By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge
the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. ~Proverbs 24:3-4
• Mar. 14, 2007 - Spring is here!
Okay, it officially starts next week, but it is here already at my house! Just look at these flowers!
We are finishing the Polar habitat this week. Swamps are next! Math is going well - only 30 lessons left! In LA, we have done all the letters of the alphabet except X. Yup! Spring is here!
Update on the boys: They both had their state writing tests this past Tuesday. Both said it went okay. Mark said it was easy and he actually finished with enough time to review his work! Wow! It has been taking him literally hours to write 5 paragraphs at home! Praise God!
We are celebrating Mark's birthday this Saturday with a sleep over. I'll let you know how it goes with 6 boys age 10 and up! We bought the Pringles and candy bars. Mark wants one of those big cookie pizzas instead of a cake. That will be easier for me! I'll try to post again once I recover.
Only 8 days until the WinterPromise retreat!! I can't wait! I am leaving on Mark's actual birthday, so we will have a family celebration sometime before then.
May Spring arrive at your house soon!
Mei's Permafrost Experiment:
Mei's Fat Experiment - or how the polar bear and the walrus stay warm:
Who says science is boring??
We have entered the polar region. We read about seals, sea lions, walrus and polar bears this week. We also played a fun game based on Happy Feet on the National Geographic site.
In math we did more subtracting, learned about 1/3 and 1/4, and started to learn about quarters. Mei is starting to understand the money stuff. I am really, really glad we are doing a program that does not require mastery before moving on. Things seem to take awhile to sink in with her. She does better if the topic is presented several times over several weeks. However, when she gets a topic, she is gets it! She really enjoys working on multiple topics at a time. We have slowed down in the number of lessons we do a week, so it looks like we will have enough lessons for the whole year.
In LA, we learned the letter W and read another BOB book. It had some rhyming words, so I made a list to show her how rhyming works - words like pat, fat, sat, cat, mat. I told her it was a game and she was quick to start making up words on her own. She even wanted to write them down herself -- so we did spelling!
We also went on Mark's field trip to the NC Museum of History and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. We will have to go back to the history museum next year when we study Indians. The science museum was full of animal habitats. It was pretty cool. They had skeletons of whales among other things. They also have a sloth! He was down on the ground so we got to see him moving around.
In honor of all the snow my WP friends in the north got, here are some pictures of snow.
Our Once-in-100-years snow storm in NC. We got 17" in one day. Schools were closed for 4 days. My sons Paul & Mark, ages 9 and 3, trying to wade through it. January 2000.
What is more likely is ICE! Here is the worse in the 20 years I have lived here - December 2002. It snowed about 3" before it turned to sleet. We got 1/4 to 1/2" of ice. We were without power for 3 days - some people were without power for a week! We lost the tops of 8 pine trees. Fortunately none of them hit the house!
Yes, those are 30+ feet stumps!
Sledding across the ice in the cul-de-sac!
Wow! The other day Mei and I were looking at her calendar to start learning the months of the year, when I noticed how many stickers we had on the calendar since the start of school. It doesn't feel like 6 weeks, but it really has been that long. It still feels fun, exciting, and new!
We finished the African Savannah in Animal Worlds this week. Yay! We get to move onto the Rainforest. I am ready for a new habitat. We completed a diorama this week. Mei had fun coloring, cutting, and gluing. Mark wasn't convinced of my hippo. He still wonders what a fat dog is doing in the grasslands. Mei didn't seem to mind that the leopards look more like kitty cats. She was so proud of it that she took it to a friend's house to show it off.
In LA we studied the letter E this week. We had to have eggs twice for lunch, which was good since we needed the eggshells for our letter project.
My son Mark asked to be home schooled this week. He figures he will have to write less if he is at home. Boy, did I set him straight on that one! His writing needs work, so we would do more writing, not less if he was home! He is quite the social butterfly. He is running for school vice president and is participating in the Foreign Language play. I told him if he still wanted to be home schooled at Christmas time, then we could pull him then.
Well, we are starting to get the hang of this school thing. I realized two benefits for me this week - 1) I get to learn about animals I never heard of before and 2) I have to learn my phonics! Yes, I was one of those kids taught in the 1960's to read by sight, so I never learned them. I am a terrible speller and my pronunciation is horrible! So I am excited - although I still have to stop and think about how to say a short A. Perhaps after I review for a few weeks, I will get it down pat.
Mei is doing wonderful. She enjoys her math. She is adding small numbers, remembers her ordinal numbers, almost has the days of the week, and some-day-soon will be able to remember that 20 and 30 come after 10, but before 40. We are having fun with Astronaut Abe from Alaska and Friendly Fred. We also learned what civets, genets, gharials, and caimans are - do you know?
We love the crafts. However, I have come to realize that I need to make my own animal, or I have a tendency to do all the work for Mei!
We made the zebra (sporting My Little Pony stickers) and Freddy Frog this week. The animals are lined up in the order they might eat each other, according to Mei.
Our second week went well. I thought we would have school on Monday, but we took the holiday off. I was too tired from painting my kitchen and family room on Saturday and Sunday. They share a common wall so I had to paint both. They are now both a nice shade of green!
We also took most of Friday off, too. I took Mei to the mall for a play date with other adopted Chinese girls. Most of the girls her age are in school or preschool but she enjoyed seeing the toddlers. Of course I enjoyed talking to the moms.
So somehow we managed to squeeze in most of AW and LA assignments for the 5 days into 3 days. In AW we started the African Savannah and talked about gazelles, ants, and lions. In LA we worked on Aa with Astronaut Abe from Alaska. And Stumpy had her babies, but then there was an ice storm. We are reading Gooseberry Park instead of Red Dog. Mei loved the Weird & Wacky reading assignments too!
We also took a trip to the local science museum to see the ants. In addition to the ants in the glass tunnels inside the museum, we found a large ant hill outside in the parking lot. I forgot to take my camera, so no pictures to show you.
Here are the animals we made this week. It was Mei's idea to add the legs for the lion. She also later added the "My Little Pony" stickers to him. We had fun!
