Emily's Essay

Emily had to write an essay for school. It was supposed to be a descriptive paragraph about her experience with language. She chose to write about when she uses language to tell Allison bed time stories. I enjoyed it so much I thought I would share it.

When Allison Goes to Bed

by Emily Paulson

When Allison, my little sister, goes to bed, sometimes she will ask if I can read a story to her. But when I tell her a story it is not out of a book. I always imagine things in my head and form it into a story.

Allison is a very good listener. When I tell her when something bad happens in the story she always gets a worried face! That is how I tell that she is listening. Sometimes my other sisters even like listening to my stories.

But when my story is over it is time for Allison to go to bed. I tuck her in and give her a kiss and hug. Sometimes she wants me to tell her another story, but I tell her that we have a lot of nights left for story telling time.

Emily's Poem

When you go outside there's a touch of breeze,
But it is not winter so you will not freeze.
The birds sing a lovely song,
It makes you want to sing along.
The bees are out, forget the sting,
That means it must be spring.

Emily Paulson 6-1-09

Can't forget the other two...

Of course, seeing her sisters have their pictures taken with their projects, Allison wanted her turn so here she is with here bear. Lydia is just busy playing with all her little toys. This is what she spends most of her day doing. It reminds me of those if you give a pig a pancake books, if you take a kids picture, the other sister will want a picture, too. And if you take the other sisters picture, you had better take another sisters picture...

More Creations

Sophia painted a mini pumpkin.

Grace's name picture made with oil pastels.

Emily's Name picture made with oil pastels.

Brooke had a project today to help someone in need and then write an essay on it. So when Grandma Linda called and asked if the girls would come and help get apples peeled and ready to freeze, it was the perfect opportunity for her to help out! So the three oldest went up to Linda's for the afternoon and worked on apple crisp filling. Then Brooke baked up an apple crisp to bring over to our neighbor who had provided the apples and isn't feeling very well.

Emily And Grace's Creations

Emily's Unicorn

Grace's Bear

Emily's Nutcracker

Grace's/Emily's

Grace's/Emily's

Finally posting those paintings I said the girls had been so busy working on. The big painting phase must be over now though because they haven't been painting like this lately. I sure have enjoyed the beautiful pictures. I was just informed as they are watching me type that they "haven't got the time". Hopefully that will change sometime here!

Sophia And Allison's Creations

This is one of Sophia's first real people pictures. I just love the bright colors.

These are the fall trees that Sophia and Allison made at storytime at the library.

Last Friday Sophia and Allison made scarecrows at storytime.

This is Sophia's newest drawing of me today. I now have eyelashes!

Here I am with lipstick and a pretty dress.

What we've been doing...

Brooke: Overwhelmed...that about sums it up. I was a bit relieved to hear from another homeschool mom that her daughter is feeling very overwhelmed with her freshman year, too. It seems like Brooke is constantly doing her school work. She is also spending a lot of time at the high school for drama. Her classes are much harder this year and besides the four basic classes, she is taking home ec. and phy ed. Phy Ed is an online class that consists of weekly lessons, quizzes, and logging three hours of exercise a week. Home Ec requires a lot of projects beyond the daily work, quizzes, and tests. So her housecleaning job is on hold for now and so is any babysitting. Oh and violin practice is almost nonexistent. Her drama meet is the first week of November and I hope that after that is over things will get easier.

Emily: School is going good for Emily right now. We had a tough time for a bit there with failing quizzes and tests. Josh has helped her with some of her studying and note taking and it has helped. She still retakes a lot of quizzes, but I think she is finally getting what she is supposed to study. She is really enjoying her history right now. She is learning about the thirteen colonies.

Grace: School is pretty much a piece of cake for Grace this year. I think I probably could have started her in the middle of third grade. But it is so nice to see her like doing her school. She is getting great grades and she feels so good about it. I was just thinking the other day how nice it is to see her happy about school. What a relief. Another homeschool mom made a good point the other day that she has never heard anyone regret holding a student back, but many that regret not holding them back.

Sophia: We are almost done with our capital letters workbook! I am so excited about that. Then it is on to the lowercase letters workbook. Not bad considering I'm lucky to work with her twice a week on her letters. But I have been really dedicated to reading for twenty minutes a day to Sophia and Allison, five days a week that is. They just love it. Sophia's favorite book right now is called "My New Toy" and it is so funny! It is great to hear her in her room at rest time"reading" it out loud. We have made it to all but one storytime I think. That is our Friday outing. I guess sophia has been busy lately drawing people. They are so cute. I'll have to see if I can get a picture and put it up here.

Allison: Not doing much with Allison, other than the reading aloud to her and Sophia. Allison loves storytime at the library. She actually loves anything that consists of leaving the house! Potty training is still a work in progress here, but it does seem to be getting better. She is back in whining and screaming mode again. Oh and crying and screaming at bed time. I really need to get on top of that again. It sure makes bedtime miserable!

Lydia: I swear this baby gets cuter every day. I am just so in love with her. Even when she is crying it is so cute. Oh, she just has been melting my heart these last couple days. Being so cute and funny. She is rolling all over the living room and getting so close to crawling. It won't be long. She is finally eating food now, both baby food and table food. She loves graham crackers and bread.

Fire Safety Week

Our neighbor is the fire chief and he is nice enough to remember us during fire prevention week every year. He stops in with hats and coloring pages for the kids and answers any questions they have about fire safety. I think I do most of the question asking though. I was quite surprised at how much Em and Grace had forgotten since the last year. Sophia really took an interest and kept asking if there was a fire here how would we get out and here and here. She also liked learning the stop, drop, and roll drill. The embarasssing thing for me was that last year I believe I promised to fix our fire alarm situation. I about died when we checked them and I realized that NOT ONE alarm in the house was working. That is so scary! Well, I will be ready for him to come back next year. We are now set with working fire alarms, a carbon monoxide detector, and a fire extinquisher. Let's just pray we never need to use them!

Swimming

I really want to post some pictures of what Emily and Grace have been painting, but maybe I will get a chance tomorrow. So anyway, today was open swim for the homeschoolers. At the beginning of the week I told the girls that if they got all of their Thursday work done, that we could go to swimming on Thursday. Grace managed to get her school done. Brooke would have been able to finish this morning. But Emily was just overloaded. By bedtime last night, she still had to finish taking notes on Science and had a History quiz to attempt again for the THIRD time. And that was still Wednesday's school. I didn't have anyone to watch Allison, which would have made swimming difficult. I mean, I'm not big into everything having to be fair all of the time, because I am rather mean, but I just couldn't see letting everyone else swim and making her stand there and watch for an hour. So as of last night I decided we just couldn't go. So this morning (I woke up to the smell of pancakes made by Brooke, by the way!) I thought I would let Grace bake cookies to make up for not going swimming since she had worked ahead. All was well. But then I remembered that I needed to get dog food and a prescription refilled so I decided we would go swimming. I was going to take Brooke up on her offer to stay home with Sophia and Allison and let Em and Grace go swimming. So into the shower because we leave in an hour. Okay, so out of the shower and I discover Emily and Grace haven't even made their beds yet. After a more critical look at things, they hadn't done a very good job on their other chores either. So as much as I didn't want to, I told them no swimming. Tears. Guilt. Alright, meeting in the living room. After a big discussion and some added chores, we are once again going swimming. Maybe I am getting soft, I don't know. In then end things went as scheduled. Emily and Grace made it just in time for swimming and had so much fun swimming with their friends. I was able to visit with some moms I haven't seen in so long and even meet some new homeschooling moms. Of course my favorite part in being around other homeschool moms is that I can bring up something I am struggling with in our schooling and someone always seems to have some idea to try that I just can't seem to think of myself. So, I left with new ideas on how to help Emily with her quizzes and tests. Some things are so obvious, I don't know why it take someone else saying it for me to see the answers. In the end I was glad I decided to go. Of course by the time I got out of Wal Mart (Remember the starving dog?) Emily and Grace were arguing again and all of their promises of good behavior were forgotten. And now as I sit here tonight I don't even remember what chores they promised me they would do! Oh well, so it goes. Atleast we came home to fresh baked chocolate chip cookies! Doesn't that just make everything okay?

We Started!

School has started. Somehow we managed to be up and going with all the computers ready for our starting date. So now we are two and a half weeks in. As you can tell, Brooke has not blogged yet. Oh well. The ringer is off, though. That was the best idea I have had. I seem to get a couple journal topics in a week for Emily and Grace. It is really fun to read what they have to say on things. The first two weeks I was dedicated to spending time everyday with Sophia doing preschool things. This week hasn't gone so well on that. But I am hoping I will get back on track with that. She just loves to do school work. So much right now is dependent on how well Lydia is sleeping. When we have a good night it is easy to get up at 7:00 and keep on our schedule. However, that doesn't seem to happen very often. Many days it seems I am not up until 9:00. Thankfully the kids manage to get going on time so they don't get behind on their school. It is really hard for me though to start my day late. I feel like I am behind all day long. And of course that leads to a crabby overwhelmed mom. :) But I like to remain positive that it will get better, that Lydia will start sleeping through the night, and someday my schedule will be successful!

Some of the fun things we have done:

We took a field trip to the running track in Sidney and did a timed mile. Brooke needed to do one for her Fitness Fundamentals class. Brooke, Emily, Grace, and I all did a timed mile. It is crushing to my ego that I am running fairly consistently and Brooke doesn't exercise at all and she was only 10 seconds slower than me in the mile. Oh that hurts! Brooke and I also got our body fat measured. Obviously I am not going to post that on here! Let's just say there is work to be done, and oh how I miss those younger years! The only other fun school thing I think is that the bookmobile comes almost right to our front door now! That is really nice. Sophia and Allison just love going to pick out books there.

Brooke: I just love Alpha Omega Academy! Brooke is getting used to new classes and new teachers. Things seem to be going well so far. There is some difficulty with new teachers and understanding what they expect of her. But she is adjusting. Most days she is done with her school by noon and has plenty of time to work on her assigned projects. I know as the year goes on, the work load will get harder, but it is nice to have a slow, easy start to get her used to it.

Emily: Fifth grade is going good for Emily. The hardest thing for her right now is learning how to take notes in History and Science. It is very time consuming for her. But something has to be done because she has such a difficult time with her quizzes. Emily probably spends the most time of all the girls doing her schoolwork. Someday it seems to take all day for her to finish. Thank goodness she is not a complainer. She just sits and works until she is done.

Grace: We decided this year that Grace should do third grade again. She has struggled so much with school. It seemed that if we were going to do it, now was the time. Now she is redoing it and getting such good grades that I wonder if we should have moved her up! But, I know it will get more difficult for her as we get into the year more. It is very good for her ego right now to be doing so well. I think she needs that confidence booster. As Josh said, it is better to have a third grader that feels really smart than a fourth grader that feels, well, we'll just say "not smart".

Sophia: Sophia is working on learning how to write her capital letters in a workbook right now. Then I have a lower case letters workbook after that and am hoping to get to the preschool workbook this year. We are also doing Pre-Math-It. That is basically just dominoes. Right now we just match up the squares and are learning about zero.

Allison: I am trying to do some reading with Allison. She also helps Sophia and I with the Pre-Math-It. Her favorite though is at the end when I line up the dominoes and she gets to knock them over.

Lydia: She is sitting up now! We've been working on clapping, waving bye-bye, signing milk, and of course saying ma-ma.

So that is what is happening right now in our homeschool. The journey continues...

School Is Starting!

Well, school is set to start on Monday. But here I sit with just one computer ready. Grace is all set to start school. But Brooke and Emily's computers are still getting fixed up at Radio Shack. They are waiting for some more memory to come in for one of them. I am really praying that I get them by Friday or there is no way we can start school on Monday. Why in the world would I wait until two weeks before school starts to take in their computers??? Even getting them by Friday doesn't mean I will get them up and running by Monday. If I have any problems at all I will not be able to reach customer support until Monday. UGH!

Okay, so anyway, I am looking forward to starting and getting back on schedule. I always start the year with such high hopes. I have the perfect, organized schedule for our days. I plan on turning the ringer off during school hours this year. We will see how that goes! I also have high hopes for all the extras I want to get done on top of the basic school. I would love to have the girls journal atleast a few times during the week. I have a computer music theory program that Emily and Brooke really should do. Math Blaster is my new program to help Emily and Grace with their math facts. That one will be easy since I've already installed it and I can hardly keep them away from it. Then there is typing, and teaching Emily how to email. Brooke is supposed to blog about our homeschool on here once a week. That one I really hope we stick to!

So with that all said, I am going to turn this blog over to Brooke to run. I hope to also get on here once in a while with updates on our schooling!