Vacation!!!

I can hardly believe I haven't posted to my blog in over a month! Gosh, it's been so busy. We just got back from our vacation in the Shenandoah Valley. We stay in Front Royal every year at the same cabin. We've done it the last 3 years in a row. It's so familiar that it feels like a second home when we go there now. We always look forward to it. I have uploaded my photos of the trip yet, but I will post some pictures when I do. We actually took a trip on the Skyline Drive this time, and we got some great shots of the mountain views from there. We got up to like 3,500 ft. on some of the lookout points. It was amazing! I have to admit I felt a little scared every time I pulled off at a lookout point. I felt like I was gonna drive right off the mountain! I got more comfortable with it the longer we were up there, though.

We ended up coming home a day early, as usual. I get so antsy when we're traveling. That feeling of an impending long drive makes me feel so anxious to get it over with that I always end up just packing up and coming home! lol. My dad was always the same way. I've never liked having things looming over my head. I like to hurry up and get things over with. Anyway, it worked out well to come home a day early. Then we weren't rushed, and we had a chance to get unpacked and back into the home routine before returning to schooling and work. We also had a lot of visitors at our church that first day back, so we were glad to be here for that.

Getting the kids back into schoolwork was a challenge this week. I had given them 2 weeks to get a week's worth done before our trip. Then they had a week off during vacation. So getting back to a full schedule was a little rough for them, but they managed to do it. We wrapped up week 12 this week, so we are officially 1/3 of the way through our school year already! That feels like a great accomplishment.

We were hoping to make it to Busch Gardens today, but the weather has been just awful. Our soccer games are even canceled for tomorrow because of this ongoing rain. And it's cold! Our field trip to the corn maze was also rescheduled to next week because of the rain. It's just as well, though...we were pretty busy this week as it was. I took the whole day yesterday and spent it getting Haylee's new bedroom furniture. I sold the crib and dresser, so I finally had room to move the other dresser into the boys' room, which left Haylee needing bedroom furniture of her own. I went and got her a cherry sleigh bed, dresser with mirror, and nightstand. In the pouring rain, Hayden and I managed to get it all in one trip, bring it in, unwrap everything, carry it all upstairs, and assemble it in her room. Then we went and got the matress and boxspring and brought those in, too. Then we went and bought her some brand new Disney Princess bedding and put the finishing touches on her room. Then I cleaned up all the mess from all the boxes and packing materials just before Steve came in. Shew! Man, did I hurt! Every part of my body ached last night. I had a hot bath, but it didn't help much. I ended up taking a couple of Tylenol to go to bed. That helped a lot.

It was all worth it, though. Haylee was beside herself with glee at her new room and her pretty pink bedding. When her dad came in, she went on and on, and he was just giggling at how excited she was. Hayden was a huge help to me throughout the day and even emptied the dishwasher for me so I could do the dishes again. I couldn't get over how helpful he was all day long. There's hope for him yet! lol. :) I made sure to tell him repeatedly how much I appreciated his pitching in when I needed it. I couldn't have gotten all that stuff up the stairs without his help, for sure.

I will definitely post pics of her bedroom when I get a chance. It looks really nice, and it makes her look so tiny in that great big bed! She slept late this morning. I think she really enjoyed her new big-girl bed.

-Kelly

Tea Room

For Haylee's 5th birthday at the end of July, I took her to the English Rose Tea Room. That was such a beautiful little place! I just have to take a few minutes to post some pics. We each had the Royal Tea. It was quite a little feast with several courses of goodies to devour! The scones were so good, and so was the fruit & custard parfait. Those were Haylee's favorites of the day.

It was pouring down with rain outside, but we made a reservation for the afternoon when the tea room was only open by reservation, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. It was a lovely way to spend the day together, and we got all dressed up for the occasion. Haylee looked like such a little princess! It cost a small fortune, but we had a wonderful time, and I'd like to do it again next year.

For Hayden's birthday, Steve took him out golfing...a full 18 holes! It was equally as expensive, so then I didn't feel so bad! lol.

If you live locally, you should definitely check out the English Rose Tea Room. It won Best of the Beach 2009.

-Kelly

Party was a hit!

Well, after much preparation, the kids' party turned out to be a big hit, I think. Everybody seemed to have fun, and Hayden ended the day by telling me it was the best party he'd had yet. That was enough to make all the fuss worthwhile for me!

The cake turned out really well, and I thought it was absolutely delicious. It was a lot of work, though. I basically spent all day Friday working on it. The decorating took forever, 'cause I really have no experience at decorating cakes beyond simply winging my way through it every year! The chicken recipe was VERY good. I will definitely be making that again in the near future. I don't think anybody, myself included, was fond of the salad. The dressing was icky. I think I'll just toss it. It would have been a great salad with another dressing, but I'll be tossing that recipe, for sure. It seemed like a lot of food once I laid it all out, but it's basically gone already after one night of eating leftovers, so I'm glad I made as much as I did. The Italian Ice punch my friend, Bonnie, made was fabulous! We went through two bowls of that.

So another big Burgess Bash is over. It's good to have it behind us. The next big event to think about is our long-awaited, much-anticipated vacation to the cabin in October. Aaaaaaah, how we all daydream about it. It's been on my mind a lot lately. It's only two months away. It's so peaceful there, and I'm really looking forward to relaxing on that front porch looking out over the rapids in the Shenandoah River below.

Once we get back from vacation, then it will be Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, and Holden's birthday party, and alas, Steve and I will be another year older, and another calendar year will be gone. The end of the year always seems to fly by.

Here's a photo of me & Steve...we hardly ever get our picture taken together, so I thought it was worthy of publishing here.

New Workbox System!!!

I saw the *perfect* set of Sterlite drawers for our workboxes. It's what I wish they'd had when I first went shopping for some. Once I saw them, I knew I had to have them, so I went ahead and replaced what I had with these new ones and then used the other drawer sets to reorganize snacks and drinks in my dining room. Anyway, each set of drawers was $20 at Big Lots, and I got 4 of them. Each set has 7 drawers (3 deep and 4 shallow), and it's all one piece. So they are just the same size as what I had before, except that the smaller sets I had sitting on top weren't as wide. Now all of my teacher's manuals lay flat in the shallow drawers, and I don't have to worry about anybody knocking the smaller sets off the top. The photo at right shows the new setup. Also, Hayden kept losing the post-it notes with the assignments on them that told what pages to read of each book, so I laminated index cards and used Vis-a-Vis wet erase markers to write the assignments on them, and then I taped them inside the drawers so he can see what they say through the drawers and won't need to remove them. We use a 4-day schedule, so I put the whole week's assignments on the card (M-T-W-TH) so I only have to change them on the weekends.

So I really think it looks great, and it's very functional. Now I don't need the return baskets on top. Since each set has 7 drawers instead of 6, each one has an extra drawer on top, so each kid has one as a return drawer for finished work I need to grade, and one as a handy supply drawer for scissors, glue, extra pencils, ruler, etc. I love that it's all contained.

So if you have any comments about it, please share! I would love some feedback.

Incidentally, Big Lots is having a teacher appreciation day next Saturday, August 1st, and I could have gotten an extra 10% off and saved $8, but the kids are having their birthday party that day, and I was afraid I wouldn't ever make it up there since the party often drags on all day (we usually have about 25-30 people in the house!). So I just went ahead and bought them while I had time to get them set up.

I've also been cleaning out the kids' board games. I have been disgusted at how much space they take up, not to mention how they are always losing/misplacing pieces to them, and I find them all over the place. So I had an idea...I went and bought the Hefty One-Zip Jumbo 2.5 gallon storage bags from Target, and I took all the games out of their boxes and put them instead in one of those bags. I cut out the name of the game, any instructions, and the contents list and dropped them into the bag with the game. I organized any small pieces into snack or sandwich sized bags and dropped those in the bigger bag with the game board, as well. I was able to fit nearly all of them in one big storage tub underneath the kids' pool table. I want to make space for them in one of the toy armoires and get rid of the storage tub altogether. I literally filled up both my trash can and my recycle can already! Good thing I'll have trash pickup before the party.

So I'm busy making lists and starting to decorate for their birthday party on Saturday. I called around today and found a cake decorating store that had a handful of cupcake pics with the Italian flag on them. Turns out they were looking to get rid of them and said they's sell me all they have (more than 24) for a grand total of 60 cents! Way cool. I'm waiting for Holden to get up from his nap so we can run and get them. I'd like to find a centerpiece, but I'm not having any luck except for online, and it's too late to get things shipped in time now.

The party is going to be an Italian Cook-Off theme. The kids are all going to get their own white aprons to decorate with fabric markers and take home as party favors. They will be making their own personal pizzas using Boboli crusts. For the grownups, I'm making a full spread of Italian fare, including Bruschetta Stuffed Chicken Breasts, Italian Garden Salad, Fettuccini Alfredo, Spaghetti and Meatballs, sliced Italian bread topped with mild Italian sausage, peppers and onions, and mozzarella baked on it, a fresh fruit tray, snacks, and an Italian Chocolate Cream Cake as the birthday cake. It's supposed to be a large 3-layer cake, but I'm going to bake it as a 1/2 sheet cake instead. I figured for serving so many people, that will be easier to slice up. I'm also doing strawberry cupcakes for Haylee with green and red sugar sprinkled on white frosting and the flag pics on top.

This is going to be such a busy week. I started braiding red, green, and white streamers today and taping them to the corners of the room, meeting at my ceiling fan in the middle. I will probably wait until later in the week to blow up the balloons and hang them. I got great Italian folk music from the library that I'm going to have playing in the background, too. I wanted to find affordable chef hats for the kids to keep, too, but I haven't had any luck.

Well, I've gotta run...I hear thunder, and the Bounce Around is still out in the yard!

Trying Something New

Shew! This had been a busy month that has just simply flown by! Our school schedule has been pretty cumbersome these last 3 weeks, so we haven't had time for much else. All the Sonlight forums say that Core 5 has the heaviest workload of all the cores, even for high school, and that the first 2 weeks of it are the heaviest of all. Many people have posted that they take a full 2 weeks to do EACH of the first 2 weeks. But we have managed to trudge our way through at full steam ahead without stretching it out at all. I'm happy to say we are finishing up week 3 now, so hopefully the pace will slow a bit for us now! We're starting to get the hang of the World Book Encyclopedia on DVD-ROM and how to use it for our Eastern Hemisphere Explorer research.




Now I'm taking the plunge and venturing out to try something totally new. We've been using Silver Burdett English for years and have been loving it. I purchased textbook/workbook sets up through 8th grade several years ago and have had them in the cabinet just waiting to be used each year. I love it's straight-forward approach to teaching grammar and the way it eases kids into writing. Hayden has really needed that. But now I'm finding that he's getting very lazy with it, rushing through all the worksheets because each one focuses on one specific grammar rule. He's not really paying attention to what he's actually doing, and that has been bugging me like crazy this year. Then I stumbled onto something on the Saxon Homeschool website. I found out they've just released (May 20th, 2009) a new Saxon Grammar & Writing program for grades 5, 6, 7, and 8. I saw it about a month ago, but there weren't any samples posted yet, and I sure wasn't going to drop that kind of money without seeing the contents first. Then Thursday night, I saw there were rather lengthy 25-page samples for each grade posted on their website. I took a long look at it and was very impressed.



It has the same incremental, spiral-learning approach as Saxon Math, and that was just what I was hoping for! The "mixed practice" that Saxon Math has works wonderfully for Hayden. It helps him retain what he has learned in previous lessons by bringing forth a spattering of questions from across those lessons, and it forces him to pay attention to what he's doing because every question references something completely different. That makes him have to think about what the question is asking. I think that's just what he needs for grammar, too. In looking through the sample, it looks like it is exactly that, and each question on the mixed practice references the lesson number in parentheses that the question came from so he can look back to refresh his memory if he gets stuck.



Hayden does Saxon Math totally independently now, and I'm hoping he will be able to do the grammar program the same way. I'm very excited about it! I talked to Steve about it, and he said it sounded like a good plan, so I went ahead and ordered it. It retails for $75 from Saxon's website plus $10 shipping. But then I did an internet search and found it at http://www.homeschoolingsupply.com/ for $55 + $11 shipping, and I will have it in about a week. There are 112 lessons in it, and that works out to about 3 per week for the whole school year, so we'll have to catch up on about the first 12 lessons once it comes. I think we can do it, though. The homeschool set includes the student textbook, student workbook, and teacher's packet. The textbook covers grammar concepts, the workbook covers writing, and the teacher's packet has the answer key and forms for tracking student progress.

So wish us luck! Hayden has always loved Saxon Math and Saxon Phonics, so I'm hoping he'll really take to this since the format will be so familiar and comfortable for him.

I'm headed out shortly to pick up this month's Angel Food order. They've started sending out neat invitations to order that include photos of all of the food items in the basic box. I have to admit the advertising is very appealing and really helps you visualize what's included so you can figure up in your head if it's a good value for your family or not.

Target Finds

I saw a couple of posts about Target getting teacher helps in the Dollar Spot, so I decided to go check it out today. I found lots of goodies!

• Leveled reader books (got level 2 books on Whales, Dolphins, & Sharks and Animals of Africa…they say grades 1-3, but my daughter who is not yet 5 could read them…they also had level 3, which say grades 2-4)


• 100-piece jigsaw puzzle of North America called Coast to Coast


• A Math Bingo game (says for 2-8 players, ages 5+)…includes 42 cards on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, 70 bingo chips, and 8 bingo cards)


• They had tons of SmartMats. These are 2-sided dry erase placemats. They covered all kinds of topics. I got one of the United States. It shows states and capitals on one side, and is unlabeled on the other side. I plan to let Hayden keep this in the van to mark off the states when he sees out of state plates. He’s been making a list inside the cover of his puzzle book that he keeps in the van, but I thought it would be more fun to mark it on the map so he can see how far they’ve traveled. We have a lot of military here, and it’s also a popular tourism area, so we see lots of out-of-state plates on a daily basis. I also got one that says “class schedule” on it, but it has analog clocks without hands and blank digital clocks printed on it. I know when teaching time with Saxon Math, I have to draw a lot of these on the chalkboard for practice, so I’ll just use this mat instead!


• A small 8-pocket pocket chart called a Classroom Card Scheduler. I haven’t really decided how I could use this yet, short of using it to rearrange things in order (alphabetical order, numerical order, etc.). If anybody has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! It has grommets at the top so you could hang it on the wall if you wanted to.


• They had TONS of workbooks of all kinds from PK-3rd grade. I only bought a Science one. It says grades 2-3, and it’s called Science Projects & Experiments. It had some cool-looking experiment instructions in it that you could do with household things. The pages are perforated for easy removal, so I thought these would make great “fun” items for the workboxes.


• Primary colored pom-poms and pipe cleaners for my craft supply box. They also had a bag with various sizes of googly eyes.

There were plenty more things that I did NOT get because I didn’t need them, like flash cards, rubber stamps with encouraging things on them (nice job, A+, etc.). They also had some neat non-school-related items. One in particular I just have to share is the telescoping metal marshmallow sticks with wooden handles! I bought one for each of us to take on vacation with us to the cabin in the mountains this fall. They will also be great to use in the fireplace at home next winter. I usually just use disposable wooden skewers, but I usually still need a glove or oven mitt to keep from burning my hand since they aren’t that long. These telescoping rods extend really far! The kids were thrilled!

That’s about it. It was definitely worth stopping in there.

Interesting stuff

I finally located my camera that has been misplaced! I uploaded an updated photo of our workbox system in last week's post about my workbox adaptations. I wanted to show you the completed system with the schedule charts above it and the clock-in/clock-out pockets on the wall. I also added a clock there so they would have a better awareness of how long it was taking them to move through their boxes. You can see that I color-coded everything blue for Hayden and pink for Haylee.

I came across a really cool website to practice spelling and vocabulary. It's called Spelling City. You can enter your own spelling words there, and it will turn teach them, turn them into online or printable games and puzzles, and even administer an oral spelling test for you and grade it on the spot! It's so awesome. Most sites like this that I've seen before have a limited word bank to choose from, so they generally only work for younger kids. But on this site, it seems you can add any word you have. I input Hayden's 7th grade spelling words from Houghton Mifflin Spelling & Vocabulary, and it recognized and annunciated every one correctly, and even gave them in the context of a sentence! I also like how you aren't stuck with one person's voice. It changes with each word given. There's nothing worse than being stuck with one annoying voice and not being able to change it. On this site, it automatically cycles through a number of different voices.

We're supposed to be off school this week, but we're still dabbling a bit in our workboxes to stay a little ahead of schedule in case something fun comes up! We like going to the free movie festival each week, so having some work done ahead of time ensures that we won't get behind because we're going to the movies!

I'm gonna go out in a few minutes and get our tickets for the Tides game on Friday night. It's our family tradition to go every year to one of the 4th of July celebration games that have fireworks afterwards. It's neat to be sitting so close to the fireworks, since they set them off from a boat just behind Harbor Park.