Happy Birthday Pumpkin Pie!

I can’t believe that Pumpkin Pie is now 7.

Then…

And Now…

    

For some funny reason, Pumpkin Pie likes to frown when I try to take her picture… I told her I was trying to take a birthday picture and she immediately frowned for it! After I took it she laughed.

At 7, she loves karate, playing dolls and dress-up with her sisters, and learning time. She loves her class in Primary and looks forward to co-op each week. She doesn’t want to be left behind and is constantly striving to learn and do more. She knows what she wants and isn’t easily deterred. She will not allow anyone to push her around. She also loves to laugh and be a bit silly. She adores her baby brother and likes to wrap her arms around her little sister and chant, “Always a team,” as they walk around the room. She is fiercely competitive and age means nothing to her. She has no fear of older kids or new situations and is always thrilled to compete with the big kids in karate, especially if she wins! She doesn’t want to play games labeled for her age, she wants to play her brother and dad in Dominion.

On Making a Roadtrip with Little Ones

I drove 2200 miles with 5 kids and survived… barely.

Ok really it wasn’t that bad. The drive out there was as I expected it to go. The drive home- not so much.

So, how do I drive with 5 little ones 11-3.5 months? I prepare. That was the problem coming home. I had all my stuff in the car but not organized and ready for the 3 year old. I had packed the car in the dark and was tired and in a hurry. I also just wanted to get home. If I had taken a few more minutes preparing to make things go right, I might have saved myself a few hours of going wrong.

What works:

Exercise! At potty stops, have the children run to trees and back several times.

Snacks! Have healthy snacks available and present them in no-mess containers like the little Gladware containers that fit in cup holders. I had some dried fruit, trail mix, and arari crackers from Trader Joe’s. These little cups are great because they fit in the cup holder and don’t spill.

Toy Bags! I pack a toy bag for each child. It contains coloring or activity books and a couple of car appropriate toys. I also have a toy bag with a few new toys by me which I parcel out during the trip. Having the bags packed and ready to use helps the little ones find things. Unfortunately on our trip home, my daughter Strawberry had her stuff scattered all over the car and her sisters weren’t very good about giving it to her. Having it in the bag helps her to see what she wants to play with.  

Audio books! I don’t do movies in the car. But we do audio books. Either on CD or downloaded from the library’s collection. A good story can make the driving more interesting. I also have several Sansa Clip mp3 players for the kids and kid headphones so they could listen to their own stories too. Each mp3 player I loaded with stories that child would like.

 

Water! Have a water bottle for each person to drink during the trip. 

Interim Milestones and good food! On a very long trip, there have to be interim milestones and celebrations to keep everyone motivated to get along. Meal times make great milestones. Parks and restaurants you know the location of are great places to stop and eat. Over the years, we have discovered a few restaurants that are about at proper meal time spacing on our trip. They have food that my family eats (vegetarian, whole food) and my kids look forward to going to those places. I look forward to eating something that will keep me fueled to keep driving. The break from the car also helps with enthusiasm. Yes, it takes more time to stop and sit down, but it also helps the drive go faster. Food doesn’t have to be expensive, just quality.

Here we stopped at a restaurant for dinner, but before that we stopped on the side of the road with a picnic lunch. I find it is good to mix sit down with picnics on the drive and try to have one of each during each long leg of the journey.

Dig-It Games- Schoolhouse Review

As a kid I remember playing various educational history based computer games with fondness. I don’t know how much I actually learned from them, but I had fun playing them. As summer approached, I was excited for the opportunity to review a Dig-It Games game about the Mayan civilization. June was so crazy with end of the year things that I thought Mayan Mysteries Online Game would be a fun change to our learning time. Mayan Mysteries is designed for children in grades 5-9. It is available either as an iPad game or online. The online version can be played both on a computer and a tablet. We used my Kindle Fire to play a few times.

Mayan Mysteries is an adventure game where students travel to different geographical regions, interview people, read information regarding the Mayan civilization and archeology, take short quizzes in the form of a game, excavate artifacts and discover who the thief is. Games include working with Mayan numbers and learning the calendar, decoding glyphs, and exploring and identifying artifacts.

Tiger really enjoyed playing Mayan Mysteries. In the past he had studied the Mayan civilization so not everything was brand new, but this was a good review and opportunity to learn a lot more about the Mayan civilization. It also provided him with an educational opportunity while we were visiting family. Tiger needs to do some learning every day or he tends to get unhappy. He didn’t want to go and sit and study while we were visiting cousins, but he didn’t mind playing a game while the cousins were napping.

This game is definitely easier to play on a computer, but it worked to play on the Kindle Fire. On the tablet, the entire screen was not always visible. As a result, a couple of games were very difficult to scroll around the screen to play. Also, some parts had complex details and the pictures were a little small. On the computer this would be no problem. A couple of times Tiger had to repeat a game because he clicked back instead of continue (he didn’t see the continue button) and this frustrated him, but overall he loved the game. I really liked the variety of games and topics covered. Everything from daily life to calendar and math to religion. He also learned a little about the geography and trade routes of Central America.

Mayan Mysteries is available for $21.99 for a 1 year license. The game has approximately 12 hours of playing time. I thought this game was well put together and played well. Unlike the educational games of my day, I think Tiger actually learned something from playing the game. I can’t wait to check out Dig-It Games other games too!

Reading Merit Badge

I am a Boy Scout mom. I love scouts of the opportunities scouts provides Tiger to try new things.

  

Tiger is working on his reading merit badge for Boy Scouts. Reading isn’t a new thing per se, but the Reading Merit Badge requires he expand his literary repertoire and try new genres. One book he checked out was a sandwich cookbook since he enjoys cooking and needed a non-fiction book. We got to reap the benefits for lunch last week- Navajo Tacos from Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day!  

It was tasty!

Teaching the Classics- IEW Schoolhouse Review

Institute for Excellence in Writing has long been known for its seminars for parents and teachers to learn to teach writing. Recently I was presented with the opportunity to review Teaching the Classics. Would it stand up to the quality that I have come to know and love with products from IEW?

Teaching the Classics consists of a seminar on 4 DVDs and a 97 page workbook. The workbook consists of notes from the lecture, story analysis charts and questions for each work covered, and several appendices. The appendices include an extensive list of Socratic questions which could be asked to facilitate a discussion on a literary work, a classics book list broken down into age ranges, and a glossary of terms. The Teaching the Classics seminar is intended to teach parents and teachers how to teach basic literary analysis to children of all ages. The complete package retails for $89.

For me, literary analysis has been a bit of a stumbling block. I value quality literature for reading purposes, and as I have matured, I have noticed how great works can change a person. Due to my experiences with literature in high school and college, I have not wanted to spend much time doing literary analysis though. Recently, I have begun to ponder on the necessity of analysis and came to the conclusion that it really is necessary if one is to learn from a piece of writing. Since I want my children to think about the works they read and understand how to analyze them, I need to know how to teach it to my children. I don’t want to be like the teachers I had in high school and college so I was really excited to get to review this seminar.

Throughout the seminar, Adam Andrews was engaging and animated. He had me laughing within the first minute. While he is excited to teach about literary analysis, he is a historian by training. As a result, he brought many fascinating historical details into his discussions of some of the works covered. I am happy to say there was no stuffiness or self-importance in this seminar. Andrews teaches the basics of literary analysis and how to teach it through familiar short stories, most which are often read to children because he contends that the skill of analysis is best learned through children’s stories before moving on to the more meaty classics.

I really identified with what was being taught, perhaps because of the educational models which were mentioned in the lectures. He primarily pulled from classical education and leadership education philosophies. I found that he had a good grasp on developmental stages of children and made special notes on ways to teach even the smallest students. Because he believes in inspiring children to love literature, he was very clear that the Socratic list was not a worksheet, nor was the story chart. It was a tool for discussion. I loved this!

After watching this seminar and going through the syllabus, I feel like I have a better grasp on how to approach analysis with my children- one step at a time. I love the list of Socratic questions. They ranged in difficulty from questions to ask my youngest children like, “Who is this story about?” to much more complex questions which require deeper thinking.  The only thing I would change is that occasionally I couldn’t hear the students’ answers in the seminar. I really don’t like listening to a lecture where I can’t hear the questions being asked! The only other thing is I wished I had read To Kill a Mockingbird more recently than 7th grade. Several times To Kill a Mockingbird was referenced in the lectures. Time to re-read it and re-watch the seminar!

I would say that Teaching the Classics lived up to the IEW reputation. Like a good class at a homeschool convention, Teaching the Classics has inspired me and given me a few tools to go to work with.

The crew also recently reviewed IEW’s writing programs. Be sure to check out the reviews.

Moving Beyond the Page- Schoolhouse Review

Moving Beyond the Page is a publisher of integrated homeschool curricula for ages 5-13 (with units for as young as 4 and as old as 14 coming soon). Their curriculum integrates a literature unit with a corresponding science and social studies unit. Moving Beyond the Page offers both full year packages as well as individual units. I was recently able to choose an online version of a literature unit as well as a physical copy of a science or social studies unit to review. Tiger helped me choose. We chose The Hobbit and received online access to the curriculum guide and a physical copy of the book. This package retails for $21.92. We also chose Light and the Eye and received a physical copy of the guide as well as a textbook to go with the guide. This package retails for $25.98. Both are intended for ages 11-13 or approximately grades 6-8. No other manipulatives or materials were included with these books.

The Hobbit unit contains a lesson plan, reading comprehension questions, and activities from charting Bilbo’s journey on a map to building a mythical creature from clay, to practicing editing and grammar skills with worksheets, a culminating written response to the novel and unit test. The online guide contains all the materials of a physical guide and is accessed through a portal on the Moving Beyond the Page website. Parts are downloadable like the activity pages and reading question pages. There is also a downloadable guide to writing and grammar.  The rest of the guide like the directions, explanations, and lesson plan requires logging onto the website to reference. This means that it is not as portable as the physical guides. One nice feature of the online guide is a parent control button. This is toggled on and off so parents can easily see the correct answers for the lesson questions. As long as a student doesn’t know the online login password, he cannot turn on the answers himself. Each online guide is accessible for 3 months following activation. This means that if it is purchased in February but not activated until September, the student will have access to the guide until December. Since each unit is intended to take 19 days to complete, this should be sufficient.

Each day Tiger would log in and click on the next lesson in the list. He would read through the instructions and follow them. The reading comprehension questions always have an option to do them on paper or type them right into the program and print. After reading the selection and doing the comprehension questions, which I had printed, he would click the next button to access the activities. After completing the activities, Tiger would click a button saying “Lesson Completed.” This would strike through that lesson on the lesson menu  page. After the first day, it became apparent that I needed to go through and print out all the activities and reading questions ahead of time. We bound them into a notebook (the yellow book pictured above). Some of the activities in the literature portion required editing sentences. I typed the incorrect sentences out in a document and then printed them out as well with space for Tiger to rewrite because most of the editing pages were not included in the printed activities section.

 As soon as he chose his unit study, Tiger was impatiently checking the mail. He had already read The Hobbit and couldn’t wait to begin again. The first few lessons were exciting to him because he got to research Tolkien’s life, play a vocabulary game, begin drawing a map, and write a message in runes. Once he got through the first couple of lessons, his enthusiasm began to wane.  He did not enjoy the grammar worksheets and didn’t really understand all of the directions given in the guide for some of the activities like listing out foreshadowing and flashbacks in the book.

The Light and Eye is an introductory exploration into light and how the eye perceives it. Like the literature guide, this unit included daily lesson plans reading comprehension questions, activities including a final project, and a unit test. The last several pages of the guide is the parent overview. This can be torn out as it contains all the answers to questions in the unit. The activities contained in The Light and the Eye were mostly experiments which corresponded to the reading. Like the online guide, there is a method to charting progress. This is done through little check boxes next to each activity or set of questions. All of the questions are embedded in the unit text and all the activity pages follow the entire lesson. At first this confused Tiger and he just didn’t do the activity because he didn’t know there was a page to do the activity on. Because this is a science unit, it requires extra materials. The materials needed for the Light and Eye unit are for the most part readily available in your home. There are two items I was not able to obtain. These were a model eye with snap together parts and a book which goes with the model of the eye. They don’t come with the unit as a manipulative, but are available if you purchase the entire semester science kit. If you do not purchase the entire semester science kit, then you will not be able to complete two days of lessons.

Tiger really loves science. He enjoyed some of the activities more than others. He would have liked to see the book move a little faster. He thought that the text spent too long on the same concept. One of the experiments he has attempted multiple times prior to this unit without success and once again attempted it to no avail. He wrote in his book, “This is a LOST CAUSE TO ME!!” under observations.

If I were purchasing this curriculum and deciding between online access guide or physical guide, I would definitely go for the physical guides and pay the extra couple of dollars. Being tethered to the computer in order to complete each lesson of the literature study was annoying for Tiger as well as myself. It would have been nice to load the lesson plans on Tiger’s Kindle but this was not possible. While I found aspects of both guide editions to be a bit awkward in layout, I found the coil-bound guide to be more user-friendly than the online version.

I really wanted to like these units, but they just didn’t work for my family. For us, the literature portion had a few too many worksheets aimed at covering all the language arts objectives rather than really diving into the novel. I also found the comprehension questions did not elicit much thought from Tiger. They were treated like an obstacle to get around quickly- busywork.  I did like the way the final project, a written response to the novel, was explained to the student though. It was broken up into several days with bite-sized chunks to work on. I think this literature study would work for a more structured homeschool family where students are used to completing worksheets in order to achieve learning objectives.

In terms of the Light and the Eye, I liked some of the experiments but, as mentioned above, I was really disappointed that 2 days lessons were missing due to not having the manipulatives necessary. In other stand-alone units Moving Beyond the Page includes manipulatives needed for the unit. I can see not including basics like mirrors and clay, which can be picked up locally, but to not include the model that is specifically mentioned in the text and is not available locally or online, was a bit frustrating to me. For Tiger, this was really disappointing and squashed a bit of his enthusiasm for the unit.

Many other families reviewed Moving Beyond the Page and had different experiences. Be sure to check out their reviews.

Lily Lapp Amish Children’s Fiction Books- Schoolhouse Review

Recently I had the privilege of reviewing two books published by the Baker Publishing Group. These books, Life with Lily and A New Home for Lily are juvenile Amish fiction written by Mary Ann Kinsinger, a former Amish woman and author of A Joyful Chaos, and Suzanne Woods Fisher. Both books are just over 250 pages and are intended for children ages 8-12, but I think the whole family will enjoy listening to the tales of Lily Lapp. Each book retails for 12.99 for paperback or ebook editions.

 Life with Lily is the first book in the new Adventures of Lily Lapp series. This series chronicles the life of Lily starting when she is five years old and a new baby brother is born. Throughout the story, she has many experiences like getting a new teacher whom she doesn’t like and is different from the previous one, welcoming new animals to the home, and planning a move to a new state. While the chapters are chronological, they are also individual episodes in her life to create the novel. At one point Butterfly was flitting through the book reading random chapters that looked interesting to her and loving the mini-stories.

A New Home for Lily starts when seven year old Lily moves to a new state, Pennsylvania. Moving to Pennsylvania meant leaving behind everything Lily knew. Now she lives in an ugly house, has to start a new school, make new friends, put up with an annoying boy at school, gets another baby brother, and eventually welcomes her cousin Hannah to the farm next door. A New Home for Lily is every bit as fun and detailed as the first book.

The Verdict?

These books are very sweet and full of details about the life of an Amish child, who despite the cultural differences, really is a lot like a typical young child in thoughts and experiences. I love the way the author details Lily’s thought process as it makes Lily even more loveable and believable. I also like the little lessons on family duty, friendship, relationships, and kindness that are woven into the stories. My biggest problem with these books was that my 9 and 11 yr old children ran off with them before I could read them. They devoured them and left me scrambling to read them myself during the review period. I guess that isn’t so bad since they really enjoyed them. I think I have heard, “When will you get the next one!?” each day this week. Pumpkin Pie, my almost 7 year old loves them too. One day she wanted to know what happened next but no one was available to read to her. She opened up the book and started reading it out loud to herself despite the fact that these books are above her reading level and she has never attempted a full picture book let alone a novel before!

Butterfly’s review: I liked the part when Lily got a new brother and she thought God dropped him off. I also like the part when Lily wanted to trade a treat for a store-bought cookie and was given a whole pumpkin pie to take to school. Lily was embarrassed so they ate half the pie and left it under a tree in the woods and lost the pie pan.

Tiger’s review: Tiger, being the budding chef in our home, loved reading about the mistakes Lily made in the kitchen, like making an entire bucket of jello for the family. He also liked that Lily was kind to everyone, even those who were unkind to her and that Lily thought God dropped off babies. He thought it was funny that Lily thought that when it was the Lapp’s turn for a baby God must have run out of baby girls. He noticed that Lily would make a bad choice once and then decide that wasn’t a good plan and she had good relationships with her  brothers.

Good, clean, and uplifting books are something I seek after for my children to read. The Lily Lapp books definitely fits this category. I look forward to continuing the read about the adventures that Lily has in future books.