Busy, Busy

    Wow, what a whirlwind weekend and beginning of the week! On Saturday, we went to the farmer's market to see our favorite farmers. At the one fruit/vegetable stand Molly earned a free plum by reciting a poem by William Carlos Williams:) After the market we were off to a scarecrow fest with friends. The fest was kind of a bust with the lightening sirens going off, not much for the kids to do, and no concessions available. A break in the weather and a great magician saved the event. Molly got called up to be one of the magicians helpers and she proceeded to call him out on his trick...oops! She said matter-of-factly, "You just put it up your sleeve." The audience about died laughing! He made a joke to distract from her comment but she just looked at him and said, "You really did just put it up your sleeve." She had a great time and thought he was hilariously funny...we thought so too!
    Saturday night at church we happened upon a friend of hers from her short stint in preschool last year. It was great to reconnect because Molly has been asking about her since last October and I didn't have any contact info.
    Sunday was yardwork and then we went to see Kung Fu Panda 2. Very fun! Well, not the yardwork...
    On Monday, Molly and I went to the gym and after I worked out we swam for an hour together. After that we came home and I started reading Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Very engaging! Other than that, that day was all about playing. She painted pottery ornaments, she acted out stories, and read a lot.
    Yesterday we had an ugly start to our morning. Molly pretended to not know the number one. I talked to a fellow homeschooling friend who said her daughter wasn't getting past only having five fingers. It must have been something in the air. Molly ended up reading me eight Bob books. She wrote her numbers to 15 and wrote the alphabet. We played with her Melissa and Doug wooden clock and she was soon able to move the hands to any time I threw out...before yesterday she could only do any that were simple like 3 o'clock or 4:30. Now she can do 3:20, etc. She did a lot of puzzles...I only had to help her with the 100 piece one. Molly did a computer spelling game towards the end of the afternoon. It was a very full day of school...from about 10am until almost dinnertime! Despite our rocky start and my string of frustrations (like dropping a glass jar of pizza sauce, and having a pizza drop into my oven which created a huge mess) the day turned out pretty well:)
    I ordered Molly a light panel...we are so excited for it to come!

Here's the William Carlos Williams poem...

This is just to say...

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Halloween Fun

    Today Molly has a little cold so we canceled our playdate and stayed home. We got in our warmest, softest jammies and worked for two hours on a Halloween gingerbread house. It was a huge mess but a lot of fun!

    Late this afternoon, we went to the park. We found a caterpiller on the path who has become a new member of the family. She wanted to play at the school playground next to the park so we were there with a lot of older kids who were there for an after school program. She showed all the kids "Gary" her new caterpillar friend and let them hold him. I was a little worried that one of the kids would kill him or that they would take him away from her, but I just bit my tongue and watched it play out. There was one panicky moment where one of the girls pretended to throw him, but she came over and gave it to Molly Thank God!!! Molly would have been devastated if her desire to share had resulted in her losing Gary. It was fun to see the other kids react to him! The boys were all afraid to hold him which really surprised me. Most of the kids had never seen a caterpillar before, much less held one, so it was especially cool that she could share that with them:)

Trouble in Paradise

    We had a great start to our day today. Molly and I made it through the whole sign language alphabet. We only get tripped up on one or two as we work our way through it now, but usually one of us remembers. We are a good team:) She finished a workbook today, too. She managed to accomplish the whole book in only two sittings so I was quite impressed. Today was all about telling time, completing words by putting in the missing letters, and reading sentences to find which one fits the picture. It gave her a lot of practice writing her letters and numbers. When we were finished, I put on some music and she had an art explosion! She did watercolors and also used cotton balls and glue.
   Today was swimming lessons and it did not go well. This is her third week of being excluded by the three girls that she is in class with (there are only the four girls total in the class). It is very hard to watch. Molly is one of the most social kids I've ever known and I was in child care for 28 years before I had her...I know a lot of kids. She makes friends everywhere she goes so this experience has been especially hard for her to understand. She was injured during class by another girl (an accident, though...definitely not on purpose) which didn't help make this a positive experience, but she pulled it together and cheerfully went back to class. After class ended and it was time for free swim the meanness kicked in. She came up to me so sad and started sobbing that "they are hurting my feelings so bad." Even after that she was able to get it together and go back into the water. She was injured a second time, however, by the same girl and by then we were both done. I'm at war between my desire to protect her and my desire to help her fight her way through this. The other girls are completely unsupervised during the free swim. Molly says, "They are only nice to me when the teacher is there." Without a parent there to witness and address the behavior, I'm afraid it is a losing battle. I know that kids are often mean, but she's four. Does she really need to experience this yet?

Crazy Week

    I can't remember the last time we had such a busy week! Molly had a doctor appointment, swimming lessons, a dentist appointment, we went bowling, a grandparent's playdate, friend playdate, a doctor appointment for me, endless errands, shopping, and two dinner's out with our niece. I feel like I haven't even sat down all week. Today we are cleaning the house, making bread, and going to a party at a farm later today. Next week we are calming down. I need to sit down and create some kind of routine now that I have added in a health club workout that needs to happen three times a week.
    Luckily, in the middle of all of this chaos, Molly has been working hard. She has been in full-on creative mode. Between making music, writing songs, making up stories, acting out elaborate stories with her stuffed animals, and doing endless artwork she has kept herself quite busy. We did a lot of math while we were out and about, and managed to fit in a ton of reading time. I hope to not have another week quite this busy, but it's good to know that the learning continues even when we are running from thing to thing.

Great Day

    We had a really good school day today! Molly worked on her reading quite a bit. I said sentences out loud and she told me which words were verbs and which words were adjectives. On the computer she was given words with letters missing and she filled in the letters. She also identified short and long vowel sounds in words. She worked on opposites, rhyming, and using positional words to describe where things were in pictures. Molly read sentences and then matched the sentence to the picture that it described. She really enjoyed it all and worked really hard!
    In math, she worked on greater than/less than, patterns, and writing her numbers. After we finished her math, we played up in her room and got ready for a ball. She was playing with  stuffed "Ren and Stimpy" dolls and said that Ren needed to put on his "cloak"...she cracks me up!
   Molly had her swimming lesson today. She actually put her face in the water and blew bubbles! She is making huge progress considering she hates to get her face wet. She is in class with three other girls and they are all older. I think it is good for her to see how comfortable they are in the water. Her teacher is great, too, which helps so much! We went to Oberweis after swimming for a treat and then went to Whole Foods to do some shopping. Now she has a beach scene set up (a blanket with an open umbrella on top) and is watching Lilo and Stitch. It's time for dinner and a lot of reading time with Daddy. A great end to a great day:)

Overall

     Molly and I started reading "The Secret Garden." Well, technically, I am reading "The Secret Garden" to her...she is actively listening. I have it on my Kindle and I read it aloud to her while she sits on the floor and plays. We read the first three chapters in one sitting. I make sure that I stop while she is still interested so that she anticipates the next reading time. This book is going to branch us off into so many other topics...cholera, moors, India,and England are just some of the things we are now discussing. Reading is such a love for both of us, and being able to jump around to various topics as they come up in our different books just makes it that much more exciting.
     She worked on her reading a lot this week. She is so close. She read me her sunscreen tube the other day in the car. It got a bit confusing when she was sounding out SPF;) I had to explain abbreviations. She is also really picking up verbs and adjectives when she hears them in a sentence. Math is going really well and science remains her most favorite part of school. I found a great science book called, "Super Fun Science" by Heno Head, Jr. It is full of activities that are easy to do and you don't need a lot of supplies on hand. We need to work on our sign language this week, we are both getting rusty. She also wants to add in studying constellations so we will be dabbling in that this week. I have to fit it in around her doctor and dentist appts., swimming lesson, and some playdates. We can usually carve out time in the mornings. Tomorrow we don't have anywhere to be until swimming at 1:00 so we will get a good school day in in the morning:)

A New Trend

   We were at Costco today where we met a mom and her two young kids. We were chatting about ages, etc. when she asked Molly if she goes to school. We get this several times a day so I knew what was about to happen. Molly said, "Yes, I'm homeschooled". The woman lit up and said, "I want to homeschool!" We talked about it while the kids ran up and down the peanut butter aisle (much to the delight of the other customers, I'm sure).
   There are so many parents who see that the system that is in place doesn't necessarily work for their child. There is not a day that goes by where I don't meet someone who is either homeschooling already or wishes to. I cannot express enough how rewarding it is for me, much less Molly! It may not be the easier route, but it is so exciting to be there to witness her learning. There are tremendous resources out there to help with any issue or need along the way and she is getting so much more than she would be able to get in a traditional school setting. I wouldn't trade one day of this...even the worst day is better than anything else I would be doing instead.

Studying Butterflies

    On Wednesday, Molly and I went on a field trip with our homeschooling group to Peck Farm. We had a class on metamorphasis that focused on the butterfly. It was so much fun! The teacher was great and she made it very interactive:)  The kids identified all of the body parts of a butterfly, put an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly in sequential order, and heard a great story about the migration of the Monarch butterfly (which Molly is still reciting days later!). After that, we went outside with large nets and small, plastic specimen jars and went on a bug hunt. We found lots of crickets, grasshoppers, and milkweed bugs, but it was too windy for the butterflies that day. Peck Farm has a butterfly house, though, so the kids got to go in there and be surrounded by them. We had large laminated cards so that we could try to find all of the different varieties. It was an amazing afternoon and a reminder of how lucky I am to be able to be there to experience these things with my daughter. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I am grateful to live in a state that embraces homeschooling and that so many organizations are supporting us in our efforts to educate our daughter:)

Swimming Lesson

    Molly had her first swimming lesson yesterday. We are involved in a great homeschooling group that has over 100 families.  A local park district offered us group lessons during school hours. She had so much fun and started to get a little braver as the class went on. Molly hates getting her face wet, but by the time the class was over she was sticking her head under a huge downspout of water! What a fun way to spend our afternoon:)

Sticky Box

      Ok, I cheated. Big time. I officially hate the game Clue Jr. and cheated out of sheer frustration that I could not get to the white circles to identify the person who committed the crime. After what felt like around 4 hours of torture, I caved.  I am a stickler for rules and I am not a person who lets kids win, but I am competitive (some might think that this is an understatement) and it was driving me crazy! I think that's one game where making up my own rules before playing again will be a good thing. I cannot imagine subjecting myself to that one again otherwise.

    On a more positive note, that same day Molly and I created a sticky box. I got the idea off of www.playathomemom.com. She decided to turn it into a tv so that she and her cat, Puddy, could watch The Three Stooges. She's never actually watched The Three Stooges so I'm seeing her Daddy's influence here.

Fantasy World

    So I am on day two of hiding out in the house from the heat. Next week is supposed to be cooler and we have a lot of outings planned so I'm not too worried about our lost two days. I'm not sure if other homeschooling parents find themselves getting sucked into the "I haven't showered in two days and the house looks like a tornado went through it" vortex. I am fully ensconced. I felt pretty good that I changed my shirt last night. When I first decided to homeschool, I had a lovely vision of us showered, dressed, sitting in a perfect house, working on activities that stayed perfectly contained, and experiencing non-stop learning. Umm, the reality is that it would only look like that if Good Morning America was here filming....and no learning would have existed during the entire time it would take me to actually get it to that point. Instead, my house is a disaster about 60% of the time (some weeks the percentage is much higher!) and I often can't remember the last time I gave her a bath.
    As far as the learning, today we worked on her Highlights magazine which is always fun. We then moved on to a workbook and she did quite a bit of writing, matching, and sequencing. Molly has days, luckily not too often, where she pretends to not know something. Today it was what letter comes after E. She knows the answer and had the alphabet spelled out in front of her. It takes an inordinate amount of time to get her to answer which then takes us away from all of the other things we would rather be doing. I know she is testing boundaries and that if I let her get away with it she would lose all respect for me and herself. We got through it, but it takes so much of the wind out of my sails. It makes me question if I am doing the right thing. Am I pushing too hard, am I not pushing hard enough? She always seems so happy afterwards and seems to make a huge leap following one of these episodes that it makes me think that it's just a test to see what I will accept. We ended up doing a fun CD-ROM game on the computer that allowed us to incorporate adding and subtracting into our day. There was a lot of art today and a bit of chocolate ice cream which is a very rare treat....so rare, in fact, that I spent quite a bit of time scraping off the freezer burn on top. She is signed up for swimming lessons that start next week (her first ever!) and she and I are joining our fancy, park district health club. Slowly but surely we are finding our way through this new territory. Will my initial fantasy ever come true? I hope not:)

Wonder Works

    Yesterday we had a fun field trip with one of our parent's groups,  my sister-in-law, and nephew, Drew. We went to a kids museum in Oak Park. It was pretty small so I wasn't convinced it would keep the attention of the kids for long, but they were entertained for hours! The highlight was a stage with sliding scenery and an area for a "director" to control lighting and music. It even had a tv screen built in so you could see the kids performing (and I use that term loosely! It was more like fighting, and running around, and yelling...) on screen. Very clever idea!  The kids loved the costumes and prepping to put a show on.  There was also a huge treehouse area that was decorated to look like a willow tree. Very cool! We will definitely go back again.
    Today was a lost day. We stayed home and watched way too much tv. I was happy that it was the Scholastic videos based on books and other semi-educational shows without any commercials. It also sparked her to go sit in her room and pull out all of the Kevin Henkes books she owns and read to herself. We made homemade chicken soup, played a game, read, and tried our best to stay out of the oppressive heat and humidity. I'm so ready for summer to be over. Hopefully tomorrow we will have the energy to actually function. We homeschool year round so I try not to be hard on myself when we have a lazy day. I know that we will make it up on one of her power-learning days.