End of the School Year!

Where has the school year gone? There are only 19 hours (3 days) of school left, and I have about a year's worth of projects to finish! It has been a great year and I have enjoyed it! This is my enormous list of projects to complete. 

History:
     -Finish History Book
     -Finish Timeline
Math:
     -Khan Academy
     -Review
Science:
     - Mammal Powerpoint
Latin:
     -Textbook
     -Review
Spanish:
     -Translate "Puss in Boots"
Greek:
     -Flashcards
     -Textbook
Art:
     -Art class
     -Timeline
Vocab:
     -Review
Logic:
     -Poster
Postcrossing:
    -Send Postcards
Reading:
    - All Things Wise and Wonderful

So as you can see it will be a very busy 19 hours!
Love, Kayla

Time Management Styles

As the year continues to fly by I continue to wish we had more time. Not-or, at least not just-because there's still so much to learn; but because the longer we go and the more things we try the closer we come to finding methods that work.  Another couple years and I'd have this all figured out!

As I've tried to back off and breath (without letting all education sail out the window) the last couple weeks, I'm realizing some differences in our preferred working styles. I should have seen it sooner~after all this is the kid who used to sit and sort sequins!  I have a pretty short attention span.  It's not Attention Deficit short, but I prefer to do little chunks of things and then flit off to the next.  The difference in our styles really showed up as Kayla helped me get the house ready for Easter Dinner.  While I'm busy rotating rooms/areas: start a load of laundry, spend 10 minutes in the kitchen, 10 minutes on the yard, 10 minutes decluttering the living room, vacuum all the floors, sort a handful of paperwork, take care of 2-3 things on the list of Easter needs, and go back to change the laundry and start the list again with another 10 minutes in the kitchen, etc.  Kayla sits down to spend 45 minutes washing the wall that goes the length of the living room and kitchen and then goes out to completely pick up, organize, sweep and wash down the back patio.

So the school schedule where we hit every topic every day feels great to me! 
I'm good with a day that looks like:
Reading (usually in bed)-45-60 minutes
Memorization work-10 minutes
Greek-15 minutes
Logic-20 minutes
Math-1 hour
Latin-15 minutes
Grammar-45 minutes
Piano practice-15 minutes
Miscellaneous-Art history, blog, postcrossing, geneaology stuff-20 minutes
Science 1 hour
Spanish-15 minutes
History-1 hour
Vocab-15 minutes
Throw in an experiment or a project, take the dog for a walk, watch the birds, etc

Leaving Kayla to her own devices over the course of the last two weeks I've seen her:
Reading an entire assigned book in one sitting
Spending most of a day on math review worksheets
Taking a morning to make a poster summarizing the logical fallacies book we just finished
Reading and taking notes on a large chunk of Biology one afternoon
Sitting in the middle of a history lapbook project with piles of books and working on the activities for a couple hours
Work on translating a spanish children's book

Is she ever going to pick up the grammar book and spend a full day really just digging into predicate nominative phrases? Probably not!
Can you really retain much Latin if you do all the exercises for the week in one sitting and don't look at it again until the next week?  I don't really think so.

But if she can sit and read a week's worth of electron orbits and isotopes in one afternoon who am I to stop her? 

So the new challenge would seem to be finding a way to balance the topics that do need daily time or aren't spontaneously chosen with leaving larger chunks of time to go in depth with other subjects believing that everything will be looked at during a longer cycle instead of every single day.

10 weeks!

Spring break is over.  It flew by far too quickly. I feel like we only did a couple of the things from the giant list of possibilities I generated on the first day of spring break! 

Although in reality our accomplishments for the week included:  

• An afternoon wandering downtown Portland with Auntie~taking in the Farmer's Market, animals in the lobby of the history museum, the sculptures in courtyard of the Art Museum, a streetcar ride and Powell's. 
• Two gymnastics meets. 
• Two gymnastics practices (four hours each!). 
• An orchestra rehearsal. 
• An afternoon of ice skating. 
• A new frozen yogurt shop. 
• Dinner with Nana.
• Two nights when friends stayed at our house.
• One night Kayla was at a friend's house.
• One day Owen spent at a friend's house.
• An afternoon at Grandma's house.
• A youth group sleepover.
• An afternoon of" booking"-Borders, the library and the Book Bin.
• Sleeping in.
• Watching Back to the Future.
• Bananagrams.
• Ear infection/antibiotics
• Hanging out doing nothing!
• A rained out attempt to frisbee golf.
• Church

Doesn't look like doing nothing when I see it like that. I've been informed that maybe my expectations are sometimes a little high.

So many books, so little time!

And I find myself in a similar situation with school.  There are about 10 weeks left in the school year. Kayla has begun laughing at me as I wail about how much there is that she hasn't learned yet and how we'll never be able to fit it all in.  The truth is that we have done a lot and are on track to finish quite a few of our books~Latin, Grammar, Vocabulary, reading list, Spanish, Logic and (shhh, don't tell Kayla, but I found out that lots of homeschoolers who use our Algebra book give their students credit for Algebra I and II when they finish it and we are near the halfway point so even though we won't finish the book I can still feel like we got in a year of Algebra!)   Because we aren't using set curricula, science and history could wander on forever.  (Although we are in the middle of a World War II project, which I'm pretty sure is more modern history than I ever had in school~including  AP History! So that seems like a success too)

But there is sooooo much more we could do!  Both academically~Oh no! She hasn't written a research paper! We didn't study Geography! Music History! Home Ec, etc~and enrichment: museums, plays, birdwatching...the list of fabulous things we thought we might do this year takes up several pages.  

So my goal for the next ten weeks is to accept the fact that I can't teach her everything~as she keeps reminding me she does have four years of high school and another four or more of college to meet that impossible goal.  To find a balance between pushing to finish the books and showing her some new and exciting things that she'll want to continue learning about for the rest of her life.  And to enjoy what may be the last ten weeks we get to spent starting our mornings out together with pajamas and books (high school decisions looming on the horizon!)

So she spent a couple hours this afternoon helping our friend teach an elementary art class. 
And on Friday we'll be seeing a ballet interpretation of Anne Frank.
There are ten more weeks of fun adventures coming up.
And then summer vacation just might find us dragging Owen and Justin along to work on the lists of things we thought we could do and ran out of time to complete~both during spring break and school!

Patty

Art

           Hi! Sorry I haven't updated the blog lately, I have been pretty busy. One of the things I did last week was that I headed to the art museum. My mom and I spent about three hours there wandering in circles. The featured exhibit is art by Chris Jordan, who is an amazing artist! But I couldn't help but wonder what is art? I asked some of my friends and got a lot of completely different answers. One said that it is pretty man made stuff, another that it is in the eye of the beholder, the third that it was an expression, and lastly that it was something you couldn't define, but you know it when you see it. All of these answers cover some of the things that I think are art, but none of them like they are the perfect answer. I would love to know what you think "art" is! Feel free to leave a comment, or send me a message! I would love to get a lot of answers!

Love,    K. M. B.

Graupel Day!

I woke up the morning of February 24, hoping for a snow day, but to my dismay despite approx. 1" of snow, there was still school. So I continued on like any other day (except for the constant snow distractions, involving, LOOK!!! IT IS SNOWING AGAIN!!! Oh wait, it stopped...) Then at about noonish something started to fall from the sky again! I glanced outside and realized that it was hail, or so it appeared. Going outside to investigate further I found that it was not hail, but looked like styrofoam pieces. I collected a bowl full and brought it inside to look at more closely. I looked it up Wikipedia and found this: 

 
Graupel (also called soft hail or snow pellets) refers to  a 2–5 mm ball of rime; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process. The term graupel is the German word for this meteorological phenomenon.^[2] Graupel is sometimes referred to as small hail, although the World Meteorological Organization defines small hail as snow pellets encapsulated by ice, a precipitation halfway between graupel and hail.

I am happy to report that at the moment it is once again snowing! Weather alert: There may be slight Graupeling starting at 1:00!

<3 ME!!!

Comments Please!

Hi! I just heard from a reliable source that it is hard to comment on our posts. We played around with the settings and want to know if it is better? If you could post a comment that would be great!  Love, Me!!!

Puppet Science!

After several months of grumpiness and confusion in the science department we finally came to the realization at some point in December that there is still plenty of time ahead to a) end up with a teacher who makes physics fun, exciting and understandable or b) hate physics.  But that there was no reason for us continue on miserably just because some book suggested physics as their eighth grade science step :) We could choose to switch over to the science that Kayla is actually excited about!  Which would be pretty much anything related to animals...so we ordered a book about Mammals and continued watching backyard birds and reading National Geographic articles and watching Nature and Wild! and Oregon Field Guide and even pulled out my old Biology 101 textbook and I now have a much happier scientist on my hands!  (I expected the Biology textbook to go by the wayside quickly, but she is still enthusiastically outlining~full blown Roman Numeral style which she absolutely resisted doing with the history I thought she should try it with earlier in the year~and writing down new vocabulary and reading it. Although she just shakes her head and sighs when I tell her how much she would probably be reading in a night in a college class.)



Sirenians



Cetaceans

Rodentia



Lagomorpha



Insectivora

Last weekend she volunteered to help me man my paper bag puppet table at the community college family fun day and decided to turn it into a science project. So we had a sample puppet to represent every order of mammals: 



Artiodactyla



 



Monotremata









Perissodactyla







Pinnipedia





Chiroptera





Carnivore





Marsupial





Primate



Proboscidea