Happy Halloween!!

 Happy Halloween- Samhain Greetings- All Souls Day blessings 2019! We had such a fun day and saw so many awesome costumes out and about. There was so much joy and happiness in the air. The one day of the year when adults are given permission to play pretend and believe in magic makes them so happy and friendly and carefree.
In our house the costume run down went like this: the older kids played a game of D&D tonight. Their entire party dressed like their characters. It was pretty epic. Camber was an elf and Landon was a dwarf. Story and River stayed home with mom and dad and went trick or treating around the area. Story was Red Riding Hood and River was a witch /goddess. David put together an awesome cowboy costume. Originally because he was dressing like S, who was going to be a cowgirl and then changed her mind last minute. I had a beautiful flowy pair of butterfly wings that I fluttered around in and didn't stay very warm but had a lot of fun.

 

These are soul cakes. Flatter than they should be and cracked because my vegan conversion using coconut oil made them crack pretty bad but they were oh-so-good. I started ,making them about 3 years ago as a All Saints Day Tradition. Soul cakes were originally made in Medieval Times on All Saints or All Souls Day for the souls of the dead and their friends and were given out to poor and children as they went door to door asking for food.  This is thought to  be the start of trick or treating.  Plus they are delicious. I can usually only find the recipe in metric so it's fun figuring out conversions. These taste so good!!

 We worked on Grammar and Punctuation today. We work out of daily Grammar Evan- Moore books. Today we learned that Specific Places, holidays and days of the week are Capitalized. I let the kids look at the worksheets, sometimes they want to do them in pencil but sometimes they just want to correct the sentences out loud. We did decide to refresh our punctuation by  making the punctuation with our bodies ( there was some disagreement on style of question mark). After making the symbol they would pop up and say something that would use that end punctuation.

We have been playing a lot of money games and play store to get the girls to really know money and change and different ways to make different amounts. The game money bags is our favorite for that right now bu setting up our own stores is where it usually ends up.

Today we worked on tortilla fractions. A quick snack and refresher course. 

Today was a bit of fun art too. We love using  The Nature Connection by Clare Leslie Walker. It is a great book to get kids observing and interacting in different ways in the outdoors. We worked on drawing lessons today. We got to three of five.

The first lesson was blind contour drawing. We looked at the pumpkin or Christmas cactus and without taking our eyes off the objects we drew them, in one continuous line. They are kinda hard to see. Mine is in the book, River on the top, Story on the bottom.

Drawing Two was Modified Contour-This time we could look back and forth between the paper and object but the pencil still couldn't leave the paper.

Lesson Three was a quick sketch- with just using a few lines we would draw the object on a time limit. The girls really liked this one. We tried 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 and 20 seconds.

 River ended up enjoying it so much she ended up quick sketching the sleeping dog next to her.

Last night we continued working on Egypt and we wrote our name in Hieroglyphs.

#Grammarandpunctuation #Egypt #hieroglyphs #fractions #moneygames #math #reading #halloween  #art #nature  #natureconnection  #blindcontourdrawing #LA #blossomandroot #themeadowpeople #D&D #soulcakes #samhain #sumeria #history #dailymathpractice

Us

This is my lovely family. 

This is my youngest.

We love being outdoors and this is us making snow angels on a frozen lake for my birthday last year!

  We Celebrate Fat Tuesday every year by attending The Festival of Chocolate!

*I take all my pictures either through a borrowed phone or with my terrible phone camera. I FINALLY understand the importance of a camera to document home school. Especially if your kids make things that don't fit into the keep box ( most everything )!  At the top of my need-to-get list is a good , small camera. I hate electronics and electronics hate me. The last time I went to look at cameras at Best Buy I set off the alarms just touching it. So, the process is slow going!

Reason for Being

The reasons I started this blog :

*To attempt and get myself organized, at least in the area of homeschooling. I currently have about 8 huge binders and keep every single paper they ever do. This is not going to work much longer.

* We are shifting our homeschool journey. We currently aren't even technically homeschoolers. We are public school students who receive most of their instruction at home. This is all because we partner with a PPP ( Parent Partnership Program) in our district. These are fairly popular and a great option to keep you legal, offer lots of resources, give kids a bit of a school feel, fun classes for free or cheap and other reasons. But recently our PPP has started to become more and more like a public school. I started working there this year and saw a lot of behind the scenes workings and realized this is no longer the place for us. Unfortunately, I am contracted there until January but after that we will be free and independent homeschoolers.

*Last week I attended an almost 4 hour Parent Qualifying Course to legally be able to homeschool my children in the state of WA without an overseeing certificated teacher. It was an awesome course to take and receive the certification at the end. The teacher gave a lot of great tips and blogging for record keeping was one of them.

*We started out unschool, we had some problems and didn't last for very long. Since we partner with a PPP they require monthly proof and twice yearly evaluation that your child is keeping up with the district standards for that grade. Which has shifted us to be teaching towards the testing and evaluating. It is is not our normal rhythm, we work at a grueling stressful pace, we are always behind - in where we should be in the year and where the girls should be testing. We have completely lost our fun and student led learning. I realized this as everyday there was a battle that ended in tears on both sides. This is not why we homeschool! This is NOT how it should be! I can't believe I am teaching my children for someone else's standards I don't even agree with! So after some soul searching we are shifting back towards unschooling.

* Because Story has moderate dyslexia and has been made to feel, until this point , that it is a learning disability that puts her behind, requires tutoring and is something that is wrong with her for the rest of her life. So wrong! She has dyslexia, which means she learns different. At it is my privilege to teach to her unique strengths and struggles . I am thoroughly enjoying researching and learning about dyslexia. I don't have it and didn't really understand it. I thought it meant people read backwards. Even when my older daughter was diagnosed with it all I understood was she would probably be a  bad speller and a blue lens in front of the words helped. Now, she is a bad speller but that is my fault. I don't think I used the right learning to tools to help unlock her learning potential. And I feel awful for failing her like that.

* Because I have a lot to say and I love talking about what we do in this house. I don't always get much of a chance to talk around here but I have a lot to share. Maybe I will never use this site again. Maybe it will become my new favorite outlet. Maybe I will eventually broaden it to include other things that happen around the house. Because honestly, our house is a unique, functioning blend of magic and people and animals and plants and chaos and different interests and schedules and diets and it all works amazingly!

* Because my small little town is lonely. I have been the oddball out for more than a decade. We live in a beautiful place in the Evergreen state but I don't belong here. I have a few more years until my older kids graduate and then we can move on. And that leads me to my next thought.....My older kids attend a High School I can honestly say I hate and disagree with. The influence of that High School is awful. But the kids are heavily invested and I don't think pulling them out is the right answer. I should have never let them start but now I just have to ride it out....gritting my teeth the whole time.