back to work

It was a wonderful holiday for all of us here. Staying in jammies for most of the days, bundling up inside away from the cold. Loading up on sugary goodness, and playing for hours with all of our new toys! It's been heavenly having Adam home from work for so many days, you could call me spoiled at this point. So now it is back to reality, back to routine and the rhythm of a new and productive year.

Over the weekend in preparation for this new start I cleaned out the pantry and the fridge (major accomplishment!). I must have thrown out 5 lbs of candy/cookies/sugar. And in turn stocked both places full of nutritious goodness ready to start this year on a healthy note. Of course that means more preparation and planning to do on my part, but we'll all be healthier this way. My resolution this year is to get back to a more holistic lifestyle. Prepare more whole foods, start up a family yoga practice including the boys, and have more FUN with the kids in general. I want to laugh more and fuss less!

We started back at our school work today. We did the usual handwriting, and phonics lesson, then a writing exercise where he pretends to be a reporter and reports what he witnesses as me and his little brother play. He learns to record events chronologically and has fun role playing as well.
For science we completed a lab where we took yarn and measured and labeled the parts of the digestive system. We were both quite shocked to find out that a child's digestive system measures out to be about 22 feet long. I later discovered that when I asked him to label the large and small intestine I didn't check his spelling right away and found that he was calling those parts the large and small "innards" which I found quite hilarious!
I'm already laughing more, what a great start to a new year!

Story time

Here is a funny story Avery made today after I asked him to create an adventure story that includes him and other people. We needed to use our new pronouns : we, us, our and ours. He
had a blast brainstorming about crazy plots and funny twists to his already wacky story. He
ended up with a very long list of potential stories that include such titles as "The forest on a full moon", "A boat ride on a sunny day", and "The slimy sea monster". You can tell we read a lot of Magic Tree House books by the sound of these titles. Here is Avery's story...

The Haunted Mall

Once upon a time my friends and I went to the mall. We were looking for a magnet. The magnet was to trick our moms. We were going to do an experiment pulling metal out of cereal. So when we drop the magnet into the cereal it attracts all of the iron.
We started to get lost in the mall. We were in the army section. We looked around for a second then we got out because we all had a bad feeling we were being watched.
We ran and ran and ran until we got to the doors that were open and it led us into a toy store.
We stared down at the ground and there were two toys walking toward us. They were dolls. My friend Olive thought they looked familiar. Then we looked up, we saw twenty-three dolls lined up to jump down. They were about to jump when I had the idea to spray them with antioxidants. They were all electrocuted and walked away for good.
We realized we were in the magnet section again. We found our magnet and zipped out of that creepy mall.

The End.

For the love of writing

One of my goals when I took on homeschooling was to make Avery a proficient writer and hopefully instill a love of this form of expression, avoiding pressure to "do it right". I think I found the perfect writing curriculum to help me with my goal. Here are just a few of the Writing Principles they list at the beginning of the book by Dave Marks- I just about fell in love!

• "Every person needs to learn to express ideas and feelings in writing."
  
• "There is no right way to write anything!"
  
• "The ability to write is not an expression of a body of knowledge that can be learned like a list of vocabulary words."
  
• "Writing teachers and their students both learn in any effective writing situation."

How liberating is that!? I am so excited to start writing with Avery. He is such a bright boy with so many wild ideas floating around in his head, and writing is such a huge endeavor. To be able to put your thoughts on paper has got to be one of the hardest things to learn, and teaching it even harder. With this book I feel a little more at ease guiding him through the process.

Happy Writing!!