prayingmother – Page 3 – Preparation Education

Curriculum for 2014/2015

August 15, 2014July 31, 2014prayingmother

Well here it is—another school year is upon us. Last year I managed to hardly spend any money on school supplies, this year caught me by surprise by the expense. The really expensive part is that my daughter will be taking Biology this year. Hopefully we can use some of this stuff three more times for all the younger people.

We have decided to take a slightly different approach to some things this year. My oldest starts high school this year and my youngest is now four and I’m getting pulled a lot of directions. We have purchased some prepackaged curriculums that were put together by homeschool families. We are not going to be combining everybody into one unit study. This is partly because my kids are taking interests in different directions and also because I decided that studying the ancients with my 7 year old last year didn’t go as well as I liked. This means that we will have two different history time periods being studied and two different sciences being studied. We will continue to do our Bible class together.

Here it is.

Zippy — age 14

Bible: Desire of Ages
History: Beautiful Feet Ancient History (starting in the middle as we did part of the Beginnings/Ancients by Truth Quest History last year) then Beautiful Feet Medieval History
Mathematics: Saxon Algebra 1, third edition, probably with a tutor
Science: Apologia Biology with the new DVD course
Language Arts: Student Writing Intensive Level C in conjunction with history
also Spelling Power for spelling.
Music: Piano and violin lessons
Other electives to be determined by real life!

JD — age 11

Bible: Desire of Ages
History: Beautiful Feet Ancient History (starting in the middle as we did part of the Beginnings/Ancients by Truth Quest History last year) then Beautiful Feet Medieval History
Mathematics: Saxon Math 8/7
Science: Noeo Physics 2
Language Arts: Student Writing Intensive Level B in conjunction with history
also Spelling Power for spelling
and Italic Handwriting Book F for penmanship
Music: Piano and violin lessons
Etc.

Ace — age 8

Bible: Desire of Ages
History: Beautiful Feet Early American History for Primary Grades
Mathematics: Math 3 by Teaching Textbooks
Science: Noeo Physics 1
Language Arts: Rod & Staff and Christian Light Readers
and Italic Handwriting Book C for penmanship
Music: Piano and cello lessons
Lots of nature study

So there you have it. That doesn’t count everything, I guess. It counts everything that I had to spend a lot of time and money on. If you looked at our curriculum choices last year, you will notice a few changes—Saxon math from Teaching Textbooks, Beautiful Feet History from Truth Quest History and Noeo Science from Apologia Elementary Science. It’s not that we disliked our choices last year. We were happy with all of the things we used last year, but for various reasons, we decided to do something different.

The reason that we chose Saxon is because my oldest is in high school and we had always intended on using Saxon for high school. You’ll notice that my 8 year old will still be using Teaching Textbooks. From the reviews we’ve read, it seems that Saxon is a bit more thorough than Teaching Textbooks, and better prepares kids for college and hopefully scholarships.

The reason we went with Beautiful Feet History is because, I needed something that my older two could more easily follow on their own so that I could spend more time with the younger ones on American History. I will be doing history with the older two, but they will need to be somewhat independent. Beautiful Feet just lends itself more to that for several reasons—it has a schedule; the specific books are chosen; the activities are already planned out. The reason that I have used Truth Quest History for so long is that it made it easy to not use fiction. I will still be substituting non-fiction for the fiction books assigned in the Beautiful Feet program.

The reason that we switched to Noeo science is that we were ready to read some other authors. We have enjoyed the Apologia Elementary books that we’ve done, but I like variety. Also last year, we read a lot from the book The Way Things Work, and my boys wanted to do more physics and learn more about electricity. Noeo is a bit for Science like Beautiful Feet is for History. They gather up books from several different publishers and authors, which we hope will add to the interest.

Best Friends

August 14, 2014July 24, 2014prayingmother

For some reason no matter what is outside, looking out the window is more fun with your best friend.

My little girl and her best friend always enjoy their time together.

Injured Pine Siskin

August 12, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

We had a special visitor to our home–an injured Pine Siskin. He hid under a bushes for several days, and my boys would feed him out of their hands. Then one day he flew away. All is well, that ends well.

God sees the little sparrow fall,
It meets His tender view;
If God so loves the little birds,
I know He loves me, too.

Mexico Fun

August 10, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

We always love it when we get to take our almost annual trip to Mexico. This year, we were able to do it again, after missing a few years. The sunshine and Vitamin D are a welcome additive to our lives, so is the time with extended family, and also the minimal access to email and phone.

It’s a real treat when we get to see the whales from Mom & Pop’s house.

It’s hard to keep us out of the water, as we don’t much have access to warm water near our home.

Sliding off of this natural slide has become a favorite activity of nearly the whole family. The younger ones are still braving up for it.

Can’t beat playing in the sand.

And it’s always fun to take a walk on the malecon at night and stop and have an argument with Poncho Villa.

Summer Grilling

August 8, 2014July 24, 2014prayingmother

We got a new appliance at our house this year, and we have been having lots of fun. We held off for a long time on one of these, because we are vegetarian, and we weren’t sure that we’d really use it as vegetarians, but we were wrong. The kids and the dad, especially love using it. And the grilled vegetables taste absolutely amazing. Our favorite foods to grill are green beans, tomatoes, zucchini, tofu, apples, and marinated portobello mushrooms. Oh my, my mouth is watering right now. Anyway, if you come over to our place this summer, we’ll grill you up some veges, so hurry over.

Zippy is the one who came up with grilling fruit. We’ve tried pineapple, apples and strawberries. All are quite tasty, but I have to admit the grilled apples are the ones that steal the day, in my opinion. Yum, yum!

School Pictures

August 6, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

My husband decided to try his hand at doing school pictures for the kids this year. This is his first try. We’ll see if more come later. The only thing is that Zippy has had braces put on since the pictures were taken. It’s fun to have school pictures though.

Mt. Rainier Photography

August 5, 2014August 3, 2014prayingmother

We all spent a lovely day at Mt. Rainier last week. Here are our photos from the day.

Mt. Rainier from Reflection Lake:

Mt. Adams in the distance.

Mt. Rainier:

Mt. Rainier from Myrtle Falls:

Sunset at Mt. Rainier from Sunrise:

Lego Organization

August 4, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

Legos can be the bane of a mother’s life. (If you don’t believe me, go buy some Legos for your husband to play with!) Well, my boys have been given gallons of Legos that were second hand and they love playing with them, but we were all tired of dumping them out and digging through them for the perfect Lego and then having to put them away each evening. So, thanks to the recommendation of a friend, we purchased some plastic drawers and the boys and the toddler organized them all. It was a great experience for the toddler to practice sorting colors–pre-school at it’s best.

Here are a couple of pictures of the work in process.

High Desert Museum

August 3, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

We love the High Desert Museum. There is so much to see in natural history, native history and pioneer history there and sometimes other types exhibits too. We have a lot of fun learning about all three of the permanent subjects exhibited there. You’ll probably guess by the snow in the picture, that this was not from yesterday, but it was from a fun day. (Actually we did visit there just a couple of weeks ago, but I still need to get those photos off of my camera. So that post will have to be some other day, maybe for Christmas.)

When we made this visit several months back, we were fortunate that they had a temporary butterfly house in the museum. We had so much fun watching the butterflies. A butterfly landed on JD’s finger. That was quite a treat. It sat there for several minutes and we enjoyed it immensely.

There are a few more pictures in my Flickr album from that day at the High Desert Museum, that you can look at if you’d like. Just click here.

“Origins” Lapbook by Ace (Age 8)

July 31, 2014July 23, 2014prayingmother

Here is the third and last lapbook on Origins. This one is by Ace.

If you’d like to see the sources that we used for these mini-books please see my previous post. All of the writing in this lapbook was dictated to me by Ace, but he did all the fancy designing and coloring in his lapbook. He also completely designed his Creation Days Wheel.

The cover: