Aw man. I just realized I have to re-learn cursive to teach it in Grade 3.
Tag Archives: school
What We Do All Day
Well not ALL day. But we do read a lot. A lot a lot.
Ten Weeks To Go
How many more times we can use the little plastic animals in the last 10 weeks of Oak Meadow Grade 2?
Science Last Week: How people use animals. (fiber animals included)
Ellie finished her embroidery project.
Time to get a frame!
We’ve also been carrying and borrowing in math (regrouping). We’ve covered all the multiplication tables up to 12 (Ellie has learned 2, 10, 4, 3, 11, and we’re working on 5 – all without stress or memorizing for a test yay), food chains, economics (money v. bartering), scarcity, animal tracks and locomotion, opinion writing, narrative writing, book summaries, descriptive writing, and have read all the things and then some. She makes associations between the content we’ve covered and her experiences in the outside world. Her writing is uh…substantial, so we’ve talked about topic sentences, supporting sentences, and conclusions to help her better organize her ideas (not in the Grade 2 curriculum – don’t stress). Her spelling has been the most surprising improvement for me (without weekly spelling tests and memorization yay) – lots of writing gives a person time to internalize spelling.
This is the BEST EVER. Happy Pi Day!
(we had key lime)
If You’re Following Along
The 1 mill, which needed 60% of the vote to pass, failed.
The 3 mill, which needed a simple majority, passed (56%).
While the county has lost about $3.6 million for schools, it’s kept enough millage to get matching money from the state and to stay in compliance with state funding requirements.
The school system gets to keep the majority of it’s budget. At least enough to not implode in the next year or so.
There are only provisional ballots left to be counted, so the media seems to feel secure with these results:
http://wkrg.com/2016/03/01/pass-and-fail-baldwin-school-tax-vote/
Super Tuesday
If you’ve been following along, you probably remember the Big School Tax Millage Debacle. That one time when the citizens of our county not only voted to reject the tax increase slated to fix the school system’s aging facilities and massive overcrowding, but also failed to renew the existing school tax that currently supports the public schools? Yeah, that Debacle. The drama and dramatic aftermath is chronicled here.
Today on our primary ballots, the county gets a second chance to approve the renewals. If the 4 mils aren’t renewed, not only is that tax income lost but any additional funds from the state are lost as well (if the county doesn’t put in a required amount, the state doesn’t help out).
A mill is about $1 for every $1000 of assessed property value.
I don’t know if y’all know this, but Alabama is a Very Red State. The current fad among the Red States is anti- …well… everything. That includes taxes. Let’s just see how tax renewals play out next to all those Republican candidates.
Having Backbone
Vertebrates
Invertebrates
Our little plastic animal collection has been invaluable (although Amazon values the Toobs around $12 each). We’ve sorted by mammals, insects, habitat, presence of spine, and vowel sound just in the past few weeks. I keep them altogether in a basket in the school room. You never know when the need for a tiny plastic animal will arise.
Let’s just own that I have given up on the Weekly Wrap-Ups. There’s just too much to talk about every week! Oak Meadow Grade 2 hasn’t lost steam or charm at the half-way mark.
Weekly Wrap-Up: Lesson 19
At the beginning of the school year, I thought we might want to use a white board but I wasn’t really sure how much we’d use it. So I ordered a $30 whiteboard from Amazon and used big clamps to attach it to Ellie’s easel.
I was proud of my ingenuity.
That worked great until she grew. The past few weeks, we really started noticing how much she had to hunch to write on the thing. Which is most unfortunate since we use it many times every day. The white board is at the top of my list of “wow I am glad I bought that” items and one of the things that would continue to get use for many years. So we splurged.
I’m not sorry.
It’s taller, a little bigger, double sided, and our most expensive non-curriculum, school-related item (it really wasn’t that bad when you compare prices). We love it.
This week we started talking about economics in Social Studies (different kinds of resources – we played Catan Jr. as reinforcement), science will be about birds for the next few lessons (do you know about weaver birds?), Math was a review lesson since this is the first week of the new semester, Language Arts continues with poetry and descriptive writing, and Health was sportsmanship (we played Catan Jr. so Ellie could demonstrate Gracious Winning and Parcheesi so that she could demonstrate Gracious Losing and number bonds). There was also potholder weaving.
She really enjoyed weaving – we used this kit.
Cat Project
Ellie and I are trying a little embroidery.
First we practiced basic stitches.
pink on pink is the new awesome
Then the transfer pens got here (THESE ARE SO COOL) and we made designs for a bigger project.
A day without cats is a day without…a lot of things really.
Disappearing ink pens don’t work for us when we do big projects because the humidity removes the marks them in about half an hour. I mark sewing projects with ball point sometimes. I’ve got my eye out for an iron-away marking pen.
Pro Tip: A stabilizing fabric behind the working fabric is important. I didn’t know this when I did that little house thing over Christmas and it won’t iron out all nice and flat. We’re using the light weight interfacing that I had in my machine sewing stuff.
I’m already thinking about embroidering stuff on my knitting.
People Tank is Full
Y’all.
Our social calendar generally has one or two events each week. If anyone feels that is sparse, this week should make you feel better about our “sociability*”: three separate friend visits (one is happening right now), a field trip with our homeschool group, Christmas Parade! (Girl Scouts), homeschool play group, and a birthday party.
Making the decorations for the side of the float. We thought it might be a World Record.
And a complete week of school work.
To carry or not to carry. That is the question.
I’m worn out.
*The lack of “socialization” is one of the biggest homeschool myths I’ve ever heard. A) Does every adult you know work/live/exist in an environment populated by people grouped by the sole virtue of their date of birth? B) If mainstream schools were better at socialization, they wouldn’t have to work as hard on anti-bullying programs. C) “Socialization” doesn’t mean what most people think it means.
Weekly Wrap Up: Catching Up to Lesson 14
We’d fallen into a nice comfortable pattern during our school weeks. Then came Thanksgiving. I am coming around to the opinion that there shouldn’t be school between Thanksgiving and New Year’s – there’s just way too much other stuff happening.
I put together a school schedule for the week ahead on Sunday afternoon when I make all of my notes and complete the lesson assessment for the week before. This is what next week looks like right now:
Click to embiggen. My more detailed notes about the assignments are also on the clipboard but you can’t see them from here.
You’ve got no idea how much it bugs me that I couldn’t find a weekly calendar pad that starts with Sunday. Gah. Anyway, if you give that image a click and study it, you’ll see that it’s mostly neat and tidy. Crowded in places because we have a field trip on Wednesday and Play Group Friday afternoon, but generally well-sorted. I try to leave Friday afternoon light in case anything needs more time. If we have stuff to do on Saturday, I try to make it art.
For Reference, this is a Typical Day: Once everyone is up (around 7:30 – wake up times start with me at 4:30), we have breakfast, do chores and run errands if needed. Then Ellie and I head to school for an hour or so (10:00-11:00), and then come down for lunch. We take a break until around 1 (piano is practiced during this time) and then go back to school for a couple more hours.
There are no typical days right now. This is what last week’s schedule looked like by the end of the week:
Once again, click to embiggen.
So many changes (and you’ll notice that last week also had a field trip in it – the week before was a field trip to the maritime museum). It is my personal belief that starting with a Plan makes it easier (and less frustrating) to be flexible when the situation calls for it. Plus you still know what all you need to get done when the dust settles.
I keep old schedules in a three-ring binder with all of Ellie’s rough drafts and anything else (math pages) from the week that doesn’t end up in the main lesson books. I also keep all my completed lesson assessments and weekly checklists provided in the Oak Meadow curriculum, as well as the assessments and grades from her Oak Meadow teacher in the same binder.
Language Arts has continued the review of consonant blends, switching to word family review over the past couple weeks (I bet there’s more poetry soon). Reading comprehension, reading aloud, writing, and speaking/performance work continues as usual. Descriptive and opinion paragraphs are now included as writing assignments. Note: Ellie doesn’t particularly like the physical act of writing, so I spread the big assignments out as much as I can. I typically have her do the rough draft one day and then the final draft the next. She has been writing the rough drafts of her story summary paragraphs independently for a couple months now (that was one of me Secret Goals for before Christmas). I check for spelling and grammar before she rewrites them in her Language Arts Lesson Book. One of the things I’ve just started making is a word list of anything she might need to spell while she’s working (character names and words she doesn’t use regularly or can’t sound out). Since they are new and different, we’ve been planning the opinion paragraphs ahead on the white board – typically just a numbered list of pros and cons. She uses the notes to compose her paragraph.
She wrote ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ I took dictation for the notes.
Math has focused on multiplication facts, place value (to the millions), and (after all the place value) carrying the one (regrouping) in addition. Carrying is a struggle for a lot of kids (according to the internet reading I did while looking for worksheets so I didn’t have to make problems up that week) – it’s hard to understand when to stick that one over there and when to not. I used Lego Duplo blocks so she could actually carry stacks of ten around. Ellie never had any doubt about when or why to regroup. In Ellie’s case, I don’t know that she actually needed the manipuatives to get it, she’s got a solid concept of numbers (but Legos are fun so whatever). Just to double check, I’ve got a to-group-or-not-to-group math sorting activity for Monday.
Carrying that 10 over to where it belongs. Afterwards you can play with the Legos.
We covered cotyledons in Science (perfect timing since the fall garden stuff was just coming up) and Ellie designed a garden. After that it’s been all critters with squirrels, 20 different animal cards to complete, and the creation of a book about a particular animal. I love it when Oak Meadow does the little research projects! We took a trip to the library to check out everything they had about rabbits and then Ellie went through the books to answer the questions/requirements on the white board.
I love the white board. Love it.
Then she turned each category into an illustrated page for her book.
Some illustrations are more Complex than others. These rabbits have an enormous pantry.
Social Studies has been map focused with an emphasis on climate as it relates to distance from the equator. Ellie loves maps, the globe, the atlas, the compass, all that stuff. We’ve revisited Africa to study the relationship between climate and culture (this lined up nicely with the Chocolate exhibit field trip last week), and have identified all the continents and oceans.
Art has been clay, choose your own adventure like the walnut boats (last week I helped her sew a simple skirt), and the creation of a wall calendar for 2016 (one month each week). Health’s emphasis is on nutrition so we spent some time with the vegetarian food pyramid and next week she gets to cook lunch on the stove top! Piano lessons continue in place of the recorder for music.
Full weeks but really good.