Words

Zoe loves to make words. She does this on her own. Here she is making a word search (of sorts). After she was finished she asked me to do it. It's interesting how kids can be so different Austyn never really liked anything like this. He goes through little spurts of liking it, usually when there is a good reason (a strong interest).

Email

Austyn now has email, in an attempt to bring meaning to reading, and spelling. He has been struggling with these subjects in life and really has little interest in them. To try and bring interest we set up for him to have a pen pal from Edmonton. At first he was sluggish with it, but it grew on him. His Dad also started to email him from his desk (in the other room) and he really had fun emailing him back.

I also tried to sign him up for Flat Travelers but haven't been accepted into the group still. It's been weeks! I may have to set this up with friends and just do it that way. If you don't know what Flat Travelers is, it's the homeschool version of Flat Stanley. HERE is the website, but again, they don't seem to be accepting new members.

Secret Princess Diary

At Toys R Us we found a Secret Disney Princess Diary that was on sale. I bought it for Zoe and she has almost finished filling all of it in in only a couple of days. What a great way to get her to practice spelling, printing, drawing, and imagination. We took the diary to hockey so she could work on it when Austyn was playing. She has been hiding the key and she calls it her "Homework Book". What fun!!!!

Doing It On Their Own

 From watching my children, I find it hard to understand how others can't see that children will learn on their own. They will naturally pick up and do important activities that they are ready for. People will ask my when I make them do Math or Spelling. I don't make them. In fact much of the time they do it on their own with the resources I keep around the house or they ask me to do it with them. Zoe decided to try and type to daddy on MSN Messenger. This is a great way to practice spelling in a real life situation (which is way better than spelling drills, in my opinion).

That same morning they decided to read. Austyn read me a book and then Zoe decided to read to him a book she chose. He helped her if she couldn't sound out a word.

World Spelling Day

World Math Day didn't seem as much fun for us but we really enjoyed World Spelling day.

 Austyn played and did well on more than one level. He seemed to enjoy it.

Zoe did a good job also. World Spelling Day was a success in our house.

I CAN'T TAKE IT... I MUST BLOG! LOL!!

Okay... so it's been a long time for me not to be blogging our activities on here. What a bummer that I can't import pictures easily like I could before blogger updated their import program. I've had some issues with my computer and have been doing things Austyn and Zoe's computer. While using their computer I discovered that this blog doesn't look the same on PC. On my computer the blog looks beautifully aligned and everything looks in place but on their computer it looks much different. So, I'm due to update the look soon. 

It's not easy because we are so up in the air right now. We could be moving for work soon. Things have been up in the air for a long time and it's getting to be tiring looking up homeschool laws and apartment rentals in different cities across Canada. I am now to the point of just wanting to know where we are going and when. I am tired of not knowing. 

So, with things being so busy and strange lately it has made it even more difficult to blog, but I just have to do it. It may take me hours to update you on what we've been up to since I have to go through a lengthly process with each image just to get it on here now, but I'm doing it anyway. Here goes! Here are a few of the things we've been doing at home.

I take it back!!!! I can import images right from my computer again!! YIPPPY!!! Life is going to be so much easier now that I can do this! I'm so ecstatic!! Oh ya... the picture... ha ha ha!! This is a picture that Zoe drew after watching the new movie out called How to Train a Dragon. There are some extras that came with the movie and in the extras there is a part that teaches you how to draw the main dragon in the movie.

This is the dragon that the man drew and she tried to follow along and copy. I think she did an amazing job for only being 4 years old!

We've not been doing as much music but Austyn has played a bit here and there. His guitar needs to be fixed. It has a short but he still strums away at it.

I went through almost all of our things and purged. While doing that I came across these blocks that they've not played with in a long time. They still don't want to get rid of them, apparently. 

Austyn got a skateboard for his birthday.

Zoe likes the skateboard as well.

Austyn got two Crayola glow stations for his birthday. This one is like wall paper. This is Zoe using it.

Zoe found these old curlers in a bathroom drawer and asked me to use them on her hair. 

Here is her hair after using them.

I got some craft supplies from a new friend over the summer and we finally used some of them. These are, what I use to call when I was a kid, Shrinky Dinks. I think that was the name. I can't remember what the actual brand name of these are, but they were fun. You draw and colour pictures on them, cut them out and put them in the oven. They shrink and become a thick plastic tile in the shape you cut.

I drew the letters for each of their names and that night they were mixing the letters around to make other words so I asked them if they'd like lots of silly letters. They wanted me to make more.That night I stayed up and drew them all and cut them all out. I had them set out on pans to place in the oven first thing the next morning. That is what we did. 

The whole next morning we played with the little letter tiles we made. We did sight words, phonics, and spelling. It was a great time! 

We made our jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. We are really going to miss having Daddy home when he goes back to work. 

Austyn decided one day that he wanted to sit and do all of the puzzles we have with me. We didn't get through them all, but we did most of them including the hardest ones.

This is what Zoe calls her "Character". She wanted me to take a picture of her holding her character's hand. I thought this was so adorable. She just loves to draw life sized pictures on our white board.

 

Well I guess that wraps up just a few of the activities we've done around the house.

Unschooling Jitters!

I posted on a bog the past few days some questions and concerns. From that I realized that I have unschooling jitters. I know my kids are learning. I need a better way to track what they are doing. Especially for Austyn since he is of school age.

He is so brilliant and is learning so much on his own. Yesterday he was figuring out how many minutes in a day and how many seconds in a day etc. He made up a game where he would get Daddy to help him print letters on papers that made up a secret sentence. He hid the letters around the house. I had to find them and make the sentence. When I was finished we switched turns. Today since we've had illness here for the past few days, he decided that he'd figure out what percentage we were. We tend to say that someone is still not 100% when they still show signs of being ill. He is rating us by percentage of health. LOL!

I know he is doing fine, but I crave structure and curriculum outlines somedays. I really feel, however that this is the right style for him right now. He seems so sensitive to being told when to learn what no matter how gently it's done. I see his brilliance and feel that I'm mocking him by dictating when, how, and what to learn. So for the past few months I've eased off ALOT. I've researched a bit and I see that it's worked out for him.

Tonight before he went to bed he saw our history books and decided that we could print off the hieroglyphics and cut them out so he can make words at the table while eating his night time snack. He got a kick out of that and noticed that some of the letters were almost the same. After much needed reassurance from other homeschool moms and some of these observations I feel more at ease.

The image above (that is smaller than I thought) is a chart to help me track what they do each day for each subject (Thanks to Neely at Unschooling..Let the earth be our classroom). I plan on getting curriculum and letting them do what they like. I still suggest and feel the waters for interest, but if there isn't any, why push it. They don't learn it that way anyway. This way they are interested, learn it, and retain it much better. Isn't homeschooling great!!!

Here is Neely's page that I used as a guide for our tracking sheet. She posted this last year.
http://shomeiscool.blogspot.com/2009/05/charting.html

Here is a quote I read tonight in a book I'm reading. The book I'm finally finishing is You'll See It When You Believe It; The Way To Your Personal Transformation by Wayne W. Dyer.

"Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."

~ Kahlil Gibtan (in the Profet)

(I really love the Eastern ways of thinking. They really have things right compared to how we raise kids in our society. It's just a reminder that we don't own our kids. They aren't a representation of us in life. They have their own path. Happy Parenting All!)

A Sign For The Door

I saw a sign on the lego room door. Austyn put this sign on the door and when I saw it there I couldn't help but get a picture of it. It reads "AUSTYN LEGOZ" I think he meant to do an S but did it backwards and just didn't bother to rewrite it all. LOL! It is another example of how he is just learning and practicing things all on his own.

"If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him."
~John Holt~, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Learn

Junior Scrabble

Today we played Junior Scrabble, but it was a milestone for Austyn. We used the advanced side! He did fine, but I did help a bit. He had a hard time getting use to the idea that he had to use a letter already on the board and he had trouble visualizing the word when it ran vertically down the board instead of horizontal. He did a great job for the first time and his spelling is great even with little formal practice.

I should mention that he had another milestone. He usually hollers for someone to come in the room and read the screen when he is playing a video game but today he decided it would be easier if he just read it himself. He was so excited about this that he was hollering down the stairs telling me all about it. LOL!

“It should be noted that the games of children are not games, and must be considered as their most serious actions.”~ Michel de Montaigne

A New Tool!

Zoe took this picture, by the way... ignore my messy desk.

From reading The Unschool Manual I got the idea of letting the kids use MS Word to learn reading, phonics, whole words, spelling, etc. Zoe is on my computer a great deal and while she is on it she types her name and the word "up" in any text box she can find. So I thought I'd offer to sit with her and I could tell her how to spell different things and give her practice to try some on her own and find that letters on the keyboard. She loved it! Later Austyn tried it and did well. What a great tool!

I do however think that it's time to set up a computer just for the kids. I work on my computer for our business and have had issues with the kids messing around with files and settings that I don't want them to.

“It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.” ~John Holt~ How Children Fail