Great Day!

Yesterday was so dreary around here and I had gone to bed so late the night before that we took the day off in favor of cuddling under blankets on the couch :) Today I felt the need to play catch up and since she's been zipping right along lately I thought today would be a good day to add in a little more work and see how she handled it. In a word: fantastically! I think she seemed more focused if anything. Maybe it's just her mood today. But for math she was due for an assessment yesterday so I gave her that and a regular lesson page and she did both, no problem. Normally she does 1-2 phonics pages but today I gave her 3. They were tidy and completely correct. We also did a science lesson about the 3 main parts of a plant which she liked and set up a celery experiment with colored water so we can observe how the stem moves food and water. Very good day!! I'm going to try and stay focused for the rest of the week but it'll be hard with her recital this weekend. She has dance class tomorrow, then dress rehearsal on Friday, then the recital twice on Saturday! Talk about intense! She's so excited though. She wanted to get her hair cut last month but I told her she had to wait until after the recital. Now she wants me to take her on Sunday. lol, talk about impatient!!! I told her it was unlikely that we'd go Sunday with it being Mother's Day but we'd see. The nice thing about having the recital the night before Mother's Day is that my MIL and GMIL will come back here for supper afterwards, eliminating the need to go up there on Sunday. Thank goodness!!! I would say Mother's Day is pretty high on the list for me as far as holidays go...Christmas and Easter I can happily sit back and let the kids have the glory, Thanksgiving is about families, Birthday is no big thing to me. But I really feel like everything I ever wanted in a family I work so hard for and need that one day to be appreciated. Unfortunately Dan doesn't get it and I usually spend the day shuttling around between his mom and my mom and now my sister is a mom so I have to share the day with her as well. :) Maybe with the extra time this year Dan will think to focus on me a little bit...hahahahahahaah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway, here's todays info:

~~Phonics (X3)
~~Book Adventure
~~Math (assessment and lesson page)
~~Spelling
~~Science with game and experiments
~~Math game (dominoes or yahtzee...tbd)

Fun Friday

Or is it LAZY Friday? I'm not up to setting up much today. I have a ton to do so we are having a laid back day...even more laid back than our typical Fun Friday, if that's possible. haha. The only 2 requirements today are spelling quiz (completed, got a 90) and book adventure. We just got a bunch of books from the library yesterday so she has plenty to choose from. She likes one called "Our Granny" about grandmothers and their differences. She thinks it's funny when it says "Our granny has a wobbly bottom." lol...and something about baggy underpants? It's a silly book but a really nice book about different types of grandmothers. For example, the first page says they might live in a house, apartment, farm, trailer, nursing home. It was the Story hour book yesterday and we enjoyed it so much we brought it home. Today I am working for our church's fair booth at a Ham radio festival all afternoon into the evening. Then tomorrow I'll be back there early and work until about 3. Jillian's having a sleepover with 3 friends tomorrow night and they are arriving at 4 (WHAT was I thinking???????). Then Sunday she has dance rehearsal for sacred dance at church then I'm hosting a Lia Sophia party. Sometimes I can't wait until Monday, except that Monday is craziness too. I guess Tuesday is my weekend!!! Oh, Jillian also needs to email my friend Vickie and thank her because she let us borrow her Sissix machine. Jillian and her friends are doing paper dolls at the party. :) Probably won't be back on here for a couple days, have a fantastic weekend!!!!!

Wednesday

Jillian is just flying through her work this week. It's great but maybe she needs more challenging work? I know math is challenging enough and I'm working hard to be sure I provide her with plenty of activites and games to do along with the lessons to take some burden off of the lesson/"learning" part. But phonics and spelling come pretty easy to her. I wonder if 20 spelling words is too many? Anyway, today is gym/music day (can't remember which) which she's always excited for (BTW I hate gym/music days...next year she's only taking art I think). Her boxes are:

~~Phonics
~~Spelling
~~Math activity (pattern blocks again)
~~Math page
~~Intro to frogs worksheet
~~Book adventure

Spin master (the company that made the broken butterfly thing) is not getting any more from the supplier in HK anytime soon. So we could wait or get something else. So we are getting pixos. I'm not thrilled about it but jillian's really excited. I'm happy they are sending us something!

Sickies in the Hurley house

Well yesterday was one crazy day! I had training class in the morning at 6:15, Allyson's PT at 10:30, Jillian's art class at 12, playdate at 1:30, dance at 4 and work at night. I was so tired all day but figured it was just from that exhaustive schedule. Last night I buzzed out of work as early as I could get loose, crashed at home and stayed in bed until 8:30 this morning. I woke up feeling like I was run over by a truck and thought a coffee might perk me up. No way, now I've been running to the bathroom. Jillian's complaining of not feeling well but I don't know if she's truly ill or just feeding off of my symptoms. Nonetheless I set up work boxes today since yesterday she didn't get to school work until supper time and it was a huge struggle. Today's workboxes are:

~~Spelling (I changed the setup on my printer so I can print the pages smaller and fit 4 on 1 page using both sides rather than using 4 pages which is what I had been doing)
~~Book adventure
~~Phonics
~~Math activity (playing with tangram shapes today)
~~Math worksheet
~~Art project
~~Frog book (science)

ETA: I called the manufacturer of the butterfly house and they'll either send me a replacement or a similar item of equal value. Hooray! I have to call to follow up today because they didn't call me back Friday afternoon but they were soooo nice there.

FUN FRIDAY!!!

It's Fun Friday again. I don't have much to say today except hooray for nice weather finally! Jillian is at a pottery class in the next town over right now making a coil bowl. The place is called Salty Dog Pottery and they have a show room where you can buy things and they also run lots of classes. I wonder if they have a parent/child class, that'd be fun to do together. It was very reasonably priced I thought. $25 total for an hour and a half class today (includes supplies, lesson and kiln firing) and going back in 3 weeks to glaze it. They had 4 classes this week for vacation: plate, mug, bowl and statue. I told her to choose 1. :) She wanted to make a cereal bowl so I can't wait to see it. We're going to spend some time outside today for sure. I bought her a bike the other day off of craig's list (a Little Mermaid bike, even better!) and she's itching to ride it but she was only outside for 10 minutes or so yesterday before it started raining. Since it's Fun Friday I'm only going to do a couple of work boxes today, to leave room for pottery, outside play and laundry. Yes, she is excited to help with laundry. It's apparently her new hobby!

~~Spelling Test
~~Math worksheet
~~Phonics page OR journaling (I'll let her choose)
~~Book adventure

OH, and I bought ground flaxseed last night so we are going to bake some yummy healthy muffins too. I'm really getting into the healthier living thing. Hey, I'm not spending $160 a month on a personal training class just to blow it on my food choices! :)

Happy Weekend!!

Rain, rain go away

What a rainy blah day. Good napping weather. If only my kids thought so too :) Jillian set up her own workboxes today, with the exception of the phonics page which I chose. The math pages just go in order. So today's workboxes are:
~~Book adventure (she requested it to be one of the first boxes before she runs out of steam)
~~New puzzle
~~Spelling
~~Math page
~~Matching sounds game
~~Dot to dot
~~Spring book and questions
~~Phonics
~~Journal

I'm pretty disappointed. We bought Jillian a butterfly house for Christmas and I pulled it out to look at sending away the coupon to start our caterpillars. Unfortunately the zipper is broken on the little doorway so it doesn't seal up! I bought it back in November or something from Toys R Us, I guarantee I don't have the receipt! I'm going to call and see if they'll exchange it anyway since it's never been used, I still have the coupon and everything. Grrr, so frustrating. I'm looking into doing frogs too but I was hoping to spend less than $20. We have an aquarium so if we could find tadpoles it'd be essentially free. But I don't see that happening. Plus there is a type of frog I was looking at and the skin of the tadpoles and froglets is pretty translucent so you can see the heart beating. Now Jillian has it in her head that she wants to keep the frogs as pets! At least they are low maintenance! :)

Earth Day

We are going to focus on Earth Day this week. I very foolishly last night in a flash of "brilliance" told Jillian that we could do a paper mache earth today. What the heck was I thinking? First of all my kitchen is a mess and it would take all day to get it picked up! Second of all, I have no balloons or newspaper. *sigh* Well, maybe I'll just have to run to the store and get balloons and a paper. Or maybe we'll just postpone till tomorrow, I can bum a balloon from my mom tonight since I'm sure she has some and get papers out of Dad's recycle pile. That would be more sensible, yes? :) We scrapped the idea of working on a country right now because we have so much going on with science. We are studying spring and this week Earth Day and I'm also going to send away for frogs and butterflies. Since I'm planning on schooling without a summer break I may do country studies in the summer and drop science for then. So today for workboxes we are doing:
~~Spelling
~~Phonics
~~Reading Spring book from library
~~Dominoes war game
~~Math page
~~Book Adventure
~~Some kind of science project