Feb. 23, 2006 - Day of color
We spent some time last week just getting messy with all kinds of colors. We tried various diffrent paints and papers and even made our own paints to try out. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were inspired to be creative and messy! Bring on the sunshine!
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Jan. 10, 2006 -
Our groovey space mural!
We also made awesome space rockets!
If you would like instructions you can visti my son's blog. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/ashcatchem97/ He wrote step by step instructions on his blog! 
(I am so proud!) 
For great themed worksheets and murals like ours checkout this great free resource!! Just sign up and you have a ton of great K-3 work. I have been visiting this site for years! We love doing the murals! They also look great in our play room. And they are something the youger kids can help us out with too!
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Jan. 8, 2006 -
Oh it is hard to get back into the groove of home schooling after such a nice vacation!
The kids are a bit confused since we just started home schooling them and went right into Christmas. 
I have to say I am so amazed at how my kids are blossoming at home! It was hard for me to watch my oldest son be held back in the public school classes. Now he can define for himself where he is. As long as I can keep up!
My biggest concern was with my 6 year old daughter who was showing signs of Dyslexia. She was falling far behind in her reading and writing abilities and no one at the schools was even bothered by it. No one called me to voice concern and I kept wondering if she was behind or okay for her age. With a high achieving older brother it is hard to know. I never wanted to make her feel any less intelligent. But when I brought my daughter home we quickly began to hit road blocks.
Sure enough less then 2 months into home schooling my daughter is confidently reading! To top it off she has found an interest in math; another subject that has frustrated Kayla for some time. Kayla has found a great confidence in her reading and she pushes through so many tough spots on her own. We are so proud of her!!!! 
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Dec. 21, 2005 - OOPS!
Well while I was editing my sons blog templet I managed to wipe out my own custom additions! AHH! So all my fun little links and badges are gone! I spent soo much time editing and playing with the HTML too! 
Well I will have to just get back to it one of these days!
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Dec. 19, 2005 - Been a while!
Well it has been a while since I have posted a blog!
I have been spending a lot of time reading other home school blogs around the WWW. I found the fascinating world of RVing with kids/ Earth school families. Man I tell ya what! I am so tempted to pack up in a bus with my family and travel the world! We have really young kids so that would not be too much fun for us at this point. But a girl can dream!
If you haven’t had the chance to see some of these families you should check them out!
http://www.freerangefamily.com
I find them inspirational and a great way to shake the public school ways out of my home schooling. I feel a lot of pressures to make sure my kids are constantly learning... and of course they are! I have to get my mind away form the idea that they have to be sitting in front of a book or worksheet to learn. I am not 100% any home school method but I pull from what works for us.
Right now I am highly inspired from the families who are hitting the road with their kids. I have to be honest though...
I read an unschooled site where someone has posted that their son at the age of 8 years was still not reading (OMG) I just about died! In my house my kids have a natural love for reading and books and my 3 year olds is beginning to read. To think that a 8 year old would only be at the point they were recognizing letters and their sounds makes me think that something is going off course. I am all for what ever works for a family but geese!!!! Not reading at 8! That sounds like something isn’t working; the parents say they are not worried and that he is a smart boy who can play chess very well and what not. But I have to wonder when those skills will be developed. I believe that a lot of what we need to know is learned in the early years of life. Once you get past a certain point it is sooo much harder to train your brain! I fear in a case like this child there may be something keeping him from developing his skills naturally. The parents said that reading by his age was just socially acceptable and that it was fine that he doesn’t. Um... correct me if I am wrong but I would think that developing the ability to read would be a natural progression for any human in any group of people whether it was from hieroglyphics from stone or paintings on the wall of a cave. The ability to absorb the written form of the child’s own language is a natural thing not a way to be accepted in society. That just stresses me out! But hey those are not my kids and my kids where reading before they hit public schools and not be causing it was socially acceptable. Actually my son was always getting in trouble for being too smart. Not letting the other kids take turns answering questions in class because he knew all the answers. They wouldn’t even let him read chapter books until they decided he was ready...which he was doing at home since first grade!!! What is that all about! So I think extreme unschoolers should be careful not to see their child’s progression or lack of it as just at his or her own pace. But to be sure to be ready to pick up on extreme lags in the child natural abilities! Maybe research what age children learn to read on a global level, including children for instance that live in tribes in the jungles far away from our society. These parents should be so careful not to misinterpret natural human/child development with in a group as development deemed socially acceptable. Hmm well I think I have had my moment! Deep breaths... inhale... exhale...
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Dec. 1, 2005 - Oh the things we do!
We have been so busy doing SO many things!
I am having a great time homeschooling my kids. 
We are running the rounds of the yucks but having a great time any ways!
I have done some research on my kids learning styles and have found that of course they are completly opposite! My son is a total book worm an dloves reading and will fire through any worksheets and copy work you put in front of him. My daughter on the other hand I believe is dyslexic and has fallen behind the curve(one of the reasons for home schooling) she needs a Kinetic learning teachnique. 
I am pulling from all the homeschooling styles to attend to my children's needs. It is just hard having my oldest son who was off the testing charts in public school(and adhd) flies through everything. Keeping him busy and challenged is a job in its self.
He was sitting around at school twiddeling his thumbs at school waiting for everyone else to catch up. 
And dont you know the teacher said he was "distracting" the other students. 
So now I can pull work from what ever level challenges my son. That is awesome!!! Just to see what he is capable of! Wow! My daughter is very smart as well but is challenged with reading. I am trying a Kinetic approach to reading for her. I am having her build her books and she just happens to be reading them as she goes. Cutting and pasting from "mini- books" I find on this great website called www.dltk-kids.com . Love it! Awesome stuff that site!
So if anyone has any ideas, reasourses or whatever please post on my blog. 
We are starting an Egypt themed learning session as I am calling it. I have no idea how long we will linger in Egypt but I am sure we will have a great time! We have check out 6 or so books from teh library and rented a few dvds from familypass.com. I am really excited to use the Hyrogliphics alphabet wall cards and worksheets to decode. They have a ton of great themed worksheets on edhelper.com I can print out a ton of stuff to keep my son busy in what he loves to do write and think!
We are going to do the sugar cube pyramids and make Acient Egypt outfits / wigs and all!
LOL! oh the fun!
I am sure my oldest son is gonna just love me for this! lol 
Please excuse any spelling errors I may have made. I am to tired to run this through Word. Why dont we have spell check on this Blog anywho! The pressure to spell correctly is stressing me out! he he
nite ya' ll !
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Nov. 26, 2005 - Ocean Mural Project
We have had a lot of fun learning about the ocean!
Our ocean mural!
We printed out this awesome ocean mural and lots of sea friends to color and paste onto it from learningpages.com. Check them out!
We are so proud!!
We cruised around the internet and found the coolest sound clips of dolphins and other sea critters. We even watched the folks at Monteray Bay Aquarium feed the otters yesterday morning on their live feed web cam how cool!!
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Nov. 25, 2005 - Awesome website!!!!
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Nov. 25, 2005 -
So we are having a great time homeschooling!
The kids are very eager to learn.
My son who has ADHD is actually warn out by the end of the day! One of my reasons for doing the homeschooling was for him. He is off the charts with their "testing" yet they do nothing to keep him stimulated. He spends a lot of time in his class reading and taking Accelerated reader test. If you know about the Accelerated reader program then you know that to get in to the 50 point club is a pretty cool thing. Especially when you are in 3rd grade! The down side of this is he managed to pull this off just since the begining of the school year! And he wasnt bringing the books home to read, this was all accomplished in class! ARGH!
We love reading! I taught my son how to read myself when he was three. But the school just was not presenting enough material to my son that was "level" appropriate. So he read and read and twittled hos thumbs and of course got in trouble for being distracting!
well we are easing into homeschooling with a focus on Sea Creatures this week. It was a rather unplanned "unit" but what fun! The reasources are limitless on the internet! We have watched a live web cam from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the shark tank! how cool!! Check it out at
http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_smm/smm_cam.asp?bhcp=1
the also have several other awesome cams set up like the Otter Cam which we watched the feed the otters this morning! Kelp forest and even a cam on the monteray bay its self! Oh the fun 
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Nov. 23, 2005 - Me and baby
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Nov. 23, 2005 - First Day of Homeschool
Well today is our first day of home school. We don’t have all of our supplies but I wanted to get right into the feel of learning at home. 
who just turned 3 and Kelsey 
who will be 2 in December.
I am choosing to do more of an eclectic style of home schooling. I want to use the best of all styles. I know we will find our groove and may lean more towards one style then the other. I just want the room to grow and change and adapt to my children’s needs.
So today we started off with some "copy work". I had the kids pick a favorite page from an age appropriate book and copy the text. Then they drew the picture on the page. This was an easy thing for my oldest. My daughter struggled and lost her place here and there. After lunch we did "presentations" reading the exerts they had written and showing us the pictures they had drawn.
We followed this with a little bit of charades and a game of eye spy. Just for fun!
I really want to ease the kids into the idea of home school with me. So as I gather my plans and figure out how the heck we are going to do this we are keeping it light and finding our groove! 
