Through the Eyes of Olivia (7 yrs)

This week's iHomeschool Blog Hop is "Through the Eyes of the Student". Olivia is 7 old and has been homeschooled since the beginning. She took a bunch of pictures and how to describe her homeschooling day.

Reading Eggs is awesome, you should play it, it's really cool! And Math Seeds is where you learn math. The middle one is for when you're bigger.

This is all my work for today. School is fun, I love school!

This is one of our kittens. I got my Brownies uniform today. You should go to Brownies!

This is me looking for mommy's new Pokemon, Ponyta. 

My sister Brianna is so fun. I like watching her play on her phone. Sometimes she lets me play on her phone or even on her computer.

Sorting laundry is one of my chores.

As an addition to Olivia'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? It means you do your schoolwork at home.

How long have you been homeschooling? Since I was.... forever.

Why do you homeschool? Because I'm not big enough for public school (I remind her that Brianna, 14, homeschools). Oh. Because mommy told me and Brianna to homeschool.

What does a typical homeschool day look like for us? It's fun and awesome. We start school at 10 o'clock. We look at our agendas and see what we have. The after schoolwork we play

What is your most favorite thing about homeschooling? English (language arts)

What is your least favorite thing about homeschooling? Nothing!

What is the coolest thing you've learned? Learning how to read

What is the most boring thing you've learned? Nothing.

What advice would you have for a kid who is just starting homeschooling? Don't worry, school is awesome!

What advice would you have for a parent who is just starting homeschooling? Give them English, give them math and give them 1 page of reading.

What do you want to do after you finish homeschooling? I was to have fun and have kids

Is there anything new you'd like to learn about soon? I want to make a volcano explosion experiment! (we already did that last year) But I want to do it again!

Do you ever wish you went to public school? Why or why not? I don't know. What would I do there? (schoolwork) And I'd get breaks? (yeah, 2) And lunch break (no, 2 including lunch) Oh. Then no, not really. (Why not?) Cause you don't get lots of breaks!

Weekly Wrap Up - 9/16/16

Monday was a day off for Daddy's birthday. We always take off family birthdays, but learning often still happens!

Brianna is loving getting back into CNN Student News. It teaches her current events and brings her around the world. It has serious stuff, and fun stuff (like Tuesday's llama jumping segment).

The beginning of fall has some great weather. Not too hot, not too cool and most of the humidity is gone. The girls took Poetry Tea Time onto the porch this week.

Brianna spend a lot of time this week busting her butt to hit her $500 fundraising goal for The Terry Fox Foundation. In the last 5 years she has raised almost $2000!

We have an outdoor cat who had kittens 5 weeks ago. Olivia is SUPER protective of them. She is a giant worry wart as they get bigger and more into exploring. Thankfully they love her and happy put up with her smothering.

I love freezer cooking. Brianna's helped me a few times, but it's always been "get me this" or "get me that". This time, I had her HELP. Figuring out what to make, what spices we needed, mixing (hamburger, by hand), forming hamburgers and meatballs. The whole shebang. She loved it! We made hamburgers, chili, meatloaf, sloppy joes, tator tot casserole, cheeseburger rice, sausage breakfast muffins and chocolate chip cookies.

In more "schooly" news, we finished up the Nervous System portion of our Biology course. Brianna chose to write about amnesia for her writing assignment. Olivia spent a lot of time poking and pinching herself to "send signals to her brain" so clearly that portion was well learned lol

Brianna had a bit of a meltdown over her French writing. She is a terrible speller, even in English, and Rosetta Stone won't mark the activity as complete unless you score 80% or more, which means in the writing portion, she has to spell at least 80% of the words correctly. I'm not sure how we will proceed in the next 4 years of the course. I WANT her to be completely fluent, including writing, but I don't want to make her hate it because she's a naturally poor speller.

See what Joshua did this week in my tot school post.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

Tot School - Week 2

Joshua was featured in this week's 1+1+1=1 Tot School post! Exciting!!!

Joshua has a awesome speech appointment with his therapist this week. We'll be working speech work into his schoolwork next week since the intro to school has been such a big hit.

Joshua absolutely loved school this week. When I grab his preschool box he gets all excited and runs to the living room to get to work. This week we worked on mostly stuff he knows with a couple new things put in (sorting by size and dot stickers) and finally got around to seeing how many lower case letters he knows (all but 4).

Matching colors

Dot stickers! We started with J for Joshua

Still no real interest in coloring the cars, but was more interested in tracing the letters

He loves apples, so this apple puzzle was great

Sorting from biggest to smallest

He found his cement mixer that matches the one in his book!

 Linking up with 1+1+1=1 and Hip Homeschool Moms

Reading in 2016/2017

I recently posted our Current Curriculum but left out read alouds and individual reading. Why? A mix of "I forgot" and the fact that it changes so often.

Some things we read just cause we feel like it. Some things we read because I read them as a kid and thought they were fantastic and/or important books. Some thing we read because it ties with current interests.

Our reading plans for this year, in no particular order are:
-The Hunger Games series
-Little House on the Prairie series
-Black Beauty
-The Trumpet of the Swan
-The Family Under the Bridge
-Tracker
-Hatchet (and all the "Brian" books that go with it)
-Dear Austin
-The Incredible Journey
-Jim Ugly
-Little Women
-Alice in Wonderland
-The Sky is Falling

We are starting with The Family Under the Bridge for no other reason than we haven't done read alouds (other than science and history) in a while and it's a shorter book.

Great Speech Appointment!

Joshua had a speech assessment this morning. He hasn't had speech therapy since April so I knew there was going to obviously be a great improvement.

He blew his therapist away with the drastic change! She was so happy to hear him actually talking!

As we knew, he is still, of course, delayed. BUT! Has shown enough improvement that from now until December, we will work on specific things at home (mostly, not dropping the consonants off of the end of words). In Dec, we will re-assess and see if at the center therapy visits are needed.

Since we were expecting to be dumped right back into therapy this month, this is a super happy improvement!

My Disorganized But Organized Homeschool

Week 2 of iHomeschool Network's Back to School Blog Hop is School Room Week. We show off our work spaces, our storage, our school rooms (if we have them). This is my favorite week of the Blog Hop. I love snooping in other people's school rooms and gathering ideas for our own. Especially people who, like us, do not have a dedicated school room.

I live in organized chaos.

We have a fair sized home. But no where to really call a school room. Most of our schooling happens at the kitchen table, the couch or the front porch. Most of our supplies and curriculum are stored in our over-sized (for it's purpose) laundry room.

This is my pile. Multiple weeks of work printed, my read alouds, Olivia's readers and Brianna's Biology text for me to put comprehension questions out of. The pile and the binder cubby is on/in my desk. My computer holds a world of carefully organized bookmarks to about a million sites and a folder of precisely organized ebooks. I'm slightly crazy.

These are the girls daily work folders. Most of Brianna's schoolwork is on the computer now, but her folder holds her notebooks and Pathfinder journal and notes. Olivia's holds her current math, English, reading words, spelling books and Brownie journal.

This is the school closet in the laundry room. The top shelf is board games. The 2 other shelves are various art supplies, small kits and manipulatives. One the left set of drawers is my photocopier and for some reason, our flute. In the drawers are various art supplies and school dvds. On the middle tower is completed work that I need to sort into their kept-work binders and our globe. In those drawers are various often used supplies (glue sticks, craft paper, ect...).  On the 3rd tower is Brianna's French knitter. In the drawers are a zillion supplies - pencils, staples, post it note, blank notebooks, manila folders, ect... Almost everything we need outside of curriculum is found in this closet.

Our very picked through bookshelf (most books are in the kids rooms or in current use) and our guitar. To the side is a bin of books that are between the girls' reading levels.

This pantry holds the curriculum for the grades we are not currently using as well as our science kits. The top shelf is zip binders of the kids completed work that we've decided to keep.

Our main work area, the kitchen table. On it is Brianna's laptop, the school bin (a bin of pencils, a math kit, glue sticks, calculator, ect...), the marker tower, Joshua's preschool bin (laminated printables), and our teaching clock. On the wall we have the lyrics to O' Canada, maps of Canada and the world and a cursive writing chart.

First Tot School Post in a Long Time!

Joshua turned 3 in June. Because of him being non verbal and no resources available to him, I figured it would be forever before we ever started him with school.

In July he had 5 occasionally used words. But the end of August he blew up with over 200 words, used every day. It's like a light switch flipped and suddenly he won't shut up! He's still approximately a year "behind" in speech so will be continuing with speech therapy as it's available.

In this word explosion, we discovered that he's freaking smart. Like advanced smart. Like possibly gifted smart.

Some of his first clear "words" were identifying (correctly) the letters on the fridge. 

Then he started counting everything. Ok. This isn't simply a tot school start. I need to do an assessment to see what he knows. I got a simple preschool assessment from 1+1+1=1. I knew he probably couldn't do the line tracing and cutting, but I knew he could do some of the letters.

At 3 yrs, 2 mths he can:
- recite the alphabet and identify all 26 capital letters (we haven't tried low case yet) out of order
- count objects to 13 and identify all numbers 0-10 except 8 and 9
- identifies circle, square, heart and star
- identifies blue, yellow, green and red

We are shocked. He was classed as non-verbal 2 months ago. Because of this we never bothered doing any of the beginning learning with him that we did with the other kids (we did "Shoe!" with him instead of "One, two. Two red shoes" that we did with the older kids). Yet he just assessed at a higher level than a lot of Kindergarteners. Um. Crap.

I pulled out my tot school/preschool stuff from Olivia. I pulled out a few items to introduce it to him. He is in love. He sees the bin of laminated printables on the kitchen table and begs for school. He's not really interested in any writing/coloring activities but males are typically slower to pick up that fine motor stuff than females so I'm not worried. The girls think it's awesome that he has school now too.

Anything with cars makes Joshua happy

He loves the Magic School Bus books and videos

He did this farm animal matching game several times this week

More cars! And he gets to count them! Two of his favorite things!

Linking up with 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations.