Monthly Archives: October 2014

Homeschool

This week in homeschooling: History on the go, cups of dirt and Yoda on a stick

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Heather Aubin photo
Heather Aubin photo

We had a rather nice week. Poppy started taking tennis lessons alongside her brother, and we had our normal schedule of tae kwon do, soccer practices and extracurricular classes. It felt less hectic than last week, though, because last week Rockford was in China and this week he was at home. That always helps.

I jotted down notes as we went through our school days this week, but some of them were more detailed than others. As you will soon see.

Monday

I’ve been putting our current chapter of “Story of the World” history on my phone so we could listen to it while we drive around, but this was the first week that I actually remembered to put the cord in the car so we could listen to it over the speakers. The kids were silent on the way to co-op while they learned about tobacco and the spread of slavery in the New World and about Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba. They asked to listen to it again on the way home. Those audiobooks might have been the best purchase I made this year.

Poppy is taking a Greek mythology class and a “one-act play” class at co-op this session, and Pete is taking Chemistry and “Star Wars”/Astronomy. I’m teaching the “Star Wars”/Astronomy class, and it’s been going pretty well (even though it’s exhausting, because 4 of the 5 kids are very energetic 5- and 6-year-old boys). We usually do a small “Star Wars”-related craft, talk a little bit about a planet and then paint part of a solar system kit. This week we spent most of the time making Yoda puppets using a template from “The Star Wars Craft Book.” It was meant to make a felt finger puppet, but I don’t know how to sew even without a herd of kids around so we just went with paper and popsicle sticks. After Yoda, we read about Venus and then painted our Venus models. And then some of the boys decided to paint themselves because of course they did.

After co-op we came home and I collapsed in a heap did some grammar, and then Poppy read two chapters of “The Borrowers” and worked on her literature study worksheets.

Tuesday

We all woke up late, but we still managed to start school on time. I’m still not sure how that happened. Some of the notes I took for Tuesday are completely illegible, so how about a bulleted list?

  • We started “Because of Winn-Dixie” by Kate DiCamillo last week as our read-aloud. The kids were enthusiastic about it because DiCamillo also wrote the “Mercy Watson” books. Poppy is still reading all of the “Warriors” text she can get her hands on, and Pete is still trying to finish his Boba Fett book.

  • Poppy played a few educational games on my iPad after working on Duolingo Spanish for a bit.

  • Poppy is memorizing “Invictus” (she thinks it’s creepy), and Pete is memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance.

  • Our current science unit is about recycling. We read a book called “What Happens to Our Trash?” and started an experiment that involves burying a piece of lettuce and piece of plastic in dirt. So now I have two glasses of dirt in my kitchen.
    Wednesday

    Here is exactly what I wrote down on Wednesday:

    9am. Pete: Perler beads; Poppy: math from yesterday
    “Winn-Dixie.” handwriting; history (listen & color); memorization
    Poppy: reading comp & lit; MCT
    10-11 break; 11:30 tennis; lunch; 1-3 art; 4:30 – math.

    I either need to work on my note-taking skills or start writing 1/5 of this post every evening, when the day is fresh on my mind. (That’s what I did yesterday, which is why the Thursday entry is so long.)

    Thursday

    We started working at 9 sharp yesterday morning. Pete finished coloring his picture of Queen Nzinga perched atop her servant/throne while Poppy did her reading comprehension, and then we worked on their history mapping together.

    And then I gave the kids my phone.

    A big part of the “Story of the World” curriculum is narration, which calls for the students to put the stories in their own words. The curriculum wants the kids to write their narration, but my kids really, really dislike doing that. There was much complaining and whining every time I asked them to do it, so it became something that I didn’t ask them to do very often. But then I had a minor brainstorm a few weeks ago, and narration has been smooth-sailing ever since. The secret? I downloaded a voice Mmemo app and let them record their narration.

    Poppy works with fraction tiles.
    Poppy works with fraction tiles.
    They love doing the recordings and listening to them over and over again. (I typed out at posted Poppy’s work on her blog, if you’re interested in reading the story of Queen Nzinga for yourself.)

    At 10am we took our half-hour break, which turned into an hour-long break because I got distracted and forgot to set the timer. Pete wisely used some of that time to do his required free reading for the day; he’s been reading a “Captain Underpants” book.

    At 11am we were back on track. Pete did a page in his math workbook and we worked through his spelling for the day and read from “First Language Lessons, Level 2” together while Poppy did a few sections of her Worldy Wise 3000 vocabulary program on the computer.

    When she was finished, we all gathered on the couch to read a bit of “Grammar Island” and “Building Language” together before reconvening to work through some sentences in the kids’ “Practice Island” workbooks. (I’ll share some thoughts on how the Michael Clay Thompson is working for us once we finish “Grammar Island,” which will be soon.)

    Pete was finished with his bookwork for the day after that, and Poppy finished up around 1:30, after her piano lesson and another break. The kids both had tae kwon do in the afternoon, and Poppy had soccer practice later in the evening.

    Friday

    The kids didn’t have all that much left to do today, and they got a lot of it done in the morning. Rockford came home for lunch and I went to get my hair cut. I walked in the door ready to say, “OK, kids! Let’s do some math!” and found Poppy reshelving her math book. Well done, kid and dad! Pete still had to do his math, and then we finished up with a little Michael Clay Thompson grammar. After that the kids absconded to their rooms, and it’s been pretty quiet here since about 2pm.

    Happy weekend to you!

    Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

    • in brief

    Aspirations

    Aside

    Poppy: Wouldn’t you like to go into the future to see who you’re going to marry?

    Poppy’s friend: What? Ugh, I’m not going to marry anybody.

    Poppy: I’d like to see how many kids I’m going to have.

    Poppy’s friend: Hm. I would like to see how many cats I’m going to have. I’d like 10.

    Flotsam / Jetsam, partner campaign, sponsored

    I fought the cat and the cat won (but so did I, eventually, so I guess it was more of a draw)

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    Menace 2 my sanity.
    Menace 2 my sanity.
    This time last year we were heading into battle. It was a battle for the ages against a foe I doubted we’d ever overcome. It was a fight for olfactory purity, and it was being waged in our home.

    It started in the darkest corners of the basement, where neighbor cat Boo Radley (yes, really) liked to sit in the window wells and taunt JJ T. Cat. It smelled musty, sure, but “Hey,” I told myself oh-so-naively, “that’s just what basements do.”

    I didn’t put two and two together until JJ brought the fight upstairs and I witnessed him at work.

    JJ was spraying.

    I didn’t know it yet — not until I bought a little black light and investigated just like I was Horatio Caine and JJ was a Miami uber-criminal — but JJ was spraying everywhere. The walls. The front door. The filing cabinet. And most hideously of all? He was spraying into the heat register in Pete’s bedroom. (We discovered that when we turned the heat on for the first time last fall and suddenly the kid’s room smelled like the swamps of Dagobah.)

    We were at war against the cat, and the cat was winning.

    A little Google research let us know that the war would have to be waged on two fronts simultaneously. I couldn’t make the house smell clean if JJ was still spraying, and JJ wasn’t going to stop spraying until the house smelled clean again. So I set to work cleaning every surface — Pledge wipes on the walls, carpet deodorizer on the floors and Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer on every surface — and we took JJ to the vet for a checkup.

    The cleaning worked well. The vet? Not so much.

    JJ was perfectly healthy, the vet said, but nothing was going to make him stop spraying. He was unhappy being inside, where the neighbor cat could taunt him at will. We had a choice to make: JJ could be an outdoor cat, or we could have a funky-smelling house of horrors. Emotionally, it was a difficult choice to make. I never wanted an outdoor cat. It’s dangerous out there. But logically, I knew what we had to do.

    JJ T. Cat has been outside for almost a year now. I’ll admit to missing his presence inside every now and then. He was an excellent snuggler. But now he’s the king of the yard. Boo Radley keeps his distance, and JJ gets to lounge on the sidewalk to his heart’s content. He also has his own private entrance to his suite in the garage, because it gets cold here in the winter and I have a softish heart.

    It was a tough decision to make, but you know what? I’m really looking forward to the house still smelling clean after I turn the heat on this year.

    Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Acorn: An Influence Company‘s #SmellsClean campaign. The “sponsored” part means money and some product changed hands. Acorn didn’t tell Nichole what to write, though, which was probably obvious as they almost certainly wouldn’t have suggested that she write about flying cat urine.