blog.deuley.com

Its been a crazy school year and I’ve neglected to blog for months. Let’s see if I get back to it.

We’ve maintained a busy schedule both in and out of the house. In the fall we continued our schedule as planned. In Feburary we welcomed a new family member, mommy had a baby boy. Now we are a family of 4 with 2 boys. As we waited for the baby to arrive we integrated into our human body studies a weekly update on the babies development. We ended our development of a fetus studies with the homebirth of our baby boy which big brother witnessed. DS1 continues to watch DS2 grow and is learning the patience needed so mom can attend to both of them. DS1 has grown up so much and has been a great big brother.

We had a wonderful beginning to being a family of 4. Grandpa visited for 2 weeks to help entertain DS1, help take him to classes & cook dinner. Dad stayed home 5 weeks to help keep the household running and take charge of DS1’s studies. We found that DS2 was able to bond closely with Dad while he was home so long. DS1 benefitted from the extra exposure to Spanish. We learned that dad is a more strict educator.

Now that dad is back at work we have created a new routine in between caring for baby brother:

– Monday – Morning School, Violin practice, park day in the afternoons sometimes

– Tuesday – Morning School, Violin Class

– Wednesday – Morning School, History group

– Thursday – Morning School

– Friday – Morning School, violin group class 1x/month, 4H 2x/month

What we are working on in school:

– Math (daily) – Singapore 1B, “Life of Fred,” and/or math games.

– Reading (1 story/day) – “Bob Books” set 3 or “Now I Can Read” level 3

– Writing (1x/week) – “Draw Write Now,” as part of other studies, writing letters/cards, and/or practice practical writing like full name

– History – Play SOTW 1 CD chapters, mommy reads Usborne History Encyclopedia and other relavent books as applies to weeks topic. Attend history group to do related activities. We just have the rise and fall of Rome and beginning Christianity left for this school year.

– Science – present project is to study our collection of fossils to display at a non-competitive science fair in May.

– Buddhist studies (1x/week or biweekly) – following a curriculum by the “Buddhist Youth Initiative for Interconnectedness”

– Sports – Archery for the Spring and Tap for the summer plus lots of outdoor time.

This summers plan:

– continue year around school with a schedule of 3 weeks on and 1 week off (already started this)

– Suzuki Violin Camp for 1 week

– occasional violin classes

– 8 weeks of Tap dance lessons (1x/week)

– Rockhounders Camp, 1 week, 1/2 days

– MA vacation via Train, 1 week

– enjoy the outdoors

After a number of revisions, we’ve created our curriculum for the year.  Well, at least, that is what we are going to start with.  We just completed our first week.  Here is an outline of what we did:

– Read  Lessons – LM re-read 4 “Playful Pals” books (phonics based readers like Bob Books) and 3 stories from our ” Dick and Jane” reader.

– Mom read the “Usborne History Encyclopedia” (http://rainbowresource.com/product/sku/018005/1105bfe1b59d24b983533dce)  sections on Evolution and early life to correspond to our lessons for our secular “Story of the World” (SOTW) http://rainbowresource.com/product/sku/010992/1105bfe1b59d24b983533dce) group we meet with weekly.

– Had our first SOTW class – they created a beginning life timeline, made sculpy modeling clay early creatures and created a volcano. It was really fun.

– Mom read  “The magic School Bus: Bats” book and we went on an evening walk to look for bats.  We saw 4.

– We had our first Hidden Pond Nature Class – this is the 3rd year we’ve done it.  We have a great time learning about wildlife and going on nature adventures in this class.

– Mom and Dad continued Bedtime reading in English and Spanish — Mom is reading the second “Oz” book and dad is reading Magic Treehouse” series.

– We practices the letters O & P using “Comprehensive Handwriting Practice” (http://www.rainbowresource.com/product/Comprehensive+Handwriting+Practice+-+Traditional+Manuscript/044930/1105bfe1b59d24b983533dce?subject=9&category=8266)

– We continued Singapore Math, Standards Edition, 1A, Textbook and Workbook (http://rainbowresource.com/product/sku/043065/).  This was our only daily lesson per the LM’s request.  He loves math.

– Did some modeling clay projects.

– We grew our own crystal tree.

– We read about Buddha and colored two pictures of him.

– Did a daily morning walk.

– Practiced Violin daily.

– Went to our weekly park day.

We did all that in the hours between 9 and 4 Monday – Friday and still managed to have a stay at home day so mommy could work on the kitchen for 3 hours with our organizer and an afternoon when we ran errands.  I give a lot of credit to the spreadsheet I created that had check boxes for how many lessons of each subject we wanted to accomplish for the week.  It helped us make sure to get all our stuff done while also giving my son the freedom to choose what we worked on at any given time.  A lot of credit also goes to the fact that we did most of our at home school work over breakfast before other distractions set in.

It has been awhile since I wrote.  Lots has been going on.  The spring was busy with gardening, springtime parties and activities, and finishing up a number of our “school” year activities.  The summer started busy too.  We were sad to send our exchange student back home to Spain and still miss her.  We followed our goodbyes with a week at Suzuki Institute (we call it violin camp but mommy and the little man both attend).  The little man had a great time but it reminded me of what an outstanding violin teacher we have.  I just didn’t feel like we got as much out of it as we did last year when we were new to our studio.

Last week we started “school” back up (we do year around).  We started our Reading lessons and our Chinese lessons back up and then we added in Math.  Math has been a great success.   The first day we did it during our “school time” in the morning but then the interest was so great that our son, for the first time, asked to do school work right before bed.  He calls it night school.  The first night he asked for Chinese then Math and for just about every night this week he’s asked to do Math before bed.  I love that he loves it.  I feel it is something he takes after from me.  My favorite past-time as a kid was doing math problems.  Yes, weird to some but normal for me.  I wish he had the same passion for all the things I want him to learn.  It is so seamless and easy to sit down and do lessons when my student is so willing and handing me the book.