Noah's story

The Swamp Thing

The swamp thing is a man. He looks scary with his pointy teeth, evil eyes and his slippery scaly green skin. He smells like a dead animal. He feels slimy like a fish. He makes groaning and bubbling noises that are scary. The swamp thing is a very scary looking man.
It all starts when I’m in my tree house near the swamp. I was drawing a picture of the swamp pond. The pond has lily pads, flowers and frogs in it. I saw the water start bubbling. The I saw the swamp man come out of the pond, he had plants on him because he had been underwater so long. I keep drawing and he looks at me. He stops and stares at me. I bring up the rope ladder so he can’t get to me. I decide to wait until he leaves. Next thing I know I hear my iphone ringing. He is trying to find out what is making that noise.

We are working on getting him to write creatively and add in similes. I made a few suggestions to this to correct the negatives. But the majority of this is his work right down to the iphone. We don’t have one but he would love it if we did.

Our First Day of School

So today went well, however none of us wanted to get up and get moving. Gee, I wonder why? could be we all stayed up to late and then were not quite ready for the early morning. We started with bible, while the boys were eating breakfast and then went right into our day.

Noah did really well with all of his subjects, he still gets stressed by spelling but once he saw that there was no pressure, he calmed down quickly. We stayed pretty much on track, if the boys aren’t done with an assignment before the time is up, then it becomes homework for them as I need to cover as much as possible before I leave for my class every day. I’m very happy with his work today. Less fighting and less stress for both of us.

Adrien had the worst time today, he still has a bit of trouble focusing and sitting still especially while reading. He has math for homework tonight. The husband will be helping him I think.

Camryn, was allowed to sleep in since her work really only takes about 30 minutes. She did it well and with a great attitude as well.

We took the kids swimming for only 1 session, the water was ice cold and with the breeze forget it. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow. Our pools close this saturday and I want to get in as much swimming as possible.

We still need to cover science but the boys friend is over so we will do that reading tonight. It is only a few pages. I want them to have time to play with their friends as well as do schoolwork.

All in all it was a productive day and I hope the next two weeks go this smoothly, actually I hope the whole year goes this smoothly.

Already changing the schedule

*bangs head* I went over our schedule while planning camryn’s and realized that there was just too much stuff if I did history only 3x a week and science 2x as week. So I changed it back to every day but for a lesser time frame. I sure hope that works, and isn’t too much every day. Especially since I want our focus to be on Lang. Arts. this year. I feel that the boys need more emphasis there. Hmm, I could do just cut our science and history in half and then finish it next summer for summer school. Well we will see how it plays out. It is only 16 days until our first day of school.

Radish experiments

So we have been working steadily this week on doing the experiments. Today we did the four environment and the day/night experiment. Noah has had to draw the seeds every day as well as graph what stage they are in. The Apologia Botany book is here, delivered today as well as the Draw and Write through History. Hopefully the drawing book will keep my kids busy as it is raining and they are getting a bit out of control. I also need Noah or Kendra to draw a picture of todays lesson about sunlight.

The Outline for Latin and Saxon 65

Ok, so I had to post the daily schedule for you to see for Latin for Children A and Saxon 65. If I get really ambitious I will scan Noah’s portfolio as it is right now. Latin/Saxon 65 Daily I uploaded it into a pdf. I like pdf’s lately.

Getting ready

Today I spent time putting the subject divider pages into page protectors for the boys. I had to alter one for a page for awards that the boys get. Like the summer reading club at church, I also put their swim lessons papers in there. Then I put about 6 page protectors behind each subject divider so that as we do work it goes into the page protectors and then I don’t have to panic in May when it is evaluation time. Oh yes, I almost forgot I had to make a divider for Latin. I also went over the latin lessons to figure out the scheduling today. I marked the pages in the books by days, day 1, day 2, etc. Then I wrote out the weekly schedule on a 4×6 index card and will laminate it and put it into his binder so that way he doesn’t get confused about what to do. I need to do that for his math since we are switching to Saxon 65 this year. These two subjects are on dvd. I will be at college when he does them. I will have two weeks before I start to make sure he understands the process of everything. If he runs into a problem he will have to do the work for homework when I get home that day.

So how is everyone’s planning going? Are you excited about the year yet? I’m getting there in spite of the fact i know how hard it will be.

Plants and charting…..

so we needed a graphing notebook to chart our radishes but i didn’t have time to get one right away so we will do the radish experiment again next week. However I did have Noah do the work to get the first day of charting ready. This way we are ready to go again. Well, I scanned it but it didn’t turn out very good so you will have to use your imagination. Just picture graph paper with 4×4 squares on it. 20 of them.

Swim lessons~ edit

Well, Adrien could have moved onto level 5 except he just needs some endurance and a bit of balance or perhaps a bit of control. His teacher today Valerie 2x had to jump in the pool to help him do the strokes and go the right way. It was kind of comical actually. Noah on the other hand is doing well, he missed a week of lessons while in camp. So Valerie tested him yesterday and she moved him into level 6. He needs to do laps I guess and level 6 does lots of them. I haven’t had time to talk to Valerie about it but I trust her judgement. I am hoping that she comes back next year and teaches so that Camryn will have her. I asked Noah how it went today and he said it was ok but hard. They had to place something between their legs and just use their arm ms for the laps. But he liked it and seemed excited about it. I’m sure he will be in level 6 through the rest of this summer. But that is ok as next summer I plan to put him into the swim team for our city. So Tommy took the kids swimming today and Mike and Valerie were in the pool. They just love our kids. They were playing with them and they come over to talk to them. I know that once Adrien tried to cheat at Marco polo and Valerie caught him and made him get back in the pool. Mike stopped and asked Noah what level he was in for swim class. We don’t have great city services but our pools are great as is the lifeguards/swim teachers.

Art lesson for next week

We are doing the edible color wheel next week. You will need

blank color wheel
Nilla wafers
White frosting
food dye

Explain what primary, secondary and tertiary colors are. You may want to color in a chart to show. Give child/ren a chart to color. Then place some frosting in three bowls, add the food dye to make the primary colors, then have the children mix some of the frosting to make the secondary colors followed by the tertiary colors, then frost your wafers and place them in a circle matching the color wheel, take a photo for your scrapbook. 🙂 Have fun.

Reference Book/Portfolio pdf.

I will attempt to load the pdf of the reference book I made for Noah.Reference book

knightsdoc.pdf