Classroom Changes...Some Pictures, Finally!

Math Time!

We were using our place value boards during Math...reviewing the value of numbers.

I think most everyone knows that we decided to take the plunge and move our classroom.  It was in the dining room last year, which worked fairly well, but drove this Momma to distraction because it seemed like an eternal mess.  Posters are fantastic in a classroom, but are very distracting in a dining room.  While having a dual-purpose classroom worked perfectly well for school, and the kids certainly enjoyed seeing their work displayed on all the walls of the dining room, it was a little less aesthetically pleasing for me.

Now the classroom is officially moved into the attic!  We are loving all the storage and whiteboard space. 

I finally managed to get some pictures. I have a couple bulletin boards to hang, and I still need to paint the "play" area of our classroom and a few spots I missed before construction of my whiteboard/storage carts began, but it is completely functional!

I'm sure I will eventually be replacing desks for the girls' high chairs, but we have a while yet. :)

We really enjoy having such a large space to work, study, and even play during our school day.

The kids have a hidden tunnel behind my cabinet
Rosalynne and Gabrielle love playing back here.

My little tour guide - Rosalynne loves having
a bed in the attic.

The kids helped pick neutral colors for our classroom - they actually aren't quite as bright as they appear in the photos. The toy area will be painted yellow, but with all the cold/rainy weather we've had, there just hasn't been time to get it painted.

School schmule

Last week was our first official week back in the classroom, and the kids did fantastic! We reviewed number patterns, skip counting, introduced a new book and talked about root words, examined the cursive alphabet, reviewed short vowels, talked about national, state, local, and familial holidays, and introduced our study topic in science for the coming weeks: ecology, environment, and organisms.

Whew! That was a busy week!

As we begin our second week, we are doing a slightly more focused science biome project.  The kids are making books about their biomes today. Asher picked the Rain Forest and Savannah picked the Coral Reef.

This year we will be adding three new topics in our curriculum beyond our core subjects from last year, but we are still waiting for the materials to arrive. What are we adding? Well, one of our subjects will be religion, which we covered last year a couple times a week, and has always been incorporated into our daily life, but we didn't have a specific faith-based curriculum to follow.  With the kids enjoying VBS and Totus Tuus so much this summer, they asked if we could add a more religious based subject of study. We considered entirely changing curriculum to one of the wonderful faith-based options by Seton, Our Lady of Mary or one of the many others, but thought that might be a bit too much of a change in one year. Instead, we chose two new topics of study from the Seton Curriculum to work with: Religion, and a History through Religion, which teaches history while examining changes and events in our faith. We are extremely excited to add these subjects to our daily lessons, though it will probably take a few weeks before I am able to fully integrate them into our lesson plans.

We are also incorporating Handwriting Without Tears into our curriculum.  Before we start really writing our pen pals again this year, we are going to take a while to review handwriting fundamentals (which seem to have lapsed a bit over the summer), and to begin working on the cursive alphabet as well.

Though we are starting school a bit earlier than normal, our plan is to take a short break at the end of August or beginning of September to give the kids one last hurrah before we really buckle down for the year, and also to give me a little more time to finish prepping the curriculum and adding our new topics. I am really excited that the kids are so enthusiastic about our faith and including it more thoroughly into our daily studies.

Keep checking back for more entries and updates about our school year. With starting school again myself, I can't guarantee that I will write quite as many entries, but I will do my best to keep everyone updated frequently. Also, feel free to message me or comment to remind me to post!

Summer Daze

We are on the verge of hitting summer vacation...and we know it.  I think we are all having just a little extra trouble concentrating on the work at hand because we know we are just a hands breadth away from having our school year complete. Technically the kids will be done with school on Friday, but we are playing Jeopardy next week for a year-long review of each of our subjects.  As we complete a subject we will have the glorious opportunity of removing all traces of that subject from our classroom and transferring our supplies to the attic (where we will hopefully be doing school next year) and reclaiming our dining room.

This week we are learning the basics of Multiplication in Math, which is going fairly well.  As usual, Asher is catching on slightly faster than Savannah, but they are both quickly grasping the concept.  I thought it might be a struggle, but the format the kids are learning it in, really seems to be clicking for them, so I'm very happy and excited that what I thought would be a bump in the road at the end of our year is actually a fairly smooth lesson.

In Social Studies we are finishing up our three week study of communication.  This has been an interesting section, though short, and the kids are enjoying learning about something that they already know a little more about. It's making for a nice slower pace as we close out our school year, and providing us with a lot of good opportunities to discuss people with differing abilities. 

I have been evaluating the kids' Language Arts abilities, and while I am confident they are both on track for completing Second Grade, there is definitely a gap between Asher and Savannah's skill sets.  Asher seems to have a bigger imagination and is more confident in creating his own story, but Savannah has better sentence structure and grammar.  Where Asher often skips words while he is writing because he doesn't want to take the time to spell/sound them out, Savannah has an almost uncanny ability to spell and make long, flowing sentences. When I am proofreading with Asher, he will often read the four or five words he has in the sentence, adding words throughout to form a complete sentence that he never actually wrote down on his draft.  It is something I think we will keep working on throughout the summer.  Savannah, unfortunately, gets to a certain point with her stories and simply ends them because she doesn't want to write more than two pages.  

 Reading is another subject where Asher and Savannah are finding themselves gapped slightly.  Asher is an average reader, there are words he struggles with and other words that he just misreads without looking at them (reading "what" for "when") because he isn't actually focused or paying attention to what he is reading and only thinks he knows what the book is going to say.  He does better reading new books than ones he's familiar with, because new stories he is more likely to pay close attention to, whereas stories he is already very familiar with, he will often just read by rote, filling in the blanks without truly concentrating.  Savannah is turning into an amazing reader.  It's nothing for her to sit down and read an entire chapter book from the Magic Tree House series in her spare time throughout the day.  Our last trip to the library found her reading the chapter books before I was able to get through them during school because she is such an avid reader. My plan for the summer is to have Asher review some of his phonics rules and to revisit Hooked on Phonics (levels 3 and up) to help him gain confidence in his reading ability. My goal is to close the ability gaps between the two before we start Grade Three at the end of the summer.

Science this year has been a lot of fun, and we have more fun coming! We try to do a lot of hands-on outdoorsy science during the summer, and now that we are all more mobile (being quite pregnant last summer made hiking a bit difficult) we will be out and about whenever possible this summer. We have waterfall hiking excursions planned, rainy day science experiment kits, rock exploration, bird watching, and a host of other activities that the kids are anxious to start.  Our pets are also proving a valuable tool in our scientific studies.  Learning about Max, Asher's Red Eared Slider/Painted Turtle has truly been educational. Asher LOVES feeding Max, and I had to admit, watching him eat is definitely interesting.  Max has finally started getting used to our busy family, and is rarely startled by little faces starting at him behind the glass. Butterscotch and Max are both teaching the kids about responsibility.
 

We have had a wonderful year, and while we have a few areas we need to work on, the kids have made amazing progress this year.

Many thanks to all the kids' pen pals (and their parents) for such a great experience! The kids have been enjoying writing everyone. If you haven't received a letter recently, it is coming, we are just taking our time as we end our school year.  Letters will continue throughout the summer, though it will probably take the kids a bit longer to respond. Thank you to everyone for making this such a special activity and learning experience.

Two Weeks Left...And a Few Days

We are gearing down for the end of the year...only two weeks left and three days of review!

Last week we studied several new topics.  In Math, our focus was on measurements, including studying volumes.  Fortunately for the kids, they help Daddy with a lot of projects, so they've had quite a bit of practice measuring various items.  We practiced measuring body parts, things we use daily (pencils, crayons, ect), and random items around the house.

For Grammar and Writing we were working on the writing process, and the kids are learning how to put the stories inside their heads down on paper. This is difficult for Asher, because he thinks so quickly that his writing can't keep up, and when I go over the story with him, he often adds/explains quite a bit more than what he has written down.  Savannah on the other hand, has an image in her head, but doesn't want to write "too much" so if she starts reaching a point where she thinks the story is supposed to be done (usually around 2 pages double spaced), she quickly ends her story.

In Reading last week we learned about synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms and this lesson will carry over into this week. The kids have synonyms and antonyms down fairly well, since it's a favorite car/store game we play.  I think they will do pretty well with the homonyms. They already know a few of them from our spelling lessons, so I'm curious to see which ones they will remember and what ones they might just know from reading books and Hooked on Phonics.

Our focus in Social Studies last week was Communication. The kids are doing a really good job making advertisements and discussing the different forms of communication.  One of their assignments was to design a product and advertise it.  Asher designed a snake cage.  His slogan was "Afraid of Snakes? Git Snake be Gone! It holds one snake." His illustration to go with the ad, was the image of a barred cage with a green snake inside, and a person outside the cage with a BIG smile on his face.  Savannah's advertisement was for "Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Craisins because they're healthy and delicious!"  Her illustration was a group of girls going gaga while eating her CPBPC, which she made from construction paper. The girls have comment bubbles above their heads with exclamations of how great the snack tastes.

In science last week and this next week the kids are learning about Electricity.  Daddy skipped into our class on Monday and taught a short lesson on circuits, and then we tried a few experiments throughout the rest of the week. We used static electricity to "unpepper" the salt, which was a lot of fun. Using a comb, brush, and balloon, we were able to remove pepper that we'd stirred into salt.  The kids really enjoyed this experiment, especially since they got to make their hair wild from static electricity.

As we are ending the school year, writing our pen pals has, unfortunately, slowed down. We will respond to all our accumulated letters before our last day of school and continue to write throughout the summer, though our response time may slow down over the summer. The kids have really been enjoying writing all their friends and family and look forward to the letters in the mail, so thank you to everyone that has been participating in their pen-pal activities.

I am looking forward to the next few weeks as we start looking at our progress and comparing our skills and knowledge from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. I am really impressed with the kids and how wonderful this year has gone.

Dewey Decimal Flower

My sample Dewey Decimal Flower without any pictures....

Sorry this post is delayed....we've had a very busy week/weekend.  Last week we made Dewey Decimal Flowers for Reading.  We are currently learning about the Library, the difference between fiction and non-fiction books, and how books are categorized in the Library.  

One of the kids' favorite activities so far has been the Dewey Decimal Flower.  It is a visual representation of the Dewey Decimal System that the kids can easily understand and it helps them remember the numbers associated with each topic/subject matter.  

The kids started their flowers by cutting out 10 different color petals, one for each of the number sequences in the Dewey Decimal System, 000 - 900.  One difficult thing about our Library section is that there isn't really a "card catalog"  anymore....everything is done on the computer!  I wanted the kids to understand that each book used to have THREE cards (author, title, subject), but now we can search by all of those things and MORE.  We spent a lot of time discussing the different ways to search for books, the best method of searching for a particular book (title), and the best way to do research searches (subject).

 After we had our petals cut out, we had to cut out our stems, leaves, and the middle of our flower, which served as a number guide for our flowers.  We traced circles on construction paper and cut out our yellow flower centers, then divided it into ten parts, writing the numbers 000-900 in each portion.  Then we glued our petals together and added the center circle.  This part was tough because we were trying to match up the numbers on our center to the numbers for each petal.

 Once the flowers were glued together, the kids wrote the categories on the corresponding petal: 000 General Knowledge, 100 Philosophy, 200 Religion, 300 Social Sciences, 400 Languages, 500 Science and Math, 600 Using Science/Technology, 700 Arts & Recreation, 800 Literature, 900 Geography and History.  Once all the petals were labeled, the kids illustrated the petals so they had a visual image of what each category included.  I considered printing out clip art images for the kids to paste on their petals, but decided to let them look through the listings under each category and pick their own image to draw to help cement it in by using something meaningful to them.  My flower (I haven't added images yet) will probably include clip art.

And voila! The kids' Dewey Decimal Flowers!

Asher and Savannah's Dewey Decimal Flowers!

Savannah's Flower Petals.  She took a lot of time drawing each picture.
She wanted the petals perfect, so she took the flower apart three times
trying to get it to fan out correctly.  What a hard worker!

Asher's Flower Petals.  He spent a lot of time writing out things in
each given category and then drawing a small picture.  He managed to get
his flower to fan pretty well until Rosalynne tried 'helping' him and
managed to pull a section apart. What a patient Big Brother!

 

Spring Fever!

Today was a difficult day for focus at the Quinlan Homeschool.

After experiencing sunny skies and seventy degrees yesterday and the day before, combined with Easter on Sunday, the chilling thirty-five degree, drab day outside today was hard for the kids to tolerate.  Asher and Savannah both had a rough time staying on task  Spring Fever has really hit hard in the Quinlan household. I hope they can pull it together better tomorrow.  They are understanding the concepts and absorbing the information, they just didn't feel like putting forth the effort today.

On the upside, however, their prewrites for Grammar and Writing went very well on Monday, and they did a good job on their Rough Drafts today.  Last week we talked about the process and I partially modeled each step (I didn't write an entire rough draft for example, only one paragraph), and while the kids did well on their stories last week, they struggled with a couple steps, so this week I am modeling each step completely before allowing them to move on with their stories.  They are enjoying watching and helping me as I work through the steps.

For Social Studies we are working on a section called "Global Education" so we are trying to focus on learning a few short words/phrases in several languages, and also reading fairy tales from each culture and comparing them.  Today we learned how to say: hello, goodbye, how are you, my name is..., and see you later in Spanish.  We also read the story of the Ugly Princess, which was new for me and slightly disturbing.  Tomorrow we will try learning the same words/phrases in French and read another fairy tale.

Our Library section in Reading is going well, though I think a planned trip to the library on Friday may be in order.  The Librarian for the Children's room is just a sweet lady, and I think the kids will really benefit if after we finish all or most of our Library section, they are able to have her explain all about how books are organized, sorted, and shelved at the library and the best ways to search for a given book.  We've already determined that if we are looking for a particular book, Title searches work best, because subject and author searches provide us with too many other suggestions.  I am excited for them to get to the library and ask the Librarian questions.

In ASL we are learning about rooms in our house and the things that can be found in those rooms.  It has been so amazing to see the kids learn signs this year.  They are picking up an impressive amount of signs, and using them whenever they can.  They are particularly appreciative of knowing signs during church, and often use them while we are in mass.  Savannah has been getting me a lot when I am on the phone, asking me things by signing...it can be tricky answering her while continuing a conversation. :)

Asher's turtle Max is doing very well, and seems to be adjusting to the regular sounds of children in our house and the typical activity in our classroom each day.  Asher is doing a great job with him.  For a boy that REFUSED to touch any new and especially slimy creature just last year, he is doing wonderful picking Max up and moving him when needed.  It's wonderful to see the change and animation while he is caring for Max. All the kids seem to really enjoy Max.

Fortunately, Savannah's cat Butterscotch has no apparent interest in Max, and as long as Savannah feeds and waters her first thing in the morning, she keeps to herself until the kids sit down, then she climbs on their lap to cuddle.  With Spring weather just around the corner, Savannah will have her hands full brushing Butterscotch's fur.

The First Day/Week Back....whew!

So - today is our first day back in school after Spring Break.  We are all rejuvenated after our week 'vacation' and are ready to get back to work.

Asher working on the rough draft of his story.

Monday was extra special because Daddy was able to hop in during our Science period and teach a lesson about rocks!  We learned how weathering works, what causes it, what minerals encourage weatherization and what can inhibit it, and how it is all a cycle.

This week we have also acquired a new addition to our classroom/home.  Asher got a 'small' pet turtle that he named Max.  Max is currently residing in our classroom in his small tank and in our laundry room sink when he needs a larger space to play and exercise.  He is a Red Eared or Painted turtle and is fairly friendly.  Asher really likes Max!  He is careful to feed him every day and for once, doesn't seem to mind getting his hands dirty while handling him or cleaning his cage. Mommy and Daddy may not be Max's biggest fans, but he is a fairly calm little guy that the kids enjoy watching.

Sunday after Mass, Savannah had some really deep questions about Heaven and death.  She doesn't want to die for a VERY long time and is praying that nothing happens to her Great-Grandma Pachmayer or any of her Grandparents because she would miss them so much.  I usually let Daddy take the lead on these kinds of conversations since he manages to explain them better than I can on the fly.

Grammar and Writing this week is proving to be a process - the writing process! But seriously, each day is devoted to a different part of the process. Today Savannah blew it out of the water with her rough draft, but Asher is having some problems focusing, so he is working on his third attempt of his rough draft, this time with a 'list' of story needs: who, what, when, where, why, and how.  It seems to be working better for him knowing that he needs to address these parts of the story. Wednesday the kids will be working on their reviews and peer edits. I'm curious to see how well they do.  This is our first week back AND our fist week writing "un-directed" so I'm sure it will be a learning experience and give us some ideas on things we will need to work on/improve.

Our "Friendly Letter" pen pals are still going strong. The kids have probably written about 40 letters to various people.  They love getting mail and responding to their pen pals.

A close-up of Max, Asher's turtle.