Because you just don't learn this at school

First I want to thank you all for the votes in the Homeschool Blog Poll, I so appreciate your input and it seems that the majority want to keep things just as they are.  I'm kinda glad in a way, I don't know if I could handle another blog right now, it's all I can do to keep this one and the food blog updated.

Maybe someday I may just be inspired to open a Homeschool Blog but until then, I guess you'll have to put up with my random posts about schooling and food and crocheting and all sorts of other things.

It was a long day and I mean LONGGGG day and we still have two lessons to get through tonight because my little one is not feeling very well so schooling was kept to a minimum today.

But one thing we did do was have fun with experiments and that is the one thing you just don't learn at school....to get hands on, to try all these different things, to experiment and spend an hour or two gathering and planning.

Everything seems too rushed in public school.  The kids get shuffled from subject to subject, to class and lunch and recess and shoved back into a chair for another couple of hours.  There's no fun, there's no real interaction and I don't care what anyone says....there is NO socialization.

Saying a couple of words to each other over forkfuls of food or 15 minutes of recess which really is no time to do anything at all, is not exactly what I call socializing....but who am I to decide right???

But back to hands on.

One of the things we're most loving about homeschooling right now is the experiments and the projects and doing it together and most of all.....having fun.

Here's a brief look at what we've done the past two days.

Nicholas - Second Grade

Social Studies - We've been elbow deep in Government studies...mayors and governors and presidents and federal government.  We're learning about laws, we're learning about what is where, who does what and what this Country is built upon.



Math - It's all about shapes, lines, symmetry and reflection etc. 



Math Live Lesson with Ms Clark.  Nicholas enjoys these but he is finding them very boring, everything is just way too easy so I'm going to talk to her tomorrow and see what we can do.



Tomorrow morning Nicholas will also be testing for the Dibels.   We'll see how that goes :)

Art - Textures, Lines and what artists use to create.  Today's project was to gather as many different textures as possible and either glue them on a piece of paper or put them in a box.





Here is what Nicholas came up with.  I love how it turned out, I think he did a fantastic job and he was so thrilled to be able to do something like this.  He kept saying "we couldn't do this at school, we could never do this at school".




Jasmine - Sixth Grade

Help me Lord, I'm in trouble.  Jasmine is in the Gifted Program so she is currently doing 8th Grade Language Arts and 7th Grade Math.

So we open up her lesson for yesterday and were met with this and I literally felt sick to my stomach.  Geometry.  NO, No no no no no no, no good.  I am NOT good with Math at all.



We stumbled through it but ended up BOTH learning and both working together to figure out rays and segments and all that other nonsense that is like Greek to me.  One perk of homeschooling, mommy gets to go to school too :)

Health and Physical Education - We learned about the eyes and ears.



Science - We're studying the Oceans and having a BLAST. I'm so thrilled to be doing this right now, I'm learning so so much.  Thank you Lord for giving me this opportunity.



Her experiment for today was all about Salinity and what happens when salt is present in soil or water.



Again, she really loved it and said "Mom, this is great, we would never be able to do something like this in school, I love it".



That is all that I need to hear, because any kind of doubts of whether I'm doing the right thing right now, is completely thrown out the window when my children look at me with smiles on their faces and tell me just how much they love being homeschooled.

It feels good!