The Graduate

He is my favorite 5 year old in the whole world!!!!

We decided to let Gabriel graduate from kindergarten this year. Even though he isn't technically a kindergartener until the fall, he has spent 2 years in K class at our home school co-op. The teachers all say what a delight he is to have as a student because he listens so well and clearly loves learning. Most of the teachers this year didn't know he was younger than all the other kids (in spite of the fact that he is short - even for his actual age), and he seemed to be doing pretty well socially so we thought it made sense to promote him.

We will probably leave him with his own age for most other activities (like church) and I will report him to the school district as being in the grade he should be in, but doing work on whatever level he happens to be on. At least that is the plan for now. Being Gabe's mom keeps me on my toes.

The ceremony was really cute. They put each child's picture up on the wall while they marched down the aisle, and then asked them all what they wanted to be when they grow up. Gabriel wants to be a police man and a singer. His focus right now is on careers that don't require college (go figure!). Then they invited the parents up to pray for the kids. I cried like a baby and blamed it on my hormones.

Quarter Report

Well, we are now officially one quarter of the way through a new school year. The report has been typed up and sent off in the mail. And I'm still standing (yeah, yeah, yeah).

I have to say that my boys are loving early American History. Thank you Sonlight!!! Gabriel (my 4 year old) was reading a Junie B. Jones book about a Columbus Day play and he came to tell me that the book was wrong because it talked about Queen Elizabeth but spelled it wrong and Elizabeth didn't have anything to do with Columbus. Because he knows that she was the queen a hundred years later when Roanoke was settled. After a minute I realized that it must say Isabella, and reminded him that she was queen of Spain when Columbus sailed to the new world.

Not all subjects are going as well as history, but I think that we are off to a good start none the less. Latin is going fairly well. I am seeing improvements in Jacob's spelling even if they come slowly - I think switching to a true mastery approach for spelling has been a good thing. His writing has matured significantly this quarter.

It is math that really concerns me. He is good at math concepts. He understands new stuff quickly. But he can't remember math facts to save his life and he never works carefully through the steps of a problem. And so now, Mr. Math Whiz says he hates math! I am in the process of stepping back and trying to fix that, but I don't have complete confidence in myself here.

And lest I leave Cadence out, at three and a half she can finally count consistently to five, and sometimes even gets to ten. That is after us counting with her several time a day for months. She also has learned to recognize the letter "m". It is the only letter she knows, but knows "big M, little m". I think Super Why taught her that, 'cuz I decided to give up on letters until she figured out how to count.

Where have I been?

I know, it has been a long time since I posted. It is fall, and fall is pretty busy around here! I have managed to keep up with my blog reading (for the most part), but I rarely even take time to comment. I have to hurry up and read through them in the morning before this starts:

Daily Schedule
8:30 Morning Chores
8:45 Bible/History/Poetry/Lang. Arts
9:30 "Preschool" (Cadence)
9:45 Math Lesson/Spelling Power (Jacob)
10:25 Reading Lesson (Gabriel)
Work alone (Jacob)
10:45 Latin/Typing (Jacob)
11:30 Read aloud
12:00 Lunch
12:30 Quiet Time (my chance to read, play gutiar, plan for school, practice Karate, pay bills, return calls, and maybe play Dr. Mario)
2:00 Typing (Gabe)
2:30 Review Math, reading and vocab (Jacob)

Then I have to correct work and think about dinner. Sometimes, if Cadence wakes up early enough from nap, I can get some laundry put away before I go get Todd (or he comes home). It's not unusual for me to finish correcting work while I eat dinner.

I am trying to get back into the swing of posting...but right now I need to go teach!

Did I say I was excited?

Because now I'm not so sure...Yesterday Jacob decided to write a letter to our local Christian radio station for a contest. Gabriel wanted to write a letter too, but Gabriel isn't old enough to win a week at camp. He was upset about being too young and insisting that he could write a letter, so I told him that he could go ahead and write to the lady but he wouldn't be able to enter the contest.

A few minutes later, Gabe brought me a letter that said "I want too go to teh ranc when I am littl." I told that was really good, and that I would send it later - but reinforced that he was not old enough to win the contest. I continued on with dinner preparations until Jacob came in announcing that Gabriel had written a mean letter. Now, I had just read his letter and thought that it was perfectly nice... "Leave him alone, there is nothing wrong with his letter" I said to Jacob. But Jacob insisted, "He said it says he will kill the lady, and it does - I just read it."

I called for the letter, which Gabriel brought to me again. And sure enough, it had been edited to include "or I will kill you"! I stood there, somewhere between horrified and very amused wondering how to proceed. I explained to Gabriel how unkind it was to say such things. His defense was that he wanted to go and the lady deserves to die if she doesn't let him (perfectly logical in his mind)... I guess he was trying to use strong language to sway the argument in his favor. But I insisted that he write a different letter as I would not send the death threat. He quickly complied and came back something to the effect of "Let me go to the ranch when I am little so I don't kill you." Much better, right?

After another lengthy explanation about the use of threats to manipulate a situation (not to mention the wrongness of killing!!!) an acceptable, yet still a little demanding, letter was drafted and signed. I guess now that he sees writing as useful and valuable he has fully embraced it. Maybe he has a future as a speech writer for a terrorist organization....

Learning to observe

We launched into science yesterday! And the first thing we are learning is how to observe. Well, I guess before that Jacob has to learn to keep the words "observation" and "hypothesis" straight, cause it will be confusing for everybody if I tell him to observe something and he is trying to form a hypothesis about it...

Since our work load is very light right now, I decided to take the kids to Beaver Lake this morning for some observing in the woods. It is a beautiful day, but as soon as we stepped into the woods it was cold! There was a very cool breeze blowing off the lake, and even though I brought jackets that made it a little hard for the kids to enjoy themselves. We walked through one and half trails despite the cold.

We learned how wild grapes can cause clearings in the woods and why that is an important part of the wooded community. The kids were very excited when they found one of those clearings on their own. Unfortunately, we didn't see any animals - Jacob blames that on the big noisy group of kids who were there on a field trip. He was more than a little irritated that those kids didn't know how to be quiet. Imagine, Jacob mad at someone for making noise!

We finished!

Today we finished our "core" (Sunlight Condensed World History) curriculum! We ended world history with a very brief overview of WWII. I'm thinking it would be appropriate to talk about Memorial Day tomorrow. We also finished Language 3 (ABeka) today. Jacob supposedly knows how to diagram a sentence and indentify basic parts of speech now (although Gabe has a better grasp on nouns and verbs than Jake does...)

I think we will do 4th grade science over the summer since I am always bad abut getting science done. Jacob is so happy to be done!

Monday Blahs

First off, let me mention that Super Todd found the math book! When Jake was cleaning his room he was making piles that go other places (garbage, downstairs, etc) but decided to keep the piles separate by putting them in bags. Then we were having company and someone took the bags off the bedroom floor and stuck them in the closet. The math book was in one of those bags and daddy was smart enough to figure that out (I think he may have been the one to put said bag in closet).

I seem to have a case of the Monday blahs. Or maybe just the general blahs. I feel like I need a few more days of weekend, I really want to get out and do something fun. That doesn't make any sense to me since in the last week we have gone out to eat, gone on a field trip to Fort Stanwix and gone to the movies - Horton Hears a Who. I feel like I need a vacation!!! It isn't that I mind homeschooling, I've been enjoying that a lot lately.





Perhaps I am feeling bored and purposeless now that my class is done. I'm reading three different books right now (Some of My Best Friends are Books: Guiding Gifted Readers, Finding God at Harvard, and Bonhoffer's Letters and Papers from Prison), but I find that reading for the sake of reading isn't stimulating enough. I need a project or a purpose.





We're headed to library shortly to look for books about Abe Lincoln - Gabe announced at dinner the other day "When I grow up to be president, I want to be Abraham Lincoln!" He figured since Mr. Lincoln is dead, his identity is free for the taking. When we explained he will have to be president Gabriel Young and he can't be President Lincoln he settled on getting books out to read about his favorite president so that he can learn to be good president someday too. (He decided he would like to be president when he was about 2 and Todd explained to him about someone who was "running for office")


Ladies and gentlemen, your future president...

and lets not leave out his big brother...
These are pictures from their AWANA awards ceremony last weekend(Jacob is in a borrowed shirt)

Where did it go?

I need to vent...I am so sick of asking "Where did it go?" I could scream (and perhaps I already have). A few weeks ago Jacob lost his AWANA shirt, which caused lots of stress 'cause he was supposed to have for the awards night last weekend. It still hasn't turned up. Around the same time he also lost his ruler which is also still missing. Last week, the math book up and disapeared. Seven days and several hunts later, no sign of said book! Where the @#$% is this stuff going? It isn't just that he can't find it (with his less than excellent finding skills) Todd and I searched the whole house more than once and the stuff is gone.

I thought maybe he lost the math book on purpose, but he enjoys math WAY more than he enjoys looking for stuff he lost. He is getting pretty sick of looking but I am way past sick of having missing stuff. I'm starting to think I will need to buy another math book.

Idiot Box

I was just reading an article on crosswalk on de-stressing the home school house. I came across a few things that were interesting, and I couldn't pass this part up...

By limiting or eliminating your TV time, your home life finds more stress-free hours in the day. Because your child is not subject to ads (which exist solely to tell you that you are not content with what you have), you have less-stress shopping. Your children are also more receptive of others' gifts to them. As Urie Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University puts it:The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents. ... Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into adults.

I have been fantasizing about putting the television out to the curb nearly our entire marriage, but the idea causes Todd to break out in hives (slight exaggeration - he has once or twice intentionally gone a week without tv, and didn't kill him, but it did hurt him). Now, he will be quick to point out that I spend my share of time worshiping at the shinny black idol in the living room, and he is right. That is why I would just assume not have it in my house. The only thing I would really miss is NY Giants football (did you see that they finally won yesterday?)

Any hope I had of becoming one of those crazy one income homeschool fundamentalist families without a television died last February when the above pictured 32" LCD flat screen found its way into our house, complete with 5.1 surround sound. But, you can see that the NY Giants have eyes, noses and mouths with such a television. I hate it because it has a tendency to draw you into hour after hour of mindlessness. Don't get me wrong, I understand that sometimes you need mindlessness. But tv wastes so many hours of life (and countless brain cells, no doubt). Not to mention the effects of tv on "ADHD" - somewhere I read that when children labeled ADHD went a week or two without any screen time, their symptoms disappeared and when the screen was reintroduced, so were the symptoms. And I give credence to this because we have noticed a strong correlation with Jacob. Not to say that a half-hour of tv (or even a full length movie) here and there will cause him to bounce uncontrollably around the room. But if he watches a half-hour or hour every day, he quickly becomes dependant on the tv to entertain him, and his behavior becomes noticeably more unruly.

That's all for now, I need to go figure how to watch one show while recording another since The Office and Grey's Anatomy are on at the same time this week. :)

My Little Boys...

My little boy is growing up! Today he brought home a bunch of stuff from school, including this book - a 120 page choose your own adventure. He threw it on the bed and said "I finished reading that a long time ago." He has always been a reader, but until now the only way he would read "real" chapter books is if I was reading and he was listening.

Gabriel also made a big stride in the reading world today! This was his first reading lesson without the Distar type (which includes long/short vowel signs and blends like th, sh are written more like one letter) Just when I thought he wasn't catching on and we would have to do some review, he took off and finished the lesson like a champ!

So Much to Say

Things have been hectic around here for the last couple of weeks (hence the lack of posts!). Last weekend was the homeschool convention, which Todd and I attended because we will be homeschooling again in the fall. There are lots of reasons that we have decided to bring Jake back home (and keep Gabe home). We have talked about developing a "mission statement" for why we homeschool, but that hasn't been done yet.


We subsribe to the idea of strength based living and believe that everyone learns differently and has different interests. Therefore, a boxed education is the very best that we can offer our children. No one knows their strengths and weaknesses like we do. It is our mission to train up each of our children "in the way he should go" which is a reference to the unique natural bent of each child. Then of course there are issues of morality and world view, which allthough not our primary reason for homeschooling, do play a part in our decision to educate at home.


That being said, the convention was a pretty good time. It renewed our passion and we came away with some great new ideas and vision. There was a woman there doing sessions on homschooling and special education which I found incredibly interesting! Her name is Cyndi Ringoen, and she is a Neurodevelopmentalist. She is of the school of thought that labeling and druging people with learning differences/problems does solve anything, it just makes drug companies rich. At one point in the lecture, she talked about kids who have underdeveloped deep pressure sensitivity - they tend to have bladder control problems, they overstuff their mouths and overeat, they seek out sensory stimulation by touching, grabbing, stepping on things all the time...It was amazing - I wanted to stand up and say "You just described my son!"

She suggested a massage technique to help the brain better recognize deep pressure touch, which if done frequently and regularly will cause the brain to make new connections. She also offers consulting services to families to help them find ways to educate and assist their children. I am going to try the massaging for a while, and if it doesn't help considerably, I'm thinking about scheduling a consult. The organization that she is associated with does have a website www.ican-do.net


One reccurring theme that we heard was that of mercy. Mark Hamby pointed out in one of his sessions that in the Bible, the ratio of God's mercy to God's judgment is somthing like 3 to 1. But we as parents tend to extend judgement to our children more than mercy. The idea of first time obedience is important to instill in toddlers, but as our children grow older we should begin to practice mercy a little more frequently. This goes hand in hand with the idea of letting them fail while they are in a safe place. One quote that has been stuck in my head since the convention is "Sucsess is failure upon failure with great enthusiasim."


The last big thing about the homeschool convention stirs up a whole array of emotions in me... Lew Sterret of Miracle Mountain Ranch (www.sermononthemount.org) was one of the keynote speakers. My sister and brother-in-law have been exploring moving there to go on staff for several months now. Just before the convention, they went to the ranch for a weeklong, working interview. And while we were at the convention, Lew let them know that everything was looking good and "I'll see you in August". It is about a four hour drive, and we are going to miss them like crazy. Things are still not completely in stone since they have to raise support (it is kind of like being a missionary), but I think it is probably where they belong. (The ranch has great summer camp programs too if you know anyone who is looking for one).


And in other news, my mother got married this weekend - and yes he is REALLY old! This picture is my sister, my mother, Nate (the new husband) and Joe (my new brother in law).

Jacob was the ringerbearer, and my niece Rebecca was the flowergirl. My oldest niece, Nicole played the piano as people were coming into the church and she did an awesome job! She has been playing for about 2 years - I taught her until I couldn't sightread her music anymore, and now she has moved on to another teacher. (I haven't read any music since I left Oswego in 2000). Is it just me, or is this picture adorable? Jake and Beccca are only 14 months apart and are sometimes more like brother and sister than cousins.

Aren't they adorable????

I wasn't in the wedding, but I got to light the unity candle with Nate's daughter. (Since when you marry someone who is 84 they don't have parents to light the candle!) Here is my mom pinning the flower on me and trying not to poke me in the boob with the pin!

Gabriel and Cadence had a great time on the dance floor.

And one last picture - I guess no one can ever get a good picture of my grandparents, so my mom was really excited to see that I got a couple of good ones.