Not So Picture Perfect

Not every day can be rain-kissed flowers, thoughtful lessons with nature, and awe-inspiring art projects.  That's just not how we roll 24-7, and if we are all honest with ourselves, none of us are spot on ready every day.  Still, life marches on and the little lessons around us keep on teaching us new things.

It took me six tries before I finally gave up and settled on a closed-eyed photo in the parking lot of our grocery shopping adventure, haha! As you can see our adventures are not exactly glamorous, but they do go a long way toward teaching math and home economics.  We discussed the idea of planning menus ahead of time so that we make sure we have enough food on hand for each person for two weeks.  Her favorite part was getting to push the cart through the produce section.

Once we got home, Anna parked on the porch with her Mammy and learned some new songs.  Mammy is always good at telling stories and teaching new things that childhood should bring.  Anna is never lacking for interesting activities when mammy is around!

This is the workbook that we use for skills review. It is filled with fun and interesting worksheets that cover a wide range of skills for second grade.  I picked my copy up at Costco for a whopping $11.99, and let me tell you that it is worth its weight in gold.  It has checklists of specific skills kids need to learn for second grade for Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Math.  I really like the lists, since they give me a simple guide to work from to ensure we are covering the skills she needs to learn in second grade.  What I try to do is take those skills and find unique activities we can do to help learn them, so we aren't just using the workbook. While we don't use it every day, it really is wonderful to check on her skills and learning comprehension.  It is also a great way to take work with us on a busy day. 

Girl Scouts

Anna is officially a Brownie.  

She went through Investiture and was inducted into the Girl Scouts almost a full week ago.  She cannot stop talking about it, which just makes my heart glow.  I am happy to say that I will be the Brownie Girl Scout leader this year, and I cannot wait to work with this amazing set of girls to come up with some fun, educational, and service projects for us to do this year.  

There will be endless opportunities for incorporating home school lessons in with her Brownie activities.  Our first journey will be the Wonders of Water, which lends to science studies beautifully!  I also plan to have the girls partake in social activities related to water, including writing to legislators to improve and publicize water purification as a healthy and valid source of water so that people will use fewer disposable water bottles. The adventures together will be truly amazing and endless.

And don't forget... there will be cookies.

An Affection for Worms

 Anna has always been interested in small creatures, but recently seems particularly interested in worms.  She found this cute little inch worm shortly after it rained.  Inch worms are completely adorable in the way they crawl along, and it was a lot of fun for her to get to hold "wormie."

As usual, she had a lot of questions about worms, so we turned to some of our favorite animal scientists, the Wild Kratts!  This show is available on Netflix Instant Watch, and has some very interesting and educational shows in the series.  We found one pertaining to worms, answering the mind bending question of why they come out after it rains.  It was a lot of fun to watch, and we both learned quite a few things about worms!

Rainy Days

I think it is safe to say that the rainy days have finally left us.  This has been the longest and most prolific monsoon season I can remember in Arizona, and boy did we need it.  Before it all ended, we decided to go for a walk in the rain together to do some exploring and checking out the way nature responds to rain.

We learned that drainage ditches like this were created by the city to help prevent flooding.  At the time we took this picture it was barely sprinkling and there was no evidence of running water through the ditch.  The following day it was absolutely pouring and by the time we reached the ditch it was about 2 feet under water.  We took that opportunity to discuss water safety and talked about never going in a drainage ditch when it's raining unless your crazy mom wants to take a picture for her blog and is CPR and First Aid certified. :P 

We checked out some sunflowers growing on the side of the road, and asked some questions about why flowers close up when it is cloudy, rainy, or dark.  Our scientific hypothesis (a vocab word for us this week) was that because the sunlight went away with the clouds, the flowers were not receiving sunlight for photosynthesis, and bees would not like to collect pollen in the rain.  By closing up, the flower was able to use its energy to absorb the water from the roots. 

Many of the flowers had not closed, and Anna said that she thought they were very brave by staying open in the chilly rainstorm. 

A lot of gourds grow near our house, so we took some time to check them out on our walk.  We found this one in the middle of the plant cycle, going from a fertilized flower into a "fruit."  It was wonderful to be able to explain with a hands on demonstration how pollination works.  Because we had been studying the life cycle of a plant, it was exciting to see the progress of it in person. 

In addition to these fun science lessons (and the social studies lesson about drainage ditches), we have been learning about using the letter y as a vowel and as a consonant, and being able to distinguish when both are used.  In math, we worked on estimating amounts, rounding, and recognizing & extending number patterns and sequences.  We also do a morning meeting each day, but I will talk about that another time soon!

Rounding the Corners

Some days are rougher than others, and today had a few little snags.  Anna has some allergies that affect her digestion pretty bad.  She's allergic to corn, soy, wheat, and dairy, and has a sensitivity to sugar.  Due to a snafu on my part she had one of her allergens hidden inside of another product.  As a result her tummy was upset pretty badly this morning.  Thankfully she recovered fairly well, though she still had a lack of focus for most of the day.

To give her a chance to let her tummy settle, we watched a video on Netflix for science called "Wings of Life" by Disney Nature. It was incredibly informative and interesting, and carried on the lessons we have been having about plant life.  Of particular interest to our plant study lately is the section that discusses how flowers are fertilized in order to make fruit.  Anna didn't make it all the way through the video (she fell asleep because it was so calming and her tummy was upset), so we will watch more another day.

After she woke up we decided to go to Trader Joe's for our social studies lesson today (and also for some rice-bread and sun-butter).  We talked to the cashier about her job and what she does at the store, which was a great lesson for Anna on what people do to help our community at the grocery store.  We also learned about a fun game they have going at our local store where there is a stuffed javelina that is "loose in the store" and every day they hide him somewhere in the store.  If you find him you can tell the cashier and they will give you a sucker (lucky for Anna - it is allergy-free).  This also opened up the door for a natural course of talking about and looking up javelina when we got home today.

Once we arrived home it was back to business as usual.  We worked on understanding different roles in the community and defining them.  This included things like waitress, judge, veterinarian, plumber, etc.  For language arts we worked on long, short, and double vowels some more, and she also read a short book.

In math, we learned about rounding numbers.  This seemed to be a difficult concept for Anna, and after an hour of being frustrated for us both, I did a little homework myself on how to help her better understand.  This website suggested drawing a street with houses on it, and naming each of the families in the houses a number by tens, starting with zero and working up to the highest number you would like to round to.  For us we went 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50.  Below the street, we wrote out different numbers that represented people who would be visiting the neighborhood.  These "people" would need to find the house closest to them in order to go for their visit.  So, when the person named "3" came to the neighborhood, I asked Anna to tell me which home 3 was closest to.  She got it right away!

Not every day can be filled with fun crafts and easy successes, but we are doing our best to make learning an experience for Anna that she will remember fondly.  I like that when we hit a snag we are able to adjust our day and our learning style to better fit her needs.  

Remembering

We began the day by paying respects to the thousands who lost their lives on September 11th.  This is a hard topic to broach with children, but an important one.  September 11th changed the course of American history, and due to Kevin's military service, it also changed our lives personally.  We kept the summary brief, and explained that each of the flags represented someone who died during the attack.  Flags with boots like the one pictured represent service members who passed away from the armed services, police force, and fire fighters.  I answered any questions Anna had regarding the attacks, death, and what-if's.  Sometimes history is painful, but it is an important lesson so that we do not repeat it.




After the visit to the memorial, we went to visit a good friend and her family.  While we were there Anna worked in her workbook a bit. We distinguished the difference between insects and arachnids for science today, and worked on ordering numbers from smallest to largest that contain similar numbers.  We will continue working on this for math the remainder of the week to help make it memorable for her.  Anna also started a knitting project for her hand work but I didn't get any pictures of it.  As it is a long term project, I'm sure I will have an opportunity to take photos again sometime soon.

The book we read today was Mrs. Watson Wants Your Teeth.  It is really a cute story about not trusting the gossip someone says about someone else, and getting to know the person yourself.  It is a wonderful social story!



In other news I went to a Girl Scout leader meeting for my Brownie troop that will be starting up on Sunday this week.  It turns out I will have nearly 15 girls just for my Brownies this year!  We are so excited to start on this journey together!

Ready for Fall

We are so anxious for the fall season to get here. The cool rainy days we have been having lately are kicking off the season for us nicely. 

Today we focused on recognizing 4-digit numbers in word form, and then writing the numbers numerically.  We also read The Giving Tree, and pointed out long vowels and short vowels. For social studies we talked about the street signs that we saw on our walk today.  For science, we talked about the changing of the seasons and why tree leaves turn colors and fall off. 

For our hand-work today, Anna wanted to learn to sew.  In keeping with the welcoming of fall, we decided to do a leaf-centered project.

Anna independently cut out leaves from pieces of felt to begin.  We chose 5 different fall-themed colors.  I love this craft because for our garland it only took a half sheet of each color of felt, and each sheet only cost 25-cents.  We still have plenty of felt left for other projects! 

With a little direction, Anna sewed the pieces together all by herself in a five foot long chain.  It is draped in our kitchen, adding a beautiful homespun touch of fall to our home.

We set aside the remaining half-sheets of felt for another project.  With the scraps leftover from the felt between each leaf that Anna cut, I was able to cut a bunch of smaller leaves for a mini garland that I plan to sew and drape near my computer. 

One of the nice things about projects like these is that we can display them with our seasonal stuff, and bring it back out each year. 

Happy fall, y'all!

School Days

We are homeschooling our amazing Anna girl this year for second grade, and in the process have discovered that we are not huge fans of any one particular curriculum.  As a result, we have decided to blend several styles of homeschooling, and use standards of education to ensure we work on the right things.  I thought I would use this blog a bit to share what we do.  Ideally I would like for this to be a resource for ideas for families who are homeschooling, or doing things on their own like we are.

So far we have covered things like double digit addition and subtraction (with very minor carrying), greater-than and less-than, comparing amounts using comparison words, ordering whole numbers, identifying place value, and writing/reading numbers in expanded forms.  We have covered writing a letter, consonants, vowels, putting things in alphabetical order, spelling words, vocabulary, and reading.  We have been working on understanding what a community is, and how we fit into it.  We've discussed neighborhoods, the universe, maps, talked about various services, types of transportation, and signs.  In science we have done a unit on the ocean, focusing on the vocabulary words that are used for water and animals in the ocean that we don't otherwise use.  We did a few science projects and art projects for the ocean unit as well.  We are now working on the life cycle of a plant, and have enjoyed doing some art projects to help us understand.  We are also watching a show on Netflix called Wild Kratts - it is a wonderful educational show about wildlife that is really perfect for this age group and younger.  Our next unit will be on animals and animal groups so this is great preparation, and she thinks it is fun!  We have focused a great deal on art projects as well as music, which will be seen throughout the upcoming posts.

Today we are focusing on matter, specifically solids vs liquids.  It's a rainy day and sometimes you just have to go with what works.  We are all enjoying the cool weather and the rain.  Anna was already wet after running around in the drops and wanted to jump in some puddles.  I figured this would be a wonderful lesson about mass.  Because the ground is a solid, it can hold her body weight while both standing and jumping.  The ground is dense and capable of holding her light body.  Liquid is not as dense as the ground, and also not as dense as Anna's body.  We used the jumping puddles to explore how a solid moves through a liquid.

Happy schooling!