A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

What we Learned Today

Back to Homeschooling

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“but mommy! I want to play in the snow first! Do we have to homeschool first???”
Me: Yes.
“BUT I DON”T WANT TO!”

So.. we talked and worked things out. I told him how we’re doing things different this year. That mommy is writing out a schedule of what we are doing and we’ll work from the list. When the list is done.. homeschool is done for the day.

We read from our world history book and story book over breakfast

10 minute stories

He liked the story at breakfast and thought it funny how the dad didn’t get what he wanted because the fish helped the girl.

World History

Over the holidays we got into the history of vikings. He’s really enjoying learning about them.

and then I fascinated him with this.

Always good to intrigue a child. 🙂 Found using homeschool freebie of the day.

Then off to do reflex math. I like how they emphasize speed in proficiency and they have excellent customer service. The lad is finding it difficult to maintain the required focus though and there are times when I want to make it easier for him, but that’s just the mommy rescuer part of me. He got up to 8620 feet today…not a bad score. he quit because bathroom breaks were required. 🙂 He got back into it and did better this time round. He did a variety of games and its good to see how he is improving in his math skills. 🙂 He likes ninja stars, balloon race and the egyptian conniption.

We were going to do some exercises from the super science book but we reworked those plans. One lad was PROFOUNDLY disappointed at the thought of doing science and art together. he wanted to do some hands on science. So I wracked my brain trying to figure something out that we’ve studied recently and came up on gems digging kit I got a while back. So we dug up gems. There were supposed to be 8 in the kit.. we got about 13 stones/gems all told. We talked about gems and how they are made, but mostly we dug stones up and had a good time talking and working together.



Sight words: yes, you, are, please. it was quite pleasing to me to see him sounding out the word please. He studied it and worked it out. he did the same for “are”. Very neat!

We did lesson seven out of First Language Lessons, Levels 1&2

We learned about common nouns and proper nouns. 🙂

Word of the day “abandon”. Sentence he came up with “the jail in fable was abandoned once the guards are beaten.”

We did listening skills Pg 3. he had to pay close attention to where each of the drivers had to go to get the answers correct.

The Complete book of Numbers and Counting, pp 164-165.

A dot to dot 1-50 and learning the place values of 50-59. Once he figured out the code for doing place values he said “mommy, this is easy!”.

Our animal of the day was the ermine.
in case you want to know about the picture. Ermines eat insects in some areas of the world. The lad “This brown ermine is hunting in the summer time. He is sneaking up on a centipede who is going home to his family. Then the ermine will gobble all of them up.”

I asked him if he liked working from a list.
the answer was a resounding YES! So a list we’ll continue to do. 🙂

This week

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Has gone somewhat differently than expected BUT… we’ve done some good homeschooling.

Each day we read from

10 minute stories

World History

And we’ve added some new routines.

Scripture memory. This week John 14:6

And we read from First Language Lessons, Levels 1&2

though this cover looks different than mine. 🙂 It’s been good to add a bit more routine.

We continue to work on phonics by going through the alphabet.

We also do Studyladder at least twice a week…Did I tell you that I won a year’s subscription to it courtesy of The Old Schoolhouse.. they were doing giveaways during their birthday bash and I lucked out! 🙂 Pretty cool eh? Today the lad did some art, math, English, and some French. (he was totally unimpressed doing the French).

And the lad continues to thoroughly enjoy doing ReflexMath.

Otherwise what have we filled our time with?

Monday is Gymnastics.

Tuesdays the lad goes swimming with our HOPE group. It’s a lot of fun. We do stuff in the morning at home, mostly just our standard fair, plus reflexmath and chores.

On Wednesday he does book work with his dad since I attend bible study Wednesday mornings. This week he did Three pages in each book.

My heavenly Helper

The Complete book of Numbers and Counting

Complete Canadian Curriculum 1

My Book of Numbers 1-120.

When I got home I said Come on buddy, let’s get out of the house (it was such a lovely day) so we headed off to the dam to collect leaves and do some tree rubbings. We used chalk and hair spray to stabilize the chalk. Collected samples and once we did five trees we went bug hunting. When you are six.. bug hunting is important. We brought home one spider, one black bug, and one leaf with a nest on it. We talked about birch trees and how the wood was once used for writing on.

Then off to the dentist where we received the news that due to some odd fluke one of the lad’s teeth had no roots to it, which led to a lad going back to the dentist today to get that tooth removed and infection out. The lad was super scared but the dentist was marvellous with him and talked him through everything. So today we mostly played lego this afternoon and watched a video on rehabilitating orangutangs. It was quite interesting.

Anyways, we needed to do some problem solving for Wednesday night as I needed to be out of town, hubby had a meeting and the lad had kid’s club which he definitively did NOT want to miss. We managed to find an acquaintance that he would accept picking him up and taking him to his dad’s meeting and then I picked him up at the meeting when I got back. Meant a late night for one six year old but everything worked out well for all concerned.

We’ve read books, listened to books, talked and laughed and kept busy. Thus far a good week.

Tomorrow is Friday and we are shopping in the a.m. with family, having lunch out, and then heading to the London Children’s Museum for the afternoon.

What We Learned Today: Head of the Class

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today we did a couple of things.

We continued reading through

We did a fair amount of work on the letter ‘a’ through head of the class. Filling in the missing A, sounding out words, picture matching and what not. I really like that they use a variety of methods to teach the same concept.

We did a bit more research on the house centipede. 🙂

We talked about the difference between living and non-living things using as a basic talking guide the simple schooling e-book Living & Non-Living.

We continued our transportation theme by learning about air pressure and resistance, using a craft from Transportation Thematic Units (Enhanced eBook). We experimented a bit with adding a paper clip to see if that would make a difference in how the helicopter worked.

Both the simple schooling and transportation unit are available from Currclick. One of them currently is free.

Tuesday… hard days

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So today I had a, what seemed to me, harsh reminder of why Tuesdays should NOT be book work days… the lad is too unfocused and too easily upset as is his mommy. SO no more book work on Tuesdays except maybe a tiny bit.

Instead we will read.
We will draw.
We will do science.
We will simply relax, play a bit, and work a bit, and just let Tuesdays be the quiet relaxing days that we need them to be.

Today we had a mental break-down over the alphabet and doing numbers up to 30. Quite frankly alphabets and counting should NOT be reasons to have harsh words between parent and child on either side. it simply isn’t, ergo my change of focus for Tuesday.

On a positive note… he did really well figuring out the sounds of letters of the alphabet and I started introducing the concept of hard/soft sounds. AND of the 26 alphabet letters….he recognized all but one of them (the dreaded letter K). I was simply thrilled by this and the lad smiled as well. 🙂

We had fun lying back on my bed and reading a poem. It was actually quite funny. We read one poem, and then read another and we looked at each other at the exact same time and smiled… That would make a fun picture we said. So we drew a picture of it. It was interesting how different they turned out from each other. The poem comes of the old Childcraft series. The link is for the 1995 series, but ours is the older one yet.. 1977 I think?

We started reading through a world history book (we will do two pages most every day) and another book with 10 minute stories.

We finished the first book of the people of christian history book tonight at bed time. The lad has enjoyed learning about these people who really lived. It’s been interesting learning some of the Christian history behind us.

Starting to school properly this week :)

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This morning we played an alphabet game and we went through, do you recognize this letter? He got all but 5 of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Not sure why he struggles with G, K, W, D, and N. but he does. He struggled with them last year as well.

For the alphabet we used the flashcards we had on had (though he’s a bit beyond blue’s clues we had them so we used them).

I just took random cards and asked him what they were and if he didn’t get them just put them in a separate pile. then I took those eight cards and lay them out and got “OH.. that’s “E” and we were left with these five that “I just don’t have a clue mommy, I can’t remember that one, My brain is all confused mommy.” I said “that’s okay buddy, just means we get to practice more.”. 🙂

Then I had him put the cards in alphabetic order and he did pretty good with that with having to use our alphabet chart on the back of the door a bit. In time he won’t be able to use the “cheat sheet”. 🙂 but for now, with a boy still recovering from an ear ache, I’ll go with what I got.

We also did three pages in one workbook, and two pages in another one. Mostly we worked on math type sheets.
The complete book of numbers and counting

My heavenly Helper

Kumon, my Book of numbers 1-120

We played battle for 15 minutes. Then the lad gathered up random dishes so they could be washed, I planted some things out in the garden (parsley and radish) and then folded a load of laundry.

Then off to town for the afternoon/evening. The lad enjoyed spending time with gramma and going to gymnastics.

Today’s Efforts

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Started reading magic tree house the rain forest. the lad is enjoying this book though he thought we’d start reading a hardy boy book.

Played Farm Sounds. I have a cd with bingo type cards produced by myactivemind, which is a company that seems to no longer be in service. We got it at the dollar store. The lad had fun playing it though we had to have the sound turned up as his ears aren’t working the best right now.

did some work in books as well.
kumon counting – so nice to see him better than where we left off in the fall. 🙂

Jesus heavenly friend – needed a bit of help with the alphabet dot to dot, could say it, but couldn’t remember what some of the letters looked like

and a math skills book – did an excellent job on this.

then we played battle until my body said.. GET UP OFF THIS FLOOR! 🙂 But by then it was time for the lad to chill out for a while again. Earaches are NOT fun things to deal with.

the afternoon was taken up with canning applesauce and watching mammoths and the ice age, we also watched Astro Boy – which provoked all sorts of questions about what the future world could possibly look like. 🙂

Playing and Doing Homeschool

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Our Tuesday generally consist of play, homeschool, play, homeschool and so forth. I normally throw in doing dishes, laundry, and so forth.

We mix it up with some computer time, science time, art work etc. It’s usually a very enjoyable day.

Today we did two lessons in Reading Kingdom. Reading Kingdom uses a whole word approach, I tend to be more of phonetics person, but I see no harm in learning a different way. I figure a varied approach is not always a bad thing. There are good and bad points to each way of learning how to read. We are currently doing a trial period to see how it goes.

We then did two lessons from Head of the Class. This is their kindergarten page. One where I wanted him to do a simple exercise but had to look at the first letter in order to figure out what colour he had to do. For a younger child I would have read the word, but I wanted the lad to sound it out and then make his decision. He did fairly well. It’s called Colours. Then I was wanting to do something kinda artsy cause well.. he’s that type of child. So I saw this one called Stitch and Sew. I expected it to be the normal yarn/shoelace around a pattern…but it was actual needle and thread sewing. The boy was QUITE pleased with himself and showed off his art work to dad. “I did it myself daddy”. I helped for the first bit and around the tricky bits, and we didn’t do the heart as shown in the video..we did a cat. The lad was quite very pleased with himself, and I have to admit, I was quite pleased as well. We talked about the parts of a needle, the thread, I tied in the bible verse about the camel going through the eye of the needle and so forth.

Then we played for a while. ended up going for a walk instead of reading and then cleaning the kitchen. on our walk we met the dirties, They make you act like dirt until
someone uses a machine to make you human again.
Here is the lad being dirt.

The lad also wanted to do his make a pizza program as well. and then we watched the spy next door and played doctor at the same time with a bunch of sick stuffies. 🙂 Always an interesting day in the life here. 🙂

just before bed he had fun making leaf creations. He made all sorts of interesting creatures, learning to resize, rotate and just exercise his creative intelligence.