School Week 3/8-3/12/10

We had another great week due to my re-thinking our homeschool.  It just feels so much better now!  I LOVE it!  You can see my schedule/lesson planner in the right hand column of my blog.

Language Arts:  We learned 5 more phonograms this week!  The kids are excited to earn their icecream when they learn all of them!

Writing:  I have a new writing curriculum that I plan to order some time next week.  Ds may not do it, but I'm sure that Dd5 will.  She loves writing!

Composer Study: Our composer of the month.  I got this idea from someone else on the WTM forums, and it's exactly what I've been looking for!

Picture Study:  We are still studying 1 piece per month.  Basically, we just look at it and talk about who the artist was.  We try to discover things that we didn't notice the week before.

Science:  GUESS WHAT?!  Exactly a week after we planted our flower they sprouted and came to the surface!  The kids have been so excited all week!  We also did this worksheet.

We watched another educational video from here.  Make sure to preview them first.  I haven't watched them all.

Character training: We kept on top of our chore charts that I made up last week.  This is helping so much.  I couldn't be happier with the results.  Next week, I may post them for everyone to use if they want to.

Outside time:  Yay for good weather!

Art:  We did another lesson in our Artistic Pursuits Preschool book.  The Way they See It.  This book has been simple, but very good to keep them thinking artistically.  I'm not artistic, so that is a huge plus!

Friday I tried something new.  The kids really wanted to get outside and play, so I put all of the things that we needed/wanted to do that day out on the counter and they got to choose which order we did them in.  It made things go really quick, and they liked choosing.

Math:  Check out my math blog.  We had lots of fun!  I put a link in the sidebar, or you can click here.

Youngest Princess:  This is what our youngest did this week for fun!

She had a blast with a couple of bowls of black beans.  She scooped them and poured them for at least an hour.  She has been SO in to taking bath lately.  She's been begging for baths 2-3 times per day, but the black beans won out this time!  She wanted to scoop vs. take a bath.  I was impressed!

Okay, seriously I give up...

I'm surrendering to the world of All About Spelling.  Ha!  I've written many a post about my language arts selections.  One as recently as last week.  I've also been sharing about re-vamping my homeschool and I've talked about how our homeschool didn't "feel" the way that I wanted it to.  I've always been sure that I would follow an Orton-Gillingham method of instruction for our spelling.  I've waivered back and forth between Spell to Write and Read (SWR), Phonics Road (PR), and the Writing Road to Reading (WRTR).  I finally decided on SWR.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of praying and thinking and re-evaluating my homeschool.  I have a very strong determination to make learning in the early years very simple.  I also will not require any formal school before age 6 for sure, but probably more like age 7.  That doesn't mean that my children will not be learning.  It just means that I have to make things more enticing and gentle.  I can already see that this will be especially true for my son.  

So, in re-evaluating my overall homeschool and the atmosphere of our homeschool I decided to review each individual subject.  Which, led to me reviewing our Language Arts (SWR), and I knew that it would be too much writing for my son and probably for my daughter right now.  Lots of moms tweak SWR and make it more gentle, but I decided that would be too much work.  It also still would not be as gentle as what I was hoping for, and I believe that it would not entice my children the way that I want to entice my children into learning.

I took down the All About Spelling from my shelf (unfortunately I have MANY a curriculum sitting on my shelves) ;and decided to put together the student materials to see if it would work for us.  I started with this:

and ended with this:

I have to admit that I REALLY like color coded things.  : )

Then, I put together the tiles:

I must admit that I was really impressed with how sturdy the tiles were. (This isn't all of the tiles in this picture.  )

To make a long story short I have decided to give All About Spelling a try.  Here are the reasons why:

1) I can be as gentle as I want with All About Spelling (the tiles help with this)

2) I feel comfortable with moving through the steps slowly

3) Less writing in AAS

4) Mastery based - my daughter really works best with mastery based curriculums

4) Ease of teacher use.  It's so easy that even if I wanted to seperate my children it would be much easier than SWR for me.

5) Multi-sensory for my son

6) At the end of the year they are releasing All About Reading which should be an awesome compliment to AAS for my daughter

So, although **I** would rather go through SWR for ME; it's not what is best for my CHILDREN.  Gotta keep them in mind, right?  I want my children to love learning and I think this will be the best for that.  However, keep reading to find out if that is actually true.  I'll keep you all posted. Hopefully, All About Spelling wins me over and I fall in love with it.  It is a beautiful curriculum.

YUUUUUMMMM!!!

Oh, my!  I made this pizza crust recipe last night and it was delicous!  It was so easy, because all that I had to do was put the ingredients in the bread maker, turn it on, and then I was done until the dough needed to be put on the pizza pans.  Yea!  Sooooo good!  Here are some pictures of how ours turned out:

School Week of 3/1/10-3/7/10

Language Arts: We didn't do much this week.  I want us to get further ahead in our number recognition before we go full-force in this area.  We're almost there.

Read-Alouds:  I dropped the whole P4/5 schedule this week.  It's all part of my re-vamping my homeschool project that I posted about earlier.  I just HAVE to tweak things, and the SL schedule wasn't working well.  We will continue to read the books that interest us, but in order instead of skipping around in the books.  We continued with Uncle Wiggly and Stories From Around the World as well as Animals, Animals

Science: Can you guess what we're studying this month??? 

Flowers!  This week we planted some flower seeds and read this book (for some reason the picture is not coming through):

How Flowers Grow- it's an Usborne book with beautiful pictures.

I also found this great website that had some YouTube videos to watch that went along with our flower studies.  Click here for that website.  Please note that I have NOT previewed all of the videos.

Stay tuned for what we do next week with our flower study.

Math:  Our highlights include m&ms, literature, and patterning.  Click here to go to my living math blog to see everything that we did this week.

Picture Study: This is the artist that we studied this week.  Please be aware that I have not previewed all of his works of art.  At this age all that we do is look at the picture and pick out what we do/don't like about it.  We do that for 4 weeks before switching to a different artist.

Composer Study:  We will be listening to 1 track this weekend.  It's just been a crazy week with us moving.

I wanted to share my **tentative** plan for next year's curriculum.  I won't decide for sure until september (our school year has just started for us), but as a curriculum junkie I can't help but think about it now.  So, for now, my plan is this:

LA: Spell to Write and Read

Math: continue with living math supplemented by either Singapore or Horizons.  The only reason I would get Horizons is if we were done with our other Singapore and not yet ready to move on to the next level. 

Literature: Oh, goodness gracious our read-alouds is a very long list.  Maybe I'll post it on my sidebar soon.

Science:  I have Sonlight Science K.  I really like Elemental science.  I don't know.  : )

History:  We really aren't going to do much of this.  I bought a 3 book set of geography skills from evan-moor that we will use, but that's it.  I feel that the most important things in the early years are reading, writing, and math.  Therefore, I will be focusing on those 3 things and going easy on our other studies.

Art:  I have all of the art supplies for Artistic Pursuits K bk. 1.  Hopefully, I will get my butt in gear to do it.  My daughter loves art, so I really need to do it for her.  However, an artist friend of mine has agreed to give our children art lessons, so we may do that instead.

Tapestry of Grace.  I will probably be purchasing this in September to look over and explore as well as to start my own self-education.  I don't plan to actually use it in 1st grade, though.  I plan to mostly use SOTW for first grade and maybe even 2nd grade pulling in some stuff from TOG, but using it for myself more than anything.  I also want to get familiar with it before using it full-force.

Hmmmm.... looking at it all written out...I still have a lot of decisions to make before September.  I'm glad it's so far away.  I'll probably change my mind a thousand times before September.  What are you going to be using next year?