And once again it’s time to make some new 3 in 30 goals. A couple of days ago I told you how happy I was with our February goals and I’m really hoping to build on that success for March! This month, as I mentioned, the girls and I chose the goals we are all going to work on together. We’re picking more daily habit/routine type goals and I need their cooperation on these. I have high hopes. =)

Without further ado, our goals for March:

1. Turn the t.v. off at 9 a.m.

That may sound really lenient.. and in a way it is. On the other hand, if they get up at 8, that gives them an hour of tv, breakfast, getting dressed and whatever before we’re supposed to start school. The problem is that if they turn the tv on… THEY DON’T LIKE TO TURN IT OFF. … I’m sure you can relate.

We all agreed that it’s important to our day to start school at nine and one of the ways that we can help make this happen is by making sure that the tv goes off at 9 am. Recently when the 5 year old was having a particularly hard time with tv addiction I would actually cover the tv with a table cloth during school hours as a visual reminder and it’s AMAZING how much that helped!!

To accomplish this goal: I have an alarm on my phone that goes off at 9 a.m. to mark the beginning of the school day. We can use this alarm to develop the habit of turning off the tv promptly at 9 a.m. We can also cover the tv with a tablecloth during the day if we need to.

Challenges: The five year old is going to be the biggest opponent to this new rule — but it will do him good. And he didn’t throw a fit the other morning when I did this so maybe that’s a good sign…. *fingers crossed*

2. School until 3pm.

This has less to do with “the action” and more to do with “the mindset.” Lately (and this will get worse when spring fever sets in) my children have been pretty bad about asking to do other things in the middle of the school day. “I’m done with my math, can I draw?” (Math is first, so, um, no –let’s keep going.) “Can we take a break and watch a movie?” (Again, um, no.) I am ALL. FOR. drawing and playing games and playing outside but there needs to be some kind of order to our day and that’s why we’re here working on these things.

So the girls and I talked about this, too.. we need to adopt the mindset that from 9 to 3 is school time. Even if we finish all our basics before lunch (and we should be able to) we can fill our afternoon with projects, art, music, games, nature walks, journaling, you name it. Things that are educational AND fun. So you see, this is less of a “we need to be working hard at books every single minute” rule and more of a “there are better things we can do with our time than turn on the tv” habit.

To accomplish this goal: There’s an alarm on my phone that goes off at 3 p.m. for snack time. This can also serve to mark the end of our school day. The snack time habit is a solid one, so we don’t need to develop that habit, too, we just need to add the habit of working on good things up until then and not wanting to turn the tv back on or do something else.

Challenges: Being prepared ahead of time to work on projects for history and science is one area I struggle in, but preparation will help make sure we get enough projects and activities in. I need to develop some kind of system. I’ll see if I can work on that too, but right now we can at least work on the habit of staying busy (with SOMETHING) until three. I bet we see some future planning and “system” 3 in 30 goals. I open for suggestions. =p

3. Tidy after lunch, breakfast and supper.

The other day I told you about our new “20 Minute Clean-Up” that we’ve been using to get chores done and how well it is working for us. I started it just to get some cleaning done when it needed to be done…and now I want to make it a regular part of our schedule three times a day. I kind of tried to do that at one point last month, but it wasn’t our main focus and it hasn’t really become habit. So it’s going to be our third habit to develop for this month.

After breakfast, lunch and supper, each of the kids will have an assigned room to tidy and clean while I do the same in the kitchen. (They’ll each take a turn in each room so that by the end of the day they’ve each had a hand in keeping the whole house picked up.) I want this to help us develop the habits of cleaning up after meals immediately AND keeping the house picked up throughout the day.

To accomplish this goal: You guessed it – alarms. On my phone. Yes, my phone has become my personal assistant. I already had a bell for breakfast time at 8 and for school at 9 (and similar for other meals.) I *thought* I could just remember to call for a 20 Minute Clean-Up “whenever” everyone was done eating. …And here’s where I take a minute to laugh at myself… Since THAT never happened I’ve added bells to go off and remind me. I think I have a dozen bells on my phone now.. but hey, it’s working.

Challenges: Only resisting the urge to not want to follow it through or ignore the bell. Or also, if a meal is late for one reason or another, it’s too tempting to want to skip the clean-up after. But seeing the benefits of getting it done makes it worth it and encourages me to press on.

SO THERE YOU GO.

Three more habits to develop to help our day run smoothly. Three more habits to work towards our 2011 “Well-Functioning” goal. Three more ways to train ourselves to be good stewards of our time and things. What will you work on in March?

Linked to the 3 in 30 March goal linky.

Photo Credit: Some rights reserved by digitpedia

Halfway through the school year and it’s a good time for some self-assessment, right?

What I am a doing a good job with teaching, what do I need to improve and teach more of?

In the past the answer was usually science or history because we were pretty good about getting math and language arts done. But this year we have good science and history curriculum and this year the only area of learning I’m really concerned about is.. duhduhduhhhh.. language arts.

Of course, if I were really honest, I’d admit that I’ve never REALLY been 100% happy with our language arts.. I suppose I’ve just reached a point in the evolution of our homeschool where I can and need to re-vamp our language arts work. More writing, more spelling, more grammar – OH MY.

Don’t get me wrong, I start off every school year saying that we’re going to step up our game with those things… but then I go the free route and I think, “I don’t need to buy a curriculum, we can just ‘do’ language arts. More reading, having them write every week, giving them lists of spelling words, teaching grammar through it all… how hard can it be?” And then… I seriously lack on the follow through.

One thing I’ve learned about myself (and my kids) is that we do much better when there is a worktext that has a certain number of lessons sitting there just waiting to be completed. We’re good at filling things in and checking things off our lists.

So we should go with that flow, right?

Despite our more classical-ish, Charlotte Mason-ish approach with science and history (reading, hand on activities, notebooking…) I think it’s time that we take an approach for language arts that we know works well for us… workbooks. At this point, I feel like JUST DOING IT is more important than trying to find the fanciest, bestest (I know that not’s a word), snazziest, most perfect piece of curriculum.

You get better at reading by doing it.

You get better at writing by doing it.

You get better at spelling by doing it.

You get better at vocabulary by doing it.

You get better at grammar by doing it.

JUST DO IT.

Language Arts isn’t quite like the other subjects. Like math, it kind of builds concept by concept, but unlike math it’s not quite as strictly a linear progression. Unlike science or history, it’s not categorized by topic (world/American/state history or physical/earth/chemical science.) Language arts is a lot of the same over and over again, just a little harder and a little harder. The biggest thing you need for language arts, it seems to me, is practice.

Practice and practice and practice.

So that said, I’m making a few changes around here for the 2nd semester. No more skimping and doing the bare minimum on language arts. No more letting math muscle into our spelling or grammar or writing time. This school year isn’t over yet and there’s plenty of time to make a change!

So here’s what we’re going to do.

1. Keep using the grammar workbook I have for Princess. Pick up a low cost grammar workbook for Drama Queen, she’s used up all the grammar sheets that came with a multi-purpose workbook.
2. Ask the girls to write, write, write! Also, pick up a couple of writing workbooks for structure.
3. For now: I’m going to print and USE the free McGuffey Speller. It’s old school, but it worked for them (and spelling ability was higher back then!) This doubles for vocabulary because there are less common words used in these lists. I may supplement with extra vocab some days if I need to. If we do well with that, we can stick with that for the rest of the year. (If not, spelling & vocab workbooks!)
4. We also have some random workbooks we’ve acquired here and there.. a reading comprehension book, a couple of phonics workbooks, we can use those up and get those in for extra practice. They’re buried around here somewhere.
5. Each of the girls have spiral notebooks labeled “Language Arts” (that are basically empty.) I’m looking at those like workbooks, waiting to be filled in with spelling lists, copywork, writing assignments, etc. Do you think we can fill in a whole spiral notebook in one semester? ;0)

I’ve already got the 3 workbooks I need added to my Amazon cart, mostly paid for with Amazon earnings and a $5 gift card from Swagbucks, just waiting for payday so I can pay for the other 6 dollars.

Until then, we can get a move on with spelling and just writing, writing, writing.

JUST DO IT, right?

It’s been a week!

Wait–it’s been a week? DUDE. The year isn’t supposed to be flying by this fast already. ; )

And what a crazy, busy week this has been!

This week I:

• started trying to get up earlier to read and pray (for 3 in 30.)
• started homeschooling again after a Christmas break (because it was time.)
• planned lesson plans for the whole month of January (because I didn’t during the break.)
• started and mostly finished re-designing my lists and charts for my home management binder (for 3 in 30.)
• began working toward my goal of not having dirty laundry or dishes when I go to bed (for 3 in 30.)
• started reading the bible at the beginning to read all the way through (for Bible in 90 Days, double accountability for my first 3 in 30 goal.)

And if this weren’t enough… I’ve also been suffering from allergies pretty bad, wrestling a full time sinus headache because of it and trying to prevent a sinus infection from developing out of it.

That’s kind of put a kink in things, but all in all it has still been a pretty good week!

The first two days of this week I got up earlier, did my reading and praying and got a good start on my day. The past two days, with the headache, I slept in a little later and didn’t get off to a great start. Despite the headache, though, I did make sure that I got at least one load of laundry and one load of dishes done each day, so that I didn’t get behind. I also worked on the home management binder sheets and will have them ready to begin the next week, which was my goal.

So I’ll keep working on these, and hopefully next week will be a little less over-packed because I won’t have all the lesson planning and home management binder making to do. Here’s hoping, anyway. ; )

You can find more 3 in 30 here.

Did I REALLY say that I was going to make this week’s wrap up more.. brief?? Because I’m not really sure I can! We did so many fun things this week, learned so much, and there’s quite a bit to talk about!

Week 3 really did not start off well. At all. I was quite worried  the whole week would go that way, but by mid-week things picked up and we actually ended on a pretty good note. (Thank you, God, for that sweet blessing!) We didn’t get everything on my lesson plan done, but that’s mostly because I’m trying to help Princess double up on math and finish sooner. And also because Drama Queen hit a wall a couple of times and ended up breaking one lesson across 2 days. I may need to adjust a little, it’s no big deal. The girls and I did decide to make a change from last week and do history 3 days a week instead of 2, and spend two weeks on a science chapter instead of 1. We decided that part of the point of doing school the way we’re doing it this year is to enjoy it more and do more fun stuff, to learn it and remember it better. So that’s what we’re doing.

Monday:

Monday was bad, bad, bad. Icky poo. I had a headache, I didn’t feel well, we got a late start. Just all around bad. At one point mid-afternoon I “abandoned ship” and told the kids that we were going to celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day (I know, it was the day before, but we don’t do school on Sunday’s, right?!) The kids dressed up like pirates and we put on a Scooby Doo pirate movie. The rest of the day was amazingly better. HUH. Imagine that. (Thank you, Netflix.)

Monday was supposed to be History but I was so out of it, we did Science. Since we decided to slow science down a bit we spent the day catching up on our notebooking for Chapter 2 (the Sun.)

Tuesday:

I was really hoping Tuesday would go more smoothly. It kinda did.. and then it really didn’t. We did, however, print some pictures and make a Fruits of the Spirit wall (Galatians 5:22-23 is our weekly memory verse.) I browsed online for some free printable things, and ended up just printing some pictures and making our own.

You may be wondering about Mr. Obedient Orange out there to the side. He’s Self-Controlled Strawberry’s friend. They work together. ;0)

Since we did Science on Monday, we did History on Tuesday. And since we didn’t finish the last lesson from the previous week, and since we were behind on our day, we read Lesson 6, Dinosaurs, together on my bed after supper. That was actually kind of fun. One of the projects in the book suggested googling modern day dinosaur sightings just to see what we could find. We had so much fun watching videos and looking at pictures of the Loch Ness Monster that I let the kids stay up entirely too late!

Wednesday

For some reason, on Wednesday I woke up reeeeally early. It was quite nice, though, having some time before the kids woke up to sit in the half dark and listen to worship music. Because of that we got a fairly decent start on our school day. We had double celebrations on Wednesday – See You At The Pole and The First Day of Autumn (well, unless your calendar said it was Thursday, I hear there was a great calendar confusion.) ;0) We started our day with our usual prayer and we prayed for the leaders of our nation, state and local government. We followed that with the Pledge of Allegiance and a short discussion about being more involved in our local government and elections coming up.

To celebrate the onset of fall, we cut out and colored leaves to decorate the wall around our calendar. Next week we’ll add a few more things to complete our school room fall decorating.

Wednesday was history and we couldn’t help spending more time on dinosaurs so we spent a long time reading up on the connections between dinosaurs and dragons. It was quite interesting! We eventually did get around to our two lessons for the day which were about the Sumerians and the Tower of Babel. Did you know that the Sumerians were very well advanced for their time? They had running water, toilets, writing and libraries! They may even be the civilization that invented the wheel. Abram was from the city of Ur, in Sumer, so when God called him to leave his homeland into a land that God would show him, God was calling him to make quite a lifestyle change! Oh, the faith!

Thursday

Thursday I woke up even earlier!! This time I didn’t turn on any music, I just sat down in the half dark, read my bible, prayed, blogged, checked comments.. in the QUIET. Except for the chirping birds and crickets outside the window screen, the house was silent. AND I LOVED IT. We got off to a good start on Thursday, but not before the kids watched Sid the Science kid. Prompted by the episode about reversible change, the kids asked to make popsicles. Uncharacteristically, I felt spontaneous and I agreed. We rarely ever make kool-aid but I almost always have a package in the pantry, so on our mid-morning break we assembled our popsicles and popped them in the freezer to eat on our mid-afternoon snack break.

Thursday was science again, we did a couple of mini projects and completed our sun collages. The instructions said “cut sun pictures out of magazines” — do you know how hard it is to find pictures of the sun in magazines? It not exceptionally photo-friendly. We couldn’t even find illustrated pictures, like the big sun on the box of Raisin Bran. We ended up using mostly sunny pictures of kids playing outside. Yup!

Friday

I slept in “late.” BUMMER. I missed that early morning quiet, and earned myself a headache to boot. =\ Despite slipping in a sneaky nap while Drama Queen read to me out of her McGuffey reader (can I keep reading Momma?.. Sure hon, I’ll lay here and listen).. we still got in all our subjects. It’s all good.

Friday was history again, which came with some mapwork. Even Little Prince colored a map. Oh! And while I was flipping back to the answers section of the history book, I discovered a chart of scripture references, chapters that correspond with each lesson (where there is one) so that we could line up our bible studies with our history lessons. JUST what I needed! The lesson days that don’t have corresponding scripture passages could easily be filled with other bible passages. I was excited to find that list!

In other news:

This week we also decided to take the plunge and start up a blog for Princess to use for school purposes. I found this website of a homeschool co-op blogging class, and you can participate, too! Blogging 2 Learn. In addition to using the blog for writing assignments, we’re going to be following along with those lessons to an extent. Princess would love to find other homeschooling pre-teen girls with blogs, so if you know of any…?

So how about y’all? How did your week go? I cannot believe how much we got done in spite of difficult days, headaches and allergies and whatnot. God was good to us this week.

This post is happily linked to Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Our second week of school went even better than our first! (And then at the end of the week.. it didn’t.) Ah, well, that’s the way school goes, I suppose. Like anything else, sometimes it feels two steps forward and one step back. Still, it was a really good week overall and we not only got most of our work done but we also had fun along the way.

That’s always a good thing!

Last week was a light week, so one of our goals this week was to step it up a little bit and add more work in. We also tried to start closer to 9 am (our goal start time, 30 minutes to an hour earlier than ‘normal.’) We may not have succeeded as well as I’d hoped with the start time but we did get math, language arts, science and history done this week.

Calendar Time

First on our schedule (after prayer) is calendar time. We have two “calendars” (though neither are a true calendar – ha!) One is a velcro fabric “Tell Me About Today” calendar. and the other is a “laminated” poster board with several different tasks for each child. They each their assigned “tasks.”

All in all this is supposed to take only about 5-10 minutes. At the beginning of the first week I think we spent at least twenty! By the end of last week they were practically doing it all by themselves and we were much closer to our 5 minute goal. Which of course, makes me really happy!

Bible

Next on our schedule is bible, but I’ll be honest, all we’re doing right now is memorizing verses and the books of the bible. I realize that’s a lot and that’s a good thing! But I’d thought we’d be doing some bible study, too, and now I’m re-thinking my original plan because there’s even more bible/God/scripture references in our science and history than I expected — and I’m thrilled by the way. In the meantime, our verse for the week was Psalm 19:1-

“The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

This verse went along with our science and history well (I think both books actually cited that verse at some point!) We’re using Charlotte Mason’s memory verse system, we’re just doing a new verse each week instead of each day.

Another verse we reviewed quite a bit this week (one of our Odd or Even verses) was Colossians 3:23 -

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”

Now THERE’S a good scripture verse for encouraging your kids to get busy on their work and do their best. ;0)

Math

Math is next. We got off to a really rough start with math, after taking a month and a half off. Once I realized (DUH) that we needed some math facts review, things improved A. LOT. Amazing what good old fashioned review can do for you.

One cool thing that happened this week is that division finally “clieked” with Princess. I mean, she’s been doing it, but it’s been hard. She’s like me, she needs to SEE it, to understand what she’s doing and why – she can’t just plug numbers in where she’s told and master it. We sat down with a dry erase board and I drew out a bunch of examples to help her “see” what was going on and it all made a lot more sense for her. I should have done that ages ago!!

Language Arts

Language Arts is what we added in this week, what we didn’t “do” last week. Another thing I wasn’t expecting to get so much of out of our science and history books was language arts – but I’m totally cool with that, too! There’s enough opportunities for writing and reading, vocabulary words, … I’m thinking about tweaking the way we do Language Arts, too. We didn’t really get a full load of language arts in this week, not the way that I’d hoped for, but the copywork and notebooking for the science made up that difference.

Science

I don’t know if Science is my favorite thing we’re doing this year or if it’s the history. IT’S A CLOSE RACE between the two. What’s amazing me the most is how many of the “facts” my kids can remember after the lesson, and still remembered the next week. Without pushing and drilling the facts in, just taking a different approach and doing it a different way is what they needed to have fun with it and learn it. Love, love, love that part.

I think the neatest thing we learned about/discussed was how the universe (in God’s amazing design) is designed just perfectly so that the gravitational pull from all the planets around it holds the earth at it’s perfect distance from the sun. If one planet on either side were slightly farther away, earth’s location in space would shift also, and life on our planet would not be able to survive the difference in heat or cold. It’s really neat to think about how there are verses in the bible, that were written a really, really long time ago–long before Capernicus and Galileo– that refer to the “hanging” of the stars and things of that nature. Things they had no concept of at that point, but that we can see now, how literally they really are “hung” in space – kept in place by invisible gravity fields we cannot see. God is truly amazing.

History

One of the coolest things about our school year so far is how our science and history have gone hand in hand with every lesson. While we were learning about Creation in our first week we were also learning how the universe was designed. Both texts referenced Genesis 1:1 of course. While were learning about Noah and the flood (and the rainbow) this week, we were also learning about light, how all the colors of the rainbow are in light, and how certain light waves are reflected and seen and so on. There have been many instances when we’ve been reading and thought, “Hey, we just learned a little something about that in the other book!”

One neat conversation we had this week was about Noah and his family’s experience during the flood. We took a completely different look at than we have before. Though as a child we’ve often heard the story, the happy pictures and short stories make it easy to imagine that Noah and his family were simply floating around waiting for the waters to recede. We imagined what it might have really been like, after our history book told us that a giant flood very well could have brought turmoil to the planet, causing oceanic volcanoes to erupt, earthquakes and thunderstorms. We imagined how scary it might have been, and for how long of a time, and how much faith and trust Noah would have really needed as he rode out the scariest thing on Earth ever!

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Wow, that was really long! But there was just so much that we did during the week, and I hadn’t really talked about the first week, and well, I’ve never been very good at summarizing. ;0) I didn’t even tell you about making instruments and dancing to tribal drum videos on youtube! =P

This is my first time joining in the Weekly Wrap-Up with Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, too. I plan on trying to do this every week.. but hopefully from now on I’ll be a little more… brief. =)

Raise your hand if your homeschooled child has a blog and you use it as an outlet for their creative writing? I’ve run across a few. Some of them have seriously impressed me, too! I even started a private blog for my ten year old last year, hoping to use it as a place for her to write to an audience- even if that audience was only our immediate family. There’s only one problem..

We never do it.

She rarely asks to do it, I rarely make her do it.. between all the regular subjects, assignments, chores, housework, church (and all the things that go on inbetween: reading, playing outside, watching tv, goofing off…) I’m not really sure how and when and where to implement that.

I haven’t decided if I should give assignments: “Write a short story/poem/persuasive essay to post on your blog.”

Or if I should post things after the fact: “Well done, now I want to you practice your typing skills and go post this on your blog.”

Or if I should let her just WRITE.. creatively, as the whim moves her: “How about you spend about 20 minutes writing on your blog. Whatever you want.”

Or maybe all 3? And don’t even get me started on whether or not I should be proofreading and having her re-write and correct grammar or if it should be “free space.”

I just want her to become a confident and skilled writer. That comes by writing. Lots and lot of writing. Which I haven’t had her do nearly enough of. Which I am amending this year. I want her to be comfortable with writing for herself and writing to be read, and that’s where the blog comes in.

I’m not looking for anyone to tell me what to do,.. but if you use a blog (private, public or otherwise) as an outlet for your child’s writing, I’d love to see/hear how others are doing it. I’d also like to know how you handle posting. Do you preview before they post? I’m looking for a little inspiration here. Whatcha got??

Photo Credit: John Ward, via CC.2.0