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We started August 13th into our sixth year of homeschooling and this is the first year I've actually liked it. If you wonder why I did it the previous five years when I didn't like it at all, it's because my husband and I both felt called by the Lord to do it, so I did it out of obedience. Believe me, there were times I BEGGED God to let me stop, but I always knew in my heart that I should continue; that despite myself, God was blessing my children and my work.

This year we were convicted to put our oldest into ninth grade at the public high school. So far it has been a good (albeit challenging) change for him. Of course God knows what we need and He has blessed me with the BEST curriculum and school year ever here at home! I love homeschooling with HOD. I am so used to dreading the day but just doing it anyway, that I continually shake my head throughout the day as I enjoy every subject more than the next. I don't dread anything we do throughout the day. It's amazingly wonderful. Of course my two girls still at home help in that department since they are both bright and eager to learn and have such sweet attitudes (most of the time, but the Bible verses and Godly character traits we are focusing on are helping in that area! )

OK, I've gushed enough. I have some pictures and details on my blog so I'll try to keep this short (although I'm so excited, it will be difficult!)

Monday Baylee (11) was Captain John Smith who was trading food and treats with Izzi (9), a native American. They mimed for communication since they didn't speak the same language. In science, they made a chart of the different types of mollusks along with drawings. They designed and colored Indian blankets today for art that turned out beautiful. They worked really hard on these activities and were so happy.
When I introduced the Bible verse and Godly character trait on Monday, they "fought" each other to be the one that made up the hand motions. Izzi brought up The Boy Who Cried "Wolf" to demonstrate how being untruthful can damage your trustworthiness. Baylee talked about how a boss expects their employees to show up on time and do what they are told and if they prove to be untrustworthy, they get fired. And we talked about how being untrustworthy not only hurts us, but reflects badly on Jesus. We used the word "trustworthiness" to talk about prefixes, suffixes, and how "-ness" added to the end of words turns adjectives into nouns.
We talked about The Arrow and how it is a metaphor for a man's life and how God controls it. We focused on similes and metaphors and why some words are capitalized in the poem; which is interesting because in Grammar (Baylee is using Abeka for this) she is studying capitalization. I love it when God works things like that out! With Izzi, I started her halfway through the year of Emerging Readers and am going to use DITHOR after Christmas. It is too easy for her, but she loves it and right now, that is more important to me. We do 2-3 days worth each day and it still only takes about 15 minutes. I am alternating spelling and dictation with her every week. We both like that. Baylee does the highest level of dictation in the Preparing manual (which I bought to use next year) and has not had to repeat a single day, so it must be too easy for her. But it gives her so much confidence, so we'll just work our way through it!
I read on here that someone uses the extension pack readers for read-alouds and I think that is a great idea. Baylee is reading Pocahontas and the Strangers and it seems really interesting. We read Phillis Wheatley and are now on Come On, Seabuiscuit. Both the girls dislike math but their attitude about doing it has already improved since the rest of school is so fun!
Well, I could write more but this is already so long so I'll stop now! Thanks for another good week, Carrie!

Oh, Andrea! I am thrilled for your little sweeties and your great start to your school year. I am so glad that the Lord is blessing you for honoring your call to homeschool your kiddos. My hubby and I are blessed that you are feeling a new sense of satisfaction and enjoyment from your schooling too! I agree that we all need that!

It sounds like you are doing a wonderful job with your girls and have much to praise the Lord for in your lives! Thanks so much for sharing!

Blessings,
Carrie

This week was an even shorter week than normal. I have been so tired, and having trouble sleeping at night (isn't that an oxymoron kind of situation!?). So, I've not been getting up early enough to get started early, and we've let some things go this week. We even took Wednesday 'off' because Mom just could not get it together! And Tuesday was my 13th wedding anniversary...woohoo!

We did complete the reading of Pedro's Journal and began Pocahontas and the Strangers. The kids are very excited that they will be learning about the 'Indians'. My oldest even picked out Pocahontas at the library because "it goes with our studies"; his words. My youngest is such a copycat of his older brother that he was saying, "Mom, don't you want this book...it would go so good with school" even though it was nowhere near any of our school subjects right now! They were happy to do the Science drawing yesterday...of the different creatures 'down by the sea' and 'in a shower'. They love anything even close to 'art' so that qualifies...mix science with art and they are on cloud nine! We continue to move ahead in English and Math. They are several days ahead in Math because they love the workbooks with Singapore. Yeah! I just figure they'll slow down soon enough when it gets more difficult...with ds we want him to get to 4A by January anyway, so we're moving along quickly toward that end. In English, dd is right on track. I'm very happy with what she's learning. My ds is doing 2 lessons a day, usually only half of each section, because much of it is review at this point and we want him to move into level 4 in January for English as well.

I did not get to LHTH with my youngest ds this week...my late schedule each day did not allow for that. I need to tweak my schedule, then STICK TO IT, and we will be able to get that in.

We went to co-op today, and everyone had a great time. I'm glad we're adding that to our schedule this fall. I also had a good time in my class...just discussing homeschooling...and fellowship-ing with the other moms afterward. It's going to be good for all of us, I think. I had an awesome time in the class I am co-teaching. It's 4 & 5 year olds (only 5 of them) and we're reading a Bible story, learning a verse to go with it, and doing a coordinating craft. Simple and fun...I love working with little kids! It's nice to be back in the 'classroom' in some capacity.

That's our week...abbreviated, but still productive.

even tho the kiddies were sick we still got 3 full days of school done this week woot!

I had to share my photo my dd2 asked for a camel to play DDDD dusty camel.. then I caught her being Rebekah watering the servants camels. How sweet is that!



ah the joys of concrete floors...

My first week in review! It only took us two weeks to do week one of Bigger Hearts...LOL. Mainly that's because we were easing in and both weeks were short weeks. After two weeks I can say that Bigger Hearts for his glory is a great fit for my 9-12 yo's (approx. grades 2,4,6). My 14 yo who has special needs also enjoyed the readings I have additional material for him, mainly using videos and he does not do too many of the activities.

It's our 10th year homeshooling so I can wing it but I love that I don't have to, since we're so busy with co-op and some other activities. I can open my guide and be ready to go on Tuesdays after our busy Mondays at co-op. The readings are a good length for my boys especially. This is a good fit for us. My younger three loved the activities in just week 1 and can't wait to see what we get to do next week. We did the painting of waves, balloon globes, drawing our own map of Columbus' jouney, timeline in a file folder. all of those were very well received by the kids. I know we are meant to do a separate post with just our HOD week but I haven't had a chance so if anyone cares to look the pictures of our HOD days are spread through several posts on my blog. http://anothernaturewalk.blogspot.com/
They're mixed in with other homeschooling stuff and just every day life.

Jodi using Bigger Hearts for his glory

I don't have a review this week as we took it off for a few reasons, but I love reading others' reviews!

And I want to say how much fun my daughter had at her first day of co-op this week...and Jodi is one of her teachers! Evelyn can't wait to bring in the picture of the HUGE catapiller we found at Nana's house to Mrs. Jodi for the animals/habitats class! It is a Cecropia moth catapiller (http://www.geocities.com/rainforest/5479/) ....very cool!

Hi Kelly (waving), I will look forward to hearing about and seeing the caterpiller, sounds cool!! I was so glad to meet you and Evelyn. The first day of co-op was so rushed though, I realized afterwards that I didn't even take a peek at your new baby! I'm so looking forward to teaching the children more about animals and habitats this year. Look forward to getting to know a fellow HOD-ie too, we will convert the whole co-op over time, I'm sure .

Jodi

Tansy - I just love your cute camel on the floor! Concrete floors would be fun. Your dd looks like she is loving her learning. (Acting out the stories is a favorite at my house, too. Today Rebekah (Allison ) was very disappointed that she couldn't get Isaac (little brother Garret ) to marry her.

Jodi - I loved reading your blog posts. Your kiddos look like they enjoy learning & exploring. I think you're gonna love Bigger... We are! How fun that you & Kelly get a real-life friends who use HOD, too!

Wendy - Saying a little prayer that you get to sleeping better. Pregnancy & tiredness... yep, they seem to go together. (But precious children are SO worth the inconvenience!) I'm glad that you're taking it easy and not pushing too hard. You're almost to the "fun" part of pregnancy! I bet you get that energy back soon.

Andrea - we're in exactly the same spot (for now)! I'm so glad that you've found HOD and are loving schooling your girls! What a precious gift that is! Keep sharing all your fun memories! I love to hear them!

OK...here's our week. My LHTH'ers are always excited to do school! The finger plays are still their favorite part...and I get to hear them A LOT through the day. While Garret is thoroughly enjoying doing school with us, LHTH is especially perfect for Allison. She is just soaking it up! It's perfect for her in every way. She loves the dramatic play, which helps her remember the Bible stories so much better. She is pointing out letters and sounds all day as she sees them wherever we go or hears them in words. It's so fun to see the "language lightbulb" go off in her little head! Here's a picture of our "picnic" with Abraham's visitors from heaven. Allison got to set the places, and Garret found our "friends". He didn't want to stick around for the picnic though.

Here is a picture of one of the things I pull out for Alli and Garret to play with while Grant and I are doing his school...the bean box.


Grant did 5 days of Bigger this week. It went really well, too! I can definitely see progress in learning some of the Bigger...skills already. The vocabulary cards were the hardest for us to start with, and they're going much faster now. I've been doing the writing for 2 words and walking him through what to do for the words, and then letting him do 1 all by himself.

We loved starting the week with our bartering. It was a great activity to help him understand how John Smith could trade with the Indians. And of course he loved getting to eat the snacks he traded for! (We didn't have a chance, but we wanted to play the game "Settlers of Catan". It's a family favorite, and is totally dependent on trade to get the resources you need.) Actually, all the history activities were favorites this week. (It would be way too hard to choose one!! ) I had to join in on biting graham crackers into the shapes of the continents and making a world map. We were very proud of them, and had to invite Grandma over to look before they were eaten. (Grant's is on the left, mine's on the right.)

Grant loved making his "Indian blanket", and the acrostic of Pocahontas' name, too. It's fun to see him so proud of his work!

We did all 5 days of school this week so we could finish talking about John Smith and Pocahontas (before our 10 days off with the weekends and our trip) AND read the last 5 pages of our Biography. Our family has loved learning about George Rogers Clark! Grant has been sure to keep dad filled in on what's happening if dad wasn't there when we read for the day. It's been fun to read about such an interesting hero that loves so many of the things that Grant does!

We've had a week off of DITHOR. I mentioned last week that we were waiting to finish our "Family Celebration" of dove hunting. Well, last night was the 1st night that the weather cooperated, and we made our way to the pasture and had a great time! We didn't come home with any dove ...but that sure didn't deter a fun celebration! Here are the "serious hunters" scanning the sky for dove.

The "Jr. Hunters" with their own "weapons"...sitting a ways away with mom so as not to scare the dove away from the "serious hunters". (We ended up joining them after about 15 minutes though...)

And our 2 labs, Shadow & Hunter, waiting for some action...


We're headed out to Colorado for a week enjoying the Rocky Mountains as a family! I'm so excited!! (So are the kids...we've been talking it up, and Garret is even excited about Colorado. He has no clue what it is...but it's exciting! He does know that we're going to "pack" to go there...just like Abraham did in our rhyme!) So, I'll miss talking to all of you and 'see' you the next week!

Kathleen

I love hearing about everyone's weeks! We've had a couple of weeks off - last week Samuel stayed with Grandma and Gramps for a few days and then this week, my brother is in town visiting so we haven't had school lately. We should be starting back on Tuesday or Wednesday after my brother leaves.

We have been loving school so far this year, and it’s even better now that our shipment came on Monday this week with Beyond… and a few other things to go with it. So now we are in LHFHG on the left side (plus Storytime) and Beyond… for the right side of the page. We aren’t exactly in one spot in Beyond… yet, and I don’t know that we will be for quite a while, if ever, but that’s completely okay with me. I struggled with whether we were in the right level at first, and now with combining the two levels, we are starting to figure things out.

We’re still figuring out where we are in Beyond… so we’ve been trying some things out. We’re following the Emerging Reader’s set, except I’m letting her use her own choice of books for right now. (The first nine weeks of Bible readings parallels what we are doing with LHFHG.) She loves the Young Cam Jansen mystery books, so she’s reading those to me each day. Some days she has been so excited that she has read up to four chapters to me at a time! I’ve just been trying to make sure I ask her different kinds of comprehension or detail questions without making it seem like work! She has even been doing some narration from these books as well. She seems to struggle with that with Reddy Fox, but that’s even getting a little better. We’re trying the spelling lists, too, and she seems to like that. I had her use each of her spelling words in a sentence while we baked cookies one day, and then she spelled each word orally.

Baking cookies was our math for that day, too! I don’t really stick to any one thing for math. We do all sorts of things out of Singapore, Math U See, Math Mammoth, and whatever else I decide to have her do (with lots of games or explorations from HOD and other places). She measured out the ingredients for the cookies and decided that she needed 3 scoops of the ¼ cup in order to get ¾ cup of sugar measured out!

This week we hit some extra books on Egypt while we read about Joseph and Moses for history. We are loving all the Bible History readings (which is a major reason why we kept LHFHG for the left hand page). We obtained a copy of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book from the library, and we’ve really enjoyed it. We might have to buy a copy! I wish we had been able to find more of the supplemental books (from the appendix of LHFHG) before the 4th unit!

DD loved the Egyptian collar. We did it on the 2nd day instead of the first so that we could look at some Egyptian art in books before starting the project. They turned out very nice. (Hopefully one of these days I’ll figure out how to post pictures on here!)

I know this post is getting long, but I have to share one last thing we did this week. When I read this week’s memory verse on Monday (Proverbs 3:5-6), my DD said it was too long and she would never be able to memorize it. (We have quite a bit of drama that runs in our family.) She doesn’t much care for the ball-throwing activities and such that go with the memory verses, so I came up with a different activity for my girly-girl. I had her assemble her hopscotch mats (princesses, of course) while I wrote the scripture verse out on a total of nine cards (one for each square of her hopscotch). As she jumped on each square she would read the phrase on each card, so she said the entire verse by jumping to the end. After she did that a couple of times, we used a marker she could throw to a square. Whichever square it landed on (or closest to), we removed that card. She did the hopscotch again without that card to read as she recited the whole verse. She liked this so much that she played until we had removed every card (we didn’t replace any as we went, although if she had missed a phrase repeatedly we could have, I guess) and the scripture was memorized! I took a picture at the end to show how proud of herself she was! We have a big paper tree on the wall in our basement (saved from Vacation Bible School this year!), and she gets to put a piece of fruit (paper cut-out) up on the tree for each verse she memorizes. We also played a Scripture Rummy game this week. I took each scripture we had memorized and split it up over 5 cards, and then we played Rummy with them, trying to get all the cards to one scripture verse.

(OK, so it was more than one last thing! I’ve been dying to share on this message board, and I don’t often get the chance to actually use my computer, so I guess I’ve gone a bit overboard!)

You can check out our week on our blog.

http://theavilas.blogspot.com/2008/09/s ... eek-6.html

YAY! This was our 2nd week with LHTH. We took a week off since my dd and I were getting a little frustrated. And this is what we did this week! We learned the difference between sink and float. Tacos float and cheetahs sink.Our Noah's Ark had flooding occur on the lower deck.Painting the letter B! We also used http://www.starfall.com every day after we did our fingerplays and letter activities. This helped to reinforce the sound and shape of the letter B.

You can check out our full week in our blog http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/scribbles

Last week was our first week of school. Over all it went well (we did 4 days because we HAD to go grocery shoping one day and since we are 30 niles from the closest Wal-Mart, it takes all morning to shop. We plan to go only once every 2 weeks instead of every week now that school has started).

I am doing Bigger with both my girls (ages 7 & 9) and other than the day that had a thunder storm things went mostly well. One of daughter has sensory issues and thunder sends her into a tailspin, so she usually can't think to do any school work at that time.

So far we are enjoying Bigger. My girls both LOVED the art project and did not mind the noebooking (which we have not done before). My older daughter decided that she prefers spelling over dictation because missing a comma makes it wrong! I love it as it will make her think more about her punctuation as well as the spelling.

We are loving out book about Fanny Cosby (story time). The girls also enjoyed making hand motions for the verse. They both knew it by day 4 (and even I knew it well by that time! LOL).

I am really enjoying not having to figure out everything we need to do...it is all there for me and this way I know I am not missing anything!

oo wendy i just looked at your siggy!
I'm not so strange having one from india and one from china... lol glad to hear your week was good!

Ladies,

I loved reading all of your weekly shares! I always find that the first few weeks take some settling in and getting used to at our house, but as we go from day-to-day and the kiddos know what to expect, we hit our stride. Those of you who are just starting your school year, I just wanted to encourage you that you won't believe how much more smoothly school will flow as the weeks pass if you just keep your school day going in the same general order. That's where the real freedom for me and the joy of schooling sets in! You don't have to do subjects at the same time necessarily every day, but the same order will make a huge difference. This way the structure is there without it being confining.

Anyway, for some reason I felt led to share that as we're embarking on a new school year once more. It is a time-tested tip that has made the world of difference to me!

Blessings,
Carrie