We’ve been busy at Fox Mountain Academy the past few weeks, so I haven’t had time to blog much! (That’s the name we put on our homeschool ID cards and what we call ourselves.) We started September 6th with official second grade. Since Daddy has been in Chile a lot lately (and is there for two weeks), we are sending him a picture of Satori doing her work. She’s lost quite a few teeth recently, so one of her new nicknames is “Toothless”.

So far we’ve been very happy with all our curriculum, I think I’m finally getting good at picking out what might be a success in our homeschool. Some new curriculum we are trying out this fall include:

• Adventures in America (plus our own additional readings for American/US History)
• English From the Roots Up (just a few minutes a few times a week, so far we learned PHOTO and GRAPH)
• Minimus Latin (another fun Latin we started after Song School Latin)
• Writing With Ease 2(third time’s a charm, we flew through WWE1 in a few weeks and started 2)
• Reading lots of books! Just finished Mary Poppins and The Hobbit this week. Starting Lord of the Rings and The Voyages of Dr. DoLittle
• and a few others we haven’t started yet

We have moved to the next level/year in:

• RSO Earth & Space
• Story of the World – Middle Ages
• All About Spelling Level 5
• Wordly Wise Book 3
• Evan Moor Daily Geography Practice, Grade 3

Satori is also attending a Colorado homeschool enrichment program called OPTIONS. We are in love with her first grade teacher!!! She’s been a dream… always so positive, creative, and nurturing. She even has a blog with included student family permission and no names listed of course. You can see what Satori did in her second week of school. Satori can be spotted in the second picture, next to her best friend! She loves hanging out with her friends but is glad it’s only one day a week. She tells me excitedly about everything they learn – the wordless books by David Weisner, all about the rainforest, warm and dry colors in art, her new Spanish teacher, and so on…

While I write this blog post, after she finished her independent work, she then started putting name tags on a half dozen of her stuffed animals, so they can learn along with her and I can ask the whole “class” questions. New students include: Peter Rabbit, Roxie Dog, Pixel Bear, Cobbler the dog, and Tigriss Tiger.

It’s getting cooler and we see snow up on the mountain tops when we leave the gulch we live by. We had to turn our heat on one day already.

We miss you Daddy and Gramy and Grampy!!!

Creating a Reading Tree has been a dream of mine for a few years and finally I am just going to build it. If anyone has any links to photos of Reading or Book Trees that they’ve done that are similar, I am all ears! I’m still in the brain-storming phase.

For every book read, we will add a leaf to our tree. I do have a leaf punch that I believe will work well. I didn’t want the leaves to be too big, as I envision a colossal tree with a huge abundance of leaves in the years to come. But I still need room to leave the details. We’ll add a little thumbnail of the book to the leaf, as well as date and one of the following codes:

• IR – Satori Independent Read
• RA – Mom or Dad Read Aloud
• AB – Audiobook

These thumbnails might be a bit too big yet, I’ll still have to refine our leaves. Branches will be another decision…

Next, where to put the tree? I have magnetic walls in parts of our Reading Room and we stuck a small magnet on the back of some sample leaves and they stuck to the wall perfectly.

The advantage of this is we can take down the leaves easily and put them back up, without affecting the wall. Satori can easily reach the Reading Tree here. This location also “sets off” the leaves nicely with the deep green and vivid orange-yellow.

I would take down our Dr. Seuss shelf and timelines here to make more room. The disadvantage is that if our door is open, it will hide the wall.

So that leads me to wonder if we should place it on the far wall. I’d take down our map and make a grandiose tree in a position that would be a showcase in our library. It is not magnetic so I’d probably use some kind of putty to stick the leaves to the wall. Once I can make an appealing brown branch tree design on brown paper, I’d cut it out and put it up and then stick the leaves near the branches.

Anyone have any suggestions or ideas? Has anyone done this or know someone who has? Any help would be appreciated!

Satori has discovered the iPad/iPhone game Pocket Frogs that she started playing yesterday. It’s free and I like that it has goals that she has to work to reach. She budgets her money to save for things she really wants without blowing all her coins as soon as she gets them. Satori wanted to share with you her new game and typed it out on her blog. Below is entirely unedited by Mom except for the insertion of a few photos.

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Posted by Satori, age 6

I want to talk about Pocket Frogs.

“At the Pond”

You level up, and earn more interesting frog kinds. Sometimes you win awards, new frogs, and prizes! You can earn money, breed, buy stuff, and unlock frogs as you level! Potions are very good.

Frogs must be in nursury or other habitats.

I’m almost at level 4!

You can also do puzzles and races!

We have been taking it easy the second half of the summer, enjoying the beautiful weather. We do a few lessons a week, but they’re on the bottom of our priority list at the moment. Instead we’ve been taking walks/hikes, learning how to ride a bike, organizing the library/garage, etc…

My parents visited a few weeks back and we all went cabin camping, along with my brother’s family. Here’s some pics. I should’ve taken more, but I only take it out when the lighting is good.

Gramy/Grampy (aka Nana/Papa) with all their grandchildren.

The twins… (Sorry I cannot be 100% sure who is Brady and who is Beckett.)

Satori just loves her cousin Peyton. They are going to be flower girls together in my other brother’s upcoming wedding! This was one of the few times I got Peyton to look directly in the camera. She loves to dance and flail her arms I noticed!

Satori with her two top front teeth yet (which she just lost in the past few days).

Our cabins were just outside Rocky Mountain National Park and moose were a common sight. We had some foraging just outside our cabin and all around the campground.

Paddle-boating on Lake Granby.

The highly anticipated opening of Denver’s IKEA led to the purchase of new bookshelves for our home library. Satori has been enjoying reading in the cozy library.

I am currently obsessed with filling out our library with the best literature for ages 6-14. Satori seems to enjoy reading books most written for late elementary/middle school age. We also got an Audible membership and have been listening to tons of quality literature.

Her flower girl dress has arrived and it fits perfectly! We will be getting a haircut next week, sorry for her long bangs and messy hair in these pictures.

Because Satori is losing all her teeth, she looks like a crazy jack-0-lantern when she smiles overly zealously. We now have 3 types of smiles that she’ll do for wedding pictures, lol!

1. Controlled: Lips closed, no teeth
2. Calm: Lips partly open, just top of teeth showing
3. Crazy: Let it all loose! All teeth and gaps showing!

This flower is detachable, we can take it off it it’s distracting.

Thanks Dad for making our sturdy new deck step! We now feel confident that we won’t break our leg stepping off the deck.

We are off on another trip tomorrow – to Colorado Springs! I still have to share our photos from our Oregon trip yet.

This past week I’ve been obsessed with books and what better project to do next than to start cataloging our book collection! I’ve been playing around with four book catalog software systems and hopefully next month emerge with our favorite. Our new barcode scanner (just $30) arrived today to make cataloging a cinch.

Satori and I made a video to show how easy it can be to catalog your very own book collection. In this video we are using Collectorz. One of these days we will learn how to make our videos more professional and smoother.

I’m asking for your help! The past few days I have been compiling a huge children’s literature list. I thought I would make a top 100, but it quickly surpassed that number and now I’m at 250. I opened up suggestions at a few homeschooling forums and I’ve been flooded with suggestions.

This list is books suitable for children in the grade 1-6 range, although a little lower and higher would work as well. All must be still in print so they would be easy to find. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a great book list, only to have them all out of print!

Here is the list as it stands so far – Children’s Literature Sortable List. As you can see, it’s sortable by Title, Author, Last Name, Page Count, Copyright Year, Genre and Newbery award. Books that are more appropriate for older children are marked.

I’m still open for suggestions, additions/subtractions/revisions and feedback. Once done, I’ll work on making a printable PDF page (my initial attempts have failed, but I’ll keep trying).

Just when I think I have a few 300 piece puzzles to keep Satori busy, she moves on to 500 piece puzzles. She even helps me with my 1000 piece ones, I think she worked more on my last one than I did. But hopefully, 500 piece puzzles will be a good size to stick with for a few more years.

Satori shouts out HI to Gramy and Grampy! (I wanted to add some some of personal post with photos of their granddaughter to offset all the boring curriculum reviews I do.)

Those pictures were taken late last night. This afternoon she started working on it again after we got back from the movies.

I think she’ll have this puzzle finished this weekend already. I was kinda hoping it would last a week or so. We went to the toystore today and there are no whimsical 500-piece puzzles with fairies or at least appealing, colorful images for young children. I did find a Ravensburger Curious Kitties one on Amazon that will arrive next week.

I also can’t keep up with enough writing journals and bare books for her! She freaked out this past week until our latest Rainbow Resource shipment arrived this afternoon with 20 more blank books. She had a list of a dozen stories she wanted to get down on paper.