What does homeschooling look like?

For every family that educates their kids at home, school will look a lot different, from one day to the next and from one family to the next.

At our house (and a few other home schooling families I know), the first day of public school is WAY different than a "normal" day of school, just because we want to emphasize the flexibility of home educating.

Ours looks something like this, for today anyway:

• up to early in the morning, as I had to much going on my mind.  Mostly I wanted to make sure that I had time to make t-shirts for the family.  An idea I had awhile back to make new Thing One and Thing Two outfits for the boys.  The last was done in 2004 around Halloween.  It was time to update the picture on my sidebar!

 October 2004

 September 2012

• Got the shirts finished, washed, dried.  Got myself ready for the day and Thing One and I were out the door for what we thought was 2 & 1/2 hours of therapy.  Due to illness and other unknown reasons, it was only an hour!  Woo Hoo, we got to come home early.
• Oldest was eager to get to NEW math and wanted to watch the related video.  Lucky me!  I misplaced the DVD, but found it after a brief frantic search.  He breezed through math and grammar and almost forgot spelling.  Thing Two did his while we were at therapy.
•  While Thing One was plugging away at his work, life kept moving on.  I spread out at the dining room table to pay bills and such.  Charlotte was in her spot like today was the same as any other day.

• Took some time to go out to lunch and run a few errands.  We decided to go by Cafe Rio as they have $1.50 tacos on Tuesday.  Awesome, inexpensive food and par for the coarse we saw folks we know from church.

Men in my life!  Kevin has "Parent 1", I have

"Parent 2".

• We came home very full and still had Mystery of History, Five in a Row (Roxaboxen), and Beyond Five in a Row (Cricket in Times Square) to read through.  This is how the boys entertain themselves while I read, a Klutz Lego set.  Definitely worth the money.  This set is only brought out during school

• Now we are transitioning to afternoon events and divide and conquer.  Errands for Co-op on Thursday and baseball practice for Thing Two and TKD and Scouts for Thing One.  I may go crash and burn for a few minutes.

This, like I mentioned, is a rough sketch of a day in the life.  Hope your day has been wonderful.

First Day of 2012/13

First day of school at Oak Creek Academy has come to a close; we're winding down with an episode of Star Trek Voyager!  Here is some glimpses into our day!

 One of many different "First Day of School" treats I'd

seen on Pinterest; also one of the easiest to make.

 Had seen these Cheeze its while picking up

other things for our first day.  Let the creative

juices flowing for the wording.

 Hello dollar bin at Wal-mart!  Lots of candy labeling posting

at Pinterest so it was easy to make something for candy.

 Here is most of Thing One's "new school day" loot!

He tends to get stuff in blue.

 The green version for Thing Two.

 Total impulse purchase!  Green and blue, how could I say

no to these!  Boys seemed to enjoy them too.

 Close up of shirts for physical educations!  The boys

were shocked that it didn't say Oak Creek Academy.

 Thing One's close up.  His sign says,

Oak Creek Academy

2012/13 School Year

Well Hello 7th grade

I'm ready to build a great year!

Thing Two:

Oak Creek Academy

2012/13 School Year

Watch out 4th grade ~

I'm ready to knock it out of the park!!

 Really getting tired of the photos and

ready for school.

 One more close up!

The day itself went fairly well.  They breezed through math, got through grammar and spelling (both a little shocked that we're doing formal spelling again!  Oh well kids get over it!).  Probably the best portion for both boys was mentioning it was time for Five in a Row and Beyond Five in a Row.  I didn't quite get to letting them ordering which books were first, second and so on like I'd planned, however it all worked out.  When I told Thing Two we were rowing "Roxaboxen", he was totally excited.  As always, he said it was his "favorite" and went off to get the book and manual for me.  He enjoyed doing some map work of the Southeast.  When it was Thing One's turn, I gave him a choice of the three books we had not covered in Volume Three of Beyond.  He was excited to row "Cricket in Time Square"; we read it about 5 years ago for a different curriculum and he was eager to read it again.  We spent about half an hour "exploring" some aspects of New York City.  He was excited by all this enough, he wants to write a report at the end of the week.  We'll see on this one.  Thing One even asked for more school.  UGH is all I thought, it's one day down and I already want a break (didn't sleep well last night and felt very exhausted after covering the basics).

The fall out from a crazy day and crazy school day when

no "margin" was planned for.  REALLY need to remember

that one later.  It's not such a good thing to have things stacked

that we can't clean up afterward.

The house was left as above, we got ready to zip out for Monday's therapy, briefly filled Kevin in on thoughts for dinner, and headed out.  Got home almost three hours later to a house smelling of dinner!  Thankful for a husband that likes to cook!

Feet are up, winding down, and looking forward to a better nights sleep.  Bring on day 2!!!

End of the school week

We finished up Roxaboxen and The Little Red Lighthouse and The Big Gray Bridge today. It was another science day for both boys and for a second time in the last few weeks, both lessons were similar in nature. The loose theme was rivers. As it was a nice day out, again, we made rivers with their marble run and had some fun. Turned out to be a lot of fun and they were reasonably dry afterward.






















So ends another good week of homeschooling.

How many rocks?

How many rocks are there here?

If you had to guess, what would your answer be?

Go ahead and make a guess -

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Okay, enough of the guessing and counting, we came up with 80, ten of which are black. Black pebbles where traded in Roxaboxen. Just to further the math concepts with Thing One, I had him come up with a few math problems that equal 80. Here's our list:

40 + 40
70 + 10
40 x 2
10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 (Thing Two wanted to contribute to the list!)
4 x 20
1 x 80
6 x 16
8 x 10

We could have spent a lot of time coming up with more, but this seemed like a reasonable amount for now. We've been working on finding the factors, in Math U See, when given the product. Was pleased to see that he found them all.

Roxaboxen

Thing one and I have been reading Roxaboxen this week for school (next week, too). It is a great story written by Alice McLerran, illustrated by Barbara Cooney about a bunch of kids using their imagination to make a "city", how they design it, and other aspects as well.

It seemed fitting, that while we were at Toys R Us, of all places, and I found Crystals and Gemstones Mining Kit, by Edu Science, that we should buy it. I hadn't reviewed the lesson's yet, but it just "spoke" to me and knowing that the boys love hands on science, it had to come home with us.

Here's the gypsum block with crystals and gemstones buried inside, before the boys had an opportunity to start chiseling.



The beginnings of getting into the block and taking a look at the outside. It looked like it had been fossilized along with a dinosaur and was rough feeling,









The first gem found was red jasper.









Here are Thing One and Thing Two making sure that all gems had been found. Lots of mess, lots of fun. Some how those two always go together.









When all was said and done, four gems where found. Red Jasper, Rose Quarts, Jade, and the one without a card is Rock Crystal Quartz. It was a neat way to be able to show the boys how rocks get polished through sand storms or even in a river. They didn't quite grasp the time element, but that can be saved for another day.