English Literature...what to choose next

I find myself up late at night constantly researching books and looking for fun ways to study literature without making it too dry for them but also making sure they are comprehending the material given to them. I remember when we had chosen the umbrella school in the beginning and they suggested all classic literature. ..most dating back 100s of years and I thought to myself..there has to be a better way to teach the reading skills I have learned and test the comprehension and build on it with fun activities. Then I discovered The Magic Tree House supplement website: http://www.mthclassroomadventures.org 

I am addicted. Not only do they have lesson plans and readers theatre for each book but they are from teachers who use these books in their classroom. There is also a leveling chart to help you figure out what level to start them out and what books are appropriate for them. The girls are loving the different options to choose from and I was even able to find books relating to what we are studying in other subjects such as mummies. Tying all the subjects together is so helpful yet time consuming so this year is definitely a learning curve for me. I feel that next year I will be much better at planning and choosing the right material. I am half way through this first year and I feel like I have gotten them where they need to be thus far. The new year 2015 will be even better!

Open House and Play

Who doesn't need a mini-vacation before a stressful event right? Well we did! We took a nice little trip up to Sandusky to have some R&R, play time and to see one of the Great Lakes of course. 

Ainsley's Desk

Emma's Desk

Each of the girls made "Wish Jars" for their special guests to put wishes in. Each guest wrote what they wished the student would accomplish for this year and we read them aloud in class the following week. They loved this!

Marissa's Desk

Story of the World History Timeline Progress

Report Card Display

Self Portraits

Flower Petal Art

Leaf Stamping Art

Light Hut Progress-The Valerian Root seems to be the best

Our Learning Tree

This was our biggest project for the Open House. We found as many different leaf specimens as we could find and laminated them and cut them out. Then they wrote all of the things they enjoyed learning about during the first trimester on little cards and put them on the leaves. After making a tree out of construction paper we hung the leaves off the tree. 

Report Cards

Before the Open House, we showcased our talent in musical theater by putting on a performance for our guests. This piece was taken from a story we learned about in our History book when learning about ancient Egypt. This was a total family affair and we had a blast doing it. I will post video too once I finish editing. This is a memory we made that we will never forget for eternity and I am so glad we did it together!

Fun with Cookies!

Emma's Archaeology Kit

California Woods Leaf Hunt & Flower Pressing Crafts

WOW! It has been a long time since I have blogged! Not only have I been really busy but I had to keep a lot of our photos hush hush for our Open House that we hosted over Thanksgiving. Now I can share what we have done through the first trimester.

In Botany we studied leaves and needless to say it is so much fun!  We had to start hunting a while back before the rain pulled the rest of the remaining ones down. We pressed them in between books and then laminated them.  We also did this for the flower lesson as well. Then we cut them out so we could study them and categorize them by arrangement, venation, shape and margin. They can tell you more about a leaf than most adults:) 

These are flowers from our flower bed that they found before the first frost hit that we pressed and laminated. They took the petals apart and made art with some of them using Mod Podge.

Germination, Wright Patt and Catching Up!

I have a lot of catching up to do on here! I have been swamped with work and lesson planning which does not leave much spare time. 

The girls are moving right along with Botany. They have completed the lessons on seeds and germination. As you can see, they are very excited about our herb seeds starting to germinate. They have scientific notebooks with graphs to chart the progress of each herb to see what rate each one grows at. Of course it is a competition to see whose is growing the fastest even though we are rotating who is responsible for misting each day and monitoring the temp. I love seeing the lightbulbs in their heads light up when they see something they learn about. A couple of the herbs are showing the cotyledons, the seed leaves, and they thought this was AWESOME. Hearing these big words out of their little mouths amazes me.

The yarrow was the first to show. This is funny because it is the one they are most interested about and excited to use because of its many medicinal properties including stopping bleeding. The leaves of this plant were used back in the war days to control bleeding during battle on wounded men.

We learned about Christopher Columbus this week. They played a board game on CC sailing the ocean blue and loved it so much they had to play it three times. They asked me to laminate it so that we could keep it long term;)

A Girl Scout Puppet Show in the Hull Theater was the perfect way to break up the week!

LOTS of coffee needed this week for lesson planning!!

Thank you Poppy for the Shizzle game to break up the day!

Who doesn't like playing with bunny fur?

There is no better way to learn massive amounts of exchanging money than using authentic looking play money right?

Ship Wrecked!! Another fun dice game using tally marks to 100



AIR FORCE MUSEUM HOMESCHOOL DAY
What a great learning opportunity for kids to learn! During this day they have science centers set up everywhere for the kids to learn about all kinds of different things. They also have classes on everything from light and energy to gravity and space. All the classes did not cost anything and all of the extras like the IMAX were discounted for homeschoolers so we were able to see The Hidden Universe in 3D which was amazing. There is so much to see and do there we will definitely be back numerous times. This was a great day!

Marissa

Ainsley

Emma

3D printer

Royal Italian? Why yes of course!

The girls were GLUED to the 3D printer. They were able to interact with a scientist and ask questions and learn how they put in all of the code into a computer and watch the end result being produced and were able to take it with them. I was able to find a recent news article on how a doctor was able to use a 3D printer to make a prosthetic arm and hand for a child for next to nothing when it was going to cost $40k. They were absolutely amazed by this. Of course now all they want for Christmas is a 3D printer. We are in trouble. The normal children would want one so they could make toys and such....our kids? They want one so they can "make replacement parts around the house for things that break and make learning tools for a fraction of the cost to save money and possibly sell to make money!" Only my children!!!!

Dad was able to join us for this field trip:)

The start of flight area-special to Marissa because she has read many books on this

An inchworm....they loved it!



We are still learning about Ancient Egypt in History and moving right along there. We are now into the 2000BCs. They retain at such a fast rate we move very quick. The timeline is coming along quite nice. We are just about to move onto Hammurabi and the Babylonians and will be slowly heading into China and India.

Math is going well for the twins. They are now adding 6 column problems which is awesome! They are definitey going to finish this book before the year is our. We are in our 6th week and they are half way through the book already. This is something I was not expecting. Once I get them through this book I plan to move them into the Saxon 5/6 book which is what I initially started Marissa in and found to be too easy for her.
Marissa is knee deep in fractions and geometry. She caught onto long division like nobody's business. The only issue I am running into with her is boredom. She is so bored so fast because if she does something one time, she retains it and does not forget it so doing the same type of problems over and over is absolutely impossible for her.  Keeping her challenged is definitely the hardest thing for me right now because she does not want to focus. I have had to just quickly skim lessons, teaching her things that she understands within two seconds of explaining, and moving on. It is very rare that she gets a wrong answer on something and if she does, it is because of something simple like not copying a number from one sheet to another properly. I see a lot of supplemental things coming.

The twins have mastered at least half of the alphabet in cursive and it look beautiful! I am mega impressed. They are doing really well with this. Language Arts is going pretty well so far with the interactive notebooks to keep us on task for what they need to know this year. They like the cutting and pasting but the material itself is really boring because they know everything already. I just look at it as a quick daily review. The twins have morning work that includes grammar, math, vocab and  writing and even the third grade level is a lot of review for them but at least some of it is a challenge so it is worth it.

Their writing pieces are coming along quite beautiful. We have finished our final drafts of our first big pieces and next week will be illustrating them. The twins wrote spooky stories using story starters and Marissa composed her first big opinion piece. She chose to write about the importance of art, music, gym and a foreign language in school.

Next week we are taking our first theater field trip. We are going to the Children's Theater down at the Taft for Disney's Beauty and the Beast Jr. They are so excited about this and I have to admit that I am too.