It's Friday!

I have always love Fridays. No, I don't have any party to go to nor having anyone coming over. I just love the feeling of a good week has passed and much have been accomplished. It is also pay day, which makes me grateful especially as nowadays so many are encountering the "last Friday at work" reality.

My other excitement of this day is that seeing myself made it through another week by either successfully cooked meals for the family with the budget we have set aside or with a little left over. It is a mental challenge to me but I like it. Ha! This month, though, I know we will go over a bit because we will get some extra goodies for our Thanksgiving dinner. It is ok as we are still very diligent in other areas.

I am checking my next week's shopping list. I typed up my shopping list using the excel spread sheet. People in the market thought I am so organized. The fact is, I am too lazy to write - I like the highlighting way better. Occasionally, when I ran out of the copies and have forgotten to print out more, then I will jog the needed items on a post-it notes. I dislike that very much as it just makes my front cabinet door look very cluttered. The children are trained to highlight an item when he/she is the last person used up an item.

I like the pre-print list as it frees up my brain to do other useful things like planning the dinner menu. :)

I usually post my Monthly Menu and the Shopping List one right next to the other on the front cabinet door above my phone center in the kitchen, and keeping the extra copies in my control journal. It has proved to be a good place for me to keep track of them. :)


I color coded the items to correspond to the stores I shop them at.

Friday!

Robert is off work today. We love it when we can have him with us on a Friday. No one slept in today as we wanted to get an early start on what need to be done and enjoy the rest of the day with Daddy home.

Joshua woke up at 5:30a.m. to start on his workboxes! I was so surprised to see him working away his boxes when I got down stairs at 7:30a.m.. His reason? "I want to get school done early today so I can hang out with Daddy this afternoon! I know what to do since you have already filled the boxes for me!" He was so excited about being able to do his work orderly and independently. I just love the self motivation this workbox thing promoted. AND, we know who's going to sleep well tonight.

He finished all his work at about 12:30p.m. He did a book report on Abraham Lincoln. Book report has never come easy to him. With the workbox system, though. I was able to break down the report to bite sizes. He did the rough draft and the second draft. We will finish the final draft on Monday. Joshua loves to write in cursive. He does not print at all. He is my precious "odd" child.

Rough and first draft of the book report.



Joshua loves to write in cursive.

Day two with the Workbox System

Another smooth sailing day with the Workbox system. I am very pleased with it.

I am very tired right now. The last five days I was consumed with the setting up and planning of the system that I had gotten very little sleep each night. It's so worth it, though.

I am looking at the clock now and it said 10:27pm. What happened? Seemed like we just had dinner and I gave Peter a bath and put him to bed, ate some watermelon with Josh and tried to get on here to post my thought on the day and it said that I need to go to bed. Sigh. The older I get the faster the time passes.

Anyway, Christine took some more pictures today. They were all very lovely. I like her view of things and how she captured the moment. I think she will do well in her photography pursuit.

The kids had a great time playing with the domino yesterday and today. That's another good thing about the system. It made me bring out all of those fantastic toys from my storage boxes and let them play (and learn).

After this week, I might be ordering the Math-U-See program to further enhance our math appreciation. :)

Christine's captured moment.

Let's make some patterns!

That's awesome work, kids!

Let's see how high can we go... (it fell after three more tiles on level 6 - good tried, Josh).

Day one with the Workbox System

Well I managed to get us started on the Workbox system today. I was quite nervous as I had no idea if Joshua would like it. He didn’t show any excitement about the system when I talked with him last week. He helped with putting the set up together but there were just no comments.

This morning at 7:20 am, I woke him up (the wake up time was supposed to be 7:00am but I did a load of laundry and took a shower… that dumped me into the late mode). Anyway, Peter woke up as well. I fed him breakfast before I ate mine.

Joshua came down stairs and found his before school chore/routine list, still, he said not much. He liked the one routine about checking his palm pilot, though. It gave him a big smile. After all of the morning routines were done, we began school at 8:00 am instead of 8:30 am as planned.

I walked him through how the system works and by 10:10 am he’d gotten 6 boxes done and by 11:20 am he was on box 9. Needless to say, he liked it! He said to me: “Mom, I’ve only three more boxes to go then I’ll be done with all the subjects! I like this system!” Oh, music to my ears. Yup! The Workbox system has just gained another happy user. :)


I had lots of fun making this picture list.




He went to bed at about 10:00pm. We need to do better tomorrow.


"Clocking in" for school time. Joshua appreciated the green button I printed for him.


Schedule strip for the day. Love the bite-size learning.



This was what were left by 10:10 a.m. this morning.



He finished all the subjects at about 12:15 p.m. "clocking out" time for a happy boy - and Mommy!

Workbox System set up

Even though Peter is only 14 months old but knowing how fast a baby becomes a toddler and then a preschooler, I decided to search for some preschool fun games on-line last Wednesday, just to see what’s out there that I could print out for free (especially lap book ideas). Boy, was I surprised at how the homeschool world has changed since we first started (’94). There are tons of resources and supports out there! And…. I bumped into this system called Workbox and the rest was history! I was bitten by the Workbox bug! What a wonderful idea to help move through your school day meaningfully and smoothly.
After reading many bloggers feed backs and through the email loop of the system; showing how they tweaked the system a bit to fed the needs, I was just about to tweak mine, too. Then something inside me just felt very uneasy about it. You see, I only learned about this system through the wonderful blog world but had not actually read the guide myself; after discussed this with Robert, we agreed it might be better to see the “original” idea first before we started. I devolved the ebook and must say that I am glad I did. Robert is reading through it right now so we could both be on the same page. So far he really likes the idea. We decided to follow it very closely to the method and thus eliminate the anxiety of the uncertainty of if we are doing it right. We may tweak it later to fit our situation and budget, but for now, we would just do what it said in the book (the order the child moves through the boxes - not the buying the treadmill or laminating machine). Sue emphasized strongly on using the clear plastic shoe boxes. I was not very thrilled about this part as we have been trying to go green since last year, “plastic” has become a banned word in this household. But if the system works, I guess I could put up with some plastic boxes… :)
It took us a few stores and two days to get the set-up (cart from Target, plastic bins from Dollar Tree, Velcro from Staples – it took two days because I got two wrong size items and had to make the exchange – and I was so shocked at how hard it was to find the simple plastic boxes. Both Target and Wal-mart carried only the fancy ones) and some printings of numbers, cutting and taping, we finally got the physical part of the system ready to go. The only things I’ve added to it, so far, are the Ten Commandments cards and my favorite verse at the inside of the box on the opposite side of the number. I figure visual is everything with this system, I might as well take advantage of it by posting verses for memorization.
This system is set up for Joshua right now, I will see about setting up one for Christine. She may not want it as she is very (extremely) organized and self disciplined enough to get her school work done on her own. I will be setting one up for Peter when he turns two or sooner (I will start him with perhaps three boxes).
I took a couple of pictures of the set up and will be loading the boxes maybe by Monday night for next week’s lessons. I will post more on how we like it next week.
If you want to see how others are setting theirs up, click here. Gabby had a survey for Workbox users and I will update this post to reflect the survey.

Update: I just went over the Gabby's blog again and realized she had another post for blogers to talk about the Workbox set up. I am not sure how to switch the post to the correct linky. So sorry. Here is the linky I supposed to link this post to... I was a bit too excited about the system. :)


Christine and Joshua helped cut and "laminate" the little cards.


The system doesn't stay here. I moved it here just to take the picture. We are making some rearrangement of our "schooling" area this weekend.



Number in the front and memory card in the back.





To save money on laminating the practice sheets or game sheets, I put them in the sheet protectors and erased the dry eraser board marker marks after the work/fun is over, just like I would if I laminated the sheets, the difference is in the pocket book. :)