Just a quick note to tell you guys that my kids signed on today and they were getting stuff together after they brought up the Time4Learning website and were chatting with me before they signed on.  All of a sudden something caught my oldest son’s eye and he realized that his photo was circling around the website!   They began dancing around the house singing “We are Famous!”  They are very distracted today for some reason and seeing their photo on the website got them oddly focused and now both are sitting quietly doing their work.

Every once in a while you hear “We are Famous!”…..  made me laugh.

The boys and I are heading to Florida for a week to install a tile floor for my grandparents.  Not sure if we will have any kind of internet and if we do it will be dial up so it should be interesting to see if they can do any work on T4L.  We have two field trips planned while down there, one to a hands on science museum and one (hopefully) to Kennedy Space Center! I am going to bring some bookwork just in case we can’t get online well and that will really make them appreciate T4L even more! If all else fails they are going to learn how to properly lay tile!

Here is one of my home school sites, I’m working on a couple projects with random thoughts.  I enjoy getting information out there on the web and wished that I had found more support over the last several years.  There were so many times I wanted to bag it in and had no idea that there was so much online support available.  Everyone in our home is so much more relaxed this year and enjoying the learning experience.

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving!  AND…. Thanks for making my kids (and others..) “Famous”!!!  (makes me laugh…  a million photos of them on my blog and one photo on T4L site and they are “famous!”)

Our house is run like most home schooling families where I do most of the actual teaching.  The boys tell their dad what they are doing through out the day but it is not the same as him doing things with them.  I decided a couple years ago to make my husband their “science teacher”.  Science is a “fun” lesson and a lot of neat things can be done while throwing in the learnin’ !

The boys have done several science projects with their dad but this one that they found on the T4L site has been the best so far.  To compound the fun of the science lesson, the boys had Kati’s son over for a sleep over and my boys cousin stopped in to say hello.  All the “boys” have been waiting for this experiment to work and it was great fun to watch them!

My boys are involved in a fine arts program called Master’s Academy of Fine Arts.  They have fine arts classes every Thursday an hour from our home and I drop them off and my husband picks them up; bringing them home.  This past Thursday he pulled me aside and told me that on the way home the boys were messing around in the back seat and one of them said “Oh, it’s Time4Learning now!”….  We talked about how nice it was that it is always in their heads and they use it as “catch phrases” during normal time.  I enjoy when he has alone time with the boys and hears for himself how much they talk about Time4Learning.

But my most favorite part is when they are done with a lesson and are so excited about something that they do research to find out more.  It usually happens in science and social studies but sometime something is mentioned in other parts of lessons that they want to know more about.  In the past I have encouraged them to “research” something when they have had a question but now they do it just because they want to.

Having both boys about at the same level encourages scholastic interaction between them and usually one will begin to research something and the other one migrates his way to see what is going on.  Discussions begin and it is neat to sit back and watch the interaction.   I enjoy seeing them brainstorm, research, and discuss things that they have questions about and it usually leads to more in-depth conversations.  This is only the beginning for them and is setting the groundwork for down the road when I begin to assign actual research projects and they know how to get information, come up with ideas of their own or build off lessons that they are studying.

It will be nice, a year from now to go back and see how nice the year has been; we are almost half way through and I can’t get over how nice it has been for our whole family.

Well we have been busy and thing are still rocking and rolling with normal “stuff”……   We were gone all day Saturday and although it was not freezing, it was chilly.  The boys had a great morning with Kati’s kids at the park and then we flew almost 2 hours away to a Master’s Institute program that was a reenactment of the Oregon Trail.  It was an incredible day all around but the kids were outside all day from about 9-6pm and Q ended up a little bit under the weather.  He had been fighting the same cold that we all have had and the day out in chilly weather got him.  Sunday was a very quiet day for him and this morning he is still under the weather…. No big deal, the boys never get really sick and this will hopefully be our only sickness of any kind this winter!

With that being said I am bound and determine that they are going to stick with the schedule and they are going to not get out of school work for any reason other than loss of limb or the one day that we are actually traveling all day to go to Florida.  There will be no excuses, no begging, and no skipping of days this year for any reason.  So I was ready….  Armed and prepared.   They woke and did their normal routine for the most part, turned on water for hot cocoa (but I talked Q into hot green tea with honey for quicker healing), got breakfast, and got on the puter to play a game.

Enough time passed for them to finish breakfast and wake up and I told them to get started on school work.  They both signed on.  Of course, Z said: “Q’s sick so we should not have to” but that is as far as it went.

I know that I tend to gush…..  But hey…..  When you have something that is working it is fun to gush….

I knew it would happen.  I predicted it back in August.  I said that Zachary would burn through any English that I threw at him.  Thankfully because of Time4Learning it came without pressures and without stress.  He set his own goals and this morning he read the line to me that he was so excited about “You have completed all the lessons in the second grade, please hit your back button and start in level three” or something like that.

Inside I was bursting with pride.  Scott is home today and asked what that means.  When I explained that he finished the second grade work in LA extensions  he said “Oh really?  Well that figures, should we start looking into colleges now?” and laughed.  We had a little celebratory family “dance” and Zachary in his nonchalant way about him said “Can I finish my school work now?”

YAY for us!  Now it is time to “push” the older one a bit more….  I was the older sibling to a younger one that surpassed me, the age difference between my brother and I and my two boys is about the same.  I hated when my little brother was  compared to me but I don’t know what to do about what is going to happen between my oldest and my youngest when that time comes.  Any suggestions would be great.  I know all the normal stuff, “everyone is different, everyone learns differently, etc etc…  blabla…”  What do you really say to an older sibling when the younger one is passing them by?  Of course then you have the little one trying to “pump up the older one” with comments like “Your really good at reading Q..”  Yea, I loved that when my brother would say something to me like that…….

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions you might have.