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This week in homeschooling: Spelling lists, futuristic ’50s novels and a hint of Nixon

03/25/2016 Nichole 1 Comment

Poppy has brought to my attention the fact that I have been inconsistent in my This Week in Homeschooling updates. So today I’m going to post one, just for her. No promises about improved consistency on my part in the future, though, Poppy.

Language Arts

Reading

We’re nearing the end of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” I still can’t remember who the half-blood prince is, and I’m trying to make myself refrain from googling it.

Poppy and I read “May B” for our mother-daughter book club this week — we all agreed that it was a dark & difficult story — and also finished “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” and Raina Telgemeier’s “Smile.”

Pete has been without an assigned reading book until today, when I went downstairs and grabbed a copy of “Tom Swift and His Giant Robot” that my father-in-law picked up for him at a flea market a few years ago. Pete’s career plans currently involve building robots and inventing things, so I’m guessing he’s going to enjoy Tom Swift.

Spelling

Both kids are still doing well with Spelling City. I’m using a list of fifth-grade spelling words from K12reader.com for Poppy, and Pete is working off the Dolch sight words list.

Writing

Poppy is still working independently through her writing curriculum. I check in on her progress periodically, but she’s doing a pretty good job following the book’s instructions.

Pete and I got back to work on his writing this week. He wrote a paragraph about his plans for the weekend (it involves a good deal of candy) as well as an acrostic poem about Easter.

Memorization

The kids are working on memorizing all of the US presidents. We’re up to Nixon so far.

Math

Pete is working on memorizing multiplication facts. We’ve had some very lovely days this week, weather-wise, so I wanted to find some ways to take our school outside. One of my favorites was Multiplication.com’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Outdoor Math game. I made a grid of numbers with chalk in the driveway, and the kids took turns tossing a pair of pebbles onto it and telling me what the product of the two numbers would be.

We opted not to make it a competition, but competitively minded kids might enjoy playing in teams and keeping score.

Geography

We focused on Virginia this week. We did zero fun projects to go along with our study.

Co-op classes

Pete and Poppy are taking a “Mad Scientist” class together at co-op this semester, and from the sound of it they’ve mostly been working with chemical reactions. Pete is also taking a Ninja class, in which he’s learning some Japanese history and making marshmallow blow guns. Poppy’s other class is Desserts Around the World. They made luqaimat with rosewater syrup this week. It’s an Arabic doughnut typically made for Ramadan, and they were crazy delicious.

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

Flotsam / Jetsam, partner campaign, sponsored

I fought the cat and the cat won (but so did I, eventually, so I guess it was more of a draw)

10/01/2014 Nichole 2 Comments

This time last year we were heading into battle. It was a battle for the ages against a foe I doubted we’d ever overcome. It was a fight for olfactory purity, and it was being waged in our home.

It started in the darkest corners of the basement, where neighbor cat Boo Radley (yes, really) liked to sit in the window wells and taunt JJ T. Cat. It smelled musty, sure, but “Hey,” I told myself oh-so-naively, “that’s just what basements do.”

I didn’t put two and two together until JJ brought the fight upstairs and I witnessed him at work.

JJ was spraying.

I didn’t know it yet — not until I bought a little black light and investigated just like I was Horatio Caine and JJ was a Miami uber-criminal — but JJ was spraying everywhere. The walls. The front door. The filing cabinet. And most hideously of all? He was spraying into the heat register in Pete’s bedroom. (We discovered that when we turned the heat on for the first time last fall and suddenly the kid’s room smelled like the swamps of Dagobah.)

We were at war against the cat, and the cat was winning.

A little Google research let us know that the war would have to be waged on two fronts simultaneously. I couldn’t make the house smell clean if JJ was still spraying, and JJ wasn’t going to stop spraying until the house smelled clean again. So I set to work cleaning every surface — Pledge wipes on the walls, carpet deodorizer on the floors and Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer on every surface — and we took JJ to the vet for a checkup.

The cleaning worked well. The vet? Not so much.

JJ was perfectly healthy, the vet said, but nothing was going to make him stop spraying. He was unhappy being inside, where the neighbor cat could taunt him at will. We had a choice to make: JJ could be an outdoor cat, or we could have a funky-smelling house of horrors. Emotionally, it was a difficult choice to make. I never wanted an outdoor cat. It’s dangerous out there. But logically, I knew what we had to do.

JJ T. Cat has been outside for almost a year now. I’ll admit to missing his presence inside every now and then. He was an excellent snuggler. But now he’s the king of the yard. Boo Radley keeps his distance, and JJ gets to lounge on the sidewalk to his heart’s content. He also has his own private entrance to his suite in the garage, because it gets cold here in the winter and I have a softish heart.

It was a tough decision to make, but you know what? I’m really looking forward to the house still smelling clean after I turn the heat on this year.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Acorn: An Influence Company‘s #SmellsClean campaign. The “sponsored” part means money and some product changed hands. Acorn didn’t tell Nichole what to write, though, which was probably obvious as they almost certainly wouldn’t have suggested that she write about flying cat urine.

Flotsam / Jetsam

Notes from the parking lot

09/24/2014 Nichole 4 Comments

I’d intended to bring “John Adams” to the mall with me this afternoon, but I left him at home on the couch. So I decided instead to use the time while the kids were in art class to longhand some thoughts into my little notebook and see if they might turn into a blog post.

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. I feel like I don’t have anything to say. It occurred to me a few days ago that this happens around this time every year. I run out of things to say or enthusiasm or motivation or whatever, and then I go to the Type A Parent Conference and get filled up with inspiration again. Only this year I didn’t go to the conference, so here I sit in the mall parking lot with nothing to say and no motivation and no inspiration.

My plan was to go to Ulta and buy some shampoo and conditioner and then sit in a cozy nook at Barnes and Noble and read “John Adams.” But then I left the book at home, so the plan became go to Ulta and buy some shampoo and conditioner and then sit in a cozy nook at Barnes and Noble and do some writing. But the bookstore seems to have eliminated all of their cozy nooks. I wonder if they just moved all the tables and chairs down to their Starbucks kiosk. Regardless, I didn’t want to sit at the Starbucks kiosk, so I’m sitting in the parking lot. It wasn’t a wasted trip, though. There was a copy of “Coolidge” on the clearance table. I’m quite a few presidents away from him yet, but you just don’t pass up a $6 presidential biography.

* * * * *

I needed a change of scenery, so I went to the toy store’s parking lot. It used to be a Hooters. (The toy store; not the parking lot.) I stopped for a sweet tea on the way. I was wand’ring lonely as a cloud. And also I grow old, I grow old, and I considered rolling up my jeans today to better display my sparkly new shoes, but then I decided against it. I don’t know what’s acceptable, fashion-wise, and normally I don’t care. Every now and then I wish I did, though.

So about the new shoes. They’re Tom’s, which as I understand it aren’t meant to be worn with socks. I don’t normally go sock less. How does one keep one’s shoes and feet from smelling funky when one goes without socks? (Really: Share your fresh-footed secrets.)

Today I saw an abandoned tampon in full bloom in the parking lot at the mall. Thankfully, it looked unused.

I also saw, on two different cars in two separate parking lots, a pair of bone-shaped bumper stickers. One declared the driver’s love of her pit bull. The other driver loved his/her vizsla. I had to google “vizsla.” I’d heard of them but I didn’t know what they looked like. That’s a fine-looking dog. There were a couple of guys outside of the used bookstore the other day discussing one of their dogs, and one guy kept calling it a “dash hound.” That is still bothering me.

So anyway: The blog. I don’t want to shut it down, but I need to find some inspiration. I’ll probably keep posting our menu plans, because it’s simple and I refer to the posts embarrassingly often because sometimes I forget what we eat. I’d like to be more consistent on the homeschool-roundup posts. I think it’s a nice little record for the kids. I thought I might write about “Stuff I’m Learning About the Presidents,” too, but that wouldn’t be a regular thing because I’m reading slowly.

What would you like to read about here?