Oct 1

Our chalkboard for the feast of St. Therese, the Little Flower

If you can't see it, the prayer on there is one of the easier, traditional novena prayers to St. Therese:

O Little Therese of the Child Jesus,
Please pick a rose for me
From the heavenly gardens
And send it to me
As a message of love.

O little flower of Jesus,
Ask God today to grant the favors
I now place with confidence
In your hands.

(Mention your specific requests)

St. Therese,
help me to always believe,
As you did,
In God's great love for me,
So that I might imitate your
"Little Way" each day. Amen

We are also learning All Creatures of Our God and King during our (sporadic) circle times. At least the kids can hear me sing it all day when we *don't* have circle time, as it's quite stuck in my head. There could be worse things to have stuck in one's head, huh? I had no idea the lyrics were based on St. Francis of Assisi's words -- makes it even more appropriate to sing this week.

This is just the icing on our "average" days...still trying to learn what I'm doing, find some rhythm, deal with some mental hangups (not really school related)' and a busy dh... so the fun bloggable *extras* are minimal. Well, at least the ones I take time to take a picture of, anyway, lol.

Breaking in our new chalkboard: Welcome Autumn!

I apologize for the poor photo quality - our dining room does not get good sun in the morning and the flash made a nasty glare... I wish I could remember where I got the poem to give credit! (which is why I'm not typing it in here)

Our first Waldorf-y chalkboard! :) I think I need some drawing classes. ;-)

Shake ups...

Maggie and I have decided to drop her Oak Meadow curriculum in favor of mostly workbooks. Long story (which I probably don't adequately cover in that link either. So right now she has Spectrum workbooks for both language arts and writing and Teaching Textbooks for math (which she was doing before dropping OM).

So I'm trying to think hard on what to do for science and history with her. Recent tragedies are making it hard for me to think, however, about anything, or deal with our own personal (albeit less tragic) family difficulties.

Juliet is pretty much up to date with her OM (week 5.5 or 6). I'm a little behind with Grace, but it is so easy for her, she will catch up. An upcoming vacation is most likely cancelled, so maybe we'll have that time work.

Nothing really interesting to share as we've just been plugging away. Hopefully soon I'll be adding fun stuff.

FYI

I've changed the girls' blog pseudonyms for a variety of reasons.

Rose is now Juliet.
Skye is Maggie.
Jane is Grace.
Batty is Leah.

Jeffrey is still Jeffrey!

I simply asked the girls what names they would like to be called. Rose said "Juliet" and I liked it so much that I'm not letting her change it, even though she said, "I was just kidding! It's the only other literary character I could think of!" besides Anne of Green Gables and Nancy Drew which she said no to. :-)


They'll be on the sidebar for future reference.

July 28

The last few weeks we have pretty much just stuck to the separate Oak Meadow Schedules. Among other things, Juliet studied ancient Egypt and made a Senet game, Maggie finished a model landscape of our house/yard and also wrote a little paper about Stuart Little, and Grace listened to fairy tales, worked on her handwriting of letters, and learned math concepts with the gnumber gnomes.

I'm tired this week and feeling down - since we had to take yesterday off for a dentist appointment and subsequent picnic with friends, I'm taking the rest of the week off to get caught up with house stuff. Hey, it's summer. Since we are technically three weeks "ahead" - I'm going to run with that and not push myself or the kids. I have seen them blossom creatively in doing their own educational things in the past few days.

Juliet sat down with Grace and Leah and labeled our Sonlight markable map with all the states.

Juliet and Maggie started a family olympics with categories like, "who can stand on one foot the longest," "who can whistle the longest," "who can run the longest without passing out." LOL

They all helped me garden and we talked about the soil, rocks, insects, worms, and flowers. We dug up bulbs that were in the garden (accidentally at first) and they decided to keep them and plant them somewhere else as their own project.

Maggie continues to work on her short stories and character development, writing all sorts of charts, etc.

Grace is reading through her children's bible on her own.

I find it interesting that they were really floundering until I forced some school work on them. But now they are not ONLY doing that work, they are taking some free time to be creative and fun. When we were just "off", they seemed lazy, bored, and were angry and picking on each other. I like this better. Hopefully I can find a good middle ground.

July 9 2009

Had a library visit today. My favorite librarian chided me for only getting 39 books out. I swear our rolling cart was full! LOL I got out a few books for me that were fat, so that took up a lot of cart room. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

A little less got done than usual, although we all seemed to be busy.

Rose - started writing a little Q & A from the perspective of a "cave woman." She did a lesson in TT6 and was very excited that it was on something new (a little geometry) and not the same ol' fractions/decimals/percents that have been plaguing her for months. We got a neat book out of the library called Drawing In Color by Kathryn Temple and she promptly sat down and sketched a great apple. She amazes me!

Skye-library visit, some work on her short stories (these are just stories that she is always writing, usually very American Girl-esque), we did more more tonal drawing instruction (which I believe is just using one color, but darker or lighter, to show the shape of something) and she drew an apple from many different perspectives. This was also science - we examined and cut it and discussed the geometry of it, etc. Skye did 1 or 2 lessons in TT4.

Jane - library visit, reading, TT4, and the rest of the day was playing and trying to clean her room!

The little ones watched a new Signing Time we got from the library, and the older ones watched a Mr. Wizard DVD and a Kit (American Girl) movie. At least I think it was Kit...

Some Week 1 Photos

Our future Gnumber Gnomes drying. I tried attatching the felt for their robes with glitter glue, but it turns out our glitter glue is more like glitter slime. So I decided to smear the glitter slime all over the front and just glue (when I buy some more!) the felt on to the back and for a hat. My girls like sparkly:

They're drying next to the apples we used for our taste test!


Skye's main lesson book.
Our house from the sidewalk:


And our backyard from the house:


Here's the real thing:



Some things from Rose's MLB:
Spelling words. We're not actually using OM as her spelling curriculum - i.e. I'm not going to test her on these. She's not *there* yet. But I thought it couldn't hurt for her to copy them and make sentences.


Her map of Africa and Europe:

I need to teach her the art of gentle background shading. :)

That's all for now, I'll try to share some of Jane's first grade work next time.