On this week’s episode of “Not-so-Fairy-tales from the Ferrell Funny Farm”
- Gary left for Tanzania Sunday morning, and we thus embarked on our first week without him for this school year. There’s a highly mathematical equation for this:
Routine – Routine = No Routine
- The day he left we dealt with the accidental death of two of our kittens. (By the way, does anyone want the other two before they meet the same fate?)
- A dental check-up for my children provided me the chance to hold our two-year-old down while he was somewhat violently resisting the trauma of having his teeth cleaned. Thankfully, that’s over for another six months.
- Our first trip to the grocery store turned into the most incredibly ridiculous experience as Levi zinged the Zingers across the store. I guess I really shouldn’t mention that something possessed him to run around the store like a total nut, randomly opening freezer doors and then slinging a couple of loaves of bread off of the bread shelves. Unfortunatey, I could NOT tie him down because the buckles were broken on our cart. It was probably our fastest shopping trip ever, as it took only a total of about 10 minutes from entrance to exit (I’m sure EVERYONE was happy about that one!). Meanwhile, the cashier was clucking her tongue at the fact that we are a homeschooling family and just-look-at-how-that-deranged-family-acts-in-public. *sigh*
- Our washing machine broke today, but at least duct tape provides a temporary fix. Exactly how long does that stuff hold, anyway?
- We’ve all dealt with poor attitudes. One of my children told me he didn’t like school AT ALL despite my efforts at searching for things he ENJOYS. (Do playing-in-the-creek and riding-a-bicycle-all-afternoon count as school subjects? How about staring-at-the-cement-mixer all day?)
- So, ironically, we continue to focus on our ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE. Because, we evidently REALLY NEED this lesson.
- AND, because our routine has not been what I PLANNED, we are scaling back a bit (on our core subjects, especially) to enjoy each other and enjoy learning together more. After keeping a daily planner for over two years, I have finally started using weekly checklists categorized by subject. Now I can more easily adjust when we don’t STICK TO THE PLAN, and it doesn’t take me long to make my weekly checklist because… well, I LOVE checklists (just ask my husband!).
- And we will be scaling back on our blog posts dealing with resource links. Evidently, our site is slow to load for at least some people. (Is it disqus? Or blogger? Or file size? Or background images? Or allowing blogger’s software to figure out the html code? If you are a high-tech computer person that knows about this sort of thing, please let me know how to fix our groggy blog.) In an effort to scale back on the time I’m bonding with our blog, we’ll list our ongoing projects here on this post. Subsequent posts will be on what we did (regarding crafts, mainly, aside from my ramblings and our outdoor adventures), unless I can find the time to plan my originally-planned resource-planning post (but since I’m trying to scale back on planning, I’m just not sure how well thought out this plan was. As a side note, when I was planning to do this, we were not enrolled in Essentials. Now we are. That’s my excuse.)
Ongoing projects:
(This is what we are doing each week. Kinda, sorta, more or less. Well, mainly it’s just Stephen doing most of this…)
Timeline/History/Reading
Place a timeline figure from our history sentence in a “Book of Decades” timeline notebook.
 |
| Posting timeline figures in Book of Decades. |
Listen to American History Stories Volume 1 by Mara Louise Pratt-Chadwick (pdf) and A Short History of the United States by Edward Channing (pdf) (NOTE: Though the audio recordings for the latter are listed as “Chapters” on Librivox, there are actually several chapters on each recording, so you will have recordings for the entire book if you download the 26 “Chapters” from Librivox. The recordings range from 7 minutes to 38 minutes in length.) For history reading correlations for these two books, click here.
Add a History Sentence Illustration to our History Sentence Illustration Notebook (downloaded from C3).
Science:
Select readings, worksheets and science experiments from Mr. Q’s Elementary Life Science Curriculum. This book also contains lessons that can be correlated to Classification of living things & Ecology.
Watch animated videos and activities on the organs in the Human Body from How the Body Works. Many more are listed on our science post.
Latin
Nothing.
Actually, we are memorizing John 1:1-7. I’m thinking that’s going to max me out right now.
Geography
Our boys (age 2, 5, 8) each have a “My United States Notebook” with the state coloring and fact pages from crayola.com. They will be coloring the states we are studying for our geography memory work each week.
  |
| Stephen multi-tasking with USA Notebook and Timeline Notebook. |
Readings from The Star-Spangled State Book by Knowledge Quest and the Highlights Which Way USA books.
Your Child Learns with interactive maps for study, quizzes for on-line practice of state capitals, map puzzles for memorization of state location and capitals, and instructions for printing megamaps from their site. We will also use the cut and paste exercise for major geographical features in the United States later this year.
Drawing Practice:
Donna Young’s printables that correlate with Drawing with Children. These are quick, 5-10 minute activities (33 drawing practice lessons, 19 mirror image lessons) that can be used in the classroom or at home. (No longer free – requires membership.)
If you’d like to practice drawing but have no background in art, What to Draw and How to Draw It by E. G. Lutz provides step-by-step instructions on drawing a number of pictures, including lighthouses, birds (turkeys, chickens, roosters, cranes), and farm animals.
We are also using the Draw Write Now books 2, 3, and 5
Other stuff we’re doing each week:
Cursive Handwriting
EEL/IEW Lessons
Phonics Road Lessons
Saxon Math 5/4 & Saxon Math 1 Lessons (3/week)
Rod & Staff Spelling (some, but we are focusing on phonics for spelling…)
Piano & Soccer
Starfall.com
Sheppard Software
Your Child Learns
-
History Readings/Correlations, including SotW, American History Stories, and A Short History of the United States
- Math resources