Moving

It's here- the big moving week!

We're packed and ready to go, but now we have to do the actual "going". I plan to be in this space if I can, but my list of last minute things seems to be growing and growing. School is canceled for the week, and I'm sure knitting time will be sparse... but oh so worth it to be in the new house!

I plan to be back in time for the Yarn Along on February 29 if I don't make it in this week, but we'll see if I've found my yarn by then. And seeing how clothing, towels and dishes might have to come before yarn, it might be interesting.

See you soon. :)

First Snow

Our first actual snow of the year and it waited all the way until FEBRUARY to show up!

The best part of homeschooling?

Being able to abandon "the plan" to take advantage of what might be our only snow this year.

There was sledding and snowball throwing,

Snow angels and trying to bury the cat

(and being surprised that she didn't enjoy it...)

And best of all- the hot chocolate at the end. :)

Yarn Along

{Yarning Along with Ginny again this week}

 

All the back pain I was having last week resulted in a diagnosis of "too much stress" followed by a strict order to get myself some relaxation. Of course, we're getting ready to close on both of the houses in just a few days, then there is the studio recital about 3 weeks from now followed shortly by my husband switching to a new work shift, and... oh yes- the regular every day facts that we have work and school and have to make sure people have clean clothes to wear and decent food to eat....

Who has stress?

Certainly not me.

Little did I know that my husband had planned an amazing surprise Valentine's Day/Anniversary weekend  that included a little bit of shopping for the baby and a LOT of relaxing (including a prenatal massage for me) long before the week of crazy back pain. I rested, read and knit (and bought anniversary yarn) the whole weekend, and my back is much better for it. The rule of the weekend was no talk of work or house stuff, and it was GLORIOUS.

I finished Legend amidst all the relaxing and moved on to Crossed by Ally Condie. I read the first book in this series last year, and this one has been on my request list at the library ever since it was announced.

Still working on my socks, but I'm decreasing to the toe- hoping to finish it up tonight, then on to blocking and wearing.

And I cheated and cast on another baby sweater for Baby Girl before finishing that sleeve on the pink cardigan. I know, I know-- but the yarn is Berocco Vintage and it was BEGGING to be cast on- if you had seen the looks it was giving me from the pile of baby yarn you'd understand. It's another February Sweater, but a little bigger than the pink one.

P.S. There is more Vintage staring at me, this time in yellow.

Learning In Progress, January 2012

I thought I'd start sharing a record of our work each month, partly for me to keep track, and partly because I love reading about other folks' plans.


Ender is 6 years old and in first grade. We do math, handwriting, faith and violin daily, and spread the other subjects out throughout the week.

Ezra is 4 years old and having a K4 year. I only require that he listen while we read something during the day, but because he loves to write and draw he also chooses to work out of a workbook of his choice or to draw or do projects with us.

Faith:
Reading Ender's weekly assignment from church every week.
Memorizing through the Wingrunner book for Awana, pages 80-end, then working through the review verses.
30 minute Bible Study with Brian each week, Genesis 1 & 2.
Ezra- memorizing his weekly verse for Awana Cubbies.

Math:
Ender- trying his first timed subtraction sheets this month and increasing his speed a little at a time.
Completed Singapore 1.
Completed Lesson 1-24 in Saxon Math 1
Learning to write dates.
Ezra working with dominoes and dice to match numbers.
Both- playing Too Many Monkeys and Monopoly Junior.

Language Arts:
First Language Lessons (FLL) lessons 1-13
Copywork and narrations based on our history, science and literature readings
HWT (yellow)- p. 20-48
Ezra: Moveable Alphabet practice with CVC words, working with short vowels.

Science: (this month was science light while we focused on history)
Both: learning to use our new microscope, looking at many *many* blades of dead grass.
Narrating from Christian Liberty Nature Reader K, letters F-I
Read independently from the Christian Liberty Nature Reader 1, p. 6-10


Geography:
Scrambled States of America game
Memory work- the names of the continents and oceans

History/Science/Literature: (These are read together unless marked IR)
Fables by Lobel
If You Lived in Colonial Times by Ann McGovern
Benjamin Franklin by D'Aulaire
K is for Keystone by Kristen Kane
P is for Peach by Carol Crane
And Then What Happened Paul Revere? by Jean Fritz
G is for Garden State by Eileen Cameron
Betsy Ross and the Silver Thimble by Stephanie Greene  (IR)
Everybody Needs A Rock by Byrd Baylor
N is for Nutmeg by Elissa Grodin
Listened to Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis


Memory Work
The Caterpillar by Christina Rosetti

P.E.:
Ender: PeeWee Basketball 1x per week
Ezra: Indoor soccer 1x per week

Fine Arts:
Ender: daily violin practice
Draw Write Now 1: Girl, Boy
Lots of free art time.

Ender's Free Reading:
Magic Treehouse: Dark Day in the Deep Sea: first 7 chapters
Frog and Toad Are Friends
Big Blue Book of Beginning Readers by P.D. Eastman

How Much

Progress!

We are as packed as we can be, down to about 2 small boxes worth of things in the kitchen (since I'm still working at the house and need to eat there every day that will be the last thing packed).


We've been taking the opportunity to part with things we no longer need or use and passing them along to family and friends if there is still value there, but also throwing out what is truly worn out. We don't want to move anything we don't love or truly need to the new house. The boys were champions about giving up toys to their younger cousins to make room for their new love of legos and we found ourselves saying again and again "just because we are going to have more space in the new house does not mean we can keep more stuff."


We say it just as much for ourselves as for the boys. It isn't the things filling the house that make the home- it is the people and their relationships. Too much stuff to maintain takes time away from those relationships. I mean, would I rather spend my time picking up all the toys/folding mountains of clothes or being able to play games together or head outside? No contest in my mind.

Moving makes me seriously wonder why we had as much stuff as we had. We have lived in this small space for over ten years and have tried to be very careful about what we bring in, to cull what is no longer needful, and to take care of what we do have. Neither my husband or I are "keepers" by nature, but we did have things we were finally able to part with after letting them hang around for a few years (or more- I can think of at least 5 boxes that have followed us for the better part of our 11 years).


And Ginny's post was so timely for me- I have one child who very freely gives his toys and other things away but can barely part with any piece of art he's ever made (even if it's the tiniest of scribbles of the tiniest scrap of paper) and the other one who doesn't part with anything without a fight- and we're trying to be wise about how to approach it respectfully with them. I don't want to take away or throw things out if they are truly important to the boys, but at the same time we just can't keep every little paper.

We came up with a few ground rules that everyone agreed to before we started sorting and that helped us tremendously:

1. Anything broken will be thrown away.

2. Anything that doesn't have all of its pieces will be thrown away.

3. Art work is limited to your art box. Anything that doesn't fit can't stay.

4. If no one has played with it in 3 months it goes into storage. (If we don't find we need it in the next 3-6 months it goes on to a younger cousin).

If an argument came up over any little thing I could remind them of the original agreement, and it worked shockingly well. There were still some sad moments over things that were broken and couldn't be saved (mostly things that Nana had given them... nothing truly important, just the fact that Nana had given it to them made it meaningful), but overall they cooperated beautifully.

Quiet Weekend

You know, I think we're going for some kind of record for doctor visits this week.


In the last 4 days we've been to our family doctor, to my OB, to the ER and to Labor and Delivery... everyone is fine now including Baby Girl (she's doing great!), but we're all taking it easy and trying to get some rest. It has been a LONG week. Ezra's goose egg is starting to go down (that would be the ER visit), and I'm starting to feel much better this morning.


Hoping for a quiet weekend... probably full of knitting and pinterest and movies and all the kinds of things I can do from the couch or the bed.

Knitting by Memory

In my imagination I'm the sort of knitter who keeps a beautifully arranged notebook that includes every knitting project, always listing the needle size, making detailed (never cryptic) notes about little changes I make along the way, always including a little yarn sample and NEVER losing the ball band with all its critical info...


The truth is, I often knit on the go. A row here and there, or while my son is reading out loud to me from one of his readers, a few rows while I'm waiting on a student who is running late- that sort of thing. I do get a few evenings a week to knit for more than a few minutes at a time.

I could take a little notepad with me or something, but I just don't. I could even take a few minutes to type in a note or two into ravelry on my phone, but I just don't. I remember well enough to pick up where I left off as long as I do it in the next few days, but the only things I regularly mark are anything with a chart.

A word of warning: knitting by memory is one of those inadvisable things.

Like swimming with sharks or something.

Remember when I left the almost-done sock at home over our trip? But I had the yarn for sock #2 along and my bag of DPNs, so I went ahead and started sock #2. Not a problem, right?


Except that I was knitting from memory and I *surely* remembered that I was knitting on size 1 DPNs and I remembered *precisely* where I had started in the color repeat.


Except that when I got home sock #1 looked terribly different than sock #2 and I realized that I had started at the wrong color repeat (which at worst makes the socks fraternal- and I can live with that) but most egregiously had knit sock #2 on size 1 DPNs while sock #1 was knit on size 0 DPNs. I thought at first that the difference in size was because one was knit on metal needles and the other on bamboo because SURELY I would never use the wrong needle size. Of course, I didn't realize this difference until I had finished sock #2 on the size 1's Wednesday night and picked up sock #1.


If there is such a thing as a happy turn of events in this cautionary tale, it's that the finished sock #2 fit better than the not quite finished sock #1, so I actually ripped out less by ripping out the original sock. That counts as a happy ending right?

After a weekend of catch-up knitting (around packing, Ender's basketball practice, a birthday party for my nephew, church and the never-ending laundry....) I'm happy to say that I'm blissfully knitting as if this is sock #2 and not sock #1 version 2.

A girl can pretend, right?

Day in the Life of Our Homeschool

I loved posting about our typical homeschooling day last year. Although much has changed for us this year, it has still been a good year.


This past year has been full of transition for our family. We are expecting a new baby, we are selling one house and buying another but living temporarily with my father-in-law to help his transition to single life after losing his wife last September. All this would probably best be labeled "disruption" but it's been a good lesson for our family in doing with what is necessary and right rather than what is routine for us.

We are not a traditional homeschooling family- my husband and I both work full time- so our schedule looks different than other homeschooling families in a lot of ways. I do have to plan pretty closely for certain days of the week, or sometimes if a day gets swallowed by doctor appointments and work things we will do some schooling on the weekend. The most important thing is that my husband and I work hard to pull this together even on the weirdest weeks because it is important to us to educate our boys at home in these early years.

Our son Ender is in first grade this year. He is expected to complete his "daily work" each day, which takes about 70-90 minutes depending on if we are learning new concepts in math. If anything gets ditched off of our schedule it is history and science this year, not because those things aren't important, but because in his first grade year our priorities are math, reading and handwriting.

Ezra is 4.5, having a K4 year. Ezra is expected to sit with us at the table for the first part of our morning (about 20 minutes) while we talk about the calendar and seasons, discuss what we will be doing that day, and do handwriting. At some point later in the morning he and I do a little bit of phonics work, but other than that he is free to be part of as much or as little of the school day as he would like. He spends a lot of his mornings drawing. The goal of Ezra's year is for him to start folding into the routine of the schooling morning while expecting age-appropriate things from him.

7:00/7:30- Up for the day. The boys and I get ready, have breakfast and do a few light chores before we start our learning time. My husband leaves for work about 2 hours before we get up.

8:30- We generally get to the table to start work by 8:30 and after talking about the calendar, seasons and our plans for the day, we work in whatever order the boys would like. At this point in the year Ender knows what is part of our daily work (and must be done first) and we work through that pretty seamlessly. He usually chooses to alternate work that involves writing with work that doesn't. Our daily work includes Math, handwriting, reading practice, writing/grammar (right now in the form of FLL/WWE alternating days), faith, and violin practice.

10:00- We take a little break, usually for a snack.

10:20- We read together from a history, science and/or literature title. I keep themes in each of these subjects for each quarter. Ender (and sometimes Ezra) narrates from one of these readings about once a week.

10:45-  A few days a week we head out the door about now so that I can get to work at my music studio. On those days we listen to an audiobook in the car on the way there (Prince Caspian currently). The boys spend the early afternoon with their grandmother while I teach until their dad gets home from work around 3:30.

On the days when I work a little later we get an extra hour or three to work on projects and explore things we've learned. I *love* this free project time because it is where much of our new learning is connected to the old. Sometimes they work on their own on whatever it is they're interested in, and sometimes we are all together.

Their time with Dad in the afternoons is spent on all sorts of things- time outside, finishing up work from the morning (not often, but as I've had more doctor appointments for baby we've had days where morning work leaks to the afternoon), chores, and a little more reading practice for each of them. Oh- and did I mention play time? Lots of play time.

How does your homeschooing day look?

Yarn Along

{Yarning Along with Ginny again this week}

I haven't made it much farther on the striped socks since the last post- maybe a few more stripes on the gusset, but I'm still not quite to the toe yet. I have another inch or so to go before I start the toe. My prime knitting time is in the evenings after the boys are in bed, but these last few nights I've gone to bed pretty quickly after they did, trying to catch up on some of the sleep I missed over the weekend.


I did get a few minutes to pick up the stitches on my February Baby Sweater so that I can add the second sleeve, but I haven't really started the sleeve yet. She's ready though for as soon as that sock is finished and the little sleeve won't take long.


I am still reading Legend. I got side tracked by looking through organizing and house ideas for the upcoming move and ignored the book this week, but I'm pretty close to the end. I also got a stack of fiction from the library that I've had on order for awhile, so I need to get reading! I ordered several different things awhile ago- probably 10-12 titles- assuming they'd all come in at different times since that's how it usually goes. After waiting about two months and not having many reading options, I suddenly have seven novels waiting! I'll take that as a sign that I need to get reading!