Where is the time going?

It’s almost the middle of OCTOBER! It doesn’t seem possible that it’s October already. The leaves are changing & falling faster than I’d like. We’ve already had our first (couple) frosts and I’m still holding steadfast on not turning on the furnace until November lol.

Schooling is going okay. I’m still struggling with finding creative, fun ways for them to learn stuff…Trying not to teach as much lead, you know? We’re working on volcano stuff. They really want to do the volcano kit that I bought a couple of weeks ago. I’m finding it hard to just say “Do it” without having them LEARN stuff about it first. Why do I do that? Why not let them do the volcano kit. Then maybe they will be interested enough to learn WHY it does what it does? Because that’s not the way I was told learning should be. First you read about it, learn about it, THEN you can have fun with it. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to say…have fun with it, then if you’re interested in it we’ll learn more about it.  I need to trust them more and listen to my head less, I guess. I’m wondering if it would be a good method to just do science experiments for science and then learning about the whys & what fors after we’ve done the experiment. Is that a good way to go about it? At least for the younger ones. I haven’t found a science curriculum that Ladybug likes yet….

We’ve found a great homeschool group. We went on a field trip to the fire station. Just me & the boys. Ladybug felt too old to do the fire station thing again. Taz had a blast. Blue kind of enjoyed it, but didn’t want to show how much because he’s in that “I’m too cool for this” phase. He was one of the older ones there. I think their favorite part was going up in the ladder truck….

(excuse the quality, these were taken with my cell phone)

The ladder actually extends 95 feet in the air! Impressive!!

Blue finally finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. He’s moved on to Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I daresay he likes Ender better than Harry. He dug right in and read 3 chapters in one evening! It took him more than a month to get through the 16 chapters in HP.

We are really liking Ladybug’s new Language Arts curriculum. I ditched the Abeka stuff (all those books were overwhelming and too heavily dependant on Bible content for our liking) and switched to Learning Language Arts Through Literature – Gold (American Literature). I really like how it incorporates everything…literary concepts, reading comprehension, literary analysis, vocabulary, spelling, writing, etc. all in one book. I liked it so much that I bought sets for both boys. I got Purple for Blue and Red for Taz. After looking at the Red, I’m thinking I probably should have started Taz on the Blue. Even if we started in the middle of the book because he’s really not fully ready for 2nd grade reading/writing skills yet. I may try to snag just the Student Activity Book in blue and see how it works for him. He’s extremely frustrated with phonics so we are taking it very slowly. I haven’t started Blue’s LLATL yet because he’s so into Ender’s Game and I’m waiting for Farmer Boy. I decided to just buy it rather than try to get it from the library. We have two libraries that are close enough to frequent, but neither one is very good at having books in that we want to borrow. I ended up buying Ender’s Game because neither library had it available. I could have kicked myself too, because we had a copy & I got rid of it a few years ago when I was cleaning out bookshelves. That just solidifies my opinion that books should never be gotten rid of lol.

Math is still mostly review for Blue & Ladybug. They were both very behind after leaving PS. So for Blue, we’ve been reviewing the multiplication facts. He really didn’t have a good grasp on them at all, which made long division and anything else beyond that next to impossible for him. I’m happy to say, he’s pretty comfortable in his multiplication facts through the 4s table.

For Ladybug we are still using Danica McKellar’s Math Doesn’t Suck along with worksheets from EdHelper.com to review math concepts she never really got in 6th, 7th, & 8th grades. We’ve covered prime numbers, prime factorization, greatest common factor, and least common multiple. Next we are tackling fractions.

Taz is my Math lover. He’d much rather work with numbers than letters any time of the day. We’ve moved beyond single digit addition & subtraction and have moved on to place value. He’s got the tens & ones down pat. I just worry that it will become too abstract when we start adding two-digit numbers with carrying (aka regrouping). He always suprises me though, with how much abstract stuff he really understands.

He’s so interesting…when it comes to math, he can understand the abstract with very little explanation. But with reading/writing, he really doesn’t understand the abstract. Talking animals? Made up cartoon stories? Make up a sentence about what? It’s just interesting how different he is from the other kids. They would all rather write a story than do a math problem. Taz would rather do a whole workbook of math problems than write one sentence of his own making. Or even copy a sentence I give him. It’s just not his cup of tea.