old units and new activities

At last, the human body unit we have been working on forever is drawing to a close. This is our last week on this unit, and our book of the week is The Ear Book by Dr. Seuss. We are not 100% sure what we will work on next, because semester breaks create a strange schedule for our family. Since we have already covered so much information about dinosaurs this year, we are considering doing a brief dinosaur unit.

I am excited that I am also going to start doing some new lessons. This year we have divided up labor just about 50/50. I have researched and written lesson plans, and coordinate the series we've participated in and planned field trips. Ethan has done ALL of the sit down, day to day lessons. It has been a bit hard to fit everything in, so I am going to start helping out a bit by doing some reading with Esme at night. At least three days a week she will read to me from her Brand New Readers sets, and I will read chapter books to her. We are hoping this will free up some time during the regular lessons, so that Ethan will be able to focus more on activities around Book of the Week, spelling, grammar, etc., but Esme will still get the extra reading practice that she needs.

It is hard to believe that we are almost to the end of our second year of homeschooling!!

Recent Lessons.....

This weeks book of the week is by the famous Stan and Jan Berenstain! We are so excited that Esme is reading on her own! We have also started using the Early Readers sets by Candlewick in addition to the Bob Books. Esme is learning about different types of words, and has a very good handle on nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Esme is about to start graphing in Math, and then onto some more serious addition and subtraction activities. We're almost done studying the Human Body and pretty sure that she's going to want to do an Earth Science unit next. She is very interested in all things Science!

Meeting Mo Willems!

The big day finally came that Esme got to meet Mo Willems! He is the author of some of our favorite books, including Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, and the Elephant and Piggy books. He read two books aloud and then signed the children's copies. Esme had received a gift certificate to the bookstore for her birthday, so with our hefty discount she was able to to get 4 Elephant and Piggy books!

Traumatized

Esme is so intrigued by dinosaurs, we've been taking her all kinds of different places to learn about them, reading about them, etc. We were super excited that the Springfield Science Museum was having a special animatronic dinosaur exhibit, and as soon as we could go, took her down there. I think she could have handled the roaring. I think she could have handled when the T-Rex looked right at her and bared its teeth. But what she couldn't handle was the bloody prey dead at it's feet. Poor Esme! She knew that some dinosaurs eat plants and some eat meat, and she knew that eating meat meant they eat other dinosaurs, but the bleeding Triceratops was just too much for her and she burst into tears. We tried to move along and she was quite taken with a planteater for a while, and dug out some fossils with a brush while wearing goggles, but when the Velociraptors were devouring another planteater, we had to go. All she talked about the whole rest of the day was how she liked the planteater, but didn't like the meateaters. She had nightmares about dinosaurs that night - wake up sobbing nightmares. The next day she started recreating the scenes with her toy dinosaurs, trying to work through what she'd seen. She wanted me to tell Auntie Lisa about it. She still talked about it over and over, and was afraid to go to sleep again. By the next night she was more cheerful though, and said, "I don't have to think about the meateaters now, I can think about something else while I go to sleep." On Thursday she went out with Nana Carol and could recount the whole thing for her without being retraumatized, so I think she is doing okay now.

Tests and More

Esme has officially started taking tests in both Math and Spelling. She's done taken three Spelling Tests and gotten every word right, and taken two Math tests and gotten about 90% on each. We're very proud!

Esme has been enjoying her human body unit. We got a cow femur from a local butcher and they sliced it the long way for us so that she could observe the inside. A few days ago she ran into the kitchen and announced, "Parts of your body need oxygen blah blah blah!," and ran back out.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Even though Dr. Seuss passed away several years ago, kids still love celebrating his birthday! Since he was born on March 2nd, next week our lessons will revolve around a tribute to him. Our book of the week will be The Cat in the Hat.

Video

This is a pretty good video about some of the myths of homeschooling - trust me, I've gotten almost all these comments, many from complete strangers. I try to not to be bitter about it, but it can be frustrating. I believe this was made by some homeschooled children for their mom.