Satori Smiles

Head on over to Smrt Mama’s blog SmrtLernins.com where she is having her first ever contest! Upload a picture of what you think a homeschooler looks like in her “You Look Like a Homeschooler” contest.

I love her blog. She’s got a sense of humor and wit that I could never achieve, but I do like to enjoy by visiting her blog every week. I should actually visit more than once a week, she’s one of the few homeschool bloggers I know that blog more than I do! She’s got a picture of herself in a dunce hat, and has cute misspelled words, but make no mistake, this mama seems to be one of the most intelligent homeschool parents I know.

My dear mother recently pointed out that no one ever took photos that had me in them! That is very true, it is always me behind the camera asking to get shots of everyone else. So this morning, I figured out my self timer and we got some family photos for the first time in over a year!

I’m partial to black and white for special photos for some reason…

Yes, these photos are bigger than I normally post!

We just got back from Denver where we went to the Denver Nature and Science museum (photos to come later) and I decided to update some of the blog pages.

I’ve been busy working on some photos to update the Homeschool Room section.

Fitness gym…

Kraft Kitchen has been updated with a new child-sized adjustable height table and chair…

… as well as a new Craft Embellishment Center.

History Hangout has new timelines up…

And more… Check out the Homeschool Rooms section.

We’ve finished spelling compound words in our All-About-Spelling program Level 1. Just 2 more Steps to go and we’re on to Level 2.

Before we started Step 23 today we did a review. This program has a great system for review. In our Spelling Review box we tackle things we need to review. She has all the rules, Key Cards, phonograms memorized except for a couple like all the sounds for the letter “o”. AAS is a vertical phonics system, so we are to learn all the sounds of a phonogram right away. At first it can be daunting to be presented with all these sounds that even the parent didn’t have memorized, but in the end, it makes reading and spelling so much easier. It’s certainly paying off now that we’ve moved beyond the basic short vowel and consonant sounds.

I keep all the words Satori struggles with and we start out by spelling them. Here she is spelling them on her hanging white board.

Any words that are not spelled correctly get filed away in the Review tab of our index card box. Toward the end of Level 1, here is the remaining words she has a hard time spelling. Most of the time it comes down to pronunciation issues – instead of “drink” we pronounce it almost like “jrink”. “desktop” she wants to spell as “desctop” but I think she is catching on now. “pink” is always spelled “pick”, but I know she knows most of her -ink words, so this must be a pronunciation thing for her. “windmill” often forgets the double “l” at the end. Our hint:

Remember to floss!

I admit our spelling lesson went past 20 minutes today, I wanted to get a very thorough review done. I guess we’re usually so excited to start a new level, that the Review session gets truncated prematurely. This time, we covered everything. She got bored after the 30 minute mark and started writing random phrases down. This is what it says:

chase the frog

Mat gulped. He scared the pig, ran to the pond.

Not quite a story but I love that she spelled “chase” correctly and we haven’t covered that yet.

Following the suggested activities in our Story of the World 1 Activity Guide, we gathered our little family once again on a Sunday night to do a family craft.

Satori already proved that she loved studying hieroglyphs, today she even tested me (and I failed) on my hieroglyph letters. She knows almost all of them (that stand for actual letters). Little kids have such great memories! Our first project was an Egyptian Hieroglyph Scroll. Without the guidance of our rubber stampers or stencils, and using just brush and paint (we should’ve used ink as suggested), it was tough! Satori gave up on her name and just drew random hieroglyphs.

While we let the hieroglyph paintings dry, we started with our clay and wedge stick to punch in some cuneiform!

We used 3 different clay types. The above chunk of clay was ideal, it came out of our Egyptian Hieroglyph Treasure Chest, along with the cuneiform stylus. But we only had one chunk, so we had to use others. Our Crayola Air Dray Clay was too hard and crumbly. (Maybe would have been fine if it was newly opened.) The Crayola Model Magic was easiest to work with, but it was too spongy and wouldn’t hold our markings well.

Then we set these out to dry overnight. I love the terracotta one, that was Satori’s. She added vertical lines and it really looks like a slab of ancient writing!

Back to our Hieroglyph scrolls, we attached two wooden dowels at the ends and rolled it up and tied with twine. They look so cool!

The scrolls have a nice crinkly, ancient parchment feel and are fun to unroll/roll up. Satori now wishes she would have taken better care with her hieroglyph painting and wrote her real name. I told her we can do it again.

A few more Egyptian projects we tackled over the weekend… making a necklace:

This was from our Ancient Egypt: Start Exploring Treasure Chest.

Here’s another look at our Egyptian Nile Grass, growing nicely. We started this a week and a half ago. The river is going through a drought right now.

Mom also made this Egyptian dress, I found a quick no-sew project in one of our Egypt craft books.

Satori zoomed through her Handwriting Without Tears books and last fall we took a two month break (from everything actually). She continued to write letters and books, so I figured that her handwriting wouldn’t suffer too much. This month we started up Spring Semester and started only doing handwriting in our HWT Grade 1 book two times a week (we used to do it 3x a week). We’re doing one letter at a time, just a few pages.

However, I’ve noticed that her handwriting is not improving, perhaps getting sloppier, and showing some inverted letters. Lowercase letters are not on the proper line, they rarely descend below the line and sometimes aren’t tall. In HWT lowercase is either tall, small, or descending. I’m seeing this in our ETC workbook and all of Satori’s creative papers that she does on her own accord.

Time for some emergency practice! I’m using the StartWrite software which features HWT fonts to generate worksheets with all lowercase (we’ve actually never done this before). With this software I can specify not only the font, but the shading, letter type (dotted, dashed, or solid), starting dot, directional arrows, guide line options, and so much more. Our favorite is the lightest shading in solid, with a red starting dot, and only the middle and bottom lines. Just like HWT recommends.

This colorful worksheet Satori all the tall letters are circled in red, small are in blue, and descending are in green. I hope this will help her remember these if we do this worksheet now and then.

We will be adding these StartWrite worksheets everyday until her handwriting improves. We’ll also slowly go through Handwriting Without Tears, letter by letter this time to make sure we’re forming our letters correctly.

I’ll list a few examples of our worksheets generated this week. Below is Upper and Lowercase letters with directional  arrows.

Here’s an example of just the starting dot.

This day we covered “d” in our HWT book. They have clipart built-in to the software, how convenient! As you can see, Satori likes to add her own embellishements (nex tim sing wis me). We’ll be working on her pronunciation so she can spell correctly, lol!

Here’s some pages out of her HWT book, we’re reviewing the lowercase letters which we learned in the fall.

She’s pretty good at writing numbers, but 8 is a bit awkward. On these pages, Satori will make her own checkmark box and check it off if her HWT book “forgets” to include it.

I promised I would review some of our favorite games and I realized I haven’t done any yet, so here is out first one – Rush Hour Jr. This Junior version is designed for ages 6-8, but we are just fine at age 5, perhaps even younger kids would enjoy this. I consider these types of games to be great fun as well as excellent ways to get the brain challenged.

The object is to get the ice cream truck out of the traffic grid. Cars can only move back and forth.

The one disadvantage is that these vehicles are very light plastic and can easily pop off their tracks. But once we paid heed to this and were careful, they stayed on their tracks better.

Daddy and Satori had a great time playing the game. I think the normal version of Rush Hour (get the Standard, not Deluxe version) will find its way into our house very soon!

And in the photo below – pop! The Ice Cream Truck sails away free!

I love organizing and labeling things. You can get a Dymo Label Printer for under $100, and never have to buy ink or toner, just the labels. Super useful for homeschooling. I use them to print out labels, postage, and now Timeline Figures!

This evening I decided to start our history timelines. (I will blog about my favorite timeline choices in another post.) My timelines both came with sets of timeline figures, but neither had King Narmer or a shaduf figure, both of which we’ve studied in Story of the World. I hate waiting for snail mail if I order some printed or on CD. I also wanted them in label sticker format, I didn’t want to have to cut them myself.  So I decided to make my own!

First I had to see if this was going to be easy. I loaded up the Dymo software and within a minute I had my first timeline figure of King Narmer up! (He is the tiny black and white sticker on the below timeline, you can click the image to see it full-size).

For those of you that are curious which timeline that is, it is the Classical Education Timeline Complete Package that is currently being revised. You can also find it at Pandia Press. Based on the messages, they are supposed to come out with their new version January 2010. They have one day left! It comes with a sticker pack, but doesn’t have all that you’ll need. I’ll blog more about this timeline and  our Add-A-Century timeline later.

Here he is up close.

Now that that was such a cinch, here it is documented with pictures. First I use Google Images to find a picture of the image. I copy that to my clipboard (right-click, Copy). Then I pull up the Dymo software and insert the image into my label. I had chosen “Fit to Screen” so it automatically resizes. It is also easy to put a black outline around the image, the better to see it on the timeline. Then I add a text blurb, and press the big green Print button.

Immediately comes out the beautiful label!

This is a Dymo Twin Turbo printer which holds two different labels. I can have label and postage ready at the same time, or keep a small and large label ready. I believe I have a small Dymo label printer leftover from my business, which might be fun to do as a blog giveway sometime.

And our second timeline figure it up!

If you are a member of Hannah HS Yahoo Group, they have very helpful files where you can find free timeline and history cards to print off as well.

Public Domain Images that you can use for Timeline Figures:

• Historical Portrait Gallery
• Clipart ETC – Floridal Educational resource: 58,000 pieces of free educational clipart are available for school projects
• Classroom Clipart

Want to just purchase ready-made Timeline Figures?

If you do not want to make your own, there are plenty of timeline figure choices. This one is probably the most well-known:

History Through the Ages offers hundreds of high quality timeline figures (illustrated by Amy Pak). You can get 1,260+ figures on a 2-CD set for $74.95. Store them in this beautiful “Record of Time” journal.

One of my homeschooling online groups had the great idea to send each other Valentine’s Day cards! There were so many who wanted to participate, that we got filed into groups so we wouldn’t have to send out bazillions. This was a 3-4 hour process anyway, with the whole family participating – a family craft night.

Satori did almost all the work, and I cannot believe she persevered through it all. She wrote all the names and signed the cards. She stuck on all the stickers and items, and stamped the  hieroglyphs.

Yep, since Satori memorized her hieroglyphs, she stamped each child’s name in hieroglyphs! She knew all the letters except some rare ones.

We did this assembly line, with Satori doing the writing/sticking/stamping, and daddy doing the gluing and glittering, and mama organizing and addressing the envelopes.

And once we were done, Satori sealed them with a kiss.

This week we learned and experimented with Hieroglyphs (cuneiform and more hands-on projects we’ll get to this weekend). I was kinda looking forward to playing with these ancient forms of writing, but Satori was ecstatic. She has been jumping up and down type of excited since last week (I got her on video yesterday).

I had been researching for over a month on the best tools to learn this, along with the SOTW AG book. My first choice was this Egyptian Symbols Hieroglyphic Stamp Kit. I thought it was just a book, but when we got it, it was actually a wooden box, with these stamps inside it. A small booklet comes with it. The bottom of the box shows where the stamps go back, so Satori has been very good at putting them all back.

Out of all the hieroglyphic goodness out there, why did I choose this? This seems to have the highest quality and largest stamps (some are 1″x1″) of all the kits I had been considering. (Correct me if there is a similar alternative less than $15 out there)!  Here Satori is stamping an “A”. With this kit, she actually memorized about half the alphabet without even trying!

The Egyptians used this picture writing in several ways. Left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and even stacked symbols sometimes. You can tell how to read the writing by looking at the way the animals face – they face the way that you should read the writing. Most of our stamps face left, so you read them as normal, from left to right. Here’s my name “Angela”, surrounded by a cartouche (the oval) which signifies I’m an important person!

We also got this Hieroglyphs book by Joyce Milton. I chose this one because of the stencil included. It was also a bonus that it was colorful and fun and suited for young children!

I knew it would be a hit with Satori. She dropped her stamps and filled in every stencil shape.

Here’s the stencil close up.

And the page that shows the alphabet.

Our Ancient Egypt Start Exploring Treasure Chest also has hieroglyph stamps, but they are much smaller stamps. The bonus to the treasure chest is that you get a piece of papyrus! (And many other cool stuff, more on this later.)

I discovered that the same company also makes a Treasure Chest, but dedicated to hieroglyphs! It’s called Hieroglyphics, which I recently learned should be an adjective, not a noun, but heiroglyphics is listed as both an adjective and a noun in a dictionary. This kit is neat because it gives you modeling clay and a reed stylus to make cuneiform as well! The kit includes a Rosetta Stone poster, game, stickers, of course 27 rubber hieroglyphic stamps, and more.

We chose this picture book – Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs by James Rumford. Great book for this age group of 4-8! I learned a lot myself, and enjoyed learning more about the Rosetta Stone.

Here’s a sample page:

I was also going to get Fun With Hieroglyphs, but I think we’ll be okay for now. This book actually has the most reviews, so if anyone has it, I’d love to hear how you like it!