Friday, we had our planning meeting for our homeschool co-op.  I don't know how many of you participate, but we love ours and find it to be very rewarding.

Chris will be in high school this year and is taking Hands-on biology, public speaking, art, and government.
I'm teaching the biology, and it will consist of a series of labs based on Apologia's biology program ( we are using that this year anyway, so I'm killing two birds with one stone).

We are also going to have a monthly teen outing, a support and fellowship meeting and a monthly fieldtrip day.  Very ambitious, but I have high hopes!

You would never guess that my husband builds and repairs computers.  I've lost my laptop, which I was taking to my sister's, and using her high speed, and our home computer, that had all of my homeschooling paperwork on it.  I'm now getting back up and running after my long hiatus.

What's up here?  Lesson planning and lots of 4-H stuff.  We are doing Ambleside Online Year 9 this coming year, and Chris just got back from Career Explorations at Cornell not long ago, and is getting ready to go on his Teen Exchange trip to TN.  My dog obedience class is going into summer session, and we are starting to gear up for the fair at the end of August.

Boredom in our house is NOT an option right now!

Today, Chris and I are off to 4-H Pre-Teen Fun Day.  If any of you are 4-H families, this is a great event for your county to host.  Teen Council sponsors the event, and the teens act as leaders, and occasionally teachers.  The kids are broken into groups and go from station to station, led by the teens, for different classes, crafts, or activities.  They also do fun ice breakers and lunch, sometimes pizza, sometimes a make your own thing.  This would also be a good activity for a church youth group of homeschool co-op.

I'm doing a leader workshop on making different types of dough:  pie crusts, bread, pizza, etc.  It promises to be a lot of fun.  I love making bread, but my pastry crusts are not so good.

This should be a fun and educational day for everyone.  This is a great way to spend a Saturday.

I thought I'd take a minute to pass along our writing assignment this week.  It's actually been going on for more than that, but now the pressure is on.

Christian  is a very active 4-H participant, and the teen reward trip is Career Explorations at Cornell University.  The teens spend a weekend exploring a specific program area and learn about related careers.  This is definitely a highlight of the 4-H year at our house.  Here is where we are so far.  I think he's doing a great job!  This also gives you a good idea of what type of activities we participate in around here.

If there is any interest, I may write an article on using 4-H curriculum as homeschool curriculum.  This is especially good for unit studies, eclectic schoolers, or unschoolers.  It's also really great for electives!

Rensselaer County

4-H Member 1999 – present

4-H Project Work 1999 – present

Animal Science Sheep/Goats

• Responsibilities and skills included:

·        Nutritional management for animal and self

·        Learned proper technique for fitting and showmanship

·        Cooperated with club members for barn schedule at Schaghticoke Fair

·        Sharpened time management in having sheep/goat ready to show by time of fair

·        Responsible for safety and health of animals and self

Friday Night Chefs 4-H Club

 Responsibilities and skills included:

• Researched quick bread preparation

• Located and modified recipes for taste/nutritional value  
• Planed for resources (ingredients, time, equipment)
• Organized tools and supplies
• Followed recipe directions
• Evaluated taste, texture, and appearance of Brownies, Muffins est.  
• Learned how gluten, eggs and shortening effect taste and texture of product

Decorative Sewing Pillows / Dish Towel Apron

 Responsibilities and skills included:

• Made decisions for proper fabric to use for said pillows
• Used critical thinking skills to lay out fabric and pattern
• Used resources (fabric, tools, time) wisely
• Solved problems and made decisions on what fabric and thread

4-H Activities

Leadership

• Instructor at Tri County (Warren, Washington, Saratoga) Leadership Training Demonstration     Workshop 
• Teen Ambassador
• Teen Council
• Teen Exchange
• Pre Teen Fun Day – Group Officer 2007 and 2008
• Winter Fair Evaluator for 2006 and 2007
• Club President 2006 to 2007
• Club Vice President 2005 to Present
• 4-H Teen Snack Bar Manager
• Schaghticoke Fair – Exhibitor, Snack Bar
• Pre – Teen Trip
• Winter Fair Participant
• Fair Clean up 1999-2007
• Vet science 101
• Vet science 201

Awards

• Won Junior Shepherdship two years in a row
• Won Best Fleece On the Hoof Award tow years in a row
• Placed Forth Out of Six For Best Fleece at Schaghticoke Fair

Fund Raising

• Sold 4 Cases Of Candy Bars at One Dollar a Piece  (34 Candy Bars Per Case)
• Sold Over 80 Dollars Worth Of Calendars and Cook Books 
• Sold One Box Of Cookies from 2005-2007

School Summary

Home Schooled

Estimated Graduation Date 2012

Extracurricular Activities

• Snow Boarding lessons at Willard Mountain 2007
• Home school Co-operative participant 2005 -Preset
• Chess club participant 2007

Community Service

• Cleaning agility equipment for 4-H dog obedience classes
• Help set up show equipment for Stepping Stones facility
• Demonstrator at poultry station at Ridge Farm Liberty

Being a sort of Eclectic/ Classical/CM/Semi Unschooler family (does that evoke an image or what?!), we are currently working on any number of activities.

School:

Pre-Algebra from any number of sources.  We use everything from SOS to those little homework practice books and worksheets online.  This is by far our most challenging subject.  My husband can explain a concept, and ds grasps it immediately, but I seem to speak some foreign language.

Science:  Apologia Physical Science which ds doesn't enjoy, being a biology sort of guy.  He's living in anticipation of Biology next year.

Grammar:  Once again, we are drawing on many sources, from Internet sources to Critical Thinking workbooks.  He uses grammar correctly in his writing consistantly, but show him a multiple choice question, and he's ready for a stroke.

Writing:  We recently did IEW's writing program, which I highly recommend.  Learning the dress-ups alone has totally changed his writing for the better.

History:  Beautiful Feet.  I love it, ds doesn't.  At his request, we made a brief foray into 20th Century history, but he sort of fizzled out, so we are back to this.  We supplement with historical fiction and biographies above and beyond what the program asks for to plump it up and make it more interesting.  I want to stretch it out with extra resources through the middle of ninth grade next year.

Language: We are dabbling in French and Latin.

We are also slowly reading through Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare together and want to start reading original plays when we are done.  For classics, we are reading Dickens A Tale of Two Cities, and studying vocabulary and themes from the book.  It might be a bit advanced, but he's a strong reader who's always looking for more vocabulary.

We are involved in a homeschool co-op, and there he is getting classes in Christian World View, Government (we are studying Constitutional Amendments), Art, Music, and Gym, with Hands-On Science thrown in ocassionally.

Extracurricular:

Our big commitment aside from school is 4-H.  Ds is involved in Teen Council, which helps with a lot of the programming, Teen Ambassadors, which is sort of the public face of 4-H in our county, Teen Exchange, which is a two year program involving fundraisers and trips back and forth with another county somewhere in the US. This exchange is with a county in TN.   He also belongs to a regular club called Wild Things.

Just some examples of activities Ds has participated in in the last year :  we hosted an exchange 4-Her from TN, he helped teach a demonstration workshop, he went to Cornell University for a weekend for career explorations, he showed his sheep and goats at the county fair, was a teen manager in the snack bar, he participated in vet science, was involved with cooking science, was a group leader for pre-teen fun day, trained and showed his dog, and the list could go on ad infinitum.  Needless to say, we are very busy.

I hope this gives you a little peek into our activities.  Keep an eye out here for changes and updates!

Well, I'm back again after a long absence.  Since I last posted, we've lost several friends and family members, I've got a new nephew, I've got a new dog (that makes 5 now!), and I stopped babysitting, but am once again working, watching my sisters kiddos.

I will try to be much more diligent in posting here, and I plan on updating my homesteadblogger site as well.  If anyone is interested, I have a knitting blog at Fiber Junky 

I'll be back soon!

We are wrapping up our Middle Ages study, which lasted longer than I originally planned (it WAS interesting!) and now we are starting to ease into our Renaissance studies. 

We tend to work on a bit of a tight budget, and are definitely not much into a regular  history textbook except as a read aloud to get the big picture, so I tend to use the library and internet to find most of our history materials.  I am also a bookstore junky, and people give me giftcards to Barnes and Noble for every holiday and birthday, so I save up for books that will take awhile for us to read, or books that I think we will really like that I can't get at the library.  I also surf around Ebay and the other homeschool lists to see what I can get cheap.

I usually come up with a reading list based on what some of the bigger, more expensive programs use, and use that as a starting point to begin with.  Tapestry of Grace and Sonlight are great!  If you can afford them, go for it, because they do all the work and planning for you!  I also tend to order in some of the big, more visual books, like Eyewitness, and various other younger kids books.  Even though we are seventh grade, and he reads at a highschool level, I've found if we start off with a few quick and easy reads right at the beginning, we start with a lot of the basic facts that I want to get across, and can use that as a launching point to get to the finer view of things.

I also watch out for the History Channel, Discovery Channel, etc., to have shows on related to our studies, and I incorporate them as well.  It  makes a nice break for us, and very often their websites will have a lesson plan related to it.

The internet is also a good source of materials.  I go out and google my different topics, then print what I want or bookmark them for later.  Just remember to preview them before you send the little kiddos online!

I'm going to pass along a few links here for you to check out on the Renaissance.  If anyone finds a timeline for this period, please let me know.  We keep a book of centuries, and that helps us organize entries.

http://www.kidskonnect.com/Renaissance/RenaissanceHome.html

http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/subjects/renaissance.htm

For some great free books about every period in history, and many topics, try:

www.mainlesson.com

I'll also give you a list of some of the books we are considering using for our study.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/16RGU79GM8L3E/ref=reg_hu-wl_goto-registry/103-2606855-7263811?ie=UTF8&sort=date-added

The above is an amazon.com wish list that I put some of the books that we are considering using.  I try to  get anything from the library that we can finish within 3 weeks of so.

I hope you found this informative, folks.  If you have any other suggestions or comments, feel free to post them.

Yesterday at our homeschool co-op, I had a long talk with a good friend of mine, and passed along Intermediate Language Lessons and Karen Andreola's CM book.  She is driving herself batty worrying about not being caught up because some of her son's workbook pages aren't filled in.  It got me thinking about my where we are at our house learning-wise.  We use  a combination of Ambleside Online and Mater Amabilis with a few tweeks here and there.  It's primarily the reading lists that I look at, and we have a pretty far flung education.  I know that we have a much more interesting and exciting eduacation than he would get in a  traditional school

Sometimes, though, I still worry about missing things.  I'm blessed with a very bright child, but not a very motivated one.  He learns new math concepts quickly, but is lazy about accuracy.  He has great story ideas and narrations when he dictates, but can't seem to  transfer this to paper himself.  I've been told by others that much of this is normal for a boy his age, but still, a little effort on his part would be nice.  I feel like he's getting away with murder and not living up to his potential.  However, I'm not willing to chain us to a textbook.  I think I'm going to have to actually develop a (gasp!!!) schedule, which will be tough on all of us.  I need to really pray about how to proceed with the rest of the year, and also about next year to get him in  gear. 

Well, for a variety of reasons I won't get into, it's been almost a year since I updated this blog, but I'm hoping to start out fresh.  I got my homestead blog updated, the NYS blog updated, and now I'm moving on to this one.

We've had a rough year so far in that we've had sick relatives that needed a lot of care, so now I find myself sitting back and looking at what we've done so far, and what we still need to do.  I'm trying to do my best to streamline things a bit to make planning easier, and also look ahead to next year.

So far, this is what I'm looking at: a sort of Charlotte Mason-like classical-ish approach to finish out the year, and probably for next year too.  DS is in 7th grade this year, and can work more independantly, but I'm skeptical about how  much he's retaining without a good bit of discussion, so this is what we've got going on for now

Bible- Proverbs and Mark, also Baltimore Catechism

Character- Book of Virtues

Shakespeare- Tales From Shakespeare

History- Story of Mankind along with Historical Fiction and non-fiction books out of the Library.  We have a few more weeks of the Middle Ages and then we will be launching into the Renassaince

Science- Exploring Creation with General Science. This is going to run into summer, but that's OK, we'll do a bit of cross curricular stuff with it and have it done for fall

Math- Slowly working our way through Pre-algebra topics using various sources

Grammar- Grammar review sheets and pointing out grammatical mistakes whenever they occur, also doing proofreading activities

Vocabulary-Wordly Wise

Language- I'm trying to get back into Latin, and we do Spanish at co-op

Economics- Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?  DH is tackling this one with him

Art- Meet the Masters

Music- Different composers and genres

We also keep several read alouds going, and he has lots of extracurriculars, primarily 4H.

I would like to encourage more writing, and while we do some notebooking, I'd like for living books and notebooking to be the primary learning vehicles.

So, I do have something of a plan, here, and am moving forward with it.  I'll try to stay current here, but won't make any promises.  My aunt is sick with lung cancer, and I'm at my sister's house a lot caring for her, and guess what, they don't have internet.  That's a problem for me and ds because we do a lot of online work. I think I'm going to have to plan better!!!

Well, I'm sorry I  haven't posted much.  We've been having internet connectivy troubles around here, and half the time I can't stay on long enough to post anything.  I've been researching my article for the Homeschool Nations New York blog about field trip destinations here in NY, and finally had so much trouble that I barged in on my dear friend Kelly and hijacked her hi speed.  I ended up having to email the whole article to myself and cut and paste from home because the password got reset.  I have to say, I've spent so much time wrestling with the computer that I'm glad I invested in the SOS math for Chris, because that's the one subject that he really needs help on, so he could tell as he went along where he was going wrong, and could see me for help.  The actual math part hasn't been much trouble for him, but the spelling can be a hassle.  If you spell a word wrong, it marks it wrong, so I'd have to go back through some of the problems with him just to fix the spelling.  Overall, though, he is much more successful with it than I thought he would be.  No tears and hysterics with this one.  Other than math, we've been working on test prep materials, doing lots of grammar exercises like proofreading, and doing tons of reading.  For science, we've been reading Horrible Science and doing nature study along with science in Greece and Rome and experiments at co-op.  We are also starting a science project for our co-op open house.  We are finally transitioning into Ancient Rome along with continuing NY history.  Definitely enough to keep us busy!

I'm going to try to continue writing entries off line, and when I get good connections, I'll post them all.  Take care till next time.

As my son rapidly approaches seventh grade, I’ve given more and more thought to how we will proceed in our homeschooling.  Thus far, we have taken an eclectic approach to choosing our curriculum and learning methods, as you might guess from the title of this blog.  You see, I’m just never totally satisfied with any one curriculum; I just go around gleaning ideas from everyone and everything.  I’m like a prospector, shoveling along looking for gold. 

            I think I’ve waded through just about every program out there, mixing and matching.  I’ve pieced programs together using AmblesideOnline, Abeka, Mater Amabilis, and just about every reading list out there, to create a something tailor-made just for us.  I tend to lean toward a Charlotte Mason/semi-classical approach, with history at the core of our studies, a book of centuries, and lots of living books using a history text as a framework.  We study Latin off and on, do living book science with experiments at our teaching co-op, dip in and out of various math books and software, although I just recently purchased an old copy of Switched On Schoolhouse Math 6 on Ebay, and this is going well, although I think we will never get past fractions, EVER.  I just cob it together as we go, working off a basic plan that I come up with at the beginning of the year to keep us moving forward.

            These people that plod through workbooks day in and day out just puzzle me.  I would have hated that, and so would ds.  Now, I’m not saying workbooks don’t have a place in my house, but I could never be a slave to them.  We use them more for remedial work for concepts we don’t pick up along the way.  However, it is amazing how much grammar a kid will pick up just from lots of reading and being taught to speak correctly. This year, I’ve been dipping into a Spectrum Language Arts book and doing proofreading exercises to prep for standardized testing.  I like Cindy Rushton’s lesson planning ideas, simple, easy to implement, and frequently cross-curricular.  Anything you can use for more than one subject is A-OK in my book.  I can’t imagine anyone who is reading this not knowing where to find her blog, but she’s listed in my friends section if you’re new around here.  Check her stuff out, she’s right on the money!

            As homeschoolers, we don’t need to be slaves to a pre-digested formula, a one-size-fits-all program.  We might be social creatures, but we don’t have to be herd animals.  Just because it works for our best friend down the street doesn’t mean it’s the answer for us.  It might be, or maybe it would be super with a little modification, but we have choices.  Nobody should ever feel locked in to one program; if it doesn’t work, pitch it, and prayerfully start looking for the better option.  We were all led to homeschooling for a reason, so don’t waste one day with anything less than the best for choice for your family.

Hi, my name is Kim Degener, and I'm truly excited to be here! Let me share a bit about myself. I'm a wife to dear husband Mark, an accountant by trade, computer guy by talent, and all around awesome man. I'm mom to dear son Christian, soon to be twelve years old. Chris is very active in 4-H, his homeschool group, and a complete computer junky like his folks. We reside on two and a half acres in Valley Falls, NY in the Capital District Region, along with four German Shepherds, two cats, two rats, and various assorted and miscellaneous feral poultry (definitely a huge joke in the circles that I run in, LOL.) Aside from spending time with the family, immediate and other wise, I spend my time training dogs for our county 4-H, spinning any fiber I get my hands on, reading any book that finds it's way into my clutches, and doing a bit of historical re-enacting, primarily the Civil War period. Of course, chasing the feral poultry takes a bit of time, too! I guess I ended up blogging because God laid it on my heart that I was supposed to be writing, and this seemed to be a great way to start! I'm looking forward to sharing the learning lifestyle with you all, and hope you are too.