Back to it, with a new member

**I wrote this back in January but never posted it!**

Our fall season ended rather abruptly with the surprise early birth of Miss Olivia Noelle. I told Anya, "Olivia gave you an early Christmas present--it's Christmas break now!"

I had planned for a week or two of December calendar time (singing Christmas songs! reading Christmas poems!), some human body review activities, etc., etc. But... I'm sure Anya thought it was much more fun to have Christmas break and a new baby sister.

Now, we're back to school with the baby tagging along. She's been well behaved so far as long as she's having a bottle or being cuddled.

We jumped back into it with a January calendar song (cold and rainy weather... will it snow?) and a few days of math and reading review, but Anya hadn't seemed to have forgotten much after the extended break. So now we're forging ahead with:

- Math: playing "bean store" to add and subtract multiples of ten. I pretend to be a customer looking for specialty beans for soups, and Anya sells me beans in bags of ten. It was kind of fun to see her balk at an equation of big numbers like "40 + 20" but then quickly realize that it was much easier to solve than it looked.

- Reading: "nk" and "ng" consonant teams. She somehow became a much faster reader by taking time off! We have both been amazed by how she can read quite a few words now without sounding out each letter.

- Grammar: singing the verb song (to the tune of "I'm a little teapot"), reading some cute picture books about verbs, and doing some verb worksheets.

I would like to add in our writing curriculum too, in a week or two.

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And, that's a wrap!

We finished Anya's first grade school year about three weeks ago, with a little popsicle celebration on the porch. We paged through a little book I've kept throughout the year of various projects; skimmed through some math workbook pages; looked at the first short story reader she started with back in September. It was fun to be reminded of where she started, and how much she's learned this year. I’ll share some photos. Math: where we started Math: where we finished up Handwriting/writing: where we started Handwriting/writing: where we finished up (Paragraph mapping) (Rough draft paragraph) (Final draft paragraph) Reading: where we started (This was review from kindergarten since we switched programs) Reading: where we finished Beyond all of these skills, and much more important, I am so pleased and proud about the girl she's becoming. Our family experienced a lot of change this year, as we welcomed and adjusted to anothe...

Homeschool reflections

School has been in session for a full month now, and it has flown by! I have started a blog post about it several times and never finished. There seems to be too much to say, as there is a lot going on here for the second-grader and preschooler. And for me! The summer was a time of learning and processing for me, and now I get to experiment with what I absorbed from multiple books on homeschooling. I read: - Family Matters by David Guterson - The 4-Hour School Day by Durenda Wilson - Homeschool Bravel y by Jamie Erickson - parts of The Well-Trained Mind and Writing with Ease by Susan Wise Bauer - I’m starting Teach Your Own by John Holt The biggest takeaways? One of the biggest benefits of a homeschool education is that it is, in fact, not school at all. This is a terrible paraphrase of a really good quote in one of the books I read. I think it synthesizes what I learned about how a lot of what I think of as "school" or "educ...

Calendar time

We start out each school day with calendar time. It signals the shift in our morning--school has started, and it's time to focus. It's also good practice for Alina. This is the only "school" activity that she has to participate in... after calendar time, she runs off to play. We follow the same pattern every day. First we practice some slow, deep breathing, and the girls and I take turns with coming up with fun ways to do this. Some favorites are "curtain breathing" (made by Alina; you start with your hands over your face, and take a deep breath in while moving your hands out and away), the yoga move "cat/cow," and full body breathing (lie on the floor, and take in a deep breath while lifting up your legs and arms into the air). I don't participate in that last one right now, being 35+ weeks pregnant! Next we look at their calendars and figure out what date and day of the week it is. We have a "days of the week" song that we someti...

The Colton Family Schoolhouse

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