Camian Academy

We started school at 9:15 this morning.

Warm-up: I wrote “My favorite animal is” on the whiteboard. Cameron never did come up with an animal he likes. Ani wrote on her paper that her favorite animal is a zebra. She drew a very cute zebra with horizontal stripes.

Language Arts: Ani did 7 pages in her Phonics Review workbook, completing the book. She read lesson 1 in McGuffey Second Reader. She did a handwriting page on the letter I. We’ve decided to continue giving her handwriting pages through Z to make sure she knows how to form all the lowercase letters (she says she is not sure for all of them) and then start over going through the letters slowly until she is comfortable writing both upper and lower case of each letter. I read chapters 21-24 of Treasure Island (great illustrated classics) to the kids.

Math: Ani watched the Math-U-See Beta video for lessons 12, 13, 14, and 15 and completed lessons 12, 13, 14, 15. She had a little trouble with column addition at first, but eventually got it and then had no problem with column addition when additing up the perimeters of things a couple lessons later. In less than a week she has worked her way halfway through Beta.

We took a lunch break in the middle of all that math for about a half hour.

Religion: I read four pages to the kids from the Illustrated Book of Mormon volume 2.

Unit Study: I showed the kids a picture of a herb garden and read to them about it and we played a trivia game. Then we planted some herbs in a Medieval Herbery kit. They placed the herbery in their window and are looking forward to tasting the herbs in a few weeks after they have grown.

We finished school at 2:15. Total time was 4 1/2 hours today. We spent a lot of time on math!

Once again Ani wanted homework. I assigned her to read two chapters in Knight Before Dawn (Magic Treehouse #2).

When the mail come this afternoon we got a package from Amazon.Com. Jamie had ordered The Well-Educated Mind with a gift certificate my parents gave him for Christmas. Along with that we got First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained for Ani’s garmmar lessons (right on time since she finished Phonics Review today) and Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading for a better way to teach Cameron to read than starting with teaching letters and their sounds. The kids were both excited to have new school things. Poor Jamie won’t even be able to look at his book for a while since he is in college classes Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at the moment in addition to working full time.

We started school at 8:30 this morning after about a half hour of Ani begging to start school.

Warm-up: I was still eating my cereal when I finally relented to Ani that she could start school so I told her the warm-up out loud. Today’s was “My favorite ice cream is”. She wrote that and said her’s was chocolate. Cameron said his was vanilla.

Language Arts: Ani did 3 pages in her Phonics Review workbook. She read lessons 60, 61, 62, and 63 in her McGuffey First Reader. That completes the book. She kept laughing over the 63rd lesson since it says things like it is kind of your parents to send you to school. She always finds things that most people wouldn’t think twice about (like being sent to school) funny since she is homeschooled and doesn’t have to go anywhere to go to school. She completed a handwriting sheet on the letter H. I don’t think those handwriting sheets are doing much good. She forms the letters perfectly on the sheets but still writes them however she wants when she is writing words. She says she likes the handwriting sheets and doesn’t want me to stop printing them for her, though. Cameron did 2 pages in his Letter Dot-to-Dot workbook. Those dot-to-dot workbooks are really helping him learn his letters and numbers. I read chapters 18-20 in Treasure Island (great illustrated classics) to the kids.

Math: Ani watched the Math-U-See Beta video for lessons 10 and 11 and did the lesson that go along with those. At this rate she’ll be in Gamma by her sixth birthday two weeks from today.

Religion: I read four pages in the Illustrated Book of Mormon volume 2 to the kids.

Other: Ani completed the December 2005 Week 3 Weekly Reader.

Unit Study: We read about the Black Death in I Wonder Why Castles Had Moats.

We finished school at 10:30 making the total time today 2 hours.

We keep track of the number of books we read to the kids/Ani reads. From September 1st to January 31st that number was over 1,000 books. Considering a lot of them are chapter books, we sure do read a lot around here!

Ani has been asking for homework. I’ve been resisting because, after all, all the schoolwork she does is at home. After we finished school today she brings me a piece of paper and asks me to make her homework. Specifically she wanted counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s (3 Math-U-See review-ish lessons). So I made a page for her to count by 2’s to 100, 5’s to 150, and 10’s to 500. She immediately sat down and filled in all the blanks. She was so happy to have finally had “real” homework.

Whenever I sit down to read to the kids (which is pretty much every afternoon) the new baby starts kicking up a storm. Either the baby likes reading time or hates it. It’ll be interesting to see what the baby does after they are born in about 5 months. Speaking of the new baby, this one is definitely a head down baby like Ani was. Cameron was breech (with his head firmly planted in the center of the bottom of my ribcage) until about 38 weeks. All of this one’s kicks are up high. It’s a very different feeling from the head in the ribs feeling I had with Cameron. Of course this one also likes to use my bladder as a trampoline (something neither of my other two did) which is rather weird since I’ll feel a slam into my bladder followed almost immediately by a push off the top of the uterus (which is right around my belly button now). At least I can actually feel this one. Ani and Cameron both had anterior placentas so they kicked that rather than me. This one is kicking me. A lot.