Math!

Pre-Algebra! Ah...
I have always wished to have a chance to review (or re-learn) Algebra. However, My first two kids' Algebra courses were taken while I had to care for a little one.  This year, I am fortunate to have Christine as a baby sitter while Joshua and I go to his Pre-Algebra co-op class.  I am the only "parent' student there but I don't mind.  I am having such a great time refreshing my love of Algebra, this time with a much quicker and easier understanding of the math.
When we are home, I would ask Joshua for his homework assignment so I could do "my homework" as well. We love it and it creates such a special bond between my son and I through this fun class! So wonderful!

One of the subjects I will be taking in a college when my kids are all grown and left home. It sure will keep my brain from being too rusty by not using it. lol!

How are we doing...

We are still unbelievably busy.

It has been more than two months since school started.  I felt like I still need more time to line up all of the schooling activities to make the week go a bit smoother.

I think my biggest challenge lies in having my children's ages in such a big gap.  Their activities being so varied that I could not practice the usual home teaching method where everyone sit together for the same subject, etc.

Since I can't change the fact, I need to think up some strategies to battle it before it takes me under. LOL!

First thing I need to do is to get my menu plan back in place so it will eliminate the dinner dilemma (it has been wonderful since I restarted it.)  Amazing how food can either make or break your day.

Second, Get back to my daily routines (which I have detoured when the co-op classes kicked in). I sensed that I may need to revise a few things on the weekly plans.

Thirdly, I need to multi-manage my time slightly, meaning I should do my knitting, reading and weekly planning while I sit in the classes waiting for my children.

Then I can tackle the homework part of the challenge.  We do have homework from all of the co-op classes, plus the regular studies we do at home.  Oy.

We don't do tons of extra activities because we just don't have time for them.  I like to have my children remember how fun it was to be able to stay home and learn and that whatever we did was mostly family oriented. We only watch movies on DVDs on weekends and as a family serving our community and church family.  My hope is that when they have their families, they will carry on some of their most fond traditions in their homes.

All in all, being busy is not necessary a negative thing provided the busyness help channelling the energies to something that glorifies God, such as keeping the family together by serving together as a family.  It is so vital for Christian families to have that mindset, that, in turn, may also help our children to stay out of troubles.

May the Lord bless your day today.

First Week of Learning

We made it - our first week back to school!

This year I have set a goal that is to be by my student's side no matter how hard it is going to be.  In the past, I have not been so diligent with that.  However, since I have gotten my basic daily plan down.  I realized the only interruption I had no self control over were the outside phone calls during school hours.  I answered to all the calls and thus affected our concentration in studying.  I decided to let the machine take over that job this year.  It was hard on the first day (for all of us), but it got easier as the week went on. 

With the new plan, I would check my email right before school starts and do all of my reply at lunch time unless it is an easy reply such as to say yes or no to a event invitation.  I would check the inbox again right after school time and quickly read some of my favorite blogs as a mental wind down.  I would write a quick post if everyone is out of the house (for extra activities) except Peter and me (like right now) and then I will proceed to making dinner and onto my evening routines or enjoy the evening (on Friday) with cookies and a good movie.

This means I am going to do that tonight because today is Friday!!! Yay!

This week has gone smoothly but we have not had the co-op classes jump into the picture yet.  Hopefully by the time that happens, we are prepared enough for it.

Joshua has been Acing his quizzes so he is very motivated and that makes teaching him so much easier. 

We have had some hick-ups with his math before bust I spent two hours on Tuesday helping him to refresh the long number division problems and he grasped it!  We were so excited!  I could imagine if he is in a public school he would probably not able to sit for that amount of time to tackle that math struggle.  He would be too tired at night to try to remember what he did not understand at school during the math class session.  I am so thankful that we homeschool and that we could go at the student's own pace on all the subjects.

Well, I am ready for a relaxing evening with my family.  Hope you are having a blessed one, too!

I organized Peter's drawer using the plastic shoe boxes from the work-box system.  Joshua enjoyed the work-box system last year but we both agree that he is too old for the system this year.  I am starting Peter right now so he would get used to seeing the boxes.  It also helps a great deal comes clean up time.  Peter and I have fun "sorting" the toys as we put them back into the drawer! 

I left the box that is holding the "books of the day" out for him to enjoy at the play table.

Monday

Another busy day.

We had outside classes this morning.

Then Joshua worked on his California Mission model before heading out to his baseball practice this afternoon. I think we will be getting some trees to put them in the "yard" to complete the look.

Then we attended our school's annual Poetry Recital. What a lovely way to conclude the night. The Jazz band, boy, was totally out there!

Charlie did a marvelous job on the piano!

Christine recited "Papa's Letter" - Author Unknown. I think we all had misty eyes at the end of her poem.

Joshua's piece was "When the Frost is on the Punkin" by James Whitcomb Riley. He got the Southern accent down packed alright!

By the way, we just got a notification that Joshua will be playing the role of President Reagan in our next Air Force One Discovery Center event. He is excited! Grandpa will be happy to hear that.

Used Curriculum Sale

We ought to be there earlier. When Christine and I showed up there was already a line at the check out table. For some reasons I didn't receive an email regarding the sale until the day before so I didn't get a chance to participate in the selling part of it. Maybe next year. We did well with the money I allotted to spend there. We also hit the "free" table.

On Sunday they (GBC) will have a cloth exchange event in the afternoon at the Fellowship Hall. Time to clean out the closets.

It just dawned on me that this Sunday is Father's Day and we have not sent out the card to Robert's Dad. Will take care of it when I pick up Robert so we can select the card together.

I might take the kids and flowers tomorrow to my Dad's grave site. I miss my Dad.

I only spent $25.00. The Norman Rockwell Posters book and the Animals of the World Jigsaw Book (looks brand new) being the highest priced ones ($7.00 each) but totally worth it!

The jigsaw book is an interesting book. It contains six 48-piece jigsaws inside.

On one side it has information of the animals...

On the other side it is a page of jigsaws for fun!

Joshua will enjoy it first and when Peter gets older, he could join in the fun.

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. :)

classes/events planning day

This entry was typed three days ago on the 13th. We had some PC problems but Robert fixed it. It took a few days, but I am back. :)

Yesterday was a day filled with school paperwork. I finally got around figuring out what co-op classes and events the kids are going to attend for the next school year. We are a bit late in applying for the student council position for Christine, too. Hope she could get in.
School is almost over but the learning is not. We are still on math’s time tables, doing double efforts. We may go into the summer for that. Math-U-See is also coming into this household soon. I am excited about this extra curriculum.
I am reading this book “Every Child Can Succeed” that I borrowed from my friend Angela. T is a good book talks about different learning styles. I am not finished with it yet, but have picked up some pointers from it. I like the questionnaires they asked. This particular one in ‘the way we learn’ sort of got me. It asked if I am an early bird or night owl. Well, I used to be a night owl when I was single. Then I turned into an early bird after having children and when they are younger (before Peter). Now, I am both. I am still staying up late (around 10:30 – 11:00pm – I am working really hard on going to bed at 10:00pm though) and getting up early (5:30 – 5:45am). My down time is the afternoon, especially after a big lunch with dessert. I would plop right down on the coach and snooze off. We do our important school subjects (Bible, Math and Language Arts) in the morning, leaving the afternoon for History and Science and other works. Our schedule is strict with flexibility (is there such a combo?) It works for us. Since we have some co-op classes, we found that our schooling time is more pleasant when summer is near as the outside classes ended.