Homeschool |

Hello! I cannot believe how fast time flies. I have a few updates for you.

1. After the winter off (looking for work but not finding any), Darryl got a job working for West Fraser Lumber Mill. He’s been doing that for close to 3 months and he actually enjoys it! He’s being trained on other equipment besides the entry level jobs, which he was expecting to have to work at for the first year like everyone else, but there are 5 guys under him already and he’s moving around to different areas. I never thought it would work, but graveyard shifts are the best fit for us right now, and though he’s still technically on-call, they’ve been giving him full time graveyards. They work because he only has to work 6 out of 8 hours and gets paid a teeny bit more, he’s home to see us in the morning before he goes to sleep, and up again around 4:30, so we see him more. I also get the car during the day. You know, if I really want to go to town or something. Usually I just go around the lake to the library.

2. Sadie is finished homeschooling Kindergarten. Except for Math. We can do that slowly over the summer. I still love using Sonlight. I’m using some of my government funding to get a new laptop. A MacBook Pro with retina display, to be more exact. I’m so excited for that!

3. I got a new phone. We both got new phones. Mostly because our contracts were up and our 3 year old phones were getting a leeetle beet slow. Darryl got the Samsung S6 and I got the HTC One M9. Darryl’s is really slippery. Mine has a 20MP camera.

4. Darryl bought me a present. It starts with S and rhymes with “eel”. It’s orange and white. Give up? It’s a Stihl!! The weed whacker model (brand spanking new!). I’ve needed one of these babies for like ever. I trimmed all the 2 foot tall grass around the deck and posts and stairs, then started hacking a path down to the lake through grass as tall as me. I made it halfway before I ran out of string and had to quit for the day. Maybe I’ll get down to the lake tonight. Then I can exhume the canoe from all the grass and weeds and go canoeing again.

5. We LOVE living here. Our house is a perfect size for us, it has a built in milking parlour and chicken coop, lots of places outside to sit (if I had more outdoor furniture, that is), a killer 180 view of the lake, more grass than my animals can possibly keep up with, more yard than I can possibly mow (with the old electric mower that came with the place…I need a ride on now!), awesome storms that you can watch coming for hours, an amazing community with great people, and the best librarian on the planet.

6. A bear killed our dog. A couple months ago he must have heard a bear trying to cross our property down by the lake and went to tell him where to go. The bear didn’t like what he said and got outta there, as soon as the threat (our dog) was incapacitated. Kai died valiantly doing his job.

7. We got new dogs. I found them on kijiji and they were brought down here for us to try out for a weekend. They did something horrible every day so we asked for more time and tried them out for 2 weeks. After a week they learned a few of the rules and settled down better, so we kept them. They’re 2 year old Australian Shepherds, a male and female from different litters. They’ve had one litter of puppies before we got them, so we’re hoping they will have more this summer. The male is a very handsome red and white dog whose grandpa was a show dog. His name is Jake. The female is not quite so well bred but she makes up for it in sweetness. Her name is Junie. We didn’t name them. Sorry for the horrible picture, but these two aren’t trained and don’t yet know how to stay.

8. I got chicks the other day. We do plan to get more layers this year too but I really wanted some prettier chickens that will raise their own babies. I got 3 black orpingtons and 3 buff orpingtons. They’re 2 weeks old already so I have even less time to build a pen for them until they’re big enough to join the 5 current laying hens.

9. The kids are doing great. Sadie turned 6 and got a bike for her birthday, so she’s been busy riding that around. She also likes to build forts outside, draw at least 8 pictures an hour, “read” books, and pick wildflowers for me. Chad is 4 and plays with his cars for days and days and days. Or he goes outside and plays with his cars. Tirzah is walking finally. She likes to push a plastic kids chair back and forth across the house, and she likes to go outside, but I have to carry her in the mornings. In the afternoon she’s ok if I put her down. She eats more bananas than a monkey. Her eczema is mostly cleared up with a few itchy spots on her legs and some days her cheeks are a teensy bit red.

10. I can’t stop at 9 things so I’ll write a poem here for you.

Moola was a nice jersey cow

Who liked grass as tall as her lips

She ate so much that her head had to bow

But the grass still went straight to her hips

Well that’s enough fun for now. If you’re still following me, I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment telling me what you would name a baby (girl) calf if her mom’s name was Moola.

We got a late start homeschooling Sadie, but I had a good excuse. We were still painting and moving into our house. We started on September 17. I got our curriculum in the mail the week before.

We went with Sonlight because I wanted a literature-based curriculum and this one comes with instructor’s guides that tell you what to do (if you want to follow it) and it integrates bible verses and stories but still introduces world views. It’s one of the most comprehensive curriculums too. I lean more toward a hands-off approach to school where you teach them how to read and some basic math, and let them go at it. This one is more hands-on but it’s mostly reading stories, and I’ve found them to be enjoyable too.

Their favourite books are Uncle Wiggly’s Story Book, The Berenstain Bears Big Book of Science and Nature, Eric Carle’s Animals Animals, and the Lion Storyteller Bedtime Book. These are the ones I find in their beds most often (plenty of others make it in there too), and the ones they get extra excited about hearing.

This Core is the pre-kindergarten one (as opposed to the preschool core), but I ordered the kindergarten level Math and Handwriting to go with it. I didn’t get the readers that come with this core because we’re working through the book Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. We’re on lesson 83 I think. She can read a full page story and write all her letters thanks to that book. I’ll evaluate her reading level next year and see what reader level we’ll be ordering then.

I chose the pre-kindergarten core because I want to teach Sadie and Chad with the same core starting next year. That gives Chad a chance to mature enough that he can handle the kindergarten level at age 4.5, theoretically. I’ll probably start the 100 reading lessons book with him at that time too.

All the books take up half of a shelf. They came with a sheet of flourescent orange stickers to put on the spines of the books. Every core program has its own colour to make it easy to keep track of which books belong in which core, something I could see being an issue with multiple cores in the house. I thought that was a nice touch.

The kindergarten math (Singapore) also came with these fun shapes, and cards showing different patterns or animals they can copy. These were played with daily until we got the trains unpacked. They’re still played with a lot. It keeps them busy for hours. Sadie, of course, makes people, and Chad very carefully fills in shapes on the cards. It takes him a long time and he gets frustrated whenever he bumps them, but he sticks with it until it’s done. Amazing for building attention span and patience!

We’re done Term 1 now. We’ve been doing school for about 5 weeks. We started mid-september and took a couple of weeks off when Darryl had time off work. In the first 2 weeks, we were up to week 5 or 6 of the schedule, so we slowed down a bit. Now we do school about 3 days a week and in week 7, we’re working on week 13 and 14. The instructor’s Guide is great. It gives you a schedule of what to read and when, but we like reading stories so we usually read more than the guide says to do. We’ll read all the science for that week at once, or all the read-clouds for that week (or two) at once. Then we do Math and Handwriting once a week for as long as she wants to keep going.

At this rate, we could be done the core by early spring. Math and Handwriting might take a bit longer.

I have ordered the next Math and Handwriting books for Sadie, so she can keep going into grade 1 level stuff. We don’t see the value in taking 2 months off in summer, so we’ll probably keep going to some degree through the summer. Gives us something to do and she won’t forget everything she just learned (just some of it). We will probably take a week off every 4-5 weeks all year round.

We haven’t been at this homeschooling thing very long, but so far it’s going well and it’s fun!

Do you homeschool? Have you used Sonlight? What do you like about your curriculum?