The Outdoor Hour Challenge

So it's been a little crazy around here and I haven't spent much time on my blog.  Rereading my last blog made me laugh when I realized that I was going to try to give an overview of each week.  HA!  Well, two months later, here I am...

We are beginning the Outdoor Hour Challenge and I am very excited.  I chose a peculiar day to start though.  I have been sick for 10 days and am finally on antibiotics, but still waiting for my energy to return.  Now in all fairness I have celebrated my Charity's First Communion and my nephew and sister's birthdays during that time, so I finally have tried resting to see if maybe then I can shake this thing. 

Anyway, I sent the kids into the backyard and told them to spend 15 minutes walking around to see what interested them or something new they might have noticed.  Hope got hot after about 10 minutes and came back in not very interested, however she did notice our purple flowers had bloomed.  Charity did a little experiment between two different leaves to see how they felt different.  I believe she did this because yesterday Hope took her out there to teach her that art can use all the senses to be truly appreciated.  She taught her to smell, feel, see, taste and listen to them.  She's such a great teacher!!

So our first day was without mom and didn't go all that great, but simple is good sometimes and that is definitely what it was.  Simple.  So hopefully we will spend time this week looking up what kind of flowers our purple ones are and why one of the leaves was crunchier than the other.  Thanks for coming to visit and I will update more of what we have been doing with pics later this week.  One hint...we are finally our own nation and we are beginning to travel west with a couple of fellows and their guides!

Long overdue update

Wow, it sure has been a long time since I posted anything.  We had many road bumps this fall and are finally back into our normal routine.  Hopefully we won't hit anymore bumps and we will all sail along to the end of May with a love for all things that we have come across on this journey of schooling.

In history we are moving right along learning about the Colonists and will soon be moving into the Revolutionary War.

In science we are continuing our study on the human body and moving through all the systems.  Hope and Charity will be making life size bodies and adding bones, muscles and Hope's will have all the systems labeled as well. 

Hope will be starting cursive this week and we will be using a new curriculum for this.  It is called Handwriting without tears.  Hopefully it will be true to it's name. 

We have wrapped up our study of Degas and Chopin using our new notebooking pages that I discovered on notebooking pages.com.  These have been wonderful for the girls.  It makes narration fun and gives a format to our notebooks.  They have something for every subject. 

I'll try to update each week on our daily adventures in the life of St. Therese Academy.

Back to the Books...What will we learn?

So we started back up with our lessons last week. We started slowly with just Math, reading comprehension and phonics. This week we started with history. We are studying American History and I am so excited because this is something that our entire family enjoys learning about so much.

So Hope and I sit down to begin reading her book Squanto and this is the conversation that occurs after the first page.

She stops, looks at the cover of the book and says:

"Are we going to learn why the Indians dressed so funny and also the Pilgrims?"

Me: "They didn't dress funny."

Hope: "Big hats, puffy pants, tights and tap-dancing shoes. They dressed funny!"

Me: "We'll have to read on and study why?!?!?"

I realized that I couldn't win this one, she had a point. So hopefully we'll learn why they dressed funny and a whole bunch of other interesting facts about the founders of our country and the Natives who were here first. We'll keep you posted!

Blessings to you all!

A Special Part of Me

Well it's the end of the year and I start to doubt myself as to whether or not I covered enough, did enough or am good enough to be teaching these beautiful children. But then, we had an AMAZING day! I have a child who struggles with certain aspects of learning. We have not had her tested yet, but we believe it is some sort of dyslexia. She has been struggling with multiplication and memorizing her facts. We have tried pretty much everything and I finally just gave her the table and had her look it up and we moved on to double digits. This child is so intelligent that she can't just learn something, she has to understand every aspect of it. She has to take it to such a level that sometimes I wonder who is really teaching whom? The other day was not a good day and as her frustration level grew, so did mine. Pretty soon I realized that we were not going to accomplish anything, so I closed the book, took her hands in mine and looked her in the eyes and we made a pact.
We have decided that when she reaches her frustration level (even if it's just while I give directions), then we will come back to that lesson at another time. Well...it worked!!! The next day we tried again, with patience, and it worked. It took awhile, but she understood. I love our math curriculum because it is very manipulative and hands on. She was able to understand how when you multiply double digits, you can automatically start counting hundreds. It was wonderful. She felt good about herself and I realized that no other teacher would care for her the way I do because she is a part of me, a very special part of me.

coming to an end and beginning anew

We are finishing up with formal lessons for the year and ordering curriculum for next year. It is an exciting time around here. Faith has finished several subjects and is now doubling up on what she has left so that she will finish within the next few weeks. Hope and Charity have also been trying to wrap up some formal subjects, but will continue some of them through the summer. We don't want to have to reinvent the wheel next fall, so we'll continue with math facts and our wonderful reading book. Writing Road to Reading. http://spalding.org/store/instructional.php

I am really looking forward to our new method of learning next year. After spending six months researching a new approach, I find that it is so very similar to what I learned in college. Why did I not think of this sooner? Who knows? All in His time...(I keep telling myself that). We will be changing our way of doing things and following a kind of Charlotte Mason/mom invented kind of approach. We will tweak it all to make it work for our family, so that we will learn as we live. I am a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of gal and so I will have to be diligent about sticking to a guide so that we cover everything, but that is what I like so much about this approach. There is always plenty of time for exploring in the afternoons. As long as we get Love on our time table, everything should work out just fine. HAH! He is ready to start learning right along with us and loves to color all that he can. Including his body!

I can't wait for the boxes to start arriving. It's one of my favorite things and makes me feel like Christmas morning. The girls and I tear into everything and devour it all right then and there. I love to see their faces and hear what they have to say about what the new school year will bring and what they would like to study.

This next year for history, we will be studying American History for all three girls. Faith will deepen what she learned in 5th grade and Hope and Charity will work on their own levels as well. We will use this for our vocab and spelling throughout the year. We are also switching our language to use Primary Language Lessons for Charity, Intermediate Language Lessons for Hope and Lingua Mater: Language Lessons from Literature for Faith. These books bring all of Charlotte Mason's methods together for daily language in a beautiful way. Through picture studies, narrations, dictations they are all pulled together in these books for each level. We are also beginning our own art studies and music appreciation. After researching prints from different artists, I decided calendars fit our budget best, so I hit calendars.com today and bought enough for free shipping! We will be studying Mary Cassatt, van Gogh, Monet, Renoir and da Vinci. We will also be studying nine different composers and learning about their lives as well. For science we will pick different subjects to work on together and separate. We will study life science, biology and some physical science as well. We will also throw in whatever unit studies we want to as we go along. For math we are sticking with Math U See as we really love the way he teaches the concept, not just the shortcut for learning the tricks.

Through all of this the most important message that we want to teach our children is our faith. The beauty of the Catholic Church and Jesus' gifts of the sacraments are such a blessing to all of us. A year from now, our Charity will celebrate her first communion and so this second grade year will be one filled with exploring and learning so many things as she prepares to receive her Lord and Savior for the first time. We are blessed to have the gift that Jesus left us the night he instituted the Eucharist. The love that He felt for us needs to be spread around to all that we meet. "All are to be welcomed as Christ" St. Benedict. So above all as we journey down this new year and new path, may we treat all as Jesus treats us, with Faith, Hope, Charity and Love!

overdue update

Life has been so busy around here with soccer ending and swimteam starting, that I haven't been able to catch up on our long overdue updates. We have had many wonderful things happen and have learned so much more than we set out to learn. We have also had some sad things happen, as does with nature.

First, we still have many visitors to our feeding center. One day Brian and I were out enjoying the day and we noticed a bright orange bird in a tree in our back yard. It never came to eat, but it hung around for quite a while. We finally figured out that it was a Baltimore Oriole. We were very excited!!! The next day, we had an Indigo Bunting come to eat. We were amazed at how blue it was. We have enjoyed all these colorful creatures in our back yard.

We were very excited to realize that we have 3 nests in our yard. The swallows are back and we believe the eggs have finally been laid, because someone is hanging out in that nest all the time now. We have a mockingbird who built a nest in our front yard. Funny thing, the mockinbirds never come to eat. I guess they just eat insects. Lastly, our sparrows built a beautiful nest, right in our backyard, in our bottle brush tree. We were a little concerned because there are often cats hanging out under that tree. On Wednesday we noticed the nest, on Thursday there were eggs and on Friday we had a HUGE storm with lots of wind. We were worried about the birds and when we checked on them noticed they had found shelter on our rain gutters, right next to their nest. The next day we checked on them and noticed 3 babies!! We watched them grow and checked on them daily. We used our plastic picnic table to stand on so that we could see inside the nest. Well, we left the table too close to the nest and the cats were able to reach the nest. We were all so sad to lose our babies and have learned an important lesson about interefering with nature.

If you build it, they will come.

This is an entry that the girls wrote. These are facts that they have learned about the birds in our backyard. (or some they made up) We have also been studying birds that we haven't seen in our backyard like owls, pigeons, ducks, hawks, egrets, penguins, eagles and swans. We will post more about those birds later. By the way, our swallows are back this year and as we read about the swallows of San Juan Capistrano it makes us feel special that they chose our house again to nest. If you click on the links (you may have to copy and paste), they will take you to the song of each bird here. I also found an incredible site that has much information for "birding."
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/

Have fun reading our thoughts!




This is a mourning dove with a grackle. They are called mourning doves because of the cooing sad, song that they make. The grackles have colorful patches on their neck. They're mean. The mourning doves is why they're called mourning doves is cause they're always in the birdfeeder at morning. The mourning dove's beak is not curved.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Mourning_Dove.html#fig1

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Common_Grackle.html



This is a house wren. They only came to visit once or twice and there were several of them. Their beak is small, straight and pointed. It might be a female red winged black bird.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Wren.html


This is a cardinal. It is a male.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Northern_Cardinal.html#fig1


We think this one is a Bridled Titmouse. It eats insects and acorns. The one below is a Bridled Titmouse too.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Bridled_Titmouse.html

This is a white winged dove. It is not common in Texas.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/White-winged_Dove.html#fig1

This is a female cardinal. It has a red beak not like the many other birds. And it's light brown. And the male is red. The cardinal's voice is very good. It's feathers make a mowhawk and some don't. The cardinal's are only is special spots and you don't see them very often around town. Usually in backyards.




This is a red winged black bird. It has a little bit of yellow on his wings. He's about 4 inches tall. His beak is pointed and not curved. We see it sometimes in our backyard. The female is more dark brown and is not black or red.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/Red-winged_Blackbird.html



This is a house sparrow. It can be 5-6 inches tall. They blend in with trees. They live in cities and suburbs, and farms.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Sparrow.html


This is a goldfinch. These are very obvious, but they blend in very well with the magnolia tree. This is a male. The female's colors are duller. They're just about darker. They look like the color of a flower.They sometimes come to our backyard and they eat in the birdfeeder and they don't fly away, but then a grackle comes and it scares them away. They nest in mid summer. They kind of look like the lemon fish in our fish tank.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/American_Goldfinch.html
This is a house finch. The house finch has a red head and a brown body and the female has just a plain brown body. They are very common around the United States.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/audio/House_Finch.html