paper bag puppets

Youngest came home from a few days with the grandparents with a new puppet. It's a very cute tiger striped kind of thing with googly eyes. He and Middle named it Pickle, I have no idea why. So when school time rolled around, I mentioned I could help him make a paper frog puppet since we are studying frogs and tadpoles right now. He was hesitant - he's never really done crafts like my older two and never showed much of an interest in scissors or glue. I promised I would help him and he agreed. The lure of a new puppet won him over!

Well, now I've created a monster. I helped him with the first one, a frog, but he had so much fun, he's taken off doing other animals. The rest he's done almost entirely on his own:

The blue one is a fish, if you can't tell. Middle and Oldest assure me it doesn't look like a fish, but the boy wanted to do a fish and we didn't have an example so this was the best I could do. I admit it looks a little like a blue Chicken Little.

He wanted to do more today but my allergies were kicking my butt and we had planned a slow morning anyway so I just couldn't do it. I felt bad putting him off until tomorrow so we will surely do more then.

Frogs!

Wow, these guys morphed fast. We saw legs last week, on Thursday I think. I didn't write it down, but I'm pretty sure my pictures are dated, I will have to go through and see. We saw arms for the first time Sunday. We had a froglet out of the water on Tuesday and today we saw this, less than a week from the first leg sighting:

Some of the tadpoles haven't even gotten legs yet. There may be more than one kind, but we now have about 10 froglets. Oddly, most are from the last bin I moved outside.

And I shall call him Tiny

Our first froglet! The tads are outside now, in (new, clean) kitty litter pans of all things, but they're small and cheap and I could easily sink them in the ground so they don't bake during the heat of the day. We found this guy sitting on the side of one this morning but of course he wouldn't come back for a picture so I had to lift him up for a millisecond before his little froggy legs remembered to work and he jump back in the pan.

Tadpoles!!!!

I put out a request to my friends to grab tadpoles for me if they saw any. Since we had hard freezes here for days on end, I have not seen ANY frogs around my house. We did find frozen dead frogs around the house this winter so I'm going to guess they didn't survive for the most part. I thought it would be great to have it as a science experiment for my youngest and repopulate the area as well.

We haven't had any tadpoles in two years at least. I think I am more excited about it that the kids. They weren't eating their lettuce so we gave them some of our turtle food and they ate that but it dirtied their tank quickly. I looked online and figured out I needed to freeze or boil the lettuce to soften it. Freezing didn't seem to do enough but they love the boiled lettuce. Yes, I am boiling lettuce 3 or more times a day (in my microwave, takes 2 minutes) for these little buggers. It's worth it because they are fascinating! They demolish the lettuce in minutes, leaving only the veins like a skeleton.

Skeletal remains of lettuce

The little cutie patooties.

So now we are eagerly awaiting legs and at that point, we will probably move them outside and give them a way to climb in and out when they grow arms and are ready.

Putting together Trisms

We spent this week getting our stuff together. I read as much as I could beforehand and ordered books to go along with each unit, at least the ones I could find. We still had some things to figure out as we went though. The kids have 3 ring binder with dividers for worksheets (questionnaires), vocabulary, timelines and language arts. We are opting to skip the science assignments since we are using Singapore Science.

One of the Trisms sets I bought came with their timeline, It's About Time, but I wasn't sure I really liked the format. Maybe I would once we got into and maybe I'll hate the one I made, but I made my own anyway. I think I need to tell Middle Child he doesn't need to fit each week's on one page, but at least he did a decent job of squeezing it in! I can't wait to see how it works when we get into it - the first week is pretty light.

I got the books for Middle's set, History Makers, ordered up to week 18, I believe. He'll read one book, usually historical fiction, a week. I did a post it note on the front of each one with the week's number on it. This is by far the most organized I get. (If you're wondering, yes, those books are stacked two deep on a shelf. I need to part with some stuff to make room, but it's so painful to say goodbye.)

Some of the books overlap with Oldest's set, Discovering the Ancient World, but mostly, hers were just impossible to find. I think I found a total of 3 for the first few months of assignments. She is the one I want to be doing a lot of reading to go in depth! I think I found something (books we already had! ha!) to fill the gap for the first few weeks at least.

Talk about comparing and contrasting! The Bible is...well, it's the Holy Bible. It's pretty heavy, serious stuff. The Cartoon History of the Universe is evolutionist, humorous and pretty silly, but fairly scientific by most views. She will also be reading creationist theories from different cultures. Some of it is already planned in her book, but I also need to find some outside reading for it. Meanwhile, these two should hold her over for a week or two.

The vocabulary and questionnaires seem to be pretty straightforward. I think I need to come up with some ideas to use or make the vocabulary more interesting. While it's only a few words each week, it's not very exciting or educational to just write definition after definition.

Tomorrow, I tackle IEW so I can figure out those assignments!

Learning to study

This was one thing that I have read about on other blogs and in other forums: Homeschoolers need to learn how to study. They need to learn how to take tests.

Yes, I nodded my head in total agreement, but did nothing about it. My oldest is a perfectionist and can be very unhappy with anything less than 100% or any form of criticism, perceived or actual. Trying to fit tests into our already busy schedule seemed daunting. Making the tests would be even more hassle.

As usual, the path of least resistance wasn't the way to go. I asked Oldest Child if she had studied before her first test for her FLVS class. Yes, she assured me. What she thought studying was, we will never know. She got a 70 on her first test despite knowing the material well. Many tears ensued. Threats were made to quit the class. Counter threats were made that may have involved the phrases such as "would you like fries with that" and "grounding for a lifetime."

Somehow we made it through to the second test. Oldest and I sat down and I showed her how to study. Well, somewhat. We didn't take notes or highlight, but we did go through each type of problem, looked at how the directions were phrased as this was a huge cause of panic in the first test, and made note of all vocabulary words. She took her test the next day and scored a 100% with plenty of time left over! Everyone was happy and she even admitted that studying definitely helped.

Fast forward to test 3. We studied together again, but she was a little less involved and more reluctant, like I was punishing her with this whole studying thing. We got through it, but I felt that it was more like dragging her along. She did make a study sheet since the chapter involved a lot of formulas. However, when she did her oral review and panicked because she wasn't sure what he was asking in the first question. I have learned once she panics, the recovery is slow. We reviewed a little more the next day just to be sure she had seen problems in different forms, but she definitely knew the information. She took test 3 and got a 91/95. Woot!

Unfortunately I can't teach "staying calm" which I think is the biggest factor in her success, but we will definitely have to work on making sure she is prepared beyond what she needs to avoid the panic moments. I hope that the mere act of taking more tests will help her and, if nothing else, at least she knows that one poor test doesn't ruin a grade because she has a solid A in the class now!

June update

June is supposed to be our slowest month, but between band camp, soccer camp, Dad's day and birthday, Middle's birthday (tomorrow!), it hasn't seemed slow at all.

Math is continuing. Oldest complains frequently of doing school work over summer, but gave a beautiful explanation to some neighbors about why she and some of her friends are doing school work during the summer. Apparently understanding why only goes so far when it's time to do the work!

Lego started back up. We've only got a few weeks until the season begins. End of July is when the kits ship. Where does the time go? We've worked on making programs more fool-proof and on some advanced line-following programs. I'll have to do my homework before next week to stay ahead of them. The advanced programming isn't stuff we've done before, but they were eating it up.

Soccer starts back partially this week. Tryouts and some conditioning practices once a week until August. As much as I want my kids to do what they like and learn something, anything, at a high/intense level...man, does it suck the life out of you.

Still, we have until mid-August before everything is in full swing so I am trying to enjoy lazy days when we can get them.

School-wise, we still have some labs to finish up, hopefully next week. And I just realized today I never ordered a bunch of stuff for next year, like science and writing. I was hoping it would go on sale and it never did. No wonder school supplies seemed so cheap this year, I never ordered them!

I have been so brain dead, hopefully I am getting it out of the way now before I have a million things to keep track of. Or maybe I just work better under pressure?