"Prepared", As Defined By My 5 Year Old

Normally, each day I write out my kids individual assignments for school on some cute but cheap little blue note paper & distribute them. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ways to do this, but it's workin' for us right now. At any rate, I still haven't planned out E's preschool. So I was feeling quite a bit of mom guilt once again as this conversation ensued:

E: Mama, do you have my school work prepared?

Me: Prepared? (tee hee)

E: Yeah, prepared.

Me: No, baby I don’t, but I love that you used such a big boy word like “prepared”.

E: (tapping my arm) No, no, no, mom. It means did you get ready for me!

Me: Yes, I know what it means. No, I do not have it prepared for you. (Grabbing him in a bear hug, kissing his cheek, and still giggling) You are just too cute!


Despite the mom guilt, there was a certain sense of pride that my baby knew what prepared meant & could use it correctly in a sentence! LOL

Spelling City

Have you heard of Spelling City? Do you use it? We've been using Spelling City for a few years now. It's totally free and a great way for the kids to practice their spelling words. They can play all sorts of fun spelling and vocabulary words, then take a test. When my kids were in public school I just entered the lists that they brought home. Now I use the lists from our current curriculums. When they can pass all the words on Spelling City, then they can go take their curriculum test. My kids LOVE it!

You can use other people's lists as well. So if you use Switched-On Schoolhouse Language Arts 300 or 400, I have most of lists that we've already accomplished. If you use Heart of Dakota's Bigger Hearts for His Glory, I have Units 1-7. If you want to use my lists, just search under "parent" for Jenny Beasley.

Please note that not all words and phrases are currently recognized by Spelling City. This hasn't been much of a problem for us though. Go check it out! If this has been useful to you, stop back by and let me know! :)

Math-U-See Giveaway from TheHomeSchoolMom

The Home School Mom is a newsletter I subscribe to because they have good information for homeschoolers and mommies in general.  They are giving away the Math-U-See DVD, teacher's manual, and student worktext GAMMA level. They are used, but not written in (except for a name). I've looked in Math-U-See several times, but end up going with something else for various reasons. Lil' C might be in the Gamma level next year, but I'd need to have her take the placement test to know for sure.

If this is something you'd be interested in, go enter the giveaway right away. I'm not sure when it ends, so better hurry just in case! :)
While you're there, check out their sister site Menus4Moms. They have free & paid weekly dinner menus as well as ton of information on menu planning. The Busy Cooks Pyramid is very helpful. It tells you how to cook ahead and fill up your freezer without doing once a month cooking.

I Will Survive- Homeschool Version

I received the link to this video from our home school group leader, and as today is our first day of school (plus one of my favorite songs EVAH...did I mention I saw Gloria Gaynor perform this live once?) I thought it would be appropriate.

1st Day of School!

We started the main part of our curriculum today! Last year's curriculum was great, but not for us. It involved way too much time on my part & lots of reading aloud, which sounds really nice, but didn't work so well with two little people running around and screaming. Very hard to concentrate on history, science and whatnot with all that commotion.

Now we are using Switched On Schoolhouse (SOS) by Alpha Omega. Bug and Lil'C are most excited about having their own computers & doing school on them. I am most excited about the absence of papers and paperwork. We STILL have paperwork from last year all over my desk & the family room.

We have other "electives" like handwriting, art & life skills that we will be starting later. I will try to take pix of everything and post them. Pinky Lee will also be starting some preschool things, but for now she is learning her colors and counting by playing Candy Land, the Winnie the Pooh edition! Here are Lil'C and Bug hard at work.

(Please excuse the messy craft room...the new arrangement is NOT working out)

Homeschool Christmas Party 2009

On Friday, we had our homeschool group Christmas party. The kids had fun making all kinds of crafts from hand painted sun catcher ornaments to chocolate covered cherry mice. (YUM!) Pinky Lee had fun making stuff, but Boo Boo Bear was only interested in playing with the glitter glue and eating cookies, so he played outside most of the time. Doesn't he look so cute trying to ride that bike? The adults brought cookies and had a cookie exchange. Then Bug and Lil' C played with the Uke-A-Doodlers again. Do you see all the chocolate on Lil' C's face? I told her twice to go wash her face, but apparently that chocolate was just stubborn! Oh well. It was fun and we all had a good time.

Uke-A-Doodlers Christmas Performances

Bug and Lil' C take ukulele lessons with other children in our homeschool group. For Christmas, they performed many Christmas favorites at our court house, Wal-Mart, and the homeschool Christmas party. They were very cute!

The Field Trip That Almost Wasn't

A few weeks ago, our homeschool group took a trip 3 hours away to go to a pumpkin patch/apple orchard that had all sorts of fun things to do. Our day started out around 530am in the middle of a torrential downpour and thunderstorm. It rained for most of the trip, but just when got near the pumpkin patch, the sky cleared up a bit & the sun began to shine. We were highly disappointed to pull up and find it closed! :( We went to the little store owned by the same people & tried to sweet talk them into opening up for us since we had just driven three hours to see them, but it was a no go. I did get a couple pix of the kids playing games in the store's cafe while they waited. It was finally decided that we would drive back to San Antonio to visit the Witte Museum. Our family had never been there, although we'd gone by it on the zoo train before. The museum turned out to be great fun! There was something for everyone: dinosaurs, movies, art, live animals, and a science "treehouse" that was fun for everyone. I'd like to go back some day because we didn't get to see everything, and I think everyone would enjoy it again.

Museum Pictures

Homeschool for Free!

If you are on Facebook, there is a page called "Homeschool for Free" that you can join, and they send out announcements when they find free things on the internet for homeschoolers to use. Sometimes there's some good stuff, so add them! I haven't been on Facebook for awhile :0 but today saw this link for a Christmas Lapbook. I hope this is the right link. I just copied and pasted from Facebook. I've never done a lapbook before, so I think we might use this one (or a version of it) as a break from our regular studies over Christmas break. If you've used a lapbook before, let me know what you think, and if you have any tips. Happy Lapbooking!

Busy Beaz Academy: First Few Weeks & Organization

So, you're probably wondering how the heck the homeschooling is going. Well, day one and the rest of that week was disappointing, to say the least. I had worked for weeks trying to make a schedule & plan things out so that everything would get done just so. I was feeling all sorts of crazy things & made the decision to start the same day as the public schools did. This was my first mistake. We weren't ready. I watched as my perfect schedule fell apart in a matter of hours. Soooo, after a few days like that, we took a few steps backwards, re-grouped, re-thought, and relaxed. Now, it was easy to see the flaws in my plan. I rearranged the schedule so that we do little kid activities after our first group time instead of after nap. Some of the activities that I thought Bug & Lil' C could do together needed to be done individually, so I split them up. Now, each kid gets plenty of one on one time. I also realized that we just can't get an entire days worth of the written lessons done in one day right now. I had thought about breaking it up before, but couldn't figure out how. Now I've found a solution that seems to be working for us. I've had time to get more organized as well. All of that to say that things are going much better now. We've completed 3 full weeks of homeschool now, and we're starting to find our groove. We've been talking about "persistance" in our lessons, and for us, it's starting to pay off! Yea!

Here is a picture of our "school room". It's our family room that's been converted to be used as a school room too, although we alternate between the futon in the family room, the dining room table, and the kids desks. Here are Bug & Lil' C's workboxes. I made the numbers with the pre-made workbox numbers from Melissa Renfro.

These are Pinky Lee's workboxes that I made using Melissa Renfro's blank workbox templates. Cute, if I do say so myself. And, of course, I do. The workboxes are working well so far. I've been using them more and more each day, and I've created a planning sheet that I plan to use this week to really make the most of them. Any work the child can do independently is placed in a workbox. This can be anything from their daily math worksheet to a coloring book, reading assignments to crafts. They really enjoy this. So far, there have only been 2 problems with this.

1. Pinky Lee & Boo Boo Bear take great joy in pulling all the boxes out.

2. Bug & Lil' C always want me to help them while I'm working with the other one.

I didn't make the little tags for Help from Mom, where they only get 3 helps per day, but I'm probably going to have to. The pulling the boxes out? Yeah, that's going to be an ongoing process I'm afraid.

This is a picture of Bug's Schedule Strip & Schedule. The schedule strips were also made using Melissa Renfro's templates. These are wonderful, God Bless that woman. She is very talented and I'm grateful that she shared these for free, since she usually gets paid for her work. You can find more of it on her website or at Scrap Girls. I also downloaded her fabulous caterpillar file folder game, but due to a printer problem, have yet to assemble it. (But I plan to!) I hope she comes up with more great stuff for us homeschoolers!
I probably took the schedule strip thing a bit too far, but that's kind of like me. I used them to not only schedule the school day, but the ENTIRE day. I'm so tired of reminding the kids 50 times a day to make their bed, feed the dog, etc. that I'm hoping this will help. Everything they have to do each day is on their strip. When they have completed it, the take the task off & put it in the cute little envelopes I made to hold them. This way, they can see what they have done so far and what they still have to do. This is still a work in progress for all of us. We don't love schedules, so it's taking us a while to fall into this one. However, I'm pretty sure if just DO it, it will work.

This is Pinky Lee's desk. We bought it a couple years ago at a garage sale for $10. It also doubles as a high chair, but we've never used it that way. Too cute, though.
Here is my lovely, organized bookshelf. I've organized it even more since then. I love organized stuff. *sigh*
So, that's how it's going & how it looks. If you're using workboxes, schedule strips, HOD, or whatever, please feel free to leave comments or links to let me know how things are going for you as your school year begins. Or how things are going now that your kiddos are back at school!

I know this was a long post...sorry! I still have so much to catch up on, so I'm planning on making multiple posts per day to try to catch up. Keep checking back!

Busy Beaz Academy: Grand Opening

*Note: this post is very long, and my 5th for the day, so make sure you keep going to get all of the recent posts. I've been busy trying to catch up!

Now, we are proud to announce the Grand Opening of the Busy Beaz Academy!

We will be starting our inaguaral semester on Monday, August 17th.

This is a decision that we did not come to lightly. We have been in constant discussion and prayer for nearly six months now. Bug & Lil' C both had excellent teachers who tried very hard with them last year. However, there were just so many things that didn't go well, that we started discussing the option of homeschooling. We even asked the kids what they thought. As a family, we finally came to the conclusion that teaching our children at home would be the best option.

I've spent several months finding just the right curriculum. I researched to find the teaching and learning styles that would work best for each of us, and got on many homeschool message boards to ask around, not sure if I could find one curriculum that would fit our Charlotte Mason, Classical & Unit Studies interest. (If you want to know more about these teaching/learning approaches, just do a search & you will find plenty of info!) Amazingly enough, about 90% of fellow homeschoolers recommended Heart of Dakota, which I had never heard of. I finally decided this was the perfect fit for us. Almost. I'm substituting the recommended math program, and supplementing the english program. Here is the bulk of our curriculum:

Here is the math program we will be using, Saxon Math. Heart of Dakota (HOD) recommends Singapore Math, but after doing the placement tests for several different programs, we felt this would be the best for us. Mommy isn't so good with math & this is totally scripted for me. You may be wondering why we have Math 2 & 3 instead of 2 & 4. Despite being quite good at math, Bug just didn't learn multiplication all that well, so we decided to drop back to Math 3 to make sure he really learns that before we move on to division. Don't worry though, most of this will be review for him (and some for Lil' C!), so we will probably do more than one lesson a day & be caught up before next year.
Here are our science books. True to Charlotte Mason teaching, HOD follows the belief that children will learn more from "living" books than textbooks. Textbooks are often written by a committee of people with a political agenda, while living books are usually written by one (sometimes more) person with a passion for the subject. This in turn makes the reader more interested in the subject.

This is the HOD teacher's manual. As you can see, we will be using the "Bigger Hearts for His Glory" program. It works for 7-9 year olds, with extensions for older children. We will be using a few of the extensions with Bug, but otherwise they will be studying everything except math together. This is a life saver for me! All the lessons are laid out in a two-page daily format. No more lesson planning!!

These are the history & geography books. In case you hadn't guessed from the science books, we will be studying American History from 1500-1970. The entire program revolves around the history teachings. When we learn about Columbus, we will also learn about the seashore in science, maps in geography, persistance in Bible study, and related art projects. Thanks to our trip to the Wright Brothers museum, I have an additional 2 books we will be using when we reach that unit.

Here are our music & Bible study books:

This book belongs to me. We've had it a few years, can you tell? LOL I will be using this as our preschool curriculum. Each week we read a book (at least once a day), and do one or more coordinating activities every day. It's the same concept as Five in A Row, but much, much cheaper.

I ordered this Spanish book a few months ago, but am not real sure how I'm going to help them since I don't know the pronounciations. However, just this week, I found a FREE online Spanish course that sounds everything out for you. I can't find the link right now, sorry. Just let me know if you want me to find it for you! So I will be adding that in as well.

Here is our handwriting book. It's beginning Italic cursive, which is easy and looks legible! LOL

This is "Drawn Into the Heart of Reading" which can also be found on the HOD website. It is a multi-level reading program, that helps students explore the 9 genres. Bug will be doing this in full. Depending on how quickly she moves through the Emerging Reader books, Lil' C may use this in an extended version.

These are our Language Arts books. HOD recommends the Rod & Staff "Preparing to Build" book. I wasn't so sure, so I found this other program from Advanced Training Institute. It was expensive, and I was kind of disappointed when it arrived. It has good material & activities, but is really scattered, so I ended up ordering the R&S book as well. We will use both because I love English. Weird, I know.

The kids will also be using several on-line learning sites that we like, including our favorite: Spelling City. We are also making File Folder Games (again just do a search) for fun review. For Christmas, each child recieved a recorder, and if we can find the accompanying books, we will use those as well. We'd really like to get the kids proper music lessons in piano & guitar, but don't really know how much that might cost.

As for activities outside the house, Bug is in football and Lil' C is in cheerleading again. This occupies about 15 hours of our time every week. We will also be joining our local homeschool group when they start up again in September. There are about 30 families who currently belong, so I'm sure the children will have plenty of other kids to play with. I know some of you worry about this, but there's really no need to. We aren't going to "move to a cave, start collecting lint, and only come out on Triple Coupon Thursdays"! (quote by Dave Ramsey)

We are also going to be implementing Sue Patrick's Workbox System for organization. I will write more about that when I get it all set up.

I will do periodic updates of how school is going, so don't forget to check back!