Home Economics

Maggie has been making Christmas presents with me in a joint effort this year. I'm so proud of her and happy that she's taken to sewing. I think after the first of the year, I will teach her how to cut out a pattern. I have been embroidering and she has been sewing. I can't say what we're making (for obvious reasons) but I'm so pleased with her efforts.

Homeschool Friday

Today, Maggie went with me to a client's home to since Christmas Carols and visit the girl. She is 15 and homebound and always says that Maggie is her best friend. It's probably true, since she doesn't get out much. I try to bring Maggie with me whenever I go on Fridays.

Maggie and I have made up a new schedule for us to do her work by. We were getting stuck and not getting enough work done each day because

Beyond the Code is the book we are starting to use for reading and I have ordered book 8 of Explode the Code for her to continue in phonics. Today she also read Little House in the Big Woods and read aloud to my client while I gave her massage. Both Maggie and client really enjoyed this.

When we came home, we set the timer for 30 minutes and Maggie worked on Bible. She wrote a story (which I haven't had time to read yet) about a girl living outside of Jericho in the time of Joshua. Maggie loves to write stories, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

She has been working on math for the last 45 minutes... and it's giving her fits. I actually am finding I understand math a lot better this time around...at least for now.

More later. I have a client to see and she is going to put up the Christmas tree.

The habit of neatness

Today, the first thing we did was clean up Maggie's desk. She had been getting it messier and messier and finally I had had enough. I vacillate between making her be clean (in her room) and just saying "oh well, it's her room, I don't care" I have decided that I am going to have to get in there and clean...everything needs to come out and we will have to start from scratch...but that's not really about homeschool.

Today she cleaned her desk and now we are about to embark on a history lesson. I'm going to do part of it with her to get her started. We have to move along faster. Her work is very thorough, but takes her a very long time to complete.

Language Arts

Maggie spent a large portion of today on Language Arts, including spelling. She was very proud of her spelling test, as she got 100% on it. She then worked on sentence construction, adjectives, nouns and articles. She found it to be a lot trickier than she thought it would be.

Rainy, Blessed Friday

Today Maggie and I were tired b/c we went to see a midnight movie. We slept in and then got up and got busy. Maggie did Language Arts and Math and we had some lovely teachable moments. Maggie also made some banana bread. We are starting our Christmas baking.

Joseph

So far Maggie is best at Bible. She had to write a report on Joseph and what Egypt was like at the time of Joseph. There weren't a lot of books on the subject, but I did find a DVD called Joseph. I think it was a mini-series. So today, while Maggie was pretty tired, we watched the DVD. It was actually quite good and then she wrote her report. I'm having trouble with Maggie's computer program not letting me grade her papers exactly right. I have to work on that, but otherwise, it went well. She did some History and tomorrow she will write a report on Icebergs.

Finally getting back to it

The month of October was extremely busy with outside activities, so our school work has been a bit sporadic. Now we are hitting it hard to make up what we've gotten behind on. Maggie has completed all her assignments for the day. We have studied all the subjects today and done a little cooking today. We took a break for lunch and then she is going to do some more math. In about an hour we're going to take off to pick up Jena at her school and then go ride and maybe go to the Y. Not really sure where the day will take us.

Math adventures

Maggie had the opportunity to learn some more new math with Peter. They learned another unit and now she has worksheets to do for me tomorrow.

She also wrote a book report on the book, Maggie's Dare. It may be the first book she has ever read all the way through. I had to really keep on her to finish this book as she is not one to read books all the way through voluntarily. She kept saying it didn't interest her that much, but amazingly, once she got halfway through the book, she couldn't wait to see how it was going to end.

I also have a science worksheet on my desk to grade. I will have to look at the answer key to double check the answers, but it appears that she got most of them right. She is currently studying human anatomy.

I'm hoping her Switched on Schoolhouse program will arrive before the end of the week so she can begin working on it by October 1.

Math!

Maggie and Peter are in the other room working on math. He's the math guy, so I let him do his job.

I did get the switched on Schoolhouse curriculum so by next week, I will be better able to do work with her as well and she will be able to work independently.

Today, while I saw a client, Maggie worked on science. When I came home she could tell me all kinds of good anatomy facts. I was really pleased!

Friday

Today Maggie will continue reading Little House in the Big Woods. I wasn't able to test her vocabulary yesterday, so we'll do that today. She's done reviewing math and ready for Peter to start teaching her the new math lessons. I will know by the end of the day if I have won the Switched on Schoolhouse 6th grade program I have been bidding for on Ebay. I have decided if I miss the discounted one, I will just spend the $300 and buy a new one for 2009.

Math and more math

Maggie has discovered that she really enjoys math. She is working out of Math U See, the Epsilon book. I'm waiting for the Switched on Schoolhouse to arrive so that I can give her more consistent assignments. She is also reading Little House in the Big Woods and we are using the book to pick out spelling and vocabulary words and she is learning to enjoy reading aloud to me. I can't believe we never read these books together before now.

This week

Maggie has had a great week of working on her homeschool materials. She took her first speling test and only missed two. We have been studying longitude and latitude and the hemispheres, which is mainly review. She score 100% on jer quizzes. In language arts she has been reading Little House in the Big Woods. For Bible she is studying her Little Catacism and learning about the steps toward being confirmed. She attends confirmation classes on Sundays. She and her dad have been studying human anatomy and memorizing the major bones of the body for science.

I have decided to purchase the full curriculum of switched on schoolhouse. It's relatively inexpensive and will help me with her grades and keeping her organized. I ordered some of the past years's programs and discovered that they won't run on any of our computers properly. It's disappointing b/c they were very inexpensive. I am angry at myself for not realizing they were old programs and wouldn't run on vista or windows 2000. However, it did show me that the program suited her. So, we are getting a late start, but it will ultimately be ok. Peter is installing a bigger hard drive into her computer so she'll have more room for these programs.

We are enjoying homeschooling so far. Next week she will start horseback riding classes on Wednesday and then homeschool PE on Thursdays while I am at work.

Tomorrow we leave for a ctr and she's bringing her books with her so we can do somework in the car.

Getting Started

I thought I knew all summer what we were going to do for homeschool this fall. So, I didn't worry about it too much when everyone else was scurrying around making a plan. But, as luck (and newness to homeschool) would have it, my best laid plan didn't go so well.

I found a book at half price books called Learn at home. This is the book that we used this summer, but we didn't get very far. I discovered that she should be studying post Civil War United States this year (according to this curriculum) The problem is that she has only ever studied up to the 13 colonies, several times. None of her school work has ever taken her into the Revolutionary war...so scratch that. I did find a history book series called The History of the United States. I got it from the library and we read some of it over the summer, but I really need to purchase it.

After floundering for a couple weeks, I decided on a more formal plan. I ordered Switched on Schoolhouse so Maggie can do much of her work independently on the computer, which she loves. I have the Bible, History and Language Arts curriculm from there. I also ordered 2 science teacher's manuals from Songlight. We are catching up her literature, which has been sorely neglected (no one ever made her read the Little House series) and I'm choosing vocab words from those books and testing her weekly. I have sets of spelling words from my Learn at home book. I still need to find a way to get her spelling better b/c it's her weakest area. Math is going to be the Math U See workbook series, which she loves from Flint. She understands how the math is laid out and really enjoys working the problems in the book.

So far, so good. We're off to a start.

Our weekly schedule looks like this so far:
Monday, all the subjects and assign work for her to do with her dad
Tuesday she is with her dad and will be working on projects with him.
Wednesday she goes to a riding apprentice program from 1:30-5:30, after which she is home and she and Peter will do math.
Thursdays we hit all the subjects again, grade papers from the earlier days in the week.
Friday, catch up on anything we left out

If necessary, we also do school work on Saturdays and Sundays. She probably will have to some to stay on track since I'm sure her dad will be doing more project type learning than actual book work. Last week they worked on teaching navigation and and she learned about longitude and latitude.

She has some volunteer opportunities during the week as well, going with me to the nursing home as well as seeing one client who enjoys Maggie's company.

We did look at a 2 day per week school, but it didn't pan out for us at this time. I just didn't have the money.

Today I have to go see a client in the morning (getting ready to leave shortly) and Maggie will be doing math and reading another chapter in Little House in the Big Woods as well as studying vocabulary while I'm gone. She has a vocab and spelling test when I get home and we'll do some catch up history when I get back.