2019-2020 School Year: Second Grade and Fourth Grade

Boys,

Summer flew by in a haze of pool days, sno-cones and playdates and somehow here we are again! Back to School! We usually start a bit sooner but we were having too much fun and we waited until the end of July to begin. Both of you have already completed the first units of your school year and are about three weeks into your curriculums. Both of you are more than ready for your grade levels and have had an easy transition back into school time.

Landon, this should technically be your first grade year age wise and maturity wise that fits in some regards. However, you completed a full year of first grade curriculum last year and have earned the right to call yourself a second grader. Not only that, but you are flying through your second grade curriculum easily and I can tell you are ready. I wish you'd let me call you by your age-level though because I'm not ready to make you sound older faster! But you were adamant that you are a second grader and so we'll go ahead and let the title stick since you've done the work to earn it. 

Ethan,

This year you have really stepped up to the plate time-management wise and are working hard at staying focused so that you can start school at 8 am and be done by noon. You recently discovered how much more you could get done in your afternoon between school and Taekwando when you buckle down instead of taking longer breaks! In fact, you were liking your early start so much that you tried to start before 6 am one day! We gave it a go but really Mommy works best when school doesn't start before 8 am so we had to make a rule on how early we could start. Trust me, you'll get a better Math lesson this way.

You boys keep me busy and not just during morning school-time! I love our audio books over lunch, board games in the afternoons and our early morning walks. I'm so thankful that we get to do life together!

(Kinder) First Grade and Third!

Somehow we ended up 6 weeks into our school year before I took pictures! We started early to accommodate more time off in the fall. This year we are trying out a 6 weeks on/1 week off schedule with a longer 2 week break in the fall and at Christmas. We plan to finish mid-May and then start back after the 4th of July. I can't believe that I am somehow finding myself in our 4th year of Homeschooling.

Landon, you just finished your Kindergarten curriculum last week. We didn't finish it at the end of our school year so we picked back up with it this year. You got bored and stopped wanting to participate. You are so hard to figure out right now. You get excited about a subject and then bored easily and once you are bored you no longer want to "prove" what you know. I start getting silly answers from you or we go completely off the plan and you start organically using our subject material (if I'm lucky) in a game of your choice. You seem to be showing signs of being a natural speller however we never really got into handwriting last year so you still need practice in that department. Your pencil grip has improved but you still need time and practice to develop those muscles enough to be able to write what you would like to. Given that this is technically supposed to be your Kindergarten year that's pretty good! You still love to build and will turn any assignment into a chance to build and any manipulatives get purloined for your purposes.You also are starting to like to draw and love making your own books. You surprised me last week by drawing a perspective drawing of a village! You've been noticing things about scale/perspective and asking questions that make me think you might be inclined towards art. Only time will tell though- you have many interests! Speaking of interests, you love to read and have been obsessed with Ancient Egypt and Rome. We have a stack of books on the subjects and you'll read them late into the night after you are supposed to be asleep. This school year will be interesting and I hope I can keep you engaged and interested in learning (I have a feeling I'm going to need to be very flexible). We start your first grade curriculum (and Kindergarten handwriting) next week.

Ethan, you finished your 2nd grade work early and moved into third grade so you are already a quarter of the way through. You can't wait for fourth grade and have decided that third grade wasn't as interesting as you thought it would be and that fourth grade is going to be paradise. In your eyes, the grass is always much greener a level ahead! You are especially hoping that fourth grade would teach you about genetic engineering and you were disappointed to find out that wasn't part of a standard 4th grade curriculum. You are full of big dreams and plans and bored easily by mundane subjects like spelling and handwriting. You have matured and are much better about finding a way to make them interesting and getting your work done. Its an emerging skill though- I find a lot of doodles and that your work takes twice as long as expected! You have recently discovered a love of drawing and have started carrying a sketchbook along with you. You are still into rocks, space, science, and love documentaries on animals.

We are staying so busy these days with trips to the library, playdates, homeschool park co-op days, and Taekwando. Also, this year Ethan starts 4H! Both of you boys are growing and changing so fast. I feel fortunate that you both love learning!

A day in our life at the moment

I've been "behind" on memory keeping lately. I love looking back and seeing what our days used to look like but these days our days are so full and busy that I have little time and energy left to document it. I didn't plan to do this this morning and I did not do extra activities just to make things seem "busier". This is just me waking up exhausted after an exhausting day and deciding that I really need to try to document a "day in the life" at the moment so that when I look back, I'll remember what our days were like.

Woke up to two little boys crawling into bed discussing their dreams from the night before. Ethan went to play Pokemon Quest on the Ipad and Landon put Glitter Force on the TV. I wavered on my "get by without caffeine" goal and made coffee and heated up some breakfast that "past Liesl" thankfully made and froze for a day when I didn't have it all together.

I got dressed and spent an hour exercising and then fixed the boys their breakfast. They prefer to drink chocolate milk when they wake up and then eat a real breakfast and hour later.

I put Story of the World on as an Audio CD while the boys finished eating. They were so taken with what they were learning that they begged for another chapter and then another and started playing with thinking putty while we listened to stories of ancient Egyptians, ancient military dictators, Ziggarauts, and the code of Hammurabi. We also listened to the story of Abraham, the tribes of Judah, the story of Joseph, and the famine in Egypt. I cut them off at three chapters and then we looked at the maps and pictures from our activity guide.

Next Ethan did a keyboarding lesson while I did a day of "Zin Zin a Violin" from Landon's curriculum guide. Then it was off to the Orthodontist for a last minute appointment where they worked us in to check out Ethan's palate expander and a concern we had.

After the appointment, we came back and had 40 minutes to eat lunch and work on practicing writing the letter "S" for Landon using the "wet, dry, try" method on our small chalkboard and Ethan finished his keyboarding lesson from earlier. Then it was off to Lego Club for two hours!

Lego Club was fun and the boys immediately separated and went to different tables and started making friends and building. Ethan found an older kid that was happy to mentor him/give him ideas on how to make his giant crab riding an airplane into reality and Landon built a Police Station with a basement as well as Ionic columns and a flying car. Landon got so into his creation that he ended up running around and playing on the floor with his flying car and a little boy he befriended.

After Lego Club, Landon asked for ANOTHER day of school so I agreed. Sometimes he gets behind because he'll devise his own plan for his school day so I'll take any interest and run with it. Yesterday he ditched curriculum to do "ancient city math". Ancient City Math was a game he devised where he built a house with Jenga blocks, counted up the blocks, gave a long back story about the family that lived there, the time period in which they lived and what they did in that time. Then he devised a series of natural disasters for each house/time period and would count how many logs fell/the damage caused by the disaster. I'd write it down on scratch paper as a math problem and he'd mentally solve it. Pretty quickly I might add. During curriculum he acts like 1-10 math facts are hard but mentally hes doing math in the double digits. It looks like hes ready to move on to first grade math.

After Landon finished he wandered off to go read his books. His choice- I didn't direct him. He's been pretty obsessed with books on history lately. His favorites are "A Street Through Time" "See Inside Ancient Rome/Egypt, Houses Long Ago, Famous Cities, and Famous Palaces" He also likes a different series of See Inside Books that goes over Ancient Egyptian Towns, Greek Towns and Roman Towns and Castles. And Last but not least, he loves his Rome and Castle Cross Sections books. He is learning SO much all on his own.

While I finished up teaching Landon, Ethan worked on a drawing/writing journal where he wrote about his flying crab lego creation, then we worked on a geometry lesson from his math book. After Math, Landon starting building Ziggarauts out of Duplos which was a bit distracting to Ethan so he joined in on the fun! I sorted laundry while I waited for attention to come back to school.

Landon moved on to work on Mazes from his mazes around the world book. Ethan wanted to join in on the action with his book and they decided to "race". I want to go on record as saying that I thought this was a BAD IDEA because I do not want the boys to compete with each other. They did, and Landon won. Ethan got flustered and made an error that he might not have made otherwise and Landon won by quite a wide margin and Ethan was pretty upset. We stopped and talked it through and worked on character building issues. Ethan demanded a rematch and Landon laughingly declined. Landon's afraid to lose his victory. We took a break to work on chores (boys help with laundry and unloading dishes) and then they raced around the living room bouncing on their hippity hops.

Landon is the wild card these days that can delay a school day/distract his brother. He started building a model kit of Stonehenge because he saw a Stonehenge maze in his book. We've done this model before so he pulled it out and rebuilt it. Landon had questions about some of the narrow openings in the model and how it didn't make sense so I had to google some pictures to show him the true scale and that it wasn't really narrow like it appeared. Ethan interjected facts that he had read about Stonehenge (he had more details than Mama!) and that led to the boys excitedly hatching plans to  build a model of Stonehenge out of mud. Then they went outside to water plants and build their creation but didn't finish because of our over 100 degree heat.

The desire for screen time and the necessity of finishing school first brought Ethan's attention back to school so we started working on his Language Arts lesson on the book "Sarah Plain and Tall". During Ethan's reading time Landon decided to do the noisiest build he could find with our Snap Circuits set. It wasn't on purpose but it drove Ethan crazy anyway and we had to pull out the noise cancelling headphones to get through his reading.

Last lesson was social studies but when I pulled it out and saw that it was a two day long lesson I decided to put it up and start it tomorrow. I called the school day "finished" and looked at the clock and it was already 5 pm! The boys earned their screen time and I rested up for 30 minutes before getting dinner ready for Taekwando. Luckily for me, out of the three days a week that they have class, Wednesdays are the night that Garrett takes them to Taekwando! While he took the boys, I loaded the dishwasher, hand washed dishes and made a marinade for tomorrows Chicken Fajitas. Then I put away some more laundry, paid a bill, and then collapsed on my bed to watch Anne with an E on Netflix.

The boys came home excited because Ethan earned THREE stripes on his stripe test and is now eligible to belt test for his orange belt next week. Landon earned his first stripe as a yellow belt and was excited as well. We decided to celebrate on the patio with ice cream. Afterwards, Ethan helped wiggle into our overgrown garden and harvest tomatoes from our sad looking tomato plants and then we let the boys stay up an extra 15 minutes to play since the heat was now finally bearable at 8:30 pm.

 The boys were upset that they only had 15 minutes and didn't get to finish building their mud Stonehenge or cuneiform mud tablets again. (they tried the mud tablets last week but rain ruined them before they could "bake" in the sun). Ethan also started getting full of ideas of doing chores for money but since it was 9 pm we shut down those ideas.

Finally it was time for foot baths, clean pjs (soaking out chocolate ice cream stains from the PJs they were wearing) and a quick book reading from Garrett before bed! Garrett put the boys to bed while I added water to the chicken egg incubator that we have running in our closet and monitored the humidity and temperature levels. Late next week we will hopefully have some baby chickens hatching! (side lesson in our homeschool!)

And that's it! It was finally bedtime! Garrett and both felt over-tired and ready for bed. I had to mentally shake my unfinished to-do list and the things that we didn't accomplish so I could allow my tired brain to go to bed!

Tomorrow I have to work on Ethan's Korean Vocabulary words for his belt test and it is also an allergy shot day which means a 3 hour round trip to Dallas, Audio Books on Greek Mythology for the boys during the drive, books in the waiting room to help time pass and then a half school day when we get back. I should note that during our busiest days I feel like I never get a chance to sit down for very long and it can be 3 pm before I am finally able to get my own lunch. I feel familiar feelings from their toddler days of just not getting a chance to eat and take care of myself. Crazy that life can still be like that sometimes at their ages! Its not always that hard and plenty of days I'm able to sit down and eat lunch with them but not always. Just depends and partly depends on how "busy" Landon is. At one point he was making a giant map with construction paper he taped together on the floor and was drawing on. I had to be careful where I stepped! Ethan's been learning about maps and Landon has obviously been paying attention from wherever he is playing in the room.

Our days are crazy busy and full and going by way too fast. I have no idea how other parents manage to juggle it all.We have shot room twice a week, art on Tuesdays, Taekwando Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and also on Wednesdays we have HOA run activities, and we are participating in the summer reading club. Garrett tries to take the boys out for a long bike ride once a week and we try to go swimming once a week although lately its been less often. Garrett is training 3x a week for a 100 mile bike ride. Busy busy days.

At the end of the day I had over 7,000 steps or 3.5 miles all from mostly inside our house. This wasn't even a day where we had time to walk to the playground or take the boys for a walk/bike ride. This is what life looks like at this season and while its busy I want to savor it and remember it!

Drinking Bird

December excitement has been hard on our homeschool routine so we decided to go for a more fun Art and Science emphasis for the month. Today's lesson utilized this Thermodynamic drinking bird. The boys thought it was neat that it was invented 95 years ago and is still fascinating. We talked about how the evaporation of the water on the red felt cools the methylene chloride vapor, condensing it, decreasing the pressure and pushing the liquid up into the neck of the bird. 

Before we talked over the science of it though, they made lots of guesses and had to experiment to get the balance just right so that the bird, which they named Dunce (it may have been called a stupid bird in both laughter and frustration), would tip over the correct direction. They counted the number of swings before it tipped, fiddled with it, got frustrated, came back to it, and eventually got it to work. Landon thought it was funnier when his head tipped backwards instead of forwards, but Ethan was very relieved to finally get it setup just right.

I won't say that today's lesson really ended up being easier but they definitely enjoyed it in the end!

{Daily Moments} Baby Owls

Today was the kind of school day where Landon had barely made it to the end of his lesson when you could see the wheels turning in his head and he was starting to become the owl that we read about. As soon as the last sentence was read, he was off and building an owls nest with Ethan close on his heels. They built, fought, compromised and came up with a nest design that they were both happy with and proceeded to play out hatching as eggs, growing up, learning to fly and puffing up their wings to make predators think they were bigger and fiercer than they were. Once they were all played out, we continued our other subjects with the promise that when our school day was over, we'd go back and re-read the book on baby horned owls a second time.

Second Grade and Kindergarten

Somehow here we are again, the first week of school. We actually started days ago but I just now got everything together to take your pictures.

Ethan,

You are so ready for the second grade work and in some ways I regret not letting you skip on a head a little more last year since topic wise you keep eyeing third grade. Handwriting is still your least favorite subject but you've picked up speed over the summer and you seem more willing to get it over with. We've adapted spelling words into card games and suddenly writing and spelling seems a lot more fun for you. You still love Science best and we've done two science experiments this week plus I finally found a documentary on cloning extinct animals for you since you have asked me to find one for several weeks now. You were especially excited to find out that it was on the Tasmanian Tiger since you really liked learning about them on the cartoon Wild Kratts.

Landon, you wouldn't be starting Kindergarten this year if you had been in public school but you were ready and wanted to learn this year too. Some of it is already too easy for you and some of it is just right but you are having a lot of fun with it so far. Technically you are starting your 4th week of curriculum but we have yet to introduce handwriting. You already picked it up on your own so we are going to have to go back and correct some letter formation. But not the first month back because handwriting isn't so fun and right now you are having a blast.

All in all, I think our first week back has been a success and a bit of trial and error figuring out how to juggle teaching both of you. You guys are so eager and willing to dig deeper and ask a lot of questions. You've also enjoyed requesting more activities or even extra rounds of "Spelling Old Maid" but you both found plenty of time to play together and enjoy the activities you have enjoyed this summer. Mama, however is exhausted and should have eased into this week a little slower. Thank goodness for the weekend!



I can't believe that we are already starting our 3rd year as Home Schoolers! (or even that we decided to walk this path in the first place!)

First Grade

Butterflies of our own

As promised, when Ethan finished Kindergarten and reached "first grade" we ordered a butterfly habitat and some caterpillars. He had seen a set in a curriculum catalog under first grade and had been anxious to raise caterpillars ever since. The 6 caterpillars arrived and were so teeny tiny. Each day they noticeably grew. Those hungry caterpillars ate and ate and ate. Almost always. They kept shedding their skin and growing bigger until after a week and a half they were long and had grown many many times bigger than when we received them.One never grew and eventually disappeared in the cup. 4 of them reached chrysalis phase around the same time of each other and one was a late bloomer and was almost 5 days later. Eventually we had 4 painted lady butterflies emerge over a two day span.

After surviving two cat attacks to their habitat, we decided on a butterfly release-day so that our butterflies could live out half of their lifespan outdoors. It was a little emotional for a little boy because one of the butterflies was still in his chrysalis and he didn't want him to emerge and find himself all alone. He was so sad for the remaining one that he had named "horns" but worked through it and we agreed to release them the following day.

Two of the butterflies got excited as soon as the habitat was brought outside and flew away within minutes.The other two were slower to leave. Ethan sang to "flip flap" and "beautiful" encouraging them to fly away into their natural habitat. Eventually they left and no tears were shed. Success! Now we are waiting on the last one who may or may not emerge and crossing our fingers!

"First Day" Reflections

It wasn't his first day, but it was the first day of public school for a lot of the kids that he has grown-up with so far. I wasn't prepared for the sleepless night and the nostalgia that came with it. After all, we already started school "officially" and we had already been working on school off an on during the summer. Somehow though, nothing felt more "official" than having school start for his peers (and their Mommies) and realizing that our paths had started to diverge. Life still feels similar but it will never be exactly the same as it was when they were all pre-school kids together. In the beginning there were some growing pains as we started to find our new normal. While our normal is still changing and evolving we have begun a new routine. I have a feeling that we will go through this every year and probably again during the summer. Finding a "normal" may be an ever changing thing! I do know that I love having them both home. It's not always easy, but in the end things that are worth it often aren't. Many of ours days are magical and filled with sunlight, playing outdoors, socializing and breezing through a day of school lessons in an hour or two. But not all. My house is messier than ever. I love seeing a concept "click" and my child being excited about learning. Teaching handwriting to a boy is an exercise in patience. I love not having homework in the evening and seeing my children strengthen their friendship. I never set out on the path of parenthood with the intention of homeschooling but now that we are I can't help but feel that I am living the dream I never knew I had and we are blessed by it.

{Daily Moments} Mornings

 

School in our pajamas!

First (Official) Day of School!

Landon my big Pre-K kid! He already knows his letters, phonics, shapes and colors and is working on using scissors, tracing with his finger and other pre-writing skills. He is also working on putting his alphabet in the correct sequential order and counting to 20.

Ethan my big kid Kindergartner! He is honing his fledgling reading skills, skip counting by 10's 2's and 5's, learning how money and time works and working on his fledgling writing skills. We are also working on subtraction and addition bigger than 10.

I can't believe that the 2015-2016 school year is actually already here and that we are now OFFICIALLY home-schooling. For some reason that gives me nervous butterflies even-though we've been schooling off and on all summer! It must be the official part. :-) These two are so close. I am so glad that we are getting to continue our routine at home and that I get to have more time at home with the two of them. Between our co-op and homeschool friends we will have plenty of things to do outside our house as well! It should be a fun and busy year!