Living in a Van Down By the River?? NOT MY BOYS:)

OMG I love this skit;) Well I love this type of motivational speaker don't you?? As a homeschooling family, this is what some narrow minded people might think will become of my boys. I am here to tell you that every year we ramp up what we are doing both educational, within the community and as a family. This skit came to my mind as I sat down the other night and realized that I have almost everything that we needed for the next school year. (which for us usually starts in July) This year might be a little different as I am determined to get through some things that have been sitting on the shelf for the past year. We will ,like always, work on spelling and math over the summer but I am wanting to finish up the Story of the World that we bought over two years ago. We seemed to go spurts since we bought it. Along with some art, swimming, music and lots of field trips and get togethers with the kiddos' friends! Oh and summer camps, still working on adding more. Youngest right now is signed up for a free science class that the library has here in NC. Oldest is signed up for a zoo keeper's summer camp at a local zoo that has a lot of exotic animals that he will be able to interact with;0

So what are we doing next year you ask?? Well I am not telling...... OK stop twisting my arm  "UNCLE!UNCLE!"

For my soon to be 4th grader~

Very excited about trying out our newest curriculum -

Moving Beyond the Page (8-10 level)~it has science, social studies and literature (of course)

Time4Learning.com ~ our first and fav curriculum , we mostly use it for Language Arts and Math ( and will continue with that again this coming year)

Singapore math ~last year we tried something different so we are going to start with 3A and work thru quickly to 4A within a couple months

Spanish~ 

something that the three of us are going to be taking with a Spanish teacher/tutor

Music~

guitar lessons -once a week with practice daily for an hour

Swimming~ 

at least until he gives me something else he would rather do

Rock Climbing~ 

something he really likes to do and we are going to be doing it at the gym at least once a week

Computer~

programs like Scratch and Alice, with typing

For my soon to be 9th grader~

So a couple of things about his list, he will be capping out of Time4Learning (they go to 9th grade) but he will still be doing some algebra thru them. And we really narrowed down his list during our vacation in April! After a week of NO TV and NO video games he was able to talk to me about what he wanted to do for this year.

Literature~ 

we have a great resource for this ! He has been taking this for about half a year with a great ex-teacher friend who teaches a group of teens. We will be continuing this again this year, along with some daily grammar,spelling and some animal based literature to go with the science I am making up for him this year.

Math~ 

Time4learning.com pre-algebra, and two high school textbooks for pre-algebra(which one was given to me by a good friend and the other was picked up a local used curriculum sale) this is going to be work on both our parts as I will most likely piece together the lessons for him to do daily.

History~ 

again we will be continuing a World History class that we took all last year with a group of teens.

Science~ 

We are doing an Animal Biology/Zoology (from two books I picked up from Amazon - Animal behaviors(college edition) and Beastly Behaviors) Zoology and Biology coloring books(no they are not your grandma's coloring books they are detail drawings of animals/plants,etc that you color in different parts of the anatomy) I plan on letting my oldest take over on which animal/bird/reptile he wants to study after I plan out the first two. basically so he can see how far I want him to take it. I am also adding in some literature based stories and experiments that deal with each animal. (like for example, stories like Skellig along with owl anatomy and owl pellet dissection) Supercharged Science (online science program we love) will also be a part of his lessons, I will just have to go into the program and see what they have that is related to the animal lessons we are going to be doing.

Spanish 1~ 

he actually picked this one himself!! We are going to be having lessons with a Spanish teacher and then I picked up a high school level Spanish workbook that we will be going thru together. 

Music~ 

Violin ~ lessons once a week with daily practice

PE~ 

swimming lessons, possibly some soccer or martial arts again still working on that

Computer Sciences~

he is working with the UnReal engine to make video game levels at the moment and we will continue with that as well, along with typing and possibly some computer science online classes that I am still checking into;)

As for my part, it is back to scheduling and planning out for a week or two at a time, finding field trips and camps that will further the boys understanding on the subject we are studying, ordering books or finding books at the library on subjects coming up, finding science experiments to go along with our studies and so much more I don't even want to think about it right now!! Slow and steady wins the race! Just be sure that if you see someone living in a van down by the river that it won't be my boys! ME MAYBE;0)

I'll give you $200 for "What's a good online tutoring program?"

I love the trivia games, can ya tell?? I can picture it now...... me in the middle with two VERY smart people to my right and left. Just go with me on this OK? I picture it much like a Saturday Night Live skit, after about half the game I pulled apart the display in front of me and BEAT THE SMARTS RIGHT OUT OF THOSE TWO! TO WIN THE GAME or several years in jail!! When I used to watch them before I had kids, I thought that only the super intelligent people went on there. This is, of course, before "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader" and that briefcase game, sorry I can't remember the name of that one! I mean really those kids are pretty damn smart! The adults were OK,too.

Fast forward to me now homeschooling my two boys..... fade to that picturesque scene of a loving mom carrying a well balanced breakfast to her boys (who of course are up at the crack of dawn doing chores and ready to go by 7am!). WAKE UP!! hehe  The things that I have come to realize since beginning my homeschooling adventure with my boys. You have to ask for help when you need it! I am always looking for online tutoring programs or the next cool spelling game to help the REMEMBER those spelling words. So will we be on the next trivia based game show?? You never know, but I will let you know so you can watch and cheer us on!

It's almost here, It's almost here!!

So this is the part of the year is when I began to panic a little bit! In a couple of weeks, we will be taking our end of the year testing (which in NC is required by law). Now my oldest is not a test taker by any means but my youngest doesn't seem to mind, well for most of the time anyways. I am  personally,a middle of the road mama on the subject of end of the year testing. I would probably have the boys tested on a yearly basis even if it wasn't required of us by state law. If for anything else, just to see how we were doing from year to year ( I like being able to see that yes we still have to work on spelling or that we did AWESOME in math!) and for later for my oldest's high school transcripts if they are needed.

I have had a couple people ask me this year, do you do anything special before your testing?? Those first couple of years I said, "No, I don't teach for a test, like in the public schools do". Now I still don't teach for these tests but I do use end of the year guidelines like in workbook for such and such grade, you know basically like those books "What your ?? needs to know" just so I make sure that we have the basics down. I also have started doing some vocabulary in subjects like math, science and history so that the boys will have a wide range of words in their vocabulary. I usually do some kind of search on google for what I am looking for, for my oldest I did a search the other day for 8th grade math vocabulary and came up with a vary of sites online! For my youngest, I did a search for 3rd grade science vocabulary, just so we could see if there was any of those words that he didn't know that meaning of;)

All in all, it is a personal choice on what testing you like to use if any!! I personally like the Woodcock-Johnson test, because it seems to be a good fit for my boys. They are allowed to take the test as far as they can so we can see their strengths and weaknesses! Now if only they had video game level design questions or even basic animal facts my boys would score off the chart! This test has a fee associated with it, due to the fact that only certified testers are allowed to administrator it. While other tests are free and have little requirements for giving those tests at home. I like having this one thing that someone else does, so that I can sit back and relax for a couple of hours;)

So are you a secular homeschooler ?

It is so hard for some people to come out the closet on this topic. Let me be the first to SHOUT IT OUT "I am a secular homeschooler and proud of it!"  You would be amazed at all the secular homeschool blogs that are out there and the educational lessons that some of these families are doing! I have to admit that most of them are so wonderful that I feel almost ashamed that I am not doing the same types of things with my boys. (and yes I gleam some of their ideas to use with the boys too) Secular homeschoolers are free thinkers who almost always go outside the box to teach their kiddos. Now I am not saying the religious based homeschoolers don't do some amazing things, because they do. I do have several friends (believe it or not) that homeschool with Christian based curricula even though they are not homeschooling for religious reasons. Some find that these types of curricula often offer a lot of structure which they desire BUT just so you know there are secular homeschool curriculum out there as well! There many families that take a Christian based curriculum and tweak it to their families needs. I did that my first year of homeschooling, I took FIAR and just omitted the stories/lessons that I didn't feel were necessary for us. Of course, we also were doing a secular based program (Time4Learning.com) at the time as a supplement to our FIAR lessons. It worked great for us.

It feels good to come out doesn't it! Yes not an easy thing to do in the bible belt areas of the US but there are secular groups creeping up all over the place.