Big Ed and Her Piglets: First Week of School

For our My Tech High learning log I will start with a quick summary: Amelia-we worked together on math problems that she was struggling with-i started racing her to complete the problems to practice/solidify the concept and it worked well. Isabelle-we are working on making Language Arts more enjoyable and the new Good and Beautiful did not disappoint. So far the booster cards and read along book is awesome. She aso enjoyed her lessons each day-fingers crossed. Walter-was adorable with both math and language arts. He understood both quite well and has been figuring out how to spell out words on his own.

Nature Journals

Looking at the ducks-there were so many that just kept coming to that area. It was fun to watch them drink and swim around.

Waddle Fields Park-both Isabelle and Walter loved climbing to the top. They also had a blast on the zip line and slides.

I almost got our homeschool room completely ready-but not quite-still a few things to finish up, so no official pics of it yet-those will follow soon.

I really want to instill a love for learning and make our homeschool something they really look forward too. I have several ideas that I will be implementing through the year. The first one is our helper badge-someone gets to be the helper for the day. They lead us in the pledge, a song, and prayer. Then they help with gathering things or whatever else I may need help with through the day. They get “Hansen Bucks” for being the helper. “Hansen Bucks” are from my public school teaching days-but it is paper money and then they can purchase items out of a prize box with it. They love Hansen Bucks! 😊

We then start out with our “treasure box” that has scriptures in it and we work on memorizing a scripture-we are starting out with “The Articles of Faith”. We spend about 5 minutes writing it and memorizing. Then we are also reading out of our scriptures-everyone reads 1 verse and we discuss what it means so that they can learn to understand scriptural language better. It’s been really sweet to do with them.

Another thing I’m working on being more regular about is a morning basket. There are little things I want to do with my kids that I often don’t get to. So I am putting things in the basket that I want to be sure to get to for the week. Then some items are daily and some are once a week and we will loop through them. They do not like to write, so my goal is to help them have fun writing and come to enjoy it. There is a daily read aloud story/picture book. Then we have a poem journal (they learn, write, and illustrate a poem each week-they are taking a long time, but trying to make their poetry book really nice, which I think is great 😊), they have a silly story day where they make up a silly story, and then an educational game. I plan to add other things as I gather them-a music lesson, a great person in history, etc. so far it has gone really well and I am loving it.

For the core subjects, I start with Walter and then when he is done he plays with toys that are school toys-and he’s pretty good about doing that. He knows that if he is going to be noisy, he needs to leave the school room and play somewhere else-which he is generally fine doing. Then I work with Isabelle and end with Amelia-since she has the most independent work and mostly I just help her with what she hasn’t understood.

My kids love the science units from The Good and the Beautiful. We just finished up Botany and we started Safety today. On my homeschool wall I have posters hanging up that correspond with our units we have done to help them remember.

For History we are doing the Constitution unit from The Good and Beautiful. We started it last year with Jonathan and we enjoy doing it with him so the trick is we have to do it later after he is home from high school. We plan to do it 1 day a week after school. Then next week the girls will be attending a history class that a lady teaches under the wing of 4-H. It’s 1 day a week. The parents volunteer and help make things and activities run well. I have not done that before so we will see how it goes-it sounds really neat.

This week didn’t work out because Jonathan had an orthodontist appointment on our day for history. The orthodontist is 45 minutes away, but close to an awesome park and IKEA. I needed to go to IKEA for some things for the schoolroom so it worked out well. We made it a field trip and I took the younger 3 with us. I took them to the park during the appointment and then we all went to IKEA afterwards. They had so much fun and we got dinner there too-we tried several different food items to add to our adventure.

Thursday Thursday we finished our read aloud, "The Little Princess". Such an excellent book-I teared up several times while reading aloud. The girls loved listening and thoroughly enjoyed the book. Jon and I took Isabelle out with us on our weekly date. We never took her out after her baptism. So it was her special night. She got pretty tired of sitting at the restaurant and wanted to head to the store asap. We explained that you visit and talk while you eat and enjoy the time together. She was super anxious to get on with the evening though. It was funny. So after we finished eating we went to Deseret Book for Isabelle to pick out a set of scriptures and a scripture case. She then wanted to go to Hobby Lobby (one of my kids’ favorite stores-we all have a lot of fun looking at all the fun stuff there). We let her pick out something to buy, and she had a really fun time with us.

Fridays are our official “Adventure Day”. This is when we go on field trips or work on school projects. This last Friday we went along a path by a stream of water in a park. There are ducks and plants and we looked for flowers that were in our botany book. We actually found several, so that was neat. We then sat at a table and I read about a famous Botanist while the kids ate snacks (you definitely need lots of snacks for homeschool to go well 😂). Then we drew in our nature journals. On our way home we passed the library, and I realized I haven’t taken them to the library since we moved here due to Covid!! So we went to the library, signed up for library cards and got a pile of books. Isabelle thinks she hates reading, so one of my goals is to help her gain a love for reading. It was fun to see her be so excited about her books and want to read them immediately. We came home, ate lunch and then had a read-a-thon. It was a good week 😊.