Concept Week #2: Gardening

As an expansion on the Food Pyramid and healthy eating we did gardening for our second Concept Week.  Optimus Prime & Bumblebee had already grown seeds inside a couple of different Friday's for their Arts & Crafts days so we were looking forward to moving them outside anyway.

Like I said before we start each Concept Week with a project, so since the seeds they planted were grown enough to go out they helped me fill in the raised beds with dirt, bring the trays out, and replant the new plants.

For schoolwork I went to this site and printed up a bunch of pages about gardening and farming for us to do.  Most of the pages were coloring pages, which they really just scribbled on since they really don't care for coloring, but they all had information on them about gardening.  So even though they just scribbled we did read the pages and they learned about the different tools and different plants, and what plants need to grow.

The last thing we did was read a book about gardening.  I love The Magic School Bus series so I was glad that we could use one of their books for our lesson.  We used "The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow."  In the book the class is taking care of their class garden and Phoebe's sad since all her flowers are in her class garden back at her old school.  So the class takes a field trip to go check on how her flowers are doing.  While we planted vegetables and not flowers the book was still neat.  Plus, it gave me a chance to explain that most of our future vegetables would start out as flowers that turn into a vegetable.  This lesson sunk in the other day when we went outside and discovered that our cucumber flowers had turned into little baby cucumbers!

Family Vacation!

No posts for the last week since we were off on a family vacation.  We took Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Scooby-Doo to two outdoor dinosaur museums/parks, one state park, two zoos and one aquarium!  Our vacation was packed!  I'm working on a couple of posts right now to go up over the weekend.  One about our Gardening Concept Week and one about our vacation.  I want to get them up before we start doing our dinosaur schoolwork on Sunday and I start working on our next quarters schedule - and I have to post about those things!

Meanwhile, for those of you questioning whether I made my poor kids do schoolwork while ON vacation since I have said we do schoolwork everyday, my answer is no.  Remember how I also said I was stepping up our workload to make up for some sick days back in January?  Well, I was also stepping up our workload to cover our vacation.  We are currently more or less on schedule, and so long as we don't deviate from it again we should be fine.

And for a final bit of news The Well and the Ash Tree is on Facebook!  Right now I'm just posting links to the blog but pretty soon I'll be adding more than that!  So, check us out at https://www.facebook.com/TheWellAndTheAshTree!

See you tomorrow (hopefully)!

Arts & Crafts Day #1

I'm not going to post about EVERY Arts & Crafts Day, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to show you some of our ideas and projects to give you an idea about what to do.  So, since the day before yesterday was our first A&C D since I stared this blog, here goes.

First we made jell-o.  Yup, jell-o.  We found a kids "recipe" that has you layer different colors of jello into dessert cups for a treat.  So we did.

Then, we made foam puppets.  These little guys came from Dollar General.  I wasn't sure if Optimus Prime and Bumblebee would like them or not so I didn't go crazy buying them.  Turns out, they loved doing them.  Now I need to head back to the store so we can do more.

Lastly, we painted.  This set was from Wal-Mart.  It was a six pack of farm animals that I picked up a few months ago.

We were going to make pumpkin pie, but I didn't realize that you needed evaporated milk, not regular milk, so pumpkin pie will be next week.

Excited!

With first grade coming up for Optimus Prime & Bumblebee I've been busy looking into new workbooks for them.  I have to say that I'm really excited with some of the stuff that I've found!

I found geography books, Spanish books, science books, English books, and reading comprehension books that have short stories based on little kids "classics" with questions for them to answer.  I've even found some dinosaur models geared towards kids their age that we can do during our dinosaur week!

I've been busy thinking up ways to arrange their new schedule, trying to figure out what subjects we will cover everyday and which ones we'll do every other day.  So my days have been busy!  I won't finalize everything until the last two weeks of July so I still have a bit of time to figure things out.  However I'm looking forward to finishing up with the kindergarten schedule.  For the first half of kindergarten we did just strictly kindergarten work, for the second half it's been a blend of kindergarten and first grade, but the kindergarten stuff has been boring them a bit lately - a lot of it is just based on coloring which they really don't care for - so I'm looking forward to moving on to new things!

Concept Week #1: The Food Pyramid

Since today was a day off from schoolwork I figured I'd put up this post.

The food pyramid was our first Concept Week, and it was a little rough around the edges, however it gave me a feel for what I wanted to do and the rest really took off so it worked out in the end.  I decided to do this because Optimus Prime & Bumblebee followed me around the house for four days straight begging me to make chocolate chip cookies.  Finally I told them that we needed to learn about the Food Pyramid since my answer of "No junk food today" just wasn't cutting it.  I'm not saying that you can't have junk food, but we had just finished off a cake earlier that week and I didn't see the need for cookies the following day.

It took a bit of hunting around the internet for free worksheets, and after we had finished the unit I actually found this website which has tons of free nutrition worksheets, so I was a bit bummed - but they also had gardening worksheets so it all worked out in the end.  On a side note the USDA said that they were working on worksheets for myplate but had none up.  They also said that you could access all of their old food pyramid worksheets but I couldn't.  I found the links for them but nothing was there.  I don't know if these issues have since been worked out or not.  So we didn't use anything from their site in the end and had to rely upon Google and worksheets that I wrote up myself.

I start each Concept Week with a project so I made a giant color-coded food pyramid out of construction paper and hung it up on our wall.  Then I printed up pictures of food from the internet and had Optimus Prime and Bumblebee put them where they thought they were supposed to go.  The ones they got wrong we went over together.  We also went over why things like ice cream went in junk food instead of dairy and cookies went in junk food instead of grains.  We left the food pyramid up for the whole month in the end.

We also worked everyday on a workbook that I had pulled together for them with worksheets from Google.  They were typical pre-k/kindergarten kids worksheets like "circle all of the grains," or "draw a picture of your favorite fruit."

On our final day, after we finished off the workbook, we read a book that was relevant to our lessons.  We actually read "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food" by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  While the book didn't actually go over the food pyramid it was a good book and it worked out just fine since it also covered the importance of exercise which we didn't go over.

In the end the lesson sunk in and while they still ask for junk food they don't beg for it like they used to.  Now things like brownies and cakes only get made once a week and they understand why they can only have one or two pieces a day.  They are also a lot more understanding when I say no to them, where before they would just whine that they really, really wanted cookies.  So even though the whole thing didn't come out perfect I think it was a win!

Hi Everyone!

I'm really excited to be starting this new blog about homeschooling.  I love homeschooling, but sometimes I get very frustrated by it.  Not because of my kids, who also love homeschooling, but by both the lack of information and the overload of information out there.

When it came down to finding things like curriculum and textbooks and worksheets I felt very frustrated.  I found textbooks online going for a minimum of $50 (used) each.  $50 might not sound like much but it is when it is book one of a series of six books that your first grader is supposed to cover over the year.  $300 per subject each year is A LOT of money to shell out.  Yes, you can reuse the books, and that's why they cost so much money, but I'm not planning on having 10 kids over here!  Also I couldn't seem to find worksheets online for the subject material that I wanted, so I found myself either buying workbooks - which is fine - or writing up my own - which is not so fine.  But curriculum is by far my biggest gripe.  No one, anywhere, seems to have curriculum ideas posted.  And if they do mention it they say something along the lines of "We don't use things like textbooks, worksheets, or curriculum.  We just let our child figure things out on their own."  That might work for some people, and that's fine (that's actually how one of my sister-in-laws decided to homeschool and it works great for them) but I wanted a bit more of a hands-on approach.

Likewise the overload of information going in the opposite direction is staggering.  Like I mentioned before when gripping about curriculum the number of people out there insisting on the "hands-off/don't worry about it approach" is mind blowing.  They are full of information and advice - on what NOT to do.

So I decided that what I need to do is start my own blog, which will hopefully help out anyone out there who is feeling as adrift as I was at times, and like I still am at some moments.

So, meet our homeschooling family.  There is me, Ash Falcon.  I'm a stay-at-home mom/housewife.  I'm the primary homeschooler in the house.  I am constantly working on curriculum, trying out new ideas to see what works, finding new projects, checking out new homeschooling books, searching for the perfect textbooks and worksheets to use, and generally obsessing about homeschooling to the point that I probably drive my husband crazy.

Then there is my husband, Coffee Hound.  He works to support us.  He is - both fortunately and unfortunately - wonderful.  He drives me crazy, I drive him crazy.  It works for us.

Then we have twins, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee.  They are going to start first grade in August, however that doesn't mean that they are out of school right now!  We homeschool all year round.  No winter break, no spring break, no summer vacation.  Why?  I found that they retain the material better if we go over it consistently everyday.  If we take more than 2 days off they do a brain dump and we wind up backtracking to recover some ground.  It's very frustrating, but I actually don't mind doing schoolwork everyday.  This also means that we don't have to cram every single subject in every day since they homeschool on the weekends too.  They do get two days off a week - after all I don't want them to burn out - but those two days are not in a row.  We seem to get the best results that way.

My youngest is Scooby-Doo and he's not homeschooling yet.  He will start in August with some preschool work even though he's a bit young for it.  He loves copying his older brothers in everything that they do.  Right now his own "schoolwork" consists of a clipboard with coloring book pages on it.  However in August he will start some "Colors & Shapes" workbooks that I picked up at the dollar store.  He's nowhere near ready for the concept but I think he'll be happy to have some real schoolwork to do.

Now, like I said, we don't do a Monday-Friday school week.  For Optimus Prime & Bumblebee's pre-k year we did schoolwork every other day.  For their kindergarten year I started doing two days on, one day off.  For first grade my plan was to do two on, one off, three on, one off, however they have actually started that schedule a couple of weeks ago.  They had a couple of missed days from being sick in the winter and we are hoping to take a short family vacation and my my mom is planning on visiting in July so there are a few days to make up and a few days where we will be too busy for schoolwork so we started the 2/1/3/1 schedule early but in the end it will still work out to be the same number of days as the 2/1 schedule.

Soon I'm going to be posting all sorts of stuff.  Our curriculum, our textbooks, our workbooks, our resources, our goals, and how we go about planning everything.  I hope my information helps you!