Did I skip the whole month of November?  Why yes, yes I did.

Anna and I did quite a bit of school stuff throughout November but I feel like I’ve been pretty busy and this blog, unfortunately, always gets put on the back-burner.  (Is “back-burner” two words?  One word? Hyphenated?  I have no clue.)  We started a new curriculum called Moving Beyond the Page and so far we are both LOVING it.  It covers everything except math and phonics, though it does include some activities that are more math centered.  I love this because I was having the hardest time coming up with science and social studies work so this is great.

Our first unit has been learning about animal habitats and our environment and Anna has seemed to enjoy it so far.  One of the books that is part of this unit is called Animal Habitats by Judy Press.

This is an awesome book.  There’s a couple of pages that talk about 6 or 7 different habitats and then TONS of art projects that you can do.  Anna and I made a little prairie dog that pops up out of a cup.  It’s super cute.  (I’ll add a photo later..)  We actually borrowed this book from the library but I think I may end up buying it since there are so many different activities to do.

The next thing that we have planned to do, which will probably have to wait until after Christmas at this point, is to go on a field trip to visit a habitat.  We’ll probably go to the park to visit a “forest” or woodland habitat.  She has my old little digital camera that she’s been playing with so I’ll probably have her take a bunch of photos of things she finds in the habitat and then we’ll make a collage of some sort.

So anyway, I love this curriculum.  We already have a math curriculum, RightStart Math, and that’s been working really well and I think I’m going to purchase a separate phonics curriculum soon as well.  I think I function better, at least at this point, with a set curriculum that guides me through it all.  Maybe at some point I can go back to picking and choosing different activities/work for each week, but it’s nice to not have to sit and scour the web for ideas like I was before.

I do have some things to blog which I’ll try to do at some point.  My mom is coming in town tomorrow so it’s likely to be a little busy around here until after Christmas.

Might as well end with a photo of Anna.  We baked Gingerbread cookies a week or so ago.  Anna loved helping (and licking the spoon)!

Here’s Anna’s letter to Santa.  I think she did a great job!  She did most of it by herself though we did have a short lesson on commas so I had her put those in.  Even though some of the words are spelled wrong I’m pretty proud that she was able to spell most of them right.  Dan and I were both really good at spelling growing up and I think Anna is going to be as well.  It amazes me that she’ll remember words that don’t necessarily have the most common spellings, like “have” and “year.”  I’m very proud of her!  Her handwriting is looking really good too.  It was only maybe 3-4 months ago when she had trouble with any letter that involved drawing a circle.  Now they’re looking great!

(click for a slightly larger version)

Our theme this week is APPLES!  You know, since it’s fall and apple harvest time is sometime around this time of year, and we live in one of the biggest apple producing states in the country…  This is actually the first week that I’ve selected a specific theme and have stuck with it.  Usually I end up finding one or two things for her to do that are related to the theme and that’s it.   …and it’s only Tuesday!  Go me!

We started off our apple theme week learning about Johnny Appleseed.  I found a little bio of Johnny (his real name was John Chapman) online that was age appropriate and read that to Anna.  I then let her watch the Disney movie about Johnny Appleseed on YouTube (part 1 here and part 2 here…it’s a really short movie).  It’s one of Disney’s older movies, but Anna loved it.  I found her a coloring sheet online and let her color that at the end of our school “day”.  We typically only do school stuff for a couple of hours, if that.  Yesterday afternoon we went to the library and found a great early reader edition of Johnny Appleseed by, Eric Blair.  Anna was able to read pretty  much all of it by herself, there were just a few words she needed help with.

We also grabbed a bunch of other Fall and Halloween related books while we were there.  Our library has a section with theme bags where you can select a bag of a certain theme and there are 4-6 books in the bag all related to the theme.  They just happened to have an “Apples” theme bag so I grabbed that and am excited to read her some of the apple related books in it.

I also found the following little poem online somewhere that we’re going to do every day.  You can do hand motions with it to make it even more fun.  We’ve recited this poem a couple of times today and yesterday and Anna already has it memorized.  Amazing how quickly they learn things at this age!

Two Little Apples

Way up high in the apple tree
Two red apples winked at me
I shook that tree as hard as I could
Down came the apples
Mmmmm…. Were they good!

Here’s a page that I put together with the poem and a couple of cute little apples on the top.  I’m going to save it in her binder with this years’ work.

Today, we talked about Johnny Appleseed a bit more and re-read the book.  I also taught her the Johnny Appleseed song which she remembered hearing in the movie.  I remember singing it when I was little.

Next I pulled out the three apples that she picked out at the store the last time we went shopping.  Since WA is such a huge producer of apples the grocery stores have lots of different varieties of them in the produce section.  The three that she picked were Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp.  I sliced one in half horizontally so that she could see the “star” of seeds in the middle, though she thought it looked more like a flower than a star.  We talked about the different parts of the apple and I had her color and label an apple (here’s the download I found for this):

While she was working on that, I cut up the three apples and put all but one slice of each in a big ziplock baggie.  I had her taste each apple and we talked about whether it was sweet or sour.  She thought the Granny Smith was really sour but that the other two were sweet, with the Red Delicious being the most sweet of the two.

I then grabbed the bag of apple pieces and had her shake some cinnamon in it.  We zipped the bag closed and she shook it up really good.

Then we had a snack.  They were REALLY good.  Well, I thought the Granny Smith ones didn’t taste as great as the other two varieties but Anna really liked the cinnamon apples.  What an easy snack!  We’ll definitely make this again.

While I was cutting up the apples I set aside half of the Granny Smith and half of the Red Delicious for Anna to stamp paint onto paper with.  She stamped green and red circles..

…and then painted stems on top:

She painted apples using apples!

I think they turned out pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.  I’ll have her stamp the word “Apples” with her rubber alphabet stamps once the picture dries.

Tomorrow, we’ll sing the Johnny Appleseed song again and do our “Two Little Apples” poem again.  We’ll also read a book called I Am an Apple by, Jean Marzollo.  It’s another early reader book from the library and talks about the life cycle of an apple tree.  After we do that I’ll have Anna color these apple tree sequencing cards and then see if she can put them in order.  We’ll also attempt this fingerprint apple tree and see how messy Anna can get.  (Click on the photo to go to the webpage that has instructions.)

It’s been a very applicious week so far.  We don’t usually get apples from the store for whatever reason (I think there are other fruits we usually prefer), but I think we might buy them more often in the future!

Yesterday Anna and I took a bike ride around the neighborhood and collected fall leaves in a variety of colors.  She loved hopping off of her bike and finding pretty leaves to add to the big ziplock baggie I brought along.  When we got home we dumped them all out on the table, so naturally I had to snap a few photos.

I then showed Anna how to place a leaf under a sheet of paper and use the side of a crayon to make a leaf rubbing.  She thought it was pretty cool, but I think I actually enjoyed making them more than she did.  I’m a nerd like that.

Here are a few of the leaf rubbings we made:

Anna and her leaf rubbing.  She was so proud of herself.

Today, I had her pick three of her favorite leaves and we looked at them a little closer to see the veins and other intricate details.  I had her describe the leaves to me and had to help a little bit with prompts of “how big? what color? how many ‘points?’” at times but she got better at the descriptions by the third leaf.

Next, I had her fill out three worksheets about her leaves.  She was able to do leaf rubbings on two of them, but the yellow leaf was too big so she attempted to draw it.  Click on the last two pictures for bigger versions.

This was a pretty successful science lesson all in all.  She loved looking through the magnifying glass and learned how to better describe an item.

After this we took 5 or 6 leaves and put them between pieces of wax paper inside a big book.  We’ll let them sit there for a week or so and see if we can preserve them.  The rest of the leaves got tossed in the trash.

If you’re interested in the “All About My Leaf” worksheet, click here to download a copy.  I saw a similar one online somewhere but it was just a photo of one, not an actual usable copy so I recreated it.

I can’t believe I have a 5 year old!  Anna had her birthday party yesterday, which was a blast, and today is her actual birthday.  It’s hard to believe my little girl is 5 years old now.  Makes me a little sad.  Here’s a photo from yesterday before her party (it was Rainbow Brite themed).  More photos and a longer post coming soon.

We have family scattered all over the country, so Anna often asks what state so-and-so lives in.  I decided a month or so ago to slowly introduce her to the states and try to give her the basic facts about each one.  I’m sure she won’t retain a lot of it, but she’s enjoying the activities that we’ve done so far for the two states we’ve done.  Prior to starting, I emailed family asking them to send postcards for any state they go to, and to try to find one that has the state name on the front of it.  We already have a bunch of postcards that we’ve received (mostly thanks to my parents who travel a lot) that are ready to go when we do future states.

I created a binder, as you can see in the photo above and just put a simple map of the U.S. in the front of it.  Each time we start a new state I’ll let Anna color that state in.  You can see that so far we’ve done Tennessee (where Grandma lives!) and New York (where Auntie Em, my sister, lives!).  I didn’t get a photo, but we also locate the states on our globe so that she can see the scale of the states compared to the rest of the world.  She’s actually pretty good at remembering locations on maps or globes and knows the locations of several of the states already.

Inside the binder, we started with Tennessee.  Here’s our cover page with the postcard that Grandma sent of the TN Aquarium, a place that Anna LOVES.

She did several coloring sheets over the course of a few days.  The first one is just of the state and also shows the capital city in there somewhere.  We go over the capital a few times in hopes that it maybe gets stored in the back of her brain for a few years from now.  :)

The first of these next two I found on Crayola’s website.  They have one for each state that shows the state flag, and then a couple of other pictures of the state bird, state flower, state butterfly, state motto, or a variety other things.  I love these.  There are also flash cards that you can print at the bottom of that linked page.  I might print those out later down the road.  The second page is just another that shows Tennessee’s state flower (Iris) and bird (Mockingbird).

We also did a little lesson on Davy Crockett who hails from Tennessee.

Anna’s next state of choice was New York, since her Auntie Em lives there.  We received two postcards from New York so she glued those down and wrote “New York” on the cover page.

Here’s our state coloring page, and you can see that Anna likes things very colorful.  She couldn’t just color the state in a single color…and then when she was done she decided to continue and decorate the rest of the page…

Here are her other three coloring pages.  The first one from that Crayola site happens to show the state fossil (a Sea Scorpion).  Did you know states have a designated state fossil?  No?  Neither did I.  And I bet you’ve never seen a fossil as colorful as this one!

And then another of the state flower (Rose) and state bird (Bluebird).  In case you can’t read it, these tell you the colors to color each part of the flower and bird.  She actually read the colors and followed directions, which doesn’t always happen.  She is 4 (almost 5!) after all.  :)

Along with the coloring sheets, I want to sometimes cook something specific to each state and find some books at the library that have to do with the state.  As we go through I’m sure we’ll end up finding other fun activities (other than just coloring pages) to do with them.  When we’re finished we should have a big binder that she’ll be able to look back through, which I think will be pretty cool.

To finish off this blog post, here’s a tissue paper rainbow she made today, which has absolutely nothing to do with this post about learning the states, but it turned out looking pretty good.

Even though Anna knows her colors and a couple of the color mixes, I thought it would be fun to have her do a little “experiment” so she can see exactly what happens when we combine two colors. When I first set up the glasses and mixed the food coloring into the water she was pretty excited and very intrigued. She wasn’t quite sure what we were going to do.

I gave her a piece of paper with 6 circles on it and labeled the paper “Color Wheel.”  I had her color in the first three circles to match the colors in the glasses and then attempted to explain about primary colors and how those three colors are used to create every other color out there (except for the grayscale colors).

Then we mixed the first two colors of her choice, BLUE:

…and YELLOW:

Seriously, the look on her face was awesome.  She was completely amazed that these two colors mixed together would turn green like that.  It was like magic to her.

After that I had her color in green on her color wheel between her yellow and blue circles.  The next colors she chose to mix were red and yellow.  These didn’t work so great because I think the red was a little overpowering.  It was just light enough though that Anna saw that they created orange (which is one she already knew).

Orange was colored in on the color wheel.

She then mixed the last two colors: red and blue…

…and she promptly stated, “Look Mommy! Red and blue make black!”  Hmm..  It was a little dark.   I think my blue was too blue maybe?  I’m not sure.  I held it up to the light and she said, “Oh. It’s dark purple!” So those two colors didn’t work so great either.  I’m glad we started with the green though since that one turned out perfect.

She then finished her color wheel and VOILA! She now knows the primary colors and the three colors they make when combined.

We then completed our colorful day and made some big crayons in a mini-muffin pan using bits and pieces of old crayons:

Overall, great lesson, she really enjoyed it and she now has some new big crayons to color with.  It was a very colorful, rainbow-like day..which is gearing us up for her upcoming “Rainbow Brite” themed birthday party in a week and a half.

About three years ago in my first or second semester of school I had to write a big argumentative research paper and got to choose from a list of topics. I had to pick a topic, choose a side, research, research, research, and do this big paper plus a video presentation. It was a little daunting since I HATE to write (which I’m sure you can tell by how often I actually post on here…) so I decided to go with what I thought was the easiest topic: “Homeschooling.” I chose to write AGAINST homeschooling because I thought it would be so easy to use the socialization angle to talk about why homeschooling is a really bad idea.

So I researched and researched and read many, many articles for and against homeschooling. And then something strange started happening. I began to think that maybe homeschooling wasn’t such a bad idea. The more I researched, the less information I could find that would support my stance. I was finding more reasons that homeschool is a good thing, a GREAT thing, and just couldn’t find much to support my own argument…and what I did find didn’t seem good enough, or wasn’t supported enough. So, I changed my stance and started over and did a pro-homeschool research project.

That project really opened my eyes to the world of homeschooling. I’d never really thought too much about it other than the most common arguments you hear out there: How can you properly socialize your child if they’re not in school? Won’t they turn out weird? What if you completely screw your kid up? How can you teach them everything they need to know? Those were pretty much my arguments against homeschooling going into that project. After completing the project I had a new found respect for parents who homeschool. Even though Anna was only around two at the time and we weren’t even thinking about school of any sort, homeschooling her became a very small blip on my radar.

Over the past 2-3 years I’ve read a lot, A LOT, about homeschooling in books, on the internet, in magazines… It seems to have started becoming more mainstream. A lot of families are homeschooling these days for various reasons. There is such a huge wealth of information out there, especially on the internet, about homeschooling. I read several homeschooling blogs on a regular basis and have learned so, so much. Dan and I decided a year or so ago that homeschooling might be a good option for Anna. I’m almost finished with school to actually be a teacher so I feel more than qualified. I stay at home with her so I have the time. And she’s a smart cookie. I want her to excel and I fear that she’d be bored in a regular classroom.

We decided to start a trial run at the beginning of August to see how well I’d be able to work with Anna on a regular basis. Anna isn’t eligible to start Kindergarten in public school until NEXT fall since she has an early fall birthday (WA’s cutoff is August 31st), but she’s been reading for almost a year now, can do very basic math, count well past 100, etc…so who knows where she’ll be in a year. She’s going to be way ahead of a lot of her peers in a regular Kindergarten classroom. So we’ve been trying the homeschool thing and I’ve been fairly consistent, getting in about 3-4 days a weeks for at least an hour or two of some kind of school “work”. Really, I’m trying to keep it fun right now so a lot of her “work” seems like play to her, which is what she needs.

Just in the past couple of weeks Dan and I decided that homeschooling is definitely the path we want to take. Anna’s doing great with it and I’m amazed how much I’ve taught her just in the past month and a half. She’s enjoying it, and so am I. I’m still trying to get into some kind of groove with it, but from what I’ve read it could take awhile. So, we pulled Anna out of her preschool class and enrolled her in the homeschool P.E. group at the YMCA, which starts next week.

Why did we pull her out of preschool? It just didn’t seem necessary and we’d like to save that money. Really the only reason she would attend would be for the socialization aspect but she can get that elsewhere and gets plenty of it.

How will we ensure that she’s fully socialized? If you’ve met my daughter you know she’s pretty much a social butterfly. She’s never been clingy and is always trying to make friends. She goes to gymnastics twice a week and will do the homeschool group at the YMCA twice a week. She also sees our friends kids on a really regular basis. I am not worried in the least about her socialization. Not. In. The. Least.

Do I have a problem with public school? Not really. I just think at this point it’s not for us. I realize things could change in a year, but if Anna were in a public school right now I don’t think she’d do all that great. I think she’d be completely bored and then would probably act up and not pay attention. Also, I’d like to protect her and keep her as innocent as possible for as long as possible. Schools aren’t like they were when we were kids. Some of the things you hear about happening are scary. I don’t want to keep her in a bubble forever, but maybe for a few more years. :)

So that’s the new path we’re on. Homeschooling. I’ll try to blog about it and am going to attempt to update this thing more often with our homeschool activities and projects we’re working on.

Sorry this was long…when I get going it’s hard to stop typing sometimes.

I took a bunch of video the other day of Anna practicing gymnastics at home.  I was testing out the HD video on my new, AWESOME Droid X.  I think it did a pretty good job.  This is the quality AFTER I converted from 3gp (the file type of the video on my phone) to mpg and then ran it through my video software to put it all together.  Not bad, eh?

Our garden is finally producing!  We’ve been getting strawberries for awhile, picked our first few cherry tomatoes a week or so ago and I just picked the first squash today!  Hopefully it’ll taste ok.

I took a bunch of photos at the end of July but I never updated here so I’ll show where the garden was then and then show how it’s grown SO MUCH in the last month.  It wasn’t really growing much into the beginning of July, but then I went on vacation for 2 weeks, came back and it had grown exponentially.  I guess maybe that means I really don’t have a green thumb…since it grew so much while I was gone..  Anyway, here’s how the garden looked on July 30th.  The cherry tomato plant is on the left, the larger tomato plant is next to it, there’s pumpkin and strawberry plants behind those.  The tall thing in the back right corner is supposedly a raspberry plant, but I’m not too sure…and then in front of that are two squash plants.

Here’s how the garden looks today (with much better lighting), almost a month later:

See how much it’s grown?  Crazy.  The big one in the middle is the large tomato plant (can’t remember the name of those tomatoes..  “Big 100″ or something??).  To the left of that is the cherry tomatoes.  The squash plants on the right are huge.  My raspberry plant is crazy.  It grew straight up taller than the 6′ fence and then it started bending over.  I think if I straightened it out it would be about 9′ tall.  I couldn’t get a full picture of it, but my pumpkin plant is INSANE.  You can see one end of it sticking out in front of the squash plant.  I planted it right behind the cherry tomato plant.  It is now going in 4 different directions and is in the shape of an X.  Each of the 4 directions is about 10-15′ long.  It’s taking over my garden.  I may have to trim it back.  A lot.

I didn’t really get any of the full tomato or squash plants today but here’s some of the produce from those.

This is our first squash that we picked!  I’m going to cook it up tonight and see how it tastes.

A couple more of baby squash (click for larger image):

Tomatoes from the big tomato plant (click for bigger):

Cherry Tomatoes (click for bigger):

A few strawberries we picked.  They are SO YUMMY.

Here’s part of the pumpkin plant.  Hopefully we’ll get a pumpkin before Halloween..

Last but not least…the crazy raspberry plant.  My dad thinks it’s not a raspberry plant.  I’m thinking maybe not either.  I believe he has one and it’s more like a bush.  This one just keeps growing up and up and UP.  Here it was on July 30th:

…and here it is today.  Unfortunately I just took a pic of the top of it, but you can see that it started sprouting things from the side and is bent over at the top.

So there you go.  Our garden is growing!  It’s so exciting to be able to pick the produce and eat it.  I think we’ll do a lot more next year now that I know we can actually grow stuff.