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

I'm Back!!!

Hi everybody! Sorry it has been so long since my last post, I have been very busy. I recently switched my science classes from Physics (yuck) to Biology! It has been much more interesting, and even though I am only in the 2nd chapter I am already glad that I have been learning Greek and Latin. All those roots come in handy when I am trying to figure out what all the new vocab words mean. I also started memorizing Collossians, I know the first 6 verses pretty well so far, but it has been really cool because we have a Bible written in Greek, so I can kind of translate it into English. We just finished studying the Civil War in history, and right now are studying how different countries tried to gain independence. In math I am learning how to graph equations (very confusing) and how to write equations using two points on a graph. I have two different logic books I have been using lately. One that teaches the rules of logic, the other discusses common logic mistakes. Right now I am reading a book called the Scarlet Pimpernel  which is about the aristocrats. I am still very interested in birds, and would love to get any cool bird pictures you might have! I have been receiving lots of postcards thanks to postcrossings.com, which is a website where you get to send and receive postcards from all over the world.
Love, Kayla B. <3

Field Trips!

We have had several opportunities to visit museums lately and definitely have it on our list of things to do more often in the rest of the year!

Thanksgiving weekend we took advantage of free admission weekend and took along Owen and cousin Geni and visited both the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and U of O Museum of Natural History.  The kids were interested for longer than they (and we) thought they might be, although Kayla still didn't feel like she got quite enough time and is looking forward to going back alone.  (Although we agreed it might be better to study a little bit more about the artists and exhibits before returning as it was very exciting to see postcards books in the gift store of some of the artists we had studied and thought it would be even better to have that reaction to some full sized works of art :)

We were busy trying to be respectful and quiet and didn't take any inside pictures, but here are the three museum goers in the courtyard of the art museum.

They then ran off all of that quiet inside energy by chasing squirrels around campus!

The following weekend found us with a couple hours to wander around Bend. After enjoying the Christmas parade and the snow (and watching enough of the Civil War game to feel like we knew what the outcome would be!) we decided to check out the Deschutes Historical Museum.  It's is an old school building with each classroom dedicated to a different part of local history (Native American, Logging, School Room, Medical, Clothing, etc).   Kayla especially enjoyed the school room and reading some of the eighth grade graduation requirements! I think she might have a chance in the grammar section, but some of the others would find us pretty lost!

Next week we are hoping to get a chance to head to The Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University.  

Lack of Momentum

I'd been feeling like we just can't get into a routine and keep things moving lately. 

Then I looked at the calendar. 

There are 22 weekdays this month.

5 are public school scheduled days off~2 for Thanksgiving, 1 for Veteran's Day, 1 furlough day, 1 grading day

At least 2 were sick days

2 we took off to visit Justin in Hawaii

and today~Snow Day! 

So that leaves us  maybe 12 days of school for the month~mostly broken up into 2-3 day chunks (and 3 of those are Owen's early release days).  Now I'm thinking I should get a gold star if we manage to learn anything this month!

Birdies!

Just yesterday I was sitting at my kitchen window when the cutest bird appeared. Hmm, I said, I wonder what kind of bird that is? So I grabbed a camera and took picture after picture. I uploaded the two best ones, and I am almost positive that it is a Dark Eyed Junco! Then I decided that I wanted to see a lot more birds in our backyard, so I set out some pans of bird food, and some filled with water. I will be photographing as many as possible, but if anyone has cool bird photos I would love to see them (you don't have to know what kind they are.) Please either send them to my email or my mom's. If you don't know either email address then leave a note in the comments and we will get it to you. And if anyone has tips on how to get birds to your backyard I would love to hear them! Happy Birdwatching! 

Love, Kayla <3 

The Amazing Floating Carrot!!!

This carrot not only sinks, but with the help of ocean science (and a LOT of salt) I can make this ordinary carrot float! How cool is that! We are studying the ocean in order to justify our "field trip" to Hawaii. I got to see exactly how much denser salt water is.  Obviously dense enough to make a carrot float.

 

Rain!!!

We got to make our own water cycle by filling a jar with warm water then putting a bag full of ice above, which made the water evaporate (sorry about the photo) and then rain back down, just like the real water cycle!

Love, Kayla

Fun Friday!

Finally had a week where we got enough done on the first four days of the week that we could relax and spend some time having "Fun Friday" today. 

Art this week looked at the Art Nouveau movement. We especially enjoyed the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany. So we started our morning out with a little "stained glass" tribute. 

Free form with the leftover supplies

 While the artist worked, I read to her from Canvas Caravans, by Eleanor Allen.  "Based on the journal of Esther Belle McMillan Hanna, who with her husband, Rev. Joseph A. Hannah, brought the Presbyterian Colony to Oregon in 1852"  (More specifically arriving in what was then called Marysville (now Corvallis!) on October 1, 1853.)
In honor of that, and other Oregon Trail studies this week, we made "Dried Apple Dumplings" from Oregon Trail Cooking.  





Our improvised scale. We had no idea how many of our homemade dried apples would be equal to the 8 ounce package called for in the recipe. So we had to compare it to the 7 ounce package of pasta from the cupboard!






Ready to boil/reconstitute....





Finished product.  Definitely edible.   And we agreed that after a couple months of trail cooking it would be absolutely delicious!



 We finished up the exercises for this week's Latin and Vocabulary units and then decided that the late October sunshine looked too good to pass up, so we walked to a park downtown to gather some leaves for what has become an annual tradition of tracing leaves onto construction paper or making rubbings, cutting them out and taping them in the front window.

To sneak in a little bit of geography, Kayla signed up for http://www.postcrossing.com/ in September.  She sent out her first five postcards to people in Washington, Wisconsin, Georgia and the Netherlands (2) over the course of the last month.  Yesterday's mail finally held the payoff~her first postcard received!  From St. Petersburg, Russia! 



There really isn't any good way to turn Linear-Equations into "fun" but we had some review problems at the end of the chapter she needed to get through, so we packed up our bags and headed back downtown to the coffee shop.  Sitting on a comfy couch, sipping an orange italian soda at least made Algebra look like fun. 

We also read a couple more pages in the story we are working on in Spanish.  We make flash cards as she encounters unfamiliar words, but she is definitely running across more full sentences she can understand with what she knows (and using those take a guess based on context skills). 

It turns out neither of us loves history (sorry Aunt Didi)

And science experiments are fun, but theory and formulas are not (sorry Aunt Mary)

But apparently we really enjoy languages! In addition to Latin and Spanish (and the Latin/Greek based vocabulary program and Grammar) we are now working on Greek as well.  The first couple weeks the main outcome was being able to identify the frat houses as we drove through Corvallis (which is a valuable life skill on its own!), but this week we've been working on sounding out actual words written with the Greek alphabet and have a small stack of Greek words that she can read and know what they mean! 

Kayla has decided to be part of the NaNoWriMo adventure this November so she spent the last of our coffee shop time brainstorming characters and plot ideas.  (She has been taking suggestions from everyone she runs into~so far ideas include: a basilisk named Fluffy, flying ferrets, evil twins, love, princesses, hole in the sidewalk leading to another world and many other crazy ideas!  Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments as obviously nothing is too bizarre to consider!)

I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting, as our days seem to fly by, packed with so many things to do and so much more we would love to be doing, but we thought you might enjoy a peek at today's Friday Fun!

Gumdrop Science

Thanks to Auntie, we know that the usual model of atoms with electrons spinning around nucleus like the solar system isn't really accurate, so I didn't feel like we had to do that! But I'm pretty sure that it is an educational requirement that any time you study atoms and molecules you are required to make some kind of model using common household items~preferably edible, so we went ahead (without even consulting our science advisor)  and made gum drop models of compounds: 

and salt....

 

Are You Smarter Than a Homeschooler?

I want to know if you are smarter than a homeschooler so I put together one or two questions fom each of our subjects.

Spanish
1.) What does "el conejo blanco" mean?
2.) What does it mean when you add -ito on to the end of a word?

Latin
1.) What does "e pluribus unum" mean? (you should know this)

Science
1.) How many atoms in a mole?

Reading
1.) Who are the four girls in Little Women?

Bible Study
1.) Whose fat swollowed a sword?

Vocab
1.) Give an example of an expletive..

Math
1.) Factor the expression 2r(r-7)+8r-56

Grammer
1.) Fill in the blanks
Present           Past        Past particle
Leave           ______      ___________
Sit               ______      ____________

Logic
1.) In any proposition what are the two concepts which we unite by affirming or seperate by denying?

History
1.) Who was our fourth president and what was his wife's name?
2.) In what war was the white house burned?
3.) What year did the trail of tears start?




Answers

Spanish
1.) The white rabbit ( we are reading Alice in Wonderland)
2.) Little

Latin
1) One of many

Science
1.) 6.02 x 10 to the 23 power    
or
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Reading
1.) Jo, Beth, Meg, and Amy

Bible study
1.) Eglon King of Moab       -Judges 3:22

Vocab
1.) STOP dont say it. Expletive means obscene exclamation


Math
1.) (r-7) 2(r+4)


Grammer
1.) Fill in the blanks
Present           Past        Past particle
Leave              Left        Have left
Sit                  Sat         Have sat

Logic
1.) Subject and Predicate


History
1.) James Maddison and Dolly
2.) The war of 1814
3.) 1838

Outdoor School

I got back from outdoor school on Wednesday.  I was in a cabin with 15 other people including my counselors.  My two counselors camp names were Sulley and Ski. I took four classes while I was there, Photography, Nature Hike, Dutch Ovens, and Sewing.  In my photography class I learned how to make it look like someone is standing on someone elses hand. On my nature hike I learned that there are two types of blackberries but just one of them is native to our area.  I learned that the most reliable way to heat a dutch oven is with briquettes, and in fiber crafts I made P.J. pants out of fleece. I met a lot of new people and learned a lot of goofy songs. :-)

Love Kayla

What Have We Learned?

So....we are two weeks in~still in a happy honeymoon phase! What have we learned so far?
We start each morning out with a cup of tea and the morning readings from:

 It's not intense learning time, but  those 5-10 minutes of picking out tea and finishing the readings ease us nicely into the school day.

MATH:

We spent these first two weeks working through the 26 Lessons of Hands on Equations. It was definitely easier than she needed but it was fun and a painless way to start thinking algebraically while holding a place in our schedule for math.  But I'm excited to begin our much more in-depth Algebra next week:

 from Art of Problem Solving.

GRAMMAR:
 This supposed 5th grade text was a little bit of an eye opener about grammar concepts we both usually use correctly but can't necessarily put into words!   In the first two chapters we have covered: Compound and Simple Subjects and Predicates, Helping Verbs, Verb Phrases, Subject Pronouns, Sentence Types, Diagramming Simple and Compound Sentences, Writing Paragraphs, Comma Splices and Diagramming Sentences Beginning with "There Is/Are".

VOCABULARY:
 Uses Latin and Greek roots to teach English vocabulary.  The first two lessons dealt with numbers and the key roots included:  monos, unus, duo, duplex, bi, tri, tres, quartus, quatour, decem and centum.  Roots that combined with those included: logos, arkos, gramma, polein, lithos, animus, latus, plicare, secare, athlon and gradus.  Words that were new to Kayla (or that she couldn't define clearly) included:  monologue, monolith, monogram, unilateral, bipartisan, triumvirate, quatrain, centenary and decimate.  She was also excited to understand why unanimous, monopoly and centrigrade mean what they do!

PHYSICS:

An area I haven't thought about in probably 17 years! We are both learning as we go (there may be calls to the scientific Auntie in our futures!)  We did a handful of simple experiments to experience the ideas of the first two chapters: speed, acceleration, the acceleration of gravity, vectors/scalars, Newton's Laws, mass vs. weight, terminal speed and some basic equations.

LATIN:

We are alternating Spanish and Latin so we only did Lesson 1: Vocab: amo, porto, laudo, oro, laboro.  First Conjugation: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.   But what she was really excited about was learning the Lord's Prayer in Latin. 

SPANISH:  Before our first trip to Mexico, we purchased a language program called Synergy Spanish. Kayla really picked up a lot from it in the months before traveled and is excited to learn more. We had done quite a few of the oral lessons, but not the written. So we went back to Lesson 1 and 2 and worked through the written exercises.  We also grabbed a bunch of children's books while we were in Mexico that have a simple 10 page story followed by activities~so we started in on Peter Pan.  We were excited to find out that between the words that she already knows and knowing the context of the Peter Pan story there were only a few words on each page that she needed to ask about.

HISTORY: The addition of the timeline to our kitchen and hallway walls was by far the most exciting part of history!  But we also read/talked about sections about European Imperialism (1750-1900) and India Under British Rule.  The topics that rose to the top in terms of interest were Queen Victoria and the Victorian Era and Rudyard Kipling....

LOGIC: 
  Basic definitions and introductions to the concepts of logic, simple apprehension, judgement, deductive inference, proposition, syllogism and  mental image. 

READING:  The daily report on this book is basically a barometer of whether it is more or less boring than the day before, with the occasional admission that she enjoyed a passage.  Definitely not her usual pick :)

ART/MUSIC: Daily piano practice,  read about James Whistler and added a couple of Kayla's favorite works to the time line.

OTHER ACTIVITIES:  Nature Walk with Dad and the dog, signed up for Post Crossings~looking forward to receiving some fun mail (and sneaking in some geography!)

WHAT'S NEXT?  She'll spend the first three days of next week at a "Homeschool Outdoor School" at a local(ish) 4-H camp.   I'm excited both because I loved outdoor school and she has never had a chance to go and because it will give me a chance to evalute and regroup.