School these days

I feel better about school this year than I did last year. We are only in week 3 so we shall see.  I do feel like I'm schooling with a purpose this year though. Last year I was just getting by. I couldn't find something that worked well for us at all.  I feel like I'm playing catch up this year..but that's ok.

I'm using My Father's World for History and Science.  I'm having a hard time finding my groove with the history and I can tell the text and writing portion will get monotonous. I hope I'm wrong.  If I'm not wrong, I hope I can find ways to juice it up and make it more interesting. It has great projects, but what kid wants to sit and listen to boring text for 20 minutes every couple of days?  Maybe I'll read corresponding library books or something similar for each portion. We'll see.

I like how MFW sets up science so far. You use Usborne books and just follow the book. The experiments aren't optional. Raelee is enjoying them and they are quick and easy. Works for me.  We are moving into space exploration next week. I can't figure out what it has to do with anything else we are doing, but I'll roll with it and see what happens!

Here are some pictures from Science. We haven't done history this week. I got off track somehow and am filling in this week until I can get us back on track next week.

Here is Raelee learning about how air pushes down on things and it makes it hard to push against it sometimes. This would have worked better with newspaper..I didn't have any. I'll try this again soon.

The cup is full of water...put the paper on top of the cup and flip it over. The water stays in the cup...unless you are showing this experiment to Daddy...then the water just splashes everywhere.  Regardless, Raelee was amazed by it.

We are doing Horizons (2) for math...she is doing well with it. I am amazed that I can show her a problem and she does the rest all on her own.  I set up examples on the board today and she didn't need them. I explained the problems to her and she told me "oh yeah, that's easy" and had them done in 3 minutes.  I am afraid I did her wrong with math last year and if I had found this program last year, she would likely be much further along in math than she is now.  Now, if I can just get this child to memorize her facts...lol  You all will be happy to know that she is finally writing her numbers correctly (not backwards) 90% of the time...lol

Oh and for the record, we chose to homeschool in our PJ's today in honor of all of the public kids going back to school today and having to get up early and get dressed. Normally, I would take a fun field trip on the 'first day of public school' but we did that yesterday so we couldn't today.

I'm using All About Spelling (1) for Spelling and now for phonics. It's really a great program and I think once we advance into the program a bit, it'll help her soar with reading as well.  I can use the spelling skills myself so this will be good for both of us.  It tells the 'why's' rather than just writing your words 5 times each and alphabetizing. I need to know the why's. We are getting ready to learn when a 'c' is hard or soft at the beginning of the word. I never knew there was a rule for that!
AAS is great for all types of learners...hands on, book learners, visuals.  It is teacher intensive..but I'm ok with that...I AM her teacher after all!

Since we are waiting until next week to pick history/geography back up again, I took this opportunity to work on her frog unit study from her Grandma. She sends the neatest unit studies!!  Raelee is to the point now where she requests certain topics from her Grandma. Not sure what she wants next...I'll have to ask her.

She always gets fun stuff in addition to learning stuff. What's fun is that Grandma has it all set up so that she can go back to her unit studies over and over and learn every time. We have frogs, horses, giraffe's, elephants. I can't think of any others right now.  I tried telling Raelee she can learn about stuff other than animals from Grandma too...but she wasn't buying that. She said Grandma likes teaching her about animals so she'll stick with that. 

She had to demonstrate how she can jump like a frog.

Then she said "Take a picture of this mama" so I did. I thought it was a cool pic, so here it is..lol

We read about tadpoles and the stages they go through. This was perfect for us because we are growing our own tadpoles! They are in stage 2 right now according to the book. More on that in a future blog post :) (sorry this pic is fuzzy...the chair I had my camera set on didn't focus on us very well..lol)

And yes...much to her dismay, she gets homework.  I am finding that after lunch, she gets bored and drives me up the wall. She does MUCH better with structure. So..structure she will get. I'm saving her math fact worksheets and drill until after lunch, etc. She gets this, and her creative writing (which isn't very creative at this point, but she enjoys it actually) for homework. It is working perfectly.

She even read Frog and Toad to me today while I cleaned up in the kitchen. When it was done, I wanted to see how much she comprehended. I asked her about the book. She replied, "well weren't you listening mom?" *head slap* Busted. lol  I do love to hear her reading to me though. And yes, she did understand what she read.

I'm finding that homeschool curriculum is sorely lacking in Grammar though. I don't want her to know all of her parts of speech, etc. right now, but I do want her learning sentence structure and how to form a good paragraph and creative writing skills now. I don't know how to teach her all of that and I can't find anything that I like. It's all just worksheets and workbooks. I don't want that.   I'm on the lookout...if you know of anything give me a heads up would you?