A_9 had her Suzuki piano recital yesterday. She played the song Musette and did a duet with her piano teacher to my favorite Suzuki song Goodbye to Winter. She looked so beautiful! Somebody else did her hair Nina... :)
A_9 and M_7 before the recital started!
Here is a video clip of her performance, on the second song you can hear her piano teacher playing along with her. I kept the camera on A_9 for obvious reasons!
This week we are reading the 2nd book of the Jamestown diaries, The Starving Time. I made a notebooking journal for all the books in the My America series. A_9 has different activities for each book... from copywork to mini books, questions from the book and even drawing. I tried to add different ways for her to experience the books. So far she is enjoying it!
We've also started vocabulary. I added spelling and for A_9 to find the meaning for some of the words herself using our pocket dictionary, just for practice. She is enjoying that as well.
X_6 is rowing the book Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
This week A_9 is starting American history! We will be reading the book series My America. We are going to be covering five periods of American history, starting with Jamestown and ending with immigration(early 1900's).
There are 15 books, 3 books for each period. The books are written in a diary format, which hopefully will be easy to not only read but for A_9 to understand and care about.
We start with Our Strange New Land, Jamestown Colony Diary.
X_6 will be rowing the book Katy and the Big Snow. Convenient since we are supposed to be getting lots of snow this week!
This post is brought to you by the iPad! No, I don't have an iPad... I'm just playing with one:)!
Here is her Hello Kitty cake, the thing is I forgot to order her a cake, I bought one already made and just bought the tops separately... she loved it so no harm done!
She had a little party with her friends, what she really wants is to go to Chuck E. Cheese for her birthday, we will be taking her today!!
Happy Birthday!
This week we are reading the book Pocahontas by Ingri & Edgar Parin d"Aulaire. This will be our intro to American History and to My America book series which starts with Jamestown.
I thought we were done with our FIAR books but I was wrong. We still have Paul Revere's Ride, which we will read while were are reading about the American Revolution.
X6 will be reading Winter on the Farm, from My First Little House Books.
Last Friday we had a last minute change of plans. Because of my surgery I had to cancel our dentist appointment back in November, I got a call Thursday from the dentist office asking if I would like to come in Friday morning for our regular cleaning. I said yes!!
That meant we had to get school done by 11 am. We got most of it done... well X6 did. A8 didn't get to finish her Beethoven lapbook. We read the book(Beethoven Lives Upstairs) in four days, for the fifth day I wanted to read Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers: Ludwig Van Beethoven and finish the lapbook, no such luck.
I was going to give the kids a day off today so they could play with their friends who have no school because of Martin Luther King Jr's day. However, I need A8 to finish that lapbook, so today she will be working on that and nothing else.
This week we are reading Beethoven Lives Upstairs. This is a book based on the Classical Kids CD. The funny thing is I have owned the CD since 1989, it is one of my favorite Classical Kids CDs. I found the book by accident, actually I found the lapbook first on Homeschoolshare.com.
After seeing the lapbook I knew there had to be a book, so I went looking for it at Amazon, and there it was!!! The book follows the Cd very closely except of course for the music, that's what makes the CD so special! I will be reading the book throughout the week and listen to the CD as well. Best of both worlds with this book!
I'm hoping X6 will take an interest in the book, we are doing Madeline and the Gypsies this week but I think he will love listening to the Beethoven CD as well.
While I was looking at my school planner this weekend, I found a little mistake. I have 35 books scheduled for 35 weeks of school, however A8 had two weeks of school done before we began actual school, Roxbury week and music camp week. I had Roxbury already on the schedule but the music thing was a last minute addition. They both count toward school of course but it means I have to drop one of the books I was going to do this year.... Beethoven was the book I had to drop because all of my other books are either FIAR VOl 4 books or My America books, also I really wanted to do Shakespeare this year as well.
I want to do all the books I have scheduled to do this year, which means our school year is going to be 37 weeks instead of 36. That's not counting Field trip days and other activities that count toward the school year.
I had a couple of Moms tell me that they often end up with well over 36 weeks of school because of all the things they ended up doing during the year. I guess this year that is going to be us!
A few days ago I posted about how I would love to own a comb binder so that I can continue to make my own workbooks for the kids for school.
Well, my Dh was listening!! He said, "why don't you just get one?" So I did! Amazon had then for $30 + $10 shipping.... I decided to check Ebay just to see how much they had it for...$26.95 and Free Shipping! So I bought it!
The GBC CombBind C55 Personal Comb Binding Machine is ideal for smaller offices or for personal use. Equipped with a 5-sheet manual punching capacity the C55 is perfect for assembling small reports. It binds documents up to 90 sheets with 1/2" combs.
YYAAAAYYY!!!
Continuing with the flying creatures of the fifth day theme, the kids got to build and paint a bird feeder yesterday for nature study.
I found the feeder at Michaels' two summers ago. All we need it to do was put it together using a hot glue gun and a few nails, I did that part. The kids painted the feeder and added the seeds to it.
We wanted it close to the house to give us a chance to see the birds closer but so far no birds have come, maybe we will move it to the smaller tree in our yard. We already have two ground feeders there.
Our first feeders, there is a dark eyed Junco eating the seeds, that's all we get, sometimes we'll get a male and female Cardinal and once we saw two Blue jays. We need to buy different types of seeds to attract different types of birds.
This week should be school week 18, but since we did two days of school(3 days if you count what did on Wednesday for Nature Study) the last week of school, I'm counting that week as the 18th.
Which makes this week the 19th week of school!
We are rowing our last FIAR Vol 4 book, Hannah's Cold Winter. The book is a curious true incident incorporated into a pleasant glimpse of a Budapest family during WW II.
After this book, all of the rest of the books we are reading for the rest of the year will take a whole week to read. Did that make any sense??
Usually we read the same book four times a week. The books we are reading this semester will take a week to read. I'm adding one more book this semester, A Midsummer Night's Dream for Kids by Shakespeare Can Be Fun! We saw the play this past November and I thought A8 would enjoy reading the play.
We are done with spelling and cursive. We are also done with Language Lessons for the Very Young 2 and are starting Primary Language Lessons. I was a bit worried that A8 was not going to like it, since it is a little different from LLVY2, but she is really enjoying it.. it really is a great fit! We are doing a small unit on Synonyms, Antonyms and Homophones and after that we'll start doing vocabulary.
I wanted A8 to continue to have some type of cursive practice this semester when I found Pictures in Cursive A (Daily Cursive Writing Instruction Based on Picture Study Lessons).
The thing is, it was a bit pricey at $12.95 + shipping for only 12 weeks of lessons, so I made my own! Instead of 12 weeks I made it for 15 weeks. It was a lot of fun making my own and I'm thinking of doing more of them, all I need is a binder machine!
We are also starting Writing Strands 2.
X6 is rowing winter books this week and we are working on a winter lapbook. Nothing has changed for him, we will be doing plenty of RME, handwriting and math!
We are done with Zoology 1 but will continue to do nature studies this semester. We built our own bird feeder today, but that's another post!
Last year I got my most favorite XMas gift ever.. my mini or netbook... I really thought it didn't get better than that.. until I got this year's gift.. my new Kindle!
I love to read.. I would rather read than watch TV sometimes... When the Kindle came out I thought it was the coolest thing out there since the iPod... but I kept thinking to myself if I was ready to trade books for an electronic reader.... books are magical, they have that special smell, the sound of the pages as you flip them.... I really thought I would miss all of that if I ever got an ebook reader... well, I was WRONG!! I do not miss it at all!!
I just read the entire Hunger Games trilogy on my Kindle and it was so easy, no heavy book to drag around, no bookmark to keep in place, no opening and closing... and reading the books was just as magical... I had no problems getting into the story, I soon forgot were I was reading the story from... Thank you Nina and Grandpa for my new Kindle!!!
