Work Plans for the Week of January 12, 2015: Personal Narrative, Minecraft Homeschool, and Girl Scout Cookies

Our first week back to a full schedule went well, I thought. I'm usually pretty insistent that the children finish their work plans each day, but I made a point to be more relaxed about that last week, and indeed, Syd did not complete her endangered species project, and neither kid completed her grammar or attended Magic Tree House Club. They worked hard, however, Syd got oriented to her Minecraft Homeschool class, they spent a lot of time working on Girl Scout badges, they spent a lot of time playing with friends, and it was overall a very successful week.

My plan is to try to stay that relaxed throughout the next couple of weeks, as the children's extracurriculars gradually ramp back up to their full schedule. If there are any more permanent changes that need to be made, hopefully I'll be able to more easily spot them that way.

MONDAY: The children enjoy their daily book assignment--more so, I think, because the selection often isn't relevant to their current studies, but is just a book that I thought they should read or that should be interesting to them. I'll continue that this week; in fact, I have today's books sitting next to me on my desk right now, waiting for the children to wake up, eat breakfast, and then come ask for them. Will has this chaptered biography--Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A National Hero--and Syd has this non-fiction picture book: Secrets of the Seasons: Orbiting the Sun in Our Backyard.

Will's next couple of Math Mammoth lessons on area should come quite easily to her, and so I'm sending her on ahead, but I discovered last week during a Math Mammoth review that Syd has completely forgotten how to subtract multi-digit numbers when borrowing across zeroes is required. I spent a math lesson last week reviewing this with Syd using actual Base Ten blocks, and today I'll have her review again using this subtraction tool online. I'll be asking her to complete the algorithm on paper as she works the problems with the online manipulatives, and hopefully that will be enough reinforcement that she can successfully complete a review worksheet tomorrow. Oh, how our Syd loves to be successful!

The kids had a lot of fun working on Girl Scout badges last week--Syd made some recipes for her Snacks badge, and Will completed several activities for her Cookie CEO badge. She also asked me how she could tour a small business, also for her Cookie CEO badge, so I set up a field trip in February for her and some of our other Girl Scout friends to a business owned by a couple of friends of mine. The children would like to learn about accounting, and marketing, and customer service, and I think it's going to be fabulous.

Would The Green Nursery also like to have Girl Scouts sell cookies outside their store sometime in February? We'll see!

The children's Hoffman Academy lessons continue this week. They enjoy them, they do them, they practice--yay!

Now that Will has some ideas about the topic of the personal narrative that I'd like her to write, I plan to spend some time today talking with the children about personal narratives in general. Yesterday, when I dropped the children off at the library to attend a program on Japanese music, I handed them this list of mentor texts and asked them to bring home to me as many as they could find--they brought six, so today we'll be reading a couple of those out loud together. We'll be talking about the tendency of a personal narrative to have a Big Idea as a lens through which the narrative is written, and the children will assist me as I fill out this worksheet on theme. Next, we'll talk about the way that characters are fleshed out in narrative, and the children will assist me as I fill out this worksheet on characterization. Finally, I'll have the children fill out worksheets of their own--Will about her own personal narrative, to help her in its planning, and Syd about another one of the mentor texts that she can choose.

Oh, and we've got our weekly volunteer gig today! I should get dressed for that sometime! On the way home, we're going to stop by a florist and see if I can wrangle up some white carnations that Will's wanting for an activity for her Flowers badge.

TUESDAY: Free day! Syd will want to get started on her Minecraft Homeschool class (if she doesn't start it today), and the kids may have a friend over, but otherwise, their time is their own.

WEDNESDAY: Song School Spanish remains a good vocabulary study. Ideally, the children should be learning a second language from a native speaker, but as I've had many conversations with local friends about the shocking inaccessibility of children's language classes in this university town, my problem is at least not an isolated one.

Will should write the outline for her personal narrative today. I imagine that we'll butt heads about this, as I imagine that she'll want her outline to read something like "Pappa took me fishing. I caught a fish. The end," and I'll want her to unpack her narrative into a longer, more detailed sequence of events that expands this small moment, but she promised me last week that she would not throw a[nother] fit about writing this personal narrative. We'll see...

Horseback riding starts back up today, and I'll probably sign the kids up for an aerial silks class on this day, as well. Making the crystallizing watercolors is just a fun little science-y project that can be deleted if we're too busy, but that I think everyone will enjoy, based on how much fun the kids had doing the other sensory and art projects from this book.

THURSDAY: Will hasn't had as much prior experience with volume as she has with area and perimeter, so this project, using the basic technique that makes these newspaper constructions, will be a useful one--and I think it'll be fun!

Since we had so much trouble getting grammar and science done last Thursday, I'll be especially watchful with how it goes this Thursday--should I move some subjects around? Make Thursday a shorter day or a free day? We'll see!

Will's hatred of the fine motor skill of handwriting is such a detriment to her that I permit her to dictate her essays to me. I did, however, check out several typing instruction software programs from the library, and I've already blocked out some time next week for the children to install them and experiment.

FRIDAY: The editing and revising of Will's personal narrative will probably take the entire weekend, as I'll be asking her to read it out loud to a few people--grandparents, perhaps?--and make edits after each, and, of course, I'll be showing her how essays are best left to sit for a while, so that you can come back to them to revise and edit with fresh eyes.

Dyeing beans is just a fun little activity that can be deleted if the kids need more time with Girl Scouts, Minecraft Homeschool, or personal narrative. They also do really enjoy sensory play still, so it also might be just the thing to help them wind down from the week.

We're continuing our Georgie O'Keeffe study this week by reading biographies and reporting on them. There are several to choose from, so I may just lay them all out and let the children select. Field trips to Indy are always weather-dependent this time of year, but I'm anticipating a visit to the Indianapolis Museum of Art for their Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition sooner rather than later!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: The children have a Girl Scout workshop on Saturday and a couple of events on Monday to celebrate MLK Day, but otherwise we're free to play. Should we go to the art museum? Watch Krrish 3? Go swimming?

We'll see!

La Maestra

The kids and I began Song School Spanish a few weeks ago, and I'm loving it. The vocabulary IS mostly the same as in Song School Latin, just as I'd hoped, and this makes it easy to review--every day when we do memory work, I ask for the Latin translation of the relevant vocabulary terms just as I ask for the Spanish translation. I'm hoping that it will become natural for the children to differentiate and compartmentalize the different languages; unfortunately, I never did so, and although I have a reading and grammatical knowledge of several languages, whenever I try to communicate in them, what comes out is a sort of Spanglish-Icelandic-Welsh-Latin-Anglo-Saxon mish-mash. Not super comprehensible, but thank goodness for cognates!

My new favorite portrait actually comes from an assignment in the first chapter of Song School Spanish. The children were asked to draw a picture of their maestra or maestro; here's what Syd drew:

Other than the troubling depth of my crotch--and, well, the length of that one arm--this portrait is surprisingly spot-on, and I adore it. Yes, I do wear my hair like that. Yes, I always wear pants (clumsy, remember?). Yes, I'm always barefoot.

And yes, on this day I was wearing a T-shirt of Matt's that did read "God of War." It's a video game. The video game is just as inappropriate as it sounds, but the T-shirt's okay, other than, you know, the whole "God of War" thing.

I own MUCH more embarrassing clothing than this, though, so we all got off lucky.

Work Plans for the Week of October 20, 2014: Field Trips, Flowers, and the Sun

 

We've got one last school week all together before the kids head off to California adventures with their grandparents for a week, and it's a bustling one!

MONDAY: Right now, the kids and I are in a study lounge in the basement of the building that I used to teach in at our local university; the older kid is meant to be coloring in the chapter 2 vocabulary flash cards from Song School Spanish, while the younger kid is meant to be researching the Dartmoor for tomorrow's horseback riding class, but mostly they're getting me to look up how much bounce houses cost (a lot), and speculating where they would keep a bounce house if they bought one (the field at the bottom of the hill behind our house, although the ground might still need to be leveled some), and how much fun they would have with their own bounce house (again, a lot).

Soon, however, we'll wander up to the first floor parking garage of this building, where I'll collect several more little kids, and then we'll all wander over to the campus greenhouse, where we'll take a tour, search for flowers, identify their parts, and generally have a fabulous field trip together.

After our field trip, the kids and I will go immediately over to our weekly volunteer gig; the older kid was able to man the meat counter entirely by herself last week!

In Math Mammoth this week, the younger kid is finishing up multiplication and moving into a review of telling time; the older kid is finishing up long division and moving briefly to averaging, and then into fractions.

TUESDAY: The kids have their last rehearsal for their horse show during this day's horseback riding lessons. I also found a picture book about the Lippizaner for them to read; I don't remember if they've had this breed to research yet, but it's a great story that highlights what makes a horse breed special.

I'm not looking forward to helping the kids with their Halloween costumes, to be frank, but it's one of those things that a parent must do. The younger kid's costumes, in particular, are generally elaborate and require lots of parental help; for this year's Tinkerbell costume, I believe that I will be required to take her shopping for white yarn and the exact green fabric that she requires, and teach her how to make yarn pom-poms.

The kids will continue to work on the Junior Ranger badges that they chose last week; I do ask them to put the location of the park that they're working from on our big wall map, but I'm fine that the badge books themselves are cross-curricular--there are so many interesting, unexpected things to learn!

I realized that I haven't yet asked the children to memorize our new address, so we'll be doing that, as well as crafting our fire escape plan, under the auspices of the Girl Scout First Aid badges for Brownies and Juniors. We're going on a field trip to the fire station on Thursday, and I know the fire fighters will ask them!

WEDNESDAY: Don't tell the kids, but I am NOT signing them up for an aerial silks class this week. The rest of our calendar week will be VERY busy, and so will their trip to California next week--fun, but busy!--and so I want them to have one last completely free day to rest, recharge, and play.

THURSDAY: We've got our regular homeschool group's afternoon at a local park, and a field trip to the fire station in the morning (there will also be an ambulance there, and EMTs who will discuss first aid, also for the First Aid badges), but I am the most excited, by far, by the partial solar eclipse that clear skies will allow us to witness on this afternoon! And just two weeks after the lunar eclipse--what a treat!

A couple of units of First Language Lessons will finish off the day. The kids don't really seem to be understanding adverbs, so I'm finally thankful for how slowly this book moves.

FRIDAY: Ten Times Better has some fun, easy multiplication poems to memorize, and then I'll be going over a few more problems from the AMC 8 with the kids; I don't expect them to ace this upcoming exam, by any means, but studying for it has enabled us to discuss a lot of interesting math concepts, as well as learn that a dot is the same as a multiplication sign, what an ellipses means in math, and how to work a multiple-choice question.

After this day's spelling test, the kids will be writing sentences with their new words, again, as well as playing Spelling City. The sentence-writing turned out to be a GREAT activity last week; I had no idea that the kids would have trouble writing complete sentences! We'll be repeating this activity weekly until that whole subject-verb business is an absolute no-brainer.

The kids had their first ice skating class of the season last week, and once again had a fabulous time. This week, they'll be heading straight from there to a friend's Halloween party; since we'll be missing spending Halloween with the kids (they'll be in California with their grandparents), I'm glad that we've got *some* Halloween festivities to experience with them here before they leave.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Busiest. Weekend. EVER! The younger kid's got ballet class and Nutcracker rehearsal, both kids have the horse show performance that they've been practicing for months for, and the university is hosting its open house for the science departments, AND there's a big end-of-the-year party for 4H that afternoon. We will all sleep well that night!

On Sunday, the older kid only has chess club, but I'm sure there will be tons of frantic shopping and packing and laundering and panicking, because the next day will dawn with us on the way to the airport to send the kids to their grandparents in California.

And yes, I will spend next week weeping/working/partying/missing my babies.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!