Summer Reading Club

The tiny local library has started their summer reading club up. Activities are planned once per week at the library and all books the kids read (or have read to them) are recorded on sheets and turned in. At the end of the club, the kids get a chance to redeem their “book bucks” for prizes and also have a chance to win a bike donated by a local business.

The older kids really enjoyed the first week’s activity. We arrived early enough to pick up our stash of books (eventually maxing out our checkout number). Child #1 who now “loves to read” has already read between two and three (170-210 pg) books per day since then. It is hard to find “suitable” reading material on her reading level in our small town library. We are going to be joining the “big city” library system (1 1/2 hrs drive away) sometime this late summer/early fall to gain access to more books we would like to use for our Story of the World history curriculum and hopefully more books on Child #1’s reading level.

Until then, we are having a great time with the summer reading club, swimming several times a week at the local pool, and hitting local (or regional) kid-friendly events while trying to stay cool!

A new bike

Child #2 recently decided it was time to finally bite the bullet and ride without training wheels. We’ve tried to get her to learn since last fall, but she did not have the confidence in herself to do it. Once she decided she could, she mostly figured it out herself in two days. She wobbled some on the first day and was starting herself on hills and riding comfortably around the block on the second.

It was time to pass her too-small-for-her-anyway training wheel bike onto Child #3, put the training bike (no training wheels) back down in the basement, and get her a bigger bike (20″). We were pretty close to the “big city” today, so we stopped in and picked out her new bike.

The handle bars are wider, the bike is bigger, and she wobbles a bit while riding it. However, I think that she will be back to comfortable in one medium length bike ride. I also think she will be able to keep up with Child #1 who has a much bigger bike. Child #1 has a habit of calling everyone else “slow poke” when riding.

As a really great side effect, Child #3 on the bigger bike is also much faster than when on the smaller bike. Child #3 is also relatively fearless (hopping curbs, riding quickly through broken concrete sidewalk areas) and has a much better sense of balance than either older sibling at the same age.

When I hook up the bike trailer, I can bring Child #4 along and everyone else rides. Depending on the route, I am usually able to ride right along with the older two without stopping too much to help Child #3 through “bad spots.”

The biggest question has become,  “Where will we put / what will we do with all these bikes?”

Keep the change . . .

Seen on a tractor-trailer while driving a mid-Central highway:

I’ll keep my guns, religion, and money. . .
You keep the change!

Summer Session: Day 3

We took a two week break after the official “end” of our school year. We started back up on Monday for a light summer session of schoolwork.

I start out with Child #1 & Child #2 working together on Writing With Ease Level 2. It is primarily for Child #1 who just finished second grade of our homeschool. I determined that she needs to have steady practice in copywork, narration, and dictation. Knowing myself, I won’t give her daily practice in such things unless I have a curriculum that has it all laid out for me. So, I purchased the workbook for WWE2 to do this school year.

Child #2 just finished Kindergarten but she loves to write and does a pretty good job writing in cursive. (I started teaching cursive to them both last summer with sidewalk chalk and continued this last school year with Cursive First.) She needs help in cutting her “narrations” down from a retelling into just a couple-sentence summary. The copywork is a bonus and I don’t expect her to keep up with the dictation as she can’t read or spell well at all yet.

The WWE2 workbook is laid out so that Day 1 is narration. Day 2 is copywork. Day 3 is dictation. Day 4 is narration and then dictation. Days 1 and 2 went pretty well. Day 3 was horrid. I didn’t think Child #2 would be able to do dictation, but she did pretty well – with lots of prompting of how to spell the next word (which she pretty much remembered). Child #1 remembered much of the sentence but showed a lot of frustration when I gently tried to help her with her misspellings (flattery was spelled fatery, off was miswritten oof, guard was gard, etc.) or when she left a word out (your). She quit with three words to go and refused to continue. Eventually, she did write the last three words. But she had to take a break first. I am not looking forward to Day 4 or future Day 3s. I could take her back down to WWE Level 1, but I really don’t think it is necessary. She just needs more practice and more patience! (And I need to continue to have patience.)

My up & coming (pencil-phobic) third grader also started Growing With Grammar 3. It went fine the first two days. She even said she kind of liked it. Today, however, the writing got to her. There isn’t that much, but she was asked to rewrite run-on sentences into two complete sentences. There were about eight of them in the lesson and she balked at the first one. After two separate bouts of crying an hour apart, she took a nap. She’d gotten up at 5 a.m. and I decided she needed to lay down because the histrionics were more like Child #2 than Child #1. She completed the lesson at around 5:30 p.m.

I picked GWG because it is supposed to be easy for the child to do without much direction or teacher-time while also being comprehensive, spiral, quick, and not involve much writing. I have had to go back through the lessons with her each day so far. I will say that it doesn’t take long once she applies herself to the lesson. I find myself spending the time explaining things to her from the student manual and correcting her work as she goes along because she doesn’t seem to “get” the concepts when she puts them into practice. Her sentences frequently don’t end with punctuation and they definitely don’t all start with capital letters. This is why she needs a grammar program. We will continue and see how it goes in a few more weeks.

My little first grade not-wanna-be (she would prefer to stay in K) continues in the Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons book. We left off on Lesson 44 before Christmas due to extreme frustration on both our parts. We lent the book out to a friend in the spring and when it came back, my child actually got the book out on her own initiative and started to “read” the stories. We started back up at around Lesson 15 just doing the story section of each lesson. We finished Lesson 31 today and she does really well. I plan to continue until we get to another roadblock. Then, we’ll switch back to Spell to Write and Read (SWR) phonograms and spelling lists. To be honest, she hates SWR right now, so it is doing us good to take a break.

Both children do some math for about 15-20 minutes. The older child is working on making her addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts come more easily and quickly. We play games, do speed drills (timed/untimed), work with Math Wrap-Ups (timed & untimed), and other activities that is not tied to her official math curriculum. She is already 20 or so lessons into A Beka Arithmetic 3 and I think this time will help her when we start that back up.

The younger child is slowly working through the beginning of A Beka Arithmetic 1. We finished Lesson 19 today and do only about a 1/2 lesson per day (and sometimes less). She is struggling with the concept of reading numbers above 10. (It takes her a long time to “read” 34, 71, 14, etc.) She is also working on her addition and subtraction facts for the zero to five families. She does about five minutes of either flashcard work or oral math response per day as part of each lesson.

These activities have taken about an hour total to complete each day once you subtract the whining and delay tactics each child attempts. I hope the whining gets less as they realize that doesn’t help (i.e., they still have to do the work) and when they get back ‘into the groove’ of doing school each day.

The weather has been chillier than it had been with occasional rain. When it warms back up without the precipitation, they must have their schoolwork done to go to the pool. That will hopefully be a motivating factor as well.

Decluttering

We are taking two weeks off school – from the end of our formal school year and before starting our ‘light’ summer schedule. During this time, I am attempting to declutter the house. We “clean” the house on a regular basis and “pick up” the house even more often. However, there is just too much stuff in the house.

I started in my bedroom a week ago. The first day, the progress was amazing. Visually, you could see the work I did. For the next couple of days, it didn’t look like I had accomplished much else because the “big stuff” was taken care of and I was working on eliminating the smaller items that build up into junk piles.

I moved onto the kitchen. When I work on counters, you can see progress and it is so motivating. When I work on cabinets, there isn’t as much visual feedback, so it can seem to drag on or that I didn’t get much done. So, I have been interspersing cabinets and counter tops for the best self-motivating effect.

I have several of the worst cabinets yet to go and the worst counter top. I’m tackling some of them today with the already-done areas to show me what is truly possible.

The goal is that as each area is decluttered (and cleaned), it will be kept clean (and decluttered) as part of the daily routine. We will see how that goes once we start back up a school schedule.

After the kitchen comes the dining/living room (with the large school materials area) and the toy closet. I don’t think I will have a chance to get to the other closets or kid rooms during this break. I do still have to cook, clean, and keep the kids out of trouble in between the decluttering.

My spouse told me I should have taken before and after photos, but I have them in my mind still. I’d rather just keep the ‘after’ image in my mind daily as we all endeavor to keep them in good shape.

A place for everything and everything in its place!

Potty Training – Week 2

We are into week #2 with potty training Child #3. After two days with no success, we ran into a string of great days (5-7) with one or no accidents. There was only one snag. This child would wait until I put her into a diaper for the night and then poop in it.

By the time Day 8 came around, she couldn’t always hold the poop until the night diaper was put on, so we’ve had a string of days with poop in the underwear. In fact, last night she pooped twice in her underwear within a span of about three hours. She has YET to poop in the potty. She is doing well with peeing in the potty – although she averages about one (peeing) accident a day still if I don’t remind her to go periodically.

She is usually dry come morning, although if she drinks a LOT of water and then stays up for an hour or two, she has been known to be soaking wet around 10 p.m. She doesn’t yet want to actually get up, go to the bathroom, take her diaper off, pee, and then come to me to get the diaper put back on. This is not a big deal at this point.

So, I would say she is 1/3 potty trained as we end day 11 of this saga.

Potty Training – Day 4

So, Child #3 is older than any of the other kids (so far) when attempting potty training. Well, we’ve tried it several other times, but each time was so unsuccessful that we gave up. It was a readiness thing.

But, for the past couple of months, I have known this child was ready. The child was just not willing. Frustrating.

Armed with the threat that this child will not be going to the pool with us if not potty trained, I started again on Thursday. I knew my spouse would be off work for several days after that and that I would have some ‘back up’ help for Days 2 – 6 or so. This is important because I lose focus and sometimes forget about the child who will leak all over the floor without a reminder.

Anyway, I picked starting when spouse was at work because the first day is always really ugly. And it was. Wet, wet, wet, sopping, dripping. Horrible.

The problem was that Day 2 was the same way. Two days. No successes. Nothing. Nada.

Day 3 was very similar up until nap time. I put Child #3 in a diaper with the instructions to “poop.” About 20 minutes later, Child #3 announced that a change was necessary. I KNEW it! This child CAN do it – and was just waiting for the security of the diaper to do it in. (My spouse took this as a very depressing event and was ready to give up again. Not me. This was my proof that this child was READY to potty train.) Shortly after, we had success #1 on the potty (pee). After a long dry break, we had success #2 right before bed.

So, I started Day 4 knowing it is one step forward and two back. Strangely, we only had one “oops” today and it was late in the day. This child can sit and pee on demand, but will not poop on the potty yet. Also, there is not yet any idea of the “feel the urge, hold it, run for the potty” trick. It is all based on timing of the requests by the parents.

We will continue on. The pool opens in less than a week. It will be harder with ’school’ going on. We are just doing testing, so it won’t be as tough as a “normal” school week to fit in potty breaks.

Middle of the Night Request

It is not unusual to have Child #2 visit me in the middle of the night. Usually, it is to tell me she needs to go potty because she thinks it is better to ask than just to use the potty and “wake up Daddy.” (I have tried to explain to her that I am going to always tell her to go use the potty and adding verbage will only increase the chances of waking up Daddy, but she does still occasionally do this.) Sometimes, it is a water bottle that needs to be refilled or “freshened.” But last night was different.

Child #2 came in and after I acknowledged her, she said, “Can I have a toothpick or a needle?”

I was puzzled. Splinter? Something stuck in her teeth? It was 3:30 a.m. and knowing the huge difference between the usage of these two devices, I asked for clarification.

“My nose is stuffed up and I want to clean it out.”

Ahhh. As we headed for a tissue box, I gently explained that neither a toothpick or a needle would be appropriate. I led her through blowing her nose (one nostril at a time, then both together) and sent her back to her room with another tissue.

I wouldn’t want to think of what would have happened if I would have just given her a toothpick without asking why. *OUCH*

She reports that she feels fine today. We will see if that is the beginning of a cold or just a fluke. (Probably, it is the latter.)

Winding Down The School Year & Field Trip Update

Well, we made it to the first field trip of the week, but had to skip the second. (We had two sick!) We were able to hit the third field trip and all had a wonderful time. My spouse used the time while we were all out of the house to reroute some plumbing that involves the main water line. He was also able to get a TON of other things done because we made sure we were gone long enough that there would be water available when we got home!

We are all looking forward to the “end” of formal school work for this school year. We have only one more “official” week of regular work and then testing week comes. That means I have only one week and two weekends to write my “finals” in science, history, and religion! I’ve started scribbling history questions down but have not looked at the others. Better get cracking, eh?!

We’ll take a week off and then start up with “schooling light” for the summer. Oldest will be starting Growing With Grammar 3 and Writing With Ease 2. We will also play some math games or work on flash cards for 10-15 minutes several times a week.

Child #2 will do some light math and phonics work – the nature of which changes depending on the day you ask.

Math: We are trying to cement into her brain written two-digit numerical symbols (such as 34 or 79). She struggles and the concept isn’t coming quickly. Math games and lots of dot-to-dots may be in order.

Language Arts: We may just work on handwriting using sidewalk chalk again this summer. She loves it and I can sneak in reminders of what the phonogram sounds are at the same time. We’ll see.

Field Trips

We are entering our home stretch for the 2008-2009 homeschooling year. Our official last day of school is Memorial Day, but the last week is a “testing” week where once you get tested in a subject, you don’t have to do it again. The days get shorter & shorter as there are fewer and fewer subjects on which to be tested.

Anyway, going into this final few weeks, I find myself faced with numerous field trip opportunities. After pondering each one individually and as a group, I’ve decided that some things are meant to be enjoyed!

To heck with my schedule and trying to fit in more spelling lists or a few more math lessons!

We are going on three field trips this coming week. That is, as long as the kids aren’t sick and they aren’t behaving horribly, we are going on THREE field trips. I’m still going to be able to get (morning) schooling in on one of the days, so I’m only cutting our school week down from four days to two and a half. Still, for I-Must-Stay-On-Schedule Me, that’s pretty ballsy.

Keep in mind:
- We still plan on finishing the history & science curriculum plans I have.
- We are finishing up our last planned chapter in Religion and then we’ll just review during the time we have left.
- I’m so far behind in my plan for older dd’s spelling, it isn’t funny. However, she’s doing so badly on her weekly tests that I don’t know that it matters how many more lists we do this year.
- We already started next year’s math books, so I’m not too worried about our pace there.