Homeschooling for his glory - Homeschool Blogger

Sunday Song

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:43:00 -0600

Here is a chorus that I really like. It is short but very uplifting (Romans 11:30-32).

How Great is Your Love

by Mark Altrogge

No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
No mind has ever conceived
The glorious things that You have prepared
For everyone who has believed
You brought us near and You called us Your own
And made us joint heirs with Your Son.

Chorus:
How high and how wide,
How deep and how long,
How sweet and how strong is Your love.
How lavish Your grace,
How faithful Your ways,
How great is Your love, oh Lord.

Objects of mercy who should have known wrath
We’re filled with unspeakable joy.
Riches of wisdom, unsearchable wealth,
And the wonder of knowing Your voice.
You are our treasure and our great reward,
Our hope and our glorious King.

Have a blessed Sunday,

Weekly wrap-up

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:35:00 -0600

Fridays seem to come by so quickly. The week just flies by and it feels like we have not done much. But, I guess we must have done something.

We have been following a schedule for the past 3 weeks so as to give structure to the boys and that has helped us keep things on going and on track.

One of the changes this week was to put his violin practice first thing after breakfast and before school. This has definitely minimized the complaining about having to quit his play to practice and has added regularity. Practice have been a bit of a struggle for both of us for the past few weeks but that's for a totally separate post. Today was a good day though, which has a lot to do with having prayed before we started.

Math has been going well. I am very happy to see that Zach has been enjoying Math even though he is not very happy about all the work involved, but he really likes the concepts.

English is going along as well. We finished grade 1 of FLL and have moved on to grade 2.

For reading, Zach has been complaining a bit; he does not really enjoy fiction, so it is a bit of a struggle, but we are making our way through. e only do reading twice a week since he does read a whole lot of other stuff at other times. Narration is going well. I am still to actually add more variety, but that has to do with lack of organization on my part.

Science is on track as well, we learnt about amphibians, reptiles and fishes this week.

History has been passed over for the past 2 weeks. Zach and I have been feeling pretty tired. No playdate this week either, instead, you won't believe it, but I set up my christmas tree. I know, I know it's early, but I totally love christmas trees. Next week, the baking will start.

We have also began to read Prince Caspian as our read aloud. We had read The lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe a few months ago.

Joho has been busy with playdoh, Super Mind shape puzzles, Math games, worksheets of all sorts.

So, that was our week in a nutshell. Sorry not many pictures this week.

For more weekly wrap-up, hop on over @Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Have a great day,

Link treasures

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0600

The homeschool classroom as a great post on Recommended Reading for Homeschool Moms.

I have discovered 2 great educational sites: Arcademic Skill Builders, which is a great online Math games site, and, Mark Kistlers great drawing site (it is a paid course but there are free samples and there is a good deal on it at the Homeschool buyer co-op).

Education Place has great resources as well for the teachers and students. Be sure to look around, there is lots of stuff there.

I also found a mine full of free internet resources for the homeschool here.

Heart of the matter on Fun in the kitchen with your preschooler.

An innovative take on workboxes I thought was neat. In the future I might try that.

A post on the Benefits of homeschooling.

Have a great day,

Firefighting books

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:45:00 -0600

This is my first time joining in on the Kid's Picks @ 5 minutes for Books.

Here are my boys' (6 and 4) newest subject selection: Firefighters:

I also have selections on trucks and train.

Have a great day,

Human body lapbook

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:22:00 -0600

As promised I have the pictures of the lapbook I was working on last week. It comprises all the topics we covered in our science class during our 6 weeks long elective. I just wanted to give the kids something to take home that would remind them of what they learned. I created all of the material from scratch using resources from the the internet.

If you would like the file you can e-mail me and I would gladly share it with you. I might put it on my Scribd account, but I am not sure of when yet.

Have a great day,

Link treasures

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:27:00 -0600

As I mentioned in yesterday's post I have not spent much time at the computer this week, so this week's line up will be short.

Here is what I have for this week:

At South Forte Farm: 7 habits of highly effective women.

At Confession of an organized homeschool mom: The 411 on paper.

At Apple pie you can find 2 nice articles on joy and work and find the other one here.

At Raising arrow, an excellent post on kids and chores

Have a great day,

Weekly Wrap-up

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:28:00 -0600

It is Friday and time for a weekly wrap-up.

For any of you who normally follow my blog, I am sorry I did not blog this week, but I was very busy working on a lapbook for my students at elective this week, since it was our last elective for this session. I will post the final product on Monday.

This project took me the whole on Tuesday, Thursday and part of Wednesday.

On Monday we went on a fieldtrip that took us the whole day. we went to the Royal Ontario winter fair. We all had a great time.

We did do school this week. Math, English and Science got squeezed in somehow.

Wednesday I did take the kids on a playdate for a few hours. They had fun!

Today was our last day of elective and I forgot my camera. Zach did well in his drama presentation. Could have spoken louder, but hey. . . His song presentation was nice too except he kept jiggleling during most of it. I found the whole thing rather funny.

Anyway that was our week. For more weekly wrap-up head on over at Weird Unsocialized homeschoolers.

Have a great day,

Weekly Wrap-up

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 17:54:00 -0600

I hope you all had a good and productive week. We are 3 weeks away from our Christmas break and doing well.

This week we were able to do all the things that we were supposed to. I have been trying to keep a cold off bay. Johann had a cough from last week, but is getting better. And dad is trying to keep it all away from him (getting sick with his illness is not recommended).

Here is what we did though:
Science, we moved on to species and Zach seems to be quite interrested.

Reading, we are continuing on with our BJU readers and narration. This week we did retelling of story and summary of ideas.

History, we moved on to the times of the Pilgrims. Zach was very excited to realized that we had visited quite a few of the original colonies.

Math, we finished the Singapore 1A and we are both exited about that. We did weight and measurements this week and Zach had fun. Here is Zach measuring the wall with his hand.

Here he is measuring the desk using a pen:

Here he is measuring his truck with blocks:

Spelling, I had held back in doing it, because of all the writing involved, but surprisingly on Monday Zach wanted to do spelling, so, we had a nice spelling session using a board and markers. I forgot to take a picture of that. Hopefully he will do it again next week and I will remember to take a pic.

This week we have moved on to a different topic in our FLL: Sentences. That`s exiting. We love FFL but sometimes it tends to get repetitive, which in itself is good but . . . Anyway, this week was a bit more exiting.

Here he is putting some sentences in order

I had also forgotten to mention that since we came back from our vacation 2 months ago, we have started doing Daily Geography once a week, and Zach has been enjoying it very much.

As for Joho he has been doing his reading with dad as well as his regular math games, as shown here, and this week he also did some sight word matching, which you can see here.

Last week I mentioned that the boys have been into firefighting these days. Here is a pic of them rescuing a house (that they built).

Another thing that happened this week was on Monday when Johann was hanging on my arm as usual while I was getting a dish out of the fridge, and blam, on the floor it went with the freshly, as of the night before, baked apple crisp. I let out a shout, of course, but by God's grace, and only His grace, managed to keep it together. My husband reminded of how this would be a perfect chance for me to demonstrate forgiveness and so I did. This was one of those dishes that goes both in the oven and on the stove. Both my husband and I loooved it. Anyway, today, my husband brought home a cast iron dutch oven (we've never owned one before). Thank you hubby!

And that's it. For more weekly wrap-up hop on over at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Have a great day,

What we have been adding to our homeschool

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 19:56:00 -0600

As mentioned before I am always trying to spice up our homeschool and come up with extra things for teaching different subjects. Now I am not very creative, so much of my ideas are either from somewhere or a derivative of another idea. Here is a sample of things I have done.

For language, in the past, I have made up matching cards of sight words for the kids to practice them. They've mastered them for a while now, but as I took them out to give them to a friend of mine, Joho decided he wanted to do them.

Today for our math lesson, I was supposed to have a weighing scale, but I did not. So here is what I came up with:

Lapbooks I have been working on:

As we go through our First Language Lessons book, I am making a lapbook to go along with it

This is one to go along our Building Spelling Skills

I finally starting on the Biomes one

Some visuals:

I am going to start teaching them about Continents, so, I found these continent maps at abcteach.com and a song to learn the continents at Lessons Pathways.

Here are the words of the song, sung to the tune of Up Goes the Weasel

Asia, Africa, Antartica,
Australia and Europe too,
North America, South America
These are the seven continents

And here is our latest addition:
The idea came from Pumpkin Patch, a blog that definitely deserves a visit. You will find the template and the instructions there. The boys were really happy to see this clock when they woke up this morning. Hopefully they will know how to tell time in no time.

Have a great day,

Wordless wednesday - Brothers

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 19:51:00 -0600

Have a great day,