What's not fun is putting all of your homeschool stuff in a backpack and have it stolen on your journey. Yes, you would have to call lots of people to make sure it was stolen and then start ordering the same homeschool supplies again and start feeling vandalized that someone went through your stuff. Yes. That is what we went through.....until we realized that the "stolen" bag was in our floor compartment of our van, just waiting for us.
I feel sheepish.
However, a tragedy did happen.....I forgot my camera back home. Whimper whimper. We don't know how long we'll be gone, and I don't have my gorgeous Nikon. We have device cameras, but it just isn't the same.
Dustin has been having fun with our device cameras though. Check out the movie he made of one of our days here:
I feel that I need to talk about what we accomplished before we left, and have an half-way-through-the-year review.
I have found that history activities have fallen on the back of my priority list. But we DID accomplish a few. My boys continued to have tea parties in honour of Boston:
And we ran around the house with "hobby horse" brooms while blowing trumpets in honour of yankee doodle and Paul Revere. Last time I did this we used kazoos. I would suggest doing that again. Those toy trumpets do bad things for adult's calm.
And I had planned on doing George Washington wigs again. After all, last time they were so cute:
But even before we started history for the day, Maxwell, who is the most interested in crafts, said "No no no! I don't want to do wigs! I want to make a craft of George Washington crossing the Delaware. Here, I could make him on his horse, and We could use this black paper because he did it at night, and here's some cotton balls for the ice chunks in the river, and here's this and this....."
I was quite impressed that he had soaked in so many details and just let him do his thing:
Also, I would like to announce, that we have read all of the ORIGINAL "Common Sense." I'm quite proud of this fact.
And, we have memorized all the Canadian provinces, territories and their capitals.
I doubt we will be doing very many crafts for history while we are on the coast. There's more hands-on fun that we will be doing.
Not sure if any science will happen out here either. We'll see.
And now, for our half-way-through-the-year Review!!!
Maxwell-
He is slowly but surely learning to read. We are going at half the speed that I thought we would go, but he is PROGRESSING!!! He does not love the process, but I love the life line that Barton has given us. We are now halfway through Book 4.
Yesterday, when I thought all our Barton tiles were stolen, I bought the Barton ipad app.
This had added a new spark in Maxwell's interest, and today's reading went smoother than usual.
His math is going swimmingly as ever. I think he needs a bit more challenge added actually.
Hyrum-
He is learning to read! He is very confident with three letter words. Truthfully though, he still needs to sound out every. single. word. AHHHH! He has done Barton book 2 a couple of times, but I want to make sure his "e" and "i" vowel sounds are very secure and that his digraph sounds (sh, ch, ck, th, and wh) are also secure before I move onto book 3.
The Barton tile app is actually a deterrent for Hyrum unfortunately. He just wants to play instead of doing the task at hand when the ipad gets in his hands.
Math- Hyrum and math. Well, I'm very grateful he is getting one-on-one attention. Math has always been hard for him. When he was 4 he couldn't count to four. When he was 6 he couldn't recognise the value of numbers, and I found a way through this difficulty that I recorded in this post.
Now, he's having a hard time learning the traditional names of the numbers. You see, with Right start, they have you say "two-ten five" instead of "twenty five" or "one-ten two" instead of twelve. This is great for math comprehension, and has been good for Hyrum's concept of what numbers are all about. But now, they are asking him to change over to the real words. This has been hard for him in his language-processing-disorder mind.
I've been having him watch these two cute videos done by the "singing walrus."
But even still, he's had trouble. I quickly knew what to do because of past experience with this little boy, and whipped up these two flash cards.
This has helped quite a bit.
Daniel-
You know what? I do not think Daniel has dyslexia. I also do not think he has a language processing disorder or ADHD. In other words; He's my easy kid.
Do you know how hard it is to teach children with learning disabilities? It's so hard I want to cry (and sometimes do.) I think "maybe I should just send them to school because I just can't do this anymore." but then I realize how behind they are or how many difficulties they are having and then I think "yah, public school would be so cruel to them." I'm seriously thinking I need to hire tutors. I just need some of this responsibility off my shoulders. I'm sinking in over my head.
But not with Daniel.....so let's talk about him.
He's done with Handwriting Without tears and has started journaling.
He's doing Rightstart math level A, and is doing just awesome. Totally gets everything.
Well, I think that's it. Doubt if I'll be blogging as much while I'm out here on the coast, but know that I'm constantly homeschooling even here.
