Morning Routine Checklists

I made a checklist out of our posted routine. I print them out each morning and leave it on the dining room table. The kids are really liking it and I'm liking it, too! They can move about their morning routine at their own pace and I don't have to constantly nag them "did you brush your teeth this morning"? Dan has been taking his shower right after breakfast instead of waiting until right before lunch. This is fabulous!

Sarah's Inspiration To Write A Book!

Sarah recently told me she wanted to write a book and needed some help getting started. So I grabbed some paper, folded it in half and told her "here's the cover and here inside are the pages". She went right to work and named her new book "The Adventures of Black Kitty". (I know you're all surprised she is writing about Black Kitty!)

She's been writing sentences in her new book instead of copywork this week and I'm so proud of her for continuing with her project. I love that she is writing about real life and things that are important to her.

Today I asked her what made her want to write a book. She told me she just finished reading Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk on her own. This is a story about a mouse who lives at the library and writes books. It is so sweet and clever and has inspired Sarah to write! Thank you Mr. Kirk!

So today we read it together for our read aloud (since we finished WALL-E yesterday). This is one one my new favorites! Sarah asked if she could do the book writing as her daily copywork-yes Yes YES! I love REAL LIFE learning (RLL)!

Real Life Copywork #2

This is so great! I'm printing one photo per day with a blank sheet of lines for each child. The photos are different for each one and sometimes the same. They are ASKING to do their copywork each day, so awesome! Right now they are both only required to write 3 sentences as we are still just finishing our first year of homeschooling. I will increase this soon as this becomes habit. So fun!

These sheets will go into page protectors in a 3-ring binder which will have many benefits. One of which is to look back and see improvement in handwriting!

Sarah Wants More Books

Sarah has a huge basket full of books by her bed. She recently announced that she has read them all at least once. So I pulled them out of the basket and put the books on her bookshelf...a few we gave away to a friend.

I have the book Honey For A Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt and everything I have selected from this recommended book list has been awesome. So I decided to go through it and gather a new basket full of books using our local library. I'm using the chapter "picture books for 4-8" and have many great selections for Sarah.

Every Wednesday I get another 10 to 20 from the library to keep her basket full. She loves it! Daniel and I have also benefited from the books she's finished reading!

Real Life Copywork

I've been using Spelling Wisdom by Simply Charlotte Mason. I love this resource! It is designed to be dictated for spelling but I use it differently. I have the pdf version and print one page at a time and then run the page through again with special lines for each child. I use this as copywork. They simply have to do one page per day. The first lessons are very short and have been helpful in getting my children into the writing routine which is part of our bookwork that we do for table time.

But what I really want to do is have them write about their real life. Today we took one of their drawings and they wrote 3 sentences about that picture. They actually LIKED it! I intend to keep doing this! The idea is to get these into a binder with page protectors so we can look back on their progress. Barbie told me to take pictures of their 3D projects and print the photo on a piece of paper for them to write a story about. We just haven't been there...that will come. But taking the drawing and writing 3 sentences is a great transition for us into real life writing!

Blog Evaluation

I've decided the purpose of this blog is to simply document our Lifestyle of Learning. At first, I also intended to explain how I got here, but I've decided not to have any agenda other than journaling my way as we explore homeschooling via LOL. I'm getting a tremendous amount of satisfaction from looking back over the posts! We grow and change physically and emotionally more than I realize!

Regarding Boredom...

Wow, what a great day! I spent this afternoon focusing on my current area of self-education which is cleaning up my house. I'm blogging about this at http://tidy-house.blogspot.com/

In addition to the great things that happened with cleaning today, we had some cool breakthroughs regarding LOL. This blog is really going to be a place to document our Lifestyle of Learning. I refer to Barbie and Marilyn a lot because I want to give credit where it is due and they are really my disciplers/mentors.

One thing is that we are now focusing on putting things away! Daniel got out the colored pencils and then put them away-yeah!

Especially Daniel often says, "I'm bored"...this can be a dullness of soul and/or the result of overindulgence (according to Marilyn). He did it today and I did something different as recommended by Marilyn & Barbie. I told him if he was bored, he could go to one of four rooms to find something to do: dining room (where he likes to read), playroom (where he has all his stuff and projects), sunroom (there's some Legos in there) or his bedroom (his art table is there). He did not want to do that so I told him if he was bored then I would be doing something different for him. I would ASSIGN him SOMETHING HE LIKES TO DO but he had to agree to DO IT if I was going to take the time to think of something to assign. So we discussed that I was serious for a few minutes and then he took the risk!

I told him to play a game of solitaire (he loves playing cards and games). Then he wanted more, so I told him to draw something having to do with Star Wars and then I put on some music because he loves to listen to music! I should have been more specific and I know better! I should have told him it should take him at least 10 minutes and have several things in the pic because he drew a tie-fighter and called it good. But certainly a good start because he did complete it and we had our first "I'll assign you when you're bored" success!

After that he wanted me to assign him something else, so I warned him that he might not want to do it but if I actually assigned it he was required to complete the task. I told him there was a 100 piece puzzle of a dog on the floor in the dining room in a box and he was to do it. About 75% finished, he started to waiver. I told him (since I was nearby and watching him) that in life sometimes right before the end, it gets hard and he had to persevere and finish the task even though it seemed hard. I helped him by sorting the remaining pieces by color so he could see how close he really was to finishing. He did it!

Then I assigned him a few things to draw. I told him tomorrow instead of his copywork sheet, he was going to write three sentences about one of the pictures he drew. He begged me to do the sentences now, but I stood firm and he'll do that tomorrow during bookwork time.

Sarah did a Make-It-Bake-It and we'll cook it later on. She also created a whole scenario around some cording that I cut from some drawstring bags. She tied up her plushies and then after acting it out I assigned her to draw a picture of what she just did because she wanted me to assign her something, too!

It kinda amazes me that we had some serious product that developed out of today...a puzzle finished, a stained glass ornament made, drawings and brain activity with the card games not including the two games of Clue Classic I allowed each to play on the computer.