April Homeschool

It's April and spring is here. The earth is warming and the sun is starting to shine. This month I have felt a tangible weight of grey sorrow begin to lift. As the sun starts shining the heaviness is starting to feel lighter and even though we are still sad and will still miss Sue over and over until we see her again (and I'm still crying over very small things) the hope and joy of the Gospel is filling our hearts and home with light and happiness is our most common feeling here. 

Homeschool: 

Spring Homeschool is one of my favorite months: the sun is shining, we are wrapping up a great year, we have some extra time for fun projects, and summer is in sight! It's the last month before the busyness of May hits but the excitement of sunshine and summer is already here. This year we rescheduled the Science Fair for April after I didn't have the capacity for it in February. I think I still prefer it in February - but I was happy that we still made it happen this year. I wrote an entire blog post about this - but I wanted to include it here in the homeschool notes because it was a big part of our April Homeschool. 

The only pictures I took of homeschool this month are this one of Lucy and Austin. Lucy is on Austins shoulders, listening to him while he is reading his Booster words. He is such a good brother to her, and although this picture makes me laugh because it's ridiculous, it also makes me happy because of the time that my kids get to spend together. 

Lucy has been such a trooper this school year. She's not quite old enough to really join in but she certainly wants to. My biggest win was getting her a sticker-alphabet book that she ended up loving. She would insist that she needed to "do her school" and pull out her book. I would tell her what the letter was and have her color it in while I was helping Austin or Caleb with their work, a few minutes later she'd be finished and I would tell her a sticker to find and put on the shadow-shape. "Find the Bee", she'd take several minutes hunting for the sticker, pull it off, and put it in it's spot. There were usually 3 stickers per letter and the letter and a word to color. We would do 1-2 letters per day. It was perfect because she felt satisfied that she had done her school, but I was also able to help the boys at the same time. 

The above picture on the right was an awesome example of math in action. Lydia had been learning about circumference and radius. When she asked if I would help her sew a skirt and we got the the part where we needed to cut the circle for her waistband it was super exciting to realize that if we figured out what we wanted the circumference to be (her waist measurement) we could use the formula to figure out what the radius needed to be (the inches we needed to measure down to cut the circle). We figured it out and it turned out darling. She was so happy and it made my math-mama-heart happy. 

All the kids have taken a day this month for their end-of-year testing. We are able to do the state testing through our homeschool program, My Tech High. I love that we have access to this resource and think it's good experience to be able to take a standardized test. I wanted Austin AND Lydia to be able to go to the testing center this year, but they reached out to me and said that they were moving everything online except the 6th grade science testing. I probably should have pushed a little harder, because this has been such a good experience for Lydia and I want Austin to have the same kind of confidence. Next year we will do it, but this year was fine to do most of the state testing at home. Austin did a great job on the online version.  

I'm just so proud of my kids. I don't really care about the testing scores - it's not a good measure of their learning - but I do like them having exposure and practice with different learning formats. Heavens, I'm just so glad that they aren't spending weeks and weeks studying for this test when there are so many more beautiful things to learn and sunshine to soak in! (Plus, they all did fine on the exams and it helps me see some areas that I might want to cover a little more.)

Service:

Our stake held a day-of-service as part of our stake conference this year and it was so awesome. Lydia and Austin woke up early, early in the morning to go with David to work at a food bank helping to distribute food to those in need. They worked really hard and it was a good experience for all three of them. They joined the rest of our family at the Stake Center where there were lots of service projects going on. Service is important to our family and we were grateful for this opportunity. 

In Girls Club, we continued working on quilts to donate and finally finished them! Lydia and Lucy Rich also had the opportunity to go to Wrap the World with Quilts and volunteered for several hours. It's a really great organization that is helping people all over the world. The girl's quilts were donated to the families in Nebraska who were hit by the recent tornado. 

Structured Activities: 

Lydia had her Makerspace Open House. She made the most awesome final project - a cornhole game made out of acrylic and hand sewn beanbags. She really enjoyed makerspace this year. 


Mini-Coop

We had some really awesome park days this month. The boys have so much energy- one of the days we spent our entire time at the park (I had packed a lunch) because they just wanted to keep playing. It was glorious! We finished out the kids cookbooks and finished our pile of books. Mini coop was a good thing for our family this year. 

Field Trips: 

Hike on Red Potato Trail


Classic Fun Center: 

Ashton Gardens Tulip Festival



Cleaning/Organization:

I also wanted to add that I'm jumping into some spring cleaning and have been working to get our bonus room organized a bit better. This little room has had a lot of different functions in it's life but at the moment it is acting as an additional homeschool storage area. I have a small bookshelf where I keep some curriculum I'm not currently using, a bunch of 3 ring binders with materials that we need to reference or use, unit study books, and other homeschool items. I also have been storing our old curriculums that the kids have completed, but I don't know if I really need to do that. 

This room has also played home to a massive amount of second-hand items that people have given me and I haven't had the chance to go through. Sometimes people just drop things off on my porch in the hopes that I can use them, or I tend to gather resources that people don't need anymore with the intent to go through them and filter for what I want. I have two huge boxes of books and a bunch of old curriculums/resources that have been piling up and the day came where I could not go one more minute without going through it all.

 They say it always gets messier before it gets cleaner, and that certainly was the case here. I got rid of a lot of things and am so happy with the organized finished product. I think I still want to get some clear bins to store unit study books, but I haven't figured out exactly how I want to do that yet. We will see. 

Summer Sewing Classes

Each year our YW/YM programs host a youth auction where members of the ward donate items/services and people bid on them. I offered a couple of sewing lessons for the auction, and then when a couple of friends asked if I would be interested in teaching their kids some sewing lessons this summer I decided to make it a thing and host some official classes.

I taught four different projects, one per week. I had two sessions of Monday/Tuesday classes with four kids in each class.

June 29&30 8:30-10 or 12-1:30 Adventure Banners (for collecting pins, stickers, jr ranger badges)

 July 10&11 8:30-10 or 10:30-12 Quillows (foldable fleece blanket) 

July 17&18 8:30-10 or 10:30-12 Rolled Pillowcases (Fits a standard queen pillow) 

July 24&25 8:30-10 or 10:30-12 Scrunchies and Otter Pop covers 

$15 per child per session. I will have standard supplies and a fabric stash that the kids can choose from. (*Quillows have an extra $15 supply fee)

 I will provide a supply list for kids who prefer to go pick out their fabric themselves.

I had a really fun time with this. It was fulfilling in a way that felt a little different than my normal. I enjoyed sewing with the kids and was able to use the money on some fun extras this summer. (i.e. Sarah Eden's Book Launch Party).

Adventure Banners: 

Rolled Pillowcases:

Quillows (I didn't get pictures of all the quillows, but this was by far the fan-favorite project). 

Scrunchies/Otter Pop Covers (also didn't get pictures of both sessions, but the kids liked this more than I thought they would.) 

I saw someone with this bag at church on Sunday and decided I wanted to figure out how to make it. So maybe next summer I'll add in a bow-bag project. 

I had such a fun time with this, I'm already thinking about doing a few Christmas sewing lessons. It was fun to sew again and fun to teach lessons to these small groups. 

April Homeschool

We've had a great month of homeschooling. After our (two-week) spring break, I felt rejuvenated and ready to make the most of our spring homeschooling months. I typed out exactly what lessons we needed to do to finish the workbooks I wanted to finish by summer and outlined what we need to do for each day to keep us on track. This has been helpful for both me AND the kids. I love homeschool for the flexibility and don't usually use a planner - we just spend the time that we need on each lesson and then move to the next making sure that we are participating in deep learning along the way. I don't love rushing through a certain number of lessons - but I really want to finish a few things this spring and this is working for us right now. 

Even with our structured schedule we have plenty of time for doing math while snuggling in bed and making a 144 cube rectangular prism after learning about calculating volume in a lesson. 




We've been doing our rotations - the kids LOVE the cooking rotation, the girls have dropped their science rotation and are doing our Final Projects for Utah History, including "Plan your own field trip", and County Study project. We are also still doing swimming lessons and it is made more fun by having the Youngs do swimming lessons with us, too. 



For our sewing class, I set up a field trip to Sister Roxanne Becker's house across the street. Roxanne and her daughter-in-law Robin are AMAZING seamstresses. They are especially talented at sewing costumes and they costume whole theatre productions regularly. They just finished the University of Utah's production of Sweeny Todd (Lydia asked if we could go see it after I helped Roxanne with some final details for the costuming and I was like... well ... no. Ha. But sometime it would be fun to go see one of their productions that wasn't so dark.) and already Roxanne was showing us some things that she's working on for their next production about a Chinese princess. After showing the girls around her amazing workroom she taught them about her sergers and the girls made a serving sample and then serged the outside of the pocket for their quillow blankets. It was an awesome field trip. The girls are making quillows right now (blankets that fold up into a pillow), but they also just finished making banners for their junior ranger pins and that was a super fun project! 

The other kids didn't get left out of the sewing adventures, I let Austin. Caleb, and Lucy pick out fabric and we made them quillows, too. 

Lydia did her state RISE testing in Math, Language Arts, and Science. We didn't do much prep this year, but it was a great experience for her to practice test taking skills and be able to go and sit and take the tests. I'm so proud of her. She also just started on a softball team and even though she's never played before - she's working hard to learn and improve her skills and she just does everything with such a happy attitude. I'm so grateful for her! 





We had some great field trips this month, too. 

We went to the zoo. 





Lucy was watching this snake and it slithered over and brought its head right up to the glass. The two of them were just starting at each other and when Lucy moved her head to the side, the snake would move it's head that way too. They were both touching the glass, so that only that thin pane was separating them. I have to wonder if Lucy is a parseltounge! 



We went to the tulip festival with our big homeschool group and we also went to Highland glen to scooter around the pond and feed the ducks with some other friends. 

Lydia and Iris teamed up and they planned a field trip together for one of their final Utah History projects. They decided to go to Mrs. Cavenaughs Chocolate Factory, then go to a nearby park for lunch and lawn games. It was one of the best field trips of the whole year. The tour was excellent and the kids had SO much fun playing games together at the park. I have prayed for a long time to find a group of homeschoolers that we could connect with and build relationships with and I feel like this group is an answer to my prayer. The group will look different next year, but for this year, I'm grateful for them. 






We went to the free day for Arbor Day at The Red Butte Garden. It was a beautiful outdoor area and the kids had fun jumping from rock to rock in the pond. We are so glad for good friends to explore with in this beautiful place that we live!