homeschooling, week 6

This week began with this mama fully in the throws of a nasty cold. My throat hurt, my head hurt, I was freezing, I was achey. I printed out a free (my favorite kind!) of theme pack from TPT. Part of me feels that this is just pointless busy work, because it is so simple. But, I know that she will have fun and sometimes I forgot that just because she already knows how to do something, it doesn't mean she shouldn't keep doing it as long as it is fun for her. This was a cute pack with a picture that I laminated and cut into smaller pieces so that she could put it together. It had a patterning page, a dice game, a booklet that she had to glue apples into according to direction (over/under/next to/on top of), and some cute counting cards that I also laminated but did not use this time. Her math program teaches her NOT to count so I was thinking this might not be the best activity for her, but possibly good for Rishi.

patterning, puzzle, dice game, directional words book & more

it took like 40 rolls for the blue leaf to finally be the one to make it to 10, first!

Sanji completed the last two lessons in her All About Reading program. She was very proud when she realized that she had done every single lesson in that big book. I copied the certificate and progress chart out of the activities book, I hadn't noticed the progress chart was in there. I let her stamp every single star. Now I am hoping to find a used set of Level 2. I'm giving it 4 weeks, then I'll suck it up and dish out for new if I have no luck. In the interim we will just be reading a lot of short stories, and poems, like always. We will also regularly go over what the vowels say. She is totally on it and I can pop up and ask her any time what each vowel says and she can give me all of the sounds of each one, and tell me which sounds are the long and which are the short.

Since I was sick, we also missed Science Club, such a bummer! The planned activity was vinegar and baking soda and so I thought, hey, we can do it anyway! I got a baking dish and set up 3 mason jars (or, our drinking glasses, in our house). In front of each cup I put 1 dixie cup of vinegar and 1 dixie cup of baking soda. In front of the 2nd jar I also put a cup of dishwashing liquid, and in front of the 3rd jar I also put a cup of Coca-Cola. Jars 2 and 3 also had red and green food coloring, in their respective jars. We talked about what we thought would happen and then the fun began! Sanji observed that jar 2 had bigger bubbles than jar 1 and that jar 3 grew the tallest but then became the shortest as it went down. We talked about the reactions and I read her some simple info I had printed out.  Then I just let her go to town, I filled over a dozen cups with baking soda or vinegar and let her keep combining them and adding food color. She had so much fun, she had her hands in all of it. Amazingly, most of it stayed in the baking dish.

We had friends over this week that we have known since Sanji was a newborn. We met online and have been great friends ever since. My friend is also homeschooling her daughter so it was nice to sit down with someone I know and am already really comfortable with and just talk about things. I respect this friend tremendously and she is super busy being a fantastic mom and getting her PhD at the same time. The girls are very different yet they just seem to have this magical way that they play when they are together. Something about my friend's daughter, Aria, brings out this part of my daughter that I would love to see more! They heavily play make believe and they love to explore and interact with the nature in our yard. It could be that this is one of my daughter's very few friends that are girls, too. While they had lunch, they decided to draw cats. Sanji's is the neckless one, on the left.

We talked more about evolution this week and looked over our stack of library books. We also watched the part 1 of 3, of Nova's Becoming Human, on PBS through Roku. Sanji asked several questions and was interested in almost all of it. We snuggled up and watched most of it, then she needed to move, so she walked around the room like a chimp. She was very interested when they showed what brains look like (which she remembered from Human Body camp last summer), so I am excited to get her some fun anatomy resources for Christmas, that I know she will just love.

Yoga is pretty much her only structured PE. She plays a lot outside and like most kids her age, she is almost always in some kind of motion. I started all my kids on yoga before they were 2. Deep breathing is also something they learn before they can even say it. It is such a powerful tool. I am looking into a yoga workshop for children with special needs, to see if it might be useful for my youngest one, who has developmental delays. (you will see that I quite often to OT- off topic!)

Sanji ran off shortly after saying she would do yoga with her cousin and I. Alina and I do a quick 10-15 minute video in the morning before she goes off to school. Sanji only likes doing her own yoga DVD, which is fantastic by the way.

Watching the kids rehearse in sis's Village Home class

This week I did not stay with Sanji in theater class, It was the first week that I brought Rishi along with us since my husband was teaching a class via tele conference and needed the house to be quiet. Village Home is such a cool place and I really hope I can make some new friends there. After saying bye to sis, Rishi and I hung out in the play room. It's a space designed for families with younger kids to hang out while their other kids are in class. There are plenty of toys and you can eat in there too. VH is totally welcoming of family in the classes, so we came back in for the last five minutes to watch them rehearsing their little play. Sanji is the bear.  

We covered one math lesson that we went over twice during the week. It was a fun one where she got to use the tiles to create different squares and rectangles. I was surprised when I showed her the square and asked her what it was, that she right away answered, "a square, a quadrilateral, and a special rectangle". Right on, kiddo.

Little House in the Big Woods has come to an end! We finished it this week and are going to pick up a used copy of Little House on the Prairie, tomorrow. We will start it Monday and we will also begin working on our Big Woods lap book.

In my mind we'd do school every day from 8:30-10:30. I thought it would really bug me on the days that it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes it's hard to adjust to things not being how I pictured them. Funny thing is, there was this one day where we did our calendar and handwriting in the morning, then did learning games and reading after lunch, then math right before dinner, and I felt like everything went so well and she was more excited to come to the table each time. It was probably one of our best homeschooling days.

Part of me just gets really nervous, because like I said, I am on a one year plan. So internally I panic that if I am too flexible at home, she won't adapt well to a typical school day. I also find myself really picturing myself continuing this, at least for a few more years. I'm awful at decisions. I guess we'll see as the weeks go on.