I didn't want to just do the usual summer upkeep academically.  So often I've concentrated during summertime on reading and keeping up on math (which I will still do), but I think vocabulary gets overlooked.  I want my kids to have a broad vocabulary comprised of more than slang and the words they hear us speak. 

So I came up with a vocabulary challenge for the girls that we'll begin after we've had a week or two off.  My challenge to them is to scour the dictionary and memorize 20 new words and their meanings, as well as being able to use the word correctly in a sentence .  There will be rewards at 5 new words, 10, 15, and 20.  Of course, the point is for them to learn new words so I will try not to be too hands on in their choices, but I will have to ok each word so they are appropriate and not too easy.  I've created a spreadsheet to track their progress.  My hope is that they will indeed be challenged and learn 20 new words by summer's end, but they may only learn 5 or 10.  Hopefully, the fun rewards will motivate them to exercise their brains and they will go for all 20. 

The rewards will be:  5 new words~candy bar;  10 new words~movie with mom;  15 new words~ lunch out;  20 new words~ $10 to spend

I'm looking forward to seeing their vocabularies blossom and watching them discover a whole new world of words.

I wanted to share our pastor's sermon from yesterday.  It was such an encouraging message for mom's~ to keep pressing on.  I hope it encourages those of you who read it. 

"Hannah was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the Lord.  And she made this vow: 'O Lord Almighty, if you will look down upon my sorrow and answer my prayer and give me a son, then I will give him back to you.  He will be yours for his entire lifetime.' "  1 Samuel 1:10-11 NLT

To have children is to have the "Power of Motherhood".  God has given to every woman the right, ability, and authority to bring forth life into the earth.  Women are the carriers of life.  Within them, the Lord has given human creative ability.

To raise children is to have the "Spirit of Motherhood".  Hannah was filled with that spirit to be a mother.  Without mothers and those that mother and nurture us along the way, where would we be?

Discovering The Power of Motherhood

1.  Rejoice in your calling.  1 Samuel 2:1

God has given to every women the power of motherhood~ nurturing. 

Life application: Motherhood is the highest of the salaried jobs since payment is in pure love.

Hannah was rejoicing in her motherhood.

2.  Resist stereotypes.  1 Samuel 1:6

Everyone seems to have an agenda for women- find God's agenda for you.  Your assignment is consistent with how He made you.  People should love you for who you are and who you are to become--they shouldn't want to change you.  You don't have to be like someone else.  A mother's typical antagonist will most likely be another woman.

Life Application: Every woman has a cutstom-tailored call from God.

3.  Receive God's help.  1 Samuel 1:15

Find strength, security, safety, and perspective from God through prayer. 

Life application: There is no way to be a perfect mother but with God's help there are a million ways to be a great mother. 

Hannah knew to go to God and pour out her heart when she was troubled.

4.  Remember the goal.  1 Samuel 1:11

A child is your opportunity to prepare them for a lifetime of worship and service to the Lord.

Life application: A mother's goal isn't just to get her kids to pick up their toys but to pick up values and principles that will guide their whole life. 

You have supernatural influencing power. 

A friend posted this on another page I have.  So funny!

We have about one week left of school, PRAISE GOD!  While we've had a great year and have learned alot, we are ready for some sleeping in!  We talked about our summer plans this morning and have agreed that we will be doing our usual summer routine with a bit extra.  We will review math facts occasionally, continue reading, and do several lapbooks here and there.  So that is the plan for now.  Oh and my father is already planning a couple camping trips for the girls.  What a good papa! 

So as we wrap things up in the next week, I plan to have the girls write up a synopsis of what they feel they've learned this year, their likes and dislikes.  Who knows what they'll come up with!

Not sure exactly what kind of bird has made a home in our big backyard tree, but the girls and I are loving watching her.  She has made a wonderful nest and is very attentive.  When it was snowing last week she rushed to the nest and sat there until it stopped snowing.  What a good mommy!  Here are a couple pictures--unfortunately my camera wouldn't zoom in more but if you look closely you can see her head.

Sarah and Emma finished their science curriculum a few weeks ago.  We didn't want to stop learning just because we completed the book, so we began a unit study on snails and slugs. 

We learned about their classification.  Kindom~ Animal:  They are in the largest part of this group, the invertebrates which means they have no hard exo-skeleton.  Within the invertebrate category, snails and slugs are grouped with the mullusks.  Phyllum~ Mollusca:  Mullusks are soft bodied animals without internal skeletons.  Many have shells and a muscular foot.  Class~ Gastropoda:  Gastropod comes from the Greek, "gastros" meaning stomach, and "podos" meaning foot.  There are approximately 80,000 gastropods in the world. Some live in the sea and breathe with gills; others on land or in ponds breathing with lungs.  Order~ Pulmonata:  Pulmonates are snails and slugs that live on land or in fresh water and breathe with lungs. 

We learned that there are land snails (garden snails) and pond snails.  Land snails have two pairs of tentacles.  They withdraw into their shells when water is scarce and become dormant.  They can live 5-10 years.  Pond snails have one pair of tentacles.  Some have gills, others have lungs. 

Slugs look like snails without a shell.  They live only about a year and are slow in developing.  Like snails, they need moisture to survive, and are nocturnal. 

Pulmonates need moisture; without it they will shrivel up and die.  They eat dead leaves and debris that falls to the ground.  In ponds, they eat algae, decomposed plants, and even other animals. 

The reason some pulmonates live on land is because they can create their own moisture to survive; slime!  One of the biggest dangers is drying out.  The slimy mucous they create keeps their bodies moist and helps them move across different types of terrain. 

We also learned that however interesting snails and slugs may be, they are the enemies of the garden.  They chew plants down in layers leaving brown holes in the vegetation.  Their favorite meals are young seedlings and transplants.  The best way to rid your garden is through organic means.  You can use iron phosphate which will cause the critters to stop feeding and die within 3-6 days.  You can also sprinkle salt on the slugs which will draw out their moisture.  A sprinkling of coal or wood ash around plants will make it difficult for the animals to get to the plants.  This will also cause their bodies to dry out if they try crossing the line. 

Snails and slugs have many predators.  Humans, beetles, toads, snakes, and turtles are all a danger to the snail. 

Snail shells: Their shells are used to protect their soft bodies.  The shells are made of calcium and grow as the snail grows.  If the shell cracks, the animal can repair it.  They do not change shells.  Most shells open to the right while few open to the left.  Most are colored yellows, browns, or greens.  If you look closely at the whorls of the shell, you can see the lines of growth!

This was a really cool unit and we loved learning about these creatures.  We are now putting our lapbooks together.  So far the girls are decorating the outside of their lapbooks.  I'll take pictures of the finished product!

Kayla had to do a project for school where she was required to invent a new product, create the product and business plan, as well as designing the layout and demonstrating the product.  Her invention was The Amazing Peter Piper Panpipe.  She did a great job and as usual her creative genius came out full force!

Well, we're almost to the end of our year.  As I prepared for the coming week, I glanced at how much we have left.  It seems in most subjects we are nearly finished.  Some we have already wrapped up.  We finished our science curriculum weeks ago and have been studying snails and slugs.  We will be putting our lapbooks together this week.  Emma finished her history about a month ago.  So it seems we'll be completely done within the next couple weeks!  We will continue to study a few things here and there through the month of May, but at our leisure and as the girls decide what it is they want to learn more about.  Kayla will be finished in a couple weeks as well.  Hopefully, everything else in our lives will slow down as well.    It's quite doubtful that will happen though. 

The Future of Homeschooling by Michael Farris.  Equally as informative and fascinating as Teach Your Own.  The beginning of the book contains several graphs that really spell out how well homeschooled students do compared to public school students.  It's something I was aware of but seeing it was quite invigorating.  One particular graph discusses whether or not home school parent education level has any effect on their children's academic performance.  Research found that there is no substantial effect.  However, for public school students, a parent's education level does affect their children's performance.  That is truly extraordinary!!

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There is little question that home schooled children are doing very well indeed compared to their public school counterparts.  But, as parents, we should not be satisfied with doing better than a system that, on average, has totally failed to deliver quality academics in a safe atmosphere.  We want our children to achieve both academically and morally at the highest levels rather than merely being better than the competition. 

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Dorothy Sayers~ "For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves, and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

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Some may be concerned about the emphasis on memorizing a great many facts during the grammar stage.  But children need to memorize the basic facts of grammar, history, geography, art, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division simply because they are the necessary tools for further learning.  Dorothy Sayers defends memorization during the grammar period by saying:  "Anything and everything which can be usefully committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not.  The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age.  Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond his power to analyze."

Perhaps the reason that so many adults--including, I confess, myself--find it hard to refrain from "helping" kids is that it wounds our egos to see how well they get along without us!  How can that dumb kids of mine learn so much without a smart fellow like me to teach him?  We try in effect to horn in on the kids' sense of pride in accomplishment and, all too often, particularly in schools, we succeed. 

....

At the same time, my father, who thought of himself as trying to "learn Spanish," which meant to learn to speak it correctly, so that then he could talk to the people around him, never learned more than twenty or so words in all the years he lived in Mexico.  Now and then my mother tried to get him to say a few words to the people he met.  He couldn't do it.  He was struck dumb by his school-learned fear of doing it wrong, making a mistake, looking foolish or stupid....

How true is this?  We so quickly learn the motivation of doing it "right or wrong" and this often hinders us in our true pursuit of knowledge.

....

Intelligence is not the measure of how much we know how to do, but of how we behave when we don't know what to do.  It has to do with our ability to think up important questions and then to find ways to get useful answers.  This ability is not a trick that can be taught, nor does it need to be.  We are born with it, and if our other deep animal needs are fairly well satisfied, and we have reasonable access to the world around us, we will put it to work on that world.

This next portion I found particularly interesting and thought provoking.  Mr. Holt is discussing the common issue of writing letters backwards, etc. 

..Most children will compare the two P's, the one they looked at (written by an adult) and the one they made.  Many of them, if they drew their P backwards, may see right away that it is backwards, doesn't look quite the same, is pointing the wrong way--however they may express this in their minds.  Other children may be vaguely aware that the shapes are not pointing the same way, but will see this as a difference that doesn't make any difference, just as for my bank the differences between one of my signatures and another are differences that don't make any difference.  In thinking that this difference doesn't make any difference, the children are being perfectly sensible.  After all, they have been looking at pictures of objects, people, animals, etc., for some time.  They know that a picture of a dog is a picture of a dog, whether the dog is facing right or left.  They also understand, without words, that the image on the page, the picture of dog, cat, bicycle, cup, etc., stands for an object that can be moved, turned around, looked at from different angles.  It is therefore perfectly reasonable for children to think of the picture of a P on the page as standing for a P-shaped object with an existence of its own, an object which could be picked up, turned around, turned upside-down, etc.  Perhaps not all children feel this equally strongly. But for those who do, to be told that a "backwards" P that they have drawn is "wrong", or that it isn't a P at all, must be very confusing and even frightening.  If you can draw a horse, or dog pointing any way you want, why can't you draw a P or B any way you want?  .... What we should do, then, is be careful never to use the words "right" or "wrong" in these reversal situations.  If we ask a child to draw a P, and he draws a T, we could say, "No, that's not a P, that's a T."  But if we ask him to draw a P, and he draws one pointing to the left, we should say, "Yes, that's a P, but when we draw a picture of a P we always draw it pointing this way.  It's not like a dog or cat, that we can draw pointing either way. 

Isn't this Tee great!

http://www.homeschoolshare.com/

...Children don't need, don't want, and couldn't stand six hours of teaching a day, even if parents wanted to do that much.  To help them find out about the world doesn't take that much adult input.  Most of what they need, parents have been giving them since they were born.  ..They need access.  They need a chance, sometimes, for honest, serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes for joking, play, and foolishness; or much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not to feel shut out of it, in short, to go some of the places you go, see and do some of the things that interest you, get to know some of your friends, find out what you did when you were little and before they were born.  They need to have their questions answered, or at least heard and attended to--if you don't know, say "I don't know."  They need to know more and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care of kids.  They need some friends their own age, but not dozens of them; two or three, at most... Perhaps above all, they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm times when there's nothing to do. 

Schools rarely provide any of these, and even if radically changed, never could provide most of them.  But the average parent, family, circle of friends, neighborhood, and community can and do provide all of these things....

I was really struck by this portion of the book.  How true that kids really need access to our lives as their parents.  How wonderful if we can share that with them.  To answer their questions or at least attempt to.  For won't this show them to never stop learning and asking.  To always strive for knowledge in those around them; whom they trust.  I know it's tough for us homeschool, stay at home moms sometimes.  We are always with our children and often find ourselves needing reasons to leave them at home so we can have "our" time.  But somehow wouldn't it be grand to change hats from teacher and caretaker, become friend and show them God's world outside of our home instead of leaving them behind because "we" need it.  For our time with our children really is fleeting.  Soon they will fly away and we'll long for all those opportunities we had when they were home.  Let's not forget that!

How are we going to prevent children being taught by "unqualified" teachers?

First of all, to know what is meant by "qualified", we have to know what is meant by quality.  We could hardly agree on who was or was not a good painter if we did not to a large extent agree on what was or was not a good painting.  The question asked above assumes that since educators agree on and understand correctly what is meant by good teaching, they are able to make sound judgments about who is or is not a good teacher.  But the fact is that educators do not understand or agree about what makes good teaching.  The dismal record of the schools is proof enough of this.  This further proof is that, when charged in court with negligence, educators defend themselves by saying (with the approval of the courts) that they cannot be judged guilty of not having done what should have been done, because no one knows what should have been done.  This may be so.  But it clearly follows that people who don't know what should be done can hardly judge who is or is not compentent to do it. 

In practice, educators who worry about "unqualified" people teaching their own children almost always define "qualified" to mean teachers trained in schools of education and holding teaching certificates.  They assume that to teach children involves a host of mysterious skills that can be learned only in schools of education and that are in fact taught there; that people who have this training teach much better than those who do not; and indeed that people who have not had this training are not compentent to teach at all.             None of these assumptions are true.

Human beings have been sharing information and skills, and passing along to their children whatever they knew, for about a million years now.  Along the way they have built some very complicated and highly skilled societies.  During all those years there were very few teachers in the sense of people whose only work was teaching others what they knew.  And until very recently there were no people at all who were trained in teaching, as such.  People always understood, sensibly enough, that before you could teach something you had to know it yourself.  But only very recently did human beings get the extraordinary notion that in order to be able to teach what you knew you had to spend years being taught how to teach. 

....And in fact these are not what schools of education talk about.  They give very little thought to the act of teaching itself--helping another person find something out, or answering that person's questions.  What they spend most of their time doing is preparing their students to work in the strange world of schools-which, in all fairness, is what the students want to find out: how to get a teaching job and keep it.  

Once Matt and I got over the shock that our baby was turning 8, we realized we had one free weekend to have a party; and this realization only came a few days before the weekend.  So we threw together a party.  Unfortunately, my parents weren't able to come but of course Emma's aunt and uncles that live here in town were able to.  She also invited 4 friends; we had to narrow it down b/c she had such a big party last year.  She wasn't sure what kind of cake she wanted daddy to make this year so we surprised her with a ....  guitar cake!  She loved it of course and had a super, great day. 

Kayla's youth group had a "future" night last week.  They were to dress up however they thought they might look in the future.  Kayla and her friend Valarie (from school) had a blast inventing and coordinating their look.

While we were at Nana & Papa's, they celebrated their anniversary.  The girls and I wanted to do something very special for them so we planned a special evening.  We made them dinner and dessert and served them (and my grandma).  Emma was the entertainment and sung them a song.  We played romantic music throughout and even got them to dance!  It was so wonderful to bless them as they are a huge blessing to us. 

The girls baked a cake for our pastor for Easter.  He LOVES peeps so we found this recipe for a cake using peeps.  It turns out looking like a sunflower.  They did the whole cake by themselves.  I only put the cake in the oven and took it out (and leveled it).  It turned out great and of course he LOVED it.

The girls and I are spending the week with Nana & Papa.  We are really enjoying the quiet.  The girls absolutely love being here and being able to ride their bikes freely, wander by themselves to the library or my mom's office, and of course going on nature jaunts with Papa.  As a matter of fact, Kayla has been gone most of the day with Papa antler hunting.  Can't wait to see what they find. 

Papa bought a microscope and has plans to show the girls all sorts of things.  They are eager to look at "pond scum" and whatever else he finds for them to explore. 

The girls and I made an anniversary dinner last night for Nana & Papa (my grandma was in attendance as well).  It was so much fun!  The girls and I planned what we each could make and contribute and they of course loved it.  So, when we return I'll share the pictures!

Farewell for now--