Weekly Wrap Up - 9/30/16

Olivia loves to curl up in our lawn chairs (since she's small enough she can actually curl up) and read books.

Olivia has been riding biking with the neighbour's children in the evenings. She became quite the pro at riding a 2 wheeler this summer and helped teach her year-younger friend how to as well.

Olivia was recently shown how to properly use a steak knife to cut. Joshua loves this as it means that she is willing to often cut up strawberries for him!

Brianna got a note from the local organizer of the Terry Fox Run thanking her for her continued fundraising and offered to make sure that her run is officially recorded (as Brianna was sick on the actual run day).

Olivia finished up her apple experiment with all sorts of gross success.

We recorded our "day in the life" post for iHomeschool Network.

Brianna has really taken a big change in responsibility in her school work this week. She went from needing more prompting (and arguing) to do schoolwork than Olivia, to really buckling down and getting it done. Her chores still take a lot more prompting, but I'll take it!

We all began working out again this week. Because of my surgeries in June, this summer was way too laid back. Brianna really fell short in the healthy dept. We have a dedicated workout room that we share with the neighbours (we have the equipment, they have the space) so no excuses!

If you've been reading my blog for a while (or just read back to a few years ago), you'll remember my niece Tanya used to homeschool with us. She went back to the public school route and is not working on dual credit courses at the college that Brianna plans to attend. Today was her Sweet 16.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

Day in the Life of Waterview Homeschool

This week, the final week, on iHomeschool Network's Annual Back to School Blog Hop is a "Day in the Life of" post. I love doing these. I haven't done one in forever though!

8am - alarm goes off. I am NOT a morning person and even 8am is way too early for me. Thankfully, Lee works nights and is home before Joshua wakes up, or, if I'm extra lucky, Joshua will wake me up at like 6am *grumble* I poked Olivia, who is not surprisingly in my bed. She doesn't even flinch. I come down stairs to find that Brianna's alarm has been going off for the last half an hour. I need an earthquake bed for her or something. Pour coffee and head outside to my porch to smoke and coffee in silence. My mom, Grandma, has already left for work.

8:30am - I come inside, Brianna's alarm is not still going but she's not up here. Olivia is also not out of bed. I send Lee upstairs to wake Olivia and head to the basement to drag Brianna out of bed. She fakes being dead. Dude, there is not enough coffee flowing through me yet to think that's funny.

8:50am - Breakfast is finally happening for the girls. Joshua on the other hand has been awake 2 hours and is happily "cooking" his sippy on the stove (placing it on the cold burner and calling it hot).

9:05am - Joshua's sippy might be "hot" but his toes are like icecubes and I refuse to turn on the furnace this early in the fall. Operation find-everyone's-slippers begins.

9:15am - veg fest before school. Since it's Monday, Lee didn't work last night (he works tonight though), so the little kids pile on Daddy in the living room. Brianna and I hang out on the porch, being kitten perches and discuss what's on the agenda for the day and I fill in chore lists for the week in their agendas.

9:45am - meltdown begins over the fact that it's not snack time yet. Cue Joshua's most pitiful look. He is temporarily soothed by a blanket fort to watch Brianna play her game.

10am - let the schoolwork commence! Nope, wait... let the hang out in the bathroom for long periods of time commence....

10:25am - school actually starts. Thomas starts on Netflix for Joshua. Lee hides in our bedroom to watch non-preschooler tv.

10:40 am - I cover Brianna's eyes to enter her laptop password while she's on her phone doing DuoLingo. "She chocolate eats" is now the French phrase of the day. Olivia is excited to see seasonal (fall) worksheets in her pile.

11:30 - Laundry on the line! Joshua loves to help Brianna with the clothes pins.

11:50am - Olivia is done her paper schoolwork. Since it's almost lunch break, she just breaks early. She is loving her newly allowed privilege of cutting with a steak knife, so cut up Joshua some strawberries for lunch

12pm - lunch break! Also, mail call! Brianna got a card from the local organizer of the Terry Fox Run with this year's pin.

12:30pm - back to work. Brianna starts with a load of dishes, Olivia starts with her Reading Eggs and I get to work with Joshua's schoolwork.

1:10 pm - Joshua's (and Lee's lol) nap time means my work time. While the girls work on schoolwork and chores, I head up to my office to sew zippers and necklines into car seat ponchos. Right now is my bust season in general but also the only time of year I really sell car seat ponchos. So add prepping for Christmas sales and shows to roughly 40-50 ponchos means I'm pretty busy!

2:50pm - read aloud time. Today we are reading from our biology unit on respiration and our novel "The Family Under The Bridge".

3:20pm - reading is done so I go to wake up Joshua. I find him napping under the bed, silly boy. Under-bed napping apparently makes a grumpy boy. Brianna tried to cheer him up some by making a train track for him.

3:40pm - Olivia and I finished her apple experiment. It was her first long term science experiment so she was excited for it to finally be done.

4pm - school work and most chores are done. Electronics time for the girls. Olivia hides in a blanket for to play Minecraft and Brianna plays a bunch of games for Joshua (who wasn't terribly impressed with Brianna's track building skills and went back to being grumpy). I do some tidying up so I can get some freezer cooking done. When Joshua is finally less cranky, Brianna joins me to make Sausage Breakfast Muffins.

6pm - Brianna got ready for Pathfinders and then researched how to tie her scarf properly. She was so proud to have figured it out! She noticed that the videos she found on youtube were using the older style scarf (uniforms changed recently), so once she perfects it, she plans to make a youtube video with the current uniform.

6:30pm - Brianna is dropped off at Pathfinders. I come home and finish making the gazillion muffins (and ate about 348765 of them!). I manage to get Olivia to consume something of nutrients other than cereal (extreme picky issues here) - homemade apple honey oatmeal!

8pm - Lee and I went to Brianna's Pathfinders meeting for parent planning. They announced the current planned international trip - ENGLAND! Mommy is massively jealous. In 2019, Brianna will be able to go to England for approximately a week with the Pathfinders and Rangers to the Pax Lodge. Brianna is insanely nervous as she hates sleeping away from home, but in the next 3 years she will have a zillion opportunities to sleep away with Guides.

8:50pm - back home. Joshua and Lee have gone to snuggle to bed. Olivia cleans the living room and Brianna started her garbage and dishes chores.

8:55pm - for some reason, Brianna's alarm started randomly sounding. Why on earth it would be set for this time, who knows....

9:30pm - bedtime! I tuck Olivia in, Joshua's still awake so I snuggle with him for a few. I send Brianna downstairs to write in her Pathfinders Journal and park my butt on the computer to veg out on facebook.

10pm - Tell Brianna it's lights out.

10:10pm - kick Lee off to work and hang out on my porch with the neighbour, talking about Brianna's England trip.

10:40pm - I packed all the sausage muffins into freezer bags and found room for them in the freezer. That's a lot of freaking muffins!

10:50pm - I feel sorry for my American friends after reading the aftermath of the Presidential Debate.

11pm - I work on some online stuff for work, talking to customers, organizing coop buys.

11:30pm - Well past my bedtime...

Thanks for reading our newest Day in the Life post. I can't wait to read everyone else's on iHomeschool!

Apple Experiment

For Fall Equinox, we started a cool apple experiment that I found here.

We filled jars with air, water, oil and vinegar, then placed a quarter of an apple in each.

Olivia made predictions of what would happen to each apple:

Air - I predict it will turn rotten
Water - I predict it will become soaked and mushy
Oil - I predict it will be all messy and yuck
Vinegar - I predict it will smell weird

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

I forgot to take Day 4's picture but it was equally gross.

Finally, Day 5. Olivia was excited to check out the final progress of her apples and see if her predictions were correct.

Her best EW face

Her predictions and results

Her drawings of the results

Linking up with Practical Mom

Tot School - Week 3

We got a new toy box, a simple wood chest with wicker drawers. Joshua has taken to cleaning up the living room several times a day. He even sorts the toys correctly for each drawer! I'm certainly not complaining!

His favorite thing this week has been shapes. He's loving any shape activities that I've pulled out for him and was even finding shapes in regular household items.

Look! Square!

Joshua's independence levels are growing. He very much wants to do it all himself. One of my favorites from this week was him grabbing a toy knife from our kitchen set, grabbing an apple out of the fridge and trying to cut it. When that didn't work, he grabbed a butter knife from the silverware drawer to try again. He wasn't too happy when I wouldn't let him use a steak knife lol

For the Fall Equinox we all did a bunch of fun fall activities. Joshua loved making this hand print tree. He was very unsure about me painting his hand but he loved smacking it on the wall and making a "biiiiig tree"

Linking up with 1+1+1=1, Hip Homeschool Mom and Homeschool Creations

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.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

I Have Failed as a Crunchy Mama

Crunchy Mama - mom of kids who breastfed and cloth diapered. Coconut oil everything. Garden full of veggies. Clothes on the clothes line. Lovingly home made, healthy meals. No chemical cleaners.....

You know the type. We all know at least one. The one you kinda roll your eyes at, sometimes. The one you have learned a couple things from.

I am a Crunchy Mama. I love line dried clothes. I homeschool. I love baking from scratch. Hell, my 5th child was a planned homebirth. I even disconnected our cable!

Until today that is...

As we speak, the cable guy is fiddling with wires to connect us to the world of cable again.

I miss hockey.

I missed watching the Olympics.

I miss watching the weather channel.

I'm tired of listening to 37 episodes of Paw Patrol in a row because Netflix is what lives in my house.

So we have cable again. The kids acted like I gave them a trip to Disneyland. Apparently they have been deprived.

Our new cable however, has Netflix integrated so I can still watch documentaries with the kids for school. So do I get to keep my crunchy card?

Through the Eyes of Brianna (14 yrs)

This week's iHomeschool Blog Hop is "Through the Eyes of the Student". Brianna is 14 yrs old and has been homeschooled since November of Gr. 3. She took a bunch of pictures and how to describe her homeschooling day (her cell phone doesn't always take the best pics).

This is my agenda. It helps me figure out what to do each day. For me, the agenda has the time, which helps me. Which is the best thing about homeschooling is that it's what works best for the child.

This is my CNN Student News. I watch it, it gives you some pretty cool information about around the world. What I do with it is after I watch it, I choose one of the segments and I then write about it in my daily news book in my own words.

This is my Time4Learning. It's pretty fun. There's different subjects you can do on it - math, science (my favorite), English and social studies. This time limit on it is so after your lessons are done you can click on the game room and play cool learning games. This is most of my daily schoolwork.

This is a picture from one of my lessons in Rosetta Stone. I am learning French. I'm on the 1st year, but I have up to 5 years of lessons. If you get under 80% then you fail that specific lesson and you have to redo it which is good for fluency

Here's me in my new Pathfinders uniform. It's part of Girl Guides. In my hands, is one of our kittens, Meatball.

This is a really cool spider that my mom found on the edge of our porch. It looks like a bumble bee and it was pretty big.

This was after Pathfinders last night. We sell Girl Guide cookies to raise funds for girl guide. Our neighbour, who picked me up, made my cookies safe by strapping them into my brother's car seat.

As an addition to Brianna's picture choices, I also did this interview with her. I asked these questions and wrote down the answers she gives me verbatim.

What does homeschooling mean? You do your homeschool at home. You can adjust to what works best for you. Like you give me a paper schedule and that seems to work better for me than you just telling me what to do.

How long have you been homeschooling? 4 or 5 years, I think? (Actually, 6 years)

Why do you homeschool? Because you didn't like how they were teaching and I was getting bullied at school.

What does a typical homeschool day look like, for us? Wake up at 8:30, have breakfast before 9am. Get to be lazy, I guess, until 10am. Do school for how ever long it takes to finish it. Then horse around for the rest of the day.

What is your most favorite thing about homeschooling? How you can make boring old subjects, like English, into fun things, like Poetry Tea Time. And at school you'd just be doing these boring English lessons, where as at home you can turn something boring into something fun that you really enjoy doing.

What is your least favorite thing about homeschooling? The chores after my schoolwork (to which I reminded her that she'd still have chores after public school lol).

What is the coolest thing you've learned? A recent one is my Minecraft houses. It was cool cause it was fun, but was challenging because of the pressure to do the set requirements for the lesson.

What is the most boring thing you've learned? I find math is boring, but it's something I'll need every day....

What advice would you have for a kid who is just starting homeschooling? Try to get your mom or your teacher, since it's not necessarily your parent, to find what works best for you.

What advice would you have for a parent who is just starting homeschooling? Kinda the same thing for the kid, but like try out different things. If you find something that works, do it for a while. But if it stops working, keep looking to find something else.

What do you want to do after you finish homeschooling? Going to college to get my Environmental Tech degree.

Is there anything new you'd like to learn about soon? Chemistry cause I need that for college, but also cause it sounds fun. Also, learning to use my telescope and about Astronomy.

What do you miss, if anything, about public school? The only thing I really miss is seeing my (school) friends every day.