Preparation Education – Page 18 – Preparing for higher education in the school above.

Piano Recital & Violin

September 25, 2009prayingmother

One of the things that has brought both my husband and I quite a bit of enjoyment is music. My husband plays the violin and I play the piano. We decided that having the skill to play an instrument was definitely something that we wanted to pass on to our children.

A couple of weeks ago our second child had his first music lesson. He’s learning the violin. This week he was just so proud of the affirmation that he got from his teacher. He had complained a bit about the practicing during the week, but when the teacher was happy with his performance, his face beamed for the rest of the day. Yesterday, he was struggling with his new song, but he told me that now he is determined to practice even when it’s hard. Move over Joshua Bell, your competition is on his way!

Our oldest has been making music for quite awhile. She started playing hymns and Christmas tunes by ear when she was four. When she was six, we got her a violin, and she started playing hymns and simple classical tunes by ear on her violin. The child exudes music. She walks through the living room and she cannot resist sitting at the piano and playing. I can’t wait to see what she will become. I know she has a great future in music. (Okay, if I sound too much like an overly proud mom, forgive me. Sometimes I can’t help myself.)

She also just had her first violin lesson and she is thrilled to finally be taking violin lessons. She is learning to turn music on a page into music from her violin and she’s so happy and anxious to be able to sight read hymns. Recently she, along with her cousins and some friends, had the joy of participating in accompanying the singing at a church conference that we attended. She played everything by ear, but her goal for next year is to play from the hymnal. She was quite inspired by the experience.

Zippy has been taking piano lessons for about a year and a half. She has had a few privileges to bless others with her piano. She has played special music once for church and has played a few times at a retirement center that we go to once a month. She recently had her first recital. That was both exciting and nerve racking for her. She worked really hard to make sure that she had her songs memorized. (The music on the piano was left there by other students.) I was proud of her effort.

So much of the effort that I put into educating my kids is to give them the foundation so that they will be able to get into the occupation of their choice, but the time and money that I am putting into them learning music is my gift of enjoyment to them for the rest of their lives. I hope they will find as much joy in music as I have, even more. And I hope that their music will not only bless them, but will bless many others and ultimately point to Jesus.

Botany with the Outdoor Hour Challenges

September 15, 2009prayingmother

At the beginning of the summer we decided that we wanted to learn about plants and flowers. If you have followed my blog for awhile, you may remember that we decided to use the Apologia’s Botany book. Well, to make a long story short, it wasn’t for us. I think that it is geared for an older audience than what my kids are. It was too wordy or technical or something like that.

Since we were already on the flower quest and had decided to continue that for our summertime nature study, we were very thrilled when the Handbook of Nature Study blog released the ebook for studying garden flowers. This is a great and simple series of nature challenges. I highly recommend it. The ebook is very inexpensive. The depth of study was just perfect for us. Granted we didn’t learn a lot of latin terms, but we had fun playing with and learning about flowers. My kids have already decided that they want to do these challenges again next year. This is partly because, since we started them a ways into the summer, we weren’t able to do every single one. Anyway, if you’re looking to do some Botany with your family, check out the ebook here. By the way, you can find and look at the challenges for free on the Handbook of Nature Study blog, but the ebook comes with some really nice notebook pages to accompany the study.

Some of the notebook pages that we did from the Garden Flower Challenges. (One of those is from the Crop Plant Challenges.)

Of course, the favorite thing for the kids out of these challenges was to grow flowers.

A close inspection of our Geranium plant.

We had quite a lot of fun looking closely at the flowers. Even my youngest really enjoyed learning about flowers.

An exciting addition to our study was a microscope. After quite a bit of consideration and researching, I purchased this stereo microscope from Tobin’s Lab. This is one of the neatest things we’ve ever got. I was a bit afraid that the kids would bore with it quickly, so I emailed Tammy at Tobin’s Lab and asked her if my kids were too young for a microscope. She recommended this one and said that people from 3 – 93 love this one. She’s right. We keep it out and look at all kinds of things, but we really enjoyed looking at the flower parts and the pollen with the microscope.

The kids looked at the plants through the microscope over and over.

Another fun thing we did was to soak beans and look at the cotyledon. My daughter liked to look at the bean through the magnifying glass. The rest of us just used our naked eye.

Learning about pollen was fun too. As per the instructions of the Garden Flower Challenges, we took Q’tips and gathered pollen with them and then rubbed the pollen on notebook pages to have a closer look.

You can’t really see the pollen in this picture, but it’s in the upper right hand corner. We also spent some time watching the bees–the master pollinators.

Then we did one plant experiment was not part of the challenges, because we’d seen somebody else do it and my kids were very intrigued by it.

We put various amounts of food coloring in the water for these white carnations and then waited to see what happened. You can see what happened: Our carnations began changing colors. We did notice that the carnations with the higher concentration of food coloring had a bit more red in them. And as for the green food coloring, we couldn’t see any green in that carnation.

And last but not least, we just really enjoyed the flowers around our house. Here are a few of my favorite shots.

We have hydrangeas all around our house. I love that they still have flowers on them, this late in the summer.

We have a whole row of these pink rhododendrons behind our house. When they’re in bloom, it’s like our patio is on fire.

We don’t have many azaleas, but we appreciate them, because they are the flowers that announce that summer is about here.

I should have posted about our flower studies as we did them, because we did so much more and I’ve got a long post now and don’t think I should add another thing. We sure did enjoy learning about flowers and we hope to cultivate even more flowers next summer than we did this summer. And don’t forget to check out the Garden Flower Ourdoor Hour Challenges.

Kitchen Math

September 12, 2009May 3, 2012prayingmother

Well, we finally officially started back to school on Tuesday. We had a fun and full week.

One of the new things we are trying this year is a new math program, called Math on the Level. It is a very unique math program which I am quite excited about, partly because the editor of it is an electrical engineer (like me!) This program is set up in such a way to help parents (or teachers, but it is written for homeschoolers) teach math without workbooks. The reason that I was attracted to this program is that my son declared last year that he hated math, but in a different conversation, he told me that he spends his time in the shower figuring out different kinds of math problems. I started quizzing him and realized that his math skills had surpassed his textbook significantly. Before I even heard of Math on the Level, I put away his math book and I just printed off a scope and sequence from the internet and started teaching him the concepts on my own. I had intended to keep that up until I found Math on the Level. But I really love it when somebody has invented the wheel before me. This program has a very systematic way of recording so that you can keep track of the areas in math that your child(ren) need to work on. It has several books to teach from: Geometry, Operations, Activities, and Money. There might be more. My only concern with this program over a textbook math program is how parent intensive it will be. Math was the one subject last year that I told my kids to do and I went and made lunch, but this requires my time too, at least right now. Perhaps, once the kids and I understand the program better, it will become a bit more independent.

So what did we do for math this week? Well, my first grader needed to learn the definition and measurements for volume. My fourth grader needs to work on her multiplication and she needed to learn the difference between the English and Metric systems. So we went out to the garden and picked this:

That is one very overgrown zucchini. Not all of them we pick are this big, but the ones that are get turned into zucchini bread.

Then we chopped this zucchini into all kinds of fractions to run it through the food processor and we practiced our addition and subtraction of fractions with our mammoth zucchini.

$Cutting the Zucchini into fractions$

After we had it run through the food processor, we had eight cups of zucchini, which translated to eight recipes of zucchini bread. So my daughter got out the recipe book and started her calculations.

I’m not quite sure why, and not sure if you can tell, but she felt that the best place to work on this math, was standing on the counter. I promise she didn’t get that idea from me. I have never stood on the counter to look at recipe books.

Then the kids set out to measure and measure. JD Boy learned the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons and Zippy learned the difference between cups and milliliters.

Learning Volume Measurement the Messy Way

And, if you couldn’t already tell from that picture, they made a mess. I took on the job of cleaning the whole time they were cooking (and answering questions). I probably should have taken a picture of how high and carefully I had dishes stacked in the drying rack by the time they were finished. That was my math lesson for the evening: how many layers of dishes can be stacked in a drying rack at once.

I’m ashamed to say that I did not take pictures of the bread after it got out of the oven. Everybody else was in bed when it was finally done baking and I was a bit anxious to get there myself. But, they must have done their math well, because the zucchini bread was delicious and we ate the whole lot of it up before the week was over (and before I got the battery on my camera recharged.) I had planned to freeze it, but we ate it. So I guess, we’d better head back out to the garden and see if there are any more over grown zucchini.

So did I need Math on the Level to turn this into a math lesson? No. I had already discovered that the kitchen is the yummiest and messiest place for math class. We are however, excited, to try a new approach where we learn math with real stuff. Even my fourth grader will be doing minimal written work with this program. She will mostly be doing hands-on activities to learn her math. I hope to one day soon give a more thorough review of the program, but after the zucchini-bread math class, my kids are totally sold on the program, at least for the time being.

We also did some geometry this week and even my preschooler thought that was fun. One of the neat things about this program, is that it gives you lots of ideas for teaching multiple ages. So you can teach names of 3-D objects to one age, while at the same time, you’re teaching something more technical about the 3-D objects to the older students. One lesson plan, but multiple levels at once, makes for a less stressed mama.

Last but not least, I have to share one more little math lesson that my preschooler did this week all on his own. I didn’t prompt him to do this at all. I don’t think kids usually need prompted for this math lesson, but it is the best lesson we’ve found around our house to teach the one-to-one relationship to preschoolers.

G'tums learning one-to-one ratio with olives

Yep! Olives on the fingers! He counted out his olives and put them on his plate before he put them on his fingers and he got it right. I just watched the whole process and didn’t say a word, well that is, except, "Can I take your picture?"

Now, I’m getting hungry. Guess it’s time to work on some more lesson planning for math class!

Canning Peaches

September 1, 2009prayingmother

Well, I didn’t finish my list, and my husband gave me two days of work that must be done now, and I looked at the weather and saw that it was supposed to start raining the middle of this week and then rain indefinitely. (That might give my location away.) So I decided to start school when it starts raining, and let the kids enjoy what’s left of sunny weather.

My sister and I did get all the windows washed inside and out and tracks vacuumed and frames wiped down. Yeah! Check! And bless my sister’s heart, she repainted all the gutters around the house and did a bunch of other touch-up painting. I cleaned out one last closet and have more to take to Goodwill now. My kids and I cleaned out two fireplaces. Don’t know why I waited until it’s about to get cold before I did that. Hmmm… Now I’m down to computer work for my husband and typing up my schedule for school. I do have all my books though and my month-by-month plans done. It’s just trying to figure out how to make everything fit in the day that still has me mystified.

We also canned forty-nine quarts of peaches and froze thirty-plus quarts. Yummy! We saved twenty pounds to eat. Here are some pictures of our canning process.

Top Left: A dozen empty but clean jars ready to be filled. Bottom Left: Seven of nine boxes of peaches. Right: Peeling peaches and filling jars. We did it in the garage, so that we could hose off the floor when we were finished. The peaches were just right and we decided not to blanch them.

Left: Jars full of Peaches. Right: Canning in my steam canner. (I love it. It’s so much lighter to haul it around than my waterbath canner.)

Rows of canned peaches! I just think they’re pretty. I don’t know if it’s sentimentalism or what!

Since we consider work and service an integral part of school, I think my kids have been getting a fine education the last week, even if we haven’t "hit the books" yet.

What Am I Doing Anyway?

August 25, 2009prayingmother

I’ve been so negligent about my blog this summer. Sigh. Our plan is to start school on Monday so maybe life will start feeling more structured.

In the meantime, this is what I still really want to get done before Monday. Some of it I have to.

Can and Freeze 180 lbs of peaches (They’re sitting in the garage, so that’s a must.)
Wash all of the windows inside and out.
Get caught up on the bookkeeping for my husband’s business (Working on that right now.)
Type up my school plans that are only sketched on paper right now.
Empty my ironing and mending baskets.
Oh yea, make 15 meals and clean up the kitchen and do half a dozen loads of laundry and vaccuum and mop and…

Wish me well!! (I do have help on the window washing and the canning. My teenage sister is going to help me out on those.)

But I’m quite happy about what I have accomplished this summer in the way of things around the house.

Got my husband’s bookkeeping all caught up–oh that was a few weeks ago.
Totally reorganized the school area. It feels so clean now.
Moved two children into different rooms and redecorated both rooms.
Cleaned out all but two drawers in my whole house and all cabinets.
Took two trips with boxes of stuff to Goodwill!!
Reorganized the pantry (which is a full size room in my house.)
Oh yeah, did some laundry, lots of laundry, and cooked a few meals, I’m not even going to calculate that.

I always look at my list of accomplishment and wonder why I get so little done. I used to be such a productive person. Sometimes now I feel so unproductive. I don’t know if I’ll make it, but I’m giving it my best shot!

So long, until next week!

Glacier National Park

August 12, 2009prayingmother

As I said in my last post, we were very privileged to spend a whole week at Glacier last week. My parents and my three youngest siblings also went with us. We had hoped to do some backpacking while we were there, but we ended up doing car camping and day hikes. We discovered that there are enough day hikes there to keep a person busy for weeks, we weren’t shorted a bit. Our longest hike was on Tuesday and most of us hiked 12 miles. A few went more. I nick named my brothers on this hike. One was Race Horse, because he talked Zippy and my sister to go an extra 4 miles with him. (Okay, I’m a bit proud of my 9 year old daughter for hiking 16 miles with quite a lot of elevation change, all in one day.) My other brother, I nick-named Pack Horse, because he took on the very honorable job of carrying G’tums on his shoulder for probably 4 miles, my husband carried him a couple more of the miles. G’tums walked around 7 miles of the hike–not bad for a three year old. The name of the trail was the Highline Trail. Here are a few pictures.

That was a tiring day, but we all thought it was awesome. It ended up exciting for Zippy and JD Boy and my siblings and my dad as they came face to face with a bear at the end of the trail.

The next day some of us got to go on another trail. (I stayed with G’tums and gave him a nap.) It was a 9 mile hike (roundtrip) to the Iceberg Lake. It was no less stunning. Here’s the lake.

Zippy hiked around 35 miles last week and JD Boy 30+ miles. Not to bad for a couple of youngsters, and both did quite a bit better than I did! There was lots of beauty from the road side too. There whole park had wildflowers galore and vistas that would take your breath away. Here are few more shots from around the park.

Upper Two Medicines at Sunrise–This was where we camped the last half of the week.

Wild Goose Island–close to where we camped the first half of the week.

A beautiful waterfall!

We also got to see quite a bit of fun wildlife. Unfortunately the birds were a bit sparse, but we saw bear, deer, mountain goats, long-horned sheep, marmots, ground squirrels and more. Here are a few of some of the animals.

The kids watching Mountain Goats.

An adorable Columbia Ground Squirrel eating wildflowers. (This might be my favorite shot of the trip.)

And last, but not least–The Natives!!

There are many, many more pictures that I’ve posted on Flickr (around 60). Some of them are outstanding too, so I hope you’ll stop by my album and check them all out. Here’s the link.

The Outdoor Classroom

August 11, 2009prayingmother

We had the privilege of camping at Glacier National Park all last week. It was stunning and I have tons of pictures to sort through to share with you, but I’m just going to post this one today, because it’s so neat.

We owe a thank you to a fellow hiker who loaned us this chair that he had hauled up the mountain with him. I may make it my banner (when I have time).

"While the Bible should hold the first place in the education of children and youth, the book of nature is next in importance. God’s created works testify to His love and power. He has called the world into being, with all that it contains. God is a lover of the beautiful; and in the world which He has fitted up for us He has not only given us everything necessary for our comfort, but He has filled the heavens and the earth with beauty. We see His love and care in the rich fields of autumn, and His smile in the glad sunshine. His hand has made the castle-like rocks and the towering mountains. The lofty trees grow at His command; He has spread earth’s green velvet carpet and dotted it with shrubs and flowers." Ellen White, Counsels to Parents, Teachers and Students.

P.S. If you want a preview of our pictures from Glacier that I’ve started uploading, click on this link.

Mt. Rainier Nature Drive

July 28, 2009prayingmother

We made a very short trip to Mt. Rainier just because we were sure that we would get to see some wildflowers.

The one picture of the mountain that we managed to take. This picture is thanks to my daughter. I forgot to take pictures of Mt. Rainier, because I was so busy studying flowers. We identified several; here are a few pictures.

Giant Red or Orange Paintbrush (or several other names) Castilleja miniata

Subalpine Lupine Lupinus articus subsp. subalpinus

More wildflowers.

The main meadow at Paradise that I thought would be covered with flowers was not. All of these shots were taken roadside. I’m kind of hoping that I can sneak back there again and see if the meadow blossoms one of these days. We’ll see, I do have to get ready to start back to school one of these days too!

One of the interesting things that we learned when working on identifying the flowers in our pictures is that Paintbrushes are mostly parasites. Because of this, it is very difficult to transplant them or to plant them from their seeds. They latch onto roots of other plants and live off of them. I’ve always loved Paintbrushes, but I think being a parasite is rude; so now I don’t know what to think.

Snow Lake Trail Nature Walk

July 21, 2009prayingmother

Maybe you get the idea that I’m just not feeling very verbose lately. It’s not that we don’t have things going on. It’s that we have lots going on. We have been taking pictures though and I’d love to share some of the pictures that my husband took on one of our recent nature walks. We hiked on the Snow Lake trail. Unfortunately we got started a bit late, and took quite a few pauses to take pictures, so we never made it to the lake. Next time. We did really enjoy the waterfalls and the many wildflowers on the trail though.

Here are my favorite pictures of the day.

Field full of wildflowers.

Red Columbine Aquilegia formosa

Coumbine covering the rocks.

Columbia Tiger Lily Lilium columbianum

McCurdy Park Nature Walk

July 16, 2009prayingmother

We recently took a very enjoyable nature walk and just enjoyed what we saw. We saw a few things that we are studying a little further, so will post about that later, but we saw several things that were just fun to see. We walked through McCurdy Park on Lake Washington.

We went in hopes of seeing Buffleheads, but we missed them. We did get to watch and observe several Mallard families and their antics. They were quite entertaining. When they were swimming around in the duckweed, it looked like they were swimming in grass, because it was so thick.

The little duckings just followed their mother, wherever she went, like playing follow the leader. So moms, if you ever feel like you can’t get a second to yourself, know that your not the only mother that deals with that.

Caption for that picture is "I finally, got all my ducks in a row."

As you already know, flowers is our quest right now and we saw a few beauties.

Wild Iris

Marsh Forget-Me-Nots (This picture is larger than life size.)

Water Lily

We also got to observe a little insect study, quite a little actually. This goes with learning about flowers though. The bees were very busy pollinating all the flowers.

This one is pollinating a blackberry.

We also enjoyed the watching the sail boats, canoes and kayaks that were on the water. I know that’s not really nature study, but it was beautiful.

"Dad, we want to go on that…"