Satori Smiles

Behind the scenes I’ve been working on updating a SOTW Lessons page. I started making this page last year as I was preparing our SOTW lessons, but now I brought it into the blog for easy viewing. Seeing all the chapters lined out on one page makes it easy for me to see at a glance where we are, for current, past, and future lessons. This is a work in progress. I actually told Susan Wise Bauer’s team I was doing this, so that I could come up with something that wouldn’t infringe on her hard work. I think it will actually make people more interested in her program, as well as helping me plan, so everyone wins.

Also updated is our K-1 Weekly Lesson schedule. I’m a spontaneous person, so I don’t have a schedule down to the hour. Click to see full view, or head to the link above. You may notice I finally cut out our Explode the Code workbook, it was redundant. We cover reading/phonics with our normal reading and readingeggs.com. We cover handwriting in our normal handwriting and copywork for several subjects. Spelling is adequately covered in All-About-Spelling. There are subjects that we haven’t covered yet this year, like Science and Art. I do feel bad about that, and hope to get organized enough to include them. Other subjects, like Spanish/Latin/piano/swimming class/drama classes maybe we’ll start later this spring or summer.

A Sample Monday

If I had to describe a typical day, here’s how a typical Monday might go. As you can see from our lesson schedule above, actual sit-down work is less than two hours a day, so most of our day is spent as freetime. For some reason, we both like to do Math at night, after we both get a second wind. It has become very enjoyable, but the disadvantage is that if we’re busy, we sometimes skip it. I need to prioritize certain lessons to make sure we cover them as planned.

• 9:00: Wake up, breakfast, shower, check email.
• 10:00-10:20 – Reading (OPG)
• 10:20-10:40 – Spelling (OPG)
• 10:40-11:00 – History (SOTW)
• 11:00-12:00 – Mama reads aloud, Satori plays ReadingEggs.com, watches educational video, etc…
• 12:00-1:00 – Lunch
• 1:00-5:00 – Freetime – Play time. Possible craft. Possible educational videos/movies.
• 5:00-6:00 – Dinner
• 6:00-6:20 – Math (RS)
• 6:20-6:25 – Writing (WWE)
• 6:25-7:00 – Mama might work on blog, while Satori might color/play.
• 7:00-9:00 – Playtime, mama workout time, TV time…
• Before bedtime, Satori reads a few stories from her readers, and then Mama reads aloud from a chapter book.

Here are some photos of our newly decorated living room/family room. (I had promised my mom to take these.) This is just below our Loft area where we do most of our lessons. So you can see that the family can stay connected if some of us are hanging out in the Loft or in the living room watching TV.

This new furniture kicks out and reclines, and most of it even rocks back and forth. It’s so comfy to curl up and watch movies or read.

Very important to me in this little redesign of this room was a place to read comfortably. With the adoption coming up, we may be losing our Library room to a bedroom, so I still wanted a place to curl up with my children and read. This recliner chair certainly fills that need!

This piece below was sitting in our basement playroom unused. It is supposed to be a media center, but we decided to convert it to a bookcase showcasing large hardcover books, like the kind you’d put on a coffee table. I’ll get a swivel dictionary stand to hold our unabridged New Oxford American dictionary.

When we bought this house, we inherited all this rustic Aspen furniture. We added two new pieces to this room, the bookcase above, and the end table. These join the huge entertainment center in the room, as well as all the window sills and railings in the room.

This weekend, we  got some beautiful Colorado snow. You can’t see all the windows, but this room has windows climbing way up high and we can see the snow-covered trees surrounding the house.

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.

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.

I spent the entire day organizing this blog, fixing links, updating categories, adding a favicon, etc… When I first started this blog, it was mostly about Five in a Row program, but we’ve added so much since then. I still want to row some more FIAR books now and then too.

I updated our Curriculum main page, and added sub-pages for each semester. I think it will be interesting to go back and see how things were going from year one.

And I can’t leave without posting one of Satori’s Smiles.

To fund my new obsession with reading quality literature (and addiction to homeschooling books, games and curriculums of course), I am selling hundreds of old books. As you can see by the pictures, I used to be a computer programmer, and then had my own online e-commerce business. As a book addict, I think I bought all the related books on the market, eek. A few weeks ago, I started selling them all, and have sold over 100 books and made over $1000! In my garage I have boxes and boxes of books, they are slowly coming out and making it on my Amazon Marketplace pages for sale.

No, my bookshelf isn’t actually tilting, I just could show more books that way.

Wanna see the desk of a former girl geek?

Some of my online ecommerce tools are coming in handy, such as this Zebra thermal printer (to print my postage) and this scale. I will keep my Endica postage account.

I would love to say goodbye to my former computer-programming/business entrepreneur life forever, and fill this shelf and many more with the classics! While we have a children’s library reading room, I wish I could make my very own comfortable reading room filled with the Great Books, and floor to ceiling shelves. If we had an extra room in our house, I would do just that, but I ran out of rooms…

I’ve uploaded our SOTW Lesson Plans on my Google Docs as public today. This is a work in progress and just helps me visualize the lessons in one handy place. Maybe this will help others too that are using Story of the World and the Activity Guide.

Also, I’ve found some great free resources! First up, a free Story of the World workbook that you can download immediately. Use this to write down narrations, illustrate drawings, keep a list of related books you’ve read, store photos of your activities, and more. It has a handy 2-day week, which you could easily extend to a 3-day week. (You’ll need to already own the Story of the World book and Activity Guide.)

The above workbook will help you build the ultimate history binder. I suppose you want a suitable cover and spine for your binder? No worries, download the free cover here or purchase one for just $1.50!

http://barefootmeandering.com/homeschool/ (Scroll down for the free covers.)

Want more to choose from? Kathy Jo has over 70 Notebook Covers for all your homeschooling needs, from History to Science to Language Arts and more.

Need some interactive quizzes? No problem thanks to Elizabeth Stapel! She’s got chapters 1-34 covered, and some great reviews.

http://www.bradenbryce.com/homeschool/

Now that we’ve had a thorough study of prehistory, we are just about to launch into our studies of actual history using Story of the World (SOTW) by Susan Wise Bauer. You may have heard me chatter away about SOTW in the blog or in homeschooling forums asking how soon I could start. All summer I was dying to start this history program designed to start around Grade 1, but decided to wait until Satori was 5.  Well, now she is, and I’ve been preparing our lessons for this exciting endeavor!

We’ll be closely following the actual Story of the World Volume 1: Ancient Times book and Activity book, but like the perfectionist geek that I am, I also got History Odyssey and a similar free program called Myths, Maps, and Marvels. This month I’ll be seeing how to combine the best ideas from them all. Art in Story book will enhance our learnings. I’ve got timelines, black line maps, history pockets and more on hand to help with the lessons.

I expect our history studies to take up a large part of this blog, as I’ll be documenting the whole journey with descriptions and photos - what we’ve learned, what we’ve made (crafts/art/projects), what we’ve read (literature read-alongs) and more.

The past few days I’ve been working on the blog, changed the them *again* and updated a few sections, mostly the Homeschool Room photo section.

Added our Learning Loft page.

Learning Loft

Sometimes I get obsessed with something, and collecting all the Five in a Row books was I suppose one. In February I started my FIAR collection, and after seeing how much Satori loved these books, even wanting me to read them over and over long after we rowed them, I added on. And on. Eventually I thought I might as well collect all the first 3 volumes our first year.

Here’s what they all look like together. Click each picture to see the full, original size.

FIAR books in Rain Gutter shelves

There are some OOP (out-of-print) books that are not there, I couldn’t justify spending $100 on a rare, hard-to-find OOP book. There are also a few in my Amazon cart that I need to purchase, that are above the usual $7 I wanted to spend on a book.

Another view, here you can see the bottom shelf needs one more support, it is sagging a bit, oops.

FIAR books Vol 1-3