Donut Falls

We made it back to Donut Falls and I remembered the camera! I love it in the mountains! It is so beautiful. I love the trees and the rivers and the smell of pine. I love the rockiness of the Rocky Mountains. I feel the majesty of God's creations when I am in the mountains.

Beautiful Donut Falls

Hiking Up

2 year old trooper that hiked the whole way there and most of the way back!

The beautiful River

feeling a little tired and cold just before leaving the falls

I sure am a lucky Mom to have been blessed with all of these!

On the way back

Creativity

 My cute kids created in their spare time rather than just watching. Rachel, Anya, and Johnny made little plays by drawing pictures, cutting them out and preforming a sort of paper doll show for us. They each did their very own, they made these while, Ruth, Kate, and I cleaned the bathrooms.

 Adam built with blocks. He made a track to send his cars down.

 I am glad that my kids took some of their free time to create.

Of course, creativity does cause more clean up.

Becca's Experience

My cute sister in law, Becca. (You should all be reading her blog. She is the best of young moms.) Wrote about her Wal-mart experience on her blog. This is what happened to her:

I was just walking around Wal-Mart doing my shopping, I was in the process of picking out some Q-tips, when an elderly man, 75-80 yrs of age I'd say, crosses the main aisleway to come over to speak to me specifically. The conversation went something like this:

"Are you the mother of these {points to my kids sitting in my cart} children?"
"Yes..."
"Ok, well, I'm just an old man, but I'm trying to figure something out. I just am trying to understand...."
"Ok...?"
"I just want to know if you have the time to do her hair so pretty..." he grabs one of Graces braids and pulls on it a bit... "How do you not have the time to make yourself look pretty?"

Anyway she went on to say how upset this made her feel (of course). How she suddenly felt rude to other people (she wasn't). I know I would feel the same way. It did make me think that while so many people go out of their way to say rude things. Wouldn't it be nice if more people went out of their way to say nice things. So that is what I am going to do-- probably to the embarrassment of  my own children-- every time I shop, I am going to go out of my way to say something nice to at least one person. I think it is just a nice simple way to make other people feel happy and to spread a bit of sunshine. Thanks for sharing your tragedy, Becca. And by the way 99% of the time I see Becca, she is absolutely beautiful and stylish and poised. I look like white trash compared to Becca.

Focus

Too often I find my focus is on my older children. They are the ones doing the neat things. They are busier. They have clever, fun things to say, and they are much better at securing my attention at appropriate times. Too often my little kids are left in the lurch. I do play and read to them, but they don't receive the special treatment the older kids. do I have realized that I need to fix this. My older kids had my undevided attention when they were young. Obviously, I cannot start ignoring my older kids, but I need to make sure I am making the little kids feel special and not just in a catergory of "sorry, you are too young."

In the last week, John and I have been trying to fix this. After I bought the older kids some music they wanted, I bought the little kids, Raffi's Singable Songs. I had a tape of this that the older kids listened to a ton in the car when they were toddlers. The little kids loved it. The older kids basked in nastalgia, and whenever we play the music, Anya and Rachel begin to dance and happily declare, "this is for me." John took Adam, and Rachel, and Anya out to ice cream and to the special art store we never bring them too. They came home happy and proud.

This is something I need to think about as a parent of many children. All of my children are special to me, and I want them all to feel that way. So I need to remember to shift my focus from the older kids to the younger kids some each day.

Joining Up with Latter Day Homeschooling

I am joining up with the Latter Day Homeschool bloggers. 

 

 

This is a group of blogging LDS homeschool moms. Some of them take turns writing about family life and homeschool and everyone else gets to add their blog to the blog roll. By deciding to homeschool I have decided to leave my comfort zone and meet strangers who homeschool their kids too. My kids insisted on this particular. So welcome me. I am here to get ideas and meet other moms who do what we are about to embark on.

Getting Ready For Homeschool

I have had a couple of sick kids this week, so I have used this down time to begin preparing for homeschool. We have talked a lot about how we are going to set things up and what we want for curriculum and such. This week we have finally gotten serious about getting things together. One of our problems was how to set up our learning space. Ruth, Kate, and Johnny are enrolled in an online charter school. We had to have a space where several family members could use the internet at the same time. We talked about buying a number of cheap laptops and sitting them at the dining room table-- a good solution, but a costly one. We looked at larger computer desks. We have two old computers that more than fit the minimum requirements for the school. The problem with computer desks is no matter how large they are, they only allow room for one chair. The extra space is filled with drawers and things. We then talked about buying one of those large, long, plastic Costco tables. The problem is they are very ugly and I do need to feel happy in my home. Then I went to Shopko (a local department store) for school supplies. Without little hope of finding anything, I thought I'd look at their dining room tables for our computer space. They had a very large table the very same color of wood as our banisters, bookshelves, and kitchen cabinets (our dining room table doesn't even match that.) The table was on sale for $150. I told John about it, but we never got back to look at it, and we had the big car bill. On Tuesday when I had to go buy crackers and soda for the stomach flu, I thought I would look and see if the table was still on sale. It was. Not as good. It was $20 more. I made a snap decision (I never do this with anything above $10) and bought the table. To my great joy, John was pleased at worst, and excited at best. He got the table set up right away. John has always wanted a line of computers. He collects old computers for me to throw away ;-). Since I had not thrown out the last two yet, and they are better than his normal finds this has worked out very well.

I have also been addressing the subject of curriculum for my kindergartener and first grader. I have always home schooled pre-school. I have also been the main person to teach my children how to read. But I know that I need to broaden what I do. Here is a sample of what I have always done.

My homemade flashcards. These are letter combinations that usually make a certain sound when found together in a word. I have a lot of these

These are some of Adam's high frequency words. I found a nice list of first grade high frequency words here. I will be doing one list a week.

These are a sample of some of my pre-preschool flash cards. Right now Joseph is using these.

 

 

 

 

 I have also used this website for math papers since about 2006 for my kids. They have worksheets up through algebra and a small amount of geometry. I like the five minute drills for teaching my kids to do their math facts quickly.

So now I need to add upon what I do. I bought a workbook (it hasn't arrived in the mail yet). I found it on Amazon.

Looking at the reviews of this particular workbook, I think I will need to have the kindergarten, 2 first grade and the second grade workbooks for kindergarten and first grade. I only bought the first grade book because I wanted to look it through and I did not want to be stuck with a whole curriculum that I do not like. (This is also due to my inability to spend money on anything besides food.) I will still use my homemade flash cards, and the math worksheet site. I will have Adam and Rachel each spend a half hour reading from the Book of Mormon Stories to me, and another half hour reading to me from the easy reader books we already have and what we can get from the library.

At this point I have no idea what we will do for science or history. I want to cover the classical composers and some of the Impressionists artist. Does anyone know of a curriculum for classical composers or is this something you just make up on your own? Also I quite welcome other suggestions for reading, math, science, and history curriculums.

I have a tentative schedule written out. I am not sure how this will work. (I post that in hopes of better suggestions later.) The online school begins Aug 29th, the public schools begin Aug 22, so I think we will take the week the kids friends start school as a before homeschool vacation week where we will not do any school stuff at all, and then we will begin full swing. Until Aug 22, we will continue our summer schedule of 2 days a week field trips, and 3 days a week with 2 hours spent on education-- that is math and typing for the older kids and reading and math for the younger kids.

I am feeling both excited and apprehensive. This will be a big change for our family.

Media Free Week

Media Free week was not what I was hoping it would be. I was hoping we would suddenly have a lot of time together and all. But it happened to fall on a very busy week with a lot of errands and car repairs and such. So on Monday we did our normal stuff in the morning, and then Ruth and Kate babysat for me in the afternoon while I took Johnny on a date and Costco shopped. Then Ruth and Kate all the kids went out to play with friends. It was kind of funny to see Johnny bring a friend home and embarassingly say, "we can't play wii."

On Tuesday, we did our normal morning nonmedia stuff. After lunch I made all 8 kids come with me on errands that took us past 6pm (ughhh!!) By the time we got home, it was time to get dinner and do chores and then bedtime-- not terribly exciting.

Wednesday, I paid bills and such in the morning. Then we had lunch at home. Ruth and Kate took Joshua with them to a friends house while I took the rest of the kids to join the rec center and we went swimming for a couple of hours. We all got home just in time for Kate's achievement days at 6, and Ruth's Young Women's activity at 7. After dinner was cleaned up and chores were done. John played blocks with the littlest kids while I took Kate, Johnny, and Adam swimming. Again, not a very special day.

On Thursday, things were a little tougher for the kids. We were less busy. We followed our morning routine. The van was in the shop to get the brakes fixed for registration, so there was no going anywhere anyway. By 2 o'clock I decided Joseph and Joshua should take a nap at least once during the week so we had naptime. This is usually when we play a movie and I read to the older girls. Well, I read to the older girls and whoever did not settle down into either their own book or drawing or listening to the book I was reading had to lay down in their bed. All the girls either drew pictures or listened to the book. The boys had trouble and were sent to bed for a nap.

On Friday, we did lots of chores and then played together in the morning. Usually we go out this day, but the car was still being repaired. However, just as I finished reading to the little kids, I got the call about the car. John started a new job last week and couldn't make it to get the car before closing. So Ruth and Kate babysat Anya, Johnny, Adam, and Joseph while I walked myself, Rachel, and Joshua the 5 miles in the 90 degree afternoon heat to get the van and pay a whopping $872 for new brakes and such. (That is all of our food money for the month). I got home at 4:45. John was home about 45 minutes later, and we were planning on going to the temple. I knew babysitting without TV was really hard on our girls, it had been a tough week, so I let them watch Phineas and Ferb while we went to the Temple and out on a date.

Saturday was very busy again. Near the end of the day we took the family swimming and had an 8:30pm dinner and a rush to bed. Sunday we had a baby blessing for a cousin and a family dinner. The kids thought I would give them unlimited media today. Hahahaha. We already decided it was time to get back to having media days only on Fridays and Saturdays unless they are invited to do something with a parent.

We did have the pleasure of a rare Utah summer thunderstorm to dance in.

After our media free week, I have to say we are just too busy. I would like to find a way to have more unscheduled time for the kids to think and create in. That is just hard to do with a family this size. And it is weird to say, "I am going to schedule in unscheduled time." As we approach the school year and our first year of home school, I would like to make sure some of that time is for crafting and free play with me. How we are going to make it all fit is beyond me. Sorry I didn't come up with great ideas to do besides media. However, Kate did say, "Without TV, reading is a lot more entertaining." :).