Book Mania!

I really enjoy this time of year! Easter and spring are upon us; the temperatures are warming up; our bird feeders are slowly getting more visitors; and, of course, new books are the norm!! I love greeting our mailman, especially when he has several packages tucked under his arm! This past week I've been slowly adding to our collection of first grade materials. It is very exciting and I can tell that science is going to be a hit around here! Our science living books are becoming most popular and the kids are enjoying looking at all the pictures.

I'm also on a personal quest for knowledge. This means that I'm adding to my collection new parenting books, homeschooling references, and family-themed books as well. Interested in what we've gotten? Below is my list. This list is without a doubt, going to grow in size as I order more books for the new school year. I've still haven't received them all, so I'm anticipating to receive them within the next week or two. I'll update my list as I add to it.

• A Charlotte Mason Companion
  
• For the Children's Sake
  
• Apes and Other Primates (Eye View Book)
  
• Outside and Inside Snakes
  
• Eagles (Lets Investigate)
  
• Mr. Carey's Garden
  
• Elephant (Eye Witness Book)
  
• Giant Panda (Welcome Book)
  
• The Life and Times of the Ant
  
• Fantastic Frogs! (Hello Reader)
  
• Are You a Snail? (Backyard Book)
  
• Discipline That Lasts a Lifetime: The Best Gift You Can Give Your Kids
  
• Penguin Chick (Lets Read and Find Out)
  
• Snakes are Hunters (lets Read and Find Out)
  
• A Mother's Rule of Life: How to Bring Order to Your Home and Peace to Your Soul
  
• Science with Plants
  
• What Happens to Your Food?
  
• Stokes Beginners Guide to Birds: Eastern Region
  
• Identifying Trees: An All Season Guide to Eastern North America
  
• Kids Love North Carolina
  
• Seton Religion 1 For Young Catholics
  
• Miracles of Jesus (St. Joseph Picture Book)
  
• The Holy Spirit (St. Joseph Picture Book)
  
• Mary My Mother (St. Joseph Picture Book)
  
• Jesus and I
  
• Coloring Book about Angels
  
• Here We Come/This is Our Home (Faith and Freedom Readers)
  
• This is Our Family (Faith and Freedom Readers)
  
• These Are Our Friends (Faith and Freedom Readers)
  

Nature.

I recently stumbled across a great website while looking for a nature magazine for the kids. We used to subscribe to Your Big Backyard when Marco was younger, but cancelled it because we found that he was still not mature enough for it. Now that we are thinking of bringing it back to our home, I went to their website to check it out again. It was here that I found out about the National Wildlife Federation Green Hour.

The Green Hour was designed to get parents and kids outside for "unstructured play and interaction with the natural world." It is a program that provides parents with ideas for outdoor activities and journaling. They break down the daily activity on their home page with books related to the activity, things to make and do, and other tips. They have a parents' guide available as well as resources. Overall, it is an AWESOME program!!!

Considering that we love to do mostly anything nature related, we'll be checking this website out on a daily basis. It should help us get away from the chaos of overindulgence in toys and tv. It can even serve as a great nature portion to any science curriculum!

Check it out and sign up!
NWF Green Hour

Have you read my latest toy rants? Well, check out this article on the Green Hour website. 10 Steps to Play, the Plastic-Free Way.
You can bet that this list is printed out and hanging on our bulletin board!! It will be helpful to any parent wanting to get away from the materialism of today and into the fun and games of yesterday.

Saturday Science Wrap-Up.

Today we finally finished off our insect unit. This is one study that really went on and on! The kids loved it as they got to see all kinds of insect picture books and movies. And who better than my kids to spend endless afternoons working on buggy crafts and their beloved lapbook? It was fun, but I'm glad I can finally move on to something new. I'm actually looking forward to passing the science teaching torch to my darling husband, Dr. Science. Although he's been a little far removed from the basic sciences, I know he's excited about studying biology with the kids this year.

So today we said farewell to the study of insects. We finished putting our insect lapbook together and now we are moving on to something new. Perhaps our next project will be our Lent lapbook. Hopefully we'll be able to finish it before Easter. Anyways, hope you enjoy the pictures!

Marco did the butterfly for the front of the lapbook.

Isabella created the butterfly for the back of the lapbook.

The mini-books and folds inside were fun to make!

The coloring pages were done by both Isabella and Marco. They did not want to leave them out of the lapbook since they spent so much time with them!

A Toy Story: Part 2.

Let me start off with our math lesson. We recently learned to use tally marks to count by 5's, and being that I cancelled afternoon lessons in order to tackle the toy situation, I decided to have Marco practice his tallying. We went around the first floor marking a tally for every piece of toy that was on the floor or not put away (legos counted as 1 toy). Then we sat down on the couch and counted. Our grand total? 42. Yes...42 toys out of place and on the floor; and that was only in the living room, entry way, and school room. I didn't even bother to continue the lesson into the second floor!

So after tallying the toys, I took Marco upstairs and I read him my earlier blog entry about my frustration with toys. It seems that the level of understanding of an almost 6 year old goes further than I thought. His reaction? "Mami, you sound really frustrated. I'll help you take all the toys downstairs. Maybe I can even give some away to some other kids." Wow. Although I know he didn't quite get the whole gist of what I read to him, he understood that I was feeling frustrated. His understanding that basic idea actually helped me to calm down and he was a great help in transporting bins of toys into the playroom.

As it stands, we now have no toys anywhere in our main living areas with the exception of a few baby toys for Christian and some educational toys I use during school. These are all located at the top of our bookcase and aren't accessible to any child. The basement playroom is now full with all the toys and I have tried to organize them to the best of my abilities, but there is still work to be done. The kids never play downstairs without permission, so it is something that I am able to fully control.

The question in my mind is...will this work? Will this help me teach a greater lesson in gratefulness? Will all the values I want to instill in my children become easier with less "stuff" in their lives for them to worry about? Well...we are not throwing their things away, but we are limiting their use. Maybe it's a start. I think the rest of our life lessons will all fall on our parenting and life experience.

The toys? Well, they aren't being missed yet! I'll have to do an update in a week or so to let you know if my kids are going crazy.

The Last Straw. A Toy Story.

I am so tired of fighting the toy clutter. I have spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up, divide, sort, put away, and clear all the toy clutter! And it seems that as much as I try and teach the kids about putting things away in the right place, it NEVER lasts! I am tired and I have decided to clear the house of all toys. No more toys in any child accessible areas. I used to keep only a few toys in their bins in a shelf where the kids could easily get to. But now I give up.

I am angry and upset right now. It seems that I spend every day telling the kids to clean up their toys. No more! I am putting everything in the basement or in the attic. No more toys in their rooms. No more toys in the living room. No more toys ANYWHERE! If they are bored, I’m sure they can come up with something to do. I’m tired of the entitlement they feel. I’m tired of the attitude of not caring if something gets broken or lost. I’m tired of them being spoiled with toys. I refuse to let my children grow up thinking that they can always get something for nothing. I refuse to let them turn into materialistic brats. The more I give them, the worse they get. Sure they are all “thank you, mami” and “I love you”…but that wears down pretty quick.

I want them to really know what being thankful is. I want them to know what being grateful feels like. I want them to learn to take care of things because it matters to them and to others! What kind of a mother am I if I don’t teach them humility, thankfulness, gratefulness? What am I doing to them when I yell because I am once again inundated with toys and child clutter? Is it their fault? I feel like I’m pointing a finger to them only to see it point back at me.

So today I am canceling our afternoon lessons. I am moving the toys out. I will still let them play with things, but not like now. I want to go back to the days when we didn’t have so much stuff. When things were simple and we were entertained by just reading a book or playing outside. When playing with toys meant you actually played with one toy for more than a minute before throwing it out. I pray that this is the solution to my current problem and that it will cut down on the amount of frustration I feel everyday.

Science Schedule

Following is a table that breaks down the order in which we have planned our science units.

If we were to follow the lessons as they are in the curriculum lesson plans, we would have 45 weeks of science study. Since that goes a little over what we want, we turned a few of the animal lessons into 1 week studies and incorporated them with Harcourt materials. We also decided to combine the human body units of study with the Harcourt corresponding unit. Of course, we can always just omit what we want.

Science is not a big deal in terms of grading, so our main objective is to fulfill the needs of the kids. They are big science buffs (as is DH) and we want to be able to satisfy their curiosity in a fun way while getting them to learn along the way. The great thing is that I feel like we are being completely flexible with our schedule. We are not committing to this many units, but I know that with DH teaching science, it will probably all get done.

To put things in perspective. We school year-round and we will be starting with this first grade science plan within the next couple of weeks. Maybe if time permits, I'll make a list of all the books we will be using to go along with each unit.

LLB = Living Learning Books

*= Units to shorten or omit

Whales (LLB)	2 Weeks
Elephants (LLB)	2 Weeks
Snakes (LLB)	2 Weeks
Ants (LLB)	2 Weeks
Eagles (LLB)	2 Weeks
Butterflies (LLB)	2 Weeks
Primates (LLB)	2 Weeks
Leaves and Roots (LLB)	2 Weeks
Growing Things (LLB)	1 Week
Flowers (LLB)	1 Week
Trees (LLB)	1 Week
Carnivorous Plants (LLB)	1 Week
Pandas* (LLB)	1-2 Weeks
Frogs* (LLB)	1-2 Weeks
Penguins* (LLB)	1-2 Weeks
Harcourt Intro	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.1/Lesson1	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.1/Lesson2	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.1/Lesson3	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.1 Review/Links	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.2/Lesson1	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.2/Lesson2	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.2 Links	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3/Lesson1 Exploring the Five Senses (LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3/Lesson2 Sight (LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3/Lesson3 Hearing(LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3/Lesson4 Touch (LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3 Links Smell (LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3 Review and Activities Taste (LLB)	1 Week
Harcourt Chp.3 Activities Digestion (LLB)	1 Week
Muscles & Bones (LLB)	1 Week
Respiration (LLB)	1 Week
Skin (LLB)	1 Week
Immune System (LLB)	1 Week

Monday Lessons.

Today we played catch-up in a couple of things. Since we've been under the weather, our lessons have been extremely light. Math was the first thing to conquer this morning and we started out with some leftover worksheets from Friday's lesson. After that, we continued with 2 more lessons in order to catch up a little. Lucky for us, one lesson was with pattern blocks and the second lesson was an assessment. Both went really well.

Of course, doing phonics with Marco lately is like pulling teeth. After much hesitation we got through the page and we were done. Isabella is quicker to please and she completed 4 pages worth of reading. Girls and boys are so different in this aspect. Marco went straight to playing hockey in the hall after reading, whereas Isabella picked up Cat in the Hat and attempted to read it all by herself.

We have all been suffering from a bit of cabin fever, so I decided to do a nature activity. I was raised by tree hugging parents, so it is obvious that I have a great love for nature. Nature walks have always been part of what we do around here, especially when the weather is as nice as it was today! I made up a simple list of things to find and I sent the kids off to explore the backyard and forest area. After a good 30 minutes of exploring, the kids returned with a bag full of goodies. I set out our trusty picnic blanket and we set out to look at our finds while we enjoyed a snack.

Part of our nature exploring routine has always been to find something different and present it to everyone. I have always felt that this helps the kids to develop their ability to describe and narrate. I always help by asking them the same basic questions: "What do you think this is?" "What does it feel like?" "What color is it?" "Where did it come from?" This always leads to more questions and extends our nature exploring for a while. Today Marco found a seed pod from a crepe myrtle tree and Isabella thought some grass was interesting.

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