The Letter A

Wes and I are 9 letters and 1 reading day into our Preschool/Kindergarten, homemade curriculum and we've been having a lot of fun working our way through the alphabet. We're not going through them alphabetically, but in a seemingly random order, equipping his reading ability, and consequently his feelings of success, as quickly as possible. We're following the lessons in Mc'Guffey's 1st Eclectic Primer (recommended from the Robinson Reading List). For each lesson there's a list of letters that need to be known in order to read the words of that particular lesson. We've been working through one letter per day with one day at the end to pull all the sounds together and do some definite reading. I taught a few kindergartners to read as part of my high school curriculum as a homeschooler myself, child development class I think, and I had forgotten how much I love the light and excitement on their little faces when they realize that they're actually doing the reading themselves. It's one of the best moments of a homeschooling parents job, for sure.

I use this chart to make sure I don't forget about any of the letters that make more than one sound.

We begin with the letter A.

#1 - Coloring in the letter of the day. I use these templates.

#2- A letter maze for upper and lower case recognition practice.

#3 - Tracing practice. I create one line with 5 capital letters and another line with 5 lower case letters from here. The bottom, empty portion of this page is used for our letter activity of the day.

(I print the letter maze and tracing activity on opposite sides of the same page to save a bit of paper.)

#4- A letter related activity or two. I try and do a paper/crafty activity as well as something for motor skills. For the letter A we did apple prints.

#5- ABC journal. I look through our stack of magazines and pull out pages with letter of the day words and pictures on them. He cuts them out and glues them in his journal.  
He's such a perfectionist though and doesn't like this activity very well cause he can't "cut things out perfect", but scissor work is great for fine motor hand skills used for writing, so this activity remains.

#6 - ABC animal tracks.
Probably his most favorite, unless of course there's a food related activity which obviously trumps anything and everything else.
For A he learned about Armadillo.  

Our School Day Schedule

Captain's log.

Stardate blah blah blah point something-or-other

We're 4 days into our homeschool journey and thus far everything's working pretty much like I expected. I'm REALLY enjoying sleeping in till 8, having a leisurely breakfast with the kids while I check emails and Facebook (it's the new morning paper you know), working on laundry, dishes, getting dinner in the crock pot, having a bit of time to read or write, making sure all our supplies are gathered in one place, having lunch and THEN launching into our schoolwork for the day. It only take us about 3 hours right now to get through our scholastic check list for the day. Here's what the line up looks like;

They each have a drawer with the needed supplies for the day.

After singing the National Anthem and saying a prayer together, they fill out their calendar and weather pages for the day.

This was our first day of school "time capsule". We'll repeat it next year to see how they changed.

Bre starts with Math (www.khanacademy.com & Life of Fred) while she listens to Mozart on itunes radio to block out distractions.

Wes and I work on the letter of the day with phonics, tracing, a project or two and his ABC journal.

When Bre is done with math, she reads out loud to me and then does her comprehension questions and copy work (The Tale of Jolly Robin).

While I'm listening to Bre read Wes does his ABC Animal Tracks power point I made for him (vidoes, sounds, pictures and skeletal structures). Bre loves to do this when all her other work is done as well.

Once they're done with their core subjects then we do an extra subject; 

Monday is bible (www.jellytelly.com)

Tuesday is Art (this month we're studying Henri Matisse)

Wednesday is Piano (John Thompson) and 

Thursday is Science (We're exploring our 5 senses right now)

Bre also practices piano every day for a short bit (5-10 minutes) once everything else has been completed.

They both look forward to art, science and animal tracks the most.

To help curb whining and complaining, they each start the day with some fruit jellies from Trader Joes in a small mason jar (I cut them in 1/4ths), the same amount as they have subjects for the day, and if after 1 warning a bad attitude is not corrected they loose a gummy. When we're all done for the day they get to eat whatever's left in their jar. This has worked really really well for them thus far. I usually only have to issue a warning because no one want to loose any of those yummy jellies.

To Much S***, Not Enough Shovels

All the best trip planning in the world can't prepare you for unexpected car troubles, and BOY oh boy, did we have a doozey...10 hours and 656 miles from home and husband...on Labor Day...when every car repair shop in town is closed.

 On the first day of our 2 day trip to TN I had noticed that if I needed to slow down below 60 mph the car had a REALLY hard time getting back up to speed again and once it hit 70 mph it would act normal again. I wondered if the car was going to puke out on me, but there wasn't much I could do about it, and it wasn't happening continually, so I hoped it was a fluke horsepower type thing and kept trucking to our hotel for that night.

We were through about 2 1/2 hours of the 2nd day with only 1 stop for gas and bladder relief, and I was feeling pretty good about the good time we were making. That's when the fecal matter began to forcefully contact the air redistribution device.

Turd #1 The air conditioning stopped working

Turd #2 I could no longer accelerate beyond 60 mph

Turd #3 I could no longer accelerate at all

Turd #4 I didn't make it all the way out of the turn lane at the end of the exit ramp before the car died completely

Turd #5 As we exited the car I smelled burning rubber

Turd #6  I had to embarrassingly walk into a busy KFC with my small dog under my arm so I could use the phone to call for a tow

Turd #7 The tow guy can't help me till I know where I want him to take the car

Turd #8 The ONLY car repair shop open on Labor Day won't even be able to look at the car till the next day

Turd #9 After deciding to leave the car till the morning (the KFC manager had called police dispatch, told them my situation and they had told her it was fine to leave it where it was) spend the night in the hotel next door and then have it towed the next morning when everything was open, we grabbed a bite to eat and saw a policeman an a tow truck next to our car about 50 yards away loading it up to take it away, with all our stuff still in it.

We had been eating outside on rough and prickly patch of grass since we had the dog, and couldn't eat inside, so I grabbed the dog, told Bre to grab my purse, left all our food on the ground and began running toward the car yelling and waving our arms.

Turd #10 As I was running to rescue our belongings I stepped squarely into a pile of what appeared to be a large pile of freshly dropped horse poop

Turd #11 As soon as we reached the car the officer treated me VERY harshly and rude, fussing at me for not pulling the car all the way out of the turn lane (like I had done it on purpose) and roughly stating that he had every right to have the car impounded but instead was going to have the tow truck pull it 10 yards to the right and I would most certainly have to pay the driver for that tow and then pay for a separate tow to a repair shop later.

I couldn't take it anymore and was reduced to a flood of unstoppable tears and almost unintelligible sobs of explanation, to which the kids quickly followed suit, thinking they were going to take all our things away...forever. At this unexpected display of raw emotion from a bedraggled, travel weary woman, her 2 children with mashed potatoes and gravy still on their mouths and their tiny dog, the officer AND the tow truck driver began attempting to console us with words of comfort and consolation. The tow truck driver offered to drive us to a hotel down the road from the car repair place, drop our things off and then take the car to the shop, only charging us for 1 tow.

As we walked away to go clean up our cut-to-short picnic, the officer called Wes back over and gave him a real Indiana State Police shoulder patch. I think he was trying to make sure the kids didn't walk away traumatized from their emotional encounter with the law. Wes asked me if I had any sewing stuff. I didn't.

When we arrived at the hotel the tow truck driver wasn't sure if they allowed pets or not so I put Jak in the car while we went in to register (at this point I couldn't have cared less about a pet friendly policy). I figured I could just keep him in his kennel once we were in the room and everything would be just fine.

Turd #12 As I went to get our things out of the car, on the back of the truck, I discovered that all the doors were locked, and the key was still in the ignition. Jak had stepped on the lock button while waiting for us to come back outside. I hadn't cracked the windows, but before I could fall apart again, the driver grabbed his lock bag and assured me he could get it unlocked, which he did.

Turd #13 As I was removing our things from the car, not knowing how long we would be staying, Bre's pencil box flipped out of my hand, and all the contents fell to the ground and rolled under the bed of the truck. With arms full, I muttered something under my breath, and when I came back out the driver was retrieving them for me

Turd #14 I had called Matt when the car had first broken down, but quickly realized that I did not have enough minutes on my prepaid cell phone to stay on the line while I worked out this mess, especially with roaming charges. Once at the hotel I could only text Matt to try and inform him of our situation because texts are so much cheaper. It is VERY difficult to relay such a story via text, especially when all your have is a querty keypad on your phone. So I wasn't even going to try.

Turd #15 Matt could not call me at the hotel because our prepaid long distance had run out and he nor I could remember out log in information to purchase more.

Turd #16 I could not get the wifi functioning in our hotel room so that Matt and I could at the very least chat with each other to work out the whole mess.

I finally gave up and used the room phone to make a long distance call home, not caring a single solitary second how much the Best Western would charge me for such a transaction. As I lay on the bed and attempted to relay all the information of the afternoon to Matt, I began sobbing once again, this time with total abandon, and it felt really good to let it out.

Turd #17 Wesley pushed the disconnect button in the middle of my call. I had to apologize to him later for yelling about it.

Once Matt got the full story he shifted into knight-in-shining-armor-mode, called my mother, the uhaul place down the road from our hotel, and worked out a plan to rescue his use-to-being-super-active-and-on-the-move family from sitting in a pool-less hotel for another day, possibly more. My Mom drove up to Clarksville with a Jeep. A uhaul tow hitch was rented, and the plan was decided; to haul Matt's car with us to TN where it could be repaired while we commenced with the purpose of this whole trip in the first place, visiting my family. Hopefully there are no more hiccups while executing Drive To TN and Back Again version 2.1.

I'm not a believer in the "everything happens for a reason" philosophy. Never have been, but it seems like it would be very convenient, comforting even, in a situation like this. Instead I usually find myself walking a "sometimes life is good and sometimes life is shitty and that's all there is to it" line of thought, and that pretty much accurately sums up how I feel about today's events. Today was pretty shitty, and that's all there is to it.

I'm very relieved that we didn't break down in the middle of nowhere. I'm very grateful to the gals at KFC who were so kind and helpful to us when we needed a phone, and to the tow truck driver who went above and beyond his job, on a holiday weekend even, to make this as easy as possible on me and my checkbook. And I'm especially happy that I got to have supper with a friend that only lives 30 minutes away from our sidelined local which was definitely a silver lining to this whole menacing and ugly, rain cloud over my head of a day.

This kids did really well, all things considering. 

 

They rode their bikes in the parking lot, got to watch as much tv as they wanted, jump on the beds, play rock games on the pavement, eat pizza @ 10:30pm,

 and share their very first Steak & Shake shake.

It's been one hell of a day, one that I don't hope to repeat...ever, but at least we could squeeze a little bit of fun and adventure out of it, together, and that's probably what matters most.

All 3 of my babies tucked in for the night after our harrowing day of adventure.