Park fun, Museum fun, Computers

Usually we head to a park for P.E., and we do a good chunk of structured activity, and then I let them run around on the playground for a while. No big whoop, but one day I was able to take this picture

and that was a big whoop. It was big because Josh got about 7/8ths of the way up there and then started to panic about the transfer from ladder to crow's nest. And, get this, I encouraged him and he actually listened to me and did it! That's huge. It's kind of rare for my kids to trust me like that. Or, at least, it feels like it. Anyway, he got up there and gave me the sweetest thank-you for the encouragement. Totally made my day, but mostly I was proud of him for trusting not only me but himself to do something challenging.

The first Saturday of September, we made an impromptu decision to go to the L.A. Natural History Museum. And then we figured, as long as we were there, why not become members and use it to our homeschooling advantage? The only small hiccup in our day was that it just happened to be opening day of USC football (and the museum is pretty much smack on campus), so that made parking exciting, but we got there eventually.

And so did the Goodyear Blimp.

I haven't been there in AGES. They've really gussied the place up, most notably the area around the front entrance. It's really gorgeous.

The kids hammed it up while we waited for Daddy to finish signing up.

We spent a good chunk of time there. Favorite exhibits were the butterflies, the dinos, and the bugs.

Surprisingly, though, we ended up spending the most time (I think - at least it seemed that way) in the Minerals and Gems area. Too dark for any good photos, but the kids had a blast checking out all the colors and designs and hunting down their birthstones.

Matt has begun his Computer Science unit with the boys. OH MAN are they excited! He'll keep it pretty basic with Josh and Joseph, but with Ben he's doing more with programming. Although, he's gotten them all started on Kodu, and boy do they love that!

The first thing he did with them, though, was grab an old computer out of the garage (of course we have some of those, Matt's a computer guy!) and crack it open to explain the innards to the boys.

Kelly was also very excited to learn.

Joseph spent most of the lesson hugging a hard drive. Yeah, I don't know, either.

Josh just mostly wanted his picture taken with Computer Part. Ben was fascinated by the heat marks on the case.

This made total sense at the time.

Go figure, Ben is eating up the programming lessons. Can't wait for the time I get to call him over every other day to come program my house or fix my holographs or whatever.

Do you feel a breeze?

There it is - whoooooooop the passage of time! Dang! But we've had lots of good in the past few weeks.

Looking back, I'm pretty horrified at how much I haven't blogged. So many things that I thought "I'm SO blogging this" and then didn't, but I had thought about it enough that I was sure I had blogged it. DANG! Now I need to look back and do highlights. Let me go get my USB cable so I can start getting some photos in here from my phone. Be right back, you guys. Don't go anywhere.

Dang, there's a lot. I'll start with Day 3, because I LOVED Day 3.

We went to Simi's "Duck Park" because I remembered from my childhood that they had ball diamonds there, so it seemed like it would be a fun place to practice throwing & catching with a baseball.

Ah, the march of time.

The city has "upgraded" the ball diamonds to super snooty FENCED & LOCKED areas for league play only. NICE. Provided a couple of fun experiences, though: we lost a ball over a fence (since we decided to practice in the lawn right next to it), which is a pretty classic childhood experience, right? And that led to the next bit of fun - Josh & Joseph making their first attempt at fence-hopping. I did it all the time when I was a kid, but my feet are too big to get me enough traction on fences anymore (same for Ben). They put in some valiant efforts, but decided not to go all the way since the best places for climbing had cement in the landing zone. Not the best for first-timers.

So we put in some good exercise time, then went and fed the ducks, which got pretty hilarious pretty fast.

Yay, let's feed the ducks!

RETREAT!!!

As soon as the free food came out, we got swarmed. Josh was in heaven, since it was so very much like a horror movie. He can't wait to go back armed with a loaf and a video camera. My little Alfred Hitchcock.

When we left, the boys asked if we could walk ALL the way around the baseball fence to see if there were any openings so we could get our poor little ball. There were none, but I felt it a good opportunity to point out that they were walking... by a graveyard MWAHAHAHAHAAAA! Which they could hardly believe, but right across the wall from the ball diamond is Simi Valley Public Cemetery. Oooh, they wanted to see that! And I thought, why not? Isn't that exactly one of the much-looked-forward-to benefits of homeschool? The freedom to pursue educational whimsies? So we went, and we walked through the section with the oldest graves, and it was fascinating and we all loved it. Cool little mini-history lesson. With some Spanish and math thrown in. Plus, the boys had a dentist appointment later that day, and their dentist is over in Chatsworth which is where my dad is buried. So we stopped by there, too. Found his grave, impressed the kids with his military cred and angel Moroni on the marker. :) Got to tell them stories about the grampa they never got to know. It was a pretty sweet experience.

Few individual days since then stand out as clearly, so I'll hit some highlights.

Here's some small indication of the mess from the art lesson on Burnout Monday:

Twelve tiny cups of paint, yay.

I love that we have our own color wheel that we made, though. And we learned about warm and cool colors and did a fun project to highlight that. I got the idea at this website, and the template is very handy to have around. Here's one of the finished projects (mine, sorry):

Math continues to be an interesting challenge. Ben blasted right through his 6th grade workbook, and I have deemed the 7th and 8th grade books from Spectrum useless in his case. SO much emphasis on basic arithmetic, which he already does for funsies in his spare time. Matt found a great self-teaching algrebra textbook; so today I got him going on that.

Josh just plain hates old-fashioned left-brain math, so he continues to struggle. I found some good resources, though, and I'm going to order some special flashcards for him. They incorporate pictures and story to make it easier for Captain Right-Brain to give them room in his head.

Joseph just plain hates grunt-work. Letting him do math on a whiteboard instead of his workbook tends to help quite a bit.

P.E. has been a surprising delight. We're not a sports family. But dang if the boys and I can't each hit a baseball (as long as it's pitched slow, underhand, and from a short distance). The four of us have found a favorite ball diamond on the east end of town (Santa Susana Park), that's league-quality and in a beautiful setting, but also open to the unwashed masses. We rotate the boys through the positions of batter, catcher, and 1st Base while I pitch. Once they've each hit a fair ball and made a run for 1st, they each take turns pitching for me.

The ball diamond is surrounded by gorgeous rock formations and cliffs.

Before every pitch, I ask the kids "Listo?" "Are you ready?" Joseph loves to sort of digs his toes into the dirt and give me a fierce look and say "You know I am" in a dead serious voice that just about kills me.

Well, I have about 10 minutes to get ready for my 2 hours of students and CRAP I just remembered that I never put dinner in the crock pot! CRAP CRAP CRAP!

Dear Matt's Work Bonus,

I'm sorry, but I have to use you for take-out tonight, because I am lame. Please forgive me.

Love,
Amy

Anyway, my point is I can't finish this post right now. Coming soon: park fun, museum fun, science, Spanish, more changes in how we're doing English, church history, more art, life skills learned, U.S. history silliness, and bread baking. Geez, I wonder if I'll finish this month, much less today.

Doing better!

Okay, so I learned some things from my burnout.

The first is that even on my worst, most stress-filled day, I can still feel tender mercies from a loving Heavenly Father. That is a tremendous gift, and not one that I've been able to have at all points in my life, so I'm extremely grateful. I had moments of feeling successful, even a few small bright spots of joy, and I never once degraded all the way down to "this is a failure, and it's time to send the kids back to school." And then my sister came over and watched the boys so I could leave the house for a short bookstore/milkshake run with my hubby, which was massively healing.

Also, I got a couple of awesome Spanish resources for half price. Thank you, poor management of Borders!

The second thing I learned is that I cannot afford to skip my "homeschool prep" time. My past experience with teaching has been with church, which either doesn't require much prep time, or happened infrequently enough that I had weeks of dedicated prep time for a one-shot lesson, and with music, which I know well enough that I CAN get through a lesson even if I haven't prepped for it

U.S. History, not so much. Science... definitely not.

The third thing I learned is that all the prep time in the world might not help. Monday was our first Art lesson. I probably put more prep time into that than anything else so far, mainly because FUN! And while it was indeed a fun lesson, it also didn't go hardly anything at all like I had planned, and it was messy and exhausting and it didn't go hardly anything like I had planned, you guys! Today, I could handle that just fine. On Burnout Monday, it was just one more.... something that makes a clever metaphor for "it sucked."

The fourth thing I learned is that chilling out is so incredibly beneficial. Mini-date helped enormously. By Tuesday morning, all the stress was back again. Mainly because I was facing a day full of subjects I hadn't prepared for and couldn't fake my way through. So my morning journaling went abnormally long while I ranted and raved and eventually came to the decision that I would make Tuesday a half day - I would spend the morning pulling my act together, and the afternoon doing the two subjects I was prepared for, and we would make up the other half a day sometime over the long weekend. Go to a museum or something.

It's hard to decribe the relief I felt when I came to that decision. It started off in my journal as a sort of "I wish I could do that without ruining my children and homeschooling forever" and then became a reality as I looked at it in black and white and realized it totally wouldn't do that. In fact, it would be more beneficial than not.

And it was.

So Tuesday put out the fire that caused the burnout, and I've rebuilt from there. In fact, Wednesday ended up being a really good day, homeschool-wise. Used one of my new Spanish resources with great success (learning Spanish from movies we own), too.

Today's a bust because a dental extraction will put my youngest in a non-learning state for the majority of the day. And today, that's okay. I can handle it. Actually, it just means more prep time, so yay!

I've had two other breakthroughs that have nothing to do with "poor me," but everything to do with school.

1) Scheduling. My pretty pretty psychotic-looking daily schedule has changed up a bit. I had tucked in just way too much variation to actually work for us. So the days are a bit more consistent for now, and that seems to work better.

2) Rotations. The two subjects that I have workbooks for - English and Math - are just too dry for the kids if all they get to do is spend an hour with a workbook. So I've broken up those two hours into 20-minute Station Rotations.

For Math, the Stations are Workbooks, Computer, and One-on-one with Mommy Time. That way I have a chance to go over what they've done and what they're learning next in whatever way works best for each kid (they're all such different learners!). And there are endless fun resources for math online; all I have to do is find a game that fits what they're doing and email it to them.

I couldn't find anything for Ben, though, so I made my own. And while it was a fun project and Ben enjoyed it, it was WAY too time-consuming to put together for regular use. I may do it again at the end of the year, though, for all the boys.

What's that you say? My double chin is completely oversahdowed by my fabulous hair and shining smile? Why, thank you!

Anyway, English works similarly, although we have three workbooks to work with, so usually the rotations will be one workbook, then another, then one-on-one time with me.

And now, time to take a very nervous child for an extraction! YAY MOTHERHOOD!