Pictures of My Cuties

Sammy

I know I don't seem to post anything about Sammy, but only because he's three and we have chosen up until now to have no structured school time for him. He has his own "school work" that he chooses to get out and play with sometimes, but I never make him do it. Well, I have noticed lately that he loves to play with the manipulatives that came with Cameron's Right Start Math Level B program. This made me think about the Level A kit (kindergarten level) that I am loaning to a friend and I realized that he is totally ready to start that, and I think he would love to do it. So we are planning to start Level A in January. I will let you know how he likes it after we start.

Flexibility

One of the greatest things about homeschooling is the flexibility. Here's an example: Cameron has a tendency to grumble at me when it's time to do school work. Our current schedule has us doing his work after lunch when any little I am watching are napping. The other day I got especially frustrated with him because he was not being cooperative and was complaining about how unfair it is that he has to do school work while his 5-year-old friend (who I watch periodically) gets to do whatever she wants. I explained to him that she does not have to do school work when she is here because she comes from her kindergarten class where she has spent 3 1/2 hours doing school work. Anyway, I realized that we needed a little change in our schedule if I was to maintain my sanity, so I made Cameron a deal. I told him that from now on I would wake him up at 7:00 am to eat a little breakfast and immediately work on Math and Language Arts. Those 2 subjects seem to be his least favorite, so I figured if we could get those out of the way then we can do the fun subjects at naptime. We just started this 2 days ago and it seems to be working.

I realized that something like this wouldn't happen if he was in school. Our schedule would be dictated by his school, not by what works for us. Maybe lots of people would be OK with that, but I am definitely not a rigid schedule keeper and absolutely love the idea that we can be flexible and change our schedule to fit our needs at the time. Another confirmation that we were meant to homeschool.

Starting School

Tomorrow is our official first day of school! We'll see how everything goes. It might be a slightly crazy day, as I have many kiddos to watch and my mom and grandma are coming at some point to get Sammy and take him back home with them for a few days. Also, I don't have our math and Spanish curriculum yet that Horizons ordered. So, we'll make do without that until it comes.

So Excited to Start School This Year

Well, my planning for this upcoming school year is almost done and I am excited to start. I've pretty much decided that every year we will take six weeks off of school during the summer (for planning) and another six weeks off during the Christmas season. Otherwise, we will be doing school year-round.

We are sticking with Horizon Charter School this year, but am thinking we will go totally independent next year. The reason? Too lengthy to discuss in this post, but call and ask if you really want to know.

Sammy has been really progressing without us doing much work with him, so I am thinking this year I might start doing some official "schoolwork" with him. I've noticed that he is very deliberate and focused when he tries to write or draw. So maybe we will work on writing and also learning the 70 phonograms for our Spell to Write and Read program for Language Arts.

For Cameron, we're sticking with the same math program we used last school year (Right Start Mathematics), but moving up one level. Language Arts will also be the same (Spell to Write and Read), but I am incorporating some other fun curriculum I have acquired that should help him with sentence structure and writing. He wants to learn Spanish and, after a terrific ordeal trying to choose a foreign language curriculum that Horizon will approve and purchase, I settled on Power-Glide Spanish and am hoping that he likes it and learns from it. I'm still not sure what we will be doing for science. I have a few science kits we will probably go through and I know we want to do a mini unit study on winter animals, but other than that I am stumped. One thing I am really looking forward to is our Lego unit study. I know Cameron will love it. It will take us 5 weeks and each week has a building challenge, along with information to look up on Legos and how they got their beginning. There are also activity pages to complete. Such a good unit study for a boy!

For now, we are loving summer and enjoying all that it has to offer. The boys are having a blast swimming at the community center pool about 3-4 days a week. We took them to the drive-in for the first time, visited family and friends in Oregon, went to a live concert-in-the-park at Cameron Park Lake, saw 2 movies at the free movie showing in El Dorado Hills, and still have planned a 2-night camping trip and week-long vacation in park City, UT. Good stuff to look forward to!

End of School Year

Shh! Don't tell Cameron, but our school year with Horizon Charter School is officially over for the summer. I still plan on doing school work with Cameron, though, until the week before his birthday, then we will take off the end of June and the whole month of July so I can plan our next school year. It just seems like taking 3 months off of school would not be that beneficial. I remember when I was in school, the first few weeks of the fall school year were always spent doing review from the previous year. Such a waste! If we only take off about six weeks, then we should have little to no review.

I was notified by Cameron's Horizon ST (supervising teacher) that I can put in my request now for curriculum I want for the fall. Wow, I thought I would have more time to figure that out. I was thinking that I wouldn't be able to put in my request until July, at the earliest. So now I am on the hunt for what I think we might want to learn. Math and Language Arts are easy. For math I will just order level B of the same program we are doing now. And our language arts program will just continue, and I might supplement with other materials I already have.

I was excited to hear that Horizon has the Muzzy Spanish program in their resource library. The ST put in the request for us to check it out for next school year, but I don't know yet if it is available or if someone else has already checked it out. If I can't get it, I found another spanish program online that I can order. I also found a cool guitar lesson book with CD and DVD so Cameron can learn to play his guitar. He's been telling me he wants to take lessons. We'll see how this program works. We can always use our Horizon stipend for lessons if the program is not good.

The only other curriculum I was thinking about getting is a unit study from Christian Cottage. I would have to purchase it since it is biblically based, but it's only $75 and would last the entire school year. The program has received very good reviews on all sites I looked at that had a review on it. Their Level 1 unit study goes from Creation to the Renaissance, and includes pretty much all subjects: life science, physical science, astronomy, weather, history, oceanography, writing, reading, etc. I am excited about this one!

I am so looking forward to this upcoming school year. Some teaching days are pretty rough, but overall I have loved our homeschooling experience and wouldn't want to change anything. It has been such a blessing to be so closely involved in Cameron's education and to see how his thought process has changed and matured this past year.

AWANA Games

We are all very excited at our house about AWANA Games today. In case you didn't know, the AWANA Games is a competition where teams from AWANA churches in an area compete against other AWANA teams in AWANA sanctioned games. Cameron has gone to two practices at our church, and they practice some of the games at each AWANA club night, so he's ready! I've got my camera, now I must remember to take it. Go Church of the Foothills!

March 2010 Update

I haven't written in a while so I thought I should say something. Let's see, I am trying to get a jump start on the next school year and figure out what we will be learning. I asked Cameron and he said he wanted to learn about birds, specifically about how they gather food and feed their young, and how they poop (my boys very much love to talk about poop). So I am now in the process of putting together a unit study on birds. I put a whole bunch of books on hold at the library, and when they come in I guess I'll just take a look at them and hopefully will get some ideas on activities we can do to go along with the reading on birds.

I am loving the language arts program we are using, Spell To Write And Read. I modified it a little to fit our specific needs and Cameron's age, but it has worked so well for us. Cameron has now done 210 spelling words, and he is so very proud of himself. We will continue on with this program next school year, but will also start the Cursive First program so he can learn to write in cursive. I think we might also put more emphasis on sentence structure and writing creatively.

Still trying to figure out what to do for social science. Maybe a unit on California History, or the Railroads, or Pioneer Days, or World Capitols? Oh well, I still have plenty of time to figure it out. We'll probably do science kits for science this year. Cameron loves to do anything that even remotely seems like a science experiment.

Well, we're still trucking on in this homeschooling thing. We've kind of figured out a schedule that works for us, but I also realize that I need to be flexible and willing to change if necessary. It's such a wonderful adventure!

Beginning Of The Year Update

Well, where should I begin? We had a nice break at Christmas but are now back into the swing of things. For science, we ended our unit on the human body and are now working with a textbook to finish out the kindergarten standards. The focus is on the earth and it's natural resources. Pretty interesting, but I will definitely need to make it a little more exciting for Cameron by adding activities to reinforce what is being taught in the book.

Cameron started Gymnastics again at Tumble Time and he is loving it! I wanted to get him into doing some kind of scheduled physical activity and, since he has no interest in sports at the moment, I thought gymnastics would be good. And it has turned out to be great for him. And the best part is that Horizon is paying for it. The students are allowed to use a portion of their yearly allotment on PE, so we chose gymnastics.

We are still continuing in the same math and language arts curriculum that we have been using all school year. I am constantly amazed at how well Cameron can read. And he loves to do it, too. Sometimes he reads to Sammy and it just melts my heart. We are thinking about signing him up for the Paws For Reading program at the Cameron Park Library. Every Tuesday at 4:00 he would go to the library and read to the dogs (they are all guide dogs in training). He really wants to do it, but he also has AWANA on Tuesday nights so we need to decide if we want him to have 2 activities back-to-back like that.

This might sound nuts, but I am already planning some topics to study for the next school year. I figure I should start now so I have plenty of time to prepare. We are thinking about a study on the railroad systems with a focus on the early U.S. railroads. I got this idea the last time we were at the Train Museum in Sacramento. Cameron seemed to be receptive to it, so we'll see.

I still need to work on being disciplined with his school work. Luckily, I have time because he is only in Kindergarten and the amount of work he needs to do is so little that we can get it done in about 1 hour total per day. I'm just not that good at making sure we do it every day. Some days we will do a lot of work and then we might skip the next day or two. That might be a good New Year's resolution: stick to my schedule and do school work every weekday. OK, I am committing to it. let's just see if I stick to it.