Super Summer Challenge

Just because its summer does not mean that we strop learning at our house!  I really hate that we have to spend so much time at the beginning of our school year going over things that may have been lost over the summer, so we keep up with those skills.  A few years ago a friend shared with me what she does with her family over the summer to keep them motivated and to help curb the boredom.  Its called a Super Star Challenge.  It works fabulously!!

The basic concept is that they earn a certain number of stars for doing certain things.  There are 5 aspects of it, health, leaning, helping, Spiritual growth, and caring.  They have daily and anytime stars that can be earned.  For example, under Spiritual growth they earn 5 stars each for Bible reading, devotion and prayer.  Under leaning they earn stars for doing math pages, doing something crafty, reading, etc.  Under helping and caring they earn stars for helping their siblings or mom and dad with chores around the house.  Under health they can earn stars for bathing, brushing their teeth, going to bed on time, etc.  Those are daily stars, they can also earn anytime stars in those same categories.  Like learning a bible verse, swimming, doing extra chores, and things like that.

The key to this all working is that they have to earn a crazy amount of stars to get their prize at the end of the summer.  This summer our total number per kid is 2000 stars, over an 8 week period.  Their prize at the end of the summer is a trip to the Legoland Discovery Center.  Its a great incentive for them, this is our third summer doing this and each year they get a different reward.

What do you do to keep your kids motivated over the summer?

Where have I been?

In case you were wondering, yes I am still alive!  These past almost 6 months have been insanely crazy at our house and blogging was put on the back burner.  I did want to come and give a brief overview of how our schooling went the our second semester though.  So here it is!

For Elijah, we finished up Adventures in U.S. History by studying the 50 States and when they came into the union.  We also studied some inventions and inventors that were important to our country.  In math he continued in Math U See Gamma, learning his multiplication facts.  We stopped about half way through the book, and will pick it back up next year.  He finished out his school year very well, and we look forward to all that we will learn next year!

Noah finished up his Kindergarten work in April and for the last few weeks of our school year we focused on learning to read and improving his handwriting skills.  At the beginning of the school year he just wasn't quite ready to read yet, so I put off the reading lessons.  In about January we picked up with Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read, and that worked really well for us, for about a month.  After that it was a struggle to get him interested in doing his reading lessons.  So I picked up Ruth Beechick's book A Home Start in Reading, it gave me a lot of great information and tools to use in helping him learn to read.  After implementing some of her ideas he began doing really well.  We played sight word games and used our letter tiles from All About Spelling that Elijah is using.

We finished up our official school year on May 21, and I must say that we were all ready to be finished for the year!  All in all I think our school year was a success.  The boys both learned a lot and finished strong.  I am very proud of what they accomplished this year!  I look forward to see what the Lord has in store for us next year.  Stay tuned to see what we will be using next year for our curriculum.

To stay with tradition, here is our side by side comparison pictures of the first and last day of school.  Enjoy!

Good Bye 2013!

This has definitely been a whirl wind month for my family and our town as we settle into our new "normal" and move forward to rebuild.

What you see driving around my town!

Today I will update on some of our school work that has been taking place and where we are headed for 2014!

In 3rd Grade Elijah is moving right along and I am so proud of him for finishing up his math book so he will be moving on to the next level.  When we began homeschooling last year about half way through the year I realized that he was not catching on as quickly in math as the program was moving.  So last January we switched to Math U See, after taking the placement test we put in him the Alpha level and he quickly moved through that and finished by May.  I could really tell it was clicking for him!  So this year we began using Beta, and again he moved really quickly and was able to finish it up!  For Gamma I am anticipating getting about half way through the book before we end our school year in May, which is fine with me.  I feel like he is finally getting caught up to where he should be in math at the 3rd grade level.

In October we visited a Dairy Farm!  This is Elijah right after he scared the little calf!

Noah and Zach watching the goats.

Spelling has been the same way for him, we are almost finished with Level 3 in All About Spelling and we will be moving on to Level 4 sometime in January.  Once again this is one subject I felt he was falling behind in and we made the choice last January to switch to All About Spelling.  That was a great decision for us, he has been making great strides and really catching on to the concepts quickly.

In My Fathers World Adventures in US History, we have begun to learn about the states, we just finished the first 13 colonies.  We are having so much fun learning all the cool facts about each state!  This week we talked about Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road.  When we come back from our Christmas break we will begin learning about the Westward Expansion.  Have I mentioned before that I love History and Geography!!  Elijah and I are so excited about the things we are learning.

My 3 Little Indians ready for Thanksgiving!

In Kindergarten we have had a rough road this past month.  Back in October we began adding in reading lessons, those were not going well!  Noah was struggling to remember how to put the sounds together and making them into words.  So with much thought and struggle on my part, we have decided to not pursue the reading lessons at this time.  I have heard, and been given the advice, to shelve it and come back to it.  He is just not ready!  On the other hand I found a computer learning program that he loves!  ABC Mouse.com!!  So he loves doing his "school" on the computer!  We are still using a majority of the My Fathers World Kindergarten, we use the Bible lessons, the sound cards and sound discrimination pages, and we are also using the handwriting pages.  I have hopes that he will come around before summer to want to learn to read, but I have heard account of young boys not being ready to read until the age of 7, so I am trying to prepare myself for that!  Its hard to think of because Elijah was an early reader, and loves to read.

Tot school for Zach has been reading, puzzles, playing with rice, and Daniel Tigers Neighborhood!  The poor kid is going through a lot right now, we are getting ready to remove his "babis" (i.e. pacifier) and he is not too happy about that!  On a good note though I am so impressed at how much that kid is picking up!  He can identify all of the letters in the alphabet and is working on learning their sounds.

Starting today we are on a two week break from school!  We will be starting back up on January 6th! I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and  a Happy New Year!  See you all in 2014!

My Pinterest Success!  A felt Nativity play set.  This is what it looked like at night.

This is what it looked like by 9 am the next day!  He loves it though.

My Boys getting ready to go play in the snow.

Merry Christmas!