Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival- Back and Bloggin'!

I have to admit to a bit of fretting over my poor neglected blog- having a new baby as well as a two and three year old (not to mention the older girls) has really cut down on my computer time. So, what a better way to get back on the blogging bandwagon than hosting an edition of the Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival? This edition is somewhat short, but full of good posts. Thanks to everyone that contributed. If you sent a post and do not see a link here, please let me know. I tried to monitor the spam folder but some may have slipped past.

Jeanne at A Peaceful Day gives us a look at Christmas "Down under" style in her post "Dashing through the...um...er Snow?"

Cindy at Our Journey Westward gives us some great ideas for living math in "Hardhatting in a Geo-World"

Kris at At Home Science gives us a look at "Living Science for middle school."

Lynn at Raising Little Shoots gives us an interesting lesson in "Preparing for the Solstice"

Barb at Handbook of Nature Study sent us two posts to enjoy this edition. "Here is another entry from my nature blog with a great quote from the Handbook of Nature Study. Also an invitation to join us for our study of flowerless plants." Check out "Into the Realm of the Undiscovered". She also gives us "Just a great CM quote that reminded me of our nature study this week" in "Freshness and Contentedness".

I decided to share how we are making our own information pockets to use for our history studies in "Homemade History Pockets".

And that's all, folks. I hope that everyone has the happiest of Christmases! Thanks again to everyone that submitted for this edition.

Homemade History Pockets

Wow! It's been awhile since I've blogged- our new baby has kept me too busy to be on the computer. (she is four months old now!) Kasey decided that she wanted to return to school this year and we found her a good little elementary school with an accelerated second grade classroom that only goes to fourth grade. We are just taking it year by year for right now but we have decided that we definitely want her to come back home after fourth grade. I think that my regular posting can resume now but I will probably only be posting once a week for a little while.

I thought I would post one project we have been working on here and there, something I call Homemade History Pockets. It's kinda' our cheapie version of the regular History Pockets. We made the pockets by taping an index card file to a piece of card stock. Here is one that we completed on James Madison since we are studying the Constitution in co-op right now.

Inside the pocket are 3x5 index cards with various pieces of information we have learned about our subject. To get the pictures for the blank side, I just Googled whatever image I was looking for, saved them and printed them out in wallet size.

This particular cards has a picture of the Constitution on one side...

...and the information that James Madison was known as "Father of the Constitution".

Here we have a picture of our main man, James...

...and some biographical info about him on the other side.

These have been a fun way for the girls to learn about our history subjects and give them a great way to review.

Math Journal- Entry 2

The girls did a neat little activity for their math journals the other day that I thought I'd share. I got this from the Aunty Math site- Quilt Challenge



We took some colored paper squares that we have had lying around and created a quilt similar to the one in the story. We used these to help us figure out the challenge and glued them into our journals:

The neat thing about the Aunty Math challenges is that in addition to solving the word problem, there are several supplemental activities as well. The girls had to work out additional problems such as "What if the quilt had five rows of five squares?" They also measured and figured out what the perimeter of their quilts were, as well as completed a little lesson on equivalent fractions.
All of their work was documented in their journals and dated. I plan on having them complete a challenge like this every week and adding it the the journals as well.

A Charlotte Mason Co-op

Sorry for the bloggie break- school has been curtailed a bit by our new little one so there hasn't been much to blog about, school-wise. I needed a submission for the blog carnival and Barb suggested that I post about the new co-op some friends and I are creating and how it is being organized.

A Charlotte Mason school co-op- it's been a dream of mine since we started homeschooling. For our first semester we have four families involved and everyone is really excited. The idea first began by observing some other friends create small co-ops that featured classes in core subjects, not just enrichment, and succeed. Each mother is taking a subject and teaching it to our elementary age children, which range from Kindergarten to fifth grade. The idea is that beyond math and reading (which we will teach at home) each mother will only have to prepare to teach one other subject- "many hands make light work". We are meeting at a local church which has graciously lent us two classrooms two days a week from 8 am to 12 pm. Hear are the subjects we are offering this semester:

Apologia Science- Astronomy
Early American history - beginning at the American Revolution and continuing using living books as our base and notebooking through the class, as well as narrating through the books
Your Business Math from Simply Charlotte Mason (Pet store version)
Literature- The Wind and the Willows (we will be reading the story out loud, narrating and creating lapbooks for this class)
Nature Study (once per week)
Artist Study (once per week- we will be studying the works of Mary Cassatt)

I am teaching history as well as leading the nature and artist study.

And what about our little ones? We will be setting up a preschool classroom with games, activities, stories and crafts. This way the older kids can work without the distractions and the little ones can play and learn together. While one mother teaches the elementary school children, the others will be in the preschool class.
All of the kids are really excited to be schooling with their friends and the moms will hopefully get a little break in teaching and lesson planning. We will hopefully be able to add a few more families to our little school in the spring semester if all works out. I will be blogging throughout the semester on our activities, beginning after Labor Day.

Baby Lauren is Here!!!

Introducing the newest student at Freedom Academy- Lauren Rebecca. She was born on July 22 and weighed 8 lbs., 14 oz and was 21 inches long.

Welcome to the world, Lauren! We are so glad you're here!

More Handicrafts

Since becoming obsessed with my set of loom knitters, everyone will be getting knitted presents this year for Christmas. Here is a double layered neck-warmer I finished today and I am really happy with how it turned out.

Kasey finished her knitted bag she has been working on. Both Hannah and Kasey will be earning their Keepers of the Faith badges for knitting and wildflowers (see the post below) We are working through the handbook just by ourselves at home, although Hannah was involved in a local group here this past school year. She did all the knitting for this bag- I helped her attach the handles and remove it from the loom. It turned out very nice.

Here is what Taylor does with yarn! She got her little mitts on this lovely shade of chartreuse from Hannah's knitting bag while I was on the interstate and I had to pull over to remove it from around her neck. Of course, I had to take pictures of the whole darn thing before I went about the rescue operation. Good times! Good times!

Living Math- Math Journal

Everyone has these insane school sales going on right now and I picked up some new composition books that I found on sale for us to use. I decided to take two of these and have the girls create a math journal (much like their nature journals) to keep. We also bought some compasses and the girls were really curious about what they were used for. I happened to have in my online curriculum stash a copy of Math Mammoth Geometry (We LOVE Math Mammoth!) so I printed off the first few sheets and we started our journals with them today.

We started off with some copywork via the definitions they were presented in today's lesson. They illustrated these with diagrams from the text.

I had the girls do some practice with their compasses by drawing out several angles (after we had completed our lesson), measuring them and decided if they were obtuse, acute or right.

They cut out the diagrams from the lesson (another bonus of downloaded curriculum!) and glued them in their journals as well.

Just to keep it real for those of you who might get the impression that math is just a blissful, zen-like experience in our house, I admit to raising my voice today more than a couple of times. Hannah struggles some with understanding math and it frustrates me to have to go over and over a concept that she just doesn't get. Therefore, I am also planning on using these math journals to make notes for the girls on how to work specific kinds of problems as a reference.

Sophia worked on a bit of math herself today. I cut part of an egg carton off that I then labeled with the numerals 1-10.We are using this with some counters to practice counting skills. She also did a bit of addition today. I had her roll a die two times and each time put that number of counters in the correct well. We would then remove all the counters and count them all together. I never liked the use of technical terms for young children so we simply said "3 and 4 give us 7".

Make sure you check out the sidebar for some great CM friendly math sites, if you haven't yet.

Wildflower Nature Project

The girls and I have been pressing wildflowers for the last month or so for a wildflower project we had planned to work on. We identified and mounted some of our specimens. The girls decorated the mats with some scrapbook stickers. These will look really nice once we get them in some frames.

Ox eye Daisy and Honeysuckle

Money plant

Wild Blue Flax

Garden Coreopsis

So Sorry, Subway!

If you have a child who enjoys writing and illustrating you must check out this contest. It is a writing contest for homeschoolers with 20 different categories to enter. Entries from Kindergarten to adult are accepted. This would be a great summer project your children could work on and could really be some great language practice as well. Check out this blog entry which contains the link. Happy Writing!!

Caterpillars, Disco Microphones and 1 Very Pregnant Mama

Hannah and Kasey are spending a few days with their cousins in Knoxville, so we left Earnie's parent's house with only two children in tow. (It's a little comical when you consider a break the time when you only have TWO children at home LOL!) Stopped by my parent's house on the way home and took a little nature walk to discover this odd looking caterpillar. It looked just like the moss it was found on. Did some research on this website to find out that it is a Virgin Tiger Moth.

Here is a picture I found online of the actual moth.

I rarely have a chance to do any crafts with Sophia these days, so while Taylor napped this afternoon I helped her make a Boowa and Kwala Disco Fever microphone. Now, if your children have never played on the Up To Ten website then you must go there and immerse yourself in the myriad of nonsense games IMMEDIATELY! (Here, I'll even give you a link so that you have no excuses!) Here is a link to the Disco game as well.

She made one for her cousin, Lillie, as well so that they can boogie-oogie-oogie together on Tuesday.

These babies even come with upgraded glitter crusted tops, guaranteed to have your floors and bare feet completely covered in five minutes.

Even though I consider this to be one of the least flattering pictures ever of me (no offense, Dad) I thought the viewing audience would think it was comical to see how very pregnant I have become. (Just in case you need help, I am the one in the swing who looks like I am holding a watermelon in my lap!)