homeschooling with a baby in tow

When Luka was littler we did so much schooling- or just I had more time for the bigger kids. Luka slept a lot- in my arms or on the bed and we had TIME together. Now.... well it's 4:22 today and it's been a loooooong day. Luka must be getting a tooth or something so it's been really challenging to put him down or anything. so our well-laid out plans for the day didn't pan out as expected....

I got us a great book from Usborne- it's a history of the world. The boys love it. It's got pictures and diagrams and small blurbs about each thing. the coolest part is that if you log on to their website, you can type in the page # you're reading and see MORE info about the subject as well as links to other sites on the subject. Last week we were reading about evolution and we found a website from the BBC that has games related to evolution. One showed how difficult it is to put together fossilized bones and find how the animal looked. The other had you trying to evolve from one creature to another. The lesson in that one was that evolution takes a LOOOOOONG time.

Mostly in the past week the kids have been obsessed with paper airplanes. They are building ones from 2 books we have as well as making ones up on their own. They are timing the amount of time the planes stay aloft. Klutz has a website with a place to enter in your flight to break records. They are having tons of fun with it.

We're also thinking of changing our math stuff. I just got hooked up with Singapore Math and it looks interesting. I printed out some tests for the boys to figure out which level to get. I'm finding the spectrum books that we're using to be good for the amount of problems, but I don't like the way that they're laid out.

Tomorrow will be a new day and Luka will not always be teething....

the books

this am I was looking at the kid's bookshelves, looking for a nursery rhyme book-- a last year or so GB did a huge book purge and got rid of most of the baby-ish books. We had a party and he had boxes and boxes of books out for the taking. The parents went wild. It was an awesome assortment. Fast forward to now.... a 7 month old in the house and maybe 2 board books left and not a Nursery Rhyme book left- not that I'm so attached to nursery rhymes, persay, but they are fun singing and rhyming.
ANYHOW.... what I did find were soooo many books on different subjects that we haven't looked through very much. Most have come from GB's mom and sometimes she gives so many at once that the less "interesting" ones (i.e. non-fiction) get relegated quickly to the shelves. So my new resolve is that we're going to go through, pick out these neglected books and READ THEM. Should be fun.

Unfortunately we have a nasty stomach thing/ flu bug going around the house. Noam is DOWN right now after Ra'am was. GB's been down too. Hopefully I stay mostly ok.

do computers really make life simpler?????

What a drama to post that last post. Apparently every time I was looking at the blog, I was seeing a cached version and missing out on the new post. sigh..... this is supposed to make my life "easier"!!! lol! Back in the day I had pages and pages of journals written- BY HAND!

Alright. The boys and I chatted it up and came up with this list of things we want to learn this year. We'll see how things pan out.
Science:
Chemistry (Noam wants to do)
Alternative Power (R wants to do)
Garden- flowers/ veggies?
GPS hunting- gotta find that website I read that talks about treasure hunting with a GPS- maybe we can borrow one

CURSIVE writing- these boys cannot read/ write cursive. Not a big deal, except for the fact that they can't read cards and things they get in the mail

Math- work on daily

Cooking- once a week

Writing
creative
journals
non-fiction (book reviews?)
animal projects (Noam)

Unit studies:
Alternative power
volcanoes (this one came about this morn when Noam said some false things about volcanoes- not a biggie, but when you live on a volcano it's good to KNOW about them!)


So far that's the list. We spend so much time just going with the flow of daily life that I have no idea if we get to this stuff. We should put history on there too and do some reading. Part of me feels good to have a "plan" and then the other part wonders if it's truly necessary. We've seemingly done fine up until now just going with the flow (unschooling?) but I do want to make sure that if there is something either of them wants to do, that we DO it.

We're also hooking up with a new group- Roots and Shoots- though I'm still not sure how that will take shape- maybe just more of a playgroup that sometimes does projects. it's coming together tho. we'll see.

starting anew

After 12 years of homeschooling. I've decided it's time to keep a record of what we do. Our lives are so unstructured and I am so often asked about how are days go. It's my goal to update at least once a week and give a little recap of our learning adventures- there are so MANY!

We've so far made a list of what the kids are interested in working on this year. I'll post it later when baby permits