Learning to Read 3 month update

We finished lesson 17 of Christian Light Education’s Learning to Read today. We’re taking it pretty slow since she isn’t 5 yet. Still, she’s made wonderful progress and is reading already! Simple short words like pat, cap, and pot. They have some more advanced “sight words” like brown, some, and many but we haven’t been [...]

Sled dog movie

Yesterday started the International Sled Dog Symposium in Fairbanks. As part of that, they showed an old dog sled movie about George Attla called Spirit of the Wind. He’s considered the father of modern sled dog racing.
We went to the movie. It was a lot of fun. George Attla himself along with many of the [...]

09-10 homeschool 2 month update

Where did the last 2 months go? It seems time just flew by. We got off to a bit of a rough start as the kids settled into school. Recently, they were sick then I went away for a 3 day weekend, so we’re a few days “behind”. I try to do school 5 days/week, [...]

Fun with science: gears, wheels, axles

The science order from Rainbow Resource arrived today. Yeah! It looks just perfect for us this year. We’ll be studying matter & physics for science and the human body for health.
Rather than just reading the books and taking tests or doing worksheets, we will be making practical applications whenever possible. So today we started playing [...]

Bible coloring book for sale

I’ve listed a new Bible coloring book for sale on E-bay. It’s Bible Pictures to Color by Rod & Staff. Great for free time or Bible activity/devotions for preschool and early elementary. There are 60 pages. Each page gives a short description as well as which verses it goes with.
This is a great coloring book. [...]

Math is here

Richard’s math arrived today. Good timing because we do math on Tuesday’s and Thursdays so we can start tomorrow. He actually watched the first lesson video tonight and seemed to understand it.
He’s doing Math-U-See Gama which covers multiplication. He’s had a vague idea of what multiplication was, but this first lesson explained it well. The [...]

3rd grade science

My son loves science, but not the watered down science textbooks for elementary students. He wants more detail then they usually provide. I looked through the 8 content standards he needs to cover for the next 2 levels. He does half this year then half next year. We decided to focus on physical science this [...]

Getting ready

It’s decided. We will begin our school year on Monday, August 10. This is a week before the public schools begin in Fairbanks. Tonight I announced our start date to my family. They took it well, but there’s still a lot to get done to be ready.
First there’s the house. Karen will be doing kindergarten [...]

‘08-’09 school’s almost over

We have just about a month of school left to do. Originally I had planned to be finished by now but with our unexpected long vacation, we got a bit behind. This post started as a comment on another blog, but I thought everyone may be interested in a wrap up of the year. I’ll [...]

2009 CLE ordering

Today was the used curriculum swap and ordering for Christian Light Education. There weren’t as many people selling stuff as the past few years. Still, the kids found a few things they spent their allowances to get. Karen got 2 wooden puzzles. One is ABC’s the other numbers 0-9. Richard got a 3D horse puzzle, [...]