Season 5-Liberate Your Parenting Potential

This is the season I'm most excited about! Last night's message was fantastic. I need to recopy my notes.

More Family Chores-Play Room (Sarah's Counter)

We've been working on doing a "family chore" for a half hour after lunch and reading a few times per week. Today we tackled the playroom and Sarah's counter. Isn't it beautiful!!?  Thursday I think we'll pick up the sunroom and playroom and vacuum. Hey that rhymes!

New Homeschool Routine/Time Blocks

It works awesome for me to look at the "morning routine" then lunch then "productive free time" then dinner then evening.

HEADLINE: Daniel Forces Bankruptcy in Monopoly-Crushing Mom For the Win

How often do you get to BEAT your parents at a board game? Daniel forced me into bankruptcy and won our game of Monopoly. He was pretty excited! You know in Monopoly as you get more and more, the greed monster gets stronger...well, these photos are the culmination of a well-played game and a wonderful memory.

Weekend Science

Early yesterday morning my son used the bathroom when he woke up. I heard the toilet flush as I was snuggling, all cozy in my bed. Then I heard footsteps heading downstairs. Ummmm, did he not WASH HIS HANDS!? (he's 11)

I levitated out of bed, floated down the stairs to find his UNWASHED HANDS on the CLEAN dishes as he unloaded the dishwasher.

Gathering my loving composure (!) I asked why he didn't WASH HIS HANDS. He shrugged.

"Do you know why we wash our hands"?

"Not really", he said.

Ah. Have I failed as a parent!? Instead of hyperventilating, I told him, "well, let me show you"!

We looked on YouTube for GERM VIDEOS (this was is our favorite-can't find it!).

It was great! We had awesome discussion about bacteria and filth (fun!) and both kids were eager to tell dad about the day's discoveries.

This led to my purchasing a set of 5 experiments for us to do with dad on the weekends. We are starting with heating soap in the microwave, more on that later!

UPDATE: 08/01/2011 - We haven't done any "Weekend Science" yet! We took on visiting lighthouses in Washington and hiking for the summer instead. This might be a GREAT family activity for the dark and cold winter months.

More Family Chores-Play Room

I'm in the season of planning and perfecting our routine. Part of our new afternoon routine is a "family chore". Yesterday we tackled Daniel's counter in the play room (which is really our family room converted to a "play" space, though I like to think of it as an "educational laboratory"). Today (Thursday) I put off the family chore, we'll do Sarah's side tomorrow.

The first photo doesn't really show the HEAP of stuff that was on his counter. The top photo is after we'd sorted and cleared a lot of stuff away. The 2nd photo is today...he has a few things on the counter (not to mention the duct tape that says "Dan") and he's USED his counter several times today. He even did his math there this morning. The process continues...

New Routines On Paper

Early on I figured out I wasn't a "by-the-hour" type of scheduler for our homeschool day. I prefer blocks of time (which is what Marilyn suggests in her book Develop A Lifestyle Routine). I post a monthly calendar so we can see what "events" we have each month. And now I have my new time blocks up which really helps us move through our mornings.

Our mornings are very fluid. Sometimes we want to play cards together or read and don't always have breakfast in the same order so it is nice to have a list of what we want to accomplish. Here's what's our our morning time block looks like for now:
-put on one hour of worship music
-kids empty dishwasher
-eat breakfast
-morning chore
-do bookwork (right now that includes: math & copywork)
-mom reads: history (we're currently using H.A. Guerber's Story of Ancient World) and fun reading
-brush teeth & brush hair
-Daniel shower

Season 4-Liberating Your Routine

Reading Marilyn's book.

Life Is Truly A Process - CHORES

Well, I've been convicted that I need to do some more bookwork with the kids so along with that comes looking at my routine. This brings up the need to add some more chores to do together (since they have mastered the one daily chore they are responsible for) so they can learn how to sort (thanks Marilyn!) and clean things.

The kids have a "personal chore" each day except Friday and it gets done before lunch each day. We've been doing that for about 6 months, so we don't have complaining anymore, amazing, they just do it.
Monday-bring down dirty laundry
Tuesday-collect upstair garbage together
Wednesday-strip sheets of beds
Thursday-take up clean folded laundry

Along with this I'm wanting to add a "family chore" for us to do together. Especially, since we have major clutter (A serious MESS!) Life is such a process, yet each moment adds up to a lifetime...so I'm trying to focus on the moments (not the "destination").

I selected a small area for us to sort and clean together today...and we did SO MUCH MORE! WOW, I'm so excited! We needed to vacuum the dining room (Daniel OFFERED to vacuum!) so we did that together and went down the hall and vacuumed the entry, too. Our official family chore was to sort and clean the upstairs hallway (about 4'x12') and stairs. Seems small but it was covered with STUFF (do you know what I mean?) So, I told the kids to sort like-things-with-like...a brilliant way to clean! Marilyn mentioned "teaching your kids to sort while cleaning" on Tuesday night and just this one thought has helped ME focus and helped me model for them. They caught on, though I did the most which was fine. We'll certainly be doing more of this (soon)!

Laaaaa la la la laallalaallaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! We have clean stairs and hallway!

Sarah's Roly Poly Bug Collection

Sarah has been collecting roly poly bugs all week. Her collection is up to 10. :) Enjoy this narration by the curator below:

Textbook Editor Can't Remember What She Wrote

This is an interesting article! The author of the post was the managing editor for a textbook. She was supposed to identify several facts that every Californian should know by 4th grade. Read her story below (you'll need scroll down quite a way to get to the start of her story which starts under the heading "Proof Positive That It's Not THAT Important That Your Kid Know What Every Fourth Grader Should Know"

http://homeschoolscrapbook-cathy.blogspot.com/2010/09/unschoolers-playing-school-i-have.html

Learning With Lego

I am tired today. The sun is out, it is gorgeous but I'm feeling like a lump. The kids on the otherhand are into hours of learning with lego! I uninstalled some of my website software that I never used, making room for the Lego Building download...Dan is having a ball! I can almost HEAR the gears in his brain grinding away as he is exploring and learning how to use the imaging program. And when I told him it was SCHOOL he got really excited!

Sarah has been contented to re-build her Winter Toy House and has been working through the pages of the instruction manual into the afternoon.

We are working on a plan to organize our Lego collection. How do you organized YOUR Lego? Feel free to leave a comment. I'm planning a post on Lego storage in the future.

Roly-Poly II

Sarah added another roly-poly bug to her "hotel". The Ps came over for a manicure & friend time. Sarah asked Dan to play with her and when I suggested it would be loving of him to play with her-he did!