This is Kyra’s first year of school (she’s five, turns six in July), and I’ve switched curriculum with her. The other kids I taught to read with TATRAS; and while it was okay, it just seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r and the phonics didn’t always translate to the spelling side. Georgie didn’t pick up any reading speed until he was at least eight despite having been through all of TATRAS and several years of school. Trinity read right off the bat but was was an atrocious speller.

This year I switched everyone over to Spell to Write and Read and started Kyra off with it. I also decided to be bold and teach her cursive right from the start instead of printing. Okay, so that’s not bold like jumping from moving aircraft or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an armed assailant, but it’s educationally bold. For me.

The basic philosophy of SWR is to skip the whole teaching them to read thing (which I loathe doing anyway because it is painfully slow and repetitive and awful) and just teach them to spell. After they hit a certain point, all the stuff that they can spell they will also be able to read and the reading will sort of organically occur.

Kyra and I have been faithfully practicing her 70 phonogram cards all year (which she only forgot two of today and she’ll have completely down by the end of next week), and guess what? It seems to be working. She’s starting to pick words off of things like the Amazon box and wants to read her readers more often. Learning cursive right away hasn’t seemed confusing with reading things in print. Here is today’s spelling test:

Awesome, huh? Go, Kyra! In case you’re trying to figure out the marking system (which I’m sure you all are), the double underlines are silent ‘e’s, and the single underlines are for double letter phonograms.

The other children have all had a marked improvement in both spelling and penmanship except for Georgie whose penmanship remains borderline terrible despite my best efforts, death threats, and blackmail. Hmmm, blackmail. Maybe I should tell him I’ll post his stuff on the blog. He’s almost to the age where parental embarrassment becomes an effective disciplinary tool. Hehe. His spelling isn’t too bad though. I guess in another year or two I should teach him to type.

In other, unrelated news that also falls under the “School” heading, I now know where the Duero River is, which until two weeks ago I had never even heard of. Yay, geography! Oh, I’m supposed to be teaching the kids school? Right. I knew that. Learning all this stuff myself is just a happy byproduct.

Rachel

Thanks to el crappo economo, my website business started tanking in August 2008. By January I was in full web redesign mode to try to breathe new life into a dying entity. By April, we were offloading expenditures, such as the kids’ school (I started homeschooling). By June the hit was hard enough that we moved in with my parents who graciously decided that they would rather we lived with them than in our van. By July, the website was costing more in payroll than it was bringing in, so I shut it down. It was weird for about a week and then I recovered. I don’t miss it at all. Kinda miss the money though…

Most of my summer was spent trying to figure out school for this year, which now seems to be humming along rather nicely. We’re on Christmas break at the moment, but the kids generally are enjoying their studies and I like teaching. We’re doing ancient history this year and I’m thoroughly enjoying learning all of that since somehow that part sort of got skipped in both high school and college (and I took a whole year of Western Civ at Portland State! So depressing.).

Our Egypt studies were a huge hit, and Georgie has begun to develop an appreciation for ancient literature. He thought the Epic of Gilgamesh was great (it was a young person’s version that sort of glosses over that whole part with Shamhat taming Enkidu). I read the full version myself for the first time and loved it! Now we’re going through stories of Greek heroes in prep for next term’s ancient Greece studies. They keep pointing out that they’ve heard half the names and other references from Harry Potter. Brilliant!

Georgie and I have had several conversations about worldviews and how the cultures we’re learning about differ from what we believe and why we believe what we do. He’s starting to recognize this stuff in reconstituted form when he watches television now, which has prompted some interesting discussions. Bwahahaha! My evil plan to make him aware is beginning to work even at eleven years old. Awesome!

George has been working himself to oblivion trying to make up for my lack of income generating-ness. He’s doing quite a good job, too. A couple weeks ago he was off on a shoot from Tuesday until Friday in Buffalo, NY and Cleveland, OH. That was the week there was a horrible storm in that part of the county. I worried about him the whole time he was gone, and after the story I heard when he returned I felt totally justified!!!!

His outgoing flight was from here to Newark and then they took a prop plane from Newark to Buffalo. George and his business partner guy Tim sat in the front of the plane right next to the flight attendant and Tim’s a pretty chatty guy so they spent the whole flight talking to her.

About fifteen minutes before landing they hit some pretty choppy turbulence due to high wind followed by a loud BANG at which point the flight got much worse. George spent the rest of the flight trying not to have to use the barf bag but Tim noticed that all the color drained right out of the flight attendant’s face and she suddenly got very quiet. The plane felt like it was listing with the pilot fighting to correct for it.

After they disembarked, Tim had to return to the plane to retrieve a forgotten item. The flight attendant was there and furtively confided that the plane had lost an engine. As in losing one of the two engines on the plane. In a windstorm. The flight got in around 8 or 9 am. By then end of that day both the Buffalo and Chicago airports were closed due to snow and wind respectively.

But by 3pm George and Tim had finished their work in Chicago and were headed down the interstate to Cleveland. After checking into the hotel and having what George described as a “terrible dinner,” they hit the proverbial sack (or hay depending on which part of the country you are from). By this time the interstate they had driven on to get from Chicago to Cleveland was also closed due to foul weather. But wait! The fun just never stops!

Around 11pm my time I received the following phone call:

George: Hi.

Me: Hi. Isn’t it one in the morning there? And what’s that weird noise in the background?

George: We’re at the hotel. That’s the fire alarm. Everyone’s out in the hall in their pajamas.

Me: Umm, sweetie, if the fire alarm is going off in the middle of the night, don’t you think it might be a good idea to get out of the hotel?

George: No, it’s minus ten degrees and blizzard conditions out there. Besides, I think it’s a sewage leak. There’s a bunch of water down the hall. The fire department is coming. We’re on the second floor. It’s fine. Oh hey, I think the alarm finally shut off. Oh, nope it’s back.

Me: George, sewer leaks can have fumes and weird things that are flammable. I think you should go out of there. Like now!

George: I gotta go. They’re sending us all to the lobby. Bye.

Charming! So after two hours of standing in the lobby, it turned out to be someone’s fire sprinkler went off and sent water gushing down the second floor. George and Tim got moved to the third floor where they got a couple more hours of sleep before heading back to work.

The rest of their trip was uneventful although even more sleep deprived since they went to a late movie, didn’t go to bed until midnight, and then had to get up at 3:30 to catch the red eye back home. I didn’t find out about the whole airplane engine debacle until I picked George up and Tim spilled the beans. I don’t think he was planning to tell me that part at all.

Considering the fact that I was worried already and the weather got so bad while they were there that every airport and road they used got shut down within hours of them being there, it was probably good that he didn’t tell me about the airplane when it happened. Then neither of us would have gotten any sleep. And now my January plans involve reinstating our life insurance and getting on LegalZoom to set up a will.

I think that’s all for today. There is one more story from this summer that I want to write down before I forget it entirely and then I’m hoping to post with a little more regularity, so I hope you four readers feel extra special now! Stay tuned tomorrow for Georgie and the Amazing Escaping Snakes!

Rachel

Then last night was a lovely jolt back into reality as we got slaughtered 22 to 3 by one of the best teams in the league. Even their girls hit way out past our center fielder. Plus, their pitcher was pitching short balls that seemed to find the plate at the last moment. The first time I was up, I let three strikes whiz on by without even swinging because they looked like they were going to be balls. Duh!

Also from yesterday, now I have a beautiful two square inch purple bruise adorning my left shin right below my knee. It matches the one and a half inch bruise on the same shin just above my ankle that I got last week (and yes, I did measure both bruises, ’cause why wouldn’t you??). Apparently I need to work on catching grounders on grass. Those tend to pop up at all kinds of weird angles because the ground is uneven, and they seem particularly fond of hitting me in the left shin. At least they aren’t popping me in the eye! Since I play infield most of the grounders that come my direction are on dirt which is much smoother. Good thing too! My next ball-related purchase is going to be shin guards because hey, me = wimp. I don’t really mind having purple lumps on my legs (when I was in Jr. High I played touch football with the boys on the blacktop every lunch break for two years and had permanent scabs on both knees for that entire time), but I don’t like not being able to sleep because my leg hurts any time anything touches it. Kind of obnoxious.

Otherwise things are going pretty well around here. We’re starting to settle in nicely, and I’ve been working on school curriculum for our next term which starts next week. In addition to our usual coursework, we’re starting two new subjects, Botany and Drawing, both of which I’m pretty excited about. The Botany book is put out by Apologia and is awesome. I come from science nerd people (like sand people but without the sand and the Banthas), and Apologia’s stuff is just as in depth as any science person could hope for when teaching their nine year old. When a book explains in Chapter 1 the term binomial nomenclature including the breakdown of the Latin roots of each word, you know that the book is going to be great.

Okay, well I’m off. You guys have a lovely holiday weekend, and may your 4th of July partying be safe and include lots of nice weather.

Rachel

This is the whole covered Tabernacle

And here are the individual pieces:

The Golden Lampstand (left) and Table of Showbread (r) with all the bread, of course.

Sacrifice (l) and Altar of Burnt Offering (r)

Ark of the Covenant

Altar of Incense

High Priest (l) and the Bronze Laver (r)

The whole shebang minus the tent top.

I’m particularly fond of the altar of incense and the High Priest. Georgie seems to have all the pieces of the tabernacle down now, and they seem to be glued to his brain cells pretty well. So great idea, Mr. Nieman (the SS teacher)! And awesome job, Georgie!

In other news, this week I started homeschooling Georgie, Trinity, Anika, and Kyra (well, and sort of Faith). It’s going pretty well! The kids are enthusiastic and have been working hard (a couple of them have even decided to get up early and do their half hour of reading before school starts at 8:30).

We’ve been pretty close to on schedule, and I’m nearly done figuring out all the curriculum for the term. It seemed better to start and finish figuring things out as I go along then to wait until everything’s perfect, which will happen in about never. Today I made the mistake of having the kids each make a set of sea animals flash cards during science. They colored and I glued the pictures onto 3×5 cards.

Math pop quiz: 5 sets (one for each kid) of 17 flash cards, each with an animal glued to the front and facts for that animal glued to the back means Mommy gets to glue how many pieces of paper to index cards? If you guessed 170, you have won the fabulous prize of coming to be my helper next time I have a stupid idea that should be spread over a few days instead of all done at once. At least science was the last class of the day.

Anyway, here’s my cuties on their first day of school:

Today Georgie and Trinity had a blurb in history about the clothing that people wear in the desert, and it was talking about the aba, which is a long bathroby-looking thing that gets worn over your long flowy shirt, and about the head coverings, which I can’t remember the names of (bad teacher!). This seemed like a good excuse to torture my children (not that I really need an excuse, but when the opportunity presents itself…):

No, actually they were quite pleased with themselves. Georgie took the stuff off his head but left his bathrobe on until I made him remove it to go to choir practice at 7:00.

This one just made me laugh because it’s amazing how expressive Trinity can be with just her eyeballs.

Okay, well that’s it for today. Is the weekend here yet?

Rachel

What, you can’t read that? Well, click on it and it will take you to the bigger version. For term study this time we are doing a unit on sea life. That way when we go to Family Camp at the end of the term, we can have an excuse to go to the excellent Oregon Coast Aquarium (like we need an excuse).

Even better, the aquarium has a whole bunch of downloadable curriculum for homeschoolers, which will make organizing easy for me (big plus). Yay! So now I’m all excited.

I went through what I have and need yesterday and am hoping to make it out to Exodus Books tomorrow or Saturday to finish picking up class materials. I think I need to clean off one more bookshelf today so I can finish setting up the classroom and then I’ll be ready-ish. So yep, feeling pretty good!

Oh, were you wondering what the heck Resurrection Term is? We are running our school year according to the church calendar and days of creation. So instead of having three or four terms of school and then the summer off, we are having seven terms that are seven weeks each.

The first week of each term the kids have off of school as a reflection of Sabbath rest the first day of each week. The school year starts mid-November for Advent Term, and that entire term of seven weeks is off of school (first term of seven, also reflecting Sabbath rest on the first day of the seven day week).

There are several advantages to doing it this way.

1. Your children’s brains don’t leak out their ears over a long summer holiday.
2. The longest break comes around Christmas when everyone is swamped and wants to do family stuff anyway.
3. If you don’t like the schedule or get behind on something, your term is only six weeks of actual school time so it’s not going to screw the kids up too much to just wait and revise next term.
4. For summer, we do a bit lighter load and the schedule is flexible enough to allow for that.

If you’ve been calculating in your head as I’ve been explaining, you’ll notice that seven terms of seven weeks makes 49 weeks but there are 52 weeks in the year. That leaves three floating weeks to take elsewhere as vacation.

We’re taking two in June, before and after Family Camp which is the start of the Apostolic Age Term and then the last one probably in August somewhere during the Church Age Term. No doubt this will come up again in a later post, but if you’d like to do a bit more reading on your own, this idea was developed by my friend Melody at Solis Ortus.

Oh! Also, I’ve decided not to bore all of you with our day in, day out homeschooling details so I have started a dedicated blog for that in order to better bore only those of you who wish to be bored. It’s at HomeschoolSandbox.com. My friend Lana who is currently homeschooling her two school-aged kids has joined that blog as an editor, so she’ll be posting her homeschooling life on here as well. I’m excited! Should be fun.Welcome, Lana! This should be fun.

Rachel

Apparently the blue frosting was very blue.

Studying India.

The schoolroom.

Anika being her usual charming self.

Trinity loves school.

Georgie loves Dragons (and school). I think he bought the book from the school store.

Thinking hard.

Thinking less hard. This picture cracks me up. Trinity is the queen of goofy faces.

Three of our happy children. Amy printed a copy of this for me and sent it home with the kids. It’s sitting on my desk so I have my children smiling at me all the time. Hmm, I think I need a frame. I love this picture.

Due to financial restrictions, the kids will no longer be attending Zera Hall as of the end of this term (April 10th) and I will be homeschooling them from then on. Amy has been extremely gracious about the whole thing, but this has been a frustrating time for me. The kids have been with Amy for three years now, love school, and have been flourishing there. Taking them out is a great grief to me, and although I am starting to look forward to homeschooling them here, I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing.

The children themselves seem to be reacting fairly well. The girls are excited about not having “the long car ride” home before they can start on their homework (we live seven minutes from school). Georgie is a bit more suspicious of the whole notion, but he pretty much starts that way when you tell him he will be doing anything new or different. I think once we get going, they will probably all miss Mrs. Hayes whom they love very much.

Amy is actively looking for new students now, so if you have daughters in the K-4 age range and are looking for all the benefits of homeschooling without actually having to do the schooling yourself, Zera Hall is the place for you. Amy is a truly wonderful teacher, and you will be delighted as we have been. It has been our great joy and honor, Amy, to have you teach our children. Many thanks.

Rachel

After rummaging around downstairs for a binder and printing off all the tracers, Kyra and I put together a school book for her and she sat down next to me in my room and did school while I worked on my computer. She’s four and a half. School at this age is not terribly consuming, and I’m pretty sure I can keep her busy with tracers for a few weeks until I get going with the big kids next month.

We started today with tracers for her name. As soon as she can do that, we’ll move on to the alphabet. Here’s a couple of pictures of my happy new student:

Yes, fancy desk and materials, I know. She seems thoroughly happy to be sitting on my bedroom floor right next to Mommy with the bathroom stool for her desk. So congratulations, Kyra, and welcome to school!

Rachel

So today was the first day of school for Georgie, Trinity, and Anika who are in grades 3, 2, and 1. Anika was soooo excited! Last year she did school at home with me so this is her first year off with the big kids. She’s been counting down the days for a week now. (“Mommy, only three more days until school starts!”). Yesterday she got her lunch ready and laid out her clothes and had a permanent smile on her face the entire night.

Here’s their first day of school picture. Aren’t they cute?

In preparation for school, we moved all the kids’ bedroom assignments around this weekend. Georgie and Trinity were together and the three little girls were in the bigger room. We needed to move the two little girls into Georgie & Trinity’s smaller room and put Georgie & Trinity with Anika in the larger room. That way the three school children would all be together.

So Thursday I cleaned out Anika’s room and Friday Georgie and Trinity and I weeded out their room, which naturally took three times longer despite being a smaller room with fewer people in it (mostly I sat on the floor trying not to pass out and directing traffic). I had done Anika’s when the kids were gone. I should have done the same with Georgie & Trinity’s.

Saturday was moving day so George and I took apart both sets of bunkbeds and swapped all four bed pieces into the opposite bedrooms. Why, you ask, couldn’t we have just swapped the bedding like normal people? Well, Georgie and Trinity’s set we got second hand (Craigslist) and it’s a lot more wobbly than the Kyra and Faith’s set. Plus it’s missing some of the bars at the top that keep the top occupant from falling out on their head. The bigger kids have enough sense to keep their heads out of the holes in the bars, but the littler kids are largely lacking in that helpful commodity.

So we took the beds apart and moved them back and forth down the hall and around the corners. In case you are wondering, this is not an advisable thing to do when you are pregnant and feeling rotten. After we moved the first bed, George looked at me and said, “you sure lose steam fast!” WELL DUHHHHH!!!!!! You want steam? I’m steamed now! What do you think I’ve been lying on the couch for two months for??

No, I didn’t say that. I just thought it very loudly. And we still had three more beds to move! And I’ve had more steam the last three days or so than I have had the last two months! When we were done, I crumpled on the couch for two hours and passed out almost immediately.

Another item in this weekend’s plus column: I made it through an entire church service (two hours) on Sunday for the first time in eight weeks. Hurray! I’ve only tried maybe three times during that period but every other time I’ve felt so rotten that I’ve come back home within about 45 minutes or so. I always feel weird when I don’t make it to church, so it was quite nice to enjoy an entire service.

All that is the demonstrative way to say that I’m feeling mildly better. I think. Although my going off the meds experiment a couple weeks ago ended two days after it started when I quickly went back on the meds, I seem to be getting a little bit of energy back. I cleaned half my kitchen the other day before pooping out (hubby comes down the stairs to find me on the couch with white lips and not moving. “You look wiped out!” he says. He’s so astute…. and it’s only taken six pregnancies to notice these things!).

Yes, pooping out after cleaning half a kitchen is really pathetic; but compared to the zero amount of kitchen I’ve been cleaning (my MIL, Mom, and various other people have been over to help some so the kitchen has not been growing science experiments for eight weeks straight), it’s an improvement.

Well, I think that’s all the news around here. I just had to share about the kids’ first day of school and my miniature burst of energy over the weekend (well, it was exciting to me).

Rachel

Needless to say, the rest of my week has been filled
with exciting things like packing and planning the packing. I have this
gigantic master packing list just for my Family Camp packing that I use
every year. It’s eight pages long (one page for miscellaneous stuff,
one clothing page each for myself and all five of the kids, and one
page for food).

I told Handsome Hubby Tuesday that I printed off
the list and was going to get started, and he couldn’t figure out why
it might take me so long and seemed shocked when I told him I had eight
pages of packing lists. His packing consists of throwing a few things
in a duffel bag. Hmph! He did sound sympathetic, however. I packed all
the clothes Tuesday night and yesterday, which is usually the most time
consuming part of the job. Today I schmoozed Kathy, my SIL, into hanging around for a couple hours so I could get some food prep done. THANK YOU, KATHY!!!

A couple years ago there was a tsunami
warning while we were at camp, which apparently made a big impression
on the kids. The other day they told me that they were going to leave their
favorite toys at home so that if there was a tsunami, they wouldn’t
lose their toys. Georgie did decide to bring his new prized chess set
though, explaining that if his got washed away he could always go to
his Grandmother’s house and borrow hers. Since we got bought it for him
on sale for $4, I told him I thought we could probably buy him a new
one if the ocean eats his first one (I didn’t tell him how much we paid
in the first place).

So, I started doing summer school with
the kids last week. I swear that is going to be the cause of death
listed in the coroner’s report when they find me keeled over in two
months.

“How did she die, Doctor?”
“Death due to educational poisoning, Detective.”
“Don’t see much of that anymore.”
“No, now it’s mostly educational deficiency; but that’s more of a
childhood disease than the poisoning, which mostly strikes teachers.”

Somehow between the workbooks, music
class, Bible class, and penmanship copy work (I sort of made up
curriculum for those last three), we’re doing a very solid two to three
hours of school every morning from nine o’ clock to around noon. Then
it’s lunch and after that it’s at least another hour of Mommy this and
Mommy that. By that time my ears usually hurt from all the racket and
I’m about ready to lock myself in the bathroom (which works
depressingly badly). They seem to be having a great time, but I’ve been
utterly exhausted for two weeks now.

Overall
I’m happy with what we’re doing for summer work. It’s keeping them
occupied, and I have yet to hear the dreaded “I’m bored” complaint yet;
however, that could be because when they do try that one out, I usually
say something like “Oh goodie! I needed someone to go clean out all the
toilets, sweep the floors, empty the trash bags, fold all the laundry,
and vacuum.” At that point they usually recant and run away as fast as
they can. I think they’ve only been “bored” a couple of times…. Hehe.

Rachel

Ha! Don’t they wish. Hehe. They may think they are entirely free to do nothing but watch Disney movies and play on the computer for the next several months, but those children are entirely mistaken. Old Mom has been contemplating a wide variety of summer tortures, errrr educational activities, for them. Plus their teacher is a good friend of mine and she’s got vacation homework plans for them as well. Bwa ha
ha ha! Learning does not end due to external temperature variation.

Anyway, that’s our excitement for this week. Last week’s broken arm
excitement concluded with a green cast that is now covered with large
quantities of hieroglyphics. Lots of relatives plus a small cast on a short arm make writing space at a premium. Anika is handling herself very bravely and so far barely complaining at all.

She only has to have her cast on for three weeks (down to two now), which means it should be off about two days before we leave for Family Camp. Hurray! That means I don’t have to try to keep her out of the ocean for an entire week while her brother and sisters are busy soaking themselves and everyone withing splashing distance.

That’s it for here! Have a great week.

Rachel