Questions asked, answered and no wonder....

Yesterday was a good day, it always amazes me how "good days" just sort of pop up on their own on what's supposed to be an ordinary day. It was Groundhog's Day and I had everything planned out, so I'm not sure how we didn't get to all of it.....but I have an idea :-)

First of all I've come to realize why our son thinks I have the answer to everything and is shocked if I don't "know" something right away. Most of the time the answers are there somewhere in the cobwebs of my mind, they just need to dusted off and brought out to the light. Every now and then though our son comes up with something that as he says, "I didn't that coming".
Yesterday it started simple enough, I simply made him a cup of hot chocolate. Come on, take a guess.....
Yep, it led to The Red Ranger asking me who invented hot chocolate.
Somehow the file cabinets of my mind didn't have that answer saved.
So, as any good mom and most especially a homeschooling mom would do.......
We looked it up!
There were a few steps to the answer.......are you curious?

It started with the Aztecs only they served it cold and used cocoa beans as currency. They also flavored it with wine and chili peppers (wine = good, chili peppers = yuck!).
Cortez brought it back to Europe in the early 1500's and Spain changed it to a hot drink, sweetened and without the peppers (Yay...Spain!).
When it came to London in the 1700's the British started adding milk to it and enjoyed it as an after-dinner beverage. 
Our short answer was that it wasn't a person that invented hot chocolate but a country, Spain.
Then we went on to look at the cocoa beans themselves and the process of how we get that powder in the cup. Which then led to how its put into trucks and delivered to stores.....etc., etc., etc!
If you are so inclined to read more...lol...here is the link for The History of Hot Chocolate .

Okay, admit it...you just made yourself a cup of hot chocolate didn't you??
If you didn't....what are you waiting for?? Go get a cup and come back to hear about our Groundhog Day stuff.........

We started off our day changing everything over for the month.
All of our calendar work which included adding all the special days this month including Groundhog Day.
We did our History Scribe holiday sheet which gives you a blurb about the holiday, a space for a drawing and journal practice. We then checked online to see what that pesky little groundhog had to say.
In case you didn't hear.....spring is coming early.......hmmmm....I'm looking out the window at all of the snow and thinking he may just be wrong about that one!
We then continued online with lots of stories, poems and shadow puppets on the wall. Our shadow puppets sort of took over the rest of the Groundhog Day stuff I had planned......we just couldn't stop making more and more of them. I also discovered that The Red Ranger loved the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, "My Shadow". I mean LOVED it.......now I'm looking into more Stevenson works for him.
Since we didn't finish all of the material we'll just use it during the week as fun stuff.
We also did our spelling introducing the match game cards I made up and we also went over all of our February vocabulary words and used some of them in the vocabulary match game that I also made. Both of these will now be added to our Scrambler Wheel for the month.
We spun the Scrambler Wheel for math as well and it landed on Dominoes and then...................

We had tears.................................
And a 5 minute break using the microwave timer.............................
When The Red Ranger came back (on his own after he heard the ding of the microwave) he was still teary and it took me a bit to find out what was bothering him. He said he hated math because it was too hard.
Not sure where this came from because he's great at math, it comes easily to him. I told him how proud I am of how well he does in math and that sometimes he surprises me with how well he does. The tears finally stopped and we got back to the dominoes and he was fine.
All I can think of is that he was doubting himself and needed to know that he was good at math or that he just didn't want to do math yesterday.....LOL!
In the end we picked three tiles at a time and used each side of the tile as a digit in a larger number and then made up our problems. He really didn't want to do the "big" number problems but I showed him that he does know how to break the problem down to get to the answer. In some cases we used the tiles for 3 and 4 digit numbers, we try to change it up as we go and it helps that he has to write the problems on the chalkboard or his dry erase board.
We also did our reading with our two books we have going at the moment and of course our weather work.
Can't forget the weather work! Since it was also the beginning of the month we took our January weather calendar and graphed the amount of sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy days and how many days we had temperatures in the teen's, 20's, 30's, etc. and how some days the wind chill bring those temperatures down even lower....sometimes into single digit numbers!!
Where's my hot chocolate??!!

For the match game spelling and vocabulary I just cut blank index cards in half and glue construction paper to the back making two's of all of the words.


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Rough couple of days.....

Granted we aren't feeling 100% yet but the "get back into the school - groove thing" was NOT working too well the past two days. It really bugged me because I was introducing some new things to give The Red Ranger more control over how he learns so that mom isn't (Ahem) "so bossy"......figured he will get more of a chance to control his own destiny with these ideas but we were butting heads enough that we both needed a couple of 5 minute time-outs in our corners. How do I handle those moments? Simple, I set the microwave timer to 5 minutes and we both don't talk to each other until we hear it go off. Then, we meet back at the table and pick up where we were before we had to re-group. I'm not exactly sure what he does during those 5 minutes (but its a NO tv, game, etc. time) but me.....I hide my face in both hands and do what Drew Barrymore does in the movie Ever After - 'just breathe'............great movie by the way, a version of Cinderella and never talked about enough.
Remember what I said before.....less stress this year!!!

Back to The Red Ranger controlling his own destiny.....
We've had this in place from last year and it was a nice chance of getting an "out" of a particular lesson/worksheet he really just couldn't bear to do. In our folder system which looks like this:

 THE BUMP FOLDER:
We have what we call a "bump" folder, it goes in the very top pocket when in use (Its actually a Transformers folder!). The idea of the "bump" is simply we come to let's say a math worksheet that he can't bear to do, he is allowed to "bump" one thing per day into the "bump" folder to be done the next school day. The catch is that it must be done before any of the other folders on the next school day we have. He also is allowed to swap the lesson in the folder if during the day he finds something else he wants to do even less than that 'math worksheet' used above, he can take out the math worksheet add the other item to the "bump" folder and the math worksheet then must be done.
Only one thing a day can be bumped.

The new thing I just introduced him too was this -
THE TWISTER SCRAMBLER:
The only reason we are calling it this is because we are using the spinner from our Twister Scram game for the colors...lol.
This is how it works. For each day that The Red Ranger has a 'good day' he gets a ticket/token to be used in the future. At the moment we are only using it for math, spelling and vocabulary but may expand it if it works out really well. If we happen to be doing a math or spelling lesson that he thinks is "boring" he may use one of his tickets to spin The Twister Scrambler, depending on the color the spinner lands on he plays a math or spelling game instead of the normal lesson in his folder that day.
We broke it down this way:
MATH: Yellow = toss across math, Green = file folder games, Blue = bag math or pizza fraction bingo, Red = dominoes or card games.
SPELLING: Yellow = match game, Green = sandwich game, Blue = scrabble slam card game, Red = letter spell.
Math -
Dominoes and card games are really simple for using for math lessons. Draw so many cards (depending on your child's age) add/subtract/multiply/mix them as is or use each separate card as a digit in a larger problem. He then writes the problems out on his dry erase board and does them.
File folder games are either ones we've made or have picked up along the way and he can choose any of them in the subject to play. Two come to mind right away, "Place Value Picnic" and " Take it to the Bank" both $ store buys.
Bag math is using the bags of manipulatives that have been premade and using those bags for the math problems.
Toss Across Math - I took his Toss Across game and re-purposed it for math by using those clear photo corners from my scrapbook desk and index cards. On the index cards I write numbers that get get placed over the "X" and "O"'s of the game (they can be removed if we go back to playing the Toss Across game), I also place a math symbol at the top so that he knows what problems he's doing or we agree to do 5 of this or that.
Spelling - 
Match game is simply a memory game for his 10 spelling words each week, we use Scrabble Slam for spelling his words and also for changing them from one to the other, letter spell is using our regular Scrabble set and any other letters in the house for spelling the weekly words. The sandwich game is using cards that look like bread, meats, lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc. to spell out his words.
For Vocabulary its mainly the match game until I can think of something else. I'm trying to think of a way to use our new Syllable Rally game for vocab., I'll most likely have to make up my own cards each month for it.
We'll be adding more to the rotation as we come across games or make up new ones ourselves. Here are some pictures of some of the games we use.

Now for some pictures of our Morning Meeting boards -

 The stand up pocket easels hold spelling word index cards, numbers/days of the week/special dates for the calendar, consonant/vowel tags and letters index cards.

 For Geography he identifies and colors the US state on a blank map sheet, which will also be updated later with capital cities, birds, flowers, flags, etc. for each state. For the world we are doing continents and oceans, which will then be expanded on with countries within, rivers, etc.

In these two pictures you can just barely make out a green sheet that is a monthly calendar that we record daily weather and temps on for graphing at the end of the month. We also have the cloud identifier and season spinner.
I tell you kids clothes hangers and clothespins really come in handy!

We had today off because Daddy was off from work but back at it tomorrow....help.....and its supposed to snow a bit. If you have any questions about anything on the boards feel free to ask away, hopefully when we play the games above I can take some pictures and expand on how they are played.



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Preparing for back to school.....

Hello and welcome to all the new followers!

Tomorrow we begin school again and I thought I would give a preview of what is in store.
I found free lessons for American holidays on CurrClick that will come in handy all through the year.
History Scribe - American Holidays
Each holiday gives you a history blurb on the holiday, a drawing block and a place for journaling (with or without lines). We printed out the one on New Year's and a blank for Christmas memories, it will make a great memory book and also bring history into everyday life for The Red Ranger.

This will come right after our morning meeting work and right before we head over to our folders.
Normally, we have our ABC fitness right before we settle into our morning meeting but since we've been sick and still have coughs we'll skip it. It does come in handy though to get rid of that excess energy before we sit down to work and using the energy bursts through the day keep things focused.
Our morning meeting starts with calendar work, including our weather graphing which he loves and geography, both USA and world, another thing he enjoys so very much. We also go over monthly vocabulary words, any themed unit studies and our books for the week. I'll add pictures of our boards tomorrow but I do have to update a couple sections for new stuff that we will be adding, as they are they may be useful for younger students. Hopefully it will give some ideas to other families just starting out.
I'll show certain area's of our home classroom, which is most of the home by the way, so that you can see how we are set up. Why does it always seem we need more room? We live in a two bedroom apartment so space is always an issue but its possible to use the walls, pocket charts and so on to make a classroom. Granted we can't put it all away or shut the door on it but that's just the way it is.....

We'll see you tomorrow!