What we have learned this week!

So our first week is done.  We have learned lots and had some fun.  We learned that we need to do our "hard" subjects first.  Spelling, Math, as Emma is doing below, and reading. 

We have also learned that a timer is a good thing!  We were doing our memory work FOREVER ... because the girls LOVE IT!  However we were doing school forever each day and getting WAY  burned out to finish anything.  So we have a timer for Spelling, Reading, Memory Work and Lapbooking and anything else we do that day.  We DON'T have a timer for math.   Otherwise, the girls just sit there and play with the blocks until the timer goes off.  So we just complete certain section that needs to be done.

As we finish our work Halie or Emma gets to check off the schedule board.

Our Classical Conversation memory work.  What do we do?  How do we memorize and learn about the different subjects??? I was very concerned about this!  Here is what we have been doing.  MUSIC. Put anything to music and suddenly it become easily motorized.  The CD's that you can buy through Classical Conversations have the timeline, the History, Skip Counting, and the Latin set to music.  VERY HELPFUL!!!  Also helpful are some incredibly kind homeschool moms out there. Our english grammar and the science sentences were on You Tube put to music.  

 While listening to the music we wrote the sentence a small white board and erased words to see if we could still remember it.  We played toss, as Halie is playing with me above. On the ball I had written the different subjects.  Whatever your thumb landed on, is the subject that we recited.  We wrote the sentence, word by word, on different sticky pads, then Emma would organize the sticky notes into the correct order.  We also the played memory game, I wrote each each sentence two times on little red rectangles of card stock.  Then we played memory.  Each time we flipped over a card, we would read what the Memory sentence was.

   

Each day we worked in our lapbooks from Wisdom and Righteousness.  The day that I took these photos they made a little spinner of the different biomes.  The next day we worked on grammar and skip counting in our lap books.  

When our wiggles were too much, we did brain breaks, there are TONS of ideas around the internet.  I just wrote out fun things to do and slipped the slips of paper into our Brain Break Jar.  This is totally fun for the girls.  Below they did 5 yoga poses.  It was hilarious!

At the end of each day we do something FUN and of course educational.  One day we cut out pictures from the national geographic and made a Biome Book, then we painted castles, which was supposed to be learning on how to make art using simple shapes, Emma caught on very well. Halie just had fun painting.  The girls made up stories to go with their painting.  Our globe that I mentioned in the last post took us longer that I thought, so we did that for a few days as our fun things.

On  Friday night we went to the Spirit of Boise hot air ballon glow.  It was pretty and beautiful.  The girls mainly had the most fun running in the wide open spaces.  It was a trial run with my newly acquired wheelchair.  It didn't go as well as we had hoped.   My ridiculous uterus was NOT happy with me.  But you don't know until you try!  So any outing in the evening is a no go :(  But oh well.

Is not that gorgeous!

Emma took this picture of me :)