Welcome Class of 2018 and 2021

School is, in fact, in session here!  We are actually in our third week, with just one day left at that.  14 days down, many more to go.  I find it incredibly hard to believe we have been homeschooling this long ~ 6 + years.  We're finding our groove and it feels like another part of life for us.  It's a way of life now.

Don't get me wrong, the beginning of each year is a hard with the adjustment back to school.  This year may have been the hardest as we took the longest summer vacation we have ever had.  Nine weeks of no school, no plans for anything other than summer.  I've learned my lesson, realizing we are more of a year round family.  6 to 8 weeks of school followed by a week or two off.  This allows for some good learning as well as a good break to get the big stuff done.

Anyhoot, here are some photo's I took this past Monday for "start of the school year" photos.  Yes, the first day of week three.  If you'd witness the first two weeks, you might just understand!  Not going to share the bad, but it was a hard transition back.  Life has settled down and we're finding our grove.  I am quite proud of both boys and learning to get their "job" done and doing it well.

Class of 2018

Class of 2021

Bad close up!

An even closer bad close up (both just because!)

What the dining room table looks like during school!

Thanks for taking the time to see a glimpse of our school!  Hope you've enjoyed what you have seen and read.
 

Confussion, 6 Days, & Rocks

How do all these things fit together?  There is some logic to all of this.

Right off the bat, I am a bit confused. Today totally feels like a Friday, not a Thursday. That's okay! I'll take a Friday feel on a Thursday. Even thought we only had 5 days left in school (excluding the current day), but alas, it is six.

In those 6 days (plus the weekend for some things) we will have finished test prep, testing, more baseball, more scouting stuff, regular house stuff, a used curriculum sale, trip or two to the post office, creating summer packets (fun, summer structured stuff), and figured out life through first part of July.

Are you wondering about the rocks now?  Is it intriguing? So many directions I could go with this.  One, I have awesome neighbors that just landscaped their yard.  The let me have some of the "old" rocks that were not integrated into the "new" design.  Sweet!  Sure beats paying for rocks (people really do this?  I do too!!) or traipsing through the woods to find them.  Or the second idea, which is the one I am really meaning, is geared more to the bible.  Joshua 4:4-7 talks about the stacking of stones to remember crossing the Jordan River and the Israelites escaping Egypt.  The stacking of stones, or Inuksuk, have been used in Artic regions as a cultural meaning as well.  They are used for various landmarks and more can be read here.

Stacking stones has been running through my head lately.  Do we take time to remember and document the triumphs we experience?  More than just the birthdays or learning to walk or graduations or learning to drive?  Do we take the time to remember how God provided when we journeyed through something difficult?  Do we journal it to remember?  Do we place stones down so that our ancestors can see the faithfulness of God in our lives?

I am desiring to do more of that.  To take time to recall those things, to be reminded, to be thankful, to be able to easily remember them.  My head knows God is faithful; my heart needs to feel it and my eyes see it through these events.  Time to pray and ask how my stone towers will look and how to pass those memories on to my family and friends!

 

School Year End . . .

is fast approaching!  Just a mere ten days, not including the weekend ~ otherwise it would be 12.

Hard to believe it is this close to being finished.  Hard to believe we have made it 170 days!  Hard to believe we didn't loose any school days.  Hard to believe we are just about to finish our sixth year schooling at home.  Hard to believe I started this blog about 5 years ago to help gather math data for a graph.

As I am looking toward the end, I start to worry.  I start to wonder.  I start to panic a bit.  I start to get nervous if the boys have acquired enough knowledge to do well on their test.

In this frenzy tonight, I heard God speak to me.  Not so much an audible voice, but a scripture.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;

Fools despise wisdom and instruction.  Psalm 1:7

Many passages came up, speaking to "do not fear" and they were consistently speaking to things other than the Lord.

This was quite comforting!  By fearing Him (read a very healthy respect for what He is capable of doing) and learning about what He has to say, we have no fear.

My spirit is beginning to slow down!  My sights return to things above. Now, it's off to bed.  Sleep is one aspect of a good day.  Hope I can sleep through!

 

Keeping {it} fresh . . .

Keeping it fresh! What it?

The it here is school!

Ruts happen when you go over the same area to many times without a change in course, even to the slightest degree.  Trenches begin to happen.  Trenches become deeper and more difficult to get out of.  There is the risk of habits, even bad habits, being formed.

How do you keep things fresh then?  How is school kept fresh?  How do we avoid the rut?  The bad habit of boring being formed?

For our household and schooling of our kids, it has been a few different things.  The quick list is home schooling, changing curriculum, and flexibility.

Home schooling began when we saw a need in Thing One that we thought he could benefit from being at home.  It was a desire to create a one on one environment that could be tailored to his needs, without the worries of others mandate of how education should be accomplished.  It has been an evolving journey that has become a life style for us.  We see the possibilities for pursing passions, delight driven schooling (no this does not mean our boys can take weeks off without doing anything!!!  I'll write another post about what delight driven means to us on another day).

Curriculum can be a scary aspect for schooling.  There are just way to many options!  Back in August, I briefly wrote about how it can be overwhelming, even after home schooling for a few years.  Here's a link to that post.  To keep school fresh, sometimes it requires a change in curriculum.  Sometimes that change comes just after ordering everything, sometimes it is mid year, other times it happens when you receive your box of stuff and have time to actually look at it without hundreds of folks wanting to look at it as well at a convention.  Probably the best resource I have seen, for choosing curriculum is Cathy Duff's "101 Top Picks".  In this book, I tell folks to first look at how she classifies learners into four different categories, then look at her spread sheets to see what works best for that kind of learner.  Once you have a few math or science or writing curriculums, then go look at them in this book for a review.  Her reviews are written well and give the strengths & weaknesses of each.  Once you have it narrowed down even more, THEN go to the manufacturers web-site.

Flexibility is probably the most enticing for us!  We enjoy being able change the order of subjects from day to day.  We enjoy being able to skip a subject one day to spend more time on literature, for example, then the next day double up on the skipped subject.  We enjoy being able to take a break for a walk, when the weather is begging for us to go outside.  We enjoy that school can take less time, because "disciplining" and "coralling" 2 kids takes a whole lot less time than 25 to 30.  We enjoy being able to take week long field trips.  We enjoy being able to use seasonal or holiday bucket lists, like this one, to add fun to school.  We enjoy that working with food can become a science and or math lesson.  We enjoy that we can quickly tie math, history, english, or whatever into real world applications.

Quick summary (like my quick intro paragraph); we are trying to keep school fresh by keeping our kids home for schooling so learning can become a life style, change the curriculum as needed and when needed, and to be able to shake in fun or linger on one thing when that "aha moment" hits!

 Jennifer

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.

A look at a Sunday Evening

It's Sunday evening here! Sitting home, alone, and it's actually okay.   Kevin and the boys are over at church helping set up for VBS which starts tomorrow.   I helped for a bit, but my back started giving out, so I came home and took extra strength stuff so I'd be ready for tomorrow.

 Once again, I'm finding my heart turn toward school for the boys.  I am finding myself getting excited about school for the boys.  I am excited about how to "shake" things up and make this year better than last year.  I'm having fun thinking of things to make and/or buy, for the first day of school (thanks Christy Mitchell, for the idea, if you are reading this).  I'm thankful for home schooling being a choice. I'm thankful we've made that choice to school our boys at home (or where ever necessary! :grin:). I'm thankful that we will be starting our sixth year in just a few short weeks.  I'm thankful for living in an area that is rich in history and places to visit as a result.

Many, many things to be thankful for.  In the coming days I'll post more of gifts we're making or buying, the subjects/curriculum we'll be using, "out sourced" subjects, etc.

Enjoy your Sunday evening!
 

Happy Labor Day!

and Happy Birthday to my husband, Kevin Brock!  He's enjoying a federal holiday coinciding with his birthday.  Nothing like sleeping in, morning nap, walk through the woods with the family, and vegging while watching baseball on your birthday.  At least for him, it seems like a good day!

For me, I've finally felt a bit productive around the house.  Yea!  Lots of little things are getting done.  So far:

• helped the boys through a worksheet (or 3) of math
• made templates for cork board and metal board to be hung
• alphabet is almost hung ~ stopped halfway through to take a walk with the family
• cleaned the kitchen some
• got laundry started later than I wanted, but finished earlier than usual ~ go figure.
• finally figured out that the washing machine takes about 50 minutes for the normal wash cycle; WILL use the microwave timer now to help me keep track

Still on tape, at least for me:

• hang the second half of the alphabet
• make brownies
• make corn bread
• hot glue some buttons on screws
• not sure what else
• make some school related things

Back to School!

Wow!  2011/12 school year is upon us.  Tomorrow begins our 4th week of the year!  Things are totally different than I had anticipated when we wrapped up last school year.  We've dropped a couple things to make life a bit easier, but at the same time we're notching up a lot of basics to help the boys "make the grade".  Going basics!


Here's what school looks like for us:

• Mystery of History Vol 2 by Bright Ideas
  
• Big Bag of Science
• A Child's Geography Vol 1 By Ann Voskamp
• Literature Unit Studies:  starting in "The Chronicles of Narnia" (everything but the Magicians Nephew which we did last summer), possibly "Farmer Boy" from Little House series, wrap up of a Christmas study we started last year, and FIAR/ByFIAR
• Nature Studies for both
• Math-U-See for both, but at different levels
• Free writing (to get them writing and getting their thoughts on paper, no length required, but just writing from various writing strands)
• Thing One individual work:  Spelling from Queens Homeschooling Supply, Mad libs, magnetic words, grammar and math games on the Ipod
• Thing Two individual work:  Language Lessons for the Very Young 1, by Queens Homeschool Supplies and Sequential Spelling Vol 1, grammar and math games on the Ipod

We'll also be adding in Grace Homeschool Co-op in September where they'll be adding in P.E. & Chess for Thing One and Free Play & Science for Thing Two.

Quite a full school year and extra activities aren't even listed!  Where's a yikes smiley when you need it?

Is it scool or is it summer?

I've seen a number of folks talking about school on facebook or through their blogs.  There are the school supplies starting to appear at Wal-mart and Staples.  Although we've done a couple weeks already, we not quite ready to start full schedule.  For us, it's been a time to gear up for Vacation Bible School (VBS).  Our church is doing "Main St." this year.

Monday is the big day.  The day that 500 kids flood our church from Pre-K through 6th grade.  Once again I'll be working with our Quest Kids (5th and 6th grade) as admin aid. 

So, after I crash and burn next weekend, I'll pull our school schedule together the week after.  After an order at Timberdoodle later today, we should be good to go for the 2011/2011 year.

Enjoy what's left of summer!

The wall and the dilemma!

Finally decided to pull everything off of one wall and patch the nail holes.  Why?  Because I really want to be able to have a school wall and that was the easiest one to use! {by the way, patching a wall goes quickly w/little or no humidity and really little holes!!!}  Besides, if I wanted a lot of wall space, I'd have to get rid of a lot of book cases and books ~ eeeekk!

So the dilemma is this (and not accounting for the triangular part of the wall that is open to the steps), there is a light switch just about dead center on the wall width wise and about 4 feet off the ground (whatever the standard height is for light switches).  It makes hanging a decent sized cork board, maps, white board, chalk board or whatever, next to impossible.  Well if I want just one or two of those things, it might not be so bad.  If I considered buying smaller maps, it might not be such a big deal, which is a possibility as well.  Hhhmm! Maybe it is time to go over to Rainbow Resources and see what they have.

What do you think?

Okay, so I'm full of questions today!  This time it's "What do you think of my new blog header?" (the previous post was about lunches).

For a very long while I've wanted to name our little school, tried a number of variations of names and things, all with no appealing luck.  A couple months ago, thought about Brock Academy, but again, it just doesn't make any bells whistle for me.  Had always wanted Oak in the name, because for awhile we actually had a oak tree in our front yard.  Finally, it dawned on me that our little cluster of streets is called "Oak Creek"  and sticking academy after it sounded right.

Of course, then, I wanted to create a new blog for school and even started working on it.  But I'm not so sure I can keep up yet another blog, just for school stuff as school and life have become so intertwined.  Decided to leave the current URL the same and just tweak the header.

So I leave you with the question again, what do you think?

School's Out for 2010/2011

and as I posted on facebook yesterday (or something close to it), "My first free afternoon and I wander Staples looking for supplies for next year!"  After mulling over the selections of colored pens and pencil holders, I left empty handed. LOL

The boys were in Tae Kwon Do, at the time, so I headed back to that neck of the woods.  All was not lost for 2011/2012 as I'd brought with me the starts of my planner, a Beyond Five in a Row manual, and my laptop (fully charged).  After getting comfy in the van and finding someones unsecured wi-fi I created a few more planner pages.  I'm really enjoying the planning aspect this go around!

Hats off to the beginning of our 5th year of homeschooling in June (I still have a few big projects around the house I want to get to).

Dreaming

of next school year, the school books, the new crayons, the new pencils, the new ~ wait a minute we homeschool there aren't always new crayons or pencils when we have a bazillion collected over the last few years (thanks Grandpa and Grandma for the LARGE donation to each boy a few Christmas' ago).

I am dreaming of texts books and planners and field trips and art projects and getting out more and making school so much fun.

What do YOU do to make school fun?  What kinds of tricks do you keep up your sleeve?  I need help with getting "the fun on" for next year.

Here are some of my ideas thus far:

• hoping for a field trip a month, possibly themed around month, season, or unit study
• designing school logo for t-shirt, sweat shirts, pj bottoms (for the all important pj school days)
• more art & science because the boys love that stuff
• having FuN fRiDaYs by cooking, exploring, science, art
• during the winter, more stay at home days with a fire going (will have to see how Speech and O/T fit into that)

Please leave some suggestions in the comments so I can come back and get inspired.

Thanks!

Yum!!!!!!!!!!!

Homemade Cafe Mocha

This is the sort of thing one makes when the guys leave the house on a Friday afternoon!  Had thought I'd be taking "the Things" to Tae Kwon Doe, but Kevin got home early.  So here I sit, still in grubby, but clean clothes, having just made a cafe mocha and now blogging.  Pandora is playing "Old Country" music.  Not a quiet house, but sounds that are okay.

As almost any teacher will tell you, the first few days back, after a break, seem long and difficult.  It's been that for us, too.  Also a full week of almost ALL activities.  No easing into it with just a few subjects or activities!

This week we've been doing our usual grammar, math, and MoH along with Amanda Bennett's "Winter Wonders".  We've had fun reading a lot of snow related books, making snowflakes, and drinking hot chocolate.  Unfortunately, no real snow to be had!  Here's a look at our snowflakes we made though:

Kind of like the reflection of the trees in the window, don't you?

Now off to enjoy my second mocha!

Long overdue!

Been awhile since I blogged.  Can cover a few things in just one post!  Lucky me!!!  We finally took a fairly decent photo of ourselves for the adoption agency we're using.  I just don't like photos of myself, so it's always a challenge finding one.  We took one of the four of us as well.  Without much further adue, here they are:

The other photo I've been meaning to take, well since Monday anyway is our Thanksgiving or Blessing tree.  We're trying to daily write out something we are thankful for, on a leaf, and hang it.  Hoping to keep this up through Thanksgiving.  Should be a full tree by then.  Yes, it wraps into the kitchen, touches the floor, and goes onto the ceiling.

There you have it, our most recent photo's!

Another blog hop

and this weeks theme - "A Day in the Life Week" from over at Heart of the Matter. What follows, is a tentative schedule of our days. There are so many variables, that can make it change. So here's what a day looks like around here:

• breakfast
• get ready for the day
• few chores
• school - in random order, we change it around to keep it fun
• possible free time if school is finished early
• lunch
• finish up school, if needed
• extra activities (field trip, nature walk, fun stuff, bikes, scooters, library, etc.)
• errands, if any are needed
• straighten up some before dinner
• dinner
• family devotions
• free time
• bed time routine (showers, reading, etc.)
• lights out

Do you like how I don't list times? I've found that if I try to keep strictly to a clock, some things get missed, for example, when they're really getting something and want to do more or almost finished and just need a few more minutes. That's an advantage of homeschooling, being able to give a bit more time when needed. We do have general guide lines, however, for when things should happen. For example, we try to get a bulk of our school finished during the morning hours. We also try to keep lights out around 8:30 to 9:00.

That's our life, in a nutshell!

Blogging . . .

lately has been a challenge. We've been in school for a few weeks and in past years, I've usually by now blogged by a few things. Some how a unit study on "Magicians Nephew" doesn't lead to many photo opportunities.

This week and next, we're working our way through Knights and Castles, using the companion guide to Magic Tree House "The Knights at Dawn". This has been a great reference guide and the print outs from Homeschool Share have been wonderful. So far the boys have learned about which kinds of castles were better for protection, the Feudal System, Lords & Ladies, parts of the castle. They've gotten a kick out me being able to hook up my Mac and do Power Point presentations for vocabulary, bring up pictures of Castles, among other things. They've also enjoyed playing with their castles while being read to from "Castle Diary, The Journal of Tobias Burgess, Paige".

Cool activities to follow: making catapults, going to Maryland Renaissance Festival, and having a Medieval Banquet. Those should be more photo worthy!

Not so school photo's

The other evening, during dinner, things got silly! Okay, life without silliness is just BORING!!! What then transpired where the following photos and as it's "Student Photo Week" at Heart of the Matter these will be perfect.

Head of our house and school ~ Kevin!
Can you see what shirt he is wearing? We think he's the
best. Here, he looks so calm and leader like. As I
recall it though, he's the one that instigated the fun!
Thing Two's fingers in the photo!

Don't know what is going on with Thing Two's right hand, but
it wouldn't be a photo without bunny ears. In fact, two sets are
better than one, right? Life with a child always in motion!

Thing One needs to be original in his
bunny ears. He always has "walked" to the
beat of his own drum. This photo started out as
my token, get in the shot. I just don't care
for photo's being taken of myself.

This is it, our happy family of four! We can be goofy and serious, happy and sad, lots of energy and dragging, but all in all, it's cool to have them to hang with.

Just thinking aloud!!!!!!!

Still wanting to "name" our home school. Not sure why I have such a strong desire to do so, but I do. What has come to mind lately is "Brockville Academy". It sounds pretty good, sounds formal, sounds official.

A while back, had looked up names, for everyone in our family, to find out the meanings of their name. Brock means badger! Think that's kind of interesting because I was born in Wisconsin, my parents were born there, and my grandparents and their sisters & brothers all lived there. The state animal is a badger. Makes me snicker just a little bit! Doesn't Brockville sound a bit better than Badgerville though?

Where is your class room?

At Heart of the Matter, it is "Not Back to School Blog Hop: School Rooms" week {click here to see post}.

As a homeschooling family, school happens many different places, mostly where ever appropriate, comfortable, room/area best equipped with the things we need! Have you ever tried teaching math and money at a register and the cashier just blurts out the answer? We have!! LOL

Anyway, from Wednesday on, last week, I had an insane idea that I could get my house clean and staged, just so, that the pictures of our various school rooms would be perfect. Then HELLO, reality set in and it's not so staged. What follows are some of the areas we school in, but quite honestly, I could have easily taken hundreds of pictures for where we school (anyone want to see the inside of a not so clean van?).

Probably our most favorite room is the living room because it has the Lazy boy recliners in it. They're nice and cozy, a lot of light comes through the window, and for the last two years it's just where we've gotten a lot of our work accomplished. Plus, the boys and I love to snuggle on the smaller couch to read. Hard to believe that it won't be long before the three of us don't fit on the couch together anymore. Also, our tv is in there, which surprisingly isn't a distraction, which makes watching the Math-U-See videos easier.


Our boys absolutely love science! The love to see how things react with one another (especially the brotherly love kind of experiments where one ends up crying ~ I'm not so fond of those ones!!). We've had fun on hikes looking at Beaver dam's, looking at erosion, and other wild life. Also fun, science wise, was the time a couple years ago, when we worked on chemical reactions. So, here are pictures our kitchen, mostly cleaned up!

"Stashing" school stuff happens, mostly, in our fireplace room. We've got a number of varying kinds of bookcases in there. It has most of our school related books, arts and crafts type stuff, math manipulatives, file boxes holding current school work. In the winter, it's probably the boys favorite room to work on school stuff if we've got a good fire going!

Also in this room, to the right of the brown bookcase (on the right of this photo) we have a piece of metal hung on the wall, a calendar for the boys, and some cork board. Really thought they would have gotten a bigger kick out of the sheet of metal, but not so much. Hoping to make better use of it this year. Possibly doing stuff with the word magnets we have or with the letters. Oh! Can you see that we have MORE bookcases to be put together in the photo to the left. Love the IKEA shelves that come in flat boxes. These are for the boys rooms for all the books they have. And possibly a few crates of toys!

So, this is a tour of our school rooms. One last thing, we do have maps and things like that. We decided to home school after a couple years of public school and we had already decorated the house. The maps and white boards, when not in use, get stored behind some chairs.

Happy schooling~



P.S. Forgot about the one thing I made for school last year that I really like. I purchase this wire basket when we were first homeschooling to contain the weeks worth of books. Over the years, our curriculum seems to be morphing into other styles of school and not AS many books. I had the thought that dividing the basket into three sections would be a great idea. The sections are labeled "school", "seasonal" (which I intend to change to "mom"), and "returns" as we use a lot of library books. The last one helps on library day to pick up those items that need to go back.

This next picture is a close up of the dividers. I used scrap, thin plywood and tried to paint it like a barn. I had left over letters from another project and was able to spell out the words I wanted. Even have enough letters to spell out "mom" when I get around to it. I just used Elmor's glue to put the letters on.