Architecture and our Volcano

We are one week into our two week study of Chapter 2 in Unit 1.  While Chapter 1 focused on Cities and General Geology, we are now focusing deeper on Architecture and on more in depth Geology.  We are also studying some about electricity as that plays such a big role in cities and growth as well. 

We started our architecture study off by looking at animal shelters and how even animals were given the ability and skills by God to do some wonderful building.  Landon thinks beavers and their building skills are pretty great so we talked a lot about them and he wrote about them.  Epi thinks the bears are pretty smart because they don't have to do much work on their homes! 

This chapter is supposed to incorporate a lot of field trips which would be nice if the kids still weren't so sick.  While they are doing better, I don't want them out of the house much yet, so we are doing our field trips at home.  Our first field trip was supposed to be us going to our church and drawing it.  I bought the kids sketch journals.  We were unable to find a picture of our church online so we used the library books that we had gotten.  We looked at tons of pictures of Cathedrals and talked about how in the Middle Ages the kings and noblemen built the large Cathedrals out of guilt for their war crimes in an effort to have God forgive them many times.  We looked online at the Cathedral in Denver and tried to look for the one in Lubbock but didn't have luck.  Epi chose to draw one of the Cathedrals we saw in a book and Landon chose to draw Our Lady of the Pines in Conifer, CO as we found a great picture of that one online.  Here is Landon's.

We have also started to look a bit at castles and they each drew a picture of a castle as well.  We will look at more of those this coming week.  Of course being boys their pictures included dragons and trapped princesses but what are you going to do, haha.   Here is Epi's.

Our biggest project this week was for science.  We studied all about volcanoes and how they worked.  We read about Mt. Saint Helens and we looked at tons of pictures from it as well.  Then we built our own volcano and made it erupt!  It was a lot of fun. 

In Language Arts this week Landon worked a lot on paragraph structure and Epi worked on sentence structure.  Their writing is already getting a bit better and they are excited to enter a home school essay contest in our state focusing on inventions.  We will start working on their essays over the next month and they are due the beginning of November. 

Math this week was the last few lessons in the first few chapters so we had the first math test for each of them.  While I love our math curriculum there are no tests included so I made the tests myself using the workbook and text book as my guide.  Unfortunately my printer was out of ink so I wrote the tests out by hand.  While Epi wasn't too impressed with many of my drawings, I think they were perfect......  They both did well on their tests though and both ended up with an A.  

City, City, City!

I talked a lot in the curriculum post about The Weaver Curriculum and how it is comprised of unit studies.  Some Units have one chapter and some have more then one chapter that all relate to the same unit.  We have finished Chapter 1 of Unit 1 and are on the second and final chapter currently.  I will talk more about Chapter 2 in a later post but wanted to do a quick summary of Chapter 1. 

The main idea behind Chapter 1 was Cities and Geology.  I know at first they may sound unrelated but hear me out, lol.  We started out learning about the Tower of Babel and how that was a starting point for all the civilizations of the future and the spreading out of mankind from Mt. Ararat.  This allowed for us to study maps of all sorts.  We did lessons using a US map and pinpointed where all of our family and friends lived.  We also wrote a letter to a family member in another state so Eric and Cameron be on the look out for those in the mail!  We drew maps of our own neighborhood and looked at and studied maps of our town, a neighboring town and our county.  We learned about how to read maps and even studied a map of Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. 

After looking at so many maps we learned more about the cities behind them including some about city governments, jobs of service people within cities and looking at cities in other countries and noting things that were alike and things that were different.  Many of their writing assignments for this unit were based on these things and we read tons of books including Curious George at the Police Station, Clifford Visits the Fire Station and Sponge Bob Goes to the Doctor.

As we studied cities we learned about why cities might be founded where they are and this included learning the history of our city.  Many decisions regarding city placement have to do with Geology so we studied rocks, soil and changes of the Earth.  This of course included studying Noah and the Great Flood as that had to be one of the greatest Geological events of all time.  We learned about different types of rocks, how they were formed and how they change over time.  We talked about good soil for farming and not so good soil.  We also talked about the Bible lesson of a house built on sand falling but a house built on rock standing strong.

Lastly we talked about the greatest city of them all, Heaven.  We read in Revelations about how John saw Heaven and then the kids wrote about what they thought Heaven would look like and we looked at many types of gemstones as John mentioned quite a few!  With so much time being spent to make sure I kept on top of things our first Chapter with this being my first time, I took very few pictures so sorry about that!  Here is one of Epi's picture of Heaven and a letter Landon wrote about how he thought Heaven would be.  

When do you go to school?

I want to apologize for the delay in a new post.  We have been having major internet issues.  On a good note, I think the internet issues are in part due to us getting tons of rain, and I will never complain about rain in Texas.  We actually have green grass around and it isn't crazy hot so all in all I love the rain!

As you know a traditional school goes Monday through Friday unless of course they adopt a four day school week like our wonderful friends in Meeker now have!  Each school day in a traditional school is usually about seven and a half hours or so.  Home schooling can be done in the same way where you do your lessons Monday through Friday as well but one of the wonderful things about it is that it doesn't have to be that way!  For starters, it doesn't take 7.5 hours a day to teach lessons to two or three children.  In a traditional school the teachers have to get 20 or 25 students through each lesson, there is a lot of transition time from one activity to another, etc.  When you only have a few students they can learn the material much more quickly and there isn't much transition time. 

So, how do we decide when to do "school" and how long to do it?  We do our best to work around Joe's work schedule.  On the days that he is working we always have school days which means we often have school on the weekends.  This allows us to have a lot of our days off when he is off as well.  I still try to maintain about as many school days a month as the public schools in the area so we do have school usually one to three of Joe's days off as he sometimes will have up to six days off in a row and I want to make sure we get enough school in.  What each of those days look like varies greatly from a public school setting though.  Due to us being able to cover more in a shorter time period when we do school at home we do about five and half hour days and that includes lunch and recess in it.  We start out the morning with our Bible lesson and/or Saint lesson.  Then we move on to Social Studies or Science.  If we have an actual Language Arts lesson and activity we do that next.  If not then we do our Grammar lesson and Writing.  Then we have lunch time and recess and after that while Daniel is napping we do Spelling, Handwriting and Math and end with Reading.  So many of our Science and Social Studies lessons are hands on sometimes they are done in the classroom and others they are outdoors.  

Field trips are also a huge part of our lessons.  Some field trips are included in our curriculum such as when the kids drew a map to get me from our house to the doughnut shop and only if I made it there based on their map would they get a doughnut or currently when we are studying architecture so we are going to the Church for them to draw a picture of it.  Other field trips are just field trip opportunities that come up that may not be part of the lesson we are doing at that point but are educational none-the-less!  We have gone to a play of Robin Hood which they did a review on afterwards and we did Landon's birthday party at a fabulous Children's Museum and Planetarium.  We are also going to a corn maze in a few weeks.  We try to do more field trips when Joe is off so he can participate as well!  Here are some pictures from the Children's Museum. 

On an ending note, one nice thing about home schooling and the flexibility of the schedule, especially for our family with the health problems we face, is that we no longer have to worry about sick days from school.  While Texas is very lenient with their home schooling laws, they have pretty strict school attendance laws(go figure, right?).  With Epi's asthma we were always worried last year we would have issues, as if they miss more then a certain number of days they can get you on truancy laws.  Now with home schooling if one of our kids is really sick we can just allow them to have as many sick days as they need and make it up later.  This is a relief as currently ALL THREE of the kids have suspected HEV68.  Luckily we are staying on top of it with asthma meds and the doctors are hopeful that no hospital visits will be needed but prayers are welcome!

Our Chosen Curriculum

For those you of you not too familiar with home schooling and the rules and regulations in place for it, the fact is that it differs greatly state by state.  In some states you have to be associated with a school district and follow their chosen curriculum and check in with a supervising teacher often.  In other states you can choose your own curriculum but need to take standardized tests each year.  In some states the parent needs to have a certain level of education and in other states there are no educational requirements for the parents.  Welcome to Texas, truly the land of the free.  In Texas a home school is considered a private school out of your home and as private schools are not monitored neither is a home school.  All you need to do in Texas is write a letter of withdrawel from your current school district(if your children had previously attended school) stating that you intend to home school and that is it.  A school district or CPS could come to check up at some point if they felt they needed to but in that case you would only need to show that you are teaching with a bonafide curriculum, that is in visual form and that covers the subjects of math, reading, grammar, spelling and good citizenship.  This leaves the options for which curriculum you choose and how you choose to structure your school wide open. 

Once we had learned this information it was great to have many choices of how we wanted to do things and what curriculum we wanted to choose, but it was also a bit overwhelming as there is so much out there.  We decided to turn to advice from others who had traveled this path before.  We contacted our friends Jessica, Jamie, Neely, Heather and Janelle all of whom home school their children.  I joined online groups of home school parents and I checked out numerous books from the library to read.  All of this really helped us narrow down what we were looking for and what we thought would work best for our family. 

We found that of the many options for home school curriculum, they can be divided into just a few categories of basic types of curriculum.  I won't go into all the different kinds here as my descriptions of them wouldn't be the best and it may get long, but in the end we decided that a unit study curriculum sounded like it would be a wonderful fit for our family.  The basic idea behind a unit study curriculum is that there will one main topic that is the basis of all the study for almost all the subjects for 4-6 weeks and then you move onto another main topic for another 4-6 weeks and so on.  So, if the unit was the Solar System, it would be studied for say 6 weeks.  It wouldn't only be studied in terms of science though.  In social studies you would also learn about he history of people who have studied the stars and planets, in writing you would write stories or research facts about it to write about, in social studies you would map the universe, in math you would look at distances, etc.  The wonderful thing about this sort of study is that kids can get excited about and fully explore one subject in so many different ways.  Another advantage to it is that with kids of multiple grade levels you can teach one main lesson and then branch off into activities that are tailored for each grade level. 

After looking through many different unit study curriculum options online, we decided to go with one called The Weaver Unit Studies by Alpha and Omega Publications.  We had decided early on that we wanted our curriculum to be Christian based and this unit study was.  It covers the Bible, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, History, Art and Field Trips.  Then we got the spelling, handwriting and grammar programs that go along with it.  It is so much fun and so hands on the kids are loving it.  They are learning a lot but not having to sit and learn it all doing worksheets all day.  They get to get up and do so much of it and they retain it a lot better that way as well!

You may be wondering where math fits in with this all.  Although there is a bit of applied math available in the unit studies, in order for the kids to really be able to learn all they need in math we purchased a separate math curriculum.  We researched quite a few and went with Singapore Math which is great because it gives me a home educators manual for ideas on how to teach the lessons, there is a text book and there is a work book.  We also use tons of things for it such as base 10 blocks, multi-link cubes, a balance, counters, cards and so much more so it is fairly hands on too for the lessons and then the workbook helps to see if they got what was taught.

Okay, so I know that was all long, but I figured letting you all have a basic understanding of what our curriculum is and how we do things would set the foundation for future posts on our units.  To end this I will post a few pictures of our school room.  A couple of notes on it is that I know it is very small, that is what you get in the tiny house we are renting until we can buy in Texas, haha.  Also, although we do have a school room and we do a lot of work in it, there is also a lot of work done outside of it whether it be outdoors, on field trips, in other rooms in the house, etc.  That is the wonderful thing about homeschooling is the kids can learn wherever they learn best!

The Start of a New Adventure

Welcome family and friends!  As many of your know, we have decided to take on the adventure of home schooling and we are thrilled to share this with you!  Coming to the decision to home school was not a decision we came to easily and we only made this choice after much research and even more prayer.  We are happy to report that we have experienced so much peace after making this decision and we truly feel the Lord's hand in our decision.  I decided to start this blog in an effort to be able to share our adventure with all of you and I hope you enjoy going along with us on this journey!  We hope you join us often to read up on what is happening at what the kids and myself have come to call J.A.M Academy or Jesus and Me Academy. 

Now for the fun!  We started our school year on August 18, 2014 with a week filled with exploring rules and boundaries.  The kids were excited for the first day but a bit nervous about what it would all be like.

We had yet to receive all of the curriculum we had ordered so for the first week I planned our lessons from scratch.  We focused on the Ten Commandments and Jonah and the Whale and talked and learned extensively about following God's rules, school rules and directions from others.

The other item we concentrated on that week was developing goals for the school year and talking about what they wanted to be when they grow up.  We read one of my all time favorite books, Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Place You Will Go" and made hot air balloons and pictures of ourselves.

Our first week was a blast and we learned a lot about classroom schedule, rules and how this all will work.