Reflections on attitude...

Today was lovely.  I am learning how to appreciate my children more.

Baby Z (my toddler) has a cold, and despite the fact that she isn't feeling well, her sunny disposition makes me smile.

And my oldest daughter, my little princess, is forever amazing me with her intelligence and willingness to help out her dear mama whenever possible.  For example, today we shopped for an hour at our local Winn Dixie (I was crossing my fingers for a few coupons at the checkout counter, which never happened...but I digress)...and the whole time Ny strolled her baby sister around for me as I pushed the shopping cart.  Baby Z had been sleeping for some time and (thankfully) slept throughout the entire shopping trip...but she isn't so light any more, so after about 30 minutes of pushing the stroller I volunteered to help Ny, but she responded, "No, mom...I can do it.  I'll help."  Her answers for me all week have been "Sure, anything else you need?"   And, as is her character, I never have to worry about a hidden agenda up her sleeve, like "okay...now can I have five bucks?"  It just never happens.  At least so far.  I hope it will remain that way.  And needless to say, after observing her actions I had to look at my own.  Truly, this is what inner beauty is all about.

My heart has melted.

I begin to wonder how God, our Heavenly Father, must feel when we remain sunny and cheerful as my dear BabyZ, despite our physical ailments or emotional pain.

I wonder how Jesus must feel when we, like NyGirl, respond to His requests with "Sure, is there anything else you would like for me to do?"

Must it brighten His day?  Cause a smile to light His countenance?  Assure Him of our faith in Him?  Cause His face to shine upon us?  Cause Him to work on behalf for our requests even sooner than we had expected (though He is always on time!)?  Does He rise up on our behalf, determined to ensure that we have not only what we need, but exceedingly, abundantly above what we even dare ask or think?

All because of attitude...

Attitude.

Lord, help me to have your attitude.

Back to school in 2010

Here we are back to school again in 2010!  We are off to a great start, and I must say, my goals for this year are a bit different than from '09.

We started a new filing system.
It basically consists of a medium size crate we got from WalMart and some simple file folders.

In it we've placed file folders and our subjects/books/materials in each folder to separate our subjects.  They are in order according to how our school day generally goes.

So in the first file folder we have our Children's bible., a hymnal, catechism, scripture memory charts, anointing oil, etc.  Our second file folder contains our Saxon math materials, our third file folder contains all Language Arts , and so forth.

BabyZ has been sitting at her own little desk (you can see she's marked it up really nicely):

NyGirl now has her own desk where she can 'officially' do her schoolwork rather than at the kitchen table:

(***Note January 2012***I lost a few of these pictures while transitioning my blog!! Sorry!!!)

This system has really been working out well for us.

I spent the better part of 2008/2009 really attempting to discover (or maybe re-discover) what it is I truly wanted for my children.  I had just had my second daughter and was learning the ropes with having a newborn, turned young toddler in the house (a really active one at that) while trying to find balance in the discovery of my role as homemaker, homeschool teacher, writer, and web designer.  Some of those things I eventually let go of completely (like designing sites for clients) while I ended up whole-heartedly persuing others (such as writing and plugging in more to my role as a homeschool mom).

While feeling my way around the homeschool community, I found that with all of the myriads of choices in educational curriculum and methods, I would need to quickly discover our family goals for our children's education, and stick with them.  It took us a while to find our way to where we are now.  We plucked through several ideologies on home education, and tried our hands at the Classical Education method (as proposed by Susan Wise Bauer).  I bought all of her books and to this day still use First Language Lessons.  The ideas were great, but with time I began to realize that I couldn't fit our educational plans and goals into the Trivium-- it soon began to box me in and I was dying to get let out of the "cage".  (This is no offense to those of you who use this method and have children who are flourishing well under this type of training.  I still think it is a great method...just not for us).

We have and are still trying a few different approaches (such as Charlotte Mason and Montessori), which I guess makes us very eclectic.  And all the while as we are adapting our way of doing things we have a true, main focus which is beginning to center us as a home school now...the idea of us teaching our children in the ways of God.  This has always been a part of our family motto...just something we normally do on a typical day with our kids.  We are Christians, and therefore we are raising our children as Christians.  But with our home school, we are going beyond the idea of simply raising Christian kids.  It is becoming more of a foundation for our school, where everything is beginning to center around our studies of the Bible, worship time, etc. I never thought I would be one to go straight for the "all Christian" curriculum or to try to find specific curriculum which was religious in nature.  Our math is Saxon (pretty streamline), our science  and social studies, Houghton Mifflin, and grammar is a combination of different workbooks (Spectrum), First Language Lessons...but our history, on the other hand, is from a free Christian-based online school for homeschoolers. My daughter is really enjoying her History lessons (currently is learning about Christopher Columbus).

But the thing I noticed about how our lives are already beginning to change because of our more pronounced focus on a Christian education this year, is that my daughter seems to be all the more content and peaceful at the end of our school hours.  School also has become more fun, for the both of us.  Everything - from reciting scripture, learning the books of the New Testament, learning hymnals and receiving prayer during "chapel", reading bible stories from the New Testament, and getting tested on spelling and vocabulary words taken straight from the bible text...has been a blast both for me and for her!  We also located a great BJU Press 3rd grade reader in our stash of books and resources which has some hearty, old fashioned, good stories.  The kind of good stories that truly are good- (the focus being on courage, honor, commitment, honesty, etc.)

So we are having a good time...not to mention we've got some techie stuff up our sleeves that we're planning for the new year.  Hopefully we get the podcast some wheels and start rolling out more audios.  I kind of liked VoiceThread, but I got a little bored of it.  NyGirl definitely enjoyed Power Point so we'll be doing more presentations of that sort- maybe next time using open source.

Looking forward to a great year ahead!

Christmas fun

We had an awesome Christmas holidays!

The girls have been spending a lot of time playing with Christmas toys and games and enjoying family time now that their daddy is home from work over the holidays.

Here are some Christmas fun pics...

NyGirl enjoying this HUGE Christmas tree (not ours, by the way!)

So we tried our hands at a gingerbread house...it wasn't too becoming :-(    But...it was yummy!

Chowing down on the gingerbread house...

After all the excitement of gift-giving, NyGirl decided she'd take it one day at a time with her gifts (playing with them, that is).
So by two days after Christmas she had finally gotten around to the box with the telescope in it. I can't remember what I was doing that made me so busy, but after her constant "Mom!!!! Can you help me put this together???!!!!" she finally bounced off to our office with the telescope box and set of directions, and fifteen minutes later, returned with her telescope completely put together.
Here she is enjoying the fruit of her labors!

And finally, we couldn't end the Christmas season without properly giving thanks to the One who came for us. Here are the girls holding our (battery-operated, of course!) candles which we lit for our family bible time the night after Christmas. We read from Luke about the virgin birth, about Jesus being born for all mankind, for our salvation. It was a wonderful family time and we enjoyed having daddy read us scripture pray with the family.

Finally, we sat in our home studio a few nights before Christmas and recorded some Christmas songs! Click on the link below to listen (be sure your browser enables popup windows).

I hope you had a joyous Christmas...and have a blessed New Year!!!

LISTEN TO OUR CHRISTMAS SONGS!- Click Here

Learning The Planets With VoiceThread

Finally we have put together NyGirl's power point presentation into our VoiceThread account.

I will add, she did this project completely on her own (after a few lessons from me on how to create the Power Point slides).  She also took off on the remaining voice narrations after showing her initially how to do the first one in Voice Thread.  It was a fun project, and I think we'll be doing a good bit more of these kinds of online presentations for our upcoming lessons.

Take a look (and don't forget to press the play button):


Enjoy!

Voicethread For Educators

Voicethread is an excellent tool I just found online, as I've stated in one of my last posts...I plan to use it for NyGirl's study on the Solar System to help her present her work.

Here's a video on the VoiceThread website which shows what it does: http://voicethread.com/#home.b409.i848804

Essentially, you can upload documents or images your student has created (or that you the teacher have created) into a sort of slideshow, and create a voiceover narration for each slide. Then others comment on your slides and documents either by voice or text.

I am so excited that I want to create my first VoiceThread right now, but I am waiting until NyGirl has created most of her slides on the planets in Power Point first. The cool thing about VoiceThread is that it accepts different formats of uploads, or you can find images through the New York Public Library (integrated already in the system).
The possibilities are endless for educators. We can have our students use it for online projects, helping them to develop presentations that get "reviewed" worldwide. We can use them as teacher-to-teacher education, creating content that teaches others how to do things...or we can create materials online for older students to learn as well.
We'll see if this is something we enjoy.

Learning The Solar System With Power Point

NyGirl has really been interested in planets lately. We have a full unit covering the solar system in her Houghton Mifflin science book...but it is very limited when it comes to techie ideas (though the book offers a supplemental website with additional quizzes and games that accompany the unit).

So I decided to create our own unit.  I thought about lapbooking and then scanning in the images to create a slideshow...until i found VoiceThread.  So instead, I ended up creating our own Solar System unit in which NyGirl will create a complete Power Point presentation to upload and narrate via VoiceThread.  In the process, she is getting some typing practice (we use Sense-Lang.org for typing lessons), and a general overview on how to use presentation software and become familiar with computer icons, commands, and tasks.
So far I have taught her how to select slide templates and styles, add slides, add transitions and effects, change fonts, and add clip art.  The easiest part was typing  the information in for the planet Mercury.

This is going to be a fun project, I can already tell.

The thing is, once younger students are introduced to the concepts of productivity and presentation software, they can run with it and leave us in the dust.  I think it's hilarious when some educators scoff at the idea of showing children in the lower elementary years how to use these types of software.  It's perfectly do-able and absolutely equips them with ways to express their ideas and thoughts, making school projects all the more fun for them.

So that's it for now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To all educators:  HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!

Whether you teach in a public school, private school, charter school, or home school-- ALL educators who TRULY care about our students, are worthy of being thanked over and over again this season.

I know that I am grateful to home educate my two beautiful daughters. It is a blessing from God to be their teacher.


Enjoy the your day of thankfulness!