Thursday's Thoughts: Mulan in the House

Cooking

FALL IS HERE! FALL IS HERE! Where we live it’s a little cooler than it normally is in the summer, but still warm enough for shorts and T-shirts. None of that stops me from cooking fall foods though. I’ve been making soups, hearty meat and vegetable dishes, and pumpkin flavored things for the past week like crazy. Here are our favorites from each category: Cheesy Chicken Chowder, Roast Chicken with Veggies, and Pumpkin Butterscotch Muffins.

Reading

My lack of non-fiction reading is over! I’m currently in the middle of an amazing book about the women who worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee at a secret government factory enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. It’s so interesting to read about these women who were called upon to do something for the war (they were not told what) because almost all of the men were fighting. It’s called The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win WWII. Definitely worth your time if you are interested in that era at all.

Listening

To the dog breathing deeply on the floor beside me and Chipette’s low voice coming from her room where she is making an American Girl movie with her dolls using my phone.

Thinking

About how well our homeschool is going right now. I’ve been adjusting and tweaking the past few weeks with scheduling and this week has been perfect.

Planning

We are leaving town this weekend for Corpus Christi, so I’m planning laundry that needs to be washed and what needs to be packed. Yippee for a mini-family vacation!

Pinning

Feel free to follow me on Pinterest using the button in the sidebar. I wanted to share some of my favorite finds this past week:

Homeschool: I am determined to be more consistent with nature study this year. When we do it the kids enjoy it so much! I quickly pinned this link to free nature study printables to get us started.

Home: I pinned this super cute, super affordable, and super functional idea for storing books. I can’t wait to buy a dish-drying rack.

Cooking: Chipette and I adore Panera Bread’s tomato soup, so I’ve been trying to find a good homemade tomato soup. The few recipes I’ve tried have been total fails. My good friend, Beauty Queen, sent me this pin for a spicy tomato soup. Beauty Queen loves to cook too, so I know she won’t steer me wrong. I can’t wait to try it!

Loving

Our new homeschool group. The homeschool group we’ve participated in the past two years is taking a break this year because of busyness in all the mom’s lives, but a new group started up in our hometown. It has been such a blessing to know that there are quite a few homeschoolers here in our neck of the woods instead of driving 30 miles to our other group.

Remembering

A couple of weeks ago we finally got Magpie signed up for taekwondo. She made the decision at the end of ballet last year that she wanted to do something different this year. She wanted to go from ballerina to being Mulan, a fighting girl! It fits her personality perfectly. Here she is at her first class:

Looking forward to a new week of productivity, loving, learning, laughing and cooking in the tree house,

Chelli

Wordless Wednesday: Zoo Crew

We visited the zoo this past Friday with some new and old homeschool friends. We had a blast!

  

Monkey is fascinated with alligators, but this albino one at the zoo had him a little frightened. This is as close as he would get to let me take a picture.

  

The girls and some of our best friends!

  

Monkey made new friends with some sweet boys. I’m glad he’s not so outnumbered with all the girls anymore!

Monkey and Miss Elizabeth Bennett

Chipette and Miss Jane Bennett: Best Friends

The zoo crew being silly after eating lunch.

The new African exhibit was open on this trip and some of the group got in touch with their tribal roots!

Chipette made a love connection with this chimpanzee. She sat down next to the glass and the chimp began to kiss at her through the glass. Chipette kissed back and for the next five minutes they swapped kisses back and forth. Quite a crowd gathered around them because it was so funny!

The nature center at the zoo had this alligator head on display. Monkey wasn’t afraid to touch it!

Before heading home I let the kids have a quick visit to the splash pad at the zoo. It was hot that day, and they had earned it!

Loving our new zoo crew in the tree house,

Chelli

Summary Saturday: Floating Needles, Shining Sun, and Paper Pizza

Chipette

Math: We did a chapter out of our Math in Focus book this week and the corresponding workbook pages. I also let Chipette take two of the upcoming chapter tests because I really thought she could pass the tests without doing the work. I was right; she made 100% on both. That’s two chapters out of the book we get to skip! Yipee!

Language Arts: We are still working our way through Sentence Island, Practice Island, Music of the Hemispheres, and Building Language. I can’t believe how quickly Chipette is able to find all the parts of speech and parts of a sentence now. It was such a struggle at the beginning of the year I was afraid I’d made a mistake using Island level for 3^rd grade, but it’s been the perfect fit.

Our most exciting news is about writing. We are using Classical Academic Press’ new writing program, Writing and Rhetoric: Fable. It has been exactly what we needed for writing. While I loved Writing with Ease and the skills it was teaching Chipette through narration, copywork, and dictation, she is such a natural writer that she was wanting more and a chance to really work on some creative writing. Writing and Rhetoric: Fable is the perfect blend of a classical writing program like Writing with Ease, but with a fun creative writing flair thrown into the mix. Perfect for kids like Chipette who enjoy writing, especially creative writing.

Here is Chipette’s rewrite of the fable The Mouse and The Lion. 

Her instructions were to chose an animal smaller than a mouse and write the story from the experience of the smaller animal helping the mouse.

  

Literature: We finished Unit 8 in K12’s Third Grade Literature program. This unit was all about Greek mythology. A great warm up for our 4^th grade study of ancient Greece.

Read Aloud: We finished A Long Walk to Water this week. It was such a wonderful story! Next up we are reading Children of the Longhouse to go along with our study of the Mohawk and Iroquois nations.

Independent Reading: Chipette finished The Secret School and is starting Freckle Juice this week.

Natives and Nations: I caved in to the girls’ demands, reworked our weekly schedule, and started back our world geography studies by finishing up Kenya and starting South Africa this week. Here are the completed Kenya notebooking pages:

For her own personal study Chipette and I are studying Native Americans two days a week. This week we focused on the Chippewa or Ojibwa people who lived in the forests around the Great Lakes area.  Here are our completed Chippewa notebooking pages:

Did you know that almost all of the wild rice that is harvested in the United States is still harvested by the Chippewa people and in almost exactly the same method that their ancestors have used for hundreds of years? Well now you do!

Science: Currently Chipette is doing two science programs, Sassafras Zoology and Apologia’s Flying Creatures, but this will be changing soon since she is only one chapter away from finishing Apologia. This week we did an experiment to see how a water strider was able to walk on water by making a needle float.

In Sassafras we have gotten WAY behind. Since I tied it to our world geography studies when we stopped world geography, we stopped Sassafras. Unacceptable according to Chipette since she LOVES Sassafras! This week we finished chapter two about lions and cheetahs and next week we’re moving on to chapter three. 

  

Magpie

Math: She did pages 123-136 in Singapore Essentials A and pages S-1, S-2, S-3, and S-4 in Miquon Orange.

Phonics:  This week she completed three lessons in Logic of English Foundations A and two lessons in Reading Made Easy. She also finished Book of Get Ready for the Code. She starts Explode the Code Book 1 this next week and is SUPER excited!

Literature: Our book study this week was The Three Pigs by David Wiesner. I had never read this one before and it was such a FUN book! Definitely put this one on your list for your next library stop. I even caught Chipette reading it on the sly! Here’s Magpie doing a piggy math activity:

I’m still trying to find a chapter book that will grab Magpie’s attention enough that she doesn’t need a picture on every page. This week I’m checking out Gooney Bird Greene by Lois Lowry to give that one a shot.

Science: This week for our Bernstein Bears’ science program, we studied the Sun. We learned some basic facts about the sun, and then we talked about how the sun makes daytime and nighttime, our years, and our seasons. Lots of work with the flashlight and our globe! Magpie works hard on her notebook pages and here are some that she completed this week:

Language Arts: I’m branching out into something different for Magpie this year for first grade. We are using Language Lessons Through Literature Level 1. I had never heard of this curriculum until a couple of weeks ago, but it was exactly what I wanted for Magpie, a very gentle introduction to language arts using copy work, picture study, poetry memorization, and fables. This level focuses on writing mechanics, and the next level for second grade focuses on parts of speech. Our first week to use it was this past week and she loved it! So far I’m pleased with my purchase as well.

Monkey

I try not to be one of those mothers who thinks that everything their little darlings do is soooo advanced, but I have to say that Monkey’s fine motor skills for a three year old boy are AMAZING! Check out this pizza and toppings that he cut out and glued while I was doing school with Magpie.

He wanted something to do so I gave him a page out of this old cut and paste book. When I looked over he was cutting like a champ, so I told him I’d pick up a new cut and paste book for him. It was actually really cute.

Monkey: I school too, Mommy?

Me: Sure, I’ll buy you some cut and paste books like this and you can do those.

Monkey: You be my teacher?

Me: Of course.

Monkey: *Huge hug* Dank you, Mommy!

So that’s a major selfish reason that I homeschool, it doesn’t get better than that!

Lots of ciphering, reading, and writing planned for the upcoming week in the tree house,

Chelli

Live Oak Academy's Fighting Squirrels

School Name: Live Oak Academy. Our name comes from one of the verses that my blog is based on Psalm 1:3 where it says, “He (the righteous man) is like… a tree whose leaves do not wither.” Live oak trees do not lose their leaves in cooler weather; they are green year round. We also have one in our yard so that was part of the inspiration as well.

School Mascot: The Fighting Squirrels. I pushed hard for The Acorns (cause you have to be a bit “nuts” to homeschool), but was outvoted.

School Motto: The Word, The Lost, The Goal

Meet the Students

This year Live Oak Academy has two students officially enrolled for the year.

Chipette is in 4^th grade this year. She wants to be a ballerina when she grows up and is starting her second year at Level 5/Pre-Pointe.

Chipette in an acorn shell (see how I worked that nut theme in any way!):

• Dramatic…all normal activities must have an element of a story or imagination to make it worth doing
• Gifted in language arts
• Loves Shakespeare, poetry, and literature
• Excitement and joy show from the top of her head to her toes
• Sympathetic to the struggles of others
• Hates disappointment
• Loves animals
• To her the world is full of wonderful things to enjoy

Magpie is in 1^st grade this year. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up and is starting taekwondo next month.

Magpie in an acorn shell:

• My firecracker…not afraid to be brutally honest and a natural born administrator
• Best laugh of any kid I know
• Professional cuddler
• Tenacious and tough
• Amazing ability to memorize
• Hates having her hair brushed
• Loves small spaces
• To her the world is something to be conquered

Live Oak Academy also has one unofficial student this year.

Monkey is three, but will be turning four in the spring. Not sure what he wants to be yet, but he’s got time to figure it out.

Monkey in an acorn shell:

• Sensitive…he wears his heart on his sleeve and you have to be careful not to bruise it.
• Natural born comedian
• My biggest helper around the house
• Amazing fine motor skills for a three year old boy
• Living doll for his sisters
• Hates the water
• Loves singing at church
• To him the world is something to be explored, preferably in a big pickup truck!

Live Oak Academy Faculty:

Teacher, Cafeteria Lady, Janitor: Chelli aka Mom

Principal and Maintenance: Preacher Man aka Dad

Superintendent: God aka Supreme Being of the Universe (Yep, He’s in charge of this homeschool)

Looking forward to a great year in the tree house,

Chelli

P.S. A HUGE thank you to Jenna Hooker Photography for the beautiful pictures of the girls. I was dreading back to school without a camera, but you saved me!

Wordless Wednesday: iPod Therapy

When school is finished for the day, everyone needs some downtime in the tree house,

Chelli

World History from Axis Powers to Ziggurats 1.0

.Mathematics

• Math in Focus: This program works wonderfully for Chipette and
  
  since I already have all of the books, I’m planning on using this with Magpie as well. You can read my review of this public school turned homeschool program here.  

• Miquon: I discovered this fun program a little too late to use with Chipette, but I fully plan on using it with Magpie. She’s already well into the Orange book in Kindergarten, and we’ll keep moving through the program at her pace. 

• MEP: I really love this math program, and if I was a little braver, I might be willing to use it as our main math program, especially since it’s free! I plan on having a rotation between this and Miquon every day after we finish our Math in Focus lesson. 

Phonics

• Reading Made Easy: We started this in Kindergarten and will finish it this year.  
• Logic of English Foundations: I signed up to beta test this program last year and we’ve been using it for most of our Kindergarten year. I plan to continue it this year on a rotation between it and Reading Made Easy, one program one day and the other program the next day. 
• Explode the Code: Magpie is my workbook lover
  and this is for her to work on as a review of things she’s already covered in her other phonics lessons. I’m hoping to cover books 3, 5, and 6 this year (thanks to advice I’m skipping 4 until after 6). I’m also hoping that she can do these on her own. 

Language Arts

• Apples and Pears Spelling: This program was my salvation when it
  
  came to teaching Chipette how to spell {read my review here}. I plan on starting this program with Magpie as well for first grade. Monday, Wednesday, Friday ~ 15 minutes
• Copywork: Magpie learned all of her Getty-Dubay Italics letters last year. For first grade I wanted to focus on having those letters become automatic and neater. Best way to do that is through copywork. I only have this scheduled two days a week, but there will be plenty of other opportunities to write. This is just the official one. Tuesday, Thursday ~ 5 minutes
• Language Lessons Through Literature Level One: This is a relatively new program on the market that I discovered this year. It fits in perfectly with what I wanted to accomplish this year in my writing scope and sequence for first grade. We’ve already been dabbling in it a little bit, and Magpie really enjoys it. Using classic literature, it teaches punctuation, copy work, narration, and picture study. 

Literature

• A Mind in the Light: You know how when you stumble across something pretty amazing it really sticks with you? I discovered this free Charlotte Mason inspired program through a member at The Well-Trained Mind Forums. She is putting together this entire
  
  curriculum and posting it online for anyone to use. This program is going to be the core of our homeschool this year for both girls. The literature selections for Magpie this year include reading through the A. A. Milne poetry books, Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young, a picture book version of Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, selected Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales, Little House in the Big Woods, Tales of Peter Rabbit and Friends, The Velveteen Rabbit, Charlotte’s Web, Aesop for Children, and various picture books that go along with our world history focus this year. The best part is that A Mind in the Light provides book notes and narration prompts for all of this great literature. 

• Read Alouds: This is my favorite part of the day! This past year we started Lit for Lunch where I read while the kids eat. It makes reading aloud so much easier when I’m not trying to cram it in at the end of the day when we are all exhausted. I will use my personal First Grade Read Aloud list for these selections. 

• Independent Reading: I’m hoping to start Magpie on the Emerging Readers from Heart of Dakota by the middle of the school year. I used this set with Chipette and it makes the transition from beginning readers to chapter books almost painless!

History 

• World History: Magpie will be studying the same topics as her big sister who's using Heart of Dakota's Preparing Hearts for His Glory. While Magpie won't be listening into the readings or anything, she will be covering the same topics including making her own history notebook. I'll be adding in lots of great picture books and videos as we cover history this year and I'll be sharing all of my plans every month.
• Geography: Using another schedule from A Mind in the Light, we will be studying basic geography. 

Science

• A Mind in the Light: The first semester Magpie will be studying farm
  
  animals (zoology) and the second semester the focus will be botany. These schedules are finished and look amazing! 
• Nature Study: I slacked off this past year with nature study, but I’m hoping to stick with it this year. We’ll be using The Nature Connection to guide our studies. 

The Extras

• Art Technique: To go along with Magpie’s focus on farm animals,
  
  the first semester I plan on using Draw Write Now Book 1. She will also use Home Art Studio K {we used the first grade video this year}. 
• Character: We love We Choose Virtues around here and focus on one virtue every month to work on. For Magpie, she will also use some of the activities from Kids of Integrity each week. 
• Logic: This is fun, quick, and simple for Magpie. She will be using Lollipop Logic Book 2. 

• Spanish: I’ve been using free Salsa Spanishvideos and the corresponding free lesson plans from the Wyoming Department of Education for a couple of years now to teach beginning Spanish to the girls. I add in my own homemade worksheets for a fun supplement. 
• Memory Work: Selected facts, information, poems, passages, and Bible verses that I want Magpie to memorize using Simply Charlotte Mason’s memory system. 
• Handicrafts: No idea what I’m going to do during this spot, but I know that cooking will make up a large portion of the lessons. The girls have been begging me to do cooking lessons with them again so we’ll work that in here. 
• Art and Music Appreciation: Using the Year One lesson plans for this found at A Mind in the Light, I will combine Magpie and Chipette for this study. Introduce the artist or composer on Monday and review all week. 

The Foundation

• Bible: This is always the most important thing that we study in our homeschool. We will continue using our favorite Bible curriculum, Bible Study Guide for All Ages {my review is found here}. This is what we do first thing in the morning to set the focus for the day. Magpie and Chipette do this together. 

Read about other homeschooler’s plans for the coming school year by checking out iHomeschool Network’s “Not” Back to School Blog Hop’s Curriculum Week.

Planning for world history grand tour in the tree house,

Chelli

Summary Saturday: Natives, Storms, and Veggies

It’s been a loooonnnngggg time since I’ve written up our week in review {since March!}. Not because we haven’t been schooling, but because 1) I have no camera other than the one on my phone and 2) I have gotten out of the habit of taking pictures while we are schooling. Later I’ll think, “Ugh! I should have taken a picture of that!”

Chipette

Math: We started Beast Academy 3A this week. I schedule it between our chapters in Math in Focus. Chipette really loves this math program. I was worried about her reaction to it because the books purposefully try to make you think about the answer and fail a few times before getting it right. Chipette generally does not do well with failure or having to work for an answer, but she enjoyed this a lot. I’ll be honest: I had to look in the back at the answer key for almost every problem. In my defense, though, it starts out with geometry which is my weakest math area. She (we!) completed pages 7-23 in the workbook and read pages 12-33 in the textbook.

Language Arts: So our language arts love this year has been Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts. We are using the Island level this year. It has been a fun and challenging program that has made Chipette a grammar guru. This week she completed five sentences from Practice Island. She does four-level analysis on these sentences which is basically like diagramming a sentence without diagramming. Here is a picture of one of her completed sentences:

  

We also read from Sentence Island (she loves Mud!) pages 31-51 and from Music of the Hemispheres (poetry book) pages 98-105. In writing, we did four lessons in Writing with Ease 3. In spelling, she took a level test and passed, then completed two and a half more levels.

Literature: We finished Unit 6 in K12’s Third Grade Literature program (the dark horse of our lineup this year) and started Unit 7. Both of us love this literature program so much. It’s fabulous!

Read Aloud: I finished reading Journey to Jo’burg and I started A Long Walk to Water. These coordinate with our World Geography studies that we stopped doing for right now. I want to finish up one subject before we pick those up again. Anyway, we are supposed to be studying Africa right now, so that’s why these are our books for now.

Independent Reading: Chipette finished reading Henry and Ribsy and started reading The Secret School.

The New Stuff: To finish out our school year, I wanted to do a Native American study with Chipette before we jump into the colonial period of American history next year. We won’t start a new school year until the calendar year, so that gives us plenty of time to dive into some of the major tribes. This first week we have studied the Inuit and also a little of history of how people came to be on the North American continent. We also read a bit about the mound builders of the central United States as well. Here’s Chipette’s completed notebook pages:

  

Magpie

Math: We are working our way through Singapore Essentials A at a pretty fast clip since most of it is review for Magpie. This week she did pages 103-122. Once we get to Book B, I will slow things down quite a bit. Here is a picture of her working on making patterns using our linking cube set:

Magpie’s favorite math is working in her Miquon Orange book using Cuisenaire rods which is why she calls it “block math”. We use Miquon here and there. I usually do a lesson or two with her after we’ve done a unit of Singapore Essentials. Here is Magpie figuring out an answer for Miquon using the rods:

She did pages A-13 and A14 this week.

Phonics: Magpie’s reading is coming along very nicely. She has made a seamless transition from letter sounds to cvc words and now to consonant blends. This week she completed three lessons in Logic of English Foundations A and two lessons in Reading Made Easy. These programs have two very different approaches to teaching reading, but I like both of them for different reasons. We alternate a different program each day. By far, my workbook loving girls favorite phonics program is the one she does on her own: Explode the Code. I use these workbooks as a refresher course over what we’ve already covered in our other phonics programs. This week Magpie did pages 63-79 in Explode the Code C.

Literature: Our book study this week was One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss. We focused a lot on rhyming words, including made up rhymes. At the end of the week I let Magpie design her very own Dr. Seuss character and then she had to tell me about it, what it ate, where it lived, etc. Very fun and probably my favorite childhood book!

Science: I was using Elemental Science’s Exploring Science with Magpie, but I couldn’t do it anymore. There was something about that program that didn’t jive with what I wanted for her. While she enjoyed it, I dreaded teaching it. So much so, that I would skip over it even though I had it written in our plans. Finally I broke down and bought The Berenstein Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature while I had a free trial of Amazon Prime. Once I had it in my hands I knew that this was what I wanted to use for her science, so I made out a lesson plan and started making notebooking pages to go along with the book. I supplement the topics with science videos (Magic School Bus is a big hit!) and both fiction and non-fiction books. This week we studied summer, thunder, lightning, and storms. Here are Magpie’s completed homemade notebook pages:

The New Stuff: I picked up some Veggietales lapbooks for Magpie that were marked down super cheap. We finished up our first one this week on Sweetpea Beauty. We talked about what true beauty is and how that’s what is most important to God. I love the way Magpie’s lapbook turned out:

And she liked watching Veggietales for school!

That was our week in a nutshell.  

Be sure and stop by this week as the iHomeschool Network’s “Not” Back-to-School Blog Hop. My big experiment of going on my own using a very Charlotte Mason inspired curriculum line up will be revealed!

Assessing and adjusting in the tree house,

Chelli