Leverage.

They're here. The boys all saved and saved for the past year...saving allowances and Christmas money and birthday money and tooth fairy money, lol. And now they're all the proud owners of these three new iPods:

To say they're excited would be an understatement. :)

(Yes, Noah started this whole thing with his purchase last year on his birthday. He hadn't actually planned to buy this latest iPod (as he's saving for a Mac) but couldn't resist when he found out about the new bells and whistles. And, obviously, it just wouldn't do for his younger brothers to have iPods cooler than his, lol.)

So. It's not what *I* would have spent the money on, but it was their choice. I'm choosing not to look at it as a huge time suck and a means for my seven year old to kill zombies in Minecraft. ;) Instead, I'm choosing to see an opportunity for teaching time management (I fully intend to find a family calendar app to keep 'em all in line)...responsibility (obviously...we've already gone over a number of rules)...and maybe even some educational stuff (yes, I have a list of apps I may require them to get and use, lol). And. Perhaps most importantly, when I look at these iPods, I see leverage. Bwaahaaahaaa! 

One line design.

I don't remember where I found the idea, but I had it in my head to do an art lesson today with the boys about drawings using only one line. (Seriously, if you know what I'm talking about, send me a link or something. I have no idea about specifics and what I'd meant to do...just had a faint memory and winged it, lol.)

So. We talked about line as an art element and I had them draw a number of pictures using only one line (not lifting their pencil). (As is to be expected, we ended up with a number of karate weapons and Star Wars vehicles, lol.) Then, because it had seemed like a cool related thing, I gave them each a length of wire and told them to make a sculpture...same principle, just one line. (Btw, I found the wire in the floral department at the Dollar Store and it worked perfectly! I'm told that getting your wire at the hardware store is another inexpensive option.)

Here's what they came up with:

1. Noah went for the obvious and made use of the principles of cursive. :)
2. Micah made himself a speech bubble, lol.
3. Then he went for the iMac.
4. Asher, meanwhile, set to work on a grappling hook. (Yay! One of them figured out something actually three dimensional!)
5. Micah's iMac became a moon or pizza...he couldn't decide which.
6. Noah solved it for him by making it the Apple symbol. ;)

Meanwhile, I made a lovely tree in honor of fall:

And then we decided we needed more wire and headed out to the Dollar Store...and now we have a small arsenal of weapons, of course. Sigh. Sometimes being the mom of boys is exasperating. But at least they enjoyed the art portion of things. :)

Leaves.

I love fall. Love it. The boys and I have this little tradition we've been doing for years now of going for a "leaf walk" in our neighborhood. Our first documented one was in 2004, just after we'd moved here to our current house. We apparently missed 2005 (on account of having a newborn Micah, lol). But we picked back up again in 2006 and have been going strong since then. Here's a little stroll down memory lane...

2004: actually ended up in a neighbor's front yard because they just had the best tree ;)

2006: some neighbor boys invited our boys to play in their huge backyard leaf pile

2007: (some of my favorite leaf walk pictures!)

2008: (lots of leaves that year)

and in our own front yard...

2009: (sorry! apparently I'm really behind on my scrapbooking, lol...here's a picture, though...and you can see the blog post here)

2010: (and again...blog post here) 

2011: (blog post here...sample pictures below...this was definitely the coldest leaf walk we've done)

And now...for 2012...here are a few of the pictures I took as we walked around our neighborhood last Tuesday...

As you can see, Noah was a bit less cooperative this year...declaring that he's too old for jumping in piles. :) It didn't stop him from throwing leaves at his brothers or helping to bury them, lol, but it did mean that he was less than thrilled to jump for me. ;)

Yup, love my leaf walks with my boys. It's a delicate art of figuring out the best time to go...and some years the trees don't feel like cooperating. But. It always brings out smiles...

Ah. Leaves. :)

Miscellany

1. Why does my HOA get all upset about people posting signs in their yards advertising work being done (well, the company doing the work...like house painting or roofing) but allow a gajillion political signs that are even uglier? Personally, I'd far rather get information like recommendations of companies that people around me like...

2. PSA...beware the acorns when running. ;) Love crunching through fallen leaves on my morning runs but realized this morning that I need to be careful not to slip on the acorns.

3. I bought butterfly bandaids for the first time ever yesterday. Yes, they were for Asher. ;) Fortunately, I ended up not needing them. The boy managed to slice his forehead while working on a demo team routine at karate...a routine using kamas. He's healing fine. Honestly, I'm amazed it took this long before he had a karate-induced injury, lol. 

4. Apparently the tooth fairy doesn't give out his name to just anyone:

Yeah. Micah lost another tooth yesterday (and only hyperventilated a little bit before deciding he needed to keep a wad of paper towels in his mouth (unnecessarily) for an hour or so and refusing to eat, lol) and left this note. He was super bummed this morning...but not enough to work on pulling the other loose tooth he has so that he can ask again... ;)

Okay, need to go get some other stuff done now before the boys' JOAD practice tonight...

Progress report

So. Lots on my mind lately and most of it's had to do with tweaking our homeschooling "plan" around here. Rather than go into long(er), convoluted tangents about the conversations that have been playing out in my head, let me just summarize where we're at...(please feel free to not read this...it's kinda boring :) ...but I know some homeschoolers, like myself, revel in reading about other people's plans, lol, and it also serves as a nice record for me)...

I'll start with math & science.

MATH: We finally started Teaching Textbooks last week. (We'd had some technical and scheduling difficulties in September, lol.) From a purely academic standpoint, it seems to be going fine and the boys definitely prefer doing their math on the computer. (And, so far, the levels we've got seem appropriate. Noah's in pre-algebra and Asher and Micah are both in math 6.)

In the "it really shouldn't have surprised anyone but it still caught me off guard" category, wow, my boys are perfectionists. Don't get me wrong. I knew this. Some would say I had it coming. ;) But, before now, in math, I didn't mark things wrong or give boys percentages...we just worked out the problems together until they were right. (This, btw, took a lot of time and is a good part of why we switched to Teaching Textbooks.) Anyhow, newsflash...certain youngest boys who miss say 4 out of 80 have the capacity to get really, really mad. Awesome. So. We've been working on our reactions...as in, it's all fine and dandy to want to do well (in fact, please do), but throwing a tantrum like a two year old because you're mad at the computer is not acceptable.

SCIENCE: Elemental Science is going pretty well. Last week, we completed a lesson about stars. To supplement, I used this book and had the boys drawing out the categories of stars on the driveway.

As you can probably tell, this was a hit. :) First, we measured out all the star categories on the driveway. (Well, *first* we actually had to make a quick trip to the Dollar Store to find sidewalk chalk since we were apparently out. Did you know that after August it becomes difficult to find sidewalk chalk in stores?)

After that, we reviewed the life cycles of different sized stars. Then, the boys decided to re-enact the death of O, B and A class stars...supernovas into either neutron stars or black holes. This was followed by the creation of white dwarfs after planetary nebula (???) for the smaller class stars like our own sun. (Don't worry. Even though I don't know what I'm talking about, the boys seemed to totally get it and took turns trying to explain it to me, lol.) 

And here's spelling:

SPELLING: We're still quite happy with All About Spelling but have changed our procedure up slightly for October...such that now all three boys each have three lists--one new one and two review lists. (Before, Micah had one list, Asher had that list plus one, and Noah had both of his brothers' lists plus a new one.) Also. I'm ditching the pretest thing because it just made boys grumpy and competitive and annoying to be around. ;) The idea, initially, had been to show how much they already knew and provide a way for them to see their progress by week's end. It didn't work that way at all. It just made them mad. See the above bit about perfectionism. Yeah.

So the new plan...having put a lot of thought into the purpose of teaching spelling in the first place...is to give them a printout of their lists at the start of the week, assign them to use those words in written sentences, dictate sentences to be written out (using words from their lists and review words) and then give them a week-end test. The key difference, though, is that I'm no longer collecting the work and correcting mistakes right away. I'm giving them the opportunity to go look up the words and make any changes they want before turning work in. I'm hoping for three outcomes...1) they'll learn the value of double checking their work before turning it in; 2) they'll actually learn the spelling of the words better; and, 3) they'll stop having fits when they get a word wrong. Thoughts? 

Continuing on with history & geography:

HISTORY: Both world and US history are going just fine and we're sticking with the original plan. All good.

GEOGRAPHY: We continue to use Expedition Earth for world geography and are still pretty happy with that. We recently finished up North America and have just two to go. For US geography, I'm tackling postal abbreviations with help from this fabulous freebie right now. We'll see how long that takes before we move on. ;)

And language arts:

GRAMMAR: Yeah, we keep changing things up here. We've decided that Michael Clay Thompson's program, though lovely, isn't working for us. Instead, I've been patching together my own stuff...focusing primarily on the basics for this year...parts of speech and sentence diagramming. Each week, I've been putting together worksheets and working through them with boys. It seems to be going okay for now.

WRITING: I decided that I wanted something a bit more structured. So. Each boy now has his own level of Winning With Writing that we've just started working through. (I've got levels 3, 4 and 5.) It's all a bit more workbook-y than I'd really like, but it's enabling me to have boys at different levels and working independently for the most part, while covering more than I was managing when I had them all working together.

READING: We're in our second month now of me assigning each boy a book and a guided book report (for example, last month focused on the main character, this month focuses on plot). It's going surprisingly well...boys are even making better use of their time to read (at karate and swim team and during lunch at LEAP). :)

So. Not a huge number of changes, eh? But. It's been a *lot* of contemplation lately. The biggest thing has been that I decided to start giving boys grades. (To date, we've not done grades...just worked things through together.)

This decision stems mostly from Noah. Now that he's technically a middle schooler, he'll be getting letter grades (rather than pass/fail) from LEAP...a first for him. Further, I'm needing some form of motivation, particularly for Noah. I need a way to encourage him to complete his independent work in a more timely fashion and with less nagging from me. (Honestly, the other two don't have this issue but I figure it won't hurt them to get them familiar with a grading system now and might help show them their progress.)

So. My grading system focuses largely on turning assignments in ON TIME and FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS. :) (I'm really working on work ethic, time management and "how to find the answers on your own" sorts of stuff lately...I feel it's more important that they have a strong foundation in those than that they know their parts of speech off the top of their heads, know what I mean?) And, I'm not grading all subjects...we're starting out with just math and language arts (but not spelling because that was just a whole can of worms, lol). I won't bore you with my table and system (yes, I got really specific...I have specific-minded boys, lol...if you're really interested, you can email me). So, we'll see how this all goes... :)