Grateful

Grateful for so very much this Christmas season...

For another very blessed and full year
For my loving, awesome husband who makes 8 years of marriage fun :)
For my (mostly) sweet, funny, quirky girls
For peace and joy in our home
For the most amazing Gift of all in Jesus!
For God's amazing provision -- just what we need, at just the right time
For sparkling lights on green trees
For home baked chocolate goodies and sweet treats
For songs of joy recounting God's goodness through the ages
For a community of believers who worship in Spirit and Truth
For new beginnings
For the message of Hope in a very dark world
For red poinsettias
For unexpected fed holidays
For sweet tangerines and kiwis
For pretty printed paper and the freedom to celebrate life
So much to be grateful for...
Thankful for these very precious days with family.
Merry Christmas, all!

To remind myself when the going gets tough...

Written by this amazing woman: 

I get asked all the time, “How long will you continue?” I don’t know. I am already three years behind what I said I would do. I’m learning to shut my mouth to His plans. It’s better that way.

I feel like I am ALWAYS reading people who write these beautiful thoughts of WHY THEY HOMESCHOOL…

I found out last Tuesday, that mine were already written.

“…Because homeschooling is this magnificent crucible, to reveal impurities and sinfulness and brokenness. It keeps us on our knees. Homeschooling often hurts and disappoints. You cry and wonder if you are insane to try to educate these children, to disciple these little hearts, while laundering, cooking, cleaning, managing a household, and still being a wife, a sister, a daughter, a missionary in your community, a servant to Christ and in your faith community. And He smiles and say that He walks with you, has grand and glorious purposes, and He understands radical and crazy!
Homeschooling is about going higher up and deeper in, for you learn to sacrificially love in ways you have never loved before. You come to know your own heart in ways you never imagined, the souls of your children in intimate, very real ways.

For you will be together, making memories together, laughing together, crying together, praying together, and asking forgiveness together. Throughout your day, you worship God, together. And you learn to die-to-self together. It’s about doing hard things… together. And there will be nofragmented scraps of learning, home-life, friends, work, God.

We keep homeschooling to weave a one-piece life – hallowed threads of parenting, love, pain, education, growing, stumbling, creativity, forgiveness, wonder, sacrifice, and God all woven together.

We wear it, and it fits –”

~Ann Voskamp    www.aholyexperience.com

Never Say Never

Oh, how I needed to read this article today.

A looooong (and potentially boring) post about learning styles. Skip if this doesn't interest you.

Ok so I briefly mentioned in my last post how I'm planning for 1st grade for Emilie...

I had a major AHA moment recently about the way she learns.

I always knew Emilie was a "Visual Kinesthetic learner", but it never occurred to me
that she thinks in terms of pictures -- and not words, the way Auditory Sequential learners process information.  This is totally foreign to me, because I am an auditory-sequential learner.  And so that is how I naturally teach.  So when I read the description below, it finally hit me like a ton of bricks. Of course! That is why when, for example, I asked her to copy the word "milk", which she did, she immediately had to draw a picture of milk next to the word.  Here is a comparison between Auditory-Sequential and Visual Spatial learners:

AUDITORY-SEQUENTIAL (eliz)	VISUAL-SPATIAL (emilie)
Thinks primarily in words	**Thinks primarily in pictures**
Has auditory strengths	Has visual strengths
Relates well to time	Relates well to space
Is a step-by-step learner	Is a whole-part learner
Learns by trial and error	Learns concepts all at once
Progresses sequentially from easy to difficult material	Learns complex concepts easily; struggles with easy skills
Is an analytical thinker	Is a good synthesizer
Attends well to details	Sees the big picture; may miss details
Follows oral directions well	Reads maps well
Does well at arithmetic	Is better at math reasoning than computation
Learns phonics easily	Learns whole words easily
Can sound out spelling words	Must visualize words to spell them
Can write quickly and neatly	Prefers keyboarding to writing
Is well-organized	Creates unique methods of organization
Can show steps of work easily	Arrives at correct solutions intuitively
Excels at rote memorization	Learns best by seeing relationships
Has good auditory short-term memory	Has good long-term visual memory
May need some repetition to reinforce learning	Learns concepts permanently; is turned off by drill and repetition
Learns well from instruction	Develops own methods of problem solving
Learns in spite of emotional reactions	Is very ***sensitive to teachers’ attitudes***
Is comfortable with one right answer	Generates unusual solutions to problems
Develops fairly evenly	Develops quite asynchronously
Usually maintains high grades	May have very uneven grades
Enjoys algebra and chemistry	Enjoys geometry and physics
Learns languages in class	Masters other languages through immersion
Is academically talented	Is creatively, mechanically, emotionally, or technologically gifted
Is an early bloomer	Is a late bloomer

I just about fell out of my chair reading this.  The description of Auditory-Sequential learners fits Elizabeth to a TEE, and the same applies for the other category to Emilie.

So what does this mean for me?  Well, for starters, I am so glad I discovered this about Emilie now, so early on in our homeschooling.  For phonics instruction, I'm going to focus more on associating pictures with individual phonograms (like drawing a BEE for the phonogram "ee", etc) and for new sight words she is learning.  We'll be making a lot of books with pictures in them.  I'm going to make sure we do more lapbooking for books we read, for history, and for even some science topics as it applies.  And also for history -- we'll be covering the Ancient World/Egypt (mostly via Old Testament studies) from My Father's World.  I'm not big into history documentaries and youtube clips, but seeing as how visual learners learn best this way -- that will definitely have to be on the plans as well.

Elizabeth is a totally different ballgame.  She learns the way I learn, so it's very intuitive for me to pick curriculum for her.  She is the kind of student who does very well with workbooks -- and that is super easy to plan (i.e. there is not much planning necessary for "school in a box" type curriculum - like this one, which a good friend of mine uses and which I might use with her as well).  Just buy the sequential workbooks and go through them!  Easy.  Done.

With Emilie, I feel like the planning is never done, because there is always this lingering question in my mind: "How can I make this topic as creative and engaging to her as possible?"  I am not the most creative person, so it takes a lot of thought and energy to present material in a way that engages her and is fun.  Emilie takes after Jee -- my very creative husband.  She is like him in so many ways, especially this learning style.

When you add in the kinesthetic component to her visual learning (i.e., she needs to be physically engaged - move around, touch things, using her hands to make things, draw, color, create) -- it adds a whole other dimension.  I recently bought Cuisenaire rods to add to her math curriculum and it has been a HUGE hit with her.  C-rods are wooden (or plastic) rods of varying lengths and colors, in increments of 1cm.  So the 1cm cube is white, the 2cm rod is red, etc etc.  All of a sudden she was getting the basic math addition facts:  What color rod + yellow rod (5cm) = orange rod (10cm)?  And she'd instantly reach for another yellow rod.  I was shocked at how quickly number bonds (for example: 9 = 4 + 5) all made sense to her.  As in, 1 week of working with the rods and she can easily figure out her math facts up to 10.  Just like that!  It blew my mind because I am NOT a visual learner, and it took me a lot longer to figure out which color rod corresponded to which number.  LOL.

So all this to say, I've really been enjoying learning how to teach Emilie this year.   There is definitely a learning curve learning how to teach (haha) but it's been good for me.  I am so thankful for this opportunity to homeschool!

December randomness

Seeing as I'm hopelessly behind on blogging...

and I still haven't posted about Thanksgiving, 

our wonderful time with Halmoni and Harabogi 

who visited from Ethiopia (!!) last week...

and a gazillion other meaningful things that happened in the last month...

I'll just post a few random things since it's so much easier!

 Trying on glasses to look like Daddy (haha) at the store..

I just love how much they love each other.

Just melts.my.heart.

 Oh yes, I am not beneath bribery.

Eat your kiwi if you want to play your ipad games today!!!

(And yes, that was a dish of ramen noodles she ate for lunch - sigh).

Biking in crazy mild December weather!

It's been so mild that the daffodils are starting to bud (not good!).

I think some snow would be awesome, 

but seeing as we need to get to the hospital to deliver the baby

in January -- no snow for now is a-ok with me!

On another note, I've been planning like there's no tomorrow

for Em's 1st grade curriculum (which will start sometime in May when she turns 6).

I admit it: I am a curriculum junkie!!!

I like too many things.

I am trying to pull the "best" portions out of 3 different curricula at the moment,

which is exhausting and time consuming.

But I can't settle for anything less

than what I think will fit Em's learning style

the best.  More on that in the next post...

For Unto Us

Every Christmas I think about this,

but this year even more so:

How God gave up, gave to us, His son,

His ONE son

to an ungrateful, undeserving world -

of which I am a part -

to watch this Son get tortured,

beaten, and killed on a cross...

so that what?

So that I could live.

This just blows me away.

 As I prepare

to welcome my son into this world --

my son, to whom I will do everything

to protect, to nurture, to love,

to keep out of harm's way --

I can't even imagine 

how this must have hurt God.

Amazing Love.

November!

Ok the days are absolutely flying by... I was in shock when my OB told me I needed to start coming in for check ups every 2 weeks since I am in my 3rd trimester.  What?!   Where did the 7 months go?  They booked me appts through December, at which time I need to start going coming in every week to the OB, and we'll have to discuss my C-section (and tubal ligation) date.  Wowzers.  This is really happening.  I've been so busy taking care of the 2 girls I haven't really begun to process having a third (and already super active) child in the house...oh BOY!!

In the meantime... we survived Hurricane Sandy (yay, we never lost power!)... Halloween came and went...and no one has been seriously ill yet (knock on wood).  School is going well.  I am really tired but we are plowing through to get as much done before baby arrives.  Then we'll take a break for a few months and pick up again for the end of Kindergarten for Emilie by May.  I plan on starting her in first grade around June and we'll keep going.  It is better for us to school year round, doing a little bit every day, then to take huge long breaks.  Learning retention is better and it keeps them busy when the weather's bad anyhow.   

I was super happy that Emilie's mid-year academic review by our Umbrella school was GREAT.  

"Her portfolio looks awesome!" she said.  YAY!  I probably overdid it, but I didn't know what to expect, since this was my first review.  I had pictures and work samples and art projects to document everything we've been doing.  At least I now know what to expect for the next review and I probably don't need to stress out as much over it as I did this time.  ;-)

Here are some pics in no particular order.  

We did a coral unit last month and made a diorama.

They girls had fun with the movable fish

(I strung them from fishing wire with toothpick holders).

 I made Em some blend cards with matching pics.

She's moved on from 3 letter words to sounding out 4 letter words with blends.

 Some of the coral we found from the Cayman Islands...

Oh it was so beautiful there!

 I love the Montessori method of teaching grammar in the 3-6 age group.

This is called the "Grammar Farm" but I've adapted it

to just be the noun farm for Kindy.  :-) 

We'll revisit this next year in 1st grade when we start talking about

articles and prepositions and such.

 Eliz doing some color sorting with planets.

 Em reviewing sight words.

 We also carved pumpkins and studied the pumpkin life cycle (not pictured).

 Eww for PULP!

 The kids went to our church's fall festival 

for Halloween and they had the "BEST TIME EVER!!".

Mom was a bee and Dad was a pirate (pic is on FB).

:-)

 We had a stretch of beautiful weather in early October

so we were outside a lot, at the playground,

going on nature walks, and making leaf window hangings.  

 Eliz working on her pencil grip!

 More sight word practice via a bingo game.

 Tally stick math, counting by 5s.

I made up some scrambled sentences for Em to unscramble and write.

Can't remember where I printed the ditto from, sorry.

It was a good month!