Simply Charlotte Mason

I had such an amazing time at the Simply Charlotte Mason conference this past weekend. Sonya Shafer was the speaker and it was wonderful to put a face to her name. I've always respected her and her work, now I was able to see and hear her. What a sweet and knowledgable lady! I have so much that I want to share, now I have to get my thoughts organized and figure out what to share first!

I want to thank my wonderful mother for first finding the conference and then driving 5 hours to attend it with me. Also, she bought all of my Christmas presents in the form of SCM books! Yay! Like I said, I have lots of resources and thoughts to share. But for now you'll have to settle for a few pictures. Until tomorrow...

Jill

Knitting knowledge!

For the past week my daughter (dd7) has been counting down the days until today. Anxiously, and impatiently she's been reminding me that we have a date to the library on Thursday at 10.

See, last week while Man-Man was in his Kindertot class I took the girls to the library. It's a favorite activity or ours and we try to do it as much as possible. We saw a few ladies from our church leaving around the same time we were. They'd previously asked me to join their "Bookworm Stitchers" group after I'd made the comment that I'd always wanted to learn. When they saw us, Mrs. Melanie again told me that I needed to come "learn the art" with them. I laughed, mostly at the thought that I could never get away from all three of my angels every Thursday from 10-12! lol! I told her that if anyone could learn to knit it would be Tink. She's very good with her hands. She loves making potholders with the looms, she loves sculpting out of clay, painting, drawing, and making "God's eye's" with the popsicle sticks and yarn. Tink has ALWAYS wanted to learn to knit. The ladies were delighted and told me to bring her next Thrusday (today) and they'd bring along some smaller needles and extra thread for Tink to learn on.

Oh, the excitment in Tink was almost unbearable. You'd have thought we had just told her we were going to DisneyWorld (which is exactly why our kids DO NOT KNOW of our impending trip to Disney the day after Thanksgiving...they'd never leave us alone! lol!). She's been talking about learning to knit all week and today she finally received her first lesson in knitting.

The group of ladies (all grandmothers or great-grandmothers) meet each week and sit around chatting while making beautiful quilts and other projects. I loved watching my daughter sit and learn from these beautiful and learned ladies. What talent, what a legacy they are! What a blessing for Tink to be taught by them. So, this next week we'll meet at the same place, same time.

Remember, as you're looking for handiworks for your children, that sometimes they can be found right in front of you. There are always ladies or men of an older generation who would be thrilled to teach their craft to a new generation. All too often we're just not interested or we don't take the time to learn. I pray Tink and the rest of my children learn all they can (and I'm hoping that Tink can eventually teach me)!

The family that prays together...

I was stunned the other day when Tink (dd7) looked at me from across the lunch table and said, "Mom, we don't pray enough in our school". Wow! I was stunned. Of course, she was right. We focus all of our school day around learning our Bible story, our Bible versus, our books of the Bible, even our science is Christian. Yet here my daughter hit the nail on the head. We don't actually pray enough. Don't your kids just amaze your sometimes?? It's like the Lord speaks directly through them! I am in awe of some of the spiritual statements or actions that my children have said or done! God truly uses them to teach me daily about His love and His mercy!

I set forth immediately to rectify our little "situation". We designed a "prayer jug" (so named by Tink herself) made from an oatmeal container. I cut out the construction paper and Tink and Man-Man decorated it together. We then taped it to the outside of the prayer jug and cut a slit in the lid. We cut little slips of paper so that at any time of the day the kids can go by and write a prayer request down (or ask someone to help them write a prayer request in the case of Man-man) and slip it into the prayer jug. Each day we have a family prayer time and someone volunteers to pray for each request. This has been amazing and a wonderful addition to our school and our family in general. After all, the main reason that I don't send my children to school is because my kids aren't going to go to a school where our Lord is not allowed. I want to make sure He's in our school each day! Thank you, Tink for reminding me to invite Him in!

Memory of Mercury

We just finished our unit on Mercury today and what fun we've had. We are using Exploring Creation with Astronomy from Apologia science. I must say that I'm very anti-textbook. It's just not the way I want my children to learn information. Yet this has some very Charlotte Mason additions in it and it's written from a Christian perspective. That's a big selling point with me, especially when it comes to astronomy. Rarely will we find school books for our children that teach from a young earth perspective or a God created perspective for that matter. We're loving Apologia's astronomy!

How is it CM? Well, the lessons are broken up into different parts. You can read one part a day or a few parts, it's up to you. Occassionally the writer, Jeanie Fulbright, will ask for the child to summarize what they've learned thus far or tell a story using some of the information learned. There are project to complete such as illustrating the different planets and writing all of the facts the child can remember. I was so impressed with Tink's narration/composition today. She wrote so many facts- it was basically her first report! Here's what she said:

Mercury

Mercury does not have an atmosphere. So rocks from the atmosphere fall into Mercury. Unlike our planet, Mercury travels around the sun in an oval. Mercury is very small. In Mercury, 59 days in our planet is 1 day in Mercury. 88 days in our planet is 1 year in Mercury. Mercury's surface is filled with rocks.

Now I must say that all I did was ask her to write down what she remembered from our two week study. She also drew a beautiful picture of Mercury revolving around the sun. She even drew the sun with sun flares (which we learned about from the sun unit). Needless to say, I was quite pleased. And again, we were able to use her report to work on handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, and language arts in general.

The picture above is of a project that was suggested in the end of the unit. We were talking about the fact that Mercury does not have an atmosphere therefore astroids are always falling into it. We went out and chose a few small pebbles. I filled a bowl with flour and we dropped the pebbles into the flour to show how the surface of Mercury looks. Of course, Tink added that Mercury is a gaseous planet and we could not actually stand on it if we were there. See, she's learning a lot! Mom didn't even remember that one! Now, onto Venus!

Jill

Simply Charlotte Mason

I'm so excited about this upcoming weekend. I just had to share it with everyone. My mom and I are going to be attending a Simply Charlotte Mason conference in Montgomery, AL. Mom stumbled upon the conference date a couple of months ago and I honestly thought that there would be no way for me to be able to go. My in-laws are from Montgomery but I didn't see how I could slip away from home for an entire weekend and go 5 hours away to attend. It turns out that we're visiting the grandparents this weekend anyway and mom and I are blessed to be able to attend! Oh, I can't wait. I'll be sure to share some of the "pearls of wisdom" that I gain. Mom's need times like these, times to rejuvinate, re-energize, and just relax while someone else does all of the work for a while. I pray everyone has a very blessed safe rest of the week! God bless!

Jill

Harvest Festival

Thought I'd share a few pics from our Harvest Festival weekend. I find it hard to believe it's only three weeks now until Thanksgiving!

Weekly Wrap-up

It was a crazy weekend so the weekly wrap-up comes as the next week begins. Oh, well!

Last week was full of momentus occasions. Tink (dd7)is really starting to take off in her writing and spelling. She's always loved to write but recently I've noticed her grammar and spelling coming along quite nicely. She also is trying to loose her first tooth (well, she had two pulled by the dentist but this would be her first to loose by herself). Right now we call her, "Buck-tooth" because the permanent tooth has pushed her baby tooth out into an awkward position. Funny and fitting right here at Halloween.

Man-Man (ds5) began putting letters together this week to form words. He started reading! He's always asking me, "Mommy, what does this spell?" and then spelling whatever word he sees to me. So I realized that we don't need to work on letter sounds much more (he's got that down), he's ready to read. I'm surprised because Tink was a lot older before she was ready. That just shows you that each child is different and wonderful in their own way.

Speaking of doing things sooner than I expected, Princess (dd2) started potty training this past week. She just turned 2 on August 30 so this came as a shock to me. My pediatrician warned me at her 2 year check up that due to the fact that her vocabulary skills are so high she'd probably be potty trained by Christmas. This too, was unexpected. Man-Man was three days away from turning 3 before he was trained, and Tink was 2 1/2. Princess has done quite well. She wears "big girl panties" at home during the day and pull ups for bed and when we're away from the house. I must say that I have to train them in actual underwear because they have NO PROBLEM going to potty in a pull up. I guess it's too much like a diaper. So the panties are out and mom's on call all day!

The weekend was so busy! We had a birthday party on Saturday morning for a dear friend and went straight from that to our local college's homecoming parade. My adopted college student was Homecoming Queen so we had to go cheer her on. We came home to get a little nap in before getting dressed in our costumes for Halloween. Tink went as Padme Amidala from Star Wars (Princess Leia's mom), Man-Man was Batman, and Princess was Strawberry Shortcake. I'll post more pics in the next post. We had so much fun! We always do. The kids have been to this every year since they were born. It's a tradition of ours. We came home and trick-or-treated a little in the neighborhood and then we handed out candy. The kids really had a ball and they especially loved handing the candy out. What a fun day!

Well, I need to begin our week now. God bless everyone in their own homeschool journey!

Jill