Week in review

Last week went by way to fast.  Lots of schoop, lots of work for me.  We got a little dusting of snow which was exciting until it melted a couple of hours later.  On Sunday we participated in The community Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. program.  The kids all enjoyed the program which included a drill team performance, selections by The MLK choir, a very moving key note speech by Ms.  Juanita Gambrill Floyd, and the presentation of the drum major award to Mr. Mack Turner.  The program was followed by a brief reception, after which we went and hung out with the local SCA group and watched some fighting, tended a fire, and had a conversation with friends about racoon parts and hunting.  Hope.this week turns out not as busy but, fun.  Untl my next post, have a good one. 

Time 4 Learning Review

A while back, I had the opportunity to review Time 4 Learning.  I actually was happy to be able to review this site because I have heard good things about it from other homeschool families.  The review came at a good time because we were spending some vacation time from our normal schoolwork anyway.   I tend to not be really big on kids spending a whole lot of time on the pc for games so my kids loved to be able to have two hours each per day set aside just for the Time 4 Learning site.  

The set-up was fairly simple.  I logged in, created a profile for each student which included which grade level I wanted them to study in, and chose the amount of time they should spend on each lesson or subject.  Each child got their own login id and had to log in on their own account.  I thought this was nice because it taught them a skill that they will need as they use further internet sites later in life.  

My youngest child, who is six, studied at three different grade levels since her math is on level, her reading well above, and her other subjects I wanted to keep the same as her older brother's so we could do projects or have discussions together in relation to what they learned.  She absolutely loved it.  She even has been asking me if she can spend time on Time 4 Learning even now that our trial is over.

  

My youngest son is eight and still has some challenges as it comes to reading.  Because I am the one who sets their levels, it was good for his self-esteem to not realize he was set at a lower level than his younger sister.  He really enjoyed the games that were really learning exercises.  I was able to log-in later and see what his scores were in what section and direct him to do exercises over. 

My sixth grader enjoyed using the site as well.  I asked him what he liked best and he said that it was all fun.  

My high-schooler, who is to old for the site because it only goes through eighth grade was seen looking over the shoulder of the younger kids as they worked on their work. She said she wishes that there was something for her age.   

I spent some time looking over the preschool portion and the other grade levels that the kids were not  enrolled in.  They seemed to be equally fun to look over and even more important they were very educational.  

In conclusion  I enjoyed the review of Time 4 Learning and will probably add it into our "school time" for this semester.  I will, however, only allow the kids one hour each on the site.  I still prefer them to do most of their learning with books and paper.  I tend to be a tad bit old-school on that one.  

Have a great weekend!

Toni

Naked egg and the rest of 1/9/13

Today was a normal homeschool day for us.  We started out at 5:30am which was terribly early for me because I spent a long time visiting a friend last night .  Little P and middle P both got up and did reading, social studies, spelling, language, and writing.  Little P finished her math quickly and headed back to bed but, the boys stayed up and played a computer game.  Big P stayed in bed and finished her studies while I was at work.  I got home late because I had a postpartum visit after I left work.  By the time I got in everyone had already ate dinner but, before the kiddos went to bed we read aloud more of the Phantom Tollbooth and Little P read There's a Wocket in my Pocket and finished our science project from yesterday.

The results Of The naked egg are in!  Tre' was the winner with an hypothesis that the shell would be soft.  The shell was pretty spongy to the touch and hard to bust amazingly.  It sort of had the same consistency as a balloon.  The experiment was pretty neat! Before we busted it open we measured.   It opened up a conversation about membranes for the little ones and we watched a couple of youtube videos of other experiments with the naked egg.  Big P and Tre' and I had a conversation about diffusion and osmosis, hypertonic vs. hypotonic solutions, and permeable and semi-permeable membranes.

I used gloves on this one because I didn't want vinegary hands.  The discoloration of the liquid and the end product of the egg are brown because I used apple cider vinegar instead of regular white vinegar because it's what I had in the cabinet.  Well, I'm off to bed,  I'm so sleepy.  I hope your day was great!  I'm ready to get ready for another one tomorrow.

School and Elvis' 78th Birthday Celebration

We finished school early yesterday morning and headed to The birthplace for Elvis' 78th birthday celebration. It's just kind of hard to be in Tupelo and not catch a little Elvis craziness!  We had cake with other Elvis fans, toured the birth pace and museum for free (yay!), watched a short film and a great performance by the Tupelo Unity Choir.   I even saw myself in the local paper in one of the pictures.  (I had not the slightest clue I was in the shot)

The theater entrance at the Birthplace Museum is complete with a headliner.  

Tupelo Diversity and Unity Choir

Couldn't get everybody looking in the same direction.  I think they were thinking about cake.  :)

Until my next update, have a great day!

School Update 1/7/13

Wow, we have been out of "school" way too long.  I think it's been about a month.  Somehow right after Thanksgiving we just never got back to it.  Before I looked up it was the holidays.  Whew, it's crazy jumping back in!  Trying to get back into the groove seems to be hard for both me and the kids.  As soon as we hit the table we dove right back in.  Today was refresher day especially for Precious who is in Algebra 2.  They have all be reading and writing during our no school days so that was good.  Everybody finished three math lessons a piece today and all of their other studies.  I think it was a good day overall.  We even got an experiment started.  We are doing the naked egg experiment.  I didn't have  any regular vinegar so we ended up using apple cider vinegar instead.  Everybody made a hypothesis, even Daddy, to see what the egg would look like tomorrow.  So stay tuned to see what happens next.  We are discussing food and where we get ours from and reducing our carbon imprint and homesteading.   On netflix we have watched and discussed a lot of shows on the subject.  Today we watched No Impact Man.

It was a very good documentary.  I really enjoyed it and so did all of the kids.  We discussed what little things we could do to reduce our own impact.  The kids really like eating local.  We already get milk, eggs, and a lot of our vegetables locally.  The kids decided that we would pick a new habit once per month and see if it is something we can stick with and they will do a project to see what the impact could possibly be. What is one thing you could do to increase your impact?  

More news on the Hill front is that.  PJ got braces!  He is super excited about it and you can already see a difference in his smile.  Until next time.  Have a great one!

Time4Learning review

I've been invited to try Time4Learning for one month in exchange for a candid review. My opinion will be entirely my own, so be sure to come back and read about my experience. Time4Learning can be used as a homeschool curriculum, for afterschool enrichment and for summer skill sharpening. Find out how to write your own curriculum review for Time4Learning.

Toni

Howling Wolf

Today we went to the Wolf Howl Animal Preserve because it's Wolf Awareness Week this week.  For recognition of this week the owners are allowing visits free of charge.  The kids absolutely loved it.  I guess it was interesting to me too!  My favorite part was when one of the owners got in the cage and put down some curry powder so the wolves could demonstrate a scent roll.  I was also fascinated to find out that the leader of their pack is an alpha female as opposed to a male.  Overall I would totally recommend the trip and even am planning to go there again later this week so Daddy can check it out as well.
School is going well.  No complaints on either end.  I just got home from the Birthing Project USA conference in San Diego so we will be sure to do school for the remainder of the week.

ta ta For Now,

Take it away Tuesday

School went great!  My pc crashed.  Praying my dear husband can fix it. 
Toni

Monday Madness

Today is Day 2 of school at Hill Learning Academy.  The troops were funny today with looks of oh yeah we can't just run and play today?

Our little people played Math games and worked on reading and writing this morning.  It's crazy how a couple of weeks of no school will ruin handwriting skills practiced daily.  This is the first time we have not done any writing during the summer and boy did I see some horrible examples of penmanship today.  Whew!  Anyway we got off to a late start (word to the wise.. start early!) and that seemed to throw our entire day off.  We spent a little while talking about cells today and explored quite a few websites on the subject.  Some of the kids favorites were:

http://www.eurekascience.com/ICanDoThat/animal_cells.htm 

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/insideacell/ 

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ 

They watched Magic School Bus goes Cellular

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mHlf17f0Y0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5RfoGiupM&feature=player_embedded

and found a cellular rap

I loved how they all were gathered around learning together, even the high-schooler.  Of course I don't have one picture to show for it though.  

little P and P had fun rolling down the hill while the older ones were having their piano lessons.  They forced me to take pictures so I might as well post them,  right?

The rest of the afternoon was a blur.  Full of running around like a chicken with my head cut off.  What's new?  Oh for dinner, we had jerk chicken and rice in recognition for our study on Jamaica.  They loved it!
Looking forward to what tomorrow brings... sort of

First Day of School yay!

Yay!  It's the first day of school at the Hill Learning Academy.  Yes, it's Sunday.  We have figured out that we will have to do school on Sunday in order for our life to work.  Good thing is homeschooling makes that a possibility.  I am so happy that I am able to spend this time with my children.  A plus for us now is that Dad is home on Sunday and can add to our school activities on those days.  This is going to be an interesting year with the way we are doing our school schedule but, I think it will work out good since I now have to work a full day at WIC.

Like most homeschool parents know, this time of year brings with interesting thoughts like - what am I doing?  Why am I doing this?  Will I be able to do it another year?  Are my children learning what they should? blah blah blah blah!!!!

For me the answers don't come as quickly as they may for others but, they do come.  Obviously they must all be positive ones since I am sitting here blogging about Day one of our 2012-2013 school year.

The run down for grades for all of you people who keep up with that sort of thing is 10th, 6th, 3rd kind of, and 1st.

So day 1 was full of fun.  Of course we started it off at church.  Daddy had a council meeting so we stayed a little later and I hung out for some adult conversation.

Once home, we had some chili dogs and fries for lunch and headed out to the Northeast Mississippi Aviation show at the airport here in Tupelo, MS.  The kids loved it and were so excited to be able to see some of the very planes that they had touched and seen the insides of take off.  The only downside of the event was that our new puppy, Captain Dodger, decided that he no longer wanted to be a arm dog and wanted to be able to walk around.  He continued to yelp and yelp until we put him down.  He will be getting a leash tomorrow for sure.

Just figured out my phone has this solarrize setting on the camera because of how these pictures came out.  Not sure why I would need it but, it did make this picture come out pretty cool!


After we got home the boys finished some yard work with Dad and headed in for cool drinks and to get started with school.  I have to say this is going to take some getting used to -beginning school when the rest of the world is winding down.  It was a light day, getting notebooks together, preparing planners for the upcoming week's worth of work and discussing possible field trips this term.

Our nation of study is Jamaica.  We have a book about Jamaica that we began to read and discussed the climate, geography, and habitat for Jamaica.  We love you tube so of course we began to learn the Jamaican National Anthem from there.

After that we explored some of the animals that are found in Jamaica.  We learned about the hutia, Swallowtail butterfly, and the Streamertail hummingbird.  I was excited to find worksheets on the enchanted learning site regarding Swallowtail butterflies.  We will be working on those later this week.  While the younger children watched in fascination to videos about the natural shoreline of Jamaica with dad, our high schooler started on a math lesson and began researching for her first paper for the semester. I'm so glad she's a writer and she enjoys that part of school.   Our 6th grader was supposed to start his first lesson with teaching textbooks 6 but, there was some kind of hang-up with the set we bought second hand from a fellow homeschooler.  Dad seems to think it's an operating system thing so he got out of doing his lesson.  lucky him.  He was very excited to be sent to work independently on his busy work for his language arts though.  This week our high schooler is reading Jubilee by Margaret Walker and our younger kids are reading From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs.  Basil E. Frankweiler and enjoying it.  Until I post again... Toni