Weekly Wrap Up - 9/23/16

The girls got their Girl Guide uniforms in this week which they were super excited about. Brianna and Olivia are now "officially" a Pathfinder and a Brownie.

Both girls received Girl Guide cookies to start selling to raise funds for Guides activities. As they just came out of fundraising for Terry Fox, this is easy work for them! Their goal is to sell 7 cases each to get a crest for their badge sashes.

We're getting into more recent history in our history studies. We covered the beginnings of the written word. Which sent the girls to play a game that Brianna remembered included hieroglyphics. I'm waiting for Olivia to decide that learning to read is overrated and she'll just write in pictures lol

Also in this week's history was talk of rituals for seasonal celebrations. Which tied coincidentally into the fact that it was Autumn Equinox on Wednesday. We discussed this Pagan/Wiccan story of Mabon (the picture below is what we read. The previous linked words take you to a longer description of Mabon) and what happens to the world in the fall. We also watched a cool video on why there are so many different types of apples.

Joshua and I painted a fall handprint tree, Olivia started an apple experiment (more about this in a later post!) and Brianna made apple muffins.

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World War II and The Holocaust

Brianna got a gift card to the local book store for Christmas. She's been enjoying these Dear Canada books so got another one, Pieces of the Past, for her collection. The book is about a little girl who immigrated to Canada during the 2nd World War. It talks about her struggles with her new life and about the event of recent past that lead her to where she is now.

Once she was done reading it, not surprisingly, Brianna had a lot of questions about the Holocaust. As we do not censor real life from our kids, I answered her questions as best as I could. As usual, my answers weren't enough. She wanted more. So I found her a bunch of documentaries and based-on-fact movies (since she's a great visual learner).

A couple of favorites:
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It's a fiction film based on historical fact about a young boy who's family moves as his father is commandant of a concentration camp. The boy, exploring, meets a young Jewish boy on the other side of the concentration camp's fence. A very moving story that shows a child's side of the Holocaust.

Schindler's List. Another fiction film, based on fact. This one is a little mature for most kids as it is more graphic than most. It is about a German business man who essentially turns his factory into a refugee camp for Jewish people to save them from Auschwitz. Brianna came up with lots of great questions with this one.

Auschwatz: The Nazis and The Final Solution. This one was a surprising like. I thought after a different one that she watched, she would be bored with this one also, but nope! She was full of questions and wanting to rewind to show me various clips. This one is fairly self explanatory as being about Auschwitz and The Final Solution (which Brianna was thoroughly disgusted with).

Weekly Wrap Up - April 8th

Math: Brianna finished up the last of her tests to see what she's missing. Next week she'll kinda have a week off, only doing Khan Academy a couple times (while I mark everything and see what she needs extra work on). Olivia finished up learning about halves, quarters and thirds and is now into measuring (I love that Math Mammoth uses both Imperial and Metric!).

English: Olivia has been working hard at her reading and seems to be picking out new words every day. I'm quite impressed!

Science: Due to this course requiring a lot of me reading out loud and a sudden hacking cough hitting me mid week, we did very little of our biology classes.

History/Geography: Brianna is finding her new series for WWII very interesting. While watching Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution she is actually asking questions and wanting to show me stuff, unlike the last one (World War II: In Color), where she kinda just zoned.

French: Olivia loves to listen to Brianna do her Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo and try to copy what she's saying. Of course, Brianna's speaking sentences and Olivia's just picking out words, but learning is learning, right?!

Phys Ed.: Brianna did one general workout and ran twice.

Other: Joshua did his last speech therapy until August. Because we're in a small city, our Speech Pathologists are WAY over booked (that and way over used but that's a whole 'nother post!). So his therapy stops while another group of kids are seen. We'll reassess in Aug (and since we KNOW he'll need more therapy), then re-start seeing the therapists.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Weekly Wrap Up - March 25th

We had a fairly quiet week as we took an extended long weekend for Easter. (Ok, really, so I could catch up on some marking, planning and sewing projects ;) )

Math: Olivia finished her chapter in math and is now moving on to shapes and measurement.

English: Brianna has restarted watching CNN Student News for her daily writing. We watch the day's episode together and then she picks a topic from the news cast to write a paragraph about.

Olivia decided to make these mice cupcakes with Brianna for Poetry Teatime.

Science: Olivia and Brianna had a great time with Cornell's bird identifier app. Because Brianna has always been fond of identifying the local birds, she quizzed Olivia to remember distinctions to be able to look up the bird.

History/Geography: Brianna finished World War II in Color for her Holocaust study and is now watching through Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.

Phys Ed: The weather is getting better so we'll hopefully be getting out for more walks and Brianna will be able to start running outdoors again. For this week's Homeschool Coop, we walked to and from the library, roughly a 5km route (just over 3 miles). Brianna also did a general workout once.

French: Brianna is really enjoying her DuoLingo and was tickled to pass me in progress (which wasn't hard, I keep forgetting to do it lol)

Other: The girls have been watching Signing Time with Joshua a lot lately and all 3 of them have picked up loads more sign language! The girls are even starting to put together sentences to show off their skills

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Weekly Wrap Up - March 4th

Monday was a Leap Day!

Math: Brianna is working her way through her new math. This week she did 12 various "tests". Olivia finished another chapter in her math and is now on to telling time!

English: Olivia is enjoying her phonics book so much that outside of me reading the instructions, she is completing it independently. It's nice to be able to walk away for a minute to help Brianna or Joshua and her still work!

Science: We watched the water/ice move on our walkway and discussed erosion. The girls walked along the ice and watched the air bubbles and water underneath move and talked about displacement.

Geography/History: We read through more of the Our Canadian Girl: Rachel series. Even Olivia is getting excited for read alouds now (this was her first read aloud for school). Week 5 of Mystery Class is in the books. The graphs are looking more definitive now.

French: Brianna worked on some problem areas this week  (Grammar and Writing). She also started DuoLingo on her phone.

Health/Phys Ed.: We got a bit of snow on Tues/Wed so got shoveling exercise! Brianna rode the bike once and ran on the treadmill once for her running training. Olivia is signed up for another year of Soccer, unfortunately she has to wait until May to start playing.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Weekly Wrap Up - Feb 12th

That's how most of our weekend/week was spent. Piles upon piles of Kleenex. Several illnesses in a row have floated their way through my house since Christmas. We're normally healthy people so this has been quite annoying.

Brianna did manage to get some schoolwork done but I had no energy to sit with Olivia to do hers most of the week.

We continued reading Our Canadian Girl: Rachel and Brianna watched a few more episodes of World War II in Color. Olivia started back on Khan Academy which she did really well with.

We seem to be all on the mend now, so hopefully next week will be more normal!

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Weekly Wrap Up - Feb 5th

On Monday, Brianna organized and ran her first homeschool coop meeting. Our usual coordinator is out of the country so our family has taken over for the time being. Brianna's great with crafty stuff, so she found this cute Pompom Popper craft to do.

On Tuesday, we ran our No Technology Experiment. Check out the results here!

We've started our 3rd round of Mystery Class. I'll have a post about that soon!

Olivia had a rough week with her attitude. She was refusing to do schoolwork, generally not listening and being hateful. Friday was a MUCH better day.

We started reading an Our Canadian Girl series for Black History month. This series is on Rachel, a girl trying to come to Canada to escape slavery. Olivia will be taking part in this read aloud, her first longer-than-10-minutes read aloud, so hopefully it goes well


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Current Curriculum July 2015

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Previous post from last Sept here.

We school year round and don't really follow grades. Brianna started Nov 15, 2010 coming from 3rd grade in public school and will go until whenever of whatever year. Olivia started "Preschool" on Feb 6, 2012. We don't follow specific grades but Brianna is anywhere from Gr. 6-10 and Olivia is mostly Gr 1, a little Kindy and some Gr. 2. 

So, since we don't have set grades or set school years, I figure every 6 mths-ish I'll post what we are currently working on. We use a mishmash of traditional homeschool curriculum, workbooks bought at teacher supply stores, stuff made up completely in my head and most subjects are supplemented by printed worksheets from various sites and of course, library books. In a nut shell, we're eclectic homeschoolers.

Olivia:

We have a subscription to ABCMouse.com and Olivia really likes it! It has all the way from Toddlers to the end of Kindergarten. This program added on a couple more levels, but only lists levels not grades, so I don't know where the program ends after Kindergarten. Olivia is still learning to control the computer so she's a little slower going here than in her paper school work.

For printables we mostly use 1+1+1=1 (there's also great tot school and preschool printables here!). Confessions of a Homeschooler also has great printables. I love 1+1+1=1 as they have a lot of themed units. They cover a wide variety of skills but under one theme (Olivia has done cats, pizza, Octonauts and more). Even though most of them are below her skill levels, she really enjoys them so we keep doing them. 1+1+1=1 now has literature units as well.

English:

We'll start dabbling in Brave Writer's "Jot it Down" program which focuses on dictation for Olivia's age group. We'll start up 1+1+1=1's You Can Read program once Olivia is more comfortable in phonics. We feel that phonetic learning is highly important over memorizing sight words so we're spending a lot of effort on letter sounds, blending sounds and sounding out short words.


Math:
Olivia has started Early Math on Khan Academy. She is super proud to be doing Khan just like Brianna. Her computer skills are still lacking, so Khan is definitely something that we do together, though she is getting better at navigating. 

Olivia loves to help take care of Joshua, cooking and household chores. We, of course, encourage her as much as possible!

Phys Ed./Health:
Olivia has started running like Brianna. This year, like last, she ran in the fun run this month and will be taking part in the Cornwall Triathlon, doing a duathlon, next month. She's also in U7 Soccer this year. The kids play weekly and Olivia seems to really enjoy it.

Brianna: 

Math: 
We really like Math Mammoth. It's almost self-teaching once a kid can read. It breaks the new concepts down into step by step instructions in a way that really gets through to Brianna. Math Mammoth goes only to Gr. 7, so once she's done that, I'll be looking for a new curriculum for Algebra and the like. We're also slowly working our way through Khan Academy. Brianna really likes the videos explaining new concepts. 

English: 
We're using Brave Writer's "Writer's Jungle" again this year. Brianna's especially enjoys their Poetry Teatimes, which we'll be starting again in the fall. For spelling, I keep track of words she has spelled wrong in her general school work and base spelling practice off of that. We'll be doing NaNoWriMo again this year. She took part last year and wrote an impressive 12,000+ words. Amazing who someone who often struggles with writing a few pages. This year, we'll be starting early with NaNoWriMo's educator's lesson plans.

French: 
We will be doing Rosetta Stone now that Brianna has her own laptop to install it on. Brianna already knows more French than I do, so thankfully Rosetta Stone is a self-teaching course! We'll be using Living Languages for extra activities. Duolingo has an app for her phone for extra, on-the-go practice. One of our neighbours has offered to test Brianna's French periodically.

Arts: 
Brianna wants to learn guitar and we have a child's guitar and a great book - The Complete Guitar Manual, hopefully we can get around to that. She also wants to get back into playing the flute (which is currently under repairs). Hopefully she can be encouraged to put in a stronger, more frequent effort this time.

She has expressed interest in learning about some Shakespeare, so we'll  learn about him and read/watch some plays. 

Phys Ed/Health: 
Brianna runs with a local MultiSport club. Her last run of the year is her Terry Fox run on Sept 14th. She actually bikes the Terry Fox run, but as she chooses to do the biggest route (10km), it's certainly nothing to laugh at! Once that is done, she's done until May. She'll spend that time doing training at least twice a week (running, yoga, strength training, cardio) and of course, we live in Canada, so there's always snow to shovel! 

Computer: 
Brianna and Olivia both have Minecraft accounts. I'm currently looking for cool educational ideas for it as I know many are out there. But for now, both girls are just working on computer skills and building. Brianna is learning to use the MinecraftWiki to research how to do or use various aspects of the game.

Civics:
This fall we're doing a study on Canadian government and our Prime Ministers from Confederation to present. We have a federal election this fall and will be tracking the candidates and their platforms. We're using various books and sites like Canada Votes, Exploring Canada and a cool Prime Ministers of Canada set that I got from the Library and Archives of Canada

Life Skills: 
Brianna has taken on babysitting and dog poop scooping jobs from our neighbours. This is teaching her a great deal about responsibility and money. Because of the sudden influx of money, she's learning about comparing prices and smart spending. She's also becoming more responsible for getting her schoolwork and chores done with less interference from us. 


Both:

History/Geography: 
Lee and I are driving across country at the end of August and the girls will be tracking us and learning about various places as we go.

We're continuing to do Country Studies. The kids have really enjoyed them so far. We read about the countries, find them on maps, watch videos about them and make a bunch of food from that country. We'll be using History of the World and Geography of the World at home and whatever oodles of books we can snag from the library. World Atlas is fantastic for maps and National Geographic Kids has a bunch of videos and articles I made both Brianna and Olivia's country reports on Microsoft Word because I couldn't find anything I liked that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg. If I can figure out how to share them here, I will.

Science:
For the most part, science is done through day to day life with no set curriculum. We'll be doing a lot of interest based topics. Both girls want to do the human body. We'll have to do a refresher in a few years for Olivia, but with the random stuff she picks up on of Brianna's school work, I'm not worried about doing a joint class with them. Brianna got an ant farm for her birthday and the girls are fascinated with watching it.  

Arts:
I want to work on art some more. Brianna loves it but is fairly terrible lol So she wants to learn little ways to make her art better. Olivia on the other hand, has this idea that her drawings aren't good enough. No telling her otherwise changes her mind :( So for both girls, we'll be doing some basic art lessons, using a variety of mediums and styles.

Joshua:

He will to continue to be cute and get into stuff and steal school work *wink*


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Weekly Wrap Up

Brianna had science camp all week so school at home was almost none. She did dictate daily reports to me though on what they did. Some highlights:
- catching, tagging and releasing cutlip fish
- setting net traps for catching more fish to tag
- collecting water samples
- studying and identifying algae under a microscope
- catching and studying invertebrates
- learning lab safety
- comparing bacteria
- growing E. coli in Petri dishes
- catching turtles
- looking for a species of endangered turtle
- dissecting fish

Algae samples

On Tuesday, we took part in the last bridge walk before they tore down the historical international bridge in our city.

A view from the top!

 From the bridge walk, we collected a bunch of rocks and even a couple pieces of loose asphalt. Olivia decided to start stacking her bunch of rocks so that led into a conversation about inukshuks. We talked about why people built them and where and looked online to see some real ones. Olivia then built her own inukshuk.

Olivia did some more work with her ABC Mouse program (but it's been working wonky lately and very slow so she gets frustrated with it easily). She worked on her Pirate unit some more.

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Seaway International Bridge Walk

Cornwall is a city rich in history. It is over 200 years old, one of the older cities in Ontario with first major settlement in the 1780s. Parts of the War of 1812 happened here or near here. We have the Battle of Crysler's Farm just down the highway, along with Upper Canada Village near by.

A couple of the more recent highlights to Cornwall's history is the formation of the St. Lawrence Seaway (1959) and the building of the Seaway International Bridge (1962 for the North Channel Bridge, which is the one that leads into Cornwall). In 2013 they completed and opened the new low level North Channel Bridge and the old one is up for deconstruction, beginning later this month.

On Tuesday, the Seaway International Bridge Corporation opened the 1.6km (1 mile) bridge one last time for people to walk the length of it, enjoy the views and get a little history lesson. You used to be able to walk on the bridge many, many moons ago, but it's be closed to pedestrians for years. Most people had never walked the bridge so it was a great treat!

The SIBC was fantastic and even put up several history boards along the bridge with historical pics, info cards, newspaper clippings and fun facts. History class! I told Brianna "see?! School is everywhere" lol

A friend's son photo bombed the pic

The traffic circle that Brianna is pointing at is surrounded by empty fields. Now it's surrounded by Walmart, grocery stores, hotels and car dealerships.

Looking west

Looking east (Waterview Homeschool originated at our old house, next door to to those red roofed apartments).

Looking south, both the old and the new North Channel bridges

Looking north at both bridges. Our skyline will change completely once the bridge arch is gone

The SIBC even set up little benches for people to get their pictures taken at

A view from the top!

WAY Late Month in Review (April)

(I swear, I WILL get back to regular posts someday!)

Learning how to ride a 4 wheeler bike

The kids' suncatchers

First spot of spring in our garden!

Hard at work on research for her book

Cross stitching (all from the pattern in her mind) a gift for her uncle's birthday

Chicken pox snake!

A cave with boulders on each side and a happy face cookie

Studying Brianna's bird watching book

She loves to try to paint/draw with her mouth

Painting her E for her alphabet book

Dot circles are still a favorite

She wanted me to take a picture of her happy face guy

Impressive tracing on her Gs

The kids love to turn my walkway into a mosaic 

Olivia insisted in joining Brianna in strength training (yes they're using soup cans for weights lol)

Earth Day litter clean up!

Making fine detail clay creations

Hard labour is great Phys. Ed. class! Doesn't matter if you're only 3 and 10, re-gravel the driveway!