ThadenPierce School

I have sadly neglected our garden this year and the little carrots gave up. We let the kids eat them and they thought the mini-carrots were great. Poor little stunted run carrots…

Next year we’ll try again when I’m more ambitious and willing to drag myself outside to water more consistently.

Emy is looking out the window of the sunroom yelling at our tree, “Squirrel, squirrel, where ARE you??” (She pronounces squirrel something like “Gurl, gurl!”)

B can sing every word in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” It’s cute. And mostly coherent.

C is on chapter 13 of Saxon 2. Doing well, it’s mostly review at this point. I’m not ambitious enough to start Mo on Saxon 1 yet.

C is on lesson 163 of First Language Lessons (so #62 of second grade) and we’re slowly working on memorizing those prepositions. He’s getting them faster than me. I’m very impressed with both of their handwriting, they can use wide ruled paper and have very neat handwriting. C’s been asking about cursive and we may start it in the fall though I planned to wait a year. We’ll see. Mo’s wanting to start First Language Lessons grade 1 and Kit did the first lesson with her (memorize definition of a noun) but again – Mommy’s too lazy to follow up. Though she’s started memorizing the prepositions as well so really she’s probably ready, huh? Today she read 5 of her early reader books.

I got organized a bit and put our daily stuff back into a bin (why did I take it out in the first place??) so they can now bring me one box and I have the math book/pages for C, the language, Mo’s easy readers and both of their composition books for handwriting/dictation/spelling, etc. The extra subjects I leave on the shelf since I only need those once a week (history, art, science, etc.)

We’re taking it pretty easy. Mommy’s not keeping up well so we’ll go slow this summer and get serious in the fall when I’m back on my feet.

Would you work with micromanaging boss, no salary, and all your work thrown away?

Well, would you?

(Yes, I’m cross-posting on both of my blogs.)

I remember when a good friend (and math professor at local university) told me about a homeschooled student of hers. Very bright, but he was not used to exams and had severe anxiety and would panic and do horribly on tests. She said he would probably fail the class over it so she encouraged us to be sure and get the kids use to testing, especially timed testing.

We’re not planning to do any national standardized testing on the kids during the elementary (grammar) years, though I know some homeschool families like to do so. We’ll do practice tests with them before the PSAT and PACT, of course. Get them use to the format and experience of being tested in the classroom in uncomfortable desks with lots of other people and a stranger administering the exams. But otherwise we plan to test them at home to get them use to completing projects/work/tests quickly but efficiently. With math that’s simple, with history we can have them do dates and multiple choice tests. I had to write up my own tests when teaching college so that’s easy – though I preferred essay or oral exams. And we’ll probably include some of those – timed essay exams for languages, with some multiple choice grammar stuff. Diagramming sentences, etc.

OH, on that topic – C just diagrammed his first sentence. He was trying to figure out which word in the sentence was a preposition so he just figured out which each word was. He didn’t write it down, did it orally. But I was so excited!

AND, Christopher just took his first timed math test. Did great.

Obviously as their teachers we’ll be aware of how they are progressing, where they need help and where their strengths are. But I want them to be very comfortable with the concept of testing or interviewing (oral exams, really) and writing (essays) so that when they are looking at college courses or internships or job interviews that they can go in with confidence and know they can handle the pressure of the time limit and being on the spot and perform and present themselves well.

He’s six, I’ve got time, right?

To convince myself we did SOMETHING educational today…

C reviewed prepositions and knew the definition with no prompting. We memorized the first four in our list – aboard, about, above, across. He used each in a sentence and then wrote them out – I said he could write them once so long as he showed me his BEST work.

We read a LOT of library books – some I read, some he read to us.

We read the chapter for our history group tomorrow on ancient India and had some great discussions about Hinduism, Buddhism, the caste system, and what Jesus would think/teach about all of these things and C made some interesting connections between world religions and our faith. (He brought up similarities in teachings from Siddhartha and Christ, I didn’t make that association for him.)

We watered our new house plants from a friend moving to Europe and we now have TEN house plants! Spider, rubber, ficus tree, some type of ivy, and we’re learning about all of them. We should write up a list.

We exercised, we ate healthy snacks and lunch, I’m prepping dinner now (spicy pork & noodles) and it’s only 3:20pm. And I only yelled at the kids once, but I don’t think it counts because they were screaming and chasing each other across the house at the time so I don’t think they heard me. AND I got Bennett and Emy down for naps, despite said screaming.

Kit’s heading home after grabbing a tape from a friend with a collection of home/birth center deliveries for the kids to watch. I’m excited to see it! And that certainly counts as educational.

No math yet. Maybe no math today, I’m tired. Perhaps we’ll do piano, I just got my new spiral bound hymnbook in so I’m trying to let the kids hear me play more often. (And before you ask, I took a few years of piano but I’m not at all skilled and would not play in public. But I know enough to get my kids covered on the basics before we pay a piano teacher.)

It was a rough night, I needed to validate my efforts today.

Somewhere I found this list of Charlotte Mason inspired habits to cultivate (wish I had the source so I could give credit.) We decided to pick 2 habits at a time and the whole family will focus on them. The kids are drawing pictures right now and writing the words down for our June habit so they can hang them up on the fridge to remember. We chose paying attention and remembering. Which is something we can all work on, right? But we’re making these a special focus so that we (Kit & myself) can be better about following through with the kids as we cultivate these habits. Here’s the rest of the list with some of our modifications (forgive the no punctuation/breaks – it came formatted like that):

~ Decency and Propriety Habits:
Cleanliness
Courtesy
Kindness
Manners
Modesty and Purity
Neatness
Order
Regularity
Candor
Courage
Diligence
Fortitude
Generosity
Gentleness
Meekness
Patience
Respect
Temperance
Thrift
~ Mental Habits: 
Attention Imagining
Meditation
Memorizing
Mental Effort
Observation
Perfect Execution
Reading for Instruction
Remembering Thinking
Accuracy
Concentration
Reflection
Thoroughness
~
Moral Habits:
Integrity
Priorities
Finishing
Use of Time
Borrowed Property
Obedience
Personal Initiative
Reverence
Self-Control
Sweet, Even Temper
Truthfulness
Usefulness
~
Physical Habits: 
Alertness to Seize
Opportunities
Fortitude
Health
Managing One’s Own Body
Music
Outdoor Life
Quick Perception of Senses
Self-Control in Emergencies
Self-Discipline in Habits
Self-Restraint in Indulgences
Training the Ear and Voice
~
Religious Habits: Prayer,
Scripture study, Reverent Attitude

Christopher just finished reading his very first chapter book! Volume 1 in the Boxcar Children. 154 pages!! Wow, we’re all so excited – a whole new world of reading to explore.

Here he is with the book, we’ve been pushing his bedtime back to 8:30pm lately and letting him stay up with us reading a chapter each night.

Emy and Mo have been “helping” me garden this morning while Kit’s at the dentist with the boys for their check ups. As you can see, Emy’s help as been very… involved?

I was too lazy to go inside for my camera but we had the laptop out here to research the pink flowering bushes we have (any guesses what pink flowering bush we may have? We’re not finding any ideas on-line.) Moira reminded me I have a camera in my laptop so of course we had to play around.

It’s beautiful today, we’ve been in the yard almost 2 hours now enjoying the breeze. We discovered yesterday that the wind in our trees really resembles the sound of waves on the beach. Not that I’ve been to the beach since pregnant with Christopher (when we lived 15 minutes from Malibu beach) but still… if I close my eyes and lay in the hammock I can imagine I am there. With all four kids running around with me, and that makes it even more perfect.

Sorting through the boxes we moved and cannot remember, I found this plastic bin that held something? NO idea what, it was Kit’s. But we realized it’s the perfect size for our crayons! We’ve had them stored in Christopher’s superman bucket but the kids would dump it out searching for colors. This morning I asked Moira to sort all the crayons out and now we have a great box that’s easily accessible BUT the toddlers cannot open it! At least for the moment, they’ll learn far too quickly how to get into it. Don’t you love those random things you find that are a perfect fit?