Home-schooling and Home-working

(I wish we had a better picture... It must be time for a family photo)

Since Our first born I've been the stay-at-home parent, homeschooling the kids, up until last summer. The contract that my husband was working on had ended early. We had already had plans to take our business in a different direction when his contract was suppose to be up at the end of 2009, but before we were ready we decided to go for it and have him work from home. Luckily we had a savings put away for times like this. A couple of months ago our business picked up and now we are doing well. I have to say that it was well worth it. His contract ending early couldn't have happened at a better time, and now we are all home together, working and homeschooling together. I'm at the point now where I can truly share the benefits of this type of life with others who might be considering it. This isn't to say that there are no downfalls. It certainly has it's challenging moments. I find the benefits have out-weighed the downfalls for us (all of us).

Some benefits of Home-schooling and Work-schooling with both parents home are as follows:

FLEXIBILITY! This seems to be the biggest benefit!

- We can go where we want when we want within the confines of the business we run (ours is very flexible and we can work while we travel)

- When we have a subject that creates interest we can go to some places to learn more (field-trips, road-school)

- We can work when we want (within reason)

- We can homeschool when we want

- When I need a break or vise-versa my husband and I can take turns with work or do things with the kids

- We can be spontaneous and do things last minute, even during a week day

- We can take last minute vacations

OTHER BENEFITS

- My husband and I can both be apart of the learning and fun

- The kids get first hand knowledge of the in's and out's of running a business at home by witnessing our experiences with it

- The weather (snow) doesn't affect us as much because nobody has to travel.

- Illnesses don't happen as often because my husband is not bringing illnesses home from an off-site job

- If anyone is sick we don't have to go anywhere (spreading it) and can keep it better confined to our home

- We spend a great deal of time bonding as a family

- Less of a need for two cars (and better for the environment)

- We can get more projects done at home together when we want to

- My husband doesn't feel left out or like he is missing the vital moments in his kids lives

- The bond between my husband and I is better because we spend more time together and understand everything the other person is going through throughout the day.

I'm sure there are more benefits and, as I said before, there are downfalls too. It seems like the right lifestyle for us. We took a huge risk doing what we did and it worked out for us.

Remember that the next time your spouse loses his job, it could be a HUGE opportunity for something much more wonderful. Is there something that you always wanted to do but you just felt that it was too risky? Maybe our story will inspire you! :)

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.”~ Anthony Brandt

Our EGG fun! - Day 1

I purchased an inexpensive Egg study online and we had a great time with it. I thought it would be a great subject to mess around with before Easter. In this picture they are dissecting a hard boiled egg and eating them.

Zoe isn't as fond of eggs as Austyn so she made art with hers.

This little guy pooped all over, from what Zoe explained to me. LOL!

She made a pretend egg drink and used the tooth pick as a pretend straw.

Then we dissected a raw egg. This egg came from a local farm in our area. I chose it so they could see that it had some raised areas on the shell. Not every egg in the world looks like the beautiful perfect white eggs we purchase in the grocery store. I read online that the bumps usually just indicates that the chicken is older.

I found that with these local eggs the internal and external membranes seem stronger compared to the eggs we purchase in the store, so it made these eggs perfect for this study. I was able to peel the shell away on the entire top so that we could open the membrane to expose the inside parts of the egg as they would appear inside the egg, undisturbed.

Here is the egg open. It is showing us the parts. You can see the yolk clearly with it's membrane around it and in the left circle you can see the germinal disk (where the egg gets fertalized). In the right circle you can see one chalaza ancharing the yolk inside the thick albumen. The unit I purchased had simple names. I downloaded another chart to use and told the kids both the simple names (eg. egg white) and the more scientific names as well.

Shortly after dissecting we moved on to our next egg project - making our own paint. I placed two yolks in a bowl and made sure it was just yolk and smooth (no membrane etc.). I added a tiny bit of water to the yolk and mixed it in. Then I poured the liquid into this paint container.

We then chose food colouring colours to make the yolk mix into paint. I know there is another version of this where you can add other things (chalk, berries etc.) but I just kept it simple. We talked about how people throughout history would make their own paint and in many instances used egg in it.

I gave each child a brush, water and a piece of bread, since the cool thing about this paint is that it's edible. They painted on the bread and I toasted their painting to cook the egg paint onto the bread and lightly buttered for them to eat.

This is Zoe's toast design. It's a girls face.

Austyn did a rainbow design on his toast.

There was paint left so I decided that recycling some cardboard cereal boxes would make nice canvases for this paint.

When they dried the paint ended up really glossy on the cardboard.

Zoe continued to paint. she decided that it would be cool to make strawberries on papertowel and cut them out. The bottom one is a purple strawberry and some blueberries. She cut them out and everything dried on a cookie sheet.

Some colour pages came with our study. Austyn isn't all that into colouring, so Zoe painted them. I'm not sure if you can tell from this picture but if you look closely the eggs in the nest have little baby bird heads pecking out of them!

They played an egg memory game, with different egg photos.

Along with the above activities we read information on my computer and watched videos online of eggs hatching. Austyn was amazed by this video we saw of snakes hatching and he went off to make lego snakes hatching out of eggs and other egg hatching type things.

We have some more egg activities to do. I'll have to update you guys with another post for our continued egg fun.


“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.” ~ Arnold H. Glasgow

Building the New Bike!

Austyn out-grew his bike this year. We went and purchased a new one. He helped put it together and took it for a test drive. It seems slightly big, but not bad at all. Now he want to go out and ride his bike all the time. I'm glad he likes it.

“Life is like riding a bicycle: you don't fall off unless you stop pedaling.” ~ Claude Pepper

Life Skills

Zoe loves to help with ANYTHING that I'll let her. Today she opened her can of Princess Noodles with a can-opener (I helped a tiny bit) and she poured it into her bowl by herself. She also put the paper-towels on the paper-towel rack for me. 

“Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.” ~ Unknown

Book Sharing Monday

Once Upon a Saturday by Leslie Lammle is a story about a little girl who wants to play but has a list of chores to do. She decides to tackle the chores in the fastest way she knows how... with her imagination. 

"Once upon a Saturday morning, June woke up early. 

Perhaps she would search for wild animals... 

or maybe learn how to fly...

or maybe even discover long-lost treasure.

Except for one BIG problem: 

THE LIST.

June had to complete everything on it before she could play.

The more she looked at the list, the longer it appeared.

As she grumbled to herself, 

"WHEN WILL I GET TO DO WHAT I WANT?"

she heard her mother "JOOO-OOOON! BREAKFASSS..."

The way she goes about her chores is very imaginative. It's a great way to enjoy doing some of the mundane things that kids sometimes need to do.  My son often has many imaginary things going on all around him throughout his entire day. I think this story touched us deeper because of his understanding of how wonderful and powerful imagination can be.

(I should probably mention that we are not into chore lists in our house. I have found that the best way for my kids to do chores is by asking them to help me or by stating that something needs to be cleaned up and that I'll help. I never use to do this. Actually chores were a nightmare at one time, but now we are all much less stressed and it just feels more natural this way. It feels like we are all choosing to help each other clean and tidy.)

Life on Discovery Channel - Starts tonight!

The Season Premier on The Discovery Channel  (Tonight at 8PM), hosted by Oprah Winfrey.


We watched it tonight. Austyn LOVED it! He was so interested and excited about all of the strange behaviour of animals. He is still awake now because there were two episodes of an hour long.


Here is the official website for more information:
http://www.discoverychannel.ca/life/

It was so interesting, even for me! They showed a frog who tends to her young (rare) and she carries each one far up trees on her back to pools of water in the leaves. Then she lays an unfertilized egg in each pool every few days for the baby to eat. They showed, the first time ever on film, how cheetahs (Africa's most endangered cat) is adapting to survive better. This solitary animal may not be so solitary anymore. They filmed three cheetahs chase prey. There was a type of mountain goat that was only 10 days old and knew how to get down steep cliffs already to get to water and when a fox decided to pursue it for dinner it had the instinct and ability to out climb the fox (at ONLY 10 days old). There were some gardener snakes from Manitoba that emerge from the earth after winter to mate. The one male emerged days late and in order to heat up fast so he could compete for a female he gave off female hormones for the males to warm him up. These things you just don't see everyday or EVER if it were not for films like this. What an amazing series!

I think his enthusiasm and interest tonight may be in indication that he's ready to watch other wildlife documentaries. March of the Penguins and Earth would be a good start. Does anyone know of any other good documentaries like this? I may have to keep my eye out for those movies to purchase or borrow them from the library.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” ~ W. Edwards Deming