Knights and Fair Maiden Academy

New Computer and a huge mess in the home.

Tracking Idea

Ordered and on their way

Curriculum Plans for 2006/2007

I see light at the end of the tunnel

I found it!!!!!

I finally found a grammar program for 3rd. grade that I like.
this has been much on my mind, since FLL~level 3 won't be done in time for us to use it. So i ahve been researching programs, looked at Sonlights LA~ hated it too hard for my dyslexic son. LLAL~ couldn't find any sample pages, didn't want to buy it sight unseen. I knew that I wouldn't like Rod & Staff, again a bit too hard for Noah. Somewhere I heard about Growing With Grammar, went back to the website and looked again at the sample pages and the lessons. Then I saw that the author hopes to have 4th and 5 th grade donw by the end of the year. That was a plus, as I don't like changing curriculums all the time. I feel that is where you get the gaps in learning. So today we called the number and the author answered the phone!!!! Very interesting, we talked she is so nice, I immediately loved her. So we will be going with her grammar books at least until 8th grade. As she said that she plans to write at least until then. Which is perfect for us. I'm so excited and relieved. She has also used FLL and really has a grip on teaching grammar to  younger children in general and boys specifically.

We made it through school today, I'm still really tired and the kids just aren't bouncing back as quickly as I would like. Noah sitll needs to do some math and read to me but we will do that later tonight. He must also draw the digestive system for science but that doesn't have to be done tonight. I'm making him do more drawing to help him retain what we are learning. Well gotta go as the baby is having a fit, we aren't holding him at the moment.

Rough couple of weeks

Fortunately, we arent' too far behind but I'm really hoping to still be done by the first week of June. I plan to take off 8 weeks this summer to do 6 weeks of swim lessons, maybe one week of VBS, then one week of nothingness

Of course we will still have Noah read out loud everyday and do spelling, the only subjects I don't want him to not do. (he forgets too much then) But that is only about 20 minutes of work a day.

I've been looking over his curriculum for fall and have much of it in place except for Lang. Arts. we are using FLL at the moment but the next level won't be done in time for us to use it. I don't like Sonlights LA so that means I must find something close to FLL.

His reading is slowly improving, he doesnt think so but I see improvement. I need to have him read a bit yet tonight, We are studying Ancient Greece, he seems to like it but not as much as Ancient Egypt. We are reading "The Year of Miss Agnes" for his read aloud. "The Grand Cat" is his current reader. We also started "Hour of the Olympics".

In our church in 2nd. grade the children recieve a bible. Noah got his on Sunday. He was so excited!!!! The teacher's did a hour long talk about why we do this and the promises we made to God when we had our children baptized as baby's. They also had a scavenger hunt. Lots of fun for the kids. Funny thing though, out of 8 2nd grader's there is not one girl in the class. Pastor Doug said he hopes that we get some new members by the time they have to do confirmation and that they are girls.

Other than that nothing much is going on here, just the normal winter illness stuff and trying to catch up with school. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly you can get behind.

Off to look for Noah's book, he misplaced it and I'm none too happy at the moment.

sickness in the house

Rainy Thursday

It is cold here today, along with dark and rainy/misty. We got up a bit earlier but had so much stuff to do before we could start we still started late. 

Oh well, I guess it is not as important when we start as that we are doing our work.

School is going amazingly well at the moment. Noah is not complaining or anything. So nice to have a child excited about learning.

He still has to read for me tonight and finish a math page. I still want him to do some science drawings about the human body and illness. I'm just going to have him look at the pictures in "What Makes You Ill?" and freehand draw them.

After we were done we took them to Wendy's for lunch. They had gift certificates from their godmother. Then we walked over to the second hand furniture store, that was fun looking at all the neat stuff they have in there. We saw a player piano. Noah would like to learn how to play piano but I can't even get a used one since we live in an apartment on the 3rd floor. We hope to rent a duplex if not this year than next and then maybe get a used piano.

Then we stopped in the library. I found a book called " Squeaky chalk and other fun things to draw when there is nothing to do." It looks so cute. Noah seemed excited with it. It has easy lessons to learn how to draw. I can't wait until we have a moment to try them.

Here we are at wednesday

Well, we woke up late once again today. I don't know what is wrong with us, we haven't slept this late in months. Then I had to return a phonce call about my dd jasmine and her poor attitude on xmas eve service. She has a servere attitude problem at times and we are really working on it with her but she lives with her dad who has a personality disorder and is no help whatsoever.

So when we finally started we were way behind today. We did everything except for the read aloud. Not bad. Noah is studying abbreviations in grammar and I keep giving him history dates for copywork. One way to get them into his head.

I taught him how to check his addition problems today. He just looked at me as if to say"why?" I told him to just do it, he at least needed to learn how to check them.

Tomorrow we start reading "The Grand Cat", we went over some of the new sight words. They are pretty hard. I'm guessing that it will take us a couple of days to get through it and then we will have to reread it for comprehension.

Oh well I need to go and get a few things done yet.

Day 2

Off and running in the new year.

Well we started school this morning after sleeping in until 10am! I guess we were tired from all the celebrations of the holidays!

Noah grabbed a bowl of cereal and we were off onto school, what a great kid he is. It was our  "pjammie day" as Noah calls it.

We did everything on our schedule.So we are more than pleased. Started out with bible, handwriting, poetry, phonics, math, history, read alouds, grammar and finally spelling. Noah hates spelling and by then was tired so he was crying, poor guy. I talked him through it and he was able to finish.

I had Tommy take the kids out for a bit to walk. I don't know where they choose to walk at the moment but anyplace is better than none. It is rainy and dreary here but warm. 43* at 1pm.

Gotta go do some work for tomorrow's lessons. We start the human body in science.

Happy New Year !!!!!

Just a quickie

Noah is hungry and wanted mac and cheese but I'm putting Caedmon to sleep so he said just tell me how to do it Mom. So I accomodate him and he comes by and says" see you're teaching me, you're teaching me how to cook". Funny boy. Sometimes he says he wants to be a chef. I'm still hoping that he will be a pastor of a lutheran church somewhere. Time will tell.

Off to finish supervising him.

I'm back!!!!!

What's going on at the moment

We finished the nature hikes we needed to get our walking stick and shield. The boys were so excited. You had to walk 8 out of 13 hikes to get the shield. Since we were first time hikers we also go the walking stick. Some things we saw~ huge two story rock formations that were growing moss, a stone quarry, a turkey buzzard, a black squirrel, tons of leaves, we saw a river that was running through hills, hence the name of the hike"Overlook". The last hike was at the nature realm, where you turn in your forms, there we saw a rock and herb garden, kind of bare since it was mid-november by that time. The building housed a taxidermy display of animals native to the area. That was very cool to see I took pictures of things that we saw but couldn't get a picture of.  I tallied up our miles we had hiked 11.4 miles in 12 days. We didnt' find out about the hikes until nov. 03 and they had to be done by nov. 30. But the Lord gave us some great weather, we only got lost once and we made great memories with the children and each other.

We have finally caught up in everything except for grammar. So we are taking a break from school until the new year. Although I might finish out the grammar just to get it out of the way. Since Noah is dyslexic and struggles with reading I'm making him read to me everyday his beginning reader's. I can't wait until he can read without struggling so much. But I do see such an improvement over last year.



We will be studying Ancient Greece and Rome in January.  I'm getting a bit tired of the "ancients". Will be glad when we finish this year in june and move onto medieval.  sometime during our break I need to plan out the rest of the year. Although, the schedule in place seems to be working fairly well.  I might need to tweak it a bit here and there. As we did add in spelling and a bit of home ec stuff.  Like helping with dishes and laundry. Very important life skills in my opinion.

Another thing we are really working hard on at the moment is family dinnertime.  My husband works nights and sometimes was in bed before we had dinner, I wasn't with family dinners so I have had a terible time getting used to them. But the kids seem to eat better and behave better, now we just have to be consistent with them. We have also really cut back on their tv time. another very difficult thing to work around,  we had to use the tv more during my pregnancy since I was on bedrest for so long. I'm praying that I dont' get sick for awhile.

Well, I must get moving on tonight as I still have to supervise some cleaning and getting ready for bed.

A quick update

Just plain swamped

1. We are almost caught up in school
2. Getting ready for the holidays
3. Bible study/choir and church things are the priority
4. Doing lots of nature walks
5. Very busy with our MOPS group this year.

This is all I have time to share right now. I will be back soon

Fairly Good Week

Noah's Pajammie Day

Today was our first day of school and it went really well considering we have Caedmon now. Yesterday, when talking about starting this morning, Noah asked if he oculd have a "pajammie day" so we did. We covered everything we needed to and with lunch it took us 4 hours. But I did do some "schoolwork" with Adrien also. We started a phonics rule notebook, I think that if Noah knows the phonics rules it will help his reading a bit. So I did a page with consonants on it, one with vowels, then the cvc rule, we covered ing/ang/ong today so that went in also. I wish I had done this last year it would have helped. We also have a small dry erase board and I left the rules on the board, so he could see them tonight, it is magnetic so I put it on the refrigerator Think he will notice? We also reread three chapters in SOW while he colored the activity pages to go with the reading. We are doing two lessons a day in math so we can catch up. If we can continue to do so well until Thanksgiving we should be pretty much caught up. I am so hoping that we can. There was no fighting today between the boys and minimal from Camryn who at 2.5 is a terror lately. It seems that when the boys get their "mom time" everything goes so much smoother, children are happier and so is mom. The boys went over to Grandma's house and rode their bikes also for 20 minutes. Which is counted for PE. So we covered quite a bit today and I am ever so happy. Although I need to get the paperwork together for the board of ed. I better go do that now before I forget.

fun stuff

Your IQ Is 120

Your Logical Intelligence is Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional