Boat race

Ben competed in a boat race with the cub scouts this week.  Ben and dad sanded, painted, decorated and assembled his boat.  Ben won his first race, but lost the second.  He still did a great job and his boat was awesome!

Strike a pose:

Sam didn't want to get left out!

Lunch

Ben asked if he could make lunch for him and Sam.  How could I refuse?  This is what he came up with.

Team Ben

Ben and Dad were playing a game of Uno.  Ellie chose team Ben.  I think she knows he cheats!

School

A friend of mine was checking out Prastis blog.  She's been posting about school with Emma each week.  My friend asked what I do with Ben.  I wont start posting weekly updates like Prasti does.  I think I've stole too many of her ideas already!  I wanted to give a small glimpse into our days.  
We started the school year heavy on the classical home schooling with a little bit of Charlotte Mason mixed in.  As the weeks have gone by, we've moved a little more towards Charlotte, but still have some classical education structure to our days.
3 days a week we work out of a writing handbook.  This is mostly copy work, but every now and then it has Ben plug in a few words or ideas into sentences already written out. It incorporates basic writing ideas like sentence structure and picking out the topic of a few sentences.  
2 days a week we work on grammar.  Ben is learning the difference between a sentence and a fragment, what is a question, exclamation, what are question words and descriptive words etc.
2 days a week we work out of a reading workbook.  This isn't typical reading though.  It has a lot of stories and famous paintings to help kids develop narration skills.  It also has poems to memorize and covers a lot of things Ben already knows like how to write his address, days of the week, the months, what we write upper case and what stays lower case.  Its a good review every now and then, but we don't spend too much time on things he already knows.  
2 days a week we do spelling.  This is the one subject that is pretty stress free.  Ben happens to be a great speller! While he isn't perfect, he is easily spelling words from the second grade word lists I've found on the Lakewood education website.
We do math everyday.  Right now Ben is learning the ones, tens and hundreds place values.  So far Ben has done well in math, but his lack of focus and rushing through with out reading directions cause a lot of errors and stress.
We do music everyday. We are on Beethoven right now. We spend a week or two listening to the same symphony. We listen to the music four days a week. Its on in the back ground during school and randomly through out the day.  On the 5th day, we talk about the composer and learn a few facts about his/her life.  We spend about a month on each composer.
We do science twice a week.  We just finished the human body.  Ben really enjoyed the body book we used.  We went through the major organs and learned what each does.  We talked about our teeth, tongue, skin, bones, blood and Ben asked a lot of questions about the heart. We might have a future cardiologist on our hands!  We are on animals right now.  We discuss a different animal each week, learning some basic info about each.  Ben either draws his version of them or does a coloring sheet.  I'm sure we'll end up at the zoo once or twice to check out the animals we're learning about.
We do history twice a week.  We've recently switched our history curriculum.  We had been reading Fifty Famous Stories as extra reading, but have made that, along with An Island Story our history.  After we read the story, Ben practices his oral narrations.  We also look up the locations we discussed on a map.  When we read about battles, we'll trace the path on the map, look at who is around and how far they were from America.  We also started reading about Benjamin Franklin to incorporate some American history.  Of course, Ben thinks its awesome they have the same name so I think that has helped on keeping the focus!
We do Geography once a week.  We started reading Paddle To The Sea which is about a boy in Canada who sends a home made canoe on an adventure that includes the Great Lakes.  Ben thinks its cool someone wrote a book about the lake we live near.
We do art three times a week.  Twice a week, we look at paintings by what ever artist we are studying.  We are on Michelangelo right now.  We learn a little about the artist, compare paintings and compare to other artists we've studied.  Depending on the artist, we spend 2-4 weeks on each.  On the third day, we try to do something fun.  I'm not very creative so it usually involves Ben coloring a picture or drawing his own version of something we are studying.  Pinterest has given me some ideas so I hope to get a bit more crafty on our art projects.  
Ben is also learning French.  We started learning some basic words last year.  This year we are working on starting conversations.  Ben can say things like, hi, how are you, I am fine, and you, please, thank you, the alphabet and lots of random filler words. 
Nature study.  This is new to our curriculum.  We will be doing this once a week.  We find a lot of bugs, birds etc around here so I'm going to have Ben start identifying some of them and we'll see where this takes us.
We do a lot of reading.  We have been pretty much following the Charlotte Mason reading schedule.  Ben reads a lot of poems, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Bible stories etc.  Some of it is over his head, but he's picked up some new words and more is sinking in each week.  
I think that covers it.  It sounds like a lot, but we are usually done in 1-2 hours depending on the length of stories and how interested Ben is in the subject.  That doesn't include the reading that Ben does through out the day and the extra day to day (handicrafts) we are working on.  We are working on actually making his bed, not just moving the comforter around a little bit. Ben helps with getting lunch together, putting away clothes and dishes.  He helps a lot with the babies, moving the bumbos, getting diapers or socks, refilling water bottles.  He sets the table, does some cleaning and make sure no one kills themselves or each other when I leave the room.  
Its taken a while to find our groove, but I think we're in a good groove right now and when its working, its really good.  

Hungry

All I can think of when I look at this is the line from A Christmas Story, "Hows a piggy eat?"

Ride

Ben loves his brother!

Busy day with snacks

We had a great Thanksgiving yesterday.  We relaxed, watched football, went through the black Friday adds and headed over to Aaron and Prastis for dinner.  As always the food was great! 

Last night Corrie and I headed to Target to get some deals. It opened at 9pm.  We got there around 9:30 to avoid the rush and were pleasantly surprised at how well the trip went.  It was busy, but not overwhelming.  They had plenty of inventory, plenty of sales people to answer questions and even though the check out line went the length of the store and around the corner as well as zig zagging through the beauty section, we were through it in less than 10 minutes!  I was home just over an hour after I left and I picked up/dropped off Corrie.  Not bad!  

Originally, I planned to boycott Thanksgiving shopping.  It kills me that its becoming more about stuff and less about the holiday for some people.  However, I had a decent list of things to get there, most of what I wanted was on sale, I had a (semi) willing partner in crime, I wasn't ditching my kids to go (Jon was happy to have some video game time) and while I know that change starts with one person standing their ground, in this case the public has spoken and they want Thanksgiving Day shopping.  Me missing out on saving money isn't going to keep the stores closed next Thanksgiving.  So I went and I had fun!

Ben proclaimed today a busy day with snacks.  We made some cookies--chocolate chip with M&M's for the boys and with out for Jon.  Jon made some home made Chex.  We baked a pumpkin pie to go with our dinner--Thanksgiving part 2.  We love spending the holiday with family, but we really miss the leftovers.  Its become a tradition for Jon to cook our own Thanksgiving dinner so we can have some too.  The big tradition is to put up the Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving.  Along with rearranging the living room and bringing up a bunch of boxes from the basement, we've been decorating.  Of course we have football to watch and lots of playing to do.  Its been a good kind of busy.

Little readers

I love that all three kids love to read and I love that Ben is always willing to read to them.

Body by Ben

Ben and I finished up our Science unit on the human body. We talked about some basic stuff like why our skin is lighter than Ellies. We took our pulse and listened to our hearts with my stethoscope.  We measured out the length of our small intestines and looked at our tongue and teeth. We spent most of our time on the organs.  We learned a fact or two about them and added to his basic knowledge of certain processes like what happens to food once we swallow it.  Ben really liked going through the body book we got and had fun putting the body together even though it didn't come together exactly like it looks on the inside, he got the jist!

Wordless Wednesday: Flowers

I love my hubby!

Leaves

The boys were more than happy to help dad with the leaves this weekend.  Sam was especially happy to mess up the piles after all their hard work!

180

A friend of mine started home schooling this year. She asked me for any tips I could giver her. I'm still constantly asking for advice, but I had a few tips to pass along. The biggest piece of advice I was given was don't be afraid to stop, reevaluate and do a complete 180 if necessary. It occurred to me that I wasn't following that advice. While Ben seems to be doing really well (most days) in the majority of school, he has not been doing well in history. I chose a series of books that go through history chronologically. We read a couple pages, Ben does an oral narration and answers a few questions. We do that twice a week and then Ben has an optional coloring page, map and activity. We started with the nomads and farmers and moved to early Egypt. Its not very exciting at the moment and Ben has no interest in sitting through the readings. The narrations and questions are like pulling teeth. Obviously this makes history our least favorite time of the week. After reading Prastis blog about Emmas schedule, I remembered the advice.  I've spent so much time trying to stay in reach of Ohio's standards in case Ben ends up in a traditional school, that I forgot the reasons we decided to home school in the first place.  History has not been fun.  He doesn't like it.  I don't like forcing it down his throat. So why am I still forcing it on him when we could be doing it 1,000 other ways?
I put our book aside and am trying a different approach. We have been doing a lot of "fun" reading including  Our Island Story.  I'm stealing a page from Prasti's play book and making this our history lesson.  We have already been doing a lot of the Charlotte Mason reading schedule. We are going to add on some of her history suggestions and make that our new curriculum.  The stories are shorter.  Most of them involve battles with swords and horses and a couple have even tied into some Bible stories he is familiar with. Right now, it doesn't get much better than that!  Ben also really likes maps and is enjoying looking up all the locations we are reading about and following the battle paths.  
While I don't know that this is the curriculum we will stick with for the rest of the year, Ben is finally enjoying history. For now, this is where we're staying.

Pre school party

Sam preschool class had their Halloween party today.  The kids got to dress up, do a few things they've learned for the parents and finish up with more candy!

The kids spent 5-10minutes on a little show for the parents.  About 95% of the time, Sam looked like this:

3% of the time he did this:

 The final 2% of the time was spent with his finger in his nose!  Thats my boy!

Happy Halloween

For most of the country, Halloween was October 31st. For Lakewood, it was last night. Sandy left trees and power lines in the roads, debris everywhere and half of Lakewood with no power. Cuyahoga county postponed the holiday until the weekend to give the crews more time to get the sidewalks safe.  We headed back to the Calaways and the kids ran wild.  It took all four moms to keep up with all the kids!  We finished the block in about an hour and called it a night.  The kids (and adults) dove into the candy and played some games until we headed home and crashed. With school being cancelled last week, Sam will have his Halloween party today and then we will have enough candy to last until Easter!