Resources

My sincerest apologies, I’ve not been posting very often lately.  I’m making a feeble attempt at lesson plans and I’m doing EVERYTHING I can think of to actually avoid them.  Today, I ran out of things to do, so I decided to post… It will put it off for a couple more hours at least. 😉

I’m not sure what the hang-up is… I’m excited about starting school this year.  I feel more organized than I have been in a couple years.  The girls are excited, the boys are excited, we’re all aflutter for the new school year.

Off topic, I went shopping yesterday for uniforms for the little folk.  Yes, yes I did.  I know it’s evil, but I’ve done it before and I loved it.  One, it is a joy to look at dressed and lovely children.  Two, I can take them in public and we look SO incredibly put together.  But, honestly?  Do you want to know the REAL reason why I LOVE uniforms so much?  You can’t kill them.  It’s true.  I think I owned the same skirts all through my four years of high school.

There are so many perks to uniforms.  I know that all of you who were public schooled felt desperately sorry for those of us who attended parochial school.  (BTW, yes, I’ve been asked, and I am a born again Christian but I was born and raised a Catholic.)   You wasted your sympathies.  WE didn’t mind.  As a matter of fact it was painless to get dressed in the morning.  My hardest question was pink, blue, or white?  Because those were the only color of polo tops we were allowed to wear… with navy pants or a navy pleated skirt.  Personally I like the red, white, and blue colors myself, but I honestly don’t care so long as they have a color, a couple buttons, and they seem utterly impossible to stain.  The little girls are getting jumpers.  Again, stain factor.  If I could justify it, I’d attach a jumper top to Tim’s shorts, just to save his shirts.  🙂  Okay, maybe not.   But, in high school, you can appreciate that when you got to do things, you didn’t wear your school clothes, your regular clothes had stayed nice and weren’t worn out or you didn’t just wear them the day before.  I know all of us girls liked it.

Bunny trail over, I’ve got work to do…

So this morning I just wanted to find some nice, easy, painless lessons for Copywork for the little girls.  I don’t know if Rebecca will be able to do much of this this year or not, we’ll see.  She has remarkable hand control and likes to do everything Elizabeth does, so perhaps.  Copywork need not only be for those who can read.

I found this site, which has EASY copywork for little girls, nice short sentences.   She has listed both Bible verses and English proverbs.  I think you’ll also appreciate the Ambleside link about copywork.  It supplies suggestions and much needed help if you just don’t know where to begin. It also links to a Yahoo group.

Aside, I need to write out my goals for this year.  For each child my goals are entirely different.

My goals for Ana is character building and biblical awareness.  I could honestly not care one whit if she did NOT advance at all in history, science, math, reading, literature, or spelling.  Truth be told, she’d be capable of graduating from practically any public high school this year in all subjects with the notable exception of math. 😀  But, I do not feel as though we’ve raised this child with a sound biblical basis.  Perhaps it is because her mama has been a baby Christian for so many of these years and I was only just learning myself.  But I do know that we spent a long time instilling in her a strong academic base which is useful in the world, but all that truly means very little if she isn’t standing on the firm foundation of Christ.   I would suggest for those of you with children in middle school and pre-middle school ages to truly examine what foundation you’re building upon.

Our ONLY goal last year was to interest Christian deeply in books.  Though he isn’t aware of it, he truly grasped reading quite late.  We started him on phonics at 5, but his speech was awful and it was just one more thing he couldn’t do.  He really had speech issues until about age 7-8 and given time, you’d never know now that he had any speech issues at all.  He needed time.  And when his speech wasn’t so great, it’s a little hard to teach phonics and then be able to pronounce each sound correctly when you can’t make all the sounds.  We would approach reading a bit at a time, hit a wall, and back down a bit.   We came into his fourth grade year with him about a good two years behind in reading and having had ZERO spelling practice.  Our only goal?  Get the kid reading, reading well, and liking it.  We instituted the family rule – read or sleep at naptime and gave him great books to read with boys as the main character.  We got him a reading lamp and allowed him to stay up an extra hour later than the little kids if he was reading.  We severely limited screen time.   We read aloud (as we always had) and we encouraged him to talk about books while discouraging discussion about computer games and television characters.  It worked.  I can say the child read the Hobbit this summer with ease, he’s just finished Eragon, and he’s now reading Redwall.  He has been consuming books as of late at the rate of 2-4 books per week and loves biographies and non-fiction.   We’re thrilled.  We honestly didn’t know if all of our efforts would ever get us to this place, and now that we’re here, I wonder why was I ever worried?  LOL.  Isn’t that always the way?  Now that he’s reading easily, I think we’ll find he’ll fly through his spelling rules.  He’s very good at memorization.  I will say that his handwriting isn’t great and that’s a focus for this year.  He is an absolute perfectionist when it comes to neatness and instead of just writing neatly, he’ll write, erase, and then re-write everything he does.  He examines everything letter by letter and it hasn’t been conducive to cursive, kwim?  With cursive, you have to keep continuing and cursive just about drives him through the roof nuts.  So, we’ll need to get him over this little perfectionistic tendency this year.  Christian, on the faith front, got saved when he was 8 years old.  He’s shown fruit since then and has an amazing sincere heart (and WORRY) for those who are not saved…  My goal for him this year?  Help him commit to memory verses and help him to get into the habit of reading his Bible on a regular basis.  In other words, instill habits.

Elizabeth is 7.  She’s reading 3 & 4 letter words and can spell  fairly well phonetically.  We’ll be bringing her up to par in reading this year.  She seems to have a mind for things academic, but her handwriting frustrates her – hence all the copywork planned for this year.  School comes easily to Lizzie, but she has never been challenged.  I think her weakest point is that if she were challenged, she’d fold.  Although I have noticed that she is becoming more and more diligent and is beginning to develop a certain strength.  It is an incredible blessing to see a child you thought would be perhaps less strong than others, begin to come into her own.  I think it GREAT part, I owe this blessing to her not being the youngest child.  My pregnancy with her was extremely difficult to say the least.  She was the child to follow Hannah and we found out we were expecting Elizabeth only a short month after Hannah’s death.  Emotionally it was difficult and physically it was VERY difficult.  After having been told that Hannah was essentially “a freak incident” and that we wouldn’t have a repeat of preterm labor, the doctors discovered they were very wrong.  At twenty weeks they decided to place the cerclage to stitch shut the cerclage because in their words, “the baby would die anyway…..”  So they wanted to give her the best shot they could, but none believed it would work.  They weren’t entirely sure they could place the stitch with the funneling we had and I had an extremely short (under 2cm) cervix at that point.  They weren’t sure it wouldn’t put me into labor or that it wouldn’t rupture the membrane.  And, at 36 weeks, my little footling breech, with the cord in the neck of the cervix, was born via C-section.  She was our very own little miracle and it would have been MIGHTY tempting to risk no more babies right then and there.  To see her grow and become a little girl with her own personality (and WHAT a personality) is a gift.  And honestly?  Where we’re at right now? It’s a reminder of God’s grace  (her name is Elizabeth Grace) on this family and that He gives good gifts, very good gifts indeed.

Rebecca is our next child.  She’s a very strange child.  I say that with all the love of a mother’s heart, but she is an oddball.  The child could spend her entire day alone, just picking flowers.  She’ll talk to us willingly enough, but she is very much a loner and you can see it when the other children play.  They don’t exclude her and she’ll play if they ask her, but you can tell she is very much content to live in her own world.  She can focus for amounts of time and learns readily enough…  Strangely, she grasps concepts so quickly and can memorize anything, and yet you can tell her mind isn’t with you.  She memorizes the names of flowers, what they look like, where we’ve found them.  We call her our little Hippie Peace Child.  She can sit and pet her favorite rabbit, Peanut, absent mindedly for hours and then comes back to earth and connects with us again.  She’s a peaceful little thing for the most part and rarely, if ever, argues or fights.  I can’t imagine ever having to discipline her and I think she’d fall apart entirely if we yelled at her.   Getting upset with her, because she often acts as you’d expect from a two year old, with accidents or whatnot, is useless.  She absolutely doesn’t MEAN to, she just lives in her own little world.  DH & I have consigned ourselves to the facts that she will live with us the rest of her life.  I say it with a sweet smile of contemplation and know that she has many years ahead of her to grow and develop.  At times we wonder if there isn’t something amiss in that head of hers, but academically I wonder if she won’t far outpace ALL of her siblings in the next 3 years.  There is something strange in the way that she simply absorbs information…..  What gifts God has instilled in her are just a whisper right now but I wonder that we won’t be amazed at the way she blossoms over the next years…..

Timothy.  Sigh.  Our only goal for Tim is to teach him to sit still for SOME undetermined length of time.  We’d also like to teach him that not all work is physical.  In one ear, out the other, Tim’s mind is always on work.  The boy wakes up in the morning, puts on work jeans, and says, “Mom, gotta go work…” And he heads out the door for the day.  Did I mention Tim is FOUR?  He moves straw, does chores, “chops” wood, stacks wood, moves the wood, cleans up the yard, moves the wheelbarrow, examines the garden, and so on goes his day.  He’s something else all right….. 😀

And finally Abigail.  We have no goals for Abigail.  She’s two and my only goal is to take as many pictures as I can.  She’s growing up SO much faster.  Why is it that each successive baby only gets older faster than her siblings and HOW is that possible?  How?  And it seems remarkably unfair.  If I could just freeze her at this age I would forever.  I LOVE the age of two.  Sigh.  How will I ever give up having babies and toddlers?  She loves doing school and sitting next to her mama. My goal for Abigail is really a goal for me.  I don’t want to just “get it done” I want to do everything WITH her.  She loves to help me cook, help me sew, help me with the baby, help Mama, help Mama, help Mama.  My goal for ME is to let her do it even more, and she is going to do a short preschool with Tim.  Do I believe in preschool?  Not really.  But I do like a good excuse to sit with my littles for concentrated times each day and just really be WITH them, mind and body.

And baby Sarah?  Well, she’ll be tagging along with everything.  We love her as much as she loves us.

And now, sigh, back to lesson plans.  I suppose this little diversion this morning was long enough.  I’ll be adding links as I run across useful ones.  Hopefully I’ll be able to report tomorrow morning that I’ve got them all done.  We have a wedding shower this afternoon for a cousin and so just Mama and all the girls get to go.  I’m trimming everyone’s hair this morning and we’re going to “do” our hair all fancy and with curls and do our nails.  Why not?  I hear the boys are cleaning the garage.  Hurrah, glad it’s not me.  It isn’t often we have an excuse to just be girls…  I also hear Daddy is taking the boys fishing while we’re gone.  I’m a bit jealous, but cake can soothe a multitude of hurts.  Have a good Sunday.