Oh my….a year later. Almost to the day! lol
I just noticed a pattern. Every March I post….because every March I suffer from mid year burn out.
I always have a very difficult time returning from Christmas break and then I continue to flounder until I break down mid March. Just like clock work. lol
Anyways, we have a busy week this week. We are heading to OK to visit with my sister during her Spring break. I know I need a break but at the same time I feel like we should be doing some work while we are there. I forever feel like we are behind. Not a great feeling.
Today is the only full day we have this week. I have to go downtown tomorrow to pick up my passport, Wednesday rachel has an eye appointment, Thursday the kids have mini sessions and Friday my cleaning lady is coming. We leave 6:00am Saturday morning.

To be quite honest I'm really struggling this year. I have a pre teen boy whom I am butting heads with on a daily basis.

Anyways, I was going to go into detail with my struggles but I best be off to tackle the day. But I'm thinking that maybe if I resurrect my little blog I may find some friends and some inspiration/motivation to carry through and finish this year on a happier note.


Nicole

WEll...oh my it has been a long time since I last posted. :o)
Life got crazy...not in a fun exciting way. Life just became heavy and full with activities, driving, commitments and work,  I tried to squeeze homeschooling in there as well.
I was finally able to unload a huge pile of work responsibilities just before Christmas 2012. Then I crashed for a month! lol After a well deserved break down,  I worked really hard to improve our neglected homeschool. I organized, revamped, researched and implemented. I am now somewhat content with our little homeschool.
I want to get back to blogging....it's such a great place to document the everyday things, the things that don't get scrapbooked. :o)

Come back soon....I plan on posting again very soon.
Nicole 

New System

Hello and Happy Monday!
So I just wanted to share with you my new little system. I love workboxes and believe in  the system, but we really had to seriously tweek it in order for it to work for us. James was getting very frustrated with all the little velcro circles, and no matter what I did it seemed like we never finished all the boxes in one day...never!  So we changed it up a bit.
Now I use this basket to corral all of our workbooks and text books that we are currently using. I also place chapter books and seasonal books that we are reading, like the Easter one in the picture.  The workbooks in the basket are the ones that I bought AFTER I ripped out the pages of my previous workbooks. They are in order and they all have tabs on them so I know exactly where we are. No page flipping. The tabs are removable, so when we are finished for the day, I move the tab for the next day.
When we finish a subject, I move the book to the back of the basket.

I also have these file folder "binders". They have six pockets in each book. The red one is Rachel's and the Yellow one is James. Every Sunday I fill each pocket with work for the day. We usually have four or five pocket full of work to do. The work I still in there is from the workbooks I had ripped out the pages from. Those workbook pages are filed and waiting for me to pull them out. So the kids work on those pages, while I teach a lesson to one of the other children. It keeps them busy so I can teach.  

This is what Rachel's pocket looks like, it's ready to go with all her work in it. (there are two days pictured)

When we are finished the day, the kids file their completed work into their binder. 

I use the binders to show our facilitator the work that we have been doing. 

Now the kids hate doing worksheets. So there are lots of games and such that we play. But when we do that sort of stuff, it makes me nervous because then I feel like we aren't completing as much as we should be, because I don't have worksheets to file! 

So I started keeping a journal of our accomplishments. I used to keep a planner, that I would write up on Sunday for the week, but I found that I was always crossing off way more than I was checking off on my planner, so I decided that a journal would be better. 

It keeps me accountable, and it also keeps a record for me to show to our facilitator. I also jot down little notes on concepts or areas that the children need extra practice in, or extra help with. That way I can keep track of their progress, and accomplishments. It's fun to go back through and see how far we have come. :o) 

Here it is:

The sheets are from DonnaYoung.com (the best homeschool printables on the web!)

I keep the sheets in this orange duotang, and at the end of the week I file the three sheets. There is one sheet per child per week. 

I think that's about it for today. 

The kids did well today, we worked really hard and made a lot of progress. 

I'm also really starting to see the benefits of game playing. Even rolling the dice, is so beneficial for math skills. How come I didn't know that 15 years ago when my first daughter was born, I just thought kids learned in school, and that it was the teachers job to teach, and the parents job to love and care for their children. 

Chinese Lanterns

Today we started our first day using Math In Focus for James. It went well....I'm really hoping that it wil be the answer to our math issues. :o) The program works with manipulatives and lots of pictorials, before   leading into the abstract. I'm really praying that it is a good fit for James. I'll keep you posted. :o)

By The Way, the kit comes with way more than what is pictured,  we pulled everything out and started working on it before I had the chance to take a picture so this is what I had available to take a picture of!

I was poking around our neighborhood dollar store last friday and I found this great little kit. There was only one like it in the store....which is too bad, and it wasn't a dollar it was more like $10.00! But oh well. Anyways, the kit is called World Explorer and it is for grade three...perfect! The kit explores 10 different countries (well-USA and Canada are put together! ): USA/Canada, Mexico, Chile, Japan, China, Kenya, Morocco, Italy, France, & Australia.  There is a small text booklet that has a one page write up, per country, for all ten countries, and then a small work booklet that has five questions per country to answer, all the answers can be found in the text booklet. PLUS, there is a craft to complete per country, with all the supplies needed to complete each craft included!

I let the kids decide which country to start with....they chose China.
So we read the information on China, and then located China on our map, and on the globe-James knew that China was next to India; and Rachel raved that she knew where India was on the globe. (because we had studied India in December). We worked on answering the questions, and then the kids made these cute lanterns. We even learned that there ARE floating lanterns that people from China use during the Lantern Festival, just like the ones from the movie Tangled, that we saw a couple weeks ago!

Sorry about my picture being out of focus...I just bought a new DSLR, and have not learned how to use it yet!

 Anyways, that was our learning day today, the kids are now outside playing in the snow, and I am getting ready to clean up from lunch and get the house cleaned up before Emily gets home from school.

Have a great day!
Nicole

Working Hard

This week has been a particularly hard week. We have been suffering from cabin fever big time! The weather is very cold....-25 most days, and -36 with the wind chill factor. It's not even fun getting packed up in the car! It's really starting to have a negative effect on our little homeschool. So we are taking it a bit easier this week. We did some playdough playing and some finger painting. Plus we are planning on visiting Opa's pet store so we can finally stock our fish tank. 

Here are some pictures I took of the kids last week. We worked so hard last week! All the kids did so well.  

 James working really hard on his Math. We have experienced some struggles with math. But I have researched and purchased a different math curriculum for James. It's also a singapore approach. Singapore Math is based on understanding Math, concretely, and abstractly, and it's also a mastery program. I am hoping it be the answer to James math issues. It is due to arrive today so I can't wait to try it out. We have made huge leaps and bounds in Language Arts! James is reading very well. He doesn't completely enjoy it yet.....but he is reading very well. He has made such a remarkable improvement over last year! I really think it has to do with all that phonics work we did last year and this year. I know phonics alone isn't the answer, but for James, it has really helped him sound out his words. I'm so proud of him.

 Rachel is working really hard on her sight word recognition. I love the little sight word program we are using, it's multisensory. She does one word a day. It takes her about 15 minutes to complete the lesson, and then she knows the sight word. Each week we review all the words she has learned so far. She is very good at remembering all of them.  We also just started a program for grammar. I really love it! It's called Voyages in English. The lessons are really short and easy to complete. She also does a little sentence starter every day. Her math is coming along beautifully. I absolutely marvel at how easily math comes to her. I always had to work at math so it's fun to see her have fun with it.

Now that Matthew knows all his letters, I started him on a phonics program. It's called explode the code, it's really simple and easy for him. He almost knows all of his letter sounds.  He is working on handwriting in the picture. He is getting really good at printing-we are almost finished his book. 

I also just started Matthew on a math curriculum called Singapore Math. He's doing really well with it. It's also very cute and fun to work on. There is a lot of cutting and pasting-which he loves. Most of the work we are doing is Kindergarden work, so I'm not sure what we are going to do next year...if he ever went back to school-he would be a whole year ahead! :o) 

My Pals Are Here

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post! Things got so crazy at Christmas.....things are just finally settling down again.
I want to share with you a new science program we started this week. It's by the same company that publishes Singapore Math...it's called My Pals Are Here....not my favorite title for a science curriculum, but I really like it. It isn't completely aligned, but that's fine with me. For James the only topic not covered is Rocks and Minerals and Hearing...and we already covered those topics.

Anyways, the series starts with grade three and four. The books are organized according to theme, there are five themes-Energy, Life Cycles, Transactions, Diversity, and Systems. Each text booklet has a companion lab booklet. The text booklet are really cute, with lots of grade level vocabulary but not a lot of "blocks of text". The pictures are vibrant and fresh. After each chapter in the book, there is a chart that illustrates the concepts and the relationships between concepts.

This is all five text booklets. 

We have started with the Diversity theme. We are working on classification. The book starts with simple classification, living and nonliving. Then it progresses through classifying animals, plants and materials. It ends with testing building materials. I just love how the books are organized, it simplifies complex concepts and then ties them all together.

This is the text booklet. Love the pictures and illustrations.

 This is the lab booklet. The labs are short and don't require a lot of hand writing. But the questions are thought provoking and can lead into further discussion, and exploration of the concepts.




The thing I love most is that all three kids are interested in listening to the lessons. They all learn, even though the content is considered grade three level.
My four year old son asked me if the black goo from the spider man movie was alive...because it can move on it's own like all living things....so mom it must be alive. :o)


If you have any more questions about My Pals Are Here...please ask.
Nicole Bailey

File Folder Fun. :o)

Rachel working on her Initial Digraphs and Matthew working on  Upper/Lowercase Alphabet recognition.

James working on his Initial Blends

This morning we got to work right away after breakfast. We have been doing lots of file folder games lately....the kids like them a lot more than the worksheets, especially for phonics. I am going to see if I can find some math file folders for Rachel and James....I could probably just make my own but wow that sounds like way too much work. I have two sets of file folder games, one set I had to cut out and glue to a file folder myself-very economical-but lots of work. The other set is already assembled-I just have to cut the game pieces out.


Have a great day!

Unit Study: Sound

We started our unit on sound today. I decided to teach it to all three at the same time even though it's part of James grade three science curriculum. The kids loved it!

We worked on a little sound themed lab that I had purchased during the summer. It was very easy with lots of little experiments. The kids learned about vibrations, pitch, and volume. 

After we were finished in the school room, we went down stairs so we could do another experiment to illustrate pitch...the "water in the cups" thing. The kids loved playing music using the cups....and they LOVED the GREEN water! :o)

I had also found a cute little story book on sound that had some cute activities in it. So I read a few chapters of that and then we did the first activity-a straw flute. We only had small straws on hand so it was hard to tell the difference in pitch between the straws but it was still fun.  

I

Well that's about it for now. 

We are going to review what we learned and then I have a few more activities, including making our own instruments!

Have a great day!

Hand Made Crayons

Rachel is learning about colors for science this year. I was searching for fun stuff to do with colors and I found this great project. So much fun! You peel the paper off crayons, and then break them up and stick them in silicone shape trays. Then melt in the oven at 275c for about 25 minutes.  When you remove the trays be really careful not to shake the trays so the colors will stay swirled, otherwise the colors will mix and turn brownish. 

We bought our trays at Ikea, in four different shapes. The best shape to use is the heart shape. They are the easiest to remove and they don't break. All the fish tales and star "arms" broke off while trying to remove them from the trays. Not so fun. 

Crayons peeled, broken and ready to be melted. 

Perfectly melted crayons. It takes a couple of hours to completely cool before you can "pop" them out of their mold

As you can see, none of the fish tails survived and a lot of the star arms broke off.. :o(

 I just love how the hearts turned out, so adorable. :o)

By the way, sorry about the for formatting on this post, I have been having a terrible time inserting pics with the "improved" blogger! :o)

Thanks for stopping by, 

Nicole Bailey

Preschool Work

So this year I am teaching Matthew too. :o) He's very enthusiastic and easy to teach. 

We are basically just working on the alphabet and counting right now.  We have already started working on letter sounds as well. Matthew should start reading by December, and working on addition also.   

Matthew working on counting to ten

We purchased Wiki Stix for practicing Matthew's letters. He just loves using them. Rachel uses them too. 

Another activity we do with the wiki stix cards is match up the letter card to the giant alphabet mat in the school room. Matthew is getting really good at this, and really enjoys getting out of his desk and moving around. :o)

Wiki Stix are basically waxed pieces of yarn. So the "stix" are bendable and slightly sticky. I just LOVE this product! I am on the look out for the number set too!

We also have a few different magnetic book sets. Matthew is working on the alphabet one here.  He is working on his letter recognition.  

Anyways, those are a few activities that Matthew has been up too lately.

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

The Family's Response and Toy Room Side Pictures

So after I completely revamped the school room, I let my family see the final product. :oD
James, Rachel and Matthew had seen it already, they were with me while I hung all the bulletin boards, no need to relive that afternoon...there were a few cuss words.
But Molly hadn't seen it, nor daddy. Emily is sleeping over at nana's so she will have to wait.
Anyways, everyone is now really excited about the homeschool adventure we are now embarking on. Even daddy. He even requested that I slot him in once a month to teach a lesson, of course it will be his own lesson and I'm hoping it isn't an "evolutionary, question your faith" type lesson. I love my husband to pieces but please God answer my prayers and open Jason's heart to you-it would make my life a tad bit easier. :o)

Molly was very impressed with the Schoolroom....I could tell she kinda wished she was a younger kid again. I not only organized the school room side, but I also sorted through and organized the toy side-including the barbies. All the toys have a nice, happy comfortable home now.  Woody would be proud.

The school room shares it's space with the children's toys. This is the toy room side. Sorry about the poor quality pictures. I have no idea what's going on with my camera. I know the pictures are quite blurry-I'm going to see if I can fix that...also taking pictures in front of the window was tough so just bare with me. :o)

On the left side of the play room is the play kitchen and big "house" toys. The tall drawer cabinet to the right of the kitchen holds all the play food/dishes.
The doll house is perched on another drawer cabinet, it holds all of the play pieces that go with the doll house.  The kids can lift the house off and place it on the mat or on one of the tables to play with.
The tall bookshelf keeps dolls/doll clothes in one bin, a couple of lego bins, a bin for trains and tracks and a bin for littlest pet shop toys. Eventually I want to replace that book shelf with more white IKEA shelving and bins. LOVE those. :o)
The basket on the very top keeps all of our curriculum from last year-I need to sort thru it, I have books that I need to return to our school.



This is the bookshelf on the right side. This is where all of the little people stuff is neatly organized. The children can easily put all the pieces back when they are done playing with it. The kids haven't played with the little people stuff forever-the pieces were all over the house, I was completely ready to pack it all up and sell it. Now they play with it everyday. I'm also going to incorporate it into our grade one community social studies unit.




My shining glory.......The Barbie Cabinet!
I bought this cabinet when I was VERY pregnant with Matthew, four years ago. It's main purpose was to corral the Barbie stuff. I had a very tough time putting the thing together. It came in a giant box with a thousand small pieces and a 100 page instruction booklet! Even after two days of wrestling with it-it still wasn't right. The drawers and doors were always falling off and falling apart.
So needless to say-it wasn't serving it's purpose.
Until last week! I conquered it. :o) I used lots of carpenters glue and even dusted off my cabinet making clamps. Success.



All of the Barbie's, accessories and furniture have their own place now.
The kids and I even went through ALL the barbie stuff-located every shoe, hat, chair and handbag. We searched the whole house. And then I repaired all and any Barbie pieces that were broken and tossed any pieces beyond repair.
Success. :o)

On top of the cabinet I keep all of the children's games. Safe out of reach. You need special permission to play with games from now on.


So now James wants to learn in depth all the Canadian Provinces. Last May/June we did a unit study on Nova Scotia, the kids LOVED it. So I think I'm going to ditch the Alberta Social Studies Curriculum and focus on learning Canada, completely and thoroughly.

Thanks for stopping by,
Nicole

Organizing....

The magnetic white board is for teaching. 

The pouches below my white board are from IKEA, I keep all of our flash cards in the pouches. Easy to see, grab and return.

The fish bowl is for our 100 day count. We haven't started the year yet so there aren't any fish in the bowl yet. :o)

The cabinet keeps several resources, including reading rods, and the LR cash register-I can't wait to use it! The kids are going to LOVE it!

This cabinets keeps most of my resources and learning tools.  I'm so excited to start using these items-almost all of them are still sealed, never used. Can you believe I only found out about the Canadian Home Education Resources store a few months ago?? Last year we hardly had any tools/manipulatives, or resources. In fact I wouldn't have even spent a third of my $750.00 fund had I not found CHER before the end of last year.  My friend Tracey was like you BETTER send that fund!  But now I am ready.  I have everything I need.