w00t! New classroom!

First, we had lunch at Mortony's. Kelsey would tell you they have the cheesiest Mac n' Cheese.

What I will tell you is it feels like the love child of Panera and Olive Garden or Macaroni Grill. The decor is mostly Panera, but the music was Celine Dion. It was a strange marriage of genres to say the least. 

Kelsey working on her sums of 10, on our new chalkboard!!! (Special shout out to my stepmom for snagging that enormous piece of awesomeness!)

Keira with her science project. It was a mobile based on these two Pinterest ideas: 

leaves

mobile

A closer look.

Kelsey's version for her Botanist Notebook.

So I moved my classroom into the old playroom. We just needed more space. I love it!

Keira's computer, our silly globe, my hanging word wall, ect.

Their desks, and mine. You can see how brilliant I am since only bright white lights illuminate from wherever I have been....... Of course it could also just be the light from the window.

Our word families hundred chart, ect.

How well I know this experience!

This is so close to how I felt. I knew I couldn't be alone, but considering this story is from CNN I guess I am actually in a group of people that continues to grow.

I can see the home stretch from here!

We are finishing up packet 5 this week and next. There are only 2 packets left!

It feels not so long ago that I embarked for crazy-town, and now we are joyfully living in it, and I couldn't be happier. It does not happen often that you get confirmation that you made the right decision, and I thank God for the fact that this has been one of those events where I can say truly, beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was the right choice for us. We have been trucking along, and it has been hard work, but worth every minute. Now for some of our recent work:

Sooooo, lots of new things. The girls got hair cuts!

Special thanks to one Mr. Roger Schneider, a science teacher in New Jersey, and long time friend of mine for helping us determine our energy chain. (and a special shout -out to facebook for allowing me to reach out for help when necessary. This is a very basic energy chain, as I am told it can get incredibly complicated and traced back to the big bang theory, in the end this is what we came up with - a first grade version)

We started a poster this packet to really dive into reading comprehension and components of stories. She loves reading "Junie B. Jones" so I thought this might be more fun than the dry stories of Sing Spell Read and Write. We still read those and do some comprehension on them, but this was more fun. What you see here is setting, main character, and the problem or conflict, that she is working on.

Here she is reading her SSRW. That silly monster finger is something her old teacher gave them for class. She likes to keep it and use it to read.

Here is an African mask she made. We are still in ancient civilizations for history.

Here is a moth that our education specialist found and kept for Kelsey, having remembered that she collects bugs. She really likes it.

More fun, we found out that "Beauty and the Beast" was playing in Cerritos, CA. My parents live just a city over, and so it was perfect timing to go visit the grandparents and take them to a Broadway show! Their Grandma got them beautiful Belle dresses (no, not the golden one, but the one she wears in winter) To say that they love them would be an understatement, as you will see, Kelsey never wants to take it off.

Travis, Keira, Kelsey, me, and Grandma all at the theater.

They were seriously awesome seats!

Here they are at intermission getting a small snack.

It was a great night! I can't believe even Keira stayed awake!

Kelsey now reaches for this dress every morning.

You are looking at rainbow math. She likes that.

Keira spends a lot of time coloring, cutting, and gluing.

She wanted to make sure I got her headband in the shot.

Fun with stamps that grandma gave her!

Here is her science poster. It is all about energy.

Here is her Junie B. poster.

There is a lot going on right there!

Here they are working on posters.

Kelsey really needed help with figuring out questions versus statements. It didn't seem to click until I made this silly thing about how we can look closely at sentences and discover clues that will help us to determine which punctuation is best. Through that we found question words, and the importance of placement in a sentence. It finally broke through! Thank goodness, because I did not know what else I was going to do if that didn't work!

I don't usually grade her work like this. This was part of the end of a section assessment.

We added on to our Egypt and Mesopotamia lap-book in this packet.

She really wants to go to China now. I'm like, ummmmm, how about we just go to Pei Wei and eat some Americanized Chinese food until we can afford travel, which will be after you move out. ;)

Cat in The Hat was our main book for Literature this packet.

Here is my daughter's answer to what should have been a longer opinion question. She is very practical, and had nothing more to say. She had a point. She could have elaborated though. That's was not the battle I picked that day to say the least.

Video of Kelsey sorting nouns and verbs

Keira sorting colored buttons.

Next up one more week of packet 5, then conferences! Packet 6 is just around the corner.

Random Videos I have been meaning to post

Some of these are pretty old, some are recent.

Keira doing a somersault at gymnastics.

A video Travis took, before Dingus realized that you have to turn the camera. This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine! Oh, and for the little bit that we did have t.v. Disney did such a great job at branding that she knew this Selena Gomez song! This was old.

This was one of our very first days of home-school.

Keira opening up a Christmas card from Granny. (travis' mom)

Kelsey opening up her Christmas card from Granny. Her hair is rather silly here.

Summer's day at the beach.

Long Overdue!

We have been hard at work for a while on doubles and doubles plus one facts. It gets tedious. Some days we do flashcards, some days it is a worksheet. Some days we do the problems using a manipulative. Today I decided to use a matching game. That way if she knew some problems she could figure out the ones next to them, and some through the process of elimination. This was definitely more fun for her, and went a lot faster too. This game may be in our repertoire for a while.

Fun with home-made geoboards. 

We are learning about congruent shapes.

They liked using nickels to turn it into a Plinko game too. Seriously, who doesn't like Plinko? The Price is Right was a pretty rad show. I soooo wanted to go on there before stupid Drew Carey took over. Remember to have your pets spayed or neutered! But I digress.....

Kelsey really needed extra practice on determining on whether or not a sentence asked a question. I made a 4 day kind of unit lap book thing about questions called Grammar Detectives - Question Clues. We started it today. You are looking at a "secret agent file" Her mission is to use the question clue words to determine if a sentence is asking a question. (You know, Who What, Where, When, ect) This worked like a charm. She has 3 more days of practice on it planned out for the week.

I also decided I had enough of the reading comprehension in the dinky little Phonic books. We still do them, but they are a more minor part now as far as comprehension goes. I now having her doing a whole poster about Junie B. Jones, which is what she is interested in. She will break it down into characters, setting, some reference (title, author), reading response prompts, compare contrast, predict, ect... More fun to come!

Keira also wanted to to a poster. She can tell you a whole silly story about hers, something about Big Baby and flying, and hair everywhere. I don't know, oh and a rainbow curtain that they walk through. If nothing else I have cultivated Imagination in this house with minimal television! They maybe watch 1-2 hours a week, sometimes not even that.

Kelsey working on her main character piece.

As we read we will add more. She seemed to really enjoy this.

And up next, new in History: finally out of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, ect. and on to.....

Ancient China. 

Ahhhh rivers. If you were an ancient civilization you lived near one, preferably two!

New place, means new lapbook!

Still in Physics for Science. She is hard at work on her poster about energy.

Today's work:

I am getting better finally at time management! I have this entire week prepped out, and that includes 2 really big projects, with the Junie B. as well as the Grammar Detective File. I also have very little left from my CSA, which is nice, I literally felt like for a while we were just bringing them home so they could rot, and then we could throw them away in a panic when Wednesday came and it was time to pick up more veggies. This means I have been making meals again, which is really nice. I started to hate going out!