Antidote to February

Goodness we've been busy! I know, familiar refrain, right?

We've been home for a couple of days and jumped right back into academics, but for now, please enjoy this antidote to the February "blahs."

How many synonyms for beautiful can you think of? :-)

This was my first time to take a vacation somewhere warm during the winter. I could definitely get used to it!

My kids are now thoroughly in love with Hawaii. I loved the flowers and birds, they loved the beaches, the food and the relaxed pace!

Of course, we all loved the sunshine and warm breezes. (Especially since we came home to over a foot of snow in our yard!)

The orchids above were so cute--I thought they looked like they were doing jumping jacks!

You know I love anything yellow. I was excited to discover that there are yellow orchids! Aren't they lovely?

Remember Frederick, that wonderful book by Leo Leoni? Frederick the mouse stores up his memories of summer to share with his friends over the long, dark winter.

I'm feeling just a bit like Frederick since we got home from vacation! If February tries to get me down, I'll light my coco-mango candle, look at my photos, and dream of warmer days.

Hope you are staying warm and looking forward to a lovely spring!

Wordless Whateverday

See You in a Few

Yeah...won't be posting much for a little while...

There is nothing like a book...

Happy New Year!

Getting caught up here at the Super-Awesome School. Or at least as "caught-up" as we will ever be! We've got lots of projects going on, including rearranging furniture, cleaning out kids' rooms and closets, and putting away the Christmas tree and decorations.

What's new? Well, both kiddos are starting 2012 as purple belts! Yup, they passed their karate exams and got bright, shiny purple belts along with new black gis. Good thing, too, because they were outgrowing their white ones.

We are trying something new in math and I like it a lot. The books are called Verbal Fractions and Verbal Percents by Michael Levin and Charan Langton ($2.99 on Kindle!) We are supposed to be tackling percents this month, but it was clear that we needed a teeny bit of fraction review so we're working our way through Verbal Fractions first. We just sit down somewhere comfortable with a cup of tea, I give the kids some scratch paper (which they barely use) and they take turns answering the questions. Couldn't be simpler and they enjoy it.

We usually follow up with some Daily Puzzlers from Laura Candler. I made a Daily Puzzler box, and the kids each draw 3 or 4 to solve. We're almost through Book B, which was a little easy for them, but I'm glad they got their feet wet before moving on to Book C. My philosophy: a little review never hurts!

Over the break I read a book by Robin Padron called How to Homeschool Math--Even if you Hate Fractions! Well, I don't actually hate fractions, but I did find the book extremely helpful. (I actually read it on my Kindle while walking on the treadmill--New Year's resolutions, you know!)

We are officially a month "behind" according the plans I made last summer, but I kind of expected that. Our world religions unit study was supposed to begin in November and culminate just before the holiday break. We started it January 2. So what? We are all enjoying it. Lots of good reading, and as many hands-on projects as I can find, including this Yin and Yang pony bead keychain from MakingFriends.com.

We're reading The Story of Religion by Betsy and Giulio Maestro, with frequent pauses as we supplement with various library books about the different religions and philosophies. So far the kids have really enjoyed The Legend of Lao Tzu and the Tao te Ching by Demi and Confucius: The Golden Rule by Russell Freedman and Frederic Clement.

As you may already know, we have a particular interest in how Asian philosophies have influenced history! We hope to start a fun unit study on South Korea soon, probably next month. This year I'm still working on those perfectionist tendencies that keep me from starting a project until it is perfectly planned and perfectly ready. I'm learning to just jump in! :-)

Let's see...what else? Oh, I did let Dude take a "piano break" and join his sister's guitar class. I was afraid he would start hating music altogether if I forced him to stay in piano. So far he has been extremely motivated, partly because he wants to catch up with the class, and partly because he wants to show me that changing instruments was a good decision!

And the coolest part: I'm taking piano now! Since Dude changed instruments, the piano teacher had an empty time slot and I asked if I could take it! I remembered more than I thought I would (it's been, what, 25 years?) and I'm having a blast!

Hope your new year is off to a great start!
Wishing you health and happiness in 2012!

Last Day Before Vacation

Today was our last day of "school" before a fun winter break!

We finished our geography study with Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling C. Holling. I took these photos before the maps were fully colored in--I should have waited because they look even more awesome now!

We read a couple more chapters of Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes together, and then we went for a SWIM!

Hope you had a great day!

A Super-Awesome week so far...

We are staying busy indoors while it's COLD outdoors!

We started our week by decorating our little classroom tree. It's blue! This photo makes it look like we pulled a charred branch out of the fire pit, but the tree is actually a very pretty shade of blue. (Maybe that pale, snowy light coming from the window messed up the color...???)

We enjoyed listening to this CD that I picked up on our trip to New Mexico. Robert Mirabal is an award-winning flute maker and musician.

We had some interesting discussions based on our "That's Debatable!" questions. This one was, "Trucking companies should have to pay higher taxes because they damage roads and pollute the air."

The kids quickly discovered that situations like these are complex and black/white/right/wrong thinking just doesn't work!

We played a few rounds of Animal Classification Go Fish. (I saved this wonderful felt gift bag from my birthday...I knew it would be perfect for something!)

These cards are yet another awesome Pinterest find. It was fun to hear the kids say, "Hey, I didn't know these animals were related!"

After playing the classification game, we compared reptiles and amphibians.

It's amazing how a few Angry Birds stickers can turn practicing fact families into a "game." I'm thinking of making some kind of bean bag toss for this to add a kinesthetic element.

Speaking of games, pop and potato chips make every game more fun! This is Three-in-a-Row from Lakeshore Learning. The kids found it to be way too easy (I guess they know their division facts better than I realized) so they changed it to "Five-in-a-Row." (And they tried placing their discs on the board tiddlywinks style. Which led to a lot of mayhem and lots of discs all over the classroom floor.)

We practiced spelling with a fun idea from Pinterest. For some reason, I can't find the specific post, but the original idea came from Hello Literacy. Anything to get Dude to practice those spelling words!

Here is my Spelling Stamps tub.

And here are the instructions. Really working on the "put it back after use" rule around here!

We also reviewed how to add -ing to words that end in -e. I had noticed a few errors in the kids' writing and wanted to give them some hands-on practice with this. I just wrote each letter of the word on Post-it Notes. The kids yanked away the -e and slapped down an -ing.

This is our Daily Puzzler box. I found the cute winter box in the dollar section of Target. I'm using Laura Candler's Daily Math Puzzlers for this activity.

The kids pick one and we work them together on the white board. After we solve the problem, the kids get to write "SOLVED" or "BTDT" or something similar in big red letters on the card. So satisfying!

This is our Quiz Bowl. (The polar bear container is from Dollar Tree.) As we move through our week, I'm jotting down questions about what we have learned. On Friday, the kids will pull questions out and answer them.

This is way more fun than an actual test! Plus I can keep the questions in the bowl for as long as necessary, or save them for a review later.

We spotted this garter snake in our flower bed. He was trying to soak up a few rays between snowstorms.

Remember our pale, dinky amaryllis? Just one week of TLC and it's almost 6 inches tall!

Hope you're having a great week, too!

It's Cran-Tastic!

We finally finished our cranberry study today! Of course I had planned to do this with the kids before Thanksgiving, but never had time to do all the activities. I thought it looked like a lot of fun when I read about it at Almost Unschoolers, and I didn't want to abandon the idea...

First we opened our cranberries crosswise and lengthwise to compare the patterns inside.

Look how teeny tiny the seeds are! They fit inside the pattern on the paper towel!

We watched an interesting video about cranberries here. (And we got a kick out of the way the British narrator pronounces cranberries.)

We predicted that the cranberries would float due to the little air pockets inside. We floated a few cranberries in water, then discussed how cranberries are harvested.

I made a very thin cranberry slice and put it on a microscope slide.

I can't believe this almost kind of worked! I didn't know I could take a picture through the microscope lens. The focus isn't the best, but still, it's cool.

I had made cranberry juice the night before by soaking about a cup of cranberries in very hot water. (I poured boiling water over them and when that didn't release much color, I microwaved them for a minute.)

So here we have plain white vinegar, orange juice (we were out of lemons,) baking soda and baking powder. The kids remembered the basics of acids and bases. They both predicted that cranberry juice would be acidic, but weren't sure why...it just seemed like it would be.

Their suspicions were confirmed when the vinegar and the orange juice didn't do anything. But look what happened when we dropped in some baking soda!

Then the baking powder...

It floated on top at first, so the kids got impatient and decided to stir it. Then it got foamy and turned deep purplish-blue.

We really enjoyed our cranberry study--thanks to Almost Unschooling Mom for a fun idea!

P.S. A million points if you get the title reference!