Swan School

SCRITPTURES - We read Luke chapter 13.

READALOUD - Trumpet of the Swan Chapters 8 & 9.


MATH - We paused in the reading of Trumpet of the Swan to talk about direction. Jared drew a compass and we played a game like "draw a line to East, Southeast." Then we talked about degrees on a compass and circle and Clarissa got to practice her place value by writing the numbers on the board while Jared practiced arithmetic figuring out which numbers correspond to N,S,E,W. We found some patterns to help us remember that the four main degrees are 90, 180, 270, and 360. We read a book called, "How do you Count a Dozen Ducklings?" While I read, the kids used fuzzy balls as little ducklings and put their "ducklings" in order along with the story. The story deals with multiplication as a mother duck puts her twelve ducklings in different sets and then skip counts them rather than counting them one by one. She starts out by putting them in groups of two and only has to count to six, six times two is twelve, etc.

SCIENCE, WRITING, & ART - Each of the three older kids made books about swans. For Clarissa and Krystal, I wrote out sentences like, "Trumpeter swans like..." and they had to finish the sentences and draw illustrations. Jared is making a book about 8 different types of swans including a description of each and an illustration. I read everyone a chapter from a Childcraft Annual book on Feathered Friends about waterfowl to get more details for Jared's booklet. The girls also practiced writing "I Love You" on the board, just like Louis from the story. Everyone continued to work on their Illuminations books while I read. (Clarissa asked me if every night I read ahead to get great ideas on what fun activities go with the chapters we are reading, I had the opportunity to tell her that, "No, I just pray each morning that the Spirit will help guide me and give me ideas to help teach the kids, and then the ideas just come." I am grateful I could share that with them.)

GRAMMAR - We reviewed Onomatopoeia in Trumpet of the Swan and How Do You Count a Dozen Ducklings.

PRESCHOOL - Amber worked her cutting skills by making crayon paper bookmarks for everyone (her own idea). She also worked on matching with some letter cards that make a complete picture when you match them correctly. She joined in on the math with sorting fuzzy balls.

SPELLING - The girls practiced their spelling list using an Amazing Handwriting Worksheet.

READING - Clarissa read an easy reader called 100 years that has the word FIND in it, since that is the word she is working on in tutoring. Krystal read a Reading a-z level D book called Little Loon and two Waterford Institute books, one focusing on the word Under (which is about soccer) and the other focuses on the words Yummy and Yellow.

LUNCH - We had a "yummy yellow" lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches with mustard, cornbread with honey, peaches and orange drink.

Illuminations

il*lu*mi*nate: 1. To provide and brighten with light. 2. To make understandable, clarify. 3. To enable to understand, enlighten. 4. To decorate (a manuscript or initial letter) with pictures or designs in brilliant colors.
SCRIPTURES - We read Luke Chapter 12 today. Also, I never realized how many scriptures there are about light and in most cases, they refer to being brought out of the darkness into the light. I love that visual analogy for the gospel and education. My goal right now in life is to enlighten, both myself and my children.
HISTORY - Today was the beginning of another week, which meant another day of illumination with the Brames. We started the day by talking about what it means to be a saint (including a Latter-Day Saint) and read about saints in the Bible Dictionary. We then read a story about St. Jerome and the Lion and looked at an art book about saints. Most paintings of saints include symbolism in the picture as a representation of their patronage. St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians, thus his painting had many books in it. Next we read in The Story of the World, Vol. 2 about the monks in monasteries who made books by hand and illuminated them. We looked at some instructions online about the process of making parchment (sheep's skin) or vellum (calf's skin), the ink to write with and the actual illuminating itself.
ART - Then we made our own books, which involved sewing the covers on, and had a lot of fun illuminating the pages. Medieval monks used gold and silver leafing to add illumination to their pages, we used gold and silver glitter and paint.
MATH - While the kids were working on their artwork, I read to them from The Life of Fred - Apples (reviewing time, days of the week and adding to 7) and The Life of Fred - Fractions, which proved to be quite challenging. The question posed today was how long would it take to write a billion reasons why Fred should buy a bicycle if he could write down 1 reason per second. Jared and Beryl got that he could write down 3,600 reasons in an hour fairly easily, figuring out how many in a day was a little more difficult and figuring out how many in a year was just mind boggling. We will work on this one again.
GRAMMAR - In The Life of Fred, we also reviewed Onomatopoeia and syllables. Onomatopoetically has nine syllables and therefore is greater than onomatopoeia (six syllables) or onomatopoetic (seven syllables).
LUNCH - Christine made a wonderfully yummy barley soup to remind us of the importance of barley in the Middle Ages as well as some equally yummy black bean humus.
SPELLING - I gave the kids their spelling pre-tests. The girls did great. Jared was surprised when he recognized some of the words from his writing, I don't correct his journal, but I do read through it and pull out words that he needs to work on for later.
READING - I had the girls read their sight word cards as well as some easy readers. They are continuing to progress each day. Jared read more of Beowulf.
P.E. - We had a very busy evening. Jared had a soccer practice at 5:45, Clarissa's was at 6:00 and Krystal and Amber started ballet today at Radford University, which was also at 6:00. I had to have my friend take Clarissa to soccer, Chris took Jared and I took the girls. They were adorable and had a great time meeting their new friends and teachers.

GOVERNMENT - Jared attended the Radford City Council Meeting tonight as part of a requirement for the Citizenship in the Community Merit Badge he's been working on.

On Fridays, Work is the Last Thing on My Mind

Even though on Fridays we do less work, we still have to do some.
SCRIPTURES - Read Luke Chapter 11 as a family.
MUSIC - Practiced piano. Since today was the first day of piano practice, we started a new incentive for practicing. I put colored fuzzies in a jar and when each child finishes practicing, they get to put a fuzzy of their color (each of my kids has a color assigned to them for everything from the bins they keep their school stuff in, to their towels, to their dishes) in the treat jar. When the jar is full they will get to choose a treat.
READALOUD - Another chapter from Trumpet of the Swan.
WRITING - While reading the chapter today we learned that Louie the swan had to write a really big word (catastrophe - vocab for the day, check) so when we were done reading, I had the kids copy some "big words." They copied the verse from John 7:17, which actually only has a couple big words and isn't very long, but I knew I needed to start out simple with copy work and wasn't too surprised when Krystal complained about it the whole time. But...they all did it, well, the older three. I helped Amber with writing her name, she knows how, but still needs some refinement, she has a hard time trying to stay in the lines on the paper, oh well, that will come with time, important thing is she felt like she was doing her writing too.
SPELLING - I gave everyone their spelling tests. Clarissa got them all right!! Krystal only missed one - good job and Jared missed 3 out of 8, but to prove to Chris that they were really hard words, Jared gave Chris the same test when he came home from work and...Chris missed 2. Jared was especially proud of the word acquainted that he got right on his pretest and Chris missed. But in the end, we decided that yes, Dad is smarter than a 6th grader.
SCIENCE - I read two books from the library about swans and waterfowl while the kids colored pages or did puzzles that I found online about swans.
MATH - Amber did a matching game. Clarissa did a worksheet on adding with regrouping. Krystal did a dot to dot up to 20 about a nest of baby birds. I forgot math for Jared, oh well, there are always other days.
P.E. - We went to the park for the annual homeschool kick-off picnic, the kids played hard for 4 hours and I talked, does talking count as exercise? Also, I made a really yummy 3 bean salad, inspired by Jared's math on Tues.
COOKING - Krystal helped make pizza dough and everyone made their own calzones.
HISTORY - We watched a movie about Mother Teresa.

Piano, Preschool, Practice

We always seem to have a busy day each year. This year it's Thursdays.
SCRIPTURES - Recited the 13th Article of Faith, Jared is trying to memorize it.
READ ALOUD - Made granola for breakfast, read another chapter of Trumpet of the Swan to the kids while they enjoyed their granola.
READING - Had Clarissa practice her sight words, PP, she finished drawing pictures to help her remember. Then I had her read the book she got from her tutor about the word SAW. Also had her read a Waterford Institute Read with Me book called At Camp that uses the word SAW on each page. It also uses many words that start with the letter C, so I had her cut out a large C and draw words that start with C. She liked that. Read some Breakthrough to Literacy Take Me Home books to Amber and Krystal about rhyming, counting, colors, and days of the week. We sang the Days of the Week song. Read a Waterford Institute book about Opposites to the girls then had them go on a scavenger hunt for the opposites of hot, hard, sour and loud. They loved that. Had Krystal read the Primer level Dolch Sight Words, she did great, only needed help with about half of them.
ART - Jared was working on his mid-eastern tile while I was reading with the girls and Clarissa was making her letter C.
MUSIC - Jared, Clarissa, and Krystal started their piano lessons today. This is Krystal's first time, she was very excited. Melinda says they all did really well.
STORYTIME - Took Amber to the library for storytime, but we were the only ones so I just read several books to her alone, several were about dots (I think I should do a little unit on dots).
PRESCHOOL - Amber's first day of Mom Preschool today. The theme this month is All About Me, it was at Adalyn's house. She loves Preschool, she brought her mat to sit on, her show and tell, and her backpack with pencil box full of supplies.
SPELLING - I used the Amazing Handwriting Worksheet Maker to make spelling practice sheets for Clarissa and Krystal. I asked them to put their words in a sentence, then I typed the sentence leaving out the spelling word. They had to trace the sentence (handwriting practice) and write in the missing word.
WRITING - Jared wrote about Beowulf. Jared also did his vocab and state capital.
MATH - Jared and Clarissa played the calculator game again. We also did graphing with trail mix. How many raisins, nuts, bananas etc. Jared and I played the Gorp Game, Family Math pg. 138. The girls listened to a math facts CD on the way to Clarissa's tutoring.
P.E. - Jared and Clarissa had soccer practice and the girls and I walked the track during tutoring.
TUTORING - Clarissa learned about the word FIND (which she recognized as one of her sight words).
Sight word practice, piano practice, handwriting practice, soccer practice...practice, practice, practice.

Math is Fun!

DEVOTIONAL - We started out today with a Devotional. We did the Pledge of Allegiance, another new thing this year (hopefully). We've done it regularly before, but it's been a while. We sang a Primary song, had prayer and then I read from Psalms 124 about birds and how if we avoid temptations, we feel like a bird being let out of a snare.
READALOUD - We then read some from The Trumpet of the Swan, our book for Book Group this month. While reading, we ran across two language arts elements, homonyms (like the word dumb) and antonyms (like the words brave and cowardly). Idea! We will use these later today.
MATH - Today's math involved many activities using...BEANS! I started by giving the girls an 18 ct. empty egg carton, Clarissa numbered each of the cups. Amber had to put the amount of beans for each number in the first row, Krystal the second and Clarissa the third. Then I showed them how to put the beans in pairs to see if there were any "odd men out" if there were then the number was odd, if there weren't then the number was even. Clarissa wrote the numbers down and noticed that there was a pattern, they went back and forth between being odd and even. She also found the pattern that the number in the units place starts to repeat after you get to 10, Family Math pgs 24 & 25. While the girls were doing this, Jared was working on making a Three Bean Salad, Family Math pg. 134 & 135, working on ratios and proportions. Example 1: This salad contains: 2 Lima Beans, Twice as many Red beans and 10 beans in all. Then I gave him the task of finding out how many total beans there were in the egg carton. Next I sent Jared to make a fraction kit, Family Math pg. 120. I gave Clarissa and Krystal each a paper with addition probs. on it like 2+5= and told them to use manipulatives to get the answer and then find the commutative problem using the same numbers, 5+2=. Amber made some patterns using cubes and blocks. Clarissa finished early so she and I played a calculator game, Family Math pg. 236. She loved it! The best part is that she thought she was sneaky when she figured out that she could choose which two numbers to add together to get her markers on the path she wanted. Of course, this is exactly what I hoped would happen. Score!
LANGUAGE ARTS - Enter Homonyms and Antonyms. I found some reusable worksheets using homonyms and antonyms and the kids had fun with those.
VOCAB - Jared learned the word Guerrillas for his word today.
GEOGRAPHY - Jared learned that Juneau is the capital of Alaska.
SPELLING - I had the kids use Bananagrams to build their spelling words and Amber worked on remembering the names of letters, she knows about 8 of them; O, X, C, A, B, K, M, S. They also helped to sort the letters.
READING - The girls had to do a lot of reading with the language arts worksheets, but I still wanted them to practice their sight words so we ran through their flash cards again, level PP. Krystal only needed help with four of them and Clarissa knew 25 out of 40, I had her draw some pictures on the backs of the ones she still needs to learn.
HISTORY - Lunch, and then off to art class, we listened to Story of the World, Volume 2, Chapter 1-3 in the van. Also, we had some extra time after art so I read a Celtic Fairy Tale to the kids called, The Battle of the Birds (it had some Greek elements and some from Jack and the Beanstalk).
ART - Miss Hannah taught the girls some techniques with pastels, drawing animals on textured paper and she taught Jared tessellations and he made a mid-easternesque tile that he still needs to paint.
SCIENCE - Jared read a book to everyone about Hurricanes and the weather chasers who fly airplanes into the storms to get information that helps to save lives.
COOKING - Jared cooked dinner for us tonight. He made Stroganoff with peas. He made the menu, made the grocery list, and bought the food with $5. He discovered that if you put enough sour cream in it, you can't tell that he used the value brand of Cream of Mushroom Soup.

First Day of School!

Today was our first "official" day of school, we don'tusually start until after Labor Day, but we felt we needed a little jump start on history which is why we did the Great Courses DVD last week.
HISTORY - We started off our first day by reading the fable of Androcles and the Lion.
Then we went downstairs to watch the next Great Courses DVD which was about the Fall of Rome. I didn't make a cool tally sheet this time, but Christine made copies of Celtic coloring pages such as their homes, clothing and a difficult dot to dot of some of their patterns. Beryl Brame made her own tally sheet, (proving that she really enjoyed the previous week's activities) while the other kids colored. The video was great. This time Mr. Thompson was dressed up as a Germanic Barbarian and told some great stories. We especially liked the one about the Huns tenderizing their meat by putting it under their thighs on their saddles as they rode horseback. The joke was that if we walked into a hamburger joint today we would much prefer to eat a hamburger than a bun burger, one that was warmed up by Huns sitting on our burger for us. We also learned that Attila the Hun died from choking on his own blood after breaking his nose by walking into a tent pole on his wedding night. Silly Hun. We also read an Irish tale called Finn MacCoul about the salmon of knowledge, I think we need to eat more salmon.
SCRIPTURES - After the video we came upstairs and read about Barbarians in the Bible Dictionary and in Acts 28 where Paul, after having survived a shipwreck was bitten by a snake and surprised the Barbarians by not being harmed. We learned that Barbarian just means strangers and that the term was given to any group of people who were not your neighbors. We also learned that many of the Barbarians did not intend on coming in and destroying the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire may have been ripe for destruction because of their wickedness.
"Had every Roman father been teaching his sons righteousness instead of war, and every mother making a home for her children, had all parents assembled their children in their homes instead of the circuses and public baths, had they taught them chastity and honor and integrity and cleanness; would Rome still be a world power? Certainly it was not the barbarians from the north but the insidious moral termites within that destroyed the Roman world empire." Spencer W. Kimball
Jared and Beryl also did a little game from The Friend called Odd One Out about different groups of people while the younger girls did a dot to dot outlining the Roman Empire, finding out that the Mediterranean Sea looks like a flying duck and Italy of course looks like a boot.
MATH - Next, we started our new math books, The Life of Fred. Jared and Beryl read their chapter from Fractions with Christine and learned about greater than and less than. For example Fred is 5 1/2 yrs. old which is great than 5. I worked with the younger girls in Apple and we learned about adding 2 to 5 makes 7. We looked at a clock and set 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock. We used three rulers to measure how tall Fred is, he is 3 ft. tall. We also learned 3+4=7 with pencils and all the other addition factors of 7. We also talked about Calendars, Days of the Week, Months of the year and watch Youtube videos of both.
SPELLING - After lunch (and the Brames going home), I gave the kids their first spelling pre-tests. Jared's 6th grade list is difficult, but he's hanging in there. Clarissa practiced her cursive with her spelling words. Amber used All About Spelling's letter tiles to practice remembering the names of the letters.
VOCAB - Jared worked on learning some new vocabulary from Vocabulary Cartoons.
GEOGRAPHY - He also learned state capitals from The Little Man in the Map Teaches State Capitals; Montgomery, Alabama to be exact.
READING - I had the girls read Dolch sight word cards for the Pre-Primer level. They both did really well. There are 40 words and they knew most of them. Jared and I took turns reading aloud the first few chapter of Beowulf (he can read with a cool accent:).
WRITING - For writing, they each wrote in their journals.
TUTORING - At 2:30 we had to stop to take Clarissa to her first day of Tutoring at Dublin Elementary with Miss Stone, we listened to a Math CD on the way. She loved it, the tutoring. She learned about the word SAW and when she got home she read the little book that Miss Stone sent home.
CRAFT - Finally, we made a snack of pretzel crayons, pretzels dipped in candy melt with crayon papers over them, the kids loved them!
First day of school, SUCCESS!

Appamattox Courthouse

As a kick-off for this school year, we went with our friends, The Freemans, on Labor Day weekend to visit the Appamattox Courthouse where General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant to end the Civil War on April 9, 1865. The above painting found in the museum is considered the most accurate rendition of what the surrender looked like. The white towel in front is the actual towel that was used to signal that the South was willing to surrender.
Dr. William Christian, a living historian, told the story of the surrender from the point of view of a southerner. Jared enjoyed asking him questions afterwards, specifically, how old did you have to be to join the army (the answer was 18) and what other qualifications did you have to have (he found out that you had to have your four front teeth, so that you could pull the plug off of the cartridge for your musket).
Our family in front of the McLean house where the actual signing took place. The part of the account that I was most impressed by is that the Union soldiers where very respectful to the Confederate soldiers as they laid down their arms and marched home. There was no taunting or chiding and many of them even gave their portions of food to the starving boys of the Confederate army. I believe that it is important for our children to learn about these events in history so that they will remember to be brave and heroic like soldiers, but will also choose never to put our country in such a grave position again.