Our 2014-15 School Year Plans

We have begun the school year!  I have both a first and fourth grader this year.  My philosophy on education is that we use plenty of good, real books - not textbooks! - and learn about real things around us, making sure to get the kids outside each day that is possible... and having relatively short lessons makes time for that.  Here is what we are doing this year and a bit about how it is going so far...

Morning Basket

(note: it does not all fit in the basket!  Shh, don't tell anyone!)

This used to be our "Circle Time," and it has evolved to remain as a whole-family together time while not merely being about the calendar and singing seasonal songs (although we still do that for the youngers!).  Now it also includes more meat... read-alouds from different books daily, picture and composer study, and poetry and Shakespeare memorization.

Here's our Morning Basket daily schedule:

Circle Time/Morning Basket 2014-15

First and Fourth Grades

 Daily:

* Recite Monthly Prayer

* Sing Hymn (at least 3x/week)

* Read from For Beginning the School Day

* Calendar/Vestments on priest – Cecilia; Caroline does finger plays with Lucy

* Caroline: Problem of the Day (math word problem)

* CCL: Time/amount of day, word families, counting patterns, odd/even numbers at easel

* Read about saint of the day; oral narration (alternate between the girls): Saints for Young Readers for Every Day Volumes One and Two

* Poetry reading/recitation; Shakespeare quotes

Our calendar with saint magnets to mark feast days

Mondays:

* A Nest for Celeste, oral narration (alternate)

* Burgess Bird Book for Children, separate written narrations (I write Cecilia’s)

++after Nest for Celeste is finished, we will read from various other bird books like Bird Watchers and Feeders, etc.++
* Peterson Field Guide Birds coloring book

Tuesdays:

* Among the People (start with Pond, then move on to Forest); oral narration (alternate)

* Composer Study (bios, listen to specific pieces, draw the song: Handel, Beethoven, Wagner)

* Life of Fred - one lesson, each girl in own book; written 'Your Turn to Play' in notebooks

Wednesdays:

* Catholic Mosaic/liturgical year story; oral narration (alternate)

* Picture Study; oral narration, sketch from memory on easel (alternate girls wkly.) - Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael

* Nature Walk in yard: find one thing for Nature Calendar of Firsts, collect specimens/photos for later work in Nature Notebooks

Last week, we studied our first Giotto painting... after looking closely and making observations, the girls close their eyes and visualize the painting, then try to recall everything they can.  Caroline made a rough outline sketch from memory on the easel and then I put the painting up next to it.

Thursdays:

* Among the People (start with Pond, then move on to Forest); oral narration (alternate)

* Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks; written narration from Caroline

* Once Upon a Time Saints for Cecilia only; oral narration (transcribed by me)

Fridays:

* Handbook of Nature Study (girls choose one relevant topic to read about each week)

* Artistic Pursuits

The girls in the mirror above their watercolor crayon project from Artistic Pursuits

Each day the girls also have independent "morning work," which consists of things they can do on their own.  Cecilia's includes hands-on manipulative type materials such as puzzles, which she can do along with Lucy.  On Fridays, they listen to prayers in Latin on a CD so they can begin to learn some of them.  The guy reading the prayers sounds like he is about to fall asleep whenever he says, "Amen," but hey, it was a free CD.

Caroline's Stuff

Caroline's major topics in 4th grade are Ancient Greece and British History.  She is also beginning some study of Shakespeare this year for the first time, which she LOVES (ask her to quote from Midsummer Night's Dream if you want proof! ;).  She is continuing with Math U See (Delta) as well as doing Life of Fred for math.  She whizzed through the younger LoF books late last year and is picking up with the Honey book to start off this year.  These books are so hilarious, in a really odd way.  It's learning math concepts through a story.  A story for nerdy people.  Perfect.  For instance, an excerpt from the third book in which place value is being taught: "Fred turned to the nurse who had just finished stacking up 324 boxes.  He asked her what she thought about stacking up 5,367,948 boxes in the hallway outside his classroom.  She laughed and left the room."  Earlier in the book, Fred gets a cat scratch on his nose and consults his alphabetized bookshelf to find out what he should do, and he finds these titles: "Castanets for Everyday Use, Casual Pizza Restaurants, Cat Scratches: What to Do, and Cattleman: What it Takes to Be One."  My kids love these books so far.

Here are the books Caroline will be using throughout this year:
* Famous Men of Greece
* The Children's Homer
* Archimedes and the Door of Science
* Science in Ancient Greece
* D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
* Tales from Shakespeare
* How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare
* Children's Encyclopedia of British History
* Our Island Story
* Augustine Came to Kent
* Beorn the Proud
* If All the Swords in England
* Castle Diary
* Our Island Saints
* 57 Stories of Saints
* St. Jude, Friend in Hard Times
* Simply Grammar
* Intermediate Language Lessons
* Faith and Life 4
* St. Joseph's Baltimore Catechism No. 1
* Paddle to the Sea
* Seabird
* Maps, Charts, and Graphs D


She is also using a neat science kit on light, and she is continuing with her recorder using the nine-note recorder book.

There are some other chapter books she will read this year set in South America, and she will begin studying the countries there on maps.  She will also continue exploring the United States - learning capitals, locations of states, general information about the states, and doing a project/report on one specific state of her choosing.  I have tons of fun puzzles, kids' atlases, games, etc. for learning about the states, and once a week she will select something to work with from the crate full of this stuff.

Doing a states puzzle with Lucy

Cecilia's Stuff

Cecilia will be using these books this year:
* New Catholic Picture Bible
* Little Angel Readers A and B
* The Earth (water section)... and this is hilarious, but this book costs $260 now used on Amazon.  I, of course, paid much, much, much less than this a few years ago!
* Math U See Alpha
* Draw Write Now (water animals)
* First Timeline and corresponding booklist
* Aesop's Fables
* This is Our Family
* St. Joseph's First Communion Catechism
* other books all mentioned in morning basket plans

Cecilia works with "Decimal Street" for a Math U See lesson

She is also excited to be starting a journal this year where she can write and draw about whatever topics she chooses.  She is making a book about Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans in which she will draw or put photos of visits to a local stream/pond area plus things such as drawings of the water cycle as she understands it, water-related experiments, etc.  Another fun thing she is doing is Family Geography - learning about her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and where they lived.  This maps maps relevant to her life as she begins to grasp the idea of what the United States looks like and where we are in the world.  She is making a book for this with her family tree, old photos of family members at their homes or in their hometowns, recipes from family members or regions they were from, saints who lived in those areas, etc.  Google Earth has made this so cool... we were able to find the house where my mom first lived as a baby, just for maybe a year, and compare the street view to an old photo of my mom outside the house with her mother... it had the same awnings over the windows!!!  My dad recently showed me the lot where his father's childhood home was in Superior, WI and the bar his uncle owned around the corner, the church near their house where they went, etc.

She will also be hearing several picture books... each week she will hear at least one from Catholic Mosaic related to a saint whose feast day is celebrated that month, as well as the First Timeline books - lots of good ones there.

Some of our liturgical year and first timeline books, plus a story about Handel, our composer for the first term.  Yay for interlibrary loans!

So, we have completed a little over a week, officially.  I have to keep days marked off for attendance-reporting purposes, but other than that, we are pretty free to school as we wish here in Georgia.  That means a day in the field of nature study plus a book on CD on the car ride home are a school day.  I know all the books listed above look like a lot... but the great thing is that every lesson takes anywhere from 5-30 minutes.  We might read just a short chapter at a time and stretch a book over an entire year.  For Cecilia, her first grade lessons are no more than about 20ish minutes for each different book or topic.  Now, she will spend another half hour illustrating her Old Testament story, but that is fine - her own interest is leading that.  By having short but focused lessons, it leaves them with plenty of free time - all afternoon, pretty much, after a bit of book work right after lunch when Lucy is napping/resting (meaning I can work with the older two relatively undisturbed!)... and they can explore their own interests further, draw, write, play outside, read whatever other books they want, create things using art materials and such...

illustrating Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

Lucy tries out the watercolor crayons while the older girls do an Artistic pursuits lesson

Fridays are "fun days," I say... they have fewer lessons in books and get to do an art project that day, plus we try to have "tea time" when we can, where they have a fun snack and tea, and they listen to me read a book aloud.  last year, we read the entire Catholic Treasure Box Book series.  This year we have started with The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air. 

Tea Time last Friday, celebrating the Feast of the Queenship of Mary with a "crown cake," aka apple butter cake made in a cathedral cake pan that was Almost a Big Mistake (see explanation of random caps further below in this post).

So here is a bit of what we have done so far...

This is one of Caroline's language lessons.  Her sense of humor shines through in her work so far... wonder if this would be frowned upon were she in school?  Note what she has written in #3.  We had just read and listened to Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne on CD:

Caroline picks up on the humor and other interesting quirks about author's writing styles now that she is older and rereading books that she had read aloud to her in previous years.

This one is her retelling of the story of Saints Joachim and Anne, Mary's parents.  She adopted Milne's writing style in her own writing, as well as her own quirkiness in her description of Joachim's age and what the temple leaders may have thought about him:

"Not Having Any Children at the age of Probably Past Thirty," "Ponder About This," and "What Had Happened to Joachim"

Greek history narration of The Children's Homer... and here she includes pronunciation keys to say the Greek names, as well as writing a forward which you should "keep in mind" as you read the rest of the book...  She also adds footnotes to her own writing and references previous things she has written or defines terms that may be unfamiliar.  Like I said, quirky.  How did she get this way??  I'm going to guess genetics/personality plus tons of reading of good literature.  She is very self-motivated when it comes to reading and breezes through books every time we get some at the library.

Caroline has a notebook in which to keep all her written narrations.

This is one thing I am most excited about:

We got a set of maps that go with the books Paddle to the Sea and Seabird and some lesson ideas for using them.  These books by Holling C. Holling are fabulous... they teach science concepts and geography in a way that is not at all boring, but instead through engaging stories.  We are reading Paddle to the Sea first.  In it, a boy living by a small lake in Canada just north of Lake Superior carves a wooden canoe which he sets in the melting snow.  He knows that the Great Lakes flow into each other, "like great bowls set into a hillside," and wants his canoe to flow all the way down into his lake, through all the Great lakes, and eventually into the ocean.  So by reading this book, we follow the canoe and learn all the states, cities, lakes, rivers, and other geography along the way.  Just by reading the book and coloring/labeling the map, we will learn the Great Lakes region.  Another of Holling's books will take us down the Mississippi River.  So cool!  After reading the first few pages, this is what Caroline did on the map.  In the top left corner, you can see the small lake, Lake Nipigon.  Then she found Canada's border and labeled it and colored it.  For some reason she got carried away and randomly labeled and colored Maine, even though the canoe has gone nowhere near that far yet, ha ha.

Caroline decided that all our Mary statues needed crowns for the Queenship of Mary.  Our Lady of La Leche already has one, so the others got paper crowns.

We are working through our second full week of school now and have upcoming travel, hands-on family geography study, field trips, and the start of dance class, religious education classes at our parish, and our first Catholic homeschool Friday Mass and get-together.  This school year is officially underway, and I have been enjoying the calm (somewhat - I do have a red-headed two year old, after all ;) settling into of a rhythm for the year.

School Stuff from February

Well, I have some fun stuff we did for school way back almost two months ago... first, we made a landform cookie cake!!  This is something I made up on my own back when I taught third grade... with my students, they'd make landform cookies after completing a study of landforms.  Each child got a sugar cookie and had to decorate it with at least ten different landforms.  So, with my own kids, I thought even bigger and went for a huge cookie cake to decorate with landforms!

We started out with a chocolate chip walnut cookie cake recipe that I modified slightly (subbing whole wheat flour and Sucanat).  I made it on our largest pizza pan (what, you don't have multiple pizza pans?  We have three - and I didn't buy a one of them!).  Once it had cooled, I cut the "shoreline."  Caroline gave me a diagram of how it should look after I explained to her that the cookie cake was like part of a large continent and the pizza pan was the ocean.  Then I whipped up some basic frosting (cream cheese, I think?) and tinted it with our natural food colors (which don't always work super-well, but they did nicely here... bright fake green for the land would look weird anyway).

Here's Caroline's plan next to the completed landform cookie cake.  I always had my students draw a plan first too, and then I took photos of their cookies to evaluate them later.  Nice thing about homeschooling: I don't have to fill out a rubric to give this project an actual "grade!"

Close-up: ocean, island, bay, mesa, peninsula

You can click on this to see it better... she ended up including lots of landforms.  In addition to the ones mentioned above, there were mountains, a volcano, hills, rivers, tributaries, oxbow lakes, regular lakes, a delta, an isthmus, a glacier, plains... and we talked about where the sources, mouths, and confluences of the rivers were.

And boy, was it yummy!!!

For about a week, his little guy visited our maple tree in the afternoons while we were outside.  He spent a lot of time on our neighbor's maple, too, and he made lots of holes.  We observed how wet the tree was around the holes he'd made and how the fresh sap attracted insects.

Here's a closer shot... we identified the bird as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The next week, we participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  By then, this guy had moved on, but we still got to identify lots of birds, including house finches, cardinals, crows, chickadees, tufted titmouses/titmice (?  they aren't even rodents, so I don't get their name at all!), mockingbirds, and a brown thrasher.  We now know the scolding call of our mockingbirds quite well, and even Cecilia will say, "There's Mocker!" upon hearing it, without even seeing the bird.  We have been reading The Burgess Bird Book and learning lots of interesting things about birds this year!

Here are the girls at our nature club one day...

one of the few days it was actually cool enough for long sleeves...

And now for cute baby photos... she's much older now than she was in these photos!

between 4.5-5 months, I think closer to 4.5

hmm, a bit over 5 months, I think?

and these were taken the day she turned five months.. now she's over 6.5 months!

Noah's Ark

We are studying Old Testament stories this year, as well as doing My First Timeline, which gives a very basic introduction to several historical figures and where they fit chronologically into history. It happened to work out perfectly that Noah was our story both in the Old Testament and on the timeline during the same week! We spent some extra time on these activities relating to the story of Noah and the flood:

Noah's Ark Snack

one tortilla, cut in half

melted butter

cinnamon sugar

graham crackers, one whole and one cut in half diagonally

animal crackers

I spread the tortilla halves with butter and then sprinkled on a bot of cinnamon and sugar. Then I put them in the oven for a few minutes to get them a little toasted. Next, the kids placed the graham crackers on top of the "boat" and then arranged some animal crackers (my favorite ones from Trader Joe's!!) however they wanted in their arks.

They used a few bunny crackers as well...

Then they ate them up!

Yummy and simple!

We also made a mural of Noah's ark using this Jan Brett resource. First, we did a watercolor wash on the background and let it dry.

Here's how it looked after the girls colored all the animal pairs and taped them to the mural!

We also read several books about Noah's Ark over the course of a couple weeks.

First Grade So Far

We have started off our school year well here and are now in the third week! We hope to finish the fourth week before taking a little vacation to Tennessee next week.

Here are some of the things we are doing this year... in random order...

Once a week, we are reading one of the fables in our Aesop's Fables book. I read it aloud, and then Caroline narrates, or retells, the story to me while I type it. Then I print it, and she puts it into her fables book and illustrates it.

Here are two she has done so far: The Young Crab and his Mother and The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox. If you click on it to see the larger image, you might be able to read it...

We are also doing the same thing with Old Testament stories. I am reading one per week from a Catholic children's Bible, and Caroline retells it as I write it in her book. Then she works on copywork: a verse from the Bible story that is important or sums up the story well. This is glued into her book and she adds an illustration. So there are three components here: her narration, the Bible verse, and the drawing.

Here is her first page, The Story of Creation.

This is her page on Adam and Eve in Paradise. Again, I think you may be able to read them if you click the pictures to see them larger. Caroline really goes into detail in her Bible story narrations! She has far less detail when retelling an event that happened to her or explaining something we did as a science project or a trip we took. She narrates stories very accurately.

Here is Caroline's science book... we have titled it Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans. We are studying bodies of water and water in general this year. We took a trip to a nearby lake and observed the plants and animals there, and then Caroline made a scrapbook-style page of our visit:

She narrated the trip to me as I typed, and it is pasted into the book at the top. Then she put the photos in and wrote notes about them and what we saw at the lake. We plan to choose one water area to make several trips to over the year so we can observe changes in wildlife and plants as the seasons change.

This is Caroline's Liturgical Year Notebook. I showed it before in the post about our plans for first grade. Under the "saints" tab, we have added some copywork from a story we read about St. Christopher. Caroline also colored a picture of him (from Fenestrae Fidei) and narrated the story to me as I typed (and it is almost a whole page single-spaced, so I didn't take a photo of it)... it is on the front of the page with the story quote. Every week or two, we will read a different story that corresponds with the liturgical year, and we will add copywork and projects to this notebook. This is an ongoing project that will cover a few years, most likely.

For math, we have been using Math U See and so far, Caroline really likes it, and she understands the concepts very well. We made a poster of "decimal street" to practice learning place value and regrouping.

This is our timeline... only one event card up there when I took this photo, but now we have four, including one before this one which shows the universe and earth being created billions of years ago. It is a long piece of yarn across the top of the wall in our schoolroom, and as w read about each event or person, we add the picture to the timeline. It is a very basic introduction to history and gives an overview of where to place certain events in time. We also read a good children's book or three about each event if we have them available through our library. I envision taking the cards down and mixing them up at some points throughout the year and having Caroline re-order them.

And back to the Liturgical Year Notebook... I said this was in random order... Caroline painted a St. Benedict's Cross after we read The Holy Twins in July (which is when his feast day falls). She also copied a quote from the story, and we made these into a page for her notebook.

Here's a look at some Circle Time stuff... Caroline puts the date on the magnetic calendar and any saint magnets for the day, then she writes the date on the whiteboard easel. She also writes the time of the day and counts coins and writes that on the board as well. On this day, she counted two amounts and wrote them both, and then I gave her the directions to circle the amount that was less and draw a box around the greater amount. Under that are a few letters for Cecilia to name. Then there is a word given, and Caroline reads it, decides what the vowel pattern is, and writes as many other words as she can in the same word family. I have also put sentences on the board for very basic editing practice... they are missing beginning capitalization, or capitalization of proper names of people, and they are missing ending punctuation. I have also done some where she circles the correct verb use in a particular sentence. Also in Circle Time, we sing a different hymn each month (August is Hail, Holy Queen) and read a couple of poems daily from A Child's Garden of Verses and The Child on his Knees.

And back to water, and science... we did a puddle experiment this week. We poured water out to make a puddle in the shade and a puddle in direct sunlight. Then Caroline traced around the puddles and we observed them every 5-10 minutes to see what happened. She is going to make a page in her book with pictures and her retelling of what we did and saw.

This is something we will do here and there throughout the year called the Nature Logbook... the page was created by our homeschooling neighbors. We looked up information on mallard ducks since we saw them at the lake, and we filled out a page. Our notebook has sections for insects, mammals, birds, plants, and...

chickens! Yes, technically they should go in the "bird" section, but I figured we'd have many chances to observe them and gather information about them... experiment on them and such (kidding! ;). We are currently tracking their daily egg-laying with a bar graph. That blank day was one where we forgot to record the number of eggs... luckily, we have not had any one-egg or no-egg days! They are not at top-laying capacity right now, but they are still producing pretty well for this heat wave, I think! We finished this graph today and so I need to print out a new one for the next few weeks!

And on to social studies...
In addition to the basic timeline, we are doing something called Family Geography. So far, we have filled out a family tree going back to Caroline's great-grandparents and glued it into her book. Then we plotted where each person was born on a map for her book...

...and we also put stickers on the wall map to show everyone's birthplace. Next, we will look at old family photos showing the areas in which people were born or lived later in life, and we'll learn more about those places... things like climate, land features, location. We'll also try to include some regional recipes and fun stuff like that!

That is basically what we are doing for first grade... we do one Bible story a week, one fable a week, one timeline event a week, one day of family geography, one day of water study (as well as nature study at water environments)... math is daily, and copywork from the Bible verses and liturgical year stories is almost daily. We also do five minutes of the St. Joseph's First Communion catechism daily and will add in seasonal and liturgical year crafts here and there. So far, so good! I am feeling good about getting several weeks knocked out before the baby is born!