Top Ten Things To Drive Me Crazy

I've been meaning to start doing the iHomeschool Network's Tuesday Top 10s but kept forgetting or getting distracted. So I figured I'd start with a slightly sillier one.

Top Ten Things to Drive me Crazy
(specifically, my kids, in our homeschool life)

1. Skipping assignments and thinking I won't notice. Really? I check your work! I *will* know you didn't do it. And claiming to have completed assignments that require my assistance (read alouds and such)? Um. I know I didn't do it, so how could you have?

2. Pretending you don't know it's school time. Sure, Joshua can't tell time. But his school time doesn't have a set time. However, both Brianna and Olivia know how to tell time, so 10am is pretty easy to know. Especially since we have 7 various clocks in the areas they spend time in in the morning.

3. Humming or otherwise making distracting noises that you recently told your sibling to stop doing. And you wonder why your sibling won't stop when you ask...

4. Whining about your sibling having different types/amounts of schoolwork. You're 7 years apart. Even in the subjects you do together, the *work* is going to be different!

5. Checking facebook when you're supposed to be doing xyz. *cough*Brianna*cough* I'm fairly certain your research on Leukemia isn't giggle worthy... that would be a meme.

6. Claiming that your chore is done when you have grabbed no cleaning products. I may be working but the cleaning closet is on one side of me and the room you're cleaning is on the other. You never passed me...

7. Whining about a sibling "playing" on the computer while you have to do schoolwork. *cough*Olivia*cough* Your sister's schoolwork is ON the computer!

8. *Still* doing schoolwork at 10pm because you piddled around all day. Dude. Do. Your. Schoolwork.

9. Grabbing a snack at snack time when you slept late so just ate breakfast 10 minutes ago. My kids live for food. All. The. Time. So we have set snack times. Sorry, you don't get to eat breakfast at 10am, snack at 10:30am then lunch. You aint hungry.

10. There's not enough hours in the day. Seriously, this one is the worst. I'm not asking a lot, just like 2 or 3 more hours. I'd get SO much more done!

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Please Stop Over-Using Programs That You Don't Need

My son, Joshua, will be 3 in June. He is mostly non-verbal. Yet he is now without speech therapy.

"Speech Issues" seem to be the "in" thing for kids to have nowadays. When Isaac and Brianna were little, I knew of, like 2 kids that had speech issues. Since Olivia and Joshua, it seems more kids have speech issues than don't.

Sadly, this is more a matter of little Suzy only says 40 words when she should be saying 50 by x age. Or little Johnny wasn't quoting Shakespeare by 2 1/2. My friends kids were referred to speech simply because they're twins that were born 3 weeks early. They were referred FROM BIRTH. They have no speech issues. Yet they took up space (two spaces actually) in the system, simply because it was assumed that they'd have issues.

Then there's a kid like Joshua. Completely normal birth circumstances. Normal development everywhere but speech. By 12 mths, he had 2 words. By 18 mths he had zero. By 24 mths he had zero. By 2.5 yrs he had 5 words (that were few and far in between).

Joshua had a speech assessment last September. It was seen that he clearly needed help. In October, Lee and I were informed that we would have to take a multi week class (to teach us how to teach him) THEN they would assess Joshua again to see if he needed individual help. The class taught us nothing that we weren't already doing with all of our kids, let alone Joshua.

In January he had another speech assessment. Clearly, he needed individual help. The worker told us that he wasn't in the group that was due to start the following month, but in the group that was due to start in May/June. However, because he would be turning 3 in June and only had 5 noises that counted as words, she would try to push him into the Feb/March group. Thankfully she succeeded.

Between the end of Feb and the beginning of April, Joshua had 7 weekly speech therapy appointments. He loved them. Sassy, his therapist was very patient with him and we got lots of new sounds out of him. We even got 2 new words! He was clearly thriving.

April 7th was our last session. We have no services until at least August when they will book an appointment for another assessment. Since we know he'll need more therapy the assessment seems like a waste of time. After the assessment, we'll be lucky to re-start therapy in October.

Our speech therapist told us that the delay was completely due to the amount of kids in their system.

Don't get me wrong! Joshua is not the only kid with speech issues. Plenty of kids DO have real speech issues. But well more than half of the kids in my town's speech system are like little Suzy above (only 40 words when she "should" have 50).

The Ultra Sick Week

As it's been all winter, everyone seems to be sick. I don't think we've had the entire house healthy since November.

I got slammed suddenly with the worst strep throat I've ever had. Friday, I was fine, felt like maybe I was coming down with a head cold by bed time. Sat morning I woke up and thought I was dying. I was sweating profusely like it was a heat wave in August, to shivering uncontrollably like it was -50 degrees. My thermometer battery is dead, but Lee says I had a pretty high fever. Went to the ER to get meds (we don't have regular clinics that are open on the weekend), dr saw I don't get flu shots and tried to insist it's the flu "because I don't get a flu shot" *roll eyes*. How about you LOOK at my throat, since that's my biggest complaint?? Finally convince him to look - oh! Looks like strep throat. Gee, really?? Other than going to the ER, I pretty much slept Sat-Mon. By Wednesday I was finally starting to feel slightly on the mend.

Brianna has had a horrible hacking cough. It has gone no where for weeks. It's not even getting better. She just sounds like she's going to cough up a lung several times a day. Otherwise she was fine. Wednesday she suddenly got very cold after she finished her schoolwork and asked to take a nap. We didn't see her again until about 10pm. Thursday and Friday she went up and down on fevers and bathroom trips.

Olivia likes to over-do everything and get multiple illnesses. On Sat, she developed this odd rash. Looked like simple hives, an allergic reaction. Except she's not typically an allergy kid and hasn't been exposed to anything new lately anyway. Then Sunday, starts popping up with an impetigo-like rash on her face (not surprising as a friend had it last week). Monday, starts having a "scratchy" tongue. *sigh* By Thursday her rashes we gone but she was still "turning into a cat" (since our cat, Bacon, has a scratchy tongue and so does she, she must be turning into a cat).

Joshua spent the week spreading snot everywhere and coughing on people (we are *trying* to work on nose blowing and covering his mouth).

Thankfully, mom and Lee seemed to be mostly spared. Lee got a bit of a cough but nothing else and mom seems to have escaped completely.

We did minimal school this week. A mix of the stuff even Olivia could do on her own and the stuff that she would allow Brianna to help her with. The basics for Brianna. Throw in a few movies (French for Kids, Dogs with Jobs (which was really enjoyed!)) and that was about it.

Daddy got to help out with schoolwork too

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Totally Flipping Brianna's Math

Brianna has several issues that are just part of her life. She has Sensory Processing Disorder, Central Auditory Processing Disorder and probable Dysgraphia. Such is life. We deal with it. Now, however, we are looking at the probability of Dyscalculia.

Brianna is a smart child. Regardless of her alphabet soup of letters between her diagnosed disorders and her probable ones, she still excels in many areas of life. Except math. Math has always been her sore spot. In a sea of straight As in everything else, the highest grade she's ever gotten in math is a C, but most often it's a D or (currently) an F.

While she seemingly has no issues with grades 1 through 4, grade 5 hit her like a lead balloon. It took her 3 tries to make it through Gr. 5 math. She is now on her 2nd try through Gr. 6 math. And yet, she's doing Gr. 8-10 in most other subjects.

Going into the high school years and the fact that she needs at least Gr. 11 math for the college course she wants to take, we obviously need to figure something out.

What we're going to do first is have her do almost all of the chapter tests (thankfully no test anxiety here) from grade 2 to 5. That will hopefully pin point the specific areas she's struggling with.

From there, we're going to spend extra time with Khan Academy, drills and randomized math questions in problem areas. Hopefully we will go back with Math Mammoth in a few months as both she and I enjoy it. We are also looking into Life of Fred and MobyMax.

Dad Bashing Sucks

My aunt posted this article to her Facebook ( <--- it's a good read, read it!). It's 110% true.

While I openly tease Lee about being my 6th child, he knows (because I tell him verbally, not just cause I assume he knows) that he is an immeasurably important person in our house.

He is a great parent. He is allowed to succeed and fail just as much as I am. I am not the queen of mommies and he's just a lowly dad. He changed as many if not more diapers than I did. He got up in the middle of the night. He gave baths. He picks out the kids clothes (usually with better taste than me!). He stuffs cloth diapers. He washes floors (on his hands and knees!). He IS an equal parent.

Too often I see moms not "allow" dad to pick clothes, do hair, snuggle baby when they're upset, ect... Then, those same moms complain that dad doesn't "get it". How could they? They're not allowed to be parents. They're sperm donors who get to live with their kids.

Society says that dads only babysit. They say that dads are bumbling fools. Look at most sitcoms. Dads are either idiots or assholes. Sure not all dads can sit through the 64th episode of Caillou (hell, neither can I!), but does that mean they suck as parents? Hell no! It means they're human, just like us moms.

ALL parents excel and lack in various area of parenting regardless of what's in their pants.

19 Days Late....

I don't typically "do" New Years Resolutions and maybe that's why this is 19 days "late". I really want to get back to my blog. I love writing, even if I sometimes stink at it. I really love reading my blog's history to see how much my kids and my life has grown. I need to get back to writing my blog.

I know, I know, I've said it before. I'm also a squirrel. My friend, Sabrina (who I've known over a year now, but no one would know, cause I suck at this blog thing lately), says I'm like a squirrel cause I flit around doing a zillion different things at once instead of focusing on one thing until its done. It's true. And maybe a kinda good thing since I have my house, my homeschooling, my business and more. I need to be able to take care of all of them. But I DO tend to leave a LOT of things unfinished to go on to the next great idea.

I found a great app, Keep, that's been really helping me. I have check lists for work, school, general to-dos, ect... While there's a zillion things on each list, I AM actually getting them checked off!

I WILL start writing my blog again. I'm sure I've lost the few followers I had by now, so for now, I'll just talk to myself. But hopefully, soon, people will start coming back to read about our little world

6 Reasons I Homeschool

People often ask homeschoolers why they homeschool, here's my top reasons, for my family. This is an incomplete list as the reasons are endless, but it's a good start for me!

1. Better education. I am not a public school or teacher hater. I am a system hater. I know loads of GREAT teachers and Brianna used to go to a GREAT public school. But the system has failed those teachers and schools. Teachers can't actually teach any more. Bullying is rampant because teachers aren't allowed to discipline any more. Grades are sky high, which seems like a good thing, but it's not because kids are doing awesome in their schoolwork, it's because the current grading system does not allow zeros. If you don't do your work, it just doesn't get graded. Another niece of mine thought she'd need an out of province drivers license if she moved to Toronto (some of my readers may not know the sadness of that, we live in Ontario, this niece lives in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada, Toronto is the capital of Ontario, 7 hrs away from Ottawa). I believe much more geography is needed, but at least some basic your-own-province geography would be nice!

2. Brianna actually ASKS to learn new things. School isn't a thing to be hated. Sure we learn the stuff she needs to know to succeed as an adult, but she also learns about the things that interest her, like when we spend about a month doing almost nothing but the Titanic.

3. Our lives don't revolve around the school schedule. If we want to take a week off in May for no flipping reason, we can! If the baby kept everyone up last night, it's no big deal if we don't start school til noon!

4. Homeschooling in Ontario is really easy. In a nut shell, we live in a no-reporting area and I don't have to keep a mound of paperwork to keep some politician happy.

5. Two words: Common Core. That crap is scary and I can't figure out math for the life of me, using it!

6. Public school does not teach even 1/4 of the life skills kids need. Most of the basic ones they used to teach, have been cut. Way too many teens can not count change as cashiers. A lot have no clue how to prepare inexpensive simple meals. Kids are often truly amazed when they discover how much what they considered "needs" costs. Ask the average just-out-of-high-schooler to unclog a toilet, how to balance a budget, how to mow a lawn, how to re-set a water heater, how to use a sewing machine, how to make a simple piece out of wood. Too many of them would have no clue. Yes, of course, I agree, it's a parent's job to teach this stuff, but a lot of it used to be taught in school.

Public school works for some families, but I'm beyond grateful that homeschooling is an option for my family.

Linked up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Real Life at Home and Hip Homeschool Moms

A Hard Life Lesson

Last night I found out that a local charity was putting on an Easter egg hunt. While we're not religious, we do follow a lot of the traditions of typical Christian families, so I knew the kids would love it. I didn't tell them about the egg hunt cause, well, they're kids. I knew I'd hear about it every 5 seconds until the moment we walked out the door.

This morning Joshua was a sweet baby and let me sleep in. A little too late. I woke up to Olivia crawling in bed with me, looked at the time and jumped up. We were supposed to be leaving in 5 minutes! I casually told the girls what we were going to do and needless to say, they cooperated easily in getting ready *really* fast!

The coordinators of the egg hunt set it up that volunteers were going to hide 1,500 eggs around the park. Now, for those not local to me, our park is actually a waterfront green space that stretches about 5 kilometers. Parents were asked to not enter the park until 9am so we took the long way as the quickest way was through the park from our end of town and I didn't know where the coordinators considered the beginning of the park.

We arrived to the main/typical "start point" of the park at 9:02am. We could see a bunch of kids walking all around with their little baskets. Very quickly I noticed no eggs. I thought no biggie, all the obvious ones were understandably grabbed quickly. The girls ran ahead of slow me with the stroller. Walking further through the park, still no eggs. I'm also seeing majority of these kids baskets are empty.

My heart dropped.

Once I caught up to the girls at the playground I saw the problem. Several children and their supposedly adult parents were at the playground with everything from traditional Easter baskets to grocery bags to *5 gallon pails* FULL of eggs. Were these coordinators helping out the kids? Nope! These were greedy, selfish "parents" who knowingly broke the rules, came to the park early and encouraged their children to break the rules and be greedy and collect as many eggs as possible.

Thankfully for Brianna and Olivia we ran into some friends who's kids shared a couple eggs they managed to find. By this point, Brianna was angry with the people who were unfair to everyone else, but was happy to get one egg. To try to distract Olivia who just didn't understand why people would do this (for that matter I don't get it either), I suggested we go look for ducks along the water and maybe we'd spot some eggs. While we were down there a lovely little boy ran up to the girls and offered 2 of his eggs to them. Again, a child who only found a few.

We continued down the bike path that runs the length of the park towards out house and the girls and I talked a lot about the people who spoiled the egg hunt. We talked about the ways I raise them and how sometimes doing the right thing seems dumb because we lose out, but at least we know in our hearts that we did the right thing.

We made the most of our morning climbing rocks along the water and chatting with the ducks. A trip to Tim Hortons for a treat and a stop at the close-to-home playground may have also soothed hurt feelings a little ;)

Brianna also had a great afternoon as she got pulled over by the police on her bike and given a coupon for a free Dairy Queen treat as a reward for wearing a bike helmet properly while riding! (another always-do-the-right-thing lesson as she was the only one of her friends wearing a helmet and so the only one to get the coupon)

I Need My Blog Back

I've been "gone" almost a year. A lot has happened in that time. But I need to be back here. While I love having people follow my blog and leave me comments, really, I write this for me. I'm a sentimental person who loves looking back and reading what I've/we've done and seeing pictures.

I've been putting off this blog. "I'm much too busy." Bullshit. If I have time to virtually wander around facebook for at least an hour a day, I have plenty of time to post here.

A lot of uncertainty has been going on in my homeschooling world. My kids still won't be going to public school, but my niece will be. Over the last year she has left and restarted homeschooling with us 3 times. As of June, she is done with us and will re-start public school in September. The option is always open for her to come back, but this random flip-flopping has put a damper in my enthusiasm about school projects. Come July, we'll learn a new normal.

Joshua's birth last June brought about a big upheaval. Prior to that we hadn't had more than a week break since starting homeschooling in November of 2010. Brianna doesn't take long breaks well. Understandably though, I didn't really care about school after just giving birth. We took 6 weeks off. We may as well have taken 6 years off. Brianna and Tanya seemed to have forgotten everything they learned in the previous year. I was obviously distracted. Thank crap it was summer and we were normally on a very light schedule.

Olivia "should have" started Junior Kindergarten last September (in Ontario, we have 2 Kindergartens, for 4 yr olds and the usual one, for 5 yr olds). A few years ago I had thought about sending her to public school just for Kindergarten, then pulling her out for Gr. 1. When she proved to be almost "done" the 2nd year of Kindergarten (by school standards) before she was due to start her 1st year, I knew she would be bored and end up labelled a "trouble-maker" or something.

I have picked back up my business, LoveBugs Accessories. More than a couple people have insinuated that I'm possibly insane for homeschooling 3 kids, having a baby and running a home business that can require hours of "creating" (for those who don't know, I sew a variety of items, make hairbows and tutus, make crochet hats and the like). While it can be stressful at times (we're trying to "catch up" Tanya as much as possible before PS and it's craft show season), I truly do love it.

So I'm back. I may post several times a week or only a few times a month, but this is important to me and I WILL be posting.

Obligatory cute current-ish pic of my 4 hooligans

Losing

Tanya will not be homeschooling with us from now on. I disagree with the decision, but hey, it's not my kid, so obviously I don't get a say.

I Have a Fear of Play Doh

I was reading a blog post at The Usual Mayhem about how great Play Doh is. And I agree! Play Doh is the first thing Olivia and I pull out when we visit her brother.

Play Doh in my house though? NO WAY! My old excuse was it gets smeared into the carpet.

Then we ripped out the carpet in the living room. But oh! We have kids and they drag their toys around and there's still carpeting upstairs! Yes! That's a great excuse!

Then we moved to our new house. Which has ZERO carpeting anywhere.

Crap.

Ok, so I hate Play Doh. Maybe it's my OCD. I can't stand Play Doh being left out to dry. I can't stand the colors being mixed, never to be separated again, eventually turning into a putrid grayish purple that no one wants to play with. I'd rather tubes of loose glitter to Play Doh

Modelling clay? Not as bad. I allow Brianna to buy it. However, she keeps it in the basement other than to bring it up to show me her creations. Olivia, not surprisingly, finds it too hard to work with.

*Maybe* just maybe, I could buy a single color tub of Play Doh and keep it high up and only bring it down when it can be contained......

New Blogger

I switched over to the new blogger and maaaaaaaan am I confuzzled! Thankfully I have some already written our posts... hopefully this one posts properly!

Unsupervised Science Experiment

Brianna's favorite subject is Science. Most of the time this is great! Sometimes, like today, it's a source of huge frustration.


Brianna has always been a mixer. Typically it's be full bottles of shower gel, facial scrub, shampoo, ect... while in the bath tub. HUGE waste of money, yes, but nothing absolutely horrible. Today it was vinegar, laundry soap and BLEACH in my WASHING MACHINE. And then she LEFT IT ALL IN THERE! Thankfully, I smelled the bleach and wondered about it since I hadn't used bleach in 2 days. 


So I did a science experiment of my own. I poured some of the bleach into a bowl and dipped an old red towel into it and showed her what would have happened to all her favorite clothes if I had done laundry without noticing the bleach. Expected horrified reaction - check. *fingers crossed* she thinks first from now on!

Weekly Wrap Up

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Training Records:
   Brianna - run - 2 mins, 49 sec
               - bike - 3 mins 27 sec
   Tanya   - run - 2 mins 35 sec
               - bike - 3 mins 15 sec
   Mom    - run - 3 mins 45 sec

Monday - The girls started their training for the year. We're starting out with some light daily exercise, multiple .3 mile runs and .7 mile bikes. The distances will be upped as we go and I figure out new routes for them. In my weekly wrap ups I'll now be including their records for the week. My mom is also sort of training, as she promised to run one of their 5Ks with them. Whether she runs in the first one or last one, we're not sure. She's doing a hell of a lot better than we thought she would (herself included!) since she hasn't run as long as I've been alive and spent most of those years 250+lbs.

Tuesday - A fairly quiet day of enjoying the weather and getting a couple basics done.

Wednesday - We were supposed to go to homeschool swimming today. Normally in the name of fun stuff, I'll put aside school for the moment and come back to it later in the day or the next day. However, the girls have been doing their best to dawdle. Come to find out that not only has Tanya been blowing of the work *I* give her for the days she's not here, but also the work my sister gives her.

Thursday - The girls started their French course with my sister. They're using Living Language (books and CDs as well as flashcards and games on the site). This week they focused on polite and familiar greetings. On Wednesdays, they'll review last week's lesson with me and if they've mastered it, they'll move on to the next lesson the next day at my sister's.

Friday - We finally got to last week's geography class. We got to figure out the longitude clues to see approximately where the locations are east or west of Greenwich, England (Prime Meridian). The girls were quite interested to see that 3 of the locations we're within 5 degrees longitude from Greenwich, but of course those locations can be anywhere on that line of longitude.

Day in the Life

I haven't done one of these in a while (last one was here)

This Day in the Life starts at midnight, since I was still up, dyeing (is that a word? lol) and cutting my hair. Yeah, I'm a night owl. Thankfully though, I'm lucky enough to have a hubby, a morning person, who happens to get off work shortly before the other morning person (Olivia) gets up. Meaning me and the other not morning person (Brianna) can sleep in.

2:08am - I go to bed

6:52am - Olivia wakes up and calls for either me or Lee. Thankfully I hear Lee talking to her so I can go back to sleep

8:59am - one minute before my alarm goes off, the phone rings *grumble, grumble*

9:02am - ship Lee off to bed and try to figure out why Olivia shirt is sopping wet

9:04am - I sit down with a coffee and discuss with Brianna whether she's really still sick or if she wants to just play the DS again all day. Not having to go back to bed wins and Brianna finds breakfast.

9:13am - talk to my sister and find out the my BIL is driving Tanya to school today. He says they're leaving at 9:45... whether that's am or pm, who knows (my BIL is notoriously slooooow)

9:33am - send Brianna to get dressed and do her morning chores and eat a bagel. Olivia's curled up on the couch watching her shows.

10:02am - The girls sit and play the DS together while we wait for Tanya to get here. I get working on printing out school stuff

10:06am - Wooo! BIL wasn't as late as usual and Tanya is here.

10:08am - Olivia tries to bounce her face off the floor so we make things all better by "feeding" the ferrets (shoving bits of cat food through the cage bars)

10:15am - The girls settle down to fixing their longitude/latitude chart for their Mystery Class from last week. Olivia insists on doing her school work too

10:32am - Tot School is ditched for Toopy and Binoo

10:34am - tell the girls that they better get school done so we can go to our field trip (which probably wasn't the best idea cause now they're yapping about the field trip instead of doing school lol)

10:37am - somehow, they lapse into talking about Terry Fox....

10:49am - explaining to the girls about their Mystery Class journal page (in which they predict what their photo period graphs will look like at the end of the month) that that's only 2 weeks from now and not the summertime so they should make educated guesses based on the current photo periods and now much they would move by the end of the month (meaning we probably won't suddenly jump from 11.5 hrs of sunlight to 15 lol)

11:26 am - Finally starting the girls on other school work, Tanya, English and Brianna, math.

11:30am - Olivia demands a red crayon to do school work in her notebook then *needs* to show Grandma her sunglasses

11:40am - Handwriting practice talks about the Wright Brothers so we head off on a mini rabbit trail about the first flights.

11:48am - Hook Olivia up with a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of yogurt for lunch, big surprise, the yogurt gets put on the sandwich

11:52am - my sister shows up to go to school (I live next door to her college)

12:04pm - set up the girls with their lunches and have them continue school work since they piddled around all morning taking 2 hours to do 30 minutes of work.

12:22pm - argue with Olivia that the sunshine streaming into her room at nap time isn't too dark, but too bright lol

12:28pm - Let Lee know that we're leaving and will be back before Olivia gets up so he can still lounge in bed.

12:36pm - Leave for the Invertebrates Workshop and the Ontario Power Generation Visitors Center

2:04pm - Back from the OPG center. The girls got OPG balloons and run balloon races through the kitchen.

2:13pm - Back to school work. The girls are finally done their review/assessment stuff and are working through actual curriculum.

3:04pm - random discussion on the difference between telescopes and microscopes (which has a lot to do with the math they're working on lol)

3:26pm - Olivia gets up and wants to wake up Daddy and have a snack. The girls hear about Olivia's snack and suddenly fall hungry

3:52pm - The girls each earned an extra page of school work for their dawdling

4:08pm - FINALLY onto this week's Geography

4:36pm - My sister comes back from school and we discuss her class while the girls screw around do their work

6:02pm - Tanya is finally done her work and goes home

6:06pm - Olivia's balloon pops and she's soothed by doing her dinosaur pre-writing page

6:13pm - Olivia switches to tracing her name and coloring Dora shapes and with Brianna finally done she plays with the Canada magnet set

6:22pm - Brianna and Olivia declare snuggle time before supper to watch Backyardigans

6:40pm - supper time!

6:59pm - I reply to an email from The Canadian Homeschooler about putting together a blog post about homeschooling in Ontario

7:03pm - Olivia suckered Lee into watching cartoons in our bed and Brianna slooooowly got started on her evening chores.

7:08pm - actually paying attention to the tv (when it's not Toopy and Binoo on) lasted about 3 seconds longer than it normally did and Olivia's off to the tub while Brianna takes 6 years to do a load of dishes.

7:14pm - discussing with Brianna what 30 minutes of exercise a day really means.... ya know, swinging your legs off a chair while you daydream doesn't count...

7:27pm - Brianna's turn in the shower, she's on a 10 minute time limit or she stay in there til the water runs cold.

7:42pm - after braiding Olivia's hair she wants to play her game (ReadingEggs). She's still stuck on a sounding out lesson  so we switch to StarFall.

7:58pm - Olivia's off to snuggle with Daddy before bed (and con him into watching Cat in the Hat lol) and Brianna is making up her own version of Go Fish!

8:31pm - Olivia come down for "one more kiss" and Lee puts her to bed.

9:03pm - Brianna decides that she's going to exercise before bed and starts running in circles in the living room

9:34pm - Lee leaves for work

9:39pm - I ship Brianna off to bed and explain to Olivia that it's supposed to be dark in her room and no she doesn't need a flashlight.

9:45pm - I sit at my desk to check facebook and try to find Tanya an English curriculum that isn't book based (while I think book based curriculum is great, I prefer ones that CAN be used with books instead of one that MUST be used with books)

10:43pm - No luck in finding more than 2 worksheets for Tanya so far, but I did find 2 French sites (here and here) and a Catholic site for my sister....

10:52pm - Give up for the night and work on some marking from last week

11:57pm - Organize pictures and links for today's blog post

12:52am - off to bed!!

Weekly Wrap Up

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Monday - We missed out on the journal work for last week's Mystery Class. I caught a "half listening" block in the girls work. The question was how could we tell from the data and graphs which mystery locations were in the southern or northern hemispheres. The answer of course was looking to see what locations were losing or gaining daylight, but the girls thought it would work just by looking at the photo periods. Nope! I showed them how 2 places could be thousands of miles from each other and yet have the same amount of daylight. Hehehe says the amused teacher ;)

Tuesday - I had Brianna focus on paragraphs. She likes to write sometimes (like her penpals), but for the most part her "paragraphs" are still quite fragmented. We'll continue to work on them over the rest of the week.

Wednesday - Leap Day! We made up a Leap Year time capsule and made a Leap Day snack.

Thursday - The girls got a school free day since it's my sister's birthday, but Tanya did end up with an impromptu Home Ec class!

Friday - This was a day of frustration. Tanya was late again and didn't even complete the work I had sent home with her on Monday, let alone her extra work that she brought home on Wednesday. Brianna got an impromtu free day out of it while Tanya spent the day catching up on irresponsibility. Here's hoping for lessons learned and a better week next week!

Homeschooling Tanya

Background: Tanya is my niece-by-choice. Her mother, Lisa, is actually not my sister, but one of my best friends. We choose to be family.

Last summer, Tanya did some summer schooling with us as she felt she needed some extra help in math. Boy did she ever. She was supposed to be going into Gr. 6 that September, but was struggling with grade 3 and 4 math. She decided right then and there that she wanted to BE homeschooled. My sister wanted Tanya to pass some expectations first and sent her back to school. I told Lisa that I would support whatever she chose, but if any time she wanted to pull Tanya, I only needed a few days to get together some assessing work.

Over the last 5 mths, Tanya continued to complain about not being helped in her problem areas and made to stay behind in areas that she excelled. When her bullying situation got worse, my sister went to the principal. However, Tanya's teacher insisted that the bully in question "would never do something like that" *roll eyes*

This progressed to the point that by Christmas, now even the TEACHER was bullying Tanya. Lisa decided, enough was enough, Tanya was going to be homeschooled. Tanya asked to go back for January in order to say goodbye to her friends.

The last week of January was the worst as the teacher was now constantly harassing Tanya about the fact that my sister "wouldn't be allowed" to homeschool. Now we live in a "no reporting" area, where the only thing we need to do is send a letter of intent each year. We reassured Tanya that she *would* be homeschooled no matter what her teacher said.

That week my sister got a phone call from the school requesting a case conference. Legally, we don't need to meet with the school, but wanted to for humour's sake and out of courtesy to the principal, whom Lisa gets along with. The day of the meeting we were informed that the school requested that CAS (Child Services/CPS) be involved. While normally this is a scare tactic pulled by the schools, thankfully in our situation, CAS was already involved in helping out with my nephew's issues and knew of and supported Lisa's choice to homeschool.

So the meeting was a bunch of "you have to do this" from the school board lady and a bunch of "here's what the LAW says" from Lisa and I. The board asked about socialization *roll eyes* and I explained that even in a town as small as ours, we have a fairly large homeschool group with many children to socialize with. When asked how we're going to stay with the curriculum for "when" she's put into public school (cause of course it's going to fail) we explained that first she needs to be assessed to see what blocks she's missing and "catch up". The board then, ever so nicely *sarcasm*, said that she could remain in school until the school board got (around to processing) the letter of intent and she could do assessment there. Um, no. This is the same school who has been giving a struggling child almost straight As.

Speaking of, I asked about how Tanya herself could complain about not understanding this and that and yet get good grades. How every report card she got said that she "needs improvement" on homework completion and independent work, yet still get good grades. The principal explained (while trying very hard not to roll his own eyes) that with the current grading system, grades are only given on completed work. Translation: a child can do really good on whatever work they actually complete and get good grades, even if they are only completing 1 of 10 pieces of work through-out the year! What great work ethics!

So we walked out of there knowing that they can't do anything to stop us from homeschooling Tanya. We even went so far as to hand deliver a 2nd letter of intent to the local branch of the school board. On Feb 8th we got word that (they finally got around to looking at the damn paper and) we're official!

Here's to a long and successful homeschooling career!

Apologies and Mini School

Sorry about suddenly disappearing. My Mozilla died and I had to figure out how to get everything working again. But I'm back!!!!

2 weeks ago I launched (locally) my children's accessories business. I have been crazy busy with orders so we have been on a ultra basic school schedule. The first week I damn near killed myself trying to get everything done (work and school). Thankfully I have some great homeschooling friends who had me let myself slack off.

We homeschool year round at a slightly above normal speed. So in a "school year" we've done about a year and a half of school. So we have plenty of "time" to slow down so I can get my customers orders done. I have Brianna doing basics almost everyday, just so she doesn't lose what we've already covered.

Lightening Up

We're having a lot of home issues right now with hubby's lay off. I've noticed myself snarking at Brianna about things that I normally wouldn't because of stress... not good. We're not going to completely break, cause that would stress me out more, but I'm gonna lighten the load to the basics for a while.

Homeschool Mother's Journal

In my life this week… Money sucks. With Lee laid off and all the bills coming in at once, money just plain sucks. But we'll get through, we always do!
 
In our homeschool this week… We had a shorter week with Brianna's father coming into town, but still got to get a lot of work done and Brianna got to show off her work to him.

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing… with it being Easter, we saw LOADS of family on both sides.

My favorite thing this week was… seeing Brianna (who is SPD/ADHD and only 8) behave a heck of a lot better than the several years older children we were with in church for my nephew's communion service.

What’s working/not working for us… Spell By Color. Or at least it seems to be working! We just started it last week, but Brianna's enjoying it!

Homeschool questions/thoughts I have… How far ahead do you collect HS material? I've been picking up pre-school stuff for my not even 2 yr old and DH looks at me like I'm nuts. Same with Brianna, she's roughly 3rd/4th grade level and I have stuff for a few grades ahead.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share…

Our color changing celery that Brianna's all excited about

 Come check out other Journals at The Homeschool Chick!