Week 11 - Cello Recital

Here is a short sample from this week's cello recital.  The kids have been playing since September.  There are kids from three groups in the recital and they've only had one practice together.  I think they're phenomenal.   CC is in the third row of cellos in the middle wearing red like everyone else. 

CC spent the early part of the week worrying about the performance and having those stressful anxiety dreams - turning into a banana on stage and not being able to play or the cello blowing up.  However, she learned that once she sat down with her cello that the anxiety went away and she wasn't nervous anymore.  All those hours of practice let her relax into the music.    When people discuss how to build self-esteem in kids, I turn to examples like this.  Actually doing real things that are a real challenge builds self- esteem much better than reading books or talking about it.

The rest of the week was wondrously routine. CC is still loving AoPS Prealgebra.  LB is getting very confident with her two math programs (Saxon and Math in Focus) and is turning out to be quite good at math.  Phonics, writing, reading, history, logic, poetry and science are plodding along too.  The girls are both enjoying their enrichment schools.  It was a very good week.

Week 23 - Art and Ideas and Math and.....

Chocolates were made (and peanut butter caramels too).


Miquon is still terrific and LB rocks on it. She mixes being brilliant at math.



With playing with the blocks.



LB made a spider web.



She also made a camouflaged lizard.


CC made an illuminated letter along with a stuffed dragon that I forgot to photograph.


LB finished her cheetah paw print. The cheetah still needs to be fired and glazed.


She worked on patterns and learned the difference between a coral snake and a king snake.


CC finished through lesson 46 in Saxon and did 4 sheets of facts practice.


She created an awesome sea dragon.


And finished through lesson 14 in Fred.

Other than that, we went out for sushi, copied America the Beautiful, read lots from Mary, Queen of Scots and learned lots about the French court, learned that I need lots of practice on my states and capitals, fed the ducks and geese at the pond at the park, took an afternoon off to play with our friends, made a huge mess in the kitchen then left it for the unsuspecting Daddy and made a tongue twister - Picky Pierre Picks Plump Purple Plums.

I think our ongoing Shakespeare study is successful. CC entertained us by retelling The Taming of the Shrew while we were waiting for our pizza this week. She discovered that one of her friends likes "good literature" when she heard him quoting lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. CC has a favorite line from Midsummer Night's Dream - "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." LB has named two of her stuffed animals after Shakespearean characters Katherina (the wild one) and Bianca (the sweet one) (which is the best test to see if a 5yo likes something).

This week LB had a very serious discussion about her future career plans. She wants to be a veterinarian and help people's pets. She was concerned about whether or not there are any good universities nearby with a program. I assured her that a top vet school was in the state which seemed to relieve her concerns.

Arts and Ideas

Saturday morning before I went to work, I helped CC sew wings onto a dragon and helped LB work on a swing made from K'nex. As I drove to work, I thought about the "arts and ideas" charter school in our neighborhood.

I am firmly on the side of imagination. I spend a lot of our time and money adding art enrichment to our lives. I work hard to create an environment in which inquiry science can thrive.
I also try to put most of my energy into getting the core subjects done. Arts and Ideas need language and math.
My goals for this week:
Make sure CC finishes her dragon for art class
Help LB finish her swing so I can have my table back.
CC needs help making a new chocolate that she has been thinking about and wants to finish before school this week. She also needs to select and print pictures of our vacation to the coast for her scrapbook project.
I want to help LB finish her digital story book.
We need to accomplish 4 chapters of Fred and 4 chapters of Saxon, and some Miquon.
We need to do 3 hours of French, 4 copywork exercises, 4 chapters in the Mary Queen of Scots book, finish Peter Pan, do a section in MCT Grammar, Poetry, and Vocabulary, and maybe read some of our viking book, some fairy tales, Shakespeare, and do some phonics.

Yep, we are all about art and ideas here. No time for rigorous work. We'll get started just as soon as CC finishes hemming that princess dress she is making for LB.

Week 21 - Fire, French, and Art

This week was a challenge. For my third straight week, I had a migraine and accomplished less than I had hoped.

I am focusing my process improvement efforts on our science right now so we had two days out of four with hands-on science. Here is a picture of one of my science lessons on energy and force and this is a link to my post about the first science lesson of the week.


I love doing science through inquiry and my kids are learning a great deal. Right now my philosophy of science is that before they can do the math involved in real science the science is basically composed of experiences, vocabulary to describe those experiences, and learning to answer questions using the scientific method. These are most of the books I used to prepare for this week's science lessons.

In not-K this week, LB decided to illustrate a story in KidPix. Her story is The Dirty Duckling based on The Ugly Duckling. She drew a picture for each scene (or verse as she called them) and then told me what to say. I narrated it what she wanted as she recorded it then add the voice to the picture. She's making a slide show of it so that it will be a mini-movie of her story with her pictures and my voice. I was surprised at how well she was able to draw on the computer and enchanted by her story. Hopefully we can finish it this week - she has 8 slides already.

Last week we started using Miquon finally. I had tried it with CC, but was never able to get more than a few worksheets into any of the books. It was just too unorganized for me to use. This time, I started following the lessons in the First Grade Diary - I know that its now how the book was intended to be used. It is working out great so far. We did lessons from Miquon most days this week with great success.

Here is the spider web she made. After trying for a long time to figure out how to make ovals on the geoboard, she had the brilliant idea that she could make a square spider web. In addition to Miquon, she's progressing with ETConline. She finally made it past the short-a and onto short-i.

For Third Grade this week, CC completed Level 1, Unit 2 of Rosetta Stone French. She is halfway through! She also completed Investigation 4 and lessons 41 and 42 of Saxon 5/4, 3 chapters of Life of Fred Pre-Algebra, and a Problemoid. She read through The Train of States book by Peter Sis again in preparation for starting Pennsylvania in her states book, but became interested in Kentucky and Bluegrass instead. We spent an hour or so listening to BlueGrass on the internet, and she determined that BlueGrass must have been a heavy influence on her favorite singer - Laurie Berkner.

We started Peter Pan as a morning read aloud, and both the kids love it. We're also reading Mary, Queen of Scots from the Royal Diaries series. It is the first diary style book we've read, and we decided to read it a short bit at a time. The girls have started looking forward to seeing how Queen Mary's day was at the end of their days. CC also did copywork most days this week.


Since I had a migraine, the girls got a day off from school and played quite a bit.


This is LB's water color and salt picture of outerspace.



This is LB's picture of a map showing a poor fox lost in the city.



Here is CC's picture of a Chinese style dragon.



And this creature is a combination of a Robin, Eagle, Baboon.

Bo's Costume - part 1

This is Bo. He is LB's son, and he wants to be a spider for Halloween. CC is making him a costume.

I wanted her to use a pattern, but of course we couldn't find a spider costume pattern in his size so CC had to make one. She has a book on sewing that she has been reading and a book on doll making and a yard of black satin. Yesterday, she sketched out what the costume should look like, and this morning I helped her measure the Bo's sister, Princess, for a pattern. Since I left for work, she has created her pattern, cut it out and done the first fitting. Right now, she is creating the pattern for the spider legs, and next she is going to make pants to match.


I'm proud of her creativity, ingenuity, sewing skills, and sisterly love - after all this is something she is doing for her sister.

Handmade Pottery

CC has finished her pottery class. Here are her creations.
A Bird House.


An Appalachian Face Jug.


A Coil Bowl.


The other side of the coil bowl.


A Fish Bowl.





She loved the class and learned a lot of great techniques for working with clay. The art school doesn't allow kids to start using a pottery wheel until they are 10 so she has a couple of more years to learn about art and clay before she gets to move up into that.

The Appalachian Face Jug is really interesting. It is based on folk art from the 1700s in North Georgia and the Carolinas. It is believed that it originated from African devil jugs. I think you could make them out of an air drying clay and use them in art project while studying the Appalachian area or as a project while studying slavery. I found a lesson plan for teaching them with real clay that needs to be fired like CC did, but you could easily use air-drying clay then paint them and get great results.

For the fish bowl, the kids were instructed to design a dish with an animal attached to it. They had to draw it on paper then transfer it to three dimensions. CC enjoyed this lesson. The teacher kept moving around the room showing kids how to get their ideas into the clay not telling them what to do. It is an important difference.

The bird house is her favorite piece. The top is attached by a string so that you can easily clean it out. She can't decide if she would rather display it as art or find a place outside to put it and see if a bird family moves in.

She loves her coil bowl. She actually eats breakfast out of it each morning now and then washes it by hand, puts it to dry, then puts it back on its display shelf. In her next pottery class, she'll be making a full set of functional dishes.

Veteran's Day - Remembrance Day

Lest We Forget

We'll be learning In Flanders Fields this year for Veteran's Day. I have also decided to do something bold for our preschool co-op, instead of a nursery rhyme, we will learn the first stanza of In Flanders Fields and make paper poppies.



I found a few sites with some good crafts, but I think this site has the best. It includes a mini-book for the poem, and a page of crafts, plus several other activities. For the preschoolers, we'll cut 4 heart shapes from red paper and a circle from green paper then glue them together, it make a simple poppy shape. We'll also finger paint a poppy wreath. CC wanted to send home some poppy seeds with planting instructions, so we will see if we can find some seeds.

In case you didn't know, In Flanders Fields was written near the end of the Great War and poppy seeds will stay dormant under ground for many years until they are plowed up. It was common for them to bloom on battlefield grave sites.

by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Rethingking Art

My kids are very artistic, but I'm sure that I understand it. Somewhere in my life, I became convinced that I have no talent and should not be "doing" art. My kids have thankfully not learned that lesson. Hubby and I were discussing CC last week. She is very visual and is also very artistic like BB. She sees patterns in things and loves to model things in clay.

This is very hard for my non-artistic self to try to find ways to help my kids with their artistic abilities and to find ways to leverage those abilities for the rest of schooling. This morning, I read Drawing with Children, and was inspired. I want to get over my own insecurities with art, and I want to give art more prominence in our homeschooling. She included a couple of examples of using art in science, history, math and language arts. That is Exactly what I want to do. First, I have to get over my art insecurities.

I think I will work through the book with the kids, then I will be better able to use it to plan lessons. I can see using illustrated books with history and geography. Draw a map of the place; illustrate a scene from the time; study an artist or artistic technique from a time. Science would be easy to center around art. First, I have to get over my insecurities.

Wow - look at my private island

Yesterday before I went to work, I left a list of things for CC to do while I was gone to work.

• Vacuum your room
• Read next chapter from Little House in the Big Woods
• Have someone read next chapter from Baldwin's Fifty Famous Stories Retold to you.
• Make something from Model Magic

Well, she did everything on her list and for her Model Magic project, she made and island for me.

Right now, she is making food and tomorrow she is planning to work on people. I think she is pretty cool.

Sunflower Painting 1

Here is CC's first sunflower painting using oil pastels. According to Grandma, it started to rain while they were painting so they had to hurry to finish. The painting had to be done outside since I am allergic to most flowers.

I think her use of color is great. She also filled the space beautifully. We'll do more sunflowers next week and read Camille and the Sunflowers again. Once we start to get tired of the Van Gogh sunflowers, we can explore other artist's interpretations.

National Gallery of Art

Did you know that the NGA loans out slides, dvds, and teaching packets? Did you know it has online lesson plans? Have you seen the Art Zone?

Why not let your kids do their art online today?

There is a Dutch Dollhouse creator.

An airbrush paint program.

You can create an imaginary landscape with the Jungle.

Make a collage with the Collage Machine.

How about a Cubits creator?

There are more tools here than my kids could use in a week. I think I have found a new place for them to play online. Maybe it will finally get CC to leave the Sims alone.

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