Homeschool October

Here are a few highlights of our homeschool this month: 

Lydia's Quilt

Lydia has been working on this rainbow quilt all month. It's been such a great homeschool activity for a lot of reasons. 1-The skills and confidence of sewing your own quilt and 2- We talked about rainbows in science, arrays in math, and quilting in family history. It's been a fun project to tie all those things together. Lydia has worked hard and I'm so proud of her. (She did all the work except for the pinning.) 

Math Cubes

We were working with these little math cubes for Austin's math lesson and it turned into a family extension activity. 

Sick Day

I caught Caleb's croup and felt pretty crummy for several weeks this month. It was just so nice to sit on the couch and do our homeschool together instead of worrying about whether or not I could send my kids to school because of a slightly sore throat. 

Poetry Treat Time & Pants

As always, our poetry treat time is one of our favorite parts of our week. Most of the time we focus on using really good manners (fancy napkins, please and thank you, etc...). But this week I decided to let it pass when Lydia decided that she wanted to turn her muffins into a Ladybug. She was so proud. (I have a distinct memory of my parents letting me make a snowman out of my mashed potatoes at dinner once and now I probably let it slide a little too often with my own kids. But it was one of my favorite memories.) Our poems this month were wonderful. 

Also a note to add here: 

Lydia got two sets of leggings in a bag of clothes from a friend. She came to me asking if I would wear them with her. I told her they wouldn't fit but she insisted. So I sq.ueee.zeeed into them. They are capris and didn't come all the way over my hips- but she was so happy and I was happy too. One of the gifts that homeschool gives is the relationships that we get to grow and nurture. My relationship with Lydia continues to grow and evolve and I love that it can contain learning and laughter, stretching and resting, teaching and love. 

Bike Ride Loop

We have a little loop that we ride our bikes on: along the sidewalks by the business buildings, under the frontrunner overpass, back by the stake center, across the bridge (plus a stop for a quick roll down the hill and to watch for any traints), and then back home. We are trying to squeeze in as much outdoors as we can before fall truly hits. 

Piano

Lydia is doing SO well at her piano lessons. Something has just clicked and she's been enjoying it like never before. She practices diligently and even when a song is tricky, she doesn't get discouraged. She just keeps working. I asked her what she liked about piano and she said "It's awesome. I love it. I like that I can learn just about anything and make beautiful music." These pictures are of Lucy joining her piano practice and shows both her great piano dedication but also her incredibly sistering-skills. She's a great sister. 

Random Day

These pictures were taken on a random day of homeschool. Lydia's language arts book had her write different words in past tense on different sized drinking glasses, then had her play a little song by "tinking" the side of the glasses. I love The Good and The Beautiful coursebooks we use for Language Arts, and this is just one of those reasons. 

Homeschooling Austin has been absolutely wonderful. We started off the year by letting him earn a candy at the end of each day if he worked hard - but now we are in the routine and he doesn't need that reward. He's usually motivated to finish so he works hard through his math and language arts, we read lots of books, and he has lots of time to play. One of his favorite places to DO school is at the piano bench, which I love. I snapped this picture of him working on his Math book. Later that day Austin was playing with the hot glue and popsicle sticks and all on his own he came to me and asked me if I could tell what he just made (the sticks were all jumbled in a pile) after a few guesses he surprised me by laying them all out. I'm so impressed he was able to figure out the popsicle sticks and make them into the letters of his name without any help from me. He's thriving with our homeschool and I'm so happy.  

Speech Class via online

I can't remember if I posted about this yet - but Austin has started doing his speech with an online teacher. I'm pretty happy with it considering that the public school was going to drop his time down to only 5-10 minutes twice a week. He meets once a week for 25 minutes. His speech teacher has been really impressed with where he is. I'm mostly concerned about conversational speech, but I think that we have a good plan laid out for the year. 

Marshmallows

We made homemade marshmallows for poetry treat time and it was quite the adventure. I like that my kids will know that you can make all sorts of things if you just find a recipe. 

And on that note: 

The Coconut

Lydia read about coconuts somewhere and decided that she wanted to buy a real coconut. So she used her money from her family economy payday to add a coconut to our grocery order. As the homeschool mom that I am, I placed every book that related to a coconut on hold at our library and picked them up for a mini-unit study. We learned about coconuts and where they grow, we read a few picture books with coconut characters, we watched a few youtube videos and learned how to open a coconut. Then we opened our coconuts, tasted them, and turned them into cookies. I think the kids were a bit disappointed with the coconut water, but it was fun to bake the coconuts, harvest the meat, and turn them into cookies (everything is better as a cookie). Reason 13,655 that I love homeschool. 

Halloween Homeschool

This picture is actually from November 1, but it should be included here because my favorite thing about all the candy my kids get on Halloween? Having them sort, categorize, chart, and analyze their candy. This was Austin's first year and it was awesome! (He counted all of his candy himself and was so proud that he got over 100 pieces. (You know you're a homeschooler when... ha)