Why Homeschool is COOL!

Here’s my amazing homeschool story for the day. 
First, the groundwork for this story is that for a couple of years there has been some unusually rapid deterioration in the vision in my right eye. On my last visit to the eye doctor, she was concerned that she was seeing Macular Degeneration, and wrote me a referral to a specialist.
Tack on to that some information about my little guy’s interest this year. He wanted to study the five senses. I owned a Scholastic book called The Body Book (you can click it on the sidebar), so I made copies of all the student pages in preparation for going through it. The first section is on the Five Senses, so it is a good fit.

So, yesterday I had this specialist eye doctor appointment, and I was wondering if I should get a sitter, when it dawned on me that I could try to capitalize on the visit in light of our studies.  Would the doctor be able to talk to my son at all, or would the office be too busy?…

Well, not only was the great doctor able and willing to, but he also let my son look INTO my eye!  He let my son look through two different pieces of equipment. My son saw the optic nerve (it is yellow), the retina (it is orange), blood vessels that feed the eye, …the whole bit.  He said my son is the only child his age that he knows of who has ever seen some of that stuff!  It was so cool!

So then we came home and put together the paper model of the eye (over two days).  Now I just wish he ever enjoyed coloring, because I really wanted him to use the colored pencils and get the model colored, but I don’t know if it’s going to happen. I’ll keep working on him.

What's Cookin'?

Today Mama’s cookin Bison Chili.  Okay, okay, you can make this with your meat of choice, but Mama’s makin it with ground bison.  Mama’s makin this to go in the freezer for two meals sometime in the future, but Daddy’s gettin home late tonight, and it looks like Mama might just serve the first dinner from this chili tonight, since Mama doesn’t much like to cook dinner twice in the same evening.

Here’s the recipe.  This is a CORE recipe on the Weight Watcher’s plan:

2 pounds ground bison
1 onion, finely chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
3/4 tsp. chili powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste
1 15-ounce can dark red kidney beans
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 15- ounce can tomato sauce
non-CORE optional ingredient: brown sugar

Brown meat with onion and green pepper in large Dutch oven; add remaining ingredients.  Bring to a boil; reduce heat.  Cover and simmer over low heat for 2 hours, or in a crockpot for 6 hours, stirring occasionally.  Serve hot with fat-free sour cream, and for non-core eaters, shredded cheddar cheese.

Serve with salad.  For 2 Weight Watcher points, cook up some hot muffins (in paper baking cups) and crumble into your bowl of chili.

Also a great meal in the following ways:

• Stuffed Baked Potatoes:  Bake potatoes and serve covered with steamed broccoli, Mama’s chili, fat free shredded cheddar cheese,  and fat free cheddar cheese.
• Chili Dogs:  (not CORE) Cook up some Hebrew National all-beef hot dogs and serve in hot dog roll, smothered with Mama’s chili and more chopped onions and cheddar cheese, with baked beans and saurkraut on the side.

So, as a way to do this, you can

1. Eat chili for dinner, and place the left overs in a heavy-duty freezer zip-lock-bag, mark it either "Stuffed Baked Potatoes" or "Chili Dogs", and plan to serve it for dinner two weeks later (so the family doesn’t feel like they are eating "leftovers".
2. Using a Once-a-Month-Cooking mentality, make up the whole thing and freeze 6-cups-worth in a gallon-size freezer bag marked "Mama’s Chili", and the rest of it bag in a 1-quart freezer bag and mark it either for dogs or stuffed potatoes.

Hope you enjoyed this glimpse into my madness today. I love to serve this with a Hot Muffin recipe I will have to post later.  While I was posting this Papa called, and he plans to swing by a Vie de France store and pick up some salad and French bread to go with tonight! He spoils me so!

D

Why Homeschool Moms Quit trying to Exercise...

Let's see, how can one begin?

I hope to make this humerous, while bringing truth to light about the real life of a home school mom! 

At about 9:30 a.m., the mom decides it is time to get ready to exercise.  She plugs her 6 year old into a computer phonics game and goes to put on exercise clothes.

She sees the bed and remembers that she needs to strip the sheets on her bed.  She strips the sheets.

She goes to use the bathroom, so that the old, saggy female plumbing won't give her trouble while she is exercising, and she gets sidetracked playing “Jawbreaker” on her Pocket PC.  She finally gets up and gets dressed.

She heads downstairs to the treadmill, but halfway there remembers the sheets sitting on the bed that need to go in the wash, so she goes back and gets them.  On her way, she sees the tissues that her allergy-prone child has discarded on the carpet, and picks them up and throws them away. 

She gets the sheets and goes down and sticks them in the washing machine.  While she is at it, she folds the stuff in the dryer and takes it up and puts it on her bed.  Since she is upstairs again, she goes into dear son's room and strips his bed as well.  While she is in there she puts away his toys, throws away stray tissues, and puts away clean clothes that are sitting on his dresser.  She takes his sheets downstairs, and makes sure that she has her hair clip, her MP3 player, and her water jug.  She dumps the sheets at the washer and then goes to the treadmill.

She turns the treadmill on and sets it to run Program 1.  Seems easy. It's for 30 minutes, and that's what she wants.  She starts out the warm up and walks for 3 minutes, and then she sees her dear son poking his head around the corner. She stops the treadmill and asks him what's up. He says the computer locked up. He rebooted it but needs help getting back into the phonics program.

She walks upstairs and shows him how to get back into the program, and gets him into it.  While she is in the kitchen, she empties the dishwasher and loads the things that are in the sink.  She goes back downstairs to the treadmill.  She sees part of a sewing project has fallen behind the treadmill, and she squats and squeezes and gets to where it is and picks it up.  It is the sleeve to a size 6 months sweatshirt. Her son is now six.  ::sigh::  She turns the treadmill back on.

The crazy treadmill does not seem to understand what she wants to do (remember, she selected a pre-set program).  The crazy thing keeps changing pace, changing to an inclined ramp, no matter how many times she reduces the speed and puts the ramp back to level.  It seems convinced that she should go 6.0 miles per hour.  She knows that she will get an inflamed knee if she goes that fast, but it speeds up every 60 seconds anyway.

Dear son is back again.  He says big sister kicked him off the kitchen computer.  She turns the treadmill off again and sets him up at the downstairs computer, by the treadmill, to do the phonics program there instead.  She turns the treadmill on again and is finally able to finish her time on it, with her son resting his foot against it the whole time, giggling because it tickles his bare foot as the treadmill turns.

She turns the treadmill off and closes it (so dear son won't play with it), and goes to check the washer.  There is very little time left on the cycle by this time, so she goes into the sewing room to do some pick up while it finishes.  She picks up the construction paper that is all over the floor from dear daughter's birthday card project last week.  She also picks up pins from daughter's sewing project, and ignores the mouse droppings from whoever had the pet mouse out last.

The washer turns off, and she transfers the sheets to the dryer and starts the next load.  She goes upstairs to shower, but since she is still sweating, she puts away the clothes that she brought upstairs earlier.  As she reaches the bottom of the pile, she is glad she put them away, because her shower towels were in this load, and she is going to need them.

She goes into the bathroom to shower, and resists the urge to clean the bathroom first.  She turns on the water and hops in.  She shampoos, conditions, and starts to shave limbs.  By this time the water is no longer hot.  Remember, she just started the second load of sheets in hot water – necessary to kill dust mites in an allergy home.  By the time she finishes shaving the water is truly 70 degrees–not her idea of a good time.

She gets out of the shower and gets dried and dressed.  She starts to dry her hair, and daughter comes in to remind her that she needs a ride to work.  Hair finished, it is now 1:05 p.m.  Daughter is supposed to be at work at 1:00, and it took 3 and 1/2 hours to exercise and shower. 

That's why homeschool moms don't usually bother trying to exercise.

Paper Models

To save friends time looking, I am going to list links of free paper models you can download, print out and construct.  Here we go (in no particular order):

7 Wonders of the World, The Great Pyramid:

http://www.delta7studios.com/pyramid.htm

Model: http://www.delta7studios.com/images/Great%20Pyramid.pdf

7 Wonders of the World, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon:

http://www.delta7studios.com/garden.htm

Model: http://www.delta7studios.com/images/garden.pdf

7 Wonders of the World: Temple of Artimis:

http://www.delta7studios.com/artemisian.htm

Model: http://www.delta7studios.com/images/tempartemisA.pdf

7 Wonders of the World: Tomb of King Maussolus

http://www.delta7studios.com/tomb.htm

Model: http://www.delta7studios.com/images/TOMB.pdf

7 Wonders: The Pharos (lighthouse) of Alexandria

http://www.delta7studios.com/pharos.htm

model:  http://www.delta7studios.com/images/pharos%20model.pdf

The other 2 of the 7 Wonders do not have models or pages yet:

The Great Statue of Zeus and The Colossus at Rhodes

The general 7 Wonders page is: http://www.delta7studios.com/wonders.htm

Happy paper modeling!

What did you learn in school today?

Well, not as much homeschooling today.  Got up this morning and did other stuff all morning figuring I'd homeschool in the afternoon.  Gave dd#2 a ride to co-op, then came home and ate breakfast, cleaned up the sink, made the bed, spent some time on the computer.  DD got a ride home from co-op with someone else (yea!) so I didn't have to go out to get her.  Had lunch, did some wiping down of furniture made dusty by our renovations (power sander on spackled walls). Cleaned out the tadpole's habitat. Cleaned up and spent time on the computer again.  Trying to do HTML programming on another other blog. 

1:00 came and it was time to take DD#2 to her job. Went out the the van.  Remembered that the tire pressure warning light has been coming on, so I walked the perimeter of the van and found a basically flat tire!  Was probably quite low when I went out this morning, too, but that was only a 1 mile round trip.

Called my daughter's employer (a friend), and she came and picked daughter up.  I asked her to follow me so I could drive up to the gas station (3/4 mile away), but after 50 feet or so I decided the tire was too low now to do it.  She left. I kept trying unsuccessfully to get ahold of hubby, figuring he might want to come and help me during daylight rather than put it off until tonight. (He works 3 miles away.)

Noticed my neighbor outside, so I called over to him. “Hey, Jimmy… Do you by any chance have an air compressor?”  Turns out he does!  It's a small one; he bought it for inflating bicycle tires, but it did the trick!  He inflated my tire sufficiently, and also was able to determine that I had gotten a screw embedded in my tire!  So now I was able to drive up to my local service station.  They were able to take me right in. They inflated the tire the rest of the way, pulled the screw, plugged the hole, and re-inflated (as air had escaped when the screw came out).  All this while my son, JD watched.

Then after they were done, JD was able to get some questions answered about what is this hole here for? (disposing of oil after an oil change) How about those over there? (That's where the gasoline tank trucks pump the gas that comes up to the gas pumps to fill the car.)

So can I count that as school for today?  Between that and the time we will read to him tonight, that is fairly substantial… I gave him the A Beka phonics worksheet for the day, but he isn't quite grasping the concept of marking the vowel with the mark to indicate it is making the long vowel sound…

Have a great day!

D

A Good School Day

Amidst being a taxi for dd#2, I managed to have a great homeschooling with ds!

8:30 dd was taken to Spanish by her wonderful dad.

9:30 I picked her her up, and of course ds was with us.  DD had had a bad class, not doing well on two quizzes on some new material that had been introduced while she was away out of state.  Now, having missed two weeks of classes, she's going to have to really hussle to get back up to speed with the rest of the class.

Home again, dd studied in her room and ds watched a bit of television while I got some things done. (It started because I needed a heater in the classroom, and I remembered there should be one around here, so I was looking in the attic.)  (I know… ::gasp!  she let's her son watch the tele right in the middle of the school day?…::  Well, I'm working on it, okay?)  After a bit, time for lunch, then dd to her afternoon class at 1:50.  I thought we were going to do some schooling while she was there, but ds got caught up in some other activity, and I remembered I a book sell on the interent that I needed to pack up and get to the post office.

3:10, picked dd up from her class.  Post Office, then home again.  This time ds and I really got busy.  First, he (on his own initiative) began doing several pages from his math book!  Now, it is a 1st Grade math book and he is only supposed to be in K, but I'm starting to find he's ready for 1st in many of the schoolwork…  After quite a bit of Math, I had him do some work from our English book, and then he did some pages from our Phonics book. 

I still would like to get serious and disciplined about daily Bible, as well as make sure I am not short changing him in Science, History, Art, Music and PE, but we really do get those, just not as often as I would like, nor in as organized a fashion as I would like.

Well, we played Uno tonight, just he and I, as dad and dd were at a 4-H meeting.  It was a great day through and through.  I read some about early North America and the conquistadors after Uno, and last night I was reading about the five senses, so that is an example that these are getting covered. I just think he'd retain it more and we'd both enjoy it more if I dove-tailed the subject material with hands on stuff.  I'd elaborate, but I'm afraid this computer is going to lock up before I can transmit this post, so I am going to quit for now. 

Blessings to you all!

Diana

A Good School Day

Monday was a good school day.  We started the day Charlotte Mason style, taking a nature walk.  We took along two empty bags to collect trash–J's great idea!  While we were on our walk we observed cardinals, mourning doves, a blue jay, chickadees (or sparrows, I need to look them up to check), and some birds with black and white stripes on their back that were either woodpeckers or flickers. Need to look them up too.

J also found a heap of rolly polly's, which he tried to bring home. But he had nothing to keep them in but his hand, and they crawled away.  We walked along the creek, and he enjoyed discovering the footbridge and crossing it. As we did so a squirrel in the tree began scolding us without mercy!

On the walk we did fill the bags with trash to the point where we had to stop long before the visible trash was gone. I promised J we will go back with bags again in the future to get rid of more of the neighborhood trash on another walk on another day.

We also did math and copy work today. J copied “God is love.”  I have decided that copy work will be a good way to reinforce for him the correct directions for the letters to go, which is something he is struggling with.

Well, I'm off to prime the hallway. After that I will be off to swap cars w/hubby, since I am getting his oil changed for him today but he forgot to leave his car with me!

Blessings,

Diana

County Fair 2005

Here in our County, we are in fair mode this week.  The County Fair started last Saturday, and ends tomorrow. 

Exciting features of this year's fair for us:

Eldest daughter is 4-H Fair Queen this year!

In addition, she received a champion ribbon for a floor-length sweater jacket she knitted, a champion ribbon for a table-topper (table cloth) that she crocheted (thread crochet), a reserve champion ribbon for a dress that she sewed, another reserve champion for… a metal etching? can't remember.  She also participated in a cheese carving contest and carved a mouse, for which she received a very nice Grand Champion award!

2nd daughter missed entry deadlines for 4-H entries and enterred her things in the Open Class category.  She received a Champion ribbon for a tile mozaic, a Champion ribbon for her metal-etching, and many other awards.  Becky also received a Grand Champion award at the dog show for their performance on the Agility course.

Youngest, just turned 5, received a participation ribbon for enterring an item in the 4-H building as a Clover, and enterred two items in open.  His lego creation received an “Honorable Mention” ribbon.

Mom spent the year homemaking, and come fair time had very little to enter.  What I did enter did, for the most part, receive awards.  My entries were: sewing: navy blue zip-front hoodie sweatshirt with pockets (1st place), thread crochet doily (5th place?), crocheted infant's hat (3rd place?), knitted adult hat (no award), biscuits (2nd place?), sugar free muffins (1st place), fat free muffins (3rd place?), and sugar free cookies (can't remember what ribbon).Keep in mind that I made all the baked goods on entry day… That's because I didn't want to have only 3 entries!

Eldest daughter gets moved into college on Monday to Tuesday.  2nd daughter and I leave on church Sr. High retreat on Monday (same Monday daughter moves into college dorm). 2nd daughter and son start school on 9/6. 

DD#2 has had a busy summer.  We finished our homeschool on a Friday, and one week later she left for a one-week mission trip to Mexico with our highschool youth group.  She celebrated her 16th birthday the after day she came home, but she came home with a terrible ear infection (which had caused her great pain while flying!).  So, the birthday consisted of a trip to the pediatrician, then to the pharmacy, and then to bed. We served a cake for her that evening, but she wasn't feeling much up to it.

She hadn't been back for a week yet when we left for our family vacation.  We travelled to Prince Edward Island, with stops along the way to ride a train pulled by a steam engine, ride a river boat, watch our car pulled up Magnetic Hill while in neutral!…  various fun things.  We also stayed at places with indoor pools the entire vacation, and ds, age 5, learned to swim!  So, we vacationed for 12 days or so, and when we got back, in less than a week dd#2 started volleyball camp–five days of volleyball from 8:00 a.m. to 2 p.m.  During this time her ear infection recurred, with swimmer's ear on top of it!  When volleyball was over, she had a couple of weeks to prepare things for fair entries.  Then came fair week, currently, and she has come down with a sinus infection!  Day after we pick up fair entries she leaves on four-day retreat; day 5 is State Fair, then one week til school!  So her summer has been reduced to the week before Labor Day!

So that's a whirlwind tour of our summer.  I, the mom, have spent a lot of time this summer trying to run my house (instead of having it run me).  I have done quite a bit of decluttering.  I am selling books on Alibris.com to get rid of ones I don't want/need.  Money from sale of books is turned right around to pay for homeschool expenses.  This might be book purchases, or postcards for our postcard exchange program that we are working on (to get postcards from all 50 states).

Well, I need to do more updating another day, as I have dinner dishes waiting for me.  I look forward to figuring out how to imbed photos right in this journal!

D