Our first week was great!

Everything went so well this week!! Bean is super excited about learning everything she can about the Eastern Hemisphere. As I type this, she is off making a Maori mask out of Model Magic to hang up at our Pacific Islands Feast she is making next Friday. I can see her from here and she is concentrating SO hard. I'll post pictures after she paints it next week. I love, love, love, love, LOVE how the Choose Your Adventure projects will help her to learn how to plan out a project, doing a little each day, so that she doesn't wait until the last minute to try to get it done. So far for her Feast she has 1) found a mask design to inspire her, 2) found recipes and created a shopping list, 3) found hula music and directions on how to hula, and 4) is working on her mask. She has little parts of the project planned for each day next week culminating with 8) shopping for the feast and 9) cooking the feast. I love it!!

Off to a good start

Okay, our toe is officially wet! WOOHOO!!

Bean and I got started with Sonlight's Eastern Hemisphere Explorer today. I showed her how I was going to highlight each day's reading assignment for her and then showed her how she may have to leave the main article to find some of the answers needed. We had a great time drawing the flags for Vanuatu, Nauru and New Zealand. She decided we should have a luau for her first "Choose Your Adventure" project. She's going to research recipes, make up the shopping list and make sure we get everything when we go grocery shopping. She's also planning to make a mask out of Model Magic, although as I don't recall the Hawai'ians having masks, I think she's going to do a Maori one instead. Now our biggest task will be to figure out where the Hawai'ian Luau music CD is since it's been two moves since the last time anyone saw it. Ruh-roh, Shaggy!

All in all, a GREAT day! I love easing into the year this way!

Hello again!

Oh my gosh, I didn't realize it had been over a month since I last posted. Let's see if I can capsulize it:

1. Turned 40 (good grief)
2. Germany had the hottest July on record (I think it was over 90 degrees every day! And with no A/C or window screens, it was either roast or roast with bugs. Ugh!)
3. Bean went to her Irish Dance camp and had a blast. She is now officially one dance closer to her heavies than I am. She's super excited. She's only lacking the Single Jig and the Primary (Hard) Reel and I'll be shelling out 85 Euros for heavy shoes. Oh boy.
4. Bean went to her swim camp in Austria. She had a great time, didn't really care for the "hiking the Alps" part too much and they didn't fix her breast stroke. I'm not sure if that 516 Euros was worth it or not.
5. While Bean was in Austria, Hubby and I spent 8 days ALONE in a rustic cabin. We went hiking in the Alps almost every day. Okay, yeah, the 516 Euros was worth it!
6. Bean turned ELEVEN!! (double good grief)

We have decided to hold off on the main part of school until after my parents visit. So, we'll be starting on 9/11. But, we will dip our toe into the pond over the next couple of weeks getting the hang of the EHE for our Sonlight Core. Then, starting on 9/11, we'll jump in whole hog with the rest of our SL Core, MUS Zeta, Christian Kids Explore Earth & Space, our homemade English from the Roots Up "curriculum", our Against the Tide bible study and La Français Facile. Hoping for a really great year!

Happy 4th! (a little late)

We had a nice, relaxing day yesterday. It was SUPER hot! I think it got hotter here than in Texas!! Woof!

The day started out with Bean having a short swim practice. Only two kids showed up, so the coach was able to get them through their workout in just over an hour instead of the 1 1/2 he had scheduled.

Next, off to the Freedom Fest where Bean had entered her "Pantry Explosion" cookies in the cookie contest. I thought her cookies were fabulous and I normally don't like cookies (once they aren't dough). There were supposed to be 4 categories: (1) Decorated Holiday, (2) No-Bake, (3) Healthy (had to include cereal or fruit), and (4) Cookie Maker's. There was supposed to be a winner in each category and then a "best in show" award which would win the grand prize. They had a grand total of 8 entries. So, I guess they decided to just give out "best in show" and not do the other category winners. And, the "grand prize" was a child-size apron that would barely fit the skinny, petite woman who won. The lady running the contest kept bemoaning the fact that they never get a good response for this contest. Now, I think I know why. This base has a habit of doing a half-way job of organizing things, a half-way job of publicizing things and then they always wonder why they don't turn out the way they thought. Oh well!

Hubby and Bean had lunch at the Freedom Fest. I decided to wait until we got home (I wanted Chicken Tenders and Onion Rings, but they told me that the meals were set up the way they had to be sold, so if I wanted Chicken Tenders and Onion Rings, I would have to pay for Chicken Tenders and Fries plus an order of onion rings and I just couldn't see myself paying $9.25 for Chicken Tenders, fries I didn't want, and Onion Rings. Plus an additional two dollars for a soda! Anyway, I had a Tomato and Cheese on Toast sandwich when we got home. Defintely a better choice, both financially and health-wise!

We mostly hung out around the house the rest of the day until Hubby grilled his famous burgers and dogs for dinner. Yummm!!

We started watching the match between Germany & Italy until it was time for the fireworks. Since we live on a HUGE hill, we thought we'd be able to see the fireworks from the base with no problems. We just forgot about the 9 million trees between us and the base. Oops! No fireworks for us this year.

After Brazil and England were eliminated, Bean and I had decided to root for Germany and now they've been eliminated. Sigh.

You know what, looking back over our day, it seems like the only things that went really right were swim practice and the Hubby burgers! Oh, well, I got to spend the whole day with my family and that makes it a great day in my book!

TTFN!

Pictures from Scotland

Okay, I think I've figured out how to do this. I want to share with all of you some of our favorite memories from our visit to Scotland.

Our first day, we drove up near Inverness to visit Culloden Moor:

On the way back to Edinburgh from there, we stopped at Loch Ness (can you see Nessie in the background?): We also found a circle of standing stones in the village of Aviemore:

The next day, we spent walking around Edinburgh. One of our favorite things was trying to find all the cows on the Royal Mile:

We finally reached the end of the Royal Mile at Edinburgh Castle:
At the chapel there, we saw this beautiful stained glass window honoring William Wallace:

Our last day, we drove up to Stirling to visit the castle there and saw this statue of Robert the Bruce:

Hope you enjoy the pictures!!

TTFN!

July already?

Summer is just going by so quickly!! Here's an update on what is new with us:

1. Bean is entering a Cookie Contest at our base's 4th of July festival on Tuesday. She came up with this recipe all on her own and did a test run on Friday. They are AWESOME (and I normally don't like cookies once they are cookies - I'm usually only in it for the dough!)! I hope she will win!

2. We had our piano recital this past Friday. Bean did well for her first time playing in front of a group of strangers. I, on the other hand, was a complete nervous wreck! I was completely falling apart when I finally told myself, "Hey! You know how to play this song, now let's do it!" Things went much better after that, thank goodness.

3. We are going to paint inside our church's new building tomorrow. The kids in Bean's class voted to have their room painted Light Blue. Did you know that they don't mix paint for you at the stores here in Germany? They sell you the base paint and the color and you have to mix it yourself. Yikes! I'd never be able to get two containers to be exactly the same color. I think I'll stick with my all-white walls here in this house and paint when we get back to where the nice paint guys at Lowes or Homey-Depot can mix it for me.

Hope everyone has a great 4th of July!

TTFN!

Whoops!

I didn't realize I hadn't posted on my blog in such a long time!!

The trip to Scotland was everything I could have dreamed!! We spent our first day driving up toward Inverness. We visited Culloden Battlefield, Loch Ness (didn't see Nessie, though) and Cairngorm National Park. Our 2nd day we spent touring the Royal Mile in Edinburgh (lots of shopping!!).

Our 3rd day was consumed by Hubby's running of the Edinburgh Marathon. While he didn't do as well as he hoped, Bean and I were so proud of him just for finishing!! It was his very first time running a marathon and we all learned a LOT! He plans to do another one in October in Frankfurt, Germany. The great thing about that one is that he'll get to sleep in his own bed the night before and eat his regular pre-run breakfast. There's also a Mini Marathon of 4.2 km for Bean to run. This is going to be great!!

The 4th day we drove up to Stirling Castle and looked around there. That afternoon we visited an American-style mall. It was almost like being home except everyone spoke with an accent! LOL

Our last day in Scotland was filled with getting back to Glasgow to get to our flight. We then got to spend 4 hours in Dublin's Airport (but at least we can say we've been to Ireland!).

I found TONS of the Horrible Histories series books at various sites we visited. If I had known how few of them would be available on Amazon, I would have loaded up my suitcase with them!!

I'll try to post some pictures after I get them off the camera.

Finished!!

Oh, I am so very proud of my Bean!!! She took her final exam for MUS Epsilon today and scored 100%!! The only one she even came close to missing was as super easy one from a lesson WAY back at the beginning of the year that she thought was WAY too easy to be on the final. WAY TO GO, BEAN!!!

We leave tomorrow for Scotland. I am so excited! This has been a dream of mine for most of my life and I can't believe it's really happening. Did I mention that we are getting to do this trip so Hubby can run in his first marathon? He's so excited about that. Our guest house includes breakfast every day and they serve haggis as a part of it. I'm definitely going to try it (I think). I would feel terrible if I made my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland and didn't even *try* haggis. I would certainly never order it as my main meal, but if it's on the breakfast buffet, I can at least try a bite, right?

Excitement!!!

Wow! I'm not sure what I'm more excited about: (1) Bean is finishing up MUS Epsilon tomorrow OR (2) we are leaving for Scotland on Thursday!! Okay, I admit the Scotland thing probably has the upper hand, but I am SO proud of Bean's effort in getting through with Math before we leave on our trip.

I had never realized how much her frustrations in Math were damping down her fire for learning, but suddenly since Math is coming SO easily for her now (using her "Momma Pencil"), she's just completely nuts about learning stuff. All I had planned to do this summer was to get through Memoria Press' Famous Men of Rome (there was no room in the "regular" school year and I really wanted us to have a strong historical background before we went to Italy next spring). Now Bean is begging me to let her try her hand at lapbooking. I was poking around the net the other night and found Homeschool in the Woods new Time Travelers History Series. Their first one is about Pirates & Explorers. Well, with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest coming out next month, Bean was all over that. So, I placed that order today. I just can't believe she's willing to do "school stuff" over the summer.

Today I also placed our order with Sonlight for Core 5. I got a nice little reminder email from them telling me my Club membership is about to expire, so I decided I'd better bite the bullet and click that "order" button. My best buddy, Carla, has already typed up all the reader questions for us, so all I have to do is get the stuff entered into Edu-Track, plug in the timeline and mapping assignments onto the reader question pages and we'll be all set for that.

The next step is to save enough money to get The Easy French. Bean has been begging me for YEARS to let her learn French and now I think I've finally found the right program for us. The step after that involves praying that Christian Kids Explore Earth & Space gets printed in time for us to use it this year. After that, it's just a matter of subscribing to The Boomerang and saving up the money to get IEW. THEN, I think we'll be all set for a while. The Easy French and IEW are both multi-year programs, so while their expense is high, it will amortize (oh my goodness, am I using that correctly? It's been WAY too long since I took accounting in college!) over several years.

Hmmm, looking back over this I think I can see that Bean isn't the only one on fire for homeschooling (and it looks like my checkbook will be the next thing on fire! LOL)

Finally back to my blog

Hello!!

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend. It was cold and rainy here, so we didn't get to do anything too fun. Hubby did grill several times over the course of the weekend (mmmmm, Hubby-burgers) so that was a nice break for me. We are going to have fajitas tonight -- I've already made the guacamole. Mmmmm.

BEAN FINISHED STATES OF THE UNION TODAY!! WOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!! This has been a much more involved project than we anticipated when we started it last August. But, it is finally finished and she is so proud of her notebook about the 50 states.

She tested out of Lesson 28 in Epsilon today, so we only have two lessons to go to finish up Math for the year. That day will be a cupcake-worthy event, for sure. I wonder if it will be the the swim team or the softball team that benefits from that?

Not much else going on here. It is still cold and rainy and I am SO ready for the sun to come back. It's going to be June tomorrow!! People in Texas have been wearing shorts for 3 months!! The high temperature really needs to get out of the 50's here. Sigh.

TTFN!

EUREKA (or "how I got my daughter to get her math done quickly!")!!!

Ever since the beginning of our homeschool journey, math has been a struggle for Bean. Our first year, we made a BAD curriculum choice (in my defense, we did make the decision to homeschool on the fly and I didn't really get a chance to research curriculum before we started). Their approach was too fast, too abstract for my kinesthetic learner. Every day there was yelling and screaming and crying about math (and sometimes Bean would get upset too ). Anyway, by the time we attended our first homeschool bookfair at the end of that school year, I KNEW we had to make a change. I wandered into the Math-U-See booth with Bean in tow and suddenly we could see the entrance to the tunnel (no light at the end yet!) Hubby leaned over to me and whispered, "I don't care what it costs, we are getting this one!"

We are almost finished with our 4th year of MUS. It has been a joy to see Bean master concepts in Math that I didn't even get exposed to until well into junior high school. BUT, every time she is faced with the most basic concepts (the ones she was first exposed to during that disasterous first year) she freezes up and gets very frustrated. Since those concepts are addition and subtraction, it has turned math time into an exercise in "adrenaline management". And, rather than following my suggestion to just "get it done and over with", her approach has been to see "just how long can I drag this out?". We have tried doing Math first in the day, but that was taking time away from other subjects that needed to get done. We tried doing Math last in the day, but with our busy schedule, that often meant she didn't finish it at all the day it was assigned. Then, one day I noticed that her handwriting for the advanced concepts was very clear and her numbers, when faced with adding or subtracting, became illegible. I began to wonder if it was all related? Could the fact that she was trying to master making pretty numbers at the same time we were using that "awful" curriculum (for her) be causing some of the stress?

So, I decided to try an experiment. I told her that I would act as the driver of her pencil during math. I would be there to offer help if she needed it during exercise days, but during test days I would just be the pencil. What a difference!!! Suddenly math is getting done in about 20 minutes (versus 2-3 hours) and she is getting 100% correct on every page. Add to that the fact that she is mastering concepts at light speed and that is how we have finished two LESSONS in MUS this week!! It is amazing and, better yet, she is starting to see that she really IS smart in math. And, finally, instead of always proclaiming, "I HATE Math!!", we have progressed to, "It's okay." If you ask me, that's the greatest thing ever!! And, it totally reinforces all the reasons that I love to homeschool. We were able to fix our problem on our own time-schedule, we had the freedom to experiment to find the solution and we have the option to use our solution until she no longer needs it.

Amen!!

My new blog!

It seems strange to be starting a new blog just as our homeschool year is winding down to an "end". Bean will finish up her last few "States of the Union" pages by early next week. Hopefully, we'll wrap up our last 3 lessons in Math-U-See Epsilon by the time we go to Scotland so Hubby can run his first marathon. :o)

We do have some "enrichment" activities planned for the summer. We'd like to work our way through Famous Men of Rome for some historical help on next year's National Latin Exam. Bean has also decided that she'd like to do a notebook on dolphins this summer. She's almost 11, so I think it's time to set her free on that kind of project and let her decide where it will lead.

We'll be heading to the Eastern Hemisphere next year with Sonlight's Core 5. It will be our last year with Sonlight, but we are very excited to be going on to Tapestry of Grace the following year. We plan to use TOG throughout the rest of our homeschool journey.

I guess that's enough for now, so I'll just close with a "Happy Homeschooling, Y'all!"