Playing With Legos

so i finally decided upon “sequential spelling” by avko…the side-by-side comparison of traditional spelling vs sequential is what sold me…that and that it was recommended by so many fellow homeschoolers. and its cheap!  $9.95 for each level.  sounds good to me! we’ll give it a try and see how it goes!!

i also ordered all the library books to go with our first 2 lessons of SOTW. and today i started ordering documentaries to go along with them as well…though i still need to search some more.

i also started sorting my materials in my massive binder thingy. i don’t know what to call it! i want to say its a trapper keeper…shows how old i am, throwback to the 80s. but its not that brand of course…do they still exist even? LOL! anyway i started figuring out how i want that thing organized…apparently last year i never did figure it out so i’m starting from scratch there. kinda fun actually…hopefully it will work for me.

so i’ve actually done a fair amount (although not anywhere near what i had wanted to do), despite spending the past 2 days in a row with migraines…today’s was a pretty good one too! that always knocks me offtrack.

i also got a lot plotted out in my planner. i have a teacher’s planner that i bought at GW school supply last year that i still had a lot of pages in, since i got so offtrack last year (school year, not regular year). so i planned out til the end of the book, which takes me through february. and then i went through the math curriculum and calculated out how many lessons we’ll have to do daily (we’ll be doing math 5 days a week to catch up on what we’ve not been doing) to get this entire level done by the end of this year. its totally doable and i even plotted in breaks for the holidays. we only have to do 2 lessons a day for the first month or so. each lesson only takes like 10 or 15min usually. they’re not that hard. at least they weren’t in the last level and it looks like this level is pretty similar in the initial lessons. they even say that you can skip the first 23 lessons if you’ve completed level a. of course we didn’t complete level a so we can’t skip all those, but we can skip some…and double up on others.

anyway so i got the math lessons plotted out to the end of the year and then i got the history lessons plotted out to the end of the year. i also want that level (the SOTW book 1) done by the end of the year because we were really behind on that as well. the thing with that one was cuz we just kept doing so very much of the extra activities…so that one we actually didn’t really get offtrack, per se, but i really want to move on to the next level by next year…so i plotted that out as well.

hopefully i’ll accomplish even more later tonite when we get these hoodlums to sleep. i have a lot of work still to do!

our math lesson book (and a couple extra manipulatives that we didn’t yet have from the last kit that i added to the order) came in as well as the story of the world audiobook.

 i haven’t had a chance to really look at the book yet, but we’ve been listening to the cd. we already read the equivalent of the first 2 cds (out of 7), i believe…so its just review for us right now…but that’s exactly what i wanted for it for now. i want to be able to have maeven hear the stories in the book over and over so that it will be more likely to stick.

 and its read by jim weiss, who is the guy that does her sleepytime cd…what she goes to sleep to every nite. repeatedly. (she frequently wakes in the night and finds that it helps her to go back to sleep to put the cd on again…so she gets up a couple times a night and hits play again. its not uncommon for me to wake in the middle of the night to his voice, LOL).

maeven’s been very interested in listening to the cds! just as i had hoped! there’s a lot of great info in there. the only thing i don’t like about the book is that it treats bible stories as historical fact and everyone else’s mythology are just stories. so i preface the bible stories with an explanation of this. i did when i was reading them aloud and i explained it again today. i told her that the author of the book is christian and so she believes that the stories in the bible literally happened. and that’s ok. i told her that i believe that maybe some of it might have happened but i tend to believe that most of it is mythology like all the other mythology we read. i did tell her that some of the things in the bible have been proven to be true by archaeologists though. but i don’t personally believe that all the “proof” that they’ve found is really true, so i didn’t really go into details of that much. not that i know much about it.

i want maeven to decide for herself what she believes in, though, so i always try to explain that some people believe this and some people believe that. and its all good, as long as it works for them and they’re not hurting anyone with their beliefs. and that its not ok to bash another person’s beliefs.

 anyway this all came up because i found it fascinating when we heard the story of sargon…and how he was supposedly found as a baby floating in a basket in the river by a servant of the king and then raised in the king’s palace. thought that was really familiar. and this supposedly happened, i believe, hundreds or maybe thousands (not sure) of years BEFORE moses. so, hmmmm…my guess is that story was created by someone that knew the story of sargon. just a guess. things like that i find really interesting…the parallels in mythology. and yet the bible mythology is seen as fact, where other country’s mythology is fiction? there’s a lot of bible stories that mirror other cultures mythology…and the bible stories came AFTER the other stories. kinda funny, i think.

 anyway…so the new stuff is in and we’re still working on gearing up for “school”.

today i also worked some on getting my planning book dated and labeled for another year. i really enjoy this sort of thing, LOL! like when i get a new calendar and get to go through and label all the birthdays and such. so i have enough pages in my planner to make it through most of february. then i’ll need a new one.

well i’m just starting, so it’s not super impressive yet…but here’s what i’ve started, in order to gear up for another year of homeschooling…

 this week i ordered the next level of right start math for maeven. (level b) we had been doing level a, but it really was too slow moving and she was getting bored (plus tyren constantly interrupted us) so i scrapped it and researched the next level. i learned that she really should be in level b. i wanted to start from the beginning, but it was designed for preschool and kindergarten aged and she was already older than that. the lessons were designed to go slowly for younger children. but i learned from the yahoogroup of people that use this program that she would be fine starting on level b because it covers the same info, but at a faster pace for older children. so i finally found the money to order it. yay me!   (its not cheap) and picked up the extra manipulatives to add to what i had already bought. i’m saving level a for tyren.

 i also bought (finally!) the cds of story of the world, which is our history curriculum. we have the book and the workbook, and we LOVE it! but i have been wanting to get the cds for awhile because i would like to be able to have some repetition of these stories so they will stick better. i don’t have the time or energy to read these stories over and over, but i can put them on for her to listen to anytime, in the car, or in the living room, or in her room…should help us all really learn these stories.

 and lastly, i had a talk with my mom…who is now no longer working (although she may be getting another job), and she has agreed to help me out…she’ll take tyren off my hands more regularly (i’m thinking like an hour or 2 for mon/wed/fri) so i can get some focused time to work, uninterrupted, with maeven. and then she also will help me with some of the actual homeschooling with maeven. not sure the details on this yet. i’m not yet on a roll with my planning, so i don’t have it all worked out in my head yet, but i will eventually.

 my first thought is that she can work with maeven on listening to her read and watch her practice writing, stuff like that.

i never really planned to be the only one homeschooling my kids…as long as there are others who can help, i don’t want to be the one with the sole responsibility. i’ll do the organizing, but i sure will appreciate the help with the actual hands-on stuff. i’m very lucky to have options with this.

ok, well i have a lot of things to do, like sleep.

i’m pretty good at blogging casually on my main blog. but i suck at consistancy at anything, and it is possible that i might suck at keeping this blog up to date. but i am hoping that having this blog will inspire me to really get organized with homeschooling. i have so many plans, but i have such a hard time keeping them going. luckily, maeven continues to learn, despite me. but i really have so many ideas for fantastic educational experiences i want to share with her. and soon, tyren too. so my hope is that having this blog will really help me stay fired up about what i’m doing and maintain more of a daily consistancy.

 i can’t guarantee that i’ll be able to blog every day about everything we are doing. but i will try to do as much as possible. and this blog will also be my personal record of what i’m doing with my kids. i really want to get out of the current summer heat rut we’re in and get back to a daily educational lifestyle like we’ve had before and like i envision.

 wish me luck!