Afternoon Fall Walk

Today was a beautiful day so I decided we needed to take a walk after we finished our work. 

The kids grabbed a ziplock bag each and we headed out. Each child collected a whole bag of beautiful leaves. This is my favorite time of year. Fall. :o)

We are casually working on the seasons for Butterfly's grade one science requirement.  I am doing each season as they come and go, instead of just doing all the seasons together in one month. I think it will be more meaningful if they can physically see the differences between each season as they occur right before their eyes. 

When we got home we got busy right away on this craft, something I made up in my mind as we walked....easy peasy. :o)

The kids tore up pieces of brown cardstock to make the tree trunk and branches and then glued it to the blue background cardstock. They cut long strips of green cardstock and then made little cuts for the grass. 

Then they added their leaves. :o)

Butterfly's Creation

Puppy's Creation

Turtle's Creation

We also read one of my all time favorite fall books, we have had this book for a long time. I highly recommend it. It explains why the leaves fall off the tree. Very scientific, and the illustrations are very informative and pretty.

Thanks for stopping by,
Nicole

Leaf Print Art Project

Well we are well into our second homeschool week. I'm still so green behind the ears...listening to all sorts of different advice coming from all sorts of directions. It's getting confusing. There are so many different ways to approach this homeschool adventure. I seem to always be second guessing myself....I just feel like I only have one chance to do it right...and if I screw up the world will fall apart! lol. It doesn't sound very likely when I say it out loud! :oP

Anyways, yesterday afternoon we actually had time to squeeze in a fun art project. This project was one of the many that I have planned for the year.
I got the complete instructions from a work book I bought at costco. It's filled with fun art projects for all the different seasons and holidays. :o)

To make the leaf print you start by making a starch/flour dough. The dough becomes very smooth when you knead it for awhile. The kids loved this part. The spent quite a while kneading the dough. Then they rolled it out with a rolling pin. Earlier that day they had picked some green leaves from the trees, which they then used to imprint in the dough. It took a whole day to dry.....and as you will soon see Turtle's LARGE hand print one still needs to dry. :o)

The Crew!

Monkey's

Puppy's

Turtle's

Butterfly's

When Monkey came home from school we were still working on our projects so she made one too. :o)

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Nicole M Bailey

Official Second Day of School

Before I start my post I just want to explain something...:o)
Everyone in blog world seems to be using nick  names for their kids..so I'm going to jump on board.....for safety reasons. When I was pregnant with my babies, I named my kids after animals.
So my 15 year old girl is Giraffe (my daughter hates this.....her aunty named her)
            11 year old girl is Monkey
            8 year old boy is Turtle  (a turtle  as a baby.....a rabbit as an 8 year old!)
            6 year old girl is Butterfly
            4 year old boy is Puppy (forever my puppy)
So from now on I will refer to each of them using their animal names.

Well I was out the door this morning at 7:45am for Monkey's first day of traditional school. Yikes.....waking up, and being ready for the day before 7:30am was quite the hardship! But we did it! We were out the door by 7:45. :o)

We had our official first day of homeschool yesterday. I didn't sleep more than three hours the night before....so needless to say it was a rough day. Monkey,  really wanted to help out with HSing so even though I wasn't completely ready to start we did anyways.

Today was the first day we started with the Workbox system. Of course I read Sue's book front to back.....but ended up modifying her system a tad bit to suit our needs.
It worked out really well. Puppy LOVED it. He was the only one who finished all of his boxes. He loved completing a box and getting a new one, it was very satisfying for him.
Butterfly also enjoyed finishing a box and getting a new one.
Turtle......had a bit of difficulty. He only completed 2 1/2 boxes. And we worked from 11:00 until 3:30pm. There was a lot of crying. He hates doing the workbook pages, and three pages just happened to be in his first workbox and then three more in his third. He was okay with the sentence making game in the second workbox but he just really struggles with the workbook pages. Tomorrow I'm going to try and move the harder boxes toward the end of the day.

We worked so hard that we didn't even get to the fun stuff I had planned so that will be slotted in tomorrow.

So here is how I set my workbox system.

I have 8 workboxes for Turtle and Butterfly and 7 for Puppy.
I borrowed the round tags from Mama Jenn
I have green tag numbers for Turtle, Pink for Butterfly and Blue for Puppy.
I made up a schedule grid in microsoft word. Each child has there own.
After school I'm going to fill the boxes for the following school day, while the kids are outside running around with the neighborhood children.
I'm going to place my tags on the boxes in numerical order.
Then go to my schedule grid and stick extra activity tags on the children's schedule in the order I want them to happen during the day. So I try and guess which box the kids will be working on around lunch time, for example, so I can place the lunch tag in that spot. The children will start with the first box. After completing a box they will remove the #1 tag from the box and stick it to the schedule and then put everything back into the box and replace the completed work and workbox on the shelf. The children will then take the next box, bring it back to their table and do the work from that box. Any extra supplies that they don't have in their pencil case will be included in the box.
Each child will keep their schedule on their table so they always know how much more work they need to complete before they are finished for the day.

Here are the kids schedule grids ready to go for tomorrow. 

I can already see that this system is going to provide us with the physical order we require. It's amazing how much work we ended up completing on the first day.....and the children generally worked very independently. Much more independent that in the past.

Want to see an example?
Here is Butterfly's grid schedule.
She has completed three boxes and it is now lunch time, after lunch she will complete three more boxes, have a snack and then two more boxes and then do some reading. And then she will be finished for the day.

Butterfly's Schedule Grid

Workboxes 1-3 are completed. We all can see that she still hasworkboxes 4-8 to complete. 

There is much more to our day than just the work boxes...I'll show you that on a different day.

Thanks for stopping by and God Bless you,
Nicole