R.E.A.D. Curriculum and Review Pack {Crew Review}

For this review, we were given the Learn to R.E.A.D. Curriculum Notebook, a 36-week phonics curriculum with some language arts components, and the R.E.A.D. Review Pack, which is 28 early readers that correspond with the R.E.A.D. Notebook, both from the The Crafty Classroom. The readers can be used with the R.E.A.D. Notebook, or on their own. Both of these are kindergarten products. The R.E.A.D. Notebook says that, "If your child is able to identify a majority of the letter sounds they are ready to begin this curriculum."

My first impression, downloading these projects, is that the files are huge. The R.E.A.D. Notebook is 798 pages, and the R.E.A.D. Review Pack is almost 100. In looking them over on the The Crafty Classroom website, I hadn't realized they were so large. That is a lot of printing, and my printer wasn't working very well at the start of the review, so be aware that a number of my pictures don't reflect the actual print quality very well. It's also a black and white only, but a number of the pages in the R.E.A.D. Notebook are very cute color pages. For most of the pages, it's not a big deal that there are light places, and color pages are printing fine greyscale. We figured out the problem with the printer, so when I printed the readers, things were much better. However, buyers should be aware that these products are going to give your printer a workout! I found a notebook and started out with the first 39 pages, which gave me the instructions for using the curriculum, pretest materials, and the first word family's activities.

The first thing that you do with your child is check and make sure that they know their letter sounds. I was a little surprised at how much work Peanut still needed on this, and we spent the first week or two just working on letter sounds, and introducing the daily page. There are several pages included in the packet for testing letter sounds, and these have turned out to be extremely useful for finishing teaching the letters. I put these letter pages in sleeves -the curriculum suggests doing that with a few things; I did it with a lot- and we started out shoring up letter sounds. We also practiced some of the daily things, her name, some of the counting exercises, and so on. We started with the page of letters with pictures (which should be color, but prints decently anyway, even with my printer doing parts of the page extra light; also the capitals on the left are uneven because of my printer: the originals are not like that), and we just mark them with a happy face when she says the sound. She loves to see the happy faces start to add up. It's extremely convenient to be able to just grab the binder and have everything we need.

In addition to the page of letters with pictures (which are easier to read than the picture suggests, not bad in greyscale, and if you can print them in color they're super cute), there's also both capital and small letters that we'll be doing the same way until she has them cold.

After a couple days working with just letter sounds, I realized that the letters she needed to begin the first week of work on the -am word family (a, m, y, j, r, and d) are mostly letters she knows, so we started to work through that letter family, while still continuing to work pretty intensely with the individual letter sounds. This means that we're moving more slowly through these first lessons than one lesson a week, but I think that it's working out fine to do it this way, as far as how Peanut is doing with it.

This is the first page in the -am word family section. I had some extra page protectors, so we just tucked all of the pages in, which helps me adapt for the poor print quality because I can write out the words. Some of the pages are black and white; these rhyming pages are supposed to be really cute colored pages; my printer does all of them greyscale and that badly right now; the packet is supposed to be way cuter than what my pictures show. We sound them out together as I add each letter, and I give it a little circle when she's done it, because she likes me to.





There's a nice variety of activities, so even though we spend quite a while working on the same letter family, she isn't getting stale on the words. This means that she's happy doing enough practice to really get good at these words before we start adding in the next word family. And, the way that things are set up, it's easy to make sure that she's not just remembering and guessing, but actually reading the words. This word card activity was a huge favorite for us both. We set up a number of different sentences, but this one was one I knew Peanut's Grandpa would especially appreciate:











The review books are cute, and highly phonetic, which I really like. They're meant to coordinate with the curriculum, with a new set introduced every 5 lessons. The overview page has some color (see the screenshot to the left), but the books themselves are black and white, which is important for me right now. Really my only complaint is that it bothers me when phonetic words are introduced as sight words; in week 5, am one of the sight words -- but it fits one of the word families the kids should have learned! The only real sight word in week 5 is "the", and even that one can be taught phonetically if you pronounce it with a long e. Week 10's only sight words are "come" and "to" -- all the rest are phonetic. My feeling is that everything that can be taught phonetically should be, as that maximizes the child's ability to attack unfamiliar words. There are plenty of words that must simply be memorized; it doesn't make sense to me to add to that by including rule-following words in the sight words. That being said, these are lovely little books.

The setup for them books is pretty simple: you print them, cut them -- they're probably in the correct order as they come out of the printer -- and then staple them. Easy peasy. By this point we'd fixed up the printer, so I just went ahead and printed out the whole file. It's a good size stack, but I thought that would be easier to do than figuring out page numbers every time we need them. The instructions suggest using a kleenex box to store them, which I thought was really clever.

Assembly was as easy as promised: I cut them out with my paper cutter I got for scrapbooking, but you could easily do it with scissors, too. Then you lay them on top in order -- the books have page numbers, so it's easy, even if you get distracted while cutting them and lose your place. I cut and made up the four books that use the words from the first four lessons, and while Peanut hasn't quite gotten far enough to be ready for these yet, I'm really excited to use them. She must be, too, because she saw my pile of printed pages ready to turn into books, and spread them out all over (very carefully and tidy), and then asked if she could color them all! The books look excellent: simple, mostly really phonetic, and I'm excited to do them with her when she's ready. Once she's read them for the first time, then she can color them. She likes that kind of thing. 

Overall, I'm really liking this program, in fact I'm feeling very blessed to be on this review, since this is working so well for my daughter. They activities are holding her attention, there's plenty of practice, and the readers are cute. It's a good fit for us, and I plan to continue to use this after the review is done, instead of the other materials that I used with the boys.

UPDATE: Six months later, we're still very happy with this program, and she's made it to the first set of Review Pack books, which are adorable.

If you want to read more reviews of a number of different The Crafty Classroom products click the banner below.

SchoolhouseTeachers.com Yearly Membership {Crew Review}

The first thing I learned when I clicked over to SchoolhouseTeachers.com is that they're a division of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine. And what a great resource!  They have so many interesting online courses as well as resources for homeschool parent support, including homeschool planners. Many of their resources that could supplement our Classical style of homeschooling. They have online courses designed for all ages, from preschool to parent; a number of the varied options they offer for high school looked interesting enough for me to want to do them, and they also have several offerings specifically for adults. This review is for their Yearly Membership, so there's enough time to do several of their offerings during one membership. Here are a few of the options that I thought sounded interesting on my first glance through their extensive list:

For the kids:
All About the Alphabet (Preschool)
Creation, Nature, and You (Elementary)
Keyboarding (Elem.-High School)
Beginning Latin (Elem. - High School)
Web Game Design (Middle - High School)
Checks and Balances (Elem. - Middle School)
Free Market Economics (Middle - High School)
Creative Storytelling (Elem. - Middle School)
Scientific Method (Elem. - Middle School)


For me:
Geography of the Bible (High School)
History of Christianity (High School)
How to Teach Elementary Math (Family)
Going Deeper: The Books of the Bible (High School)
Learning to Write the Charlotte Mason Method (Family)

All of the courses that I looked at were either web-based, downloadable, or a combination of the two: watch a film, then download some additional work to do at home. The amount of prep work for the teacher varied considerably between the courses that I worked with, and there are so many more available than the ones that I looked at, so make sure you click through to check out courses that other Crew members used in their homes. Here's the categories that SchoolhouseTeachers offer:

 

And here are the three courses that I selected for our family to actually use:

Beginning Latin

Hero(10) had outgrown our old Latin introductory course, so I was pleased to discover that SchoolhouseTeachers offers Beginning Latin, and when we tried it, we both like the simple no-frills style. It's an online course: we watch movies, then he has some worksheets to fill out.

He says he likes "the way they bring in the words, with nothing else to pay attention to, so you can focus on just that." I like that he likes it, and that it's moving further into Latin, introducing conjugations and declensions, which he hasn't seen before; he's ready for it. The pace seems to be good for him, as well: not too fast, not too slow.

All About the Alphabet

I decided to try out All About the Alphabet with Peanut(4), to finish off learning her letters and sounds. This is a fun add-on course, a nice bonus in addition to the other courses that fit our family, but it's not enough to be worth the subscription if it's the only one you want. It's simple and straightforward: you get a PDF with activities to do for each letter, and ideas for making books for the letters. We jumped in at A.

There are several things that I really like about doing this course. One is that I don't have to think up all the things that begin with each letter; they have a nice list. And the activities they suggest are varied and interesting. However, the course didn't come with any printables, so I had to make up my own. It wouldn't have been very difficult to include those, and is disappointing that they chose not to. Printables would have made this course completely open-and-go, which would have been better. That being said, we're having a blast at it - Dragon(6) is even kind of jealous that he isn't in preschool anymore - and Peanut is learning both the names and the sounds, which is exactly what is supposed to be happening.

Geography of the Bible

The last course that I chose is the high school course Geography of the Bible for myself. The course is set up as a series of videos, each with a list of Biblical passages used.  The first concern I always have with Bible material produced outside of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its membership is denominational differences: will it stick to just the simple text of scripture, or will it be overtly Protestant? I watched Moses: Exploring the Exodus, a 45 minute tour of the lands of the Israelite captivity and Exodus, and the movie was excellent. The script often quoted the exact words of the Bible's text. The scenery was beautiful. Similarly, Hebron: City of Promise was excellent. They told the story faithfully, but were also frank about the uncertainty in the archeological record. I didn't notice any interdenominational theology conflict problems at all, and found the video material to be quite interesting.

The main thing I found odd for a geography course was that there are very few maps in the videos, and none in the additional materials, and that was disappointing. When I checked with customer support, they told me that, no, I hadn't missed anything, and that it's more of a "lands, culture, and people from the particular area of study," and not so much of map work. But the main reason I picked this course is that the geography -meaning the location of events and people- is all a mushy mess in my head, and I can't wrap my head around the nuances of what's happening with "lands, culture, and people from the particular area of study," -- until I put them on a map. I need to trace the course of events, myself, preferably on a blackline map, (and not a ready-made one, with everything all marked up) to really get what is happening. For me, this is a major omission; I had to find outside maps.

However.

I love this course. It is easily the best of the ones we've tried.

I actually drew and painted my own Exodus map (and there's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it), then went back and re-watched the video, pausing in places to write stuff down and look places and people up, I looked up some verses, and looked at some of the recommended archeology resources and research assignments, and the whole process was delightful and incredibly informative, and I absolutely would not have done my own map, nor thought nearly so hard about where things ought to be placed, and the relationships of places, and the impact that had on how the story went, had there been maps included. It makes a beautiful addition to my scripture journal, and I plan to put in some information about the various Pharaohs and other historical notes behind it. I'm pretty excited about the prospect of having a little collection of these in my notebook, as I look at various Bible stories; they have units covering all the major Bible stories, both Old Testament and New Testament.

Looking at their research assignments for the the two units that I've worked on in the time that I've had the materials to review, I feel like this is a course that a high school student is going to need some assistance with, unless all you want for them to do is just watch the movies, and they'd really be missing out if that's all they do. Both units come with a great variety of research topics - enough that you could almost turn either one of the units into a complete semester; it's not intended that the student will answer every question. In the Moses unit they're good about referring the student to research materials and I was readily able to find research materials for the topics they propose, but in the Hebron unit it's just... questions. And when I started trying to search for the answers, I found it tough going even as an adult: there are a lot of opinions out there on Bible archaeology, and if you don't have a guide, then it's hard to know how to judge between them. So that was a little bit frustrating. On the flip side, though, it did lead me to dig in deeper and think harder, trying to figure things out. But I do think that a high school student would benefit from having an adult mentor do the course with them. And that's not a bad thing: it creates tons of opportunities for discussing both geography and doctrine.

This course is something I am enjoying tremendously, and I would absolutely recommend it to my friends, and I really look forward to when I can work on it after the kids go to sleep. It can be tough to squeeze out time to work on this sort of thing when you're the Mom, but I'm going to keep chipping away at it, because it's just so interesting. I am learning so much and it is really enhancing my understanding of the stories covered in both these units. I'm excited to complete this course, and really glad that I'll have a whole year to do it.


In the course of working with these courses, I ended up talking to customer support twice (once to ask about the maps for the geography course, and once to ask about finding the worksheets for Latin when they were migrating to the lovely new-and-improved version of their site), and they make it so easy: there's a little chat box at the bottom of their pages anytime you're signed in, and so talking to a real person is quick and painless, which is a huge bonus. Customer service, and what happens when things aren't going perfectly, can be a really telling experience when working with a company, and in this case, I couldn't have asked for better. Schoolhouse Teachers is welcome addition to our homeschool day.

You can connect with Schoolhouse Teachers in their Facebook Group. To read what other Crew families have to say about the SchoolhouseTeachers Yearly Subscription, please click the box below.

Busy Day

Some days are busier than others. 

Today Dragon is very busy. He's building a library. 

It's serious business. They are happy to loan books. Or sell them, so you can keep then forever. I'm not at all sure which my librarian would prefer. But I did borrow one, and his sister promptly demanded that I read it. Dragon doesn't seem to have time for stories today; he has Things To Do.

Next, the library installed sleeping space. Looks a mite cramped to me, but Dragon is pleased. 

Our "Teddy Bear" joined the game (she says she's Daddy's Teddy Bear), and the library had another nice expansion, courtesy of the kitchen chairs.

I suppose I could have interrupted their play for the book learning I had planned this morning, but play is important. So I didn't. They kept at their game for several hours. We'll actually read a few of those books tomorrow; today they are props.

Voluntary Reading!

I think one of the most exciting milestones in learning to read is voluntary reading. That's the part when you can tell that they are gaining enough skill to begin to see what all the hard work of phonics is about, and it just might be my favorite part of teaching the kids to read.

Dragon is reading today, without being asked. He asked for a box of Bob Books, and started out reading to the Daddy, but when Daddy had to go do other things, Dragon kept going. There are several books from that set that are lost now, but what was there, he read. 

Then he came looking for another box. 

But I think the best part was when he commented that practicing the Bob Books will make it easier to read the scriptures. 

Yes. Yes, it will. And that is a worthy goal for a little boy.

Heroic Number Line

Dragon is four now, and starting to do more school work more of the time. In math, he's been able to list numbers pretty high for quite some time, and we're working on helping him attach the concept of two to the number two, and the rest of them. Today, we worked the numbers up to five.

Bilingual Calendar Time

The kids have been taking swim lessons this summer at the local pool, and while they've been swimming, I've been picking the brain of a friend of mine. Mrs. C teaches in a local bilingual (Spanish-English) classroom, and we've had some great conversations about the challenges posed by bilingual instruction. I've also been reading about some of the ideas and controversy around Welsh-English bilingual instruction in Wales, which popped up in my Facebook feed. Really, I've just had an amazing amount of things around, all the sudden, suggesting the benefits of trying to take our efforts at a Japanese-English pidgin more in the direction of attempting full-fledged bilingual instruction. Looking at it all, I'm realizing that this much, all at once, is probably Providential, and I'd best sit up and pay attention. There's also calendaring and this word wall idea, which I put onto the blog's Facebook page a while back:

Post by Baby Steps Blog.

I'm not gonna lie; the idea of attempting real bilingual instruction is terribly intimidating.

I'm. Not. Fluent.

I know enough to know that my speech is full of grammar errors, and the levels of formality which are so important to good manners in Japanese... they're difficult. You have to learn multiple words fro the same stuff, and different conjugations, depending on who you're talking to. And then you have to figure out when it's right to use which forms. That is particularly difficult, since I don't currently count any native speakers among my friends, and very few who speak at all. And my vocabulary, while growing, is still quite limited. Still, having decided that the Lord is beckoning me down this path, we're forging ahead. I picked Mrs. C's brain about how they deal with teaching content in a language their students, initially, don't speak. She was so encouraging! I can't tell you how nice it is to hear, from someone who actually knows something about what's involved, "You can totally do that."

So here's my plan. We're going to take the calendaring that is commonly done in pre-K and K, and we're going to do it in Japanese. It's limited and focused. It's short duration, but it's a daily thing. We'll have the poster with the calendar in Japanese. I'm going to have to create some things, because I can't figure out any search terms that turn up printables, and I plan to share them, in case someone else wants to do something similar. I think we'll start with doing the weather in Japanese. I'm taking the vocabulary cards here, cutting off the English, and mounting them on another paper with Japanese vocabulary printed on it. Then we can put it on a "What's the weather like today?" section similar to the one segment of this. I'll put up some pictures when I get it made. Hopefully, we can start that in about 2 weeks, when we start our full schedule again (family in town has us on break right now). By the first of September, I hope to have an actual calendar going. Japanese calendar numbers are different from the rest of their numbers, so I think it'll be important to start on the first, so the kids don't get overwhelmed by all the strange numbers. Add a song to that, and I think we'll have a good start. That much, in Japanese, I can do. And it will help us all to improve. This is a long-haul project; little bits count. It will add up.

Even if we don't make it all the way to real bilingual instruction, we'll be closer for having tried, and that is success.

**There's a progress report on these efforts here.**


P.S. I'm so glad you stopped by to read about the adventures at our house! If you want more, "Like" my blog on Facebook to get posts (and the articles n things I wish I had time to blog about) in your feed. Wanna see all the projects and ideas that I may or may not get around to? Follow me on Pinterest. Thanks for stopping by!

Handwriting Songs

Dragon is showing some interest in writing, and I discovered these fun songs on YouTube that reinforce writing ideas. I'm thinking he may like these.












OK, this one's not so much for him as it is for me... I think this is a hilarious approach!

Starting to Read!

Dragon has been soooo close to making those first blends for quite some time now. So close to breaking the code and grasping the concept that takes a pile of letters and magically transforms them into a word.

He did it. Yesterday. 

We've spent some time trying to sound out the CVC words. Cat. Hat. Gun. (He likes that one lots. This kid not only turns pop tarts into guns. Also jelly sandwiches, graham crackers, you name it. If it can become a weapon it will. And, in spite of our best efforts, it generally "shoots" at whoever is closest. Good thing we homeschool.) 

Let's read the word. What does g say? /g/

g-u-n. 

Can you tell me the word? 

It wasn't really clicking. Too passive. I'm doing too much; he needs to do it. This boy is active. Yesterday we tried something different. We went over only a few words, then I laid them on the table. 

Find my word. I want "mom." 

m-o-m

Can you find mom?

How cool is that?!

Staying on Track

It's been very useful to me in the past to see others talk about how they do the practical, day-to-day things in their homeschools, so I thought I'd share the way that I do my lesson plans and daily lists for Hero. This is my planning grid. It shows 2 weeks of Hero's work, and I recently started to put ABC games and art projects down the extra space for "tot school" for Dragon, who insists that he not be left out.

The very top line is phonics, though we won't be needing that for Hero too much longer; his reading is better and better all the time. I just put a check mark by the days that we do phonics. I've got a spot to mark every day, but we've never done it quite daily. More like 3-4 times in a week.

Next is math, which is the hardest for me to plan because Hero is like a sponge in math; I can't seem to keep on top of where he needs to be. I seldom plan more than a week or two at a time, because if I do I'll just end up needing to re-plan it after he's seen what I'm showing him once or twice.

The rest of the subjects go like that: handwriting & drawing are related skills, so I've combined them, and we do that about 4 times a week. I'll be switching out geography for artist study on the next batch of charts that I print; I feel like we get a lot of geography in the context of our history, and it's far more useful and memorable when it's in context like that. Artist study is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time now, but haven't been able to make it work. We're about to try again. Science and History have the largest blocks because I have to make notes about what activities I plan to have us do. As you can see from the pink arrows, it's not set in stone. Sometimes stuff gets skipped, or in this case, forwarded into the next week.

I generally write in pencil because it's more flexible. If I write in pen I invariably end up looking for my whiteout! I plan out what I'd like to see happen in the week on this chart, but don't commit to specifics as far as the days for most things. That way, if we're engrossed in something we can stay with it for the day without messing everything up, and if we've got plans to be out or something unexpected comes up, our school schedule can absorb it pretty easily. Most weeks it takes us from Monday to Friday. Occasionally, we finish on Thursday, sometimes we've got a little mop-up that needs to be done on Saturday. It's a pretty flexible system, and it's been working nicely.

When we get up each morning, I make a list for the day, like this one we're using today. Hero knows that certain things have to wait until after school, like screen time, so he has motivation to get his work done. He chooses (mostly) what order to do things in. Some days he can do this much in about 2-2.5 hours. Other days there's lots of breaks and we're finishing up school around dinner time. I don't worry about it too much, as long as we're consistently getting things done. I do monitor to make sure that there's plenty of free play time, but it makes very little difference to me if he wants to do his school all at once or a little at a time over the day.

The second, short list on the right of the picture is my list of stuff I want to do with Dragon today. That's for my own reference; I don't think he's aware that he's "doing school" most of the time. Today I planned to play some letter games, read some stories, and I had him play with our pattern blocks. The list keeps me organized enough to actually remember to do stuff like that with him; without it I can get really bad about forgetting to do even basic stuff like reading the poor kid stories. Thank goodness for being able to make lists! I never used to do it, but the more I have to accomplish, the more useful I'm finding my various lists.

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Day in the Life

Every so often, it's fun to do a snapshot of what our days look like. This is an example of our routine when Daddy is gone for business. Happily, he doesn't have to do that very often or very long.

9:00am - Everybody up! We snuggle, we eat, we dress.

10:30 - Hero is drawing knights for his art/writing, and Dragon plays with playdough.  I shower while the baby sleeps (heaven!).

Hero's knights.

10:50 - Hero practices piano while I snuggle Dragon. Baby Girl is still sleeping.

11:00 - I realize that when I made today's list of school work, I left math off. Oops. Yes, Hero, you can do your math on my phone today. He plays Hungry Fish, Othello, and Montessori Numbers. Dragon takes a turn on the piano, then goes to watch what Hero is doing with the phone.

11:15 - I nurse Baby Girl and read Dragon some stories. Hero is still doing math on my phone, but wants to switch to the reading game, Montessori Crosswords. After the stories, Dragon wants to do Starfall.

11:20 - Dragon won't stay on Starfall, so he looses computer privileges. He throws a tantrum and gets a timeout. He's sounding tired; I wonder if he feels ok.

11:30 - Baby Girl is stinky, so she gets a change. Dragon finally completes his timeout (I don't count tantrum time toward the timeout time), so I give him a big hug, and we turn on my new Lindsay Sterling disk, turn it up, and dance around the living room.



12:00pm - Time to start cooking lunch. We're having bean and rice tacos. I give Hero some Es to practice writing while I cook.

12:05 - I put Baby Girl in the wrap and nurse her while I cook. Dragon has to be sent out of the stove area because he's making me nervous around the hot stove. He's unhappy and leaves the kitchen. Hero is drawing knights rather than doing his Es. I have an internal struggle: do I redirect him to the Es I asked for, or do I step back while he follows his interests. I decide to let him keep drawing. Once the rice is going, I go find Dragon laying on the couch snuggling one of Hero's favorite animals and looking miserable. We snuggle for a few minutes, and then he comes back to the kitchen and starts drawing too.  I'm now pretty sure he doesn't feel great. Hopefully it's just hungry, and he'll be all better after lunch is over.

12:30 - Still waiting for the rice. I get out 1001 Nights to read while the boys color and I mind lunch. Baby Girl is sleeping in the wrap.

1:00 - We finally sit down for lunch. I still haven't read any of 1001 Nights, but I do manage about 1/2 a chapter while we eat. By the end of the lunch there is shredded cheese spread all over the whole dining room floor. I'm not quite sure how that happened. It's all mixed with the muffin crumbs that I still haven't swept up from last night, and it's sticking to my feet. It's driving me crazy; I grab the broom. While I'm sweeping Dragon starts throwing his food. I give him a timeout and finish sweeping up the worst of the dry mess. Then I hand him a rag and we clean up the rice he threw. Hero clears his place and does the Es.

1:30 - Quiet time. I wish it was naptime; I want to do some scrapbooking and it's just not going to happen. Maybe after the boys go to bed. Baby Girl is still sleeping. The Daddy calls and we talk to him for a few minutes as well.

2:30 - After a couple of warnings to stay in his quiet time or he'd head up to his bed for a naptime, Dragon got "banished" and snuggled and fell asleep in about 10 minutes. I'm not terribly surprised; he's been off all day. Hopefully the evening will be better. Hero's quiet time is finished and he's back to drawing (since his mean mom won't let him have a screen right now). He wants me to come draw a knight for him, since he drew 4 for me. Baby Girl is still sleeping in the wrap. After that we do Japanese.

More knights.

Mom's knight.
 

3:20 - Baby Girl loads her diaper most impressively, with much noise and concentration, and I discover that Hero is embarking upon that stage in life wherein a single fart is worthy of 10 minutes of giggling.

3:30 - I'm beginning to think we're approaching the point of diminishing returns for school. Hero is supposed to be doing memory work with me, but the CD player has cycled through all 5 disks and is back to Lindsay Sterling. Hero's urge to dance is clearly irresistible. My poor boys need to be outside more than I can do this week. Plus, our memory work is stale; we need a new poem or something.



3:45 - Dragon comes downstairs after his nap. His mood is much improved, and he joins the dancing. Baby Girl is awake, has eaten, and is having some floor time. Hero (sort of) listens to me read to him about the Solar System while he does some summersaults. The boy has serious ants in his pants today. I'm very glad that he doesn't have to try to sit in a desk and contain all those wiggles.

4:45 - School has been declared to be officially DONE for the day, and the boys both requested some screen time. Hero is playing one of the Daddy's favorite video games, MechWarrior Mercenaries, while Dragon wanted to watch Elmo's Potty Time. I'm hoping that he'll take a hint from Elmo and decide that the toilet is cool enough to use. Baby Girl, having slept all day, is ready to start the evening's cluster feeding and is nursing again. I'm going to play in Photoshop making another scrapbook page, since everything is calm for the moment.

6:00 - Dragon's show is done, and I'm finishing up the new cover photo for my blog's facebook page. You should go check it out. I give notice to Hero that he needs to finish up and proceed to tickle Dragon, and then chase him away from Baby Girl, who is sleeping again. We head to the kitchen to start working on dinner. I'm not exactly sure what we're going to eat, but Dragon's going to help make it.

6:40 - We're still sitting at the computer, watching Lindsay Sterling this time, rather than just listening. Dragon asks for a violin. I tell him that before he can have a violin he has to be able to take care of it. I also make a mental note to talk to my friend about Suzuki stuff, and when they recommend starting and what it costs. This isn't the first time Dragon has said he wants a violin.




7:00 - The Daddy calls. Everything stops for this. However, due to the wonder of cell phones I can also cook dinner while I talk to him. "Cook" being a non-technical term. We have turkey sandwiches and applesauce. Hero asks for more of the 1001 Nights story and I oblige him.

8:15 - Toss Dragon in the shower, followed by the bucket and cup he likes to play with. Baby Girl still likes the sound of the water, so I lay her on the rug. She's fussy in the evenings, but this seems to help tonight. For a while. Hero plays piano a bit, then comes to check out the Japanese I'm studying while I wait. I promise to teach him written Japanese after he's better at spoken Japanese (and not so incidentally, reading English). Baby Girl starts freaking out (in spite of Hero's best efforts) while I'm washing Dragon's hair. Dragon, Baby Girl, and I clear out of the bathroom so that Hero can have a shower all by himself.

9:30 - It's definitely time for bed; both boys are getting grumpy, and they're starting to antagonize each other. We get our vitamins and head upstairs so they can each be in their own beds, in their own space, for the rest of the routine. Poor Baby Girl is freaking out, and I can't figure out what's going on. We say family prayers, and the boys say their personal prayers, and I set my phone up to read scriptures to them for me (not my favorite method, but it got done) and step across the hall to change the baby's diaper. It's wet, and a clean one helps, but she's still growling a bit.

10:00 - The Daddy calls to say goodnight. Dragon talks first, and while he's chatting, Baby Girl loads the new diaper. Which Hero finds hilarious, so Dragon sensibly concludes that it's hilarious, and tells the Daddy all about it. Baby Girl passes out with a look of extreme relief on her face. I change her again while Hero talks to the Daddy, then I get a turn to talk to my sweetheart.

10:30 - I'm downstairs, blogging and getting ready to play with Photoshop some more. The boys are 90% asleep, but Baby Girl is fussing some again. However, she's clearly winding down as well. Only 10:30? Not too shabby. I make a mental note: don't stay up late; the boys didn't, and that means they won't sleep in tomorrow. Don't be stupid. Stupid is easy. Photoshop is fun. But it will suck tomorrow. Don't do it.

11:30 - I have the computer start working on a backup to my external hard drive for my photos and digital scrapbook stuff. This is going to take a minute; there's more than 18,000 files in My Pictures. Happily, the computer is happy to do it in the background while I fool around in Photoshop. Baby Girl is sleeping-- and so is my left arm. I wonder if she'd sleep as nicely on my rocking chair here by where I'm sitting. I should think about going to sleep soon myself, but I just located the pictures I want to work with...

11:45 - I'm digging through my Photoshop Toys board on Pinterest, trying to find the tutorial that I need. I need to spend some time downloading the cool fonts I have pinned. Not tonight.

12:00am - I finally find the tutorial that I was looking for, but it was one of the first ones I ever pinned, and it took a long time. Continuing to play would be stupid, so I shut things down and get ready to sleep.

12:15 - I'm still sitting here, procrastinating. This is starting to be stupid. I want to read 1001 Arabian Nights all night tonight, but I'm trying to convince myself it's a bad idea. I'm as hooked as Hero, and I've never read it before, so going slowly to read it aloud is hard, even if this is just a retelling simplified for a younger audience. I decide to leave the book downstairs. Reluctantly. One of these times I need to read the real one.

12:45 - Drat. I forgot to do laundry.

Weekly Wrap-up: illuminated

We started out the week pretty sick, particularly Dragon and me. As a result, on Monday and Tuesday there was a lot of sitting around doing not much! But by Tuesday afternoon I was starting to feel somewhat better, and we started to be a little productive again. Hero practiced his math facts, did a little writing, and some reading that evening. Wednesday was much more normal. Thursday, winter finally arrived. About time, too!

After the snow play was done we started a big history/art project. Last week, we read about illuminated manuscripts in Story of the World 2. This week, we looked at some scans of real ones, at this cool site I found from the British Library. Primarily, we looked at the Luttrell Psalter, but we also had a look at a few pages from the Lindsifame Gospels before Hero's attention for the site was used up. We each picked out a few pages to do screen captures from, and those we talked about what we liked, then printed them out for reference in our art project.

 

Next, we had a look at the directions from our art project. I showed him the various fonts they suggest, and he picked out what he wanted. He's still learning to do regular letters, so I did the outline letters for him. He did all the rest, and I'm so pleased with what he did!

 

 

I love the way that the decorations on his letters are so similar to the detail work on the models we looked at. It's always fun to see that sort of comprehension. I'm hoping that by doing a big art project like this he'll remember the real illuminations better. He's already wanted to go back and look at the British Library site again, which is a good sign. The idea with our project had been to do crayon resist, but I didn't explain it very well and I told him about the painting part too soon, so he didn't put enough crayon on the picture for it to actually resist when we painted. Next time, I'll have him do the crayon part, and then I'll tell him about the paint.

This was Hero's first experience with water colors, I believe, and nearly my first as well. Dragon lost interest with the project and went to "help" the Daddy long before we got to the paints, so he doesn't have one to show. Hero tells me that he's not done, which is fine with me; the real illuminations were big projects and often art takes more than one sitting to do well. But this is a sample of what he has so far.

 

Once I got him going, I was able to do one too. I didn't get to the painting part, and the crayons were too dull to do what I had in mind when I started, but it's still a fun project. When Hero does his painting next I'm hoping to do a little as well.

I'm getting a bit of historical whiplash, switching from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe like this, but when I looked at the dates, they aren't that far distant in time. I always thought that togas and knights were further distant from each other, but it turns out that's not so much the case. Studying history chronologically makes so much more sense than the piecemeal way that I got what little I did learn about history. It's pretty amazing how much I'm learning, even though we're really only using the most basic of resources since Hero is still so young. So this Friday afternoon Hero and Dragon got their first exposure to King Arthur and his knights with our new read-aloud. This version has some amazing illustrations, which they both love, and when we started it my voice gave out just as the Green Knight burst in on the New Years' Feast at Camelot-- cliffhanger!! The boys and I are all anxious to read some more of this one.



Now that Hero is reading better, I tried stepping back a little bit with our map work, and helping him less. Instead of pointing to the map and telling him what he's looking at, I stood back and told him what he was looking for, as well as some clues as to where he should find it. This is one place where I struggle not to be a bit of a helicopter, so it worked well that we did this while I was getting dinner and I kept having to cross the kitchen to check on the food. Physical distance. Makes it hard to hover. Then, he did the coloring (except that I helped a little with the water). It went really well, and we'll be doing more like this. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at how easily he found Rome. I hadn't been at all sure how much of the other style of map work he was remembering, and apparently it's at least some.

That's the highlights! We did some other stuff; he's made good progress on filling in the Book It! chart, and will probably be ready for his next coupon by the end of the month. Dragon loves to practice reading his CVC words, and comes flying across the room if I ask him if he wants to do it, all little kid excitement. It's so much fun to see him so excited. I hadn't really intended to start him this early, but he's been showing signs of starting to remember some sight words, and he's so excited about it, so we'll do it a bit and see where it goes. It's awful cute to hear his little toddler voice work on making the blends. I love teaching my kids!

To see what other folks are doing this week, head on over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and check 'em out!