Monday day 5

This weekend we had fun up in Hope at brigade days.  Nathan really enjoyed the 4*4 races and demolition derby, Gigi not so much.  We went swimming and for some bike rides.  Gigi had her cheer on Saturday morning and we went up after and stayed at my parents house. 

We started the day out by reviewing our Latin, we played a matching game with these cards.  Can you believe we know all these Latin words!

Here are some new words we learned. 

We completed 4 worksheets in Latin.  We studied Latin 1 hour this morning.  My goal is 1/2 he every Monday doing the lesson, and using Latin everyday as the kids and I speak to each other.  Nathan and Gigi enjoyed this last year, but we did not have a set day for new lessons...

Next up mbtp poppy

This worksheet was synonyms and antonyms.  

Cause and affect

Here the kids had to compare something they have read or something they have done to the book poppy.   This is Gigi's 

This is Nathan's.  He laughed as he gave it to me, he knew he answered the question with the worst possible answer. He really did not want to do this assignment.   I thought it was pretty ingenious and I think he had to think a while in order to come up with the fewest words possible. 

Next up was math. Nathan completed another page in beast academy.  Less complaints today and he was quicker and did not need me to sit with him. 

Gigi completed chapter 6&7& the unit test.  So in 3 days she completed 1 unit, only 17 units to the entire year.  I am thinking she will probably start to slow down!   The first chapter is all review and Gigi did say it was way too easy.  New to her was the callendar portion, she did not like that part, I did come and spend 3 minutes helping her figure out how to write dates numerically.  Although I think in canada we may write dates differently, or we have a mix of American and European date writing.

After math we had lunch and then we continued in with canada.  We read about Europeans meeting the First Nations and the devestating consequences.  We also started reading julie and the wolves.  

Friday day 4

Today we started our Canadian history studies with Canada's natives long ago.  I plan on studying Canada's natives for at least 3 months.  We read the first few pages.  We discussed where the first peoples originated from, the fertile crescent.  We have been studying this in story of the world, so we picked out where this was on the globe.  And I talked about how people spread across the globe.  Showed them the bering straight etc.  We then read about religion and native culture and how it differs from Christianity. 

 

In this picture Genevieve is reading a picture book from donna ward, while Nathan practices the piano, gigi already practiced the piano...

 

quick look Nathan is practicing the piano!  And he wanted to! 

After Native studies, and piano practice, we did some math again.  Gigi is cruising through teaching textbooks!  I think she is on lesson 6, she said she really likes it, she reads the lesson and then just does the work.  She thinks she just wants to uses the workbooks and not the computer, but we will see when we get the discs I think she may like to have it...

 

Beast and Nathan, well Nathan is working at a much slower pace then Gigi, I am hoping he is going to ease back into liking beast academy again.  He is doing skip counting and patterns.  He is definitely having a mental block in that he does not want to do the work. 

 

After we were done math, I decided to play some math games, I looked up some skip counting math games in the right start math games book.  I found this one which is a memory game.  I thought it was a great way to reinforce what Nathan is learning.  Gigi had to collect the multiples of 3's in order and Nathan the multiples of 4's in order.  We then looked at what common multiples they share, and I told them the lowest one is called the lowest common multiple.  I got them to line them up and see if there was anything they noticed.  they noticed the next common multiple was 24 which is 12 plus 12. 

After math we would normally have done MBTP but I decided not to do it today, as the kids have worked hard all week, and it was already 11:30, we had been working since 9 am.  I was making plans to go to cultas with a few friends and we needed to get ready and I needed to feed the kidlets and get to cultas for 1.  So I got the kids to do a little cleaning.

We had an awesome time and cultas and the kids seemed to swim nonstop for 4 hrs.

Nathan had a pretty bad headache tonight before bed, not the my brain is going to explode from pressure really bad ones, but bad enough he asked for Tylenol, because of this he did not make it to sleep until close to 10 pm.  We are supposed to go to cheerleading tomorrow morning, not sure if Nathan is going to be able to wake up on time...

Day 3 sept 4

Thursday!  Well another fairly successful day, we completed 3 hours homeschooling bookwork today!

 

I read to them while they were eating breakfast again, but we were early for breakfast, the kids then went and played for 1/2 hr before school started, Nathan is liking knowing an exact time school starts I think, we always look at the daily schedule at breakfast so they know what we are doing.

 

 

At 9 am we started math, I started gigi on teaching textbooks, the workbook pages, this worked well for her, she read the lesson and completed the work, she did lesson 1 and part of lesson 2, she then got bored I think and she played the piano.  Nathan and I worked on beast academy, he is doing skip counting, I realized he is pretty good at skip counting from the math u -see CD, but we were working on counting by six last year.  So I decided to turn it on again while we were driving everywhere.

 

Here is gigis work

I think she likes these word puzzles...

After Nate and I finished 1 page of beast he asked to play a game, so we all played this game together, it is an attribute and colour game, you have to match 1 or the other, fun game, it was quick too!

Next up we did some moving beyond the page, I had to finish reading the second chapter and then we worked on our worksheets, I must be tired, I forget already what the worksheet was about, and I didn't take a picture...  I remember it was on quotation marks and what quotation marks mean, they had to find some examples in the book, and then act out a scene in which there was a lot of dialogue.

 

We then made some owl puppets, to act a scene in the book.  We were supposed to do this on lesson 2 but we ran out of time and I thought oh well, its only a puppet, I should have know we would use them.  The kids had fun making them, I helped Nathan colour and cut out some parts as colouring hurts his hands.

 

 

 

this picture is for you Rebecca, this is our living room after a morning of homeschooling...  Balls are everywhere as Nathan and gigi do physio excercises while I read.  and lots of math manipulatives on the flooe everywhere, all our worksheets all over the floor!  I have yet to get better at organizing all of their work after they are done!  I need to get on that and put all their mBTP stuff in a binder...

We then had lunch and off to physio and music lessons for Genevieve.  It was great to go back, Nathan is a little sore after physio today. 

We then had a bunch of running around to do, picking up our bikes that got fixed, Canadian tire, healthfood store, and grocery store, I am tired now.

Yeah for another great day...

Day 2 September 3

We completed lesson 3 in Poppy.  And I saw a mistake in our copy from MBTP  it did not tell me how many chapters to read of poppy, well I did not see it, and yesterday we only read one chapter, when we did our questions, we were all a little confused about porcupines, as we never read about any porcupines.  Anyway we read 3 chapters today to make up....

 

We mixed the order of our day up a bit, as I read to them as they were eating breakfast, as I did not sleep well, and we were eating breakfast at 9 am, our appointed start time.  We then moved onto math after reading, and our chapter summary questions.  Gigi worked on math wrap ups!  I just realized on my way home from your house Rebecca that I have TT4 workbook, I can get genevieve to start on that!  Nathan completed another page in beast, less frustration then yesterday.  I brought out our big 100 chart for him to use, as he was crossing off multiples on the small one on the beast workbook, and well, Nathan is not neat and it was hard for him to see.  He does not do well with small printing either, it overwhelms him I think I am not sure..  so after beast Nathan joined gigi for math wrap-ups

 

Next up we did some work on paragraphs, I discussed what what information goes in a paragraph etc.  then they had this paragraph worksheet they had to underline the first sentence they would make into a new paragraph.  Both Nathan and genevieve came up with the same ideas...

Next up  Owl Pellet dissection!  EWWWW its owl puke!  Its so gross.  Once she got over being a drama queen she was having a lot of fun dissecting it.

 

See cant you see how yucky this is!

Do you see this!  Look how cool this is it is a whole head.  I know hard to tell that is what Nathan is thinking when he most enjoys something this is his intent face.

And then we had lunch, we then took ginger to a free dog training session.

And Nathan and Genevieve had their first piano lessons with Marlene Carr!  Nathan came out and said he loved it.  He even came home and practiced his song.

We were not home long and we had to go to Gigis first day of cheer practice.

First Official Day of 2014

Nathan I don't want my picture taken, do you think I am happy about going back to school?

Of course Gigi is more than happy to pose for pictures.

 

Look how cute Ginger looks!

So today we were supposed to start our first day back with a beach party, but it poured buckets out, so we did school work instead, and I promised the kids to take a day off of school next week when daddy was home and do something fun.

 

We started off kinda late though as I made an opthamology appointment for myself at 9:30, it would have been perfect if we went to the beach!  So we started the day just after 10.  I made up a schedule a few weeks ago, in consultation with Nathan and Genevieve.  So I got out the schedule and asked them what we were supposed to do.  They grumbled a little about starting up story of the world again.  I promised to do the reading, as they don't like the sound of Jim wise baur.  We read a chapter and then looked at a map of the area and compared it to a present day map.  Before we started we also discussed "previously on story of the world".  Nathan thought it was much better when we talked about what happened if we made it sound exciting.

 

Next up was Math, and here is where the struggle was.  I sent Genevieve upstairs to do learning rapups to the learning rap up CD.  Nathan was in tears he did not want to do math.  I said but you like beast academy.  No No No he did not want to do any, finally calmed him down and he managed to read beast.  Then it was time to move onto his worksheets, why do I have to do the worksheets, I understand what they are telling me.  I don't want to do the worksheets.  Get him to the worksheets, I don't understand this, I cant do this, desperate tears coming out of Nathan.  Meanwhile I am also in the process of making muffins for snack for these guys.  Oh boy.  I managed to stay calm and try and work with Nathan, let him know I understood he was frustrated.  Nathan has such a difficult time with change, this is one reason I wish we had done more consistent schooling over summer, but then I think we all needed a break too!  So He managed to get 1 worksheet completed, and I sent him upstairs to do learning wrap-ups with gigi.

 

By this time it is now lunch so I made them lunch.  I read them chapter 1 of Poppy while we were eating.  We answered our chapter questions orally as we usually do.  We then went to the maps we drew this summer from the book Poppy, we located the places on the map that were in the book.  We then completed our worksheets.  Today's worksheet was on combining sentences, I gave both of them the option to choose the easy, or hard worksheet, they both chose the easy one!

Gigi adding to her map she drew over the summer...

Nathan pointing out where Mr ocax lives

Nathan completing his conjunctions

Genevieves worksheet...

So after we did this I stopped as Tyler and Cody were coming over soon, but I realize now we should have made the puppets they wanted us to make, we use them in other chapters to do enactments

 

 

These were the words gigi practiced today in all about spelling we worked on the letter C  We learned that the letter IEY then it is a soft c sound.  I brought Nathan over and asked him if he knew that rule, and he said well know but you kinda already know that when you spell how words are spelled you don't need to know the rule.  I think apparently gigi needs to know the rules...

The afternoon, Tyler and Cody came for a visit, they went for a little walk in the forest and came back extra muddy. 

 

After our playdate ended Nathan was bored, aka tired.  He wanted to do some Geo Puzzles together so I said sure.  We had a good time putting together Europe, and had some great discussions about countries, and about the USSR and Russia now.  Nathan has been curious about the Ukraine and Russia.  We don't even have TV, but apparently he has been reading the news on Yahoo!  Oh my...  Anyway we talked about the countries that used to belong to ussr.  I am beyond glad we purchased these puzzles last year, such a great investment, and so hands on, even becoming familiar with the names of all of the countries is huge, a bonus if we know where they belong :)

And of course 1 puzzle is never enough, we had to put together Asia because you could see part of asia in the Europe puzzle, we made up both and looked at how they fit together, Nathan was the first to notice that the two puzzles were a different scale.  then we built North America, when we placed all three to look like a world map I explained how they don't all look right together because the earth is round and fatter in the middle and the puzzled do not represent that it would be curved and more water in the atlantic area.

On another note, I had a email from their piano teacher that went to my spam folder!  She called today to see if we were coming to piano, I said but we said we would start next week!  Oops  We are going tomorrow at 1!  I hope I don't forget since it is not written on our beautiful and colourful class schedule!

Anyway what a wonderful way to start our homeschool journey on.  I made sure to give them some hugs and let them know how good I thought the day went!  I hope for as much success tomorrow and maybe a few less tears from Nathan!

summer!  Where did it go?  We have enjoyed our summer immensely but GASP we did not get as much schooling done as I thought. 

 

Our summer started off with a difficult even our beloved cat anna of 15 years passed away.  This was very difficult on us all and maybe more so for Nathan.  We buried anna in our backyard and planted a pear tree on top of her.  Gigi wrote a not on a rock for anna and put it under the tree.

After losing anna, we visited many cat sanctuaries in the first few weeks.  We ended up seeing this ginger from west coast cocker rescue, and I thought she would be the dog for us.  We got her on a 1 week trial, and she was a wonderful fit!  We instantly fell in love with our dog.

We celebrated Canada day in abbotsford this year.  We started off the day with gigi in a the parade with her cheer squad.  We then went to rotary stadium to enjoy the festivities there.  It was very hot so we only stayed a few hours...

Genevieve's birthday!  Can you guess what she got?

It was a computer!  We bought her a used computer, we needed a computer for her to do her teaching textbooks on.  Nathan's laptop does not have a CD drive.  She was very excited!

For gigi's birthday dinner she requested a seafood only dinner!  We dined in style, muscles with saffron,  stuffed mushrooms, shrimp skewers, and this picture of salmon with crab and shrimp stuffing.

Her homemade ice cream cake.  Ice cream cake was requested by gigi, of course I have already perfected gluten free regular cake, but this turned out pretty good for my first ice cream cake!

 

 

We spent a week in 100 mile at cannim lake.  We had such a wonderful time!  We were with another family, who also homeschools.  Here are the three amigos, doing acrobatics on the tube!  Gigi of course made a dance routine on the tube!  We also discovered on this trip an awesome game called settlers of Catan!  We loved loved loved it, gigi most especially.  We also used a book I had bought called small weapons of mass destruction, it uses office supplies to make bb shooter, crossbows, all sorts of weapons!  We have had great fun playing with these.  They also have a book called mini weapons of mass destruction siege weapons

 

http://www.amazon.ca/Mini-Weapons-Mass-Destru

ction-Build/dp/1613745486/ref=pd_sim_b_1?iehttp://www.amazon.ca/Mini-Weapons-Mass-Destruction-Build/dp/1613745486/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0569CAYDATZYZFDDZ6XF=UTF8&refRID=0569CAYDATZYZFDDZ6XF

 

We had dinner with friends and had a treasure hunt, the kids were spies and they had to figure out where the treasure was with the clues, using all sorts of logic and math skills

We went camping at maning and gig had a bad bike accident, she was pretty badly scrapped up.

 

Nathan kayaking with ginger

 

He loves the kayak!  Jeff and I are thinking we may get him a kayak as it would be so good to streghten his upper body.  thanks to physio he is getting more body aware and is more conscious of the normal movement his shoulder should be doing.  this is hard work for him!

aren't they cute!

this was a wonderful experience during the day we went down to the day use area and built these floating lanterns.  they had a bunch of scrap material to use and you had to use your imagination to build whatever you wanted.  Nathan built a pirate ship.  Gigi's is a flower

Getting ready to launch

 

here there are!

Lots of playdates with friends here we are playing games!  And I played this game with their mom when I was their age, so neat to grow up together!

Movie in the park

Mid august the kids went to a day camp for the week at camp squeah!  they had a great time, we went up with four families and we all camped together in yale.  It is a Mennonite camp and I thought it was a great experience for the kids to learn about religion.  We discussed what they were learning in the bible.  We brought up our weapons of mass destruction and it was a huge hit!   8 boys all working together, the big kids helping out the little kids to build these weapons.  We built a target for them to shoot at.  And all the kids pretty much used their implements safely, only a few reminders were needed!