New Year

I brought the children back home in mid Nov. I was going to leave them in public school (PS) for the rest of the year but I was so disatisfied with their behavior and what they were learning (or rather not learning) in school that I decided to bring them back home when we moved.
My major reason for thinking to leave them in was that I thought your Declaration of Intent had to be in to the school district before the year started. When I found out that you had a month to submit it after taking the kids out no matter what time of year, that cinched it. Now I don't have to worry about them starting another school, trying to fit in to a crowd that I would rather them not fit in, waiting for the school bus in the dark in the pouring rain and waisting their time at school being shuffled around with other children whom I do not know, under the care of a dictatorial adult whom I do not know.
After much prayer and discussion with Matt I am confident and secure that the right decision was made. If I ever had any doubts, they are gone as I see my children's behavior change for the better. Michael is much more active and talking with us more, Seri is no longer acting out in strange ways to try to gain attention from other people, and Isaac is estatic that he gets to be with his siblings again.
The past month has been crazy with the holidays and such and we didn't do much formal homeschooling. I felt bad at first but then when I thought about it the public school had a week of half days because of parent/teacher conferences and those don't really count (believe me I have taught and there is not enough time in a half day to do anything substantial with children who know they are going home in a few hours anyhow). Then there was Thanksgiving break followed by days off for a power outage that involved the whole west side of Washington, closely followed by Christmas break. Guesse the PS kids didn't have too much formal schooling for the month either.
We really focused on behavior, communication skills, manners, empathy, kindness.... things they seemed to have forgotten during their stint in PS. Amazing what the difference is. For one the name calling has dropped dramtically and so have the little tiffs that they tended to get into. They now do what is asked of them without throwing a huge fit or insisting that they shouldn't have to clean it up since they weren't the ones who did it, etc....... In fact a lot of times they will perform a service just because they want to serve their family and without being asked.
We attended a presentation of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. How amazing that was! Thing is, it was the greatest naval disaster in history and noone knows about it. Such a tragic story. I will post more about it on the family blog www.olsonclan.blogspot.com .
We went to the Pacific Science center twice, hard to tell about all the things we learned while we were there, there were somany things and they were so random.
The Dead Sea Scroll exhibit came to Seattle and we went to that, very enlightening. I am planning a unit study on this subject. It wasn't just about the scrolls but also about the ancient inhabitants of Kumran and how their civilization existed, and we learned about different dating methods used by researchers to determine how old an object is. One of them I found fascinating but am not sure I understand it enough to explain. I have to do some more research. I will attempt it though. When living things die their bodies decompose into a carbon I think is what it was. by measuring the percentage of something to identify how much of it has turned into carbon it can be determined how long ago this thing has been dead. The interesting part though is that this method can only be used on things that have died before the 1940's because experiments with atomic bombs and other radio-active endeavors have changed the way that substance turns to carbon. Hope I explained this enough that you have a sense of what I am talking about.
Another method they use involves measuring themagnetism in an item. When things are heated to a certain temparature (clay items and such) they take on the level of magnetism that exists in the earth at that time. You can figure out what period they come from by comparing the magnetism of the item to the time when the earth carried the same magnetism.
They also discussed how hard it was to piece together the scrolls because they were like puzzle pieces. Parts of one scroll would be written by different people and the same people would write on different scrolls. They used handwriting analysis to put them together but it didn't always work. They also discussed the difference between papyrus and parchment and the different methods used to make each.
We learned so much. I hope the children will always remember visiting the exhibit. It gave us a lot of jumping off points where we can learn more about the subjects.
We joined a homeschooling group and went to a few potlucks and a lego club and a drawing club. Sounds funny I know but they really learned a lot from each. At the lego club they were taught how to plot their ideas of what to build onto graph paper to make their design and then assign a point value to each square and them build it following the pattern. Not quite as easy as it sounds. At drawing club they discussed different drawing elements and drew some characters from Thomas the train.
Last week we visited the Morse Wildlife preserve and learned a lot, there is also a post about this on the other blog.
We started and finished reading aloud "Sheila the great" by Judy Blume and during reading time the children took turns reading to me. Michael's reading is amazing, I can't believe how much he wants to read. I often find him tucked away some where reading by himself or to his brother. This from the child whom all his teachers where concerned about because he wasn't on "grade level". He wants to read now, without being asked to. I think bringing him home took the pressure off of him to perform. At school he knew he was getting special help with reading and I think it made him feel like he couldn't do it or he was failing, he wasn't as good as the other kids. How it hurt to watch him go through that. Things are much better know.
Seri was a great reader, right on grade level. but when I had her read to me I discovered that she wasn't good at reading aloud. Her mind works quicker than her mouth and she didn't know how to slow it down which resulted in her running her words together and basically noone being able to understand a word she was saying. We really had to work on her slowing down and pronouncing each word individually. Who would have thought that learning to read aloud correctly would take so much time? I am happy to say that I now enjoy listening to her and don't have to concentrate half as much as I used to.
Reading time begins with me reading aloud and then each child takes a turn reading to me from a library book of their choice. We ahve read some excellent books that I would highly recommend.
-Why Explore? by Susan Lendroth. It is a rhyming book about why we need to always ask questions and seek answers.
-Is There Really a Human Race? by Jamie Lee Curtis
-A friend for dragon. by Dav Pilkey
-Train to Somewhere. by Eve Bunting. This is an emotional storybook that had both Seri and I crying by the end. It is about a girls journey on the oprhan train. Another subject we are now interested in and I am hoping to do a unit study on.
So I guesse when I take our life and fit it into their little boxes, we did study the 11 subjects that I am required to teach. After all that is what the PS does. Try to emulate life and teach it and then disect it so it fits into it's own category of Math, Reading, Writing, Social Studies, etc. I am just bypassing the emulate phase and living life (don't give me a story problem about buying apples, take me to the store and let me buy apples), and not being bothered by disecting it into the pre-determined categories.