End of November already?

Has it really been several weeks since I've posted? Wow! Well, best of intentions are not always carried out.

Let's see, we just wrapped up our study of the lithosphere, including caves, volcanoes, earthquakes, plate tectonics, and rocks and minerals.

Here are some photos from making a volcano - it teaches more about chemistry than how a volcano really works, but they enjoyed it!

Didn't quite put enough orange coloring into the mixture!

We've been working hard on school consistently now, with the Lord's help! I am excited about discovering notebooking pages for school. So instead of doing quizzes and tests so much, the girls are required to do a notebooking page every time we study something or someone. For now, I find it easiest to use the ideas from notebookingpages.com. They may seem expensive, but for the value of the learning and writing practice the girls are getting, I am finding it very worth it! It is an answer to prayer, as I have been wondering how to incorporate more writing to reinforce what we're learning. The best thing about it is that the girls can all write at their level of capability and understanding. For Melissa, I actually sometimes do the writing for her and have her dictate if we're short on time. In a while, I'll have her do more and more on her own. More on this next time.

This little hamster is our ADHD pet. I've always thought hamsters slept all the time, but not this one. It is an escape artist, and the center of much attention.

For our study on ancient Egypt, we had an Egyptian meal last week. It was chickpeas with tomatoes and spices, Egyptian lentils adapted from a recipe I found on the internet, dates, figs, pita bread, and barley cakes sweetened with honey for dessert. They weren't excessively keen on them, but it was fun!

Fall is now officially over in my books, as the leaves are off the trees. But we have enjoyed the beauty of the colors, as always. God is such an amazing creator!

Yesterday Abbie had the stomach flu, and tomorrow is Babcia's birthday so we are doing a little dinner for her this Sunday. And last night, we also found out at a little Thanksgiving dinner Jeff and Heidi hosted that they are expecting again! This will be their fourth, and she is about 2 months behind me. Exciting!
Well, that is all for right now, I will attempt to post again soon with more!

Last week in review

Recently we started learning about Ancient Egypt for history.
For a hands on activity, we made Abbie into a mummy!
This took 2 full rolls of toilet paper, and she felt quite hot by the time we were finished!

And we studied caves and caverns for science. This is a photo of a stalactite we made using 2 jars, some yarn, and an epsom salt solution. Bethany gets credit for the photo! She took it without any input from me.

Another fun thing we did last week was go to the Telus World of Science. We even took the skytrain to get there, which was half the fun! They were under construction, so almost half the museum was closed off, but we took in 3 science labs and enjoyed the dinosaurs exhibit. Here, Abbie is helping to demonstrate a bottle rocket on stage.

Melissa is being chased by a dinosaur...aaaaahhhh! :)

All in all, the exhibit was quite impressive, with life-like dinosaur models that moved, "breathed", roared, etc. They had all the sound effects as well as dim lights, to make it as exciting as possible. We spent more time here than any other exhibit.

The T-Rex was absolutely enormous. Melissa was probably 1/40th of its size!

At one of the science labs, a girl was helping demonstrate what free ions can do. I forgot the name of the machine she was touching. It made her hair stand on end. This was during the electricity lab. They thought this was pretty funny!

Well, in spite of 3 doctor appointments, a dentist appointment, hosting a prayer meeting at our home, and going to the science museum, it has been the most profitable week yet! We are working harder on Bethany's reading and spelling difficulties. I'm praying that my tiredness and headaches will gradually disappear soon too!

Can we have a new beginning?

It seems like our school days are just now starting. Because of fatigue, morning sickness, being incredibly disorganized, forgetful, tired, unmotivated, headaches, and other things, our official school year is just now rolling! It is the end of October. It is not that we have not been doing school. Just not regularly, or consistent, or anything else of that sort. We might have one official day of school per week. We have tried to do history and science in a more consistent fashion. But if I was to rate my teaching on a scale of 1 to 10, it would be around a 2. Far less than satisfactory. I had high ambitions, big dreams, lots of ideas, and even some very good plans when we started in September. There is so much I wanted to cover this year. Intensive ancient history with a strong Biblical foundation, lots of scripture memorization, more Bible study in teh mornings, science, more arts and crafts, geography through unit studies, lots of good read aloud books, artist and composer studies like we did last year, Latin, as well as a thorough covering of the basics. You know, the "3 R's" which these days is at least 4-5 subjects, including spelling, handwriting, grammar, math, creative writing, phonics, etc. As plans failed to happen, as my fatigue only worsened over time, and things didn't work out, I yielded. I told the Lord that I would just try to at least teach the basics, maybe a little history and science.

Then Bethany had major episodes with her math and I gave up teaching her math for a while. I told her when she wanted to learn, I would teach her. Shortly after THAT the Lord called to my attention her problem with reading, and that I needed to invest more time with her in that. She reads, but cannot/will not sound anything out. She will guess the word as to what it "looks" like, or skip it altogether. So her reading and spelling are both on a first/second grade level. I have concluded over time that she does have a form of dyslexia. Not surprising, since her father has it too. She has had a lot of phonics instruction, but she needs an intensive approach that I did/do not have the time or energy or know how to give her. Between her math and her reading/phonetic/spelling problems, she is going to be needing a lot of extra attention. Right now I am praying about what to do. Since I learned to read quite easily, and language, spelling, writing, etc all were natural for me, I have difficulty identifying with HER difficulty and knowing how to help her. There are programs available, but either cost too much or require too much time of me the teacher. I know the Lord has the answers. For now, Bethany is pretty much just doing reading, phonics, spelling, and handwriting as well as math.

Our day does not start until at least 10:00, and often the girls have lots of free time in the afternoon as well. So they have been left to their imaginations much of the time. They "sew" clothes for their Calico Critters, play with their Calico Critters, build things with legos and pattern blocks, get in fights, listen to stories on CDs, draw, color, and sometimes play with their cousins outside.

Life rarely goes as planned for me, so I have almost given up planning anything. However, that doesn't help either. As the saying goes "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail". I do think we get even less done if I plan nothing at all. All that benefits from that approach is my conscience. I don't feel bad for not getting things done if I never planned to do anything in the first place!

So, I will leave it at that for now. We are starting to get into the swing of things again, and finding a pace and method that we can actually carry out. I'm hoping that once my thyroid imbalance is corrected, my sleeping habits will improve, energy will pick up, and headaches will diminish. And school will happen consistently again!