Five in a Row

No, this is not a pregnancy announcement. :)

Some of you know that I was home schooled and that I currently home school my children. I wanted to post about what I do, and some of the curriculum that I use. I am in no way an expert and I've only just begun. But we're having fun and I wanted to share!

We start off our day with Five in a Row.

The idea behind FIAR is that we read the same book every day for five days, and each day we pull something out of it to discuss. For example, one of the books we read was The Story of Ping. On Monday, we talked about China and the Yangtze River and found them on the map. The next day, we talked about things that float and tried finding different things around the house and testing them to see if they would float. The third day we talked about the illustrations, how they were done with pencils and made our own pictures. And so on.

This is something that I can do with all the kids (a plus) and is what they enjoy the most. Here are a few pictures of what we have done.

After reading Papa Piccolo, which is set in Venice and has a lot of water in the pictures, we talked about all the colors the illustrator used for the water. We did a little experiment making our own colors. We took blue and added a little green, black, and other colors to see what color would turn out.

I found this painting idea here, and for some reason using q-tips to paint make me feel less stressed. Otherwise I am a bundle of nerves, knowing it will get all over the table, clothes, chairs and possibly the floor. I reeeally dislike having carpet under the table.
We read The Glorious Flight, which is about Louis Bleriot who invented the first working airplane in France and flew the English Channel. Of course we made paper airplanes!

Five in a Row is great for us. By the way, I got the manual used off of amazon for about $25, and get the books from the library. Much cheaper that way. The manual just gives lots of suggestions/ideas for their book list, so I suppose you could even come up with those yourselves and do it for free! But I like someone to do some of my thinking for me. :)

I'll post later about the rest of school. But this is the start of our home school day!

Silly Kidlets

We might have a problem...

Alternate title: The New Printer

Our old printer (that had been given to us several years ago) had started to die, and I was tired of never being able to print in color. I mentioned to James that it was very important to me to have a good printer, preferably one that could scan and copy. I find myself wanting to do that a lot as a homeschooler. I swear I only casually mentioned this, but I forgot who I was talking to. My husband is a bit of a tech nerd- he loves to research the newest gadgets and gizmos. For example, this is our computer:

He built this himself.


Twice.

And I have to say, although I was skeptical about the double monitor thing at first, now I don't know how I did without. Could we do three? Or four?



And now this is our printer:My old printer used to sit on top of that black filing cabinet. The new printer takes up my entire end table. Look at that thing! Yes, James reassures me that he got an unbelievable price, lowest one on the internet and then even lower because it was open box- but lookatitlookatit! It's huge! Practically commercial size! Am I running a marketing office? I might even have to name it.

Conclusion: Don't idly mention things like this anymore. Like wanting a new camera. I can only imagine what he would choose. Let us not speak of it.