http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/ en-us Homeschool Blogger Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:50:00 -0600 Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:50:00 -0600 Because I can't support a site that accepts advertising from baby whipping advocates.  Sigh.  I like this place, too.    http://www.odonnellweb.com/mtarchives/002299.php  Some foul language there, so I will quote a bit here that gives the gist without the language:   "Do Not Link to HomeschoolBlogger.com Homeschoolblogger.com accepts advertising from No Greater Joy Ministries, who publish To Train Up A Child, a Christian parenting manual that advocates lashing your children with plumbing supply lines, because they sting, but don't bruise. More On To Train A Child In an article published today about a child abuse case in NC, Gina Suarez, publisher of Homeschoolblogger.com, is quoted defending the use of plumbing supply lines to beat your child. "[The Pearls] are talking about something that would fit in a purse," Suarez said. "The only way you can kill a child with that is by shoving it down his throat." Isn't that nice? Should the sane members of the homeschooling community really be sending traffic to their site?" http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/102038/ Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:50:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/102038/ what with the moving preparation that has to be done.  Dh started his new job on Monday and has decided to stay.  So hopefully we'll move soon -- driving 5 hours a day isn't so fun, especially on snowy roads.  Amazingly, we've already had a tentative offer on the house.  I babysit for a neighbour who lives in this same townhouse complex, but doesn't like the unit she is in.  Hers is a bit smaller (because it has a larger fenced-in yard area) and she has noisy neighbours.  This complex is close to her kids' school -- likely the cheapest places that are walking distance to it, unless you go to an apartment.  And she loves our new kitchen.  If we sold to them, we could avoid the realtor fees.   Today, we mostly just read.  The kids played nicely together, thank goodness.  No tv, but probably more computer than they needed.  They played crazy 8's and yahtzee, lego, and they pretended that they were preparing to blast into space.  I bagged up 9 garbage bags full of clothes, toys, diapers, and other things to go to Value Village.  D helped me make supper while S raided the big utensil drawer for tools so he could "grind his bones to make my bread."  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/80990/ Wed, 8 Feb 2006 17:53:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/80990/ OK, I'm one of those parents who considers cribs, playpens, exercausers, swings, etc. to be baby cages.  I admit it.  Someone gave us a crib when D was born, and when I realized I was only using it to hold laundy, we sold it.  A cousin lent me a playpen.  I think we set it up once for a day or two when D was a toddler.  So he could climb in and out on his own, we put a chair and a stool for stairs to get in, and a toy bin inside to climb down on or up out of the playpen.  He wasn't too crazy about it, it took up a lot of space, and so it went back away again.  Recently, I have been thinking it would be a good idea to get it out so the boys have a place to play with legos or other things they don't want M destroying.  People were generally cranky yesterday, so I decided to set it up as a diversion.  S was so excited about it -- he's never seen a play pen before, and I think the name made it sound more exciting than it really is.  When I was setting it up, he asked me where all the toys were.  :P  He wanted to go in first.  After a few minutes of hanging out in there with a transformer, a dinosaur, a stuffed unicorn, and a book of mazes, he wanted to come out.  D, who was laying on the couch sick, wanted to go in next.  I set up his pillow and blanket in there, and he laid down while I finised our school reading.  Then he asked for his starfall workbook, but didn't feel like doing much.  When he came out, M wanted in.  Once she realized she was trapped in there, I figured she would want out.  Not so.  She loved it in there!  She rolled around on the bottom, jumped, pulled herself up on the sides, ran the few steps from one end to the other and hit the wall and fell down laughing.  She would crouch down and look out through the mesh, then stand up and peek over the top edge.  After a while, I thought she might be getting bored, so I went to lift her out.  She ran to the far corner and crouched down as far as she could.  The kids spent most of the rest of the day taking turns in the playpen.  When N came home, he discovered that a blanket on top makes a fun little cave.  Oh, how M squealed with delight.  This morning, M wanted back in again, and it occured to me that the play pen is a great place for playing with messy things that toddlers like -- rice bins, bits of paper they want to tear up and toss around, etc.  We have a package of pasta that was spilled on the floor and was donated to the craft bin.  I put that in there with her and various containers and such.  She loves being in there, pouring them from one container to another, dropping them on her head, and tossing them around.  I'm not getting stressed out over the mess and having to crawl under the table and locate lost pasta.  Everybody's happy!  I don't know that I would have pulled it out when she was much younger than this.  But it is wonderful now!  We just need one that's a bit bigger, since all three kids want to be in it together sometimes.   I never thought I would see the day I would be singing the praises of a play pen. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/78591/ Sat, 4 Feb 2006 12:38:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/78591/ for a few days.  I'm totally excited about moving and managed to convince myself that I need to spend all of my time searching for info on Toronto, the transit system, and apartments, or decluttering and figuring out packing.  :P  I think tomorrow morning (assuming I manage to drag myself out of bed) I will manage to let it go.  I have come to accept that when I get excited about something, I completely immerse myself in it until I start to get bored, and then I can be more rational about how much time I spend on it.    S has started practising writing letters.  He wrote four or so notes to me, all Ns and Os with an I or two thrown in.  Today, he pulled out a notebook of his and started writing lines of letters -- mostly Ns, Ms, Os, and Is.  He has also been working on sounding out short words.  He's figuring out about silent "e" -- I read some word to him recently when he asked what it was, and he asked why I didn't say the e.  I explained briefly that it was a silent e -- it didn't get pronounced, instead its job was to help us know how to pronounce the whole word.  He was looking at a book about a dinosaur bone today, and suddenly he exclaimed, "That's a silent e!  The word is bone and it has a silent e!"  :D   Both boys were feeling a bit under the weather today.  I started reading "Little Men" out loud at bedtime last night.  I read an abriged version of Little Women a long time ago, and came across this book on my most recent visit to the used book store.  Now I'll have to try and get Little Women from the library.  We didn't read much of it last night -- D was really tired and fell asleep almost before the lights were off -- and tonight, I asked him if he wanted to read it or something else, because I wasn't sure if he liked the book.  He said he loved it -- it had boys and dancing and tag, after all, what's not to love?   D played checkers with the girls we babysit who is about his age.  Since she had talked about playing checkers, I assumed she knew the rules.  D is a very rules-oriented kid (when it suits his needs, hehe), and I guess it didn't occur to me that not every kid is.  So she had to learn how to play while playing with him.  D won all three games that they played.  The girl was such a good sport about it -- when D announced the first time that he won because he took all of her pieces, she just said "Whatever, do you want to play again?" and going on to lose twice more didn't seem to dampen her enthusiasm for it.  I just hope D was soaking up her example!    I am considering hauling the play pen my cousin gave me out of storage (I think we set it up once, D enjoyed it until the novelty wore off, and it takes up a lot of room) so that the boys have a safe place to play without M being able to get at them.  They haven't been able to play with legos or the train set or the marble track thing or the car track, or anything that she can demolish, for a while now. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/77864/ Fri, 3 Feb 2006 01:38:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/77864/ I'm getting a little frustrated and dissatisfied at the moment.  One of the basic ideas of TJEd or Leadership Education as espoused by the DeMilles is to structure the time, not the content -- set aside time for learning to happen, but don't plan math for 9:30 to 10:00, French from 10:00 to 10:30, etc.  So that's what I've been trying to do.  I do loosely schedule my own studies, and I do have a basic schedule for our morning devotional and a bit of read-aloud, and then we call it "free school time" until lunch.  The idea is everyone goes about their business -- learning materials are stored in a cupboard or closet and the bookcases are in the living room, but really the only limits they place on school time is no friends, no tv, no comp/video games, and I agree with that.  But when free time starts, I feel like everything just falls apart.  The house gets messy(er), for one.  The kids sometimes get bored.  I feel like, this is the time for me to get some studying done (generally I like to work on my history studies, French, and practise piano in free time), but of course, there are interruptions.  I know I should welcome interruptions, but honestly, I feel so scatterbrained from all of them, yk?  Like I can never string together two thoughts in a row without someone needing something.  It doesn't help that the toddler is, well, a toddler, and an avid climber, and can find anything that gets left lying around, slide it across the floor to whatever she wants to climb on, and suddenly be trying to push over the cpu or standing on the piano keys or dumping out the contents of the spice drawer.  The boys get especially frustrated, because they can no longer have any freedom from her destroying anything they try to build.  She loves putting her hands into lego, shaking her hands around in it, and throwing it everywhere.  She feels terribly left out if they are building something or doing crafts on the table.  Giving her something similar on the floor doesn't help.  Sigh.  I have been tempted more times in the last few weeks than in the entire history of my motherhood to break out the playpen that someone gave us.  Hmmmm, I wonder if she might actually like it.  Or maybe the boys would like it, and she could climb on the table and feel like she is getting the better deal.  Not that we have room for it....   I guess I'm just feeling like, if I had more of a plan for our time, I wouldn't feel like we were all over the place, and I might feel like we were actually accomplishing something.  D was bored when free time started yesterday, and sometimes I end up doing something with bored kids, sometimes I let them find their own solution to the boredom.  I decided to ask if he wanted to do some more math activities from his math book (Making Math Meaningful).  So, first off, we couldn't find these manipulatives we made and needed.  (They are just little strips of paper that we cut out of the book -- equal and unequal lengths, labeled with a letter of the alphabet, and they ask if b and c are equal or unequal, etc.)  Spent some time searching for those.  No luck.  So we went on to the next activity -- you needed long, thin objects, some the same length, some different (like pencils or pens).  Used pencil crayons.  The next activity, you needed ten each of links, counting chips, and linking counting squares.  Well, you really just needed three groups of similar-sized objects, but I did my best to find the same kinds of things:  paperclips, lego squares (we have some already separate for counting with), and these litte foam geometric shapes.  Oh, and we needed a paper bag -- some container for the kid to pull them out of.  I used a cloth bag.  But, it took time to gather everything up -- D was waiting and getting bored-er, M was getting into everywhere I tried looking for things and trying to climb everything, and S was in the bathroom (the kids' favourite place for making a mess).  D enjoyed the activity (pull out a random handful, sort the three groups of objects, and then I ask how many paper clips?  How many lego?  He writes them down, and has to write the equal or unequal sign), but it really didn't last very long.  We did end up having fun with this big magnet we have and the paperclips (it was strong enough to pull them around through our inch-thick maple table).  I guess my picture of "free time" is the kids, say, happily going through the material in the school closet and building lego castles or putting on puppet shows or putting on a concert or doing puzzles or making paper airplanes or sculpting weird creatures or making neat shapes with the tangrams or reading or doing dot-to-dots or writing notes to imaginary friends or going around the house measuring everything they can find or....  Instead, everyone is trying to keep away from M, the boys are constantly asking for tv or comp time, and I can never set a wonderful example of diligent scholarship for more than 30 seconds at a time.  I know M will only be a toddler for so long... kids grow up so fast... but right now, it feels like time is moving so slowly, and we're not making any progress.   D was a big help yesterday.  He was upset when he found out that I had done the load of diapers myself.  I didn't want him handling the dirty dipes, ick.  But, oh man, I just realized that when I told him he could go down and move them from the washer to the dryer, they had only finished one cycle -- I usually run them on a second cycle with no detergent to rinse them really well.  D also helped make dinner and unload the dishwasher.  The boys didn't watch any tv yesterday -- they did play a bit on the puter.  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/74036/ Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:10:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/74036/ so far.  Monday we took off; Tuesday we had a pretty normal day, with reading, playing, building, etc.  N was home a bit late from work and insisted on stopping to get a treat on the way.  He did and to my great surprise, suggested we have Family Home Evening that night (we usually try to have it on Mondays, but N is often home so late from work that the kids are getting ready for bed and we're all to tired to deal).  I don't know why I didn't suspect that anything was up.  So we had a hymn, a prayer, and went over our calendar.  Then N announces that we're having a family council (and explains the term to D).  He said he had been offered a job.  Now, I knew that the had applied for a job in Toronto, and they had called him basically to say that he met the criteria and they would call him when a spot became available (it is a gov't job, with the Revenue Agency).  So, apparently, they contacted him.  We went over the details, and I gave my concerns.  Turned out he had already prayed about what to do, and had decided to take the job.  He did want to hear any concerns I had before I knew that he was taking the job so I would be honest.  :P  So he'll be commuting for now -- it's 4 to 5 hours round trip.  :S  He starts in a couple of weeks, and it is 5 weeks of training at 30 hours a week, and then he starts full time.  I can't imagine what the gas costs will be.  We thought a bit about somehow short-term leasing or even buying a cheap, fuel-efficient vehicle (we have a mini van).  We'll see what happens.  While he's in training, I will be packing up and purging as much as I can, and then likely the kids and I will stay at my parents.  N will work on the house and put it on the market and look for a place for us to live while we're away.  I'm really hoping it will all go smoothly.  I've already packed up a few bags and boxes of trash and stuff for Value Village.  I'm pretty excited -- I was getting really sick of being here, not in the country and not really in the city.  I felt so stuck.  And this is at least a bit closer to the grandparents.    I'm just hoping the tiredness I've been feeling isn't pregnancy-induced... I can't imagine packing up a house and moving while pg.   Today we took it a bit easier for school.  The boys were doing really well at playing together, having a fun time, so we just read a bit and then I let them do their thing.  I did the packing and tossing and searching around for info about Toronto and places to live. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/73366/ Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:48:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/73366/ We pretty much took Friday off.  If I recall correctly, it was one of the days when we actually had snow on the ground, and we went outside again.  The kids came in long enough to eat lunch (after our walk) and then went outside to play in the snow with the neighbour.  Oh no, wait, Thursday we had snow on the ground and the kids played outside.  When I woke up on Friday, it had rained and most of the snow was gone.  The kids rode bikes in the afternoon.   We did homeschool today -- dh works Tues to Sat -- and it went fairly well.  The toddler is definately a hurdle, as she wants to be in the middle of everything, and is very loud.  After doing our usual reading, we played a couple of "math" games, and then I declared it "free time."  I looked up something on the computer and then practised the piano while the kids played.  They were playing at something make believe together, and I completely forget now what it was.  :P  I also pulled out the noodles, a craft they haven't done in a while -- they are foamish little bead things that you moisten and stick together.  M fell asleep early and we had lunch.  D has discovered that he can do most of the work for baked potato skins with cheese.  He washed and pricked the potatoes, and then I baked and cut them open.  He scooped out a bit of the potato and put on the cheese; I put them in the toaster oven.  While he was doing the cheese part, he was singing "Chef D" again and again.  It was very cute.   I'm reading "Awakening Your Child's Natural Genius" by Thomas Armstrong.  He has a ton of ideas for activities do to with your child.  I tried one, where you draw together on a piece of paper, to communicate.  We ended up just drawing together, which was nice.  Oh, I did it with D.  http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/71572/ Sun, 22 Jan 2006 00:21:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/71572/ We've been having a good time, despite chronic late starting.  I get discouraged once we get going well with routinely setting aside school time -- seems like everything we do takes a long time.  Yesterday we did our usual reading, played a few games (a kids' yahtzee game and Go Fish), and then went out for a walk and a bit of snow play.  We did start late, and then by the time we were finished eating "lunch", the afternoon was practically over.  Today we started with our usual reading.  We are still working on memorizing the Articles of Faith.  I'm doing well with it, but D has lost interest.  I remembered that we have a poster with them written out on it that we bought through our church's distribution centre.  I showed it to the kids and suggested that we read them all and put the poster up somewhere to help us with memorizing it.  D decided *he* wanted to read them all himself.  Unthinkingly, I also told the boys that once anyone memorizes all of them, they get a little card with the A of F printed on it to carry in their scripture case.  Then I thought, is this bribing?  Rewarding?  Is it going to diminish the natural, intrinsic desire for learning and make the reward more important to them?  Gah.    So after our reading, again we played some games.  This morning I printed out some math games from Joyful Math and dug up the rest of our dice, as well as checker pieces.  D and S found them (before school time) and decided to make their own checker board while I was showering.  It didn't quite work.  I let the boys choose books to end our reading time, and D chose the Magic Schoolbus book we have on hurricanes.  They go up in a hot air balloon in it, and in a sidebar they describe an experiment you can do with a pan of hot water, a bottle, and a balloon (you put the balloon over the bottle opening and put it in the hot water; when the air expands, the balloon fills).  The boys loved this.  Then we each chose a game to play.  We did yahtzee again, and then checkers.  We rolled to see which two people played first -- S and I.  I won (though he did very well, and caught on quickly).  He said I hurt his feelings when I won.  Then D and I played.  I won.  He cried.  I told him I had been practising playing checkers for 20 years, and this was (he told me) his third game.  Of course it would be nearly impossible for him to win.  But if he keeps playing against me, and notices how I play and what kind of moves I make, he will get better and better and win more and more often.  I'm not sure if that was the right way to handle it, but he felt better, anyway.    That was pretty much the end of our school day, as M was majorly fussy and we were all ready to eat.  The boys were restless during quiet minutes -- probably because D chose his "airplane book" to look at and S kept trying to get in and see it too.  So I pulled out one of the Charlie Brown encyclopaedias that MIL gave us, on cars and trains, for S.  So of course D wanted one too; he got Machines.  We read from it after quiet minutes.  They then went outside to build snowmen, and are now playing at a friend's house.  Our babysitting charges will be here any minute.  I haven't done one bit of Hebrew or nearly enough reading to keep up with my reading challenge.  :P http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/70494/ Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:34:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/70494/ So, we started as usual today; our poems were again from the Winnie the Pooh poems, and we read a chapter in Our Island Story.  I tried to find pics of Roman galley ships online (the chapter we read was about Julius Caesar coming and fighting against the Britons) but had no luck.  M was very fussy so it cut short my time.  We did French, but D wasn't too interested in it, and I wanted to practise for myself, so he made himself a snack.  He decided that he wanted to practise school again, so I told him it was math time, and he could sit at the table and I printed up some math worksheets for him.  While he did that, I printed up some French colouring pages (to learn the colours) and we talked about them, then while he coloured I marked his math sheets.  While he finished the colouring I "packed" him a lunch; after putting away his things, he (and S) ate at the table.  I am amazed at how well-behaved the kids are when they play school (S was joining in with everything).  After lunch, I told D it was recess time.  He isn't feeling well (has a cold), so I told him he could choose to go outside or stay at the table and do something quietly, like reading, colouring, or more worksheets.  He waffled a bit, and eventually decided he didn't want to practise school any more.  He says he doesn't want to go to school at all, but I have a feeling he will be asking to go again once the girls we babysit start talking about pizza day or gym or something.  I wouldn't mind enrolling him so he could see what it was really like, but I don't want to be a big pain for the school.   I'm doing well with my reading challenge... almost done Coppermine Journey and I think I'm starting The Chosen next. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/66693/ Wed, 11 Jan 2006 11:37:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/66693/ We had a bit of a late start today, but nothing too drastic, and I managed to get caught up on the dishes and such, so I didn't mind.  Kids were a bit bouncy -- I think they're coming down with a bit of a cold.  Again.  M was fussy all day yesterday, and D woke up shortly after 5 am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.  S has been a cranky pants all day so far, getting upset at everything.  They are all asleep now -- a small miracle which I am not properly appreciating, since it means they might be up late tonight.    We started as usual, with singing, a prayer, and scriptures.  I'm roughly following the Old Testament Stories book, and this week is the Creation.  I was reading Genesis 1, and about the beasts being created.  D asked when, then, did God create dinosaurs?  and S wanted to know if the beasts that were created were like the beast in Beauty and the Beast.  Sigh.  We worked on our memorizing -- I recited the Articles of Faith I/we have memorized so far, and D followed along to see if I was right.  We did a brief review of the primary lesson from Sunday (I'm a teacher now, but I teach the class between D's and S's.  D's class uses the same manual, though).  We had poetry time.  I took out the Winnie the Pooh poems and let the boys choose.  Then it was history reading time -- we read a chapter from The Story of Mankind.  Last week's was about hieroglyphics, this week's was about how people came to the Nile to farm and live and how pyramids came to be built to protect the dead from robbers.  Since I printed this book without the pictures, we went to the computer to google for hieroglyphics and pyramids.  We found a page where you can [http://www.quizland.com/hiero.mv] translate into hieroglyphics and did our names, then [http://greatscott.com/hiero/] a more general page about hieroglyphics.  Then looking up pyramids, we found a [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/] virtual tour of a pyramid at the PBS website.  D loved this, and I thought it was pretty cool too.  Then we went on to the French cds and D, once again, was hesitant at first, but by the time we needed to start making lunch and pacify M, he didn't want to stop.  I had hoped to get started with Making Math Meaninful this morning, but it didn't happen.   After lunch, D said he wanted us to pretend we were at school so he could see if he liked it.  I said OK, it's quiet minutes time, so we'll have quiet reading time like they do at school.  You can choose a book to read and sit at the table (like a desk) and read it quietly.  He asked if we could do crafts instead, since they do crafts at school.  I said they do, but only when the teacher says it's craft time, and I say it's not craft time, it's reading time.  He said OK and we started.  About 6 minutes in, he leaves the table to sit on the couch.  I told him he couldn't leave without permission, since we were pretending to be in school, and he said he didn't want to any more, he hated sitting at the table.  I think it's mostly because he wasn't feeling well -- he just laid down on the couch for the rest of quiet minutes and fell asleep.   I've been trying to get my links to work, and I don't know what's up with them!  Arg. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/66297/ Tue, 10 Jan 2006 14:55:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/Brisen/66297/