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.

I sort of laughed when I saw that the Homeschool Village had “What About P.E.?” as their question of the week. Physical education is definitely not optional in our house because my boy needs to RUN. I picked him up from camp the other day and the first comment that I got was “Wow! He has a lot of energy!”. I gave that one a hearty laugh and said “Really? I hadn’t noticed that!”

When you have a very active child, you sometimes need to get creative with schooling. I need to make sure that he has the opportunity to get that energy out or things can rapidly go down hill. We try to incorporate movement into our lessons whenever we can. I posted about our “Math Mat” early this week. That’s a perfect example of how we use movement to learn. Here’s Tornado Boy learning more about addition:

We love to dance if we can’t get outside. One of our favorite songs to “shake it” to is Get The Sillies Out from Yo Gabba Gabba.

Another indoor option for us is the Wii. We like the “Outdoor Challenge” game. The mat that comes with the game is split so that two people can play at the same time. Tornado Boy and I love to battle each other in the game where you sprint and jump over logs. We can also play cooperatively in some games. He is a worthy opponent and it always makes us laugh. This game has been helpful in teaching him sportsmanship. This game and the Wii Sports Resort are also good for showing that practice really helps to improve your game.

Tornado Boy has done some organized sport classes in soccer and gymnastics. He’s going to give t-ball a try in the fall. He’s not really a natural athlete, but we think it’s important for him to learn about team dynamics and to have some fun while being active. We’ve been long time members at our local kid’s gym. I’m very sad that he’s going to age out of their classes soon. Not only have we enjoyed them, but their “open gym” time has been a great option for us when the weather isn’t the best for being outside – like during the oppressive heat this summer.

For us, P.E. is a requirement of every day life.

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