Week two

This week is going much smoother.  

Monday: 

We didn't get work done until 9pm.  This sounds bad but we slept in.  We went to get breakfast at almost lunchtime.  We spent three and a half hours at the public pool.  This is the kind of freedom that I was looking for with homeschooling.  I wish that I didn't have to work three days a week, but since I do, class has to be at my office and has to be just a bit less hands on.  Mondays and Fridays though are all about our schedule... or lack of one.  

She got 100% on each of her assignments.

Tuesday:  

We actually got done with all the assignments before lunchtime!  Well, my work day lunchtime, which is actually more like 2 in the afternoon.  And all 100%s again today.  

We started multiplication today.  With the difficulty we had last week with our review of addition/subtraction, I was concerned that starting multiplication was going to be very rough.  She seems to grasp the concept pretty well.  We have already gone over the 0s, 1s, 10s, and started on the 2s.  Only time will tell of course. 

Day Three... or goals and socialization

I have noticed that when you tell people that you are starting to homeschool your child that there are mostly negative reactions.  There is scoffing.  There is the sarcastic way that they tell other people that you are going to homeschool.  There is simple ignoring of what you said.  I had that one last night actually.  I'm not going to say names or relationships but one person told another person that I was homeschooling my daughter and the second person said to me "Oh, so you are getting her ready for next year?" Ya.  Sure.  That's what I'm doing.  Why is it so hard to believe that I am going to teach my child?  It's just third grade.  I don't think for a second that I could teach her high school.  Not even going to try.  I just want to try to give her an advantage for future years.  My goals for homeschooling are:

• standard education comparable to the public education system in our area
• education above the public education system
• gain life experience
• learn to work independently
• limit distractions so she can concentrate on learning... not boys or clothes and makeup
• gain life skills (home ec skills like sewing and cooking)

I know from what I have read online that one of the most common misconstructions about homeschooled children is socialization.  My child is by no means un-socialized.  On days that I work, she attends classes at my office.  She attends church and Awanas on Sundays with her grandparents.  She attends gymnastics (for fun only) once a week.  She will be doing Kiwanis Kids Day Cheerleading in August.  She orders her own food if we go out to eat (both fast food and sit down restaurants)... I know a 19 year old who still doesn't like to do that!  She has two weeks of summer camp and a week of church camp this summer.  She will be on a cruise for her birthday this year and will attend the day camp on ship.  She has friends in our apartment complex.  She has friends in her grandparent's neighborhood.  No one can tell me that my child is not social!  In fact, after having written down all the social interactions that she will be receiving as a homeschooled student, I now realize that I was the unsocialized child that attended public school.  I feel sorry for the next person to ask me if I am worried about her being socialized!

Second day of Third Grade

Don't worry.  I'm not going to do this everyday.

11 am:  This morning has solidified my decision to homeschool my daughter.  In math class this week we are doing a review of addition and subtraction.  She has only been out of second grade for a week, so she should not have lost anything of great importance in that time.  Today's worksheets include addition and subtraction of two digit numbers with carrying and borrowing.  It is still pretty basic.  She stressed out because of this.
Let me give you some background here:  About a month before second grade was done, her class had the MAP test.  Her teacher sent home a practice worksheet for the kids to warm up before the math section the next day.  My husband and I were up until 10 pm trying to teach her how to do the math problems.  (They were the same kind of problems that she is doing today.)  She kept trying to start the problem from the left side and had no concept of borrowing or carrying.  This is how she had been taught in class.  We couldn't even begin to figure out why they were being taught this way.  Common Core (through clenched teeth).  She was finally able to understand what it was that we were teaching her and did well on the test the next day.
She stresses so easily.  She is so smart (and I'm not just being biased) but she panics when she doesn't immediately know or if she is afraid of getting the answer wrong.  Calming her down so that she can realize that she actually does know how to do the work is the hardest part.  For her and for me because I get frustrated at her because she doesn't want to listen until she has calmed down about it.  Sometimes this ends in both of us crying and me feeling very guilty.
Back to why my decision has solidified.  She has completed second grade with almost no ability to add and subtract.  But she is in the top 10% of the second graders at her public school in math scores.  That is insanely frightening.  She is on track.  She is doing great.  These are frightening statements from her teacher last year.  How can a student who is doing that well in the class have so little knowledge about how to actually do the work?  They cannot.  What is worse is what is coming up with third grade in the public school system.  I downloaded the public school curriculum from the school district website.  For the first 9 weeks of third grade in math, they are teaching multiplication AND division.  Then starting the second 9 weeks they move on to something else.  9 weeks is not enough time to teach both multiplication and division.  Especially when the students barely have an understanding of how to add and subtract.  I don't believe that the students in the public schools are going to be ready to move on to that at all.  Let alone get through it at such an accelerated pace!  I really feel sorry for those children.  Of course, only time will tell.

3:30 pm:  Good news everybody!  We finished with school earlier than we did yesterday.  Considering we start our school about 9:30 instead of 8, I would say that we are doing pretty good with the timing.

First day of third grade

2 pm:  Today is the first day of the experiment that is homeschooling third grade.  The first half of the day went well.  We started easy and stayed on task.  There was a break after 3rd period and we have taken a long time getting back into 4th period.  4th is Science.  Each day in Science Kiera must define her new terms, read the passage, and answer the questions about what she read.  This should be easy, but we are having a disagreement about how much she should have to write down.  I have tried to explain to her that third grade marks a new way of schooling.  That there is more serious work even in the public school system.  She doesn't believe me though, and that is part of the problem.  After arguing for nearly an hour with her and trying to explain all this, and when I got to the point that I wanted to cry and rip her book in half at the same time, she finally agreed to write down her definitions.  This however, has taken about 45 minutes for her to write down four words and their meaning.  She is so easily distracted and it is very frustrating.  I don't want to spend all day yelling at her to stay on task, but I'm not sure how to keep her on task.

4 pm:  I am going to lose my mind!  What was I thinking?  She doesn't take me seriously as a teacher.  I don't want to have to yell at her, but keeping her on task is going to give me even more gray hair than I am already getting.  But I won't give up.  Not on the first day.  I think that it will probably take at least two weeks to fall into a routine with the classroom.  
I do worry that I'm going to fail to actually teach her.  How did any of us actually learn in the classroom?  I personally don't remember much of anything that I learned in school.  Oh sure the basics are there but I couldn't tell you what a participle is.  I can't list the U.S. Presidents in order.  I can't tell you all the state capitals.  So how do we learn? And what do we need to learn?  And how bad am I going to screw this up?

Another snow day

40/365
Stuck inside the house again today.  Good thing Kiera has her TagReader to keep her entertained.

Catching snowflakes

38/365

Christmas Train

37/365
Saturday morning on the Children's Christmas Train.  All the proceeds go to charity.  It is about a 40 minute round trip on the Arkansas-Missouri Railroad.  Kiera got to meet Santa and sing songs on the ride.

Atteggiamento

35/365
Atteggiamento means attitude in Italian.

Tossing leaves

32/365

Climbing

28/365
Look at her arms!  She loves to climb trees.  She asked me if we could take this tree home because she wasn't done climbing it.  Thinking maybe its time they start science at school.

Duck in a doughnut

25/365
When I was editing this photo, Kiera was standing beside me... 
Kiera:  What is that?
Me:  It's the top off an acorn.
Kiera:  Oh. (pause)  I thought it was a baby duck inside a doughnut. 

What an imagination... I love it.

On a wall

24/365
When Kiera poses for a photo she has this fake smile that she plasters on her face.  I told her to not smile like that for this photo.  The left was her response to not fake smiling.  So I told her to pretend that I was tickling her... such a ham.

Cheese thief

16/365

Xbox Adventures

15/365
Kiera has an Xbox Kinect with one lonely game... but she loves it.  She plays it on my husband's projector so it is always dark in the room and she gets in the way of the screen sometimes.  She doesn't mind it though.  Here she was jumping to make her raft jump.  Love that there are kids video games that make them exercise while they play... that's a sneaky mom thing.

Homework

14/365
Spelling words.

Cowgirl

13/365
My darling cowgirl riding a horse named Kisses.  She was only being led because this horse is one of the most stubborn animals alive and wouldn't budge for her using the reins.

Play-Doh

5/365

Sunday Scavenger Hunt

It has been a long while since I participated in the scavenger hunt.  This week was a good one though since, because of Halloween and a field trip with my daughter's school, I had been taking a lot of photos anyways.  This week I did not get too artistic with my editing... in fact many barely have anything at all done to them.  I hope that you enjoy them anyways.  Let's get started...

Dress Up

Of course I had to use a photo of my beautiful daughter in her costume for dress up.  This year she was a pumpkin witch.  I made part of her costume this year... don't get too excited it was just the tutu part of the skirt.  In the photo it is a little messed up because she was doing cartwheels in the front yard.

Candy

When I was a little girl, almost every house handed out candy and there were hundreds of kids on every street.  While taking my daughter around our neighborhood, we were able to trick or treat about 10 houses... certainly no more than 15... and I would say that there were no more than 30 kids total that we passed.  I find it sad that my daughter will never know what Halloween was when I was a kid.  Kids nowadays miss out on so much.  
Anyways... Candy.  She did get plenty of it and some good stuff too... not just tootsie rolls and bubble gum.

Pumpkin

This is obviously just a snapshot with no pre-planning involved.  The lighting is terrible and I was looking down at her.  Her Kindergarten class had a field trip to a corn maze/pumpkin patch last Friday and I went to help.  Just before they left they all got a mini pumpkin to take home.

Spooky

Ever since I saw the movie "The Birds" many years ago, it always creeps me out when I see large gatherings of birds.  Flocks like this have been gathering on these particular telephone lines for weeks now.  I wasn't really thinking prompt when I snapped this photo obviously taken from inside my truck but I couldn't think of any better photo to use for spooky.

Orange

 The peak of color in my area was this past week and we had some of the most beautiful orange, red, and yellows.  I love fall.

Quiet time with a story book

2/365

August according to my phone

Continuing the monthly instragram sized look back of random stuff that I took photos of on my phone, I realized that August was a busy month!  It started out slow with some randomness and lots of rain and clouds.  It ended with Kiera starting Kindergarten, two fairs, and a birthday party.  Of course there was plenty in between.