Addie Belle's Choral Milestones

Addie is in her second year now with the Texas Children's Choir. This has been the first thing to open up an incredible and dutiful passion for our oldest child. I have mentioned it before, but I just love how she has grown personally and socially I think because of her involvement with this just amazing group of kiddos. 

The choir practices twice a week for an hour and a half each day and one Saturday each month is dedicated to additional study.

  Along with these group rehearsals, Dr, Hardaway has also given the children self directed opportunities for further study. One of those is music theory by completing exercises in the book series Young Series Journey. There are five books total min the set. Once a singer completes the first two books and they are reviewed for accuracy by Dr. Hardaway then he has a special recognition and award. Particularly they receive special prism shaped color pencils to be used going forward for making special marks on their music. Addie hit the two book milestone in January and is shown here with her certificate and her director.

Today she was also recognized for finishing the third and fourth books. It is at this point that a Texas Children's Choir singer earns the designation as Choral Scholar. As a choral Scholar, her name is added to the choir's plaqu, she gets her own personal plaque and she will be denoted in performance programs to reflect this designation as well.

She has poured herself into the choir and this designation is a permanent representation of her work. We are proud of the intensity with which she has committed to the choir. Somehow this band geek and the guy who only learned to play guitar after college have produced quite the singer and actually quite the well rounded musician. 

Addie with Dr. Hardaway and her Choral Scholar Plaque.

Addie enjoying breaktime with her buddy Hannah.  They think TCC is all that and a bag of chips!

The Reasons Why We Homeschool

When I wrote my "Unintentional Benefits of Homeschooling" post, I was excited to share the things that are happening at home outside of what our expectation was for our kids education at home. They were all related to building better relationships.   I guess I realized I got a little out of order. I alluded to emotional protection being a reason why we chose to homeschool our kids in an older post, but I haven't ever totally shared why we homeschool and then even our intentional benefits of that choice. For other families that homeschool nothing here will be a surprise.  We have been at this now for nearly two years and I am sure there are things that I take for granted that may be left out of this post.  I mean all those things too.  We pretty much get daily affirmation that this choice was  the right one for our family and for our kids.
I decided not to go into detail with support behind these reasons.  I started the blog that way and I didn't know how to cut me off.  So just a numbered list instead.  I will try to keep it relatively short.
1. We wanted more academically. Control over the curriculum.
2. We were already monitoring bully type situations for both Addie and Lucas (kinder and 2nd grade at the time)
3. We wanted flexibility. We can visit with family on our schedule or when they need us to help out without truancy issues.
4. I wanted more time with my kids. And more time for them together.
5. We get to do many more field trips.
6. We get to pray at school.
7. We have total control over who is in our school and our kids safety.
8. We get to meet and play with kids all over San Antonio of all ages and backgrounds.  Fun diverse play.
9. We get to make our own lunches.
And just some fun extras
10. No school fundraisers. (Ofcourse that didn't really mean we got a fundraising pass though, did it?)
11. School in pajamas; No school uniforms
12. Self guided projects
13. We get to read what we want and therefore really develop a love for reading.  I do require 1 hour of reading everyday,b ut we usually all snuggle for the first hour of school and ease into our school day with a book.
14. No snow days
15. Teaching baking is teaching math sometimes, yummy banana bread.
16. Decorating for holidays is arts and crafts and creative development.
A Million more.  Do you have any to add? To be continued...

A homeschool day of fun

I spent a bit of time already looking forward to Spring Break next week when I get to travel with a sister and 5 of our kids to see out moma in New Orleans.  I am excited about the trip itself but know that it might all be wasted without a plan.  Not that it would be terrible for us all to wake up in the same place for a few days and stare at each other until somebody came up with some way to make it not boring because even then, atleast we would all be in the same place.  But a plan to have tremendous fun would be even better than an endless staring contest.  I only have a few ideas.  One was to have a little treasure hunt.  I collected these things around my house and snapped a photo.  I suppose that while they are rising to shine, my sister and I can hide these things around the house and give them each a photo of all the things they are to find.  Kind of like an egg hunt, only no eggs.  Ofcoure there are variations on this you are probably already thinking of that could be even more fun.  I am new at cool moma so just assume that I am going to do all those cool things too.

So while I was sufficiently distracted trying to plan fun stuff for us to do NEXT week, homeschool still goes on, right.  Addie was having a bit of trouble focusing too!  But she is generally ahead of schedule and he basic distraction is a book she can't put down so I am OK with that.  I decided to let her try her hand at baking.  I let her find the recipe, collect and measure ingredients and put the pumpkin bread together almost completely by herself.  I poured the batter into the pan because it was too heavy for her.  That was almost all the help I gave her.  She was pretty pleased with herself. It came out very well.

BUT you can't let Addie do something fun, NO FAIR.  Lucas helped me prepare some colored rice to use somehow I am not sure but definitely to play with next week.  This was fun.  Look how pretty!

Lot of shake shake shaking to get all that dye evenly spread.

Dad, Sorry I missed a day

It seemed like nothing much happened except that enough happened that there was no time to say so. Sometimes staying at home and homeschooling gives me the opportunity to start several things and finish none of them hence, nothing to write about.
Today seemed mostly the same. I will
attach three photos to this post. Here is a short description of each. Sorry if you have to scroll up and down for this bit. My phone always puts the photos at the end of the post.
1. Emaleigh Lucille Force is officially reading at what I am fairly sure is a first grade level. I learned over the weekend what the public school's expectations for the kinder readers are by end of the year and she is there. She could use more practice with sight words but I do have some tools for that. She is doing amazing with this Dick and Jane reader that we picked up from a garage sale.
2. Addie was right by my bed when I took that photo of ELF and insisted that I photograph her fish face.
3. Aunt Claudia gave me the shirt that Addie is wearing in this picture over 9 years ago. It is really a sweet shirt that she got from the thrift store in Del Norte. I was never able to wear it. I was pregnant with Addie when she gave it to me. It fits Addie perfectly. We decided it made her look a bit French. This is her French pose.

Roman Numeral FOUR and the Clock

Last week in our homeschool we introduced Roman Numerals.  I expected it to be a little difficult to teach/learn but Addie grasped it quickly just as she has everything else to date.  She in fact loved it.  Later that day we were shopping wall hangings at Target to hang in Daddy's office and as we were checking out the clocks Addie noticed one that looked like this,

And then she decides that we must have been wrong about the Roman numeral four because of how it was notated on the clock.  I checked every clock there and they consistently had four I's for four rather than IV.  So I had to know why it was different that what we all know to be correct.  The following theories are a few theories about why this occurs.  Generally they related to the preference of ancient monarchs, the similarity of IV to the name of the God of Jupiter and symmetry both visual and weight balance.

 "There is a story that a famous clockmaker had constructed a clock for Louis XIV, king of France. The clockmaker had naturally used IV for four. When the clock was shown to the king, he remarked that IIII should have been used instead of IV. When it was explained to him that IV was correct, he still insisted, so that there was nothing to do but change the clock dial. This introduced the custom of using IIII for four. This is probably only a story, however, as IIII occurs long before the time of Louis XIV. And this same story is also told in connection with other monarchs. There is one reason why IIII is preferable to IV, and it may have caused the change. On the other side of the clock dial the VIII is the heaviest number, consisting of four heavy strokes and one light one, as it is usually made. It would destroy the symmetry to have the IV with only two heavy strokes on the other side. Thus IIII with four heavy strokes is much to be preferred. The change may therefore have been made for reasons of symmetry."

"Classicists who have studied old Roman inscription of marble monuments etc. say that IIII was very often, perhaps predominantly, the form that was used in classical times. In a book picturing hundreds of tower clock dials, I found that about 95+% of them were in the IIII form. Interestingly, though, the most famous tower clock in the world, Big Ben, uses the IV form. There is also a hypothesis that the first clocks to use the IV form were clocks which had the rare feature of "Roman Striking." This used two bells, a higher pitch bell representing a one and a lower pitch bell representing a five. Thus four o'clock would be struck by one stroke of the small bell followed by one stroke of the big bell; six would be struck by one stroke of the big bell followed by one stroke of the small bell. This is a very efficient system, but died out almost entirely in the early 18th c.. "

Using four I's instead of IV for the "four" is due to the casting process of the numerals. Since some numerals were cast out of metal, or carved out of wood or bone, you need 20 I's, 4 V's, and 4 X's, even numbers of each, if you use four I's for "four". The molds would produce a long centre rod, with 10 I's, 2 V's, and 2 X's on each side.

This is apparently because "IV" is an abbreviation for "Jupiter" in Roman times. So they decided to use "IIII" so that their public clocks didn't have "1 2 3 GOD 5..." written on them.

Hey, Are You Still With Me?

Well, I have taken an almost two year break from publishing on this blog.  Honestly I thought it was longer.  I just looked at photos from my last blog post and Oh my goodness! my cute kiddos have grown so much since then.  We have lost teeth, learned to ride bikes, excelled in soccer, tried dance, started school a couple of times too among other things.  So there, that is kinda the last two years in a nutshell.  Well, my readership is very quaint, so I know you all know that so much more has transpired during that time, but let's talk about now. 

Raise your hand if you thought I was crazy when I said that Kevin and I had made the choice to homeschool our children.  OK, our choice was well thought out, deliberated and finally sort of encouraged by our oldes,t who was just having repeated heartbreak on a daily basis at school.  Her heartbreak wasn't the only factor, just the deciding one. 

I spent a bit of time during Spring and Summer reading about homeschooling, unschooling, rules and regulations. I went to the FEAST (Family Education alliance of South Texas) homeschool curriculum book fair in May and was flooded with information that made me feel underwater. Were we going to be traditional, classical, unit study or living books homeschoolers?  Which curriculum would we use?  Would we choose one company for all or spread it around?  Or use none of the above and totally wing it with what life threw at us. Well one thing for sure that I did know was that I always want learning to be a joy. And I want our homeschool to be so much more than public school at home. So I guess that is two things then...

The most fun thing I found at FEAST was SimplyFun. I started my little play as a SimplyFun playologist. SimplyFun's call is to build smarter kids and stronger families through play. I saw these games and knew I had to have them for our family. Who doesn't love some family play time that can also be educational?

  I was drawn to the game, Sumology, first because I love math (if you didn't know) and to Let's Drive second because I love road trips, but feel fairly deficient in geographic knowledge of the northern USA.  I signed up to start sharing these games with friends and family that I thought might like to play to learn like us. Now I am hosting parties for friends who get to earn free games and I am making new friends. The kids and I got to go to the SimplyFun convention for playologists in Las Vegas where the kids all got a Tibbar rabbit for playing so well while mommy learned more about new games and sharing. So that's new.
 
And here we are in the second week of actual planned and scheduled homeschool.  Ultimately we chose to start somewhat with a traditional textbook approach for math using the A Beka curriculum.  Addie is moving along swiftly in her math so far.  Many mornings she is up and at 'em by 6:30 cracking her math book and trying to work ahead.  She is moving through these lessons at almost double speed.  We chose A Beka for math pretty much because I knew it didn't suck and I found it for $5 at a book swap.  AND eventually a friend passed more A Beka along for language arts and then another for reading.  So we are doing some traditional homeschooling using A Beka.  We have not chosen a curriculum for science, but we are currently studying the ocean and specifically sea turtles.  We have many books by scholastic that we found at our friendly neighborhood thrift store to support this endeavor along with a great book from the library and a movie on netflix.  Addie and I drew sea turtles together yesterday.

That was SUCH a learning experience for both of us. Did you know that Addie is not perfect?  She sometimes forgets.  We got started by tracing a circle, but when the next step called for a free hand leaf shape for the body that was pretty much symmetrical, she lost it.  I mean she had a total meltdown and my patience was being challenged too.  This was supposed to be a fun artsy break for my artsy girl that also tied into what we had been studying. When she couldn't get that body perfect in her eyes, it was like the world was going to end.  We tried to keep moving forward, but it was as if she were possessed.  This joyful fun girl was being brought down by an imperfect leafy sketch. REALLY!!!

 

Eventually, she threw herself down on her bed in her room and mourned her shortcomings. Next she came back to get her paper and pencil and brought it back to her room as if I were the reason she couldn't draw a perfect turtle. And then like magic, 15 minutes later, she re-appeared and was smiling. She gave me a hug and told me she loved me and finished her turtle.  What a struggle!  This is going to continue to be a learning challenge I know.  We navigated it for the first time and I expect not the last, but ultimately she was pretty pleased and easy on herself when it didn't look exactly like the example we were following steps from.  I told her it was perfect and she is now proud because she did it all by herself.  She did identify things she wishes she did differently and wants to draw another one to send to her Grandma Prewitt.

 

Emaleigh is also homeschooling with us. She is working primarily on writing. We have write-on place mats for her to practice writing letters and numbers and she has also learned to write her name.

 She can spell the names of everyone in our family.  Her daddy was so impressed with her at bed time last night that she kept asking for more tasks to show him her brilliance.  At bed time...I was exhausted but she was so cute giggling as she ran out of the room to go do something to impress her daddy. 

 

The girls started gymnastics last Friday which I honestly think if you ask them, it is better than candy and probably the only thing we now have take away power with for Emaleigh :)

 

So what about Red? maybe you are asking yourself.  Well that lucky duck got a homeschool pass because he is at James Masters Elementary in first grade with the best teacher EVER, Mrs. Gallegos-Perez.  She is amazing and we love her.  She was Addie's teacher for both kinder and first grade.  We love her because she obviously has a heart for the job she is doing.  She loves her students but even when it was just Addie in her class she started a relationship with Lucas and Emaleigh and has always been encouraging to all of our kids.  She teaches the kids to their level and challenges them appropriately rather than choosing a class pace based on the weakest link.  I just always loved that if Addie could do what Mrs. Perez was asking, then she changed it to something a little more difficult.  For me, she actually promoted growth rather than "good enough"  So Lucas is still in public school.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Here they are on the first day of school.  I love how Addie wore the tie dye.  That would never go at her public school.

 

Well Kevin just got home about an hour ago and told the kids they needed to eat dinner and take a nap or there would be no circus this evening.  I just noticed that there are empty plates and all three kids and one dad are napping so I am going to go grab a moment of peace.  Maybe I will read a book I like.  Have a Happy weekend.