Spring-Summer Schedule

The boys did their annual testing last week which means we are now enjoying a new daily routine.  We will continue homeschooling through the summer with a focus on reading, math and nature/science. 

We always start our days with 'Morning Cards' which is an old name for our morning routine from years ago.  The same activities still get done - get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth and feed the animals - but we no longer have the cards to remind them what to do next. 

After Morning Cards we have ten minutes of Silent Reading for all of us.  Before this week, the boys did not have any requirement for reading to themselves.  I love to think that one day we can start our mornings with an hour of Silent Reading.  That seems such a peaceful and inspiring way to start one's day, sipping tea on the porch with the birds' chatter as our background noise.  Ahhhh.

We try to do our individual lessons in the morning, before the day gets away from us.  I work with each boy on learning to read and on math.  We just started a new math program this week and Armand has been exclaiming all week how much he loves math.  The program, Math-U-See, was recommended by the woman who did their testing.  So far it is working better than anything I've tried before!  It is 'mastery' based as opposed to 'spiral' which was what we had been using.  This means one topic is presented and taught thoroughly before a new topic is introduced.  The whole first book (supposedly a year of work) is single digit addition and subtraction.  The second book is multi-digit addition and subtraction.  If all goes well, I hope to finish both books by the fall of 2014 so they will be starting the multiplication book at the start of 3rd grade.  We are also working our way through a course called Living Math Through History which involves me reading aloud to the boys from a variety of books about how math came to be.

For learning to read they use All About Reading.  They are near the beginning of Level 2 and will be finished with it right around the time Level 3 is released in the fall.  Armand raves about this program and I do too since he is doing so well with it.  He shows signs of having dyslexia but since starting this program five months ago, his reading ability has gone from not reading at all to reading at grade level.  Elio was reluctant for formal lessons all this year and preferred to teach himself to read.  That worked to some extent; he was reading much better than Armand a few months ago but his progress hasn't been consistent.  Elio asked to started of All About Reading recently and I'm sure it will be good for him.

Our nature-science study will focus on monarch butterflies, local birds and nocturnal animals.  We're going to see an IMAX film about monarchs this coming week and then will read 'An Extraordinary Life', a book about the monarch migration that I adored reading to Noah so long ago.  We are making a butterfly garden and are buying two monarch eggs to hatch into a caterpillar and then a butterfly.  We will be creating a silk painting of a butterfly using a DVD from the Creating a Masterpiece series.  I've heard such good things about this series and I can't wait to try it. 

We are selecting a bird each week from my list of 30 that I mentioned in my goals post.  Last week we started with the Eastern Towhee.  We read the chapter about towhees in The Burgess Bird Book for Children, listened to their calls online, talked about the towhee nest we found in our yard a few years ago, and demonstrated their funny way of pulling up leaves to find bugs.  The boys would look and listen to them when we were outside and we found several last week.  We still need to draw a picture of a towhee in our nature journal and write some sentences about what we have learned.  I have several books about birds I have selected to read over the summer: An Owl in the House: A Naturalist's Diary, Adopted by an Owl, The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, Nests, Birds and Eggs, and we'll re-read the biographies The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon and For the Birds: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson. I've though of getting the Birding by Ear CD but I haven't decided on this yet.  We have three pairs of birds nesting in our yard right now - bluebirds, cardinals and Carolina wrens - so we have plenty to keep us engaged and learning and will focus on one of these each of the next three weeks.

And lastly for nocturnal animals I plan to read a sweet late-19th century book called Among the Night People.  We will take time to catch fire flies, try to attract some moths with a bait made in our kitchen and take a few night walks to listen to the night sounds.  We have a pair of barred owls nesting nearby and I would love to figure out exactly where they are.  We hear them calling during the night, sometimes right in our yard it sounds like, and Elio has woken to listen to them a few times.

For the first time in the history of the world...

Armand and Elio are sleeping in their own beds underneath their own Guatemalan quilts!  Armand received his as a gift from Donnie when he was a baby, and I bought Elio's when I visited Guatemala with Noah and Eiley when Elio was three.

 

 

We spent the weekend making a bedroom for the boys to share and they have now slept in there for two nights.  Below is a photo of the room.  Dialga, the bearded dragon, is in a cage above the art organizer to the left.  The art table has been used non-stop the past few days now that it has been cleared of Elio's stagnating clay projects.  The dresser is holding all the boys clothes, one drawer for Armand and two for Elio (who needs a supply of both cool weather and warm weather clothes all summer).  Their bunk bed is on the opposing wall - the upper for Armand and the bottom for Elio and Arria! 



 





As I was rearranging the master bedroom now that the twin bed has been removed, Elio said 'Our lives will be changed forever, won't they, Mom?'  I asked him what he meant.  He said now when he gets into my bed he'll have to get in the middle.  He used to sleep on the side when the bed was pushed against the wall.  He said he remembers a monster used to run its fingers up and down Elio's belly when he slept on the side when he 'was a kid'.  Now I know why he is so terribly afraid of sleeping on the outside of a bed when we go to a hotel!  He had never told me of that monster before. 

Dear Elio

A few weeks ago Elio got hit in the head with a bamboo stick while playing with friends at the Botanical Gardens.

I was talking with my friends when it happened and Armand came up to tell me Elio was bleeding.  I didn't think much of it - expecting just the usual scraped knee kind of bleeding - but when I got to him his whole face and hands were covered in blood.  I had no idea what the injury was but just pressed my shirt against it to stop the flow.  Whenever I tried to look there was too much blood to see what was going on.  Eventually I got a glimpse of the injury and with great relief I saw it was only an inch long.  I had not experienced a bleeding head injury before and had no idea how prolific they were! 

The children were so kind to Elio, offering things to help him feel better like clovers.  The mothers were so kind to both of us, finding me water and gauze, giving me emotional support and encouraging me to take him to the doctor right away.  Armand was able to stay Gardens with a friend while I took Elio to be seen. 

The two nurses said they thought it would require stitches which terrified Elio so much he just shut down and they were worried he had a true head trauma, but as soon as the doctor said he could use glue to close it, Elio was fine.  An hour later we were home and Elio went straight to the backyard to see Arria and ride his bike.  Elio had a pile of get well cards from his friends who were with us at the Gardens which he loved reading though and to cap it off he refused to wash his bloody hands because he liked 'looking like a vampire!' 

He is all healed now and we are just trying to keep sunscreen on the scar this summer (difficult for a sunscreen-averse family) and we have a camphor-based ointment that is supposed to help with scar healing.

Mother's Day 2013

Mother's Day started with a beautiful breakfast spread prepared totally by the children.  We had French toast, scrambled eggs, two kinds of sausage, fresh strawberries and a lightly sweet strawberry smoothie.   Delicious!  A bouquet of red flowers had been picked from the yard and was tied with a ribbon.  The table was set and everything was ready to eat when they called me from bed. 

In the doorway between the rooms (in the picture above, above my empty chair), the children had made a Mother's Day banner and each hanging streamer had a note saying something they loved about me.  It was all so thoughtful and lovingly planned.

a close up of some of the streamers

We usually go on a hike or bike ride for Mother's Day but this year we decided to plan a fig tree sapling given to us by Stefan's family. Our fig tree is a grandchild of the fig tree Joe's family had growing up.  Since sunny spots are so rare in our yard, we had to remove part of our gravel driveway to make a place for the tree.  We all worked together to dig up about 5 inches of gravel, sifting it through a screen we made and returning the dirt to the pit we dug.  The tree is now snugly in its new home and the beginning of our front garden transformation has begun.

making the sifting screen

our fig tree is planted 

As the children were putting together the screen frame I marveled at what a perfect family moment it was.  We were all working together for the benefit of the family, music playing on the boom box, jokes being laughed over.  Times like that are perfect mothering moments for me. 

I was excused from the final hard work of digging-sifting-planting to go clothes shopping, though I found more things for the children than for myself.  And to end the day, Noah made a delicious dinner for us on his new grill - Italian sausage, onions, bell peppers and grilled toast.  That grill, a 16th birthday gift for him a few weeks ago, has been as much a gift to me as it is for him!