A Day in the Life....

I've been reading lately about struggling homeschool moms (for the most part).  Some are dads, but most are moms.   Struggling with children not wanting to learn, struggling managing their time, their households, their...well...most anything.   Raising and educating a family keeps a body busy.   When I read things like this I need to make sure I keep my focus where it aught to be....doing what works for OUR family.  Not getting caught up in the "keep up with xyz family".   They are their own family, this one is MINE.

So today we started off the day doing dishes... I know... totally exciting isn't it?  I had a lad wanting very much to play the new levels of bad piggies.  What?   Let my boy play Bad Piggies rather than do "real homeschool?"   Bad Piggies IS real homeschool.  It's problem solving, working out engineering problems, paying attention to details and all sorts of things.    He has to work hard to figure out some of those levels and he's better at it than I am.   He was feeling a ... what's the word I want...unsure if he had his focus in the right spot and came in asking "mom, is it okay if I play Bad Piggies?  Am I learning things?"   I told him yes, you are...but what do YOU think you are learning?

His response
1. I have to keep trying and trying mom.
2. I have to figure out why it's not working and sometimes I just don't know.  I have to ask Dad for help!   Some of those levels are VERY hard mom.

For a seven year old, I thought those good answers.

Dishes done, we had breakfast, and looked at the paper

From the News

Part of the headline had this "the N-word".  

I said to the lad...The N word?  Do you know any N words?
Does Angry birds or Bad Piggies have any N words?

Led to a whole discussion on N-words which is good practice for a beginnging reader....this lead to him wanting to know what the N-word in the paper was and we talked about how one councillor used a word beginning with N that made people get all upset with her.   I said that sometimes too people make too big of a deal over something and need to just let it go.

Normal things

We read and discussed a story in his primer that we are reading. Todays story was about a man who trusted a friend to tell the truth and what happened when the friend (who said he was ever so brave) was proven to not be ever so brave and what the result of that was.

TWO lessons done with our music program Adventus.    My but the lad enjoys this on-line music course.  :)   I don't get arguments about doing it and he'll often ask to do another lesson.    So happy I get to review this program for the Schoolhouse Review Crew.   The lad has so much fun with it though today he was disappointed...they took away the story time...and that was just another bust a gut laughing time for him.  :)  Maybe they will bring it back....

After this we did our Essentials in Writing Lessons.   This lesson caused some momentary confusion in the lad because he was rushing his learning.  Once he slowed down it went quite smoothly.   He had to do some thinking which, of course, is generally a good thing to do.  

Lunch and then upstairs to do some book work.  Things kinda broke down here.  The lad and I worked through telling time several times over the past while but he's having some difficulty retaining this information.   So I have a clock poster from the dollarama that I just wrote on all the five minute increments.  Then a lightbulb went off. :)   AH>> "okay.. I understand mom.  BUT MOM>>> Why can't people always just say 3:15 and not a quarter past 3?  Why can't they just do it all the same?!??!"    He's much aggrieved by this.

How would YOU answer this??

Canada Study - First Nations

Doing this activity resulted in the lad saying "mom, this was good homeschooling today".

The lad loves angry birds, I love teaching him.   It doesn't matter to me if I use angry birds to instill a love of learning in him.   So our dogs are really yellow angry birds pulling a sled.  Does he know that dogs helped the Inuit get around more quickly than walking?  YEP!    We built fish (For the birds to tease the pigs with)...but the main diet of the Inuit consisted of fish, whale and such like.  Does the lad know this?  For sure!  :)  Same with the igloo, the cache, and such...angry bird theme-ing it just helps the knowledge be retained and he has retained alot.  It's very cool to see some of this stuff sink into his brain.

We are doing Canada much slower than I anticipated..but that's okay... we have a whole life ahead of us. :)

Tomorrow we paint! :)

Bannock - recipe

Came across (in our Inuit studies) this recipe for Bannock.  So we made it for supper.

Ingredients

• 4 cups flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1½ cups water

Directions

1. Mix ingredients together to form a stiff dough.
2. Sprinkle flour on a clean work surface. With very clean hands, knead the dough. Dust hands and dough with flour if the dough is sticky.
3. Form in a round loaf about 1 inch high. Bake on a greased baking sheet at 350° F for 30 minutes.
4. Serve warm with butter and jam or honey.

We served it with Honey.  The lad very much enjoyed it.   It was fairly decent, not as good as the fried bread though....not sure which we'll make for the project fair.....


Before I forget, the lad's crystals continue to grow
This was a dollar store purchase...thus far...worth the $1.25 spent on it. :)

We added to the experiment a bit.  The rocks on the right hand side, tray, green stuff came with the kit.  The popsicle stick and the large rock came from the lad.  He wanted to know if the rocks used made any difference and what would happen if you left the popsicle stick in it.

What do you think??