Geography guessing game

The kids thought of a fun game we can play in the car or waiting for our food at a restaurant: the geography guessing game. The "it" person says the name of the letter it starts with, and if it's a city, state, country or continent, and then everyone asks questions and makes guesses.

fun math game

We did a fun game for math today, mostly because I wanted to lay down. The boys came in my bed next to me, and I asked them a math question. If he got it right, I tickled his brother; if he got it wrong, I tickled him. I asked a few "what is the mathematical equation for the theory of relativity", and there was some chasing involved. math+bonding=great math lesson!

Our schedule

Someone asked me how long I spend on school each day. It's usually about 4 hours, but we end with the projects, so I let the boys do the projects as long as they want. We have scriptures, math, spelling, writing and grammar (though writing and grammar aren't strictly every day); then we have lunch, and then after lunch we have the fun projects: on Mon. and Wed. we do art and science and Tues. and Thurs. we do music and history. I'm starting to add Spanish (Rosetta Stone) and piano. My plan is to have one doing Spanish on the computer while I give the other one a piano lesson. On Fridays we go with the homeschool group to Park Day or field trips or Friday Fun Classes (the moms take turn teaching) and doing PE at the public school. We do the reading aloud and the boys reading to me at night, so it doesn't make "school" too long, and they want to read at night anyway. Alex reads for 30 min. and Nathan 15-30 min.

P.S. I use Susan Wise Bauer's Grammar book and each lesson takes 60 seconds or less-- it's great.

accomplished

Today has been a good day! It's 2:20 and we've done:
scriptures and scripture pictures,
math,
spelling,
wrote a book report,
ate lunch,
spanish,
piano lesson,
history and
music.

Read-a-thon

We decided to have a read-a-thon. They decided to do it today (Sat.) so Todd could do it with us. We got junk food, stayed in our jammies and read-- I read to them, and they read to us. It was a better idea in theory than acutality with a 5, 7 and grumpy one year old. Alex did it at school with his kindergarten class. I'll have to ask his teacher how she did it. The boys thought it was a junk-food-a-thon.

American history

This is so I can remember what we're doing in American history and I'll add to this post during the year:
-The History of US
Native Americans: we got a book on each tribe and we read one each class, then I got a lot of Native American legends in picture books and we read a couple, I have "More Than Moccassins" from the library and we do a project out of there at the end or do "History Pockets: Native Americans"; we read aloud "The Sign of the Beaver" by Elizabeth George Speare and "The Courage of Sarah Noble"; watched "The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush" Reading Rainbow

Explorers: projects I think of or find online, read lots of kids books, Norse myths with Vikings, read aloud "Pedro's Journal"; map voyages using a relief map we make, biography paper dolls on timeline; make homemade compass; sail on Salem Pond; make map (house or street) and have someone else find point on map

first settlements: History Pockets for the pilgrims, First feast, read about first settlements in non fiction kids books, colonial days crafts and activities and recipes

the kids' binders

First, I want to highly recommend a book I got on Amazon.com called "history pockets." They have many different topics, and I chose 3 of the American history ones and the boys really love it!

We had a busy day in school today! For art, we made Halloween paper chain countdowns, and made fall leaves for our wall tree:

Notice how there are none down low? (Baby) And Nathan's cute mickey mouse looking apple right in the middle:)

Here's how I do the kids' notebooks:

(The pics are in random order)

It's divided into: scriptures, writing, spelling, history, science, art, music and book reports.

In the front, there are checklists (there are 6 days per sheet) for me or the boys to check off as we do our subjects:

For spelling I write a silly story with their spelling words, and they fill in the blanks. The other days they make up sentences and I print them out and they fill in the blanks. Baby wanted to do spelling, too:)

This is their writing. I have them tell me something they learned, or write a journal, and I write it and they copy it:

For scriptures, I read the scriptures and they draw a picture about what we read. I write the verse numbers and the date and the title of their drawing:

For their book reports, I either have them write their favorite part and draw a picture:

...or I write it down for them. We keep a record of all our read aloud books this way:

For science we read a book, and then do an "experiment" (just a hands-on lesson really) and then they can write about it and make a drawing:

For history, here is a writing about what we learned that day. We are also doing "history pockets" but I am not going to keep them in this binder until we store it away at the end of the year. We also will have a time line (book of centuries) in the history section.

For art, they have a seperate sketchbook for drawings, but when we do the projects from "Discovering Great Artists" we'll have a copy of the master's art original and their reproduction on the other side of the layout. We've only done one project from that book so far, and it didn't really work out so I didn't put it in the binder.

I'm not sure what we'll do for music. Maybe I could have them write about the music they like, but I don't know. Maybe I'll wait for a stroke of inspiration. For music, I play them different types of music and talk about it, and we also learn songs from Wee Sing America (because we're doing American history this year) and Wee Sing Halloween (because we love holidays).