One morning a couple of days ago, Tornado Boy came out to greet me when he was supposed to be changing into his clothes for the day. He was giggling mightily with his pants on his head. He said: “Look, I’m Picasso!”

Yesterday morning we went to the park for a nature walk. We happened upon this goose who clearly had a wounded wing. I asked Tornado Boy what he thought may have happened to the goose. He told me that he thought he was attacked by either “a jaguar or a piranha”. Evidently we have some serious predators that I wasn’t aware of in the park!

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Tornado Boy: Mom, it’s 8:16.
Me: (facing away from clock) Yes, I know.
Tornado Boy: How do you know? Do you have compound eyes?

See what others are saying at Not Before 7.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

• Reading: TB can decode and read (literally) any individual word. We are still having definite tracking issues that the eye doctor didn’t know if we should chalk up to muscle issues or wiggle issues, but he was leaning towards wiggle. TB still reads every day, but he is resistant to chapter books. It is totally emotional. Sees it and says “I can’t do that” even though he is totally capable. It’s frustrating, but I’ve just decided to try to give him time to mature and get the wiggles out. I’m trying to instill good habits like leaning his back against a solid surface when he reads, otherwise he literally is always moving. In the meantime, we’re either reading chapter books over time with my reading to him, or enjoying them as audio books in the car. TB’s phonic skills are “complete”. He tests at the maximum for them, so we’re moving on to work on grammar this Spring. We’ll also continue TB’s ‘Five in a Row‘ co-op class. It’s a great fit and we use the curriculum some at home as well.
• Writing:TB’s writing is coming along nicely, mostly due to the extra time spent with fine motor skills in his Kindergarten co-op class. They do lots of coloring, cutting and pasting in class. I can definitely tell the difference at home because he is asking for pencil and paper far more often and using them to draw and write a lot more than he used to and of his own accord. I had held off on starting Handwriting Without Tears Sentence School, but he’s almost ready now. We’re still working on having his lower case letters be a little more consistent.
• Spelling:
  Most of our spelling time is spent playing auditory word games. TB’s phonic skills are so strong that he can spell most any phonetically regular word by sounding out the individual letters. Some letter blends (like ph instead of f) stump him, but he does very well. He likes to quiz me as well by reading words in his environment and having me spell them. He made me laugh when he told me that he wanted me to spell ‘Movies Crazy G Burgers’. I was totally stumped. It turned out that he was reading ‘Movies Ampersand Burgers’. It does sort of look like a ‘crazy g’ doesn’t it? We had a long talk about symbols that day.
• Math: We have been doing a lot of applied math lately – reading and setting the analog clock time to the minute. We’ve done a lot with calendar skills. This really clicked in the fall and TB’s concept of time is so much better now. He’s good at calculating things like what the day after tomorrow is going to be. We’re also learning how to write the date – both written out and using numbers for the months. TB is also learning his addition and subtraction facts. I hadn’t been pushing this, but he got an iPod Touch for Christmas and there are so many great math games (Math Bingo, Park Math) that they are coming along through play.
• Social Studies:
  
  The Melissa & Doug License Plate Game was by far, one of the best toys that I’ve ever bought. We did finally finish all 50 states at the beginning of December. I think I heard the Hallelujah Chorus play when a car from North Dakota drove by us on the way back from a trip to Washington, DC. This game was such a great backdrop for learning so much about our 50 states. Finishing the game on the day that we visited our nation’s Capitol city was so fitting. Tornado Boy was a bit bummed out that we couldn’t just stroll up to the White House and visit with the President. It turns out he was out of town in Afghanistan that day, anyway. I was just glad that they didn’t arrest me when I stuck my cell phone through the fence to take this picture.
• Science:One of TB’s favorite activities was from a class that he attended at a museum. They learned about the five senses and they had a really neat listening toy from Guidecraft. The child picks up a box and shakes it and then tries to find the other box with the matching sound. When they think they have a match, the turn it over to check to see if the dots on the bottom are a match. I hadn’t seen this toy before. It was really neat and a great concentration builder.
  
  We learned a lot about the Earth this fall. We learned about things like why we have seasons at a Science Museum. They had a great hands on exhibit that allowed the kids to see how the tilt of the Earth and it’s rotation around the sun creates the seasons. There’s also a good video about it on the Happy Scientist if you have access.
  One of our other favorite activities was observing the stars, moon and planets in the sky when we were out at night. We had a couple of opportunities to use the Celeste and Google Sky Map apps on my phone in order to identify objects in the sky and to learn more about them.
• Sports and Physical Activity:We had two main sporting endeavors this fall – Tornado Boy’s first crack at t-ball, and a homeschool gym class. While TB was pretty excited the day that he won the “game ball”, t-ball proved to be a bit much for everyone involved. Yes, my kid was the one sitting in the field, pulling at the grass, kicking the dirt to make clouds of dust fly and the like. Two days a week between practice and games wore me thin. I was not a big fan of t-ball, but it was a good introduction to team dynamics and sportsmanship. The program was good, and they were pretty patient with him, but it’s pretty unlikely that my kid is going to be all that athletic. It just isn’t in the blood. On the flip side, we all love his homeschool gym class. It’s at an indoor facility, so we don’t have weather issues. They get to try out all kinds of sports and run the sillies out for an hour and a half. I wish this was more than once a week!
• Playtime:Tornado Boy got to go to his football game and see his Dad’s beloved Virginia Tech Hokies score 7 touchdowns in one half. That’s going to be a very hard standard to live up to in the future!
  Tornado Boy has been an avid fan of games of late. Yahtzee in any format – Junior, Kismet or even electronic on the iPod is a huge favorite. It’s also been a great introduction to the concept of multiplication. It’s easy to see the relationship between skip counting and multiplying when you’re adding up dice.
  Costumes continue to be a favorite playtime activity for TB. He’ll often change into his bathing suit and serenade us with “Backyard Beach” from the show Phineas and Ferb. Building forts, throwing the frisbee or playing Simon Says with Dad and sledding have been fun as well.

The biggest drawback to not blogging our first semester is that I took almost no pictures of our experiences. The plus side is that I was more present in the moment rather than being an observer. I’m hoping to find more of a balance between the two for the next few months. We’ve started using the Moving Beyond the Page 6-8 curriculum, so we’ll have a little more consistency at home.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

• Q: What did you do before you became a stay-at-home or homeschool mom? Do you think you’ll go back to that profession when you are done homeschooling?
  A: I worked in the technology field as a programmer-analyst, then as a liaison between the programmers and the business people for a major retailer. There was a lot that I liked about the technology field, but I can’t imagine going back to a full-time job and dealing with being on-call, etc. I love technology, so maybe some sort of “virtual” job will be in my future.
• Q: If you could live any place in the world, where would you live? A:Right where I am. I love our home and our life.
• Q: Do you have any pets? A:Not right now. We had cats for years, but the last one passed away at 16 when Tornado Boy was 1. We really don’t have a very pet-friendly lifestyle right now.
• Q: What kind of car do you drive? A: A mom-mobile, aka Honda Odyssey. I swore that I’d never have a minivan and then my husband rented one when we were on vacation. Not having to pull over and find a place to change my kid turned out to be a very attractive feature. I miss my top-down sports car days, but you really can’t beat the utility of a van AND it’s paid for. Win-win.
• Q: What is the last book you read? A:Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. I lost about 50 pounds this fall and I’m now working on figuring out how to keep them off.
• Q: What was the last movie you saw in the theatre? A: The American with George Clooney with my college suite mate. “How bad can two hours of George Clooney be?” we thought. The answer – that bad. What a waste!
• Q: Do you have any phobias? A: Not really
• Q: Do you have any bad or annoying habits? A: I spend too much money on Amazon.com – their Prime membership makes it way too easy. I also tend to over-think things and worry too much.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

After my last (non-review) whiny post about our lack of a summer, I decided to do something about it. Tornado Dad was headed out to California for a conference, so Tornado Boy and I got a fabulous deal on a timeshare room and we spent 5 days at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, VA. While we were there we also visited Water Country – the companion water park and also the Virginia Living Museum. It was still really hot, but we just dealt with it and had a wonderful time seeing and learning lots of new things.

After we got back from Williamsburg, we went to visit my in-laws and also Tornado Boy’s great grandmother, whom we call Big Mammaw. She is 92 and is at an assisted living facility. She has been having an increasing number of health issues of late, so we’re trying to see her as much as possible. Tornado Boy also got to see his two cousins while we were visiting. They are some of his favorite people in the whole world. He had a blast playing with them. They worked on showing him more about baseball since he was about to start playing t-ball.

Next up was a trip to New York to see a college friend of mine and her two boys for a few days. We all had a wonderful time together. Tornado Boy really enjoyed having a constant companion for a few days. It was nice to kick back and relax. The highlight for the boys was visiting a space museum. I’m hoping that my friend will share some of her pictures when she gets them loaded from her computer.

On the way back, we visited Tornado Dad who had another work conference going on. We ended up sleeping in six cities over the course of two weeks. Needless to say, we are exhausted! We are thankful to be back home and sleeping in our own beds.

So… right before this two weeks of insanity, I started a medical weight-loss program. Great timing, right? A friend had joined the week before and I opted to do it with her. Well, that produced a major surprise in my life. The program includes a complete physical, blood tests, urinalysis and EKG. When the lab results came back, they revealed that I had a major problem with my thyroid. I visited my regular doctor and have been put on medication for life. I got very little information, so I spent all of my spare time since then reading about hypothyroidism and trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to me. The doctor said that it’s been likely bothering me for a very long time. I had tons of symptoms, but really had no idea that there was something significant going on. I had just chalked them up to the fact that I was getting older and I’m heavy. I’m hoping that the diet plan – which happens to be a good match for my thyroid issues, along with the thyroid medication will help to alleviate a lot of the problems that I was having. Scary news, but hopefully good results.

That, in a nutshell, is what has been going on for the past two weeks. School and t-ball start this week, so hopefully we’ll be able to get back in a routine that includes regular blog posts. I’ve missed it, but I definitely needed the time to do some heavy-duty reading.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I’m really finding it hard to believe that summer is nearly over and that we’ll be starting our first official homeschool year in less than two weeks. I feel like we never really got to have a summer this year. We didn’t go to the beach, we didn’t travel with Tornado Dad to any of his conferences, we didn’t visit any amusement parks. In early July, I was really ill and it pretty much took me out of commission for a little over a week. Up until the last week or so, our weather was ridiculously hot with stifling humidity. Nearly every day it was 90+ degrees, and we had 11 days where it was over 100. Tornado Boy and I both have incredibly fair skin, so being outdoors was really not much of an option except for early in the morning for most of the summer.

Tornado Dad works at a small office. About three weeks ago, the other top level employee suffered a massive stroke in the office. He is recovering, but his absence has taken a toll at work, so we haven’t seen all that much of Tornado Dad of late. One major change that this has caused is that I haven’t been doing the bedtime routine with Tornado Boy. This is the little bit of time that they get to share each day, so instead of alternating, my husband does the read/rock/lights out routine most nights.

It feels very strange to say that I haven’t been reading to my son much at all. We are working on independent reading during the day, and Tornado Dad is doing the reading at night. I haven’t been participating in Natalie’s reading meme because I really can’t do much of a review on books that I haven’t read or heard. Tornado Boy has been enjoying a lot of book and CD combos from the library on his own each day. He’s also just starting to read some chapter books on his own. He’s had the capability for quite a while, but he has been somewhat resistant to it. We know that he’s having some visual tracking issues, but the crux of the problem really seemed to lie more his being unwilling to tackle a longer book with fewer pictures. He did read Arthur and the Crunch Cereal Contest on his own and we’ve picked up Nate the Great for him to read next.

One good thing about the change in nightly duties is that Tornado Dad tends to be a bit more creative than I am at times and tonight he had TB acting out the story while he read Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, so the change there was quite positive.

I also had some technology struggles this summer. In the past month I’ve gotten a new computer and a new phone. Both came with some pretty substantial learning curves. I love them both, but transferring and adjusting has taken some serious time. I now have 12 years worth of photographs on my computer. I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to do some archiving! I also upgraded some software in the transition, so that’s taken some time to get used to as well. The phone is incredible. LOVE it. Tornado Boy is having fun with it, too. The educational applications for the Droid phones seem to be pretty limited, but we’ve found a few fun ones and are looking forward to finding more in the future.

Tornado Boy still seemed to enjoy himself this summer. He spent a lot of weeks attending partial day camp sessions at several different places. This was the first time that we had been able to do that (his previous preschool was year round), so I wanted him to be able to sample several themes. The sports camp that he did the first week and the science camp the last seemed to be the favorites. We did some play dates and hung out a lot at the park. We attended a couple of weddings. We learned a lot together. I can look back through the blog and see that we did things, but I feel somewhat guilty that we didn’t spend mass amounts of time being lazy and swimming. I’m really looking forward to a temperate, productive and fun fall!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Last week I started writing a weekly review post for Homeschool Creations Preschool Corner Friday meme. It really struck me after I’d gotten my pictures together that we really don’t fit well with that group any longer. I’ve always enjoyed reading the posts, but I’ve felt a little out of step with the group for some time, even after Jolanthe added the Pre-K element to it. I know that part of the feeling for me is that Tornado Boy turned 5 this weekend. The other part is that he is starting his official homeschool journey in the next month, essentially as a 1st grader. I’m not sure if there is an existing weekly wrap-up for early elementary kids or not. If anyone knows of one, I’d love a link.

I’ve been surprised by many little things that Tornado Boy has done over the past couple of weeks. A lot of these little things are really making me question my plans for the fall. Some of the things that have happened:

• He read sdrawkcaB as backwards without flinching.
• He jumped on his trampoline and skip counted by 10 to 500 without anyone asking him to. I’d never heard him go higher than 100 before.
• He’s figured out that multiplication is adding the same number to itself many times and he is verbally playing around with the concept a lot.
• He’s starting to ask me words in Spanish that aren’t in the Little Pim videos. We’re using an online English-Spanish dictionary with audio entries to help answer the questions.
• He’s asked to learn French and Chinese.
• He’s asking to listen to specific classical music pieces by name and composer. I know that part of this is coming from Little Einsteins, but it’s interesting that he can name pieces that I can’t.

We’ve already covered more than a standard Kindergarten curriculum in the past year. Since we have the luxury of time, I’m really wondering if I shouldn’t just pitch the curriculum that I had picked out (with the exception of Five in a Row) and really let Tornado Boy lead this year and see where it takes us. I really also should consider finding a foreign language class of some sort for him – that is so not my forté.

I feel like no matter what I plan for the school year, I have no idea where TB is going to be developmentally even six months from now. So anyway, I’m feeling a tiny bit lost at the moment, but we’ll work through it!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Five years ago today, I gave birth to a brown-haired blue-eyed baby boy. He was exactly 28 days early. He was sitting bolt upright inside me and I think that he used his razor-sharp nails to claw his way out. Even at birth, he did things his way. He hated to be swaddled and was like Houdini, he’d have his arms out of the blanket in seconds, no matter who wrapped him or how tight. All of those things make so much sense knowing his personality now.

Some things have changed. The blue eyes turned dark brown after about six months. The brown hair fell out and blond peach fuzz replaced it. The personality is still intact. He’s so curious, and so ready to take on the world. Happy Birthday, my big boy! Mommy loves you!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I’ve found two articles this morning that I think are well worth sharing.

1. So Smart It Hurts – An article about gifted education in Minnesota, but more than applicable to most areas in the U.S.

2. Brilliant speech about the state of American schooling by a valedictorian.

Happy Reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.