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

Hooray for a Successful Day!

We haven't had this much fun and success in a homeschool day in a while. I feel awesome! Ok, to begin with, we had a great Easter! Lots of running around but that's ok, the girls loved it. I didn't post yesterday's workboxes and now I can't remember them so oh well, forget it. :) I don't think there was anything unusual in them anyway. We STILL hadn't gotten to the poster so while I was setting up school today I put the poster 1st so that we had to do it. It came out great! I had a few suggestions for her on how she may want to set it up as far as spacial planning but she did the real work herself. I gave her small cards on the main water cycle things I wanted her to take from it (evaporation, precipitation, ground water, run off, clouds/gathering, pollution) and she had to include all those things in her poster and use the cards to label the poster. IF my stinkin camera worked I could put up a picture. She painted most of it but used some construction paper to cut out a mountain and the clouds. It looks fabo...well, except the part where she painted the snowy mountain red to look like a volcano. Despite my explanation that a volcano could never have snow on top she exercised her creative license. Oh well, it's ok.

So here were today's workboxes:
~~Poster (done...yay!!!!!)
~~Spelling (final page of these words, quiz tomorrow)
~~Book Adventure
~~Math (lots of fun, we had to open up apple cores that I've been saving to graph how many seeds in apples)
~~Journal (today's topic: Spring)
~~Phonics pages
~~New social studies unit. Today she's going to pick a country.
~~Electronic matching game

Fun Friday

I decided today to use less boxes and make Fridays "fun Fridays" since I intend to work on Saturdays as well because we are so behind. So todays boxes were:
-journaling
-back of yesterday's math page and today's math lesson
-spelling
-book adventure (she got a 100% on a second grade book! I don't know how they level their books, I think it's similar to AR I've heard).
-science poster

We had to deliver a wedding cake today to Warner so that took up most of our midday time so I'm glad that I didn't give her much. However, we still didn't get to work on the water cycle poster and I'd REALLY like to wrap this stupid unit up that's been going on forever it seems like. I think we are going to try to set up frog eggs and see how that goes. We did have Meredith (our dear friend who turned 14 in March and we still hadn't seen her) over for her birthday supper (tacos!) and dying easter eggs so that was fun. Tomorrow is an Easter egg hunt here in Pittsfield, then a playdate with some friends we haven't seen much of since they moved. Then some Mommy time, I'm going out with a friend and my sister. I'm going to try to fit in a math lesson and science poster in there as well but who knows.

So she's really taken to the journaling over these past 3 days, day 1 she was reluctant. Today's topic was water, anything about it. She drew a picture of the ocean with her swimming and wrote "This yis me swimming. i love swimming a lot-i love so much i can do it. April 10, 2009." It was so tidy and nearly perfect spelling. Besides the random hyphen that she put in I added the punctuation, she's not there yet.

Finally!

Jeepers, I've been trying all day to reset my stupid password...is it me? Yeesh. Ok, so last weekend I went out and bought some Sterilite bins and set up an old shoe rack to try work boxes (yes Missy, I really do want to BE you...not just follow you on blog websites but actually BE you!!! lol). I didn't buy the ebook but I'm considering it, I wonder if I can just buy the section on discipline? Actually, today was our first day of me actually filling the boxes and she did great!!!!! I got 9 boxes but could only think of 8 things...lol. So Wednesday's boxes were:

-Journal (a new adventure for us...I am trying not to be picky on spelling but...yeesh. Today her topic was homeschool, I told her sometimes she'd have a topic and sometimes she'd be free to write about whatever she wants)
-Phonics
-Science (reading library book on water and answering questions I made up)
-A gluing project (her choice)
-Math lesson
-Spelling
-Learning Palette
-A reading type page

I already set up tomorrow's boxes (the nice part about this is that I like the visual for me too!). There is a flash card story order game, phonics, science library book, math game with pennies, spelling, math lesson, journal, water cycle poster (which we are creating together so that's fun!). I really like this system, seems like it will work well for Jillian because it's so visual she can't ignore it. It took her until 4 to do all her boxes today but in fairness, she did have music class in there too! Hopefully tomorrow there will be less dawdling and distractions and we can forge on!

I think I've decided to make the 9th box be Allyson's box and I'll put some things in there for her because she kept monkeying around with Jillian's boxes. We can work on colors together.