This week, I’ve done a lot of this:
Planning, planning, planning. It is exhausting. This week I got the finalized plans for Tornado Boy’s enrichment classes for the fall (think parent co-op). I got to visit the class site and meet with some of the parents and teachers. I am really, really excited for the fall. TB will be doing a Lego class, a once a week, multi-age kindergarten class and also studying with Five In A Row at home and with the co-op. I’ve got my volunteer duties arranged with the group as well.

We also went to our first homeschool gym class – LOVED it. It was well run and Tornado Boy had a great time. He seemed to be engaged and involved. There were a lot of kids, but they did a good job breaking into groups and keeping them occupied. Today we went to sign-ups for a local homeschool group. They do so many trips, tours, exchanges and other activities. I was completely amazed at what they had to offer. I finally feel like we’re becoming part of the homeschool community here and I’m really excited for the upcoming year.

I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate my plans for the year with the classes and group activities. One thing that’s become abundantly clear this week is that we are going to be spending a lot of time in the car – probably 3-4 hours per week. I need to figure out how to leverage that time and use it for car schooling time. It actually works well for us because Tornado Boy is strapped in, so he can’t go anywhere. I can play educational videos or audio books. He can also do some lap work, but he’s still prone to dropping things, but he’s getting better about that. I just need to make sure that I can set him up with activities that are independent so that I don’t get distracted. I am trying to figure out how to leverage our existing curriculum into unit studies that we can incorporate car components into. It will be interesting to see how it all goes.

Camp/Science:

Tornado Boy puddle jumping on his way into camp.

Tornado Boy was at science camp this week while I was hard at work with all my planning and errand running. He really enjoyed it and his absolute favorite experiment that they did was the mentos in Diet Coke explosion. He drew this picture of the experiment:
Evidently the top thought bubble says “camp” and the left one is him exclaiming “Ooohhh!”. The exploding bottle has “DC” for Diet coke. He was so cute and animated when he explained the experiment to us. Tornado Dad says that we can re-create the experiment at home this weekend if Tornado Boy is good, but we’ll see. Listening and following directions has been a huge issue this week. It’s been wearing me out.

Geography:
At home, Tornado Boy continued to be interested in learning more about the United States. We used this neat PowerPoint presentation that I found on ABC Teach. If you’re a member, you can find it here. The interactive map allows you to click on the question mark to reveal the name of the state and capital city. TB enjoyed this activity and was able to name about a quarter of the states and capitals based on knowing the outline and location of the state. For the ones that he didn’t know, I would give him clues – either the name of the capital city, something that the state was known for (i.e. potatoes for Idaho) or something like the state starts with ‘O’ and has 4 letters for Ohio and then he would take a guess. I like that this document could easily be used independently by the child, if desired. Good stuff!

Language Arts:
We did some work on identifying parts of speech this week. We talked about nouns, verbs and adjectives. We used the demo for Destination Reading, Course II to reinforce some of the concepts. We also used a Venn Diagram for the first time to talk about adjectives. We read a story and then Tornado Boy used the Venn Diagram to place adjectives that described two different characters in the story. I found a nice resource for some graphic organizers. They’re in pdf format and you can type directly on to them if you choose. On a technical note, if you use Firefox with the “Download Them All” add-on, you can download them all at once – it’s a huge time saver.

Physical:
Our fun activity of the week was bowling. Trying to get a picture of Tornado Boy bowling was close to impossible. Talk about always in motion! I think that this was the first time that he’s gone “big ball” bowling. We did candlepin last year when we went to New England, but we haven’t been since. They had gutter guards up, so he did okay when he wasn’t totally lobbing the ball. We had fun, so we hope to go again soon.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

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

We were on the road for part of this week, so our “official” school time was pretty limited. We did a lot of “car schooling”. I posted earlier in the week about our wedding trip to DC, Canada and Detroit, Michigan. The photo to the left was taken in Maryland during our trip. This mosaic sculpture was outside the restaurant where we had breakfast. Tornado Boy saw it from the window where we were sitting and wanted to go investigate after we ate. Unfortunately there wasn’t any sort of plaque on it and I couldn’t find any further information on it. The tile work was really neat, though. We’ve done foam mosaics and we once participated in a group mosaic tile at our local gardens, but we’ve never done a full tile pattern. I think I’ll put that on the bucket list for this school year. I’ve seen craft kits for them at Michael’s before. I’ll have to put a note on my to do list to save one of their coupons for it.

Science:
We attended a drop-in science class this week that was really awesome. I’ll post more about it on Sunday, but this photo is Tornado Boy holding a balloon that we were able to pass a dowel through without popping it. They had so many cool experiments set up for the kids to try out.
We also got a neat impromptu lesson in animal camouflage when we saw this Katydid on our door. If he was on the right plant, he sure would blend right in. His wings have veining identical to a leaf. We’d still hear him though, they make a tremendous amount of noise. Between the Katydids and the frogs around here, it is loud with wildlife at night.

Reading:
We turned in our Summer Reading program sheet at our local library this past week. Tornado Boy is super excited because he now has a “Star Reader” sticker on his window of the car. Unfortunately we didn’t get to Barnes and Noble yet and Borders was out of most of their free promo books, so we’ll have to try again later to complete those programs. I’m glad that we had participated in What We’re Reading for several weeks because it made it really easy to log the books that we had read on the worksheets – all I had to do was look at my blog posts.

Math:
Tornado Boy is working on memorizing his addition and subtraction facts. He can do some in his head, some on his fingers and for some others it helps to use the Math-U-See blocks. I had him do this Toucan worksheet this morning to try to evaluate where he was. He seems to know all of the +0, +1, +2 and doubles facts for addition. The remaining facts he is typically using a manipulative to solve. He taught himself subtraction, so we haven’t learned them in “families” of facts.
I’ve sort of put Math-U-See on hold for the moment and we’re mostly working on writing fluency at the moment. He can write the numbers, but he will sometimes reverse seven and the rest still require a some thought to print. He got the answers correct on this worksheet, and then I scanned it into the computer and we used the computer to do the color by number part.

Playtime:
Tornado Boy had fun doing a puppet show for me in the new studio at our Children’s Museum. They have a great selection of puppets, but he was disappointed that there was not a curtain for the stage.

He also visited the art studio for a bit of painting time. In the first one he was just experimenting with mixing colors – green, blue and yellow. In the second, he asked for my help in making a rainbow. He picked the colors using the ROYGBIV mnemonic – except that as usual, there was no indigo paint.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

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

I had in my (very loose) master plan for this year to start studying the individual states of our country. We’re currently participating in a postcard swap and we get one postcard a week. We’re working through the alphabet and we received the Maine postcard last week. I want to use them to start a scrapbook of sorts for our states study.

Fast forward to one seriously cool birthday gift and we’ve jump-started our state study this week. This Melissa and Doug License Plate Game is such a great learning tool AND you can’t drop any of the pieces, they stay attached to the board. The board has a map as the base, and then example license plates that rotate on top. When you see a car with the license plate, you flip that piece and that state and capital are listed on the reverse side. It is a brilliant car game. We were so excited to be able to add this to our travel kit.

We spent three days this week out looking for license plates around town. So far we’ve found 44 of 51 (the map includes Washington, DC) plates. I must admit, we have sort of stacked the deck by spending some of our time driving through hotel parking lots. Tornado Boy definitely likes to be successful and this helps keep him engaged in the game. The good news is that there is so much to learn playing this game, there is far more to it than meets the eye. Here are some of the things that we’ve talked about during the past couple of days:

• The names and pronounciation of the states and capital cities.
• That Washington DC is the capitol of our country, an independent city and not part of any state.
• Mapping/direction skills. I used north/south/east/west directions to help guide Tornado Boy with locating states on the map.
• How “counties” work as some states have them listed on their plates.
• What an “antique” is, since we saw an antique vehicle plate.
• That laws vary state by state – some states require two plates – front and rear, some only rear.
• About some professions since we saw special license plates for things like farm use and government vehicles.
• Inconsistencies in the English language – like the pronunciation of Kansas vs. Arkansas.
• What some of the named areas of the country are like the West Coast, East Coast, New England, etc.
• How a ferry boat works when we saw a license plate from Hawaii. I was shocked that we saw one!
• How different states have different populations, which makes us more likely to see some states plates even if the state is far away. We’re also less likely to see closer states with small populations.
• We talked about the fact that Hawaii and Alaska are not placed in their true geographic position to save room on the board.
• We saw a couple of Canadian plates and we talked about their provinces, and how they’re similar to our states.
• We talked about geographic boundaries like the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Great Lakes.
• We talked about the state motto that some states have on their plates. My favorite is Washington, D.C’s – “Taxation Without Representation.”
• We talked about the fact that Alaska is a relatively ‘new’ state as shown on their 50th anniversary plate shown above.

How many toys can you say help you learn about language arts, math (probability), history, geography and government that a young child can really enjoy? Probably not too many. We had such a great time this week. I’m going to have to figure out a way to really celebrate when we find the rest of our missing states.

That was our major schooling this week. We still have a lot going on here with camp, Tornado Dad’s birthday and general summer activities. Tornado Boy and I were able to see a youth theater production of Willy Wonka that was a ton of fun. In true little boy fashion he told me that his favorite part was when Grandpa Joe burped the fizzy lifting drink. Such a boy!

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

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