I've Been Tagged and So Have You

I'm not an overly exciting person. I enjoy quiet and solitude to the point of being called a hermit and I am introverted. Something to this day my husband still doesn't understand. I was doing my daily Blog stalking and saw that Michelle from whimsyway has tagged me for a question game. The rules are for me to answer the 5 questions she has come up with and come up with my own 5 questions and tag 5 other bloggers to answer. My answers may be boring as I stated above about my lack of being exciting. The questions are as follows:


1) What is your favourite book of all time? That's a tough one. I read....alot, pretty much any spare time I have I am reading. I love a lot of different books more many different reasons, each one meaning something to me in a different way. I love Medieval Mystery novels, but I also like SciFi (sometimes one needs a vampire/fairy/werewolf fix). Depending on my mood and what day it is my favorite will change. I will say that The Clan of the Cave Bear novel is the one book that I have re-read the most. Ayla is my favorite heroine....so far.

2) What is your idea of the perfect day? Am I allowed to have this day occur in a different location? If so, then the perfect day would entail travelling. Staying in a fantastic hotel where we (family) can wake up and have real authentic eggs benedict (my fave). The day would be spent going to a museum, sight seeing, people watching and getting lost in the history of a city. Ending with a quiet dinner in the hotel room wearing pajamas and winding down with a book.

3) If you weren’t homeschooling, what sort of career would you have? Realistically I would still be the manager of a store dealing with not so pleasant people daily (with a forced, but genuine looking smile). But if I am allowed to rewind time to finish my Museum Studies degree, I would be working in a museum somewhere living and breathing history.

4) If you had the chance, what one famous person would you meet and why?As of right now, I would like to meet Queen Elizabeth 1. I recently read a biography on her and found her a fascinating character. There are many people from history I would love to spend and afternoon with. Even if it is just to see if the stories about them are true. I don't really have any desire to meet modern (alive) famous people though.

5) If you could possess one talent (singing, painting, writing, etc) and be truly proficient in it, what would it be? I am not very creative, I am more literal if that makes any sense. So it would be a big change for me to have an interest to have a talent in any of the creative fields. But I think I would like to be a writer if I could. I could see myself getting lost in researching and creating stories. I know how much a good book means to me, I would love to be able to give that gift to others.

Now for my five questions, which honestly I will probably have to use Google to come up with some ideas.
1) What type of music to you enjoy the most? Please provide examples.
2) What is the thing you cook that gets the most compliments? Recipe please.
3) What subject do you find the most difficult to teach or learn and why?
4) What city/country would you most like to live and why?
5) If you could have unlimited funds to feed one of your addictions what would it be? (I'm talking, shoes, books etc.)

I'm going to be a party pooper and not tag anyone in particular........but it would be so much fun if any of you ladies that read this choose to participate. No pressure, but you know who you are.

WW- Road Trip (actually parking lot)

Just Finish Something Already! Blog Hop

I will be the first to admit that I fall into the "I'll do it tomorrow" catagory. I won't deny it, there are just so many more things I would rather be doing that what I should be doing. So today I am officially 32 weeks pregnant. That's 8 months, and when I say that out loud it kind of freaks me out. So this past weekend I kicked it into semi prepare for the baby mode.

Things completed:

1. I got our crib back from the friend that borrowed it. It has not been assembled yet and we still need to buy a mattress (which isn't too urgent because we have a bassinet as well). But part one of three is done.

2. I went through Roo's old baby clothes. Cleaned them and separated them into girl and gender neutral piles. I then put the GN clothes into the baby dresser.

3. I took all of the girl stuff and neatly stored it into a an easy access bin, so it is there and ready to use if the baby is a girl.

I feel good, positive and I even have photo proof. I also cleaned the dining room/homeschool room today if that scores me extra points;)





 

Weekly Report and Funny Hats

This week was a short one due to an out of town opthamologist appointment that took up a huge chunk of the day and the rest was spent with our friend who lives in the city and it was her birthday. We did do a bunch of  Mondays work the week before (and on the weekend) in order to not throw our week off to much.  We have an early ballet class in the morning and I should be sleeping, but I am determined to finish this before I go. I might make it brief though;)

This weeks accomplishments

Memory Work: Invertebrates and the FLL poem Work have been memorized.

Phonics: We are still working on two syllable words and are on lesson 189 in The Ordinary Parents Guide to teaching reading. I have noticed that each time she reads to me she seems to be able to read words that I thought she wouldn't be able to. I don't know if this is a flicker before the light bulb goes on or if it is really good guessing within context. Time will tell.

Spelling: Still working on short vowel words.

First Language Lessons: We learned about proper nouns that are places. Rooms, our city, province and country.

Writing with Ease: This week was excerpts from Mary Poppins. She LOVES that movie and enjoyed the book. I am finding that her copywork is getting neater and she is starting to stay within the line boundaries better than before.

Math: We are still focusing on math facts up to 10 as well as did drill sheets and pages from the Evan Moor Skills Sharpener series. I think one more week on facts will do before we move onto subtraction in Singapore Math.

Latin: We focused on people in a family as well as boy, girl, man, and women. I am thinking of using the Song School Latin cutouts to make flashcards because for some reason she seems to love flashcards. The problem with SSL is that the songs really do get stuck in your head. I was humming one while brushing my teeth and no matter how hard I tried (believe me I tried). It would not go away.

French: Weather words and how to ask about the weather.

History: We read two DK Eyewitness books, one on ancient Egypt and one on mummies. We did a chapter from Story of the World on Sumerians and well as map work and a narration.

Science: This week we studied Chimps, Pandas and Polar Bears. She loves to learn about animals, but I believe she can't wait until we move onto the body section of Science. I found two really great diagrams of the skeletal system and the digestive system at the dollar store. She thinks these are great.

We skipped art this week because she wanted to go out for a walk at that time. We went and ran some errands while we were out. She fell, I'm not to sure what she fell over, but in the process both her hat and boot fell off. She scraped her hand, wrapped a kleenex around it and put on a brave face. So I took her out for hot chocolate and a treat after.

Here she is "reading" the paper and drinking her hot chocolate, not looking like she is going to cry like she did 5 minutes before.

We went out tonight and her while I was perusing other isles her father let her pick out a winter hat. The hat makes her look like a mountain man but she loves it. Below is front view and side view. At least she will be warm.

I Don't Know if This Counts as a Weekly Report

I hate being sick, but I especially hate being sick while being pregnant because you can't take anything to feel better. I am the type of person who catches anything and everything so I was expecting to get sick, but it was a doozey. It was the type of cold that seems to get worse by the hour for the first few days. Sleep was non existent and what little sleep I got was sitting up so I could breathe more comfortably. But enough complaining, I feel a little better today so we went out leaf collecting (along our walk to the grocery store).

She fell on her butt and was mad.

Stuffed all of the leaves in her purse, which I am sure will be fun to clean out after.

We knew it was cold out, but it was a lot windier and colder than we thought, so after my husband came home from work we went to the mall to get Roo a new winter coat. I am doing my happy dance that we finally got an H&M, which opened yesterday. Now we don't have to travel for 45 minutes to get to the nearest one. We found her this cute hooded parka for 30% off.



School this week was shaved down to the basics. Monday was Thanksgiving so we didn't do school, the rest of the week we worked on phonics, memory work, spelling, math facts and a little french.

Memory Work - Vertebrates and Seven Continents and location on a map, done. We are still working on the Egyptian Ennead (7 memorized), Invertebrates, the oceans and the FLL poem "Work".

Phonics- we are on lesson 187 in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. Her reading is getting more fluent and she only is sounding out 1 in approximately every 10 words.

Spelling - For spelling we are trying something new. We retired Spelling Workout for a bit and are now using the Ordinary Parents Guide for spelling as well. I want AAS, but can't afford it right now so we will see how this works in the interim. I went back to the beginning of the book and instead of using the rules as phonics rules, we are applying them towards spelling. The beginning short vowels with cvc words are easy, but we are going through them just to ensure understanding.

Math - We focused on learning our math facts to 10 this week, She knows her plus zeros, plus ones, and double facts. We have started the plus two's and will continue next week. We are not moving on to the next section in Singapore Math until the facts are known.

French - Counting to 12 is completed and now we are working on the weather terms.

Next week we will be back to normal.

On a side note. I don't know if I am nesting or if I am panicking but I really am determined to get the apartment ready for the baby. I made my husband dig out all the old baby clothes out of the storage room (he really didn't want to) so I could go through them all and separate them into sizes and gender neutrality. I now need to clean them all and get everything settled and put away. Currently they are all spread out in the living room on the open futon that Roo decided to set up and move into the middle of the room. The mess of it is pretty horrifying. On a positive note it has allowed me to purge some of our stuff again. I purged before we moved in the summer and now that I have had a chance to go through some of these clothes a second time, I have gotten rid of more. Does one really need 30 spit up blankets? Maybe, but hopefully not.

Does a baby really need this many clothes?

Where Did The Week Go? - Weekly Report

Is it just me, or did this week seem to go by in a blink of an eye? I had a list of things that I wanted to finish this week (or at least start to accomplish), but I found myself with the end of each day nearing and putting it off until the next day. I'm now going to have to try to do some of it this weekend. I only have approximately 10 weeks left before I should be having this baby and I have so much that I need to do.

We did do school everyday this week and some days took longer than others based on Miss Crankeypants waking with a bad attitude for several of those days. Currently she is in the other room singing some random song that she is making up as she goes long. She should be sleeping, but she is fighting it and she has ballet early in the morning which will be fun to wake her for (note the sarcasm). It's hard to get her to sleep sometimes because we live right downtown and often there are festivals in the streets. This is what we watched from our bedroom window a few days ago.

The picture looks weird, but it is of a fire spinner doing his show.

We began to work on the memorization of the poem "Work" in First Language Lessons and completed week 5 in Writing With Ease. For memory work Vertebrates has been memorized and has moved out of daily work replaced with Invertebrates. We are still working on the Egyptian Ennead list as well. We had a breakthrough with spelling this week though. There is an exercise in some lessons of the workbook that involves  looking through a list of words and determining what word is spelled incorrectly. She used to guess randomly because she had no idea. Well this week she not only could figure out what words were wrong, but also what the incorrect part was. Phonics is still an everyday thing, but we have slowed and review more for awhile.
One day this week Roo decided she was going to chores. So she tied a scarf around her head, put on her rain boots (I'm not sure why) and grabbed a broom. I took a photo because more often than not it is her making messes not cleaning them.



In Math we have reached the end of the first part of the addition lessons for facts up to 10. Before we move onto subtraction we are going to take the next week to just focus on math facts and and cementing the number bonds into her head. Song School Latin focused on family names (mother, father, sister, brother) and review. She noticed the similarity between that and the French version of those words. For French we worked on numbers 6-12 and review of past units. I like how quick and efficient these two programs are. It's nice to be able to see progress from something that only takes 5-10 minutes a day. On a side note, my library has finally gotten an online subscription to Byki. So now I can finally start my own French and Latin lessons for free.

Giraffe, camel and deer were the animals we studied in Science this week. There was a camel experiment that we didn't complete, but I am planning on doing this weekend. Mummies and Pyramids were the focus of history. I borrowed the DK Eyewitness Mummies book from the library. I thought she might be a little scared from some of the pictures, but she was enthralled. I should have known better because when we went to the museum last time, she really, really enjoyed the Egyptian exhibit. For the activity this week I couldn't bring myself to do the mummified chicken. So we opted for the pyramid from sugar cubes. It suggests making your own cubes from sand and glue for a more realistic effect, but lets be honest. I am not a uber crafty individual. Although she may have enjoyed that process, it was just a little too much work so I opted for the easy alternative. She enjoyed it, and made it herself. Afterwards she asked if we could wipe off the glue so that she could eat the sugar.




This weekend is Thanksgiving weekend and we are not planning on having a full on Thanksgiving meal. My husband is on a strict diet and I am not cooking for two, especially when one is picky. So I need to find a good alternative that will be easy to make and satisfying to have. I did promise Roo that she could pick the dessert and she chose this after seeing it in my cooking magazine. Is it sad that one of the highlights of my week was getting the new 2011 Ikea catalogue?


And she sleeps.

What to eat for....Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?

My daughter is a picky eater. Not just a small list of things she will eat, but she likes to pick at things. Small amounts of things spread across her plate seems to appeal to her more. So in enters my new inspiration. I came across a blog that has such a great concept that I am very excited to start implementing. Shannon over at BentoLunch is a very inspirational and creative woman. She has taken the concept of a Bento lunch to the next level by incorporating kid inspired menus, creativity and visual appeal. Her artisitic talent with cheese alone astounds me. I don't know if I can be that creative, but she inspired me to try.

I seriously want a set of these Lunch Punch sandwich cutters.

School Week 4 - Weekly Reports

This week ended up being a 4.5 day week instead of 5. We had errands and library time on Friday morning that cut our day shorter. On a positive note, Roo was switched from a Friday night ballet class to Saturday morning because Friday nights are really hard to make it to on time. The Saturday morning class I think may be better for her anyway. It has a bigger range of ages from 3-6 which is nice because she has the tendency to fidget a lot and now she isn't the only one. It's funny though, the dance class has a two way mirror out into the waiting room so you can watch your kids without distracting them. They were flying softly like fairies today in a line passed the window, and then there comes Roo flapping like an eagle ready to take off. Hubby has to get up a drive us and I make him suffer the adult social scene with me in there. Today he looked like he wanted the floor to open and to disappear. If I must suffer, so must he (insert evil laugh).


We also got side tracked to feed the ducks.


This week for language arts we completed, Week 4 of Writing With Ease which focused on Alice in Wonderland.  We finished three lessons of First Language Lessons which is still talking about nouns. One lesson of Spelling Workout was completed with only one error of forgetting to double the L in the word sell. For memorization it seems that she has the list of Vertebrates down and half of the Egyptian Ennead. I will add another one or two lists to next week.

In Singapore Math week completed 3 lessons in 4 days and yesterday we focused on the math facts up to 5. I am trying to pace out the work so that we are spending as much or as little time that is needed. When she starts to lose focus during a lesson, it's time to put it away and do the rest the next day. In Geography we were discovering and locating various landforms in North America. We pulled out the atlas, and used the wall map and globe to find them and then mark them in the workbook.

Latin was review week this week. We are both enjoying this course a lot and she really digs the songs for some reason. I find myself annoyingly humming them throughout the day, which I guess is appropriate since the purpose of them is to stick in your head. In French we are still focusing on counting, this week numbers 6-12 plus a big review yesterday to ensure nothing is being forgotten. She likes to test me periodically to see if I know. Or will randomly ask what things are in French and I will have to go look it up and report back. I'm glad that she seems to have an interest in languages, because that is one of my regrets. I wish I would have focused on learning another language when I was younger.

The First Writing was the topic we learned in History. We read a couple of books on Ancient Egypt and did a Hieroglyphic scroll as a project. For Science we focused on elephants, zebras and foxes. We completed narrations, placed them on the food chart and into their correct habitats.


This is the semi finished version of our scroll. I tea stained some paper and then she told me what she wanted it to say. I drew it in pencil and she went over the lines with paint. All we need to add is a wooden dowel to roll it and some ribbon.


In art we finished a picture narration and a water colour art project. Her picture was of a funny experience that her dad had while we were on vacation a few years ago. It involved watching Shark week on television, him snorkeling in a beach called Turtle Bay and an encounter in the water. Today it is still one of the funniest things I have ever seen. We also completed week 4 of our composer study of Hildegarde von Bingen. Next week we move on to Arcangelo Corelli.

Last night we went to the city next to us because is has a guitar store my husband likes to frequent and the mall has H&M which I like to frequent. I was depressed going into H&M for me though because I can't really buy myself clothes like that when I am pregnant, so I bought stuff for Roo. They had great deals on leggings, sweater/shirt dresses, tights and jeans. I think she is officially outfitted for the fall/winter season. Now if only I new for certain what this babies gender was, they had so many cute things for babies there.


This is the bored face while we were sitting in the car waiting for dad to finish his guitar business.
In some random garden outfitted in some of her new stuff. Weird pose and a weird expression on her face.