuff by the door taken to Salvation Army.  Double yay!!
Bag of clothes sold to a consignment store.  Triple yay!!!
Read outloud to all the children for 30 minutes every day.  Quadruple yay!!!!

Preparing for School - Weeks of July 18 and 25

The following projects were all cumulative ~ I began them one week on my "Ross day" and finished them all the following week. The timeline notebook on the left is our daughter's that I bought 3 years ago at Rainbow Resource. Our rising 6th grader, son G, has graduated from the wall timeline to having his own notebook timeline, but since the one our daughter uses has been discontinued, I decided to copy hers and make up my own notebook for him. His new timeline notebook is on the right.



Our daughter started her timeline notebook around about the 1500's A.D, so all the pages before that are still blank. I just copied them all onto beige cardstock, and voila! A timeline notebook. The earliest events as recorded in the Bible are left blank as to a date. This is the first page of their notebooks.


I then downloaded and printed out timeline figures from the Tapestry of Grace Year 1 yahoo group. I printed two copies, one for each of our children who keeps a timeline notebook.


Then I filed them in their weekly file (file folders numbered 1-36). Tuesday is normally our timeline day, so when they see the 3 x 5 card in their workbox that says "timeline" they can go get the figures from these files (on my desk) and then cut and glue them into their notebooks.


I also printed out all the lapbook pages and maps for all 4 units of Year 1 and put them in page protectors at the front of the corresponding week in my Tapestry of Grace binder.


I'm so glad the bulk of my annual summer printing is over!!

Summer Fun! (and co-op planning)

I mentioned that our co-op moms met together (all 3 of us now that Angela has moved away ~ boo hoo!) and planned out the writing portion of our co-op for this coming year. Our kids also had a chance to swim and play together - which they dearly loved!





This is a short video showing each of the children on the slip 'n slide. It will put a smile on your face!!




As the children played, us moms were able to: schedule out the entire year, which weeks we would be meeting, schedule which lesson of our writing curriculum would be taught each week, and schedule who was teaching which lessons. I feel so good about what we accomplished!


This year we will be using another IEW product called "Student Intensive Continuation Course - B", or SICC-B for short (just like "sick-b"). It picks up where our writing class left off last year, and will be a rigorous class for our older children. Each week there will be a dvd lesson taught by Andrew Pudewa, and then the writing teacher will help the students begin outlining and practicing the new "dress ups" and "decorations" prior to their homework assignment.

Since all 3 families are using Tapestry of Grace (though not the same year plan), we each plan to substitute the content of the homework assignments with topics from our history studies, which means the moms will grade their own children's work rather than the writing teacher doing it. We also have to adjust SICC-B down considerably for our younger writers which will require another gab session, oops! I mean planning meeting. ;-) But we got a lot decided!

As an aside, doing SICC-B along with a grammar program (such as IEW's Fix-It which our family will be using) and literature discussion (which is included in Tapestry of Grace's program) counts as 1 English credit. So at the end of this school year, our daughter G will have earned her first "official" high school credit!

Our younger children, who did the young 5's alphabet class last year, will be working through several books from Five In a Row, Volume 1 (more on that later). We will essentially have 3 groups, 2 writing groups and the Five in a Row class, and just 3 moms. So Friday mornings are going to be busy! But we are very excited for our upcoming year and are thankful for likeminded families and good friends to learn with!

Preparing for School - Week of July 11

This week on my "Ross day" I mapped out hands on activities and center activities for units 1 and 2 of Tapestry of Grace Year 1. That is half the year! We are really looking forward to going back to the beginning and studying the ancient world with Tapestry. It has been 5 years since any of our children studied ancient history, and then it was primarily just our daughter. Little Man wasn't even born yet!

In preparation for this, I quickly made a form on the computer that just listed out different areas of study. Us perfectionists can easily spend hours creating the "perfect" form, and I didn't want making the form to take up all my time, so it's just super simple and I realized later that I had left off a couple things. But it just helps me to tie everything together for a week of study ~ such as what hands on activity to do that week, what science we hope to complete that week, if L and C will make timeline figures that week, any special books or activities for Little Man to do in kindergarten that week, etc.

This was my work area:

And this is the form I made. Click on the picture to enlarge if you want to see the details. I have to go through this stack again and add science and writing assignments, but I got all our history activities mapped out for half the year! This will help insure that the fun supplemental activities will actually be used, and the hands on activities will actually be done. Whoo-hoo!!!

Preparing for School - Week of July 4

Now that it's already July (how did that happen??) I have begun to plan and prepare for our next school year in earnest. Though I do love planning our school year, I try not to let this take over my whole summer. In order to have focused, uninterrupted prep time, and to help hold me accountable to one day a week, I was able to enlist the help of a high school friend of mine. Ross comes to watch the children for me one day a week for several hours so I can focus on school prep. I love, love, love this!!! It has been working out very well, and I am so thankful for his good care of the children and for all I have been able to accomplish while he is here.

Here is what I did this past week on my "Ross day".

I made "Fix It" grammar notebooks for my three older children. Fix It is another wonderful product made by IEW, the same company that produces our writing curriculum. In it there are 5 different classic stories (for different ages) that have grammar errors imbedded in them. Each day the children try to find the errors in ONE sentence. Yes, just one sentence! As they edit and correct, we discuss the appropriate grammar rules and then they rewrite the sentence correctly. By the end of the school year, they will have edited and rewritten the entire story! I love that it is broken down into very small chunks each day, and I love that the grammar rules will be very relevant because they are tied to writing. A few years ago my daughter used Editor in Chief, which is another error finding and fixing workbook, but neither of us were happy with it for several reasons. Of course we haven't actually used Fix It yet, but it looks far superior to EiC, and I'm excited to give it a try!


I purchased the teacher book, and then downloaded the student pages from the IEW website. I printed out these student pages, they are pictured below on the left. Each page represents a week's worth of work, 1 sentence to correct for each of 4 days. I found some blank lined pages here and printed them on the facing page, so my children can easily re-write the corrected sentences each week. This will also be cursive writing practice for all three of them (bonus!! penmanship practice taken care of too!).

I printed out a few pages that have space at the top for drawing pictures to go along with the story, since all our children love to draw!


By the way, I just want to put in a plug for my friend Debra and her fantastic website, notebooking pages.com. She has several sets of notebooking pages for sale, for all different subjects, and she also has a FREE section where I found the pages for our Fix It notebooks. She also has lots of samples and encouraging articles on how to use notebooking in your homeschool. Click on the button in my right sidebar to visit her website.


I was also able to prepare two more posters for our poster center. Centers are not a new idea to me, but I had never explored ways to make them work for us until last summer when I read about the Workbox System. We don't have tons of room and I just didn't think I could be creative enough to make centers work in our limited space and with our limited budget. However, Sue Patrick explains in her book how centers can be such a great way to reinforce learning in a fun way ~ so much so that children don't even realize they are still learning! They can also break up the day, giving a nice change of pace from bookwork.

I realized that since posters are flat and don't take up much space, that was a "center" I could do pretty easily. We used our poster center this past year and the children loved it! Over the years I had already acquired several posters, so as I was able I bought second posters identical to the first. Sue's point about a poster center, is that it needs to be interactive to be effective. So I followed her guidelines and cut out all the pieces of the second, matching poster.


Then I put velcro on the original poster and on the backs of all the matching pieces. Voila! Last fall I taught the children how to use the poster center. When they stick the matching piece onto the poster, they must either name the piece or say the word on the piece. This way they are seeing the item, saying the name of the item, and hearing themselves say the name of the item, all at the same time. Multi-sensory!

I have been blessed to find posters covering specific topics that I wanted to practice with the children. Here is one of our new ones for this fall:


Here is our poster center collection so far. We will use just 2 or 3 at a time in our poster center (which is the back of a toy bin shelf, which sticks out into the room creating a little "wall").


Each week I plan to post what I get done on my "Ross day", so stay tuned!