I'm still alive!!!

Yep, I'm still here. Things have just been so chaotic since we moved. So I'm just going to give some updates...

We moved! Yay! It wasn't all peaches and cream, but it worked out. We ended up staying with my mom for almost a month. (15 people in an 1100 sq ft house, Fun!) Had a really hard time finding a house. Not many people wanted to rent to a family this big. Sad really that people think children are so bad. But just when we were despairing we found the perfect house! It's out in the country. 3/4 of an acre lot, so plenty of room for the kids to run around. The house itself has 3 bedrooms, 2 spare rooms and a family room and living room! Plus a two car garage and shed in back. More than enough room for us and all our stuff. I'm so glad to be done moving and unpacking! The only think I "like" about moving is the unpacking and going through everything and getting rid of so much excess stuff we don't need!

School is going well. We are still using Landmark. I still think it's a good curriculum, but I'm not liking it so much for a large family. Plus opposite of what I was told, it is not really a self teaching curriculum. It takes a lot of teaching on my part. It also is a lot to grade every day. 7 subjects and 5 kids, plus doing school with Emily. (she doesn't want to be left out ya know?!) Just isn't working so well. We are going to be adding some other things and not doing ALL textbooks though. We are going to try out Spell Power and Story of the World. I'll let you know how it goes with that!

The kids are all doing well. Kathleen and Zachary still keep getting croup. I'm thinking it must be allergy induced, but location hasn't seemed to change anything. There's not much they can do for it unless it's bacterial croup and Kathleen has only had that once. It's always just a "let it run it's course" type of thing. They're all doing pretty well in school too. Michelle especially. She's 6 and doing 2nd grade. She's helping her older siblings with their work though. God really blessed her with an amazing mind! They older 5 are all doing piano and doing really well with that. James Michael's teacher is very impressed with how well he's doing. The older 3 girls are all doing sewing lessons as well and LOVE it! Their teacher is the mom of one of my good friends from childhood. She taught me a few times and she's taught 3 of my sisters to sew as well. Jason and Makenzie have birthday's coming up next month too and are very anxious for them to get here! :D I'm not as anxious, as I still have to get working on their blankets. I have Jason's started, but don't have anything for Makenzie's.

This pregnancy is going well. I'm over my paralyzing all day sickness and exhaustion! Baby is pretty active, usually in the middle of the night of course. Still haven't had an U/S, but I'm hoping to have one soon. I usually only have one a pregnancy as I don't really think they're all that healthy for the baby. But I like to have at least one, just to make sure everything's o.k. and to see whether we're having a boy or a girl. We have no names picked out yet though for either sex. Still have plenty of time for that though :)

Well, I'm off to bed!

Blessings, ♥T

Another Curriculum Review

Today I'm doing Rod and Staff.

I don't remember exactly why, but I ordered their science for my son. After using it, and liking it, I decided to order the whole curriculum for all my kids.

I absolutely loved the fact that not only is it from a biblical perspective, EVERYTHING was referenced or related back to God. It wasn't just, God made the world...this is how this works. It was God made the world and this is how it works and this is what scripture says about it. Like the weather for instance. It was talking about how God made the wind, and how the wind works and affects nature, and then it quoted the scripture that talks about how the wind works. Ecc 1:6. I read it and was amazed! God made the wind to work the way it does! It wasn't just by chance that it blows the way it does! I hadn't realized it was in the Bible though.

All of the work was like that! All centered around God and building their character. For that aspect I thought it was wonderful! To have the Lord woven through all their work was awesome! No worries about immodest pictures. All KJV scriptures. No weird "magical" stories. I didn't find or have any doctrinal issues either. I only  used it for a year though.

I did think it was kind of silly that all the pictures of people were "Mennonite". It was funny seeing Abraham and Joseph, etc looking like Mennonite men, instead of Jews! But not a problem in any way. I did have to disagree with their interpretation of "1 Timothy 2:9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;" I do not agree with their interpretation that it's saying you can't braid your hair, wear gold, pearls or costly array. I believe it was talking about not adorning yourself with those things instead of with modest apparel, shamefacedness and sobriety. I think Pro. 31:21-22 makes it clear that she was wearing costly array and that it was good. There are other things I could cite, but this isn't a post about the way you dress, it's about the curriculum. (it's fine if you disagree, but my opinion☺) So when my son read that in his health book, I simply told him that we disagreed. But we do agree that women should be modest, just have a different opinion on what modesty entails. Not a big deal at all.

The main reason I don't use Rod and Staff. It is very similar to Abeka and Bob Jones, in that, it's a LOT of work. The kids have the workbooks, quizzes, drills, activities and tests to do and to me that's just too much stuff to do. I want my kids to learn, but as homeschoolers, I don't think we need to be spending the 8 hours a day that public/private schools have to, doing school work. I'm sure if I took the time, I could figure out how to cut down on the work load. I guess I'm being lazy, but I don't want to. I'm not at a time in my life where that's feasible.

In addition to that. It still has a lot of teacher prep and teaching time necessary for them to understand what they are supposed to do. You HAVE to use the teachers guides for them to understand their work. Not something I have time for with 6 kids doing school. It already takes me quite a bit of time just answering questions, correcting work and helping the ones learning to read. I don't have time to "teach school" to 6 different grades. It wasn't just a matter of helping them to understand the concept either. You really had to use the guide to help them know what they were even supposed to do on the pages. Some pages didn't even have instructions on them. So for that I did not like it.

Blessings, ♥T

Curriculum Review

Today's review is going to be pretty short.

Bob Jones

I grew up doing their Bible and Spelling. As a student I liked it well enough. My kids used it in their third, and last, time being in a private school. I think it is very similar to Abeka. It's great for a classroom, but not so much for homeschool with multiple grades. They learned a lot while using it. I didn't find much objectionable with it. I think I probably don't like all their pictures, but nothing horribly offensive I guess. I like the way they do the curvy printing so that it's easier to switch to cursive when they're older. I did end up using their history for part of one year at home. The reason I stopped using it...My children were failing the tests! I was like "Didn't you guys study?" They were telling me that the stuff on the tests wasn't in the book. I checked it out and sure enough, it's not in the books. I'm not sure where the extra info was coming from, but it was not in the textbook. For some of the older grades there were some extra workbooks that go along with it and I wondered if some of it was in there, but we couldn't afford to get it at the time. We did end up just reading through the books and not doing the tests and the information was good. The kids all enjoyed it actually! The other reason for not using it, is the money. It's quite pricey! Definitely not within our budget. So while I have very few complaints, I do not recommend Bob Jones for larger families such as mine. I think it has the same problems as Abeka. I do really like some of the reading books from BJUPress though. Not all, but a lot of them I read as a kid and love to have my children reading them and enjoying them now!

Blessings, ♥T

ACE Review

Since I'm apparently being "harassed" into another review ;) (I've been sick, sorry!)

My review on ACE isn't very long. My kids used it for 1 semester while in a private christian school. Mainly it was my oldest, as the other two were mostly just doing the learning to read program. My son was able to go through a PACE a day in each subject. So every other day he was starting and/or finishing the next one. While he got an award for going through so many PACE's, I'm not sure it was so great. I personally wasn't too impressed with the content in ACE. Just didn't feel like it was very thorough. The worst thing I thought about it actually occurred after they stopped doing it. My oldest son is very smart. He has a GREAT memory. When we started school the next year after summer break, we started using ABEKA again. He had NEVER had trouble with it before. We spent the first week doing school like normal only to have him FAIL his test! He has never in his life failed a test. Never even gotten under a 90% for the most part. Now here he was failing??? So the next month we had to work on memory retention. Why? Because in doing the PACE's the way they did, he only memorized for 1 day or at most 2 to take the test and then moved on to other things. He COULD NOT remember anything! It was awful. It took months really to get him back to a normal memorization ability.

While I'm sure some people like them for their ease of use, I prefer something that has more "meat" and is meant for building on and learning/retaining the information they're studying!

School Curriculum

We just recently got our new curriculum. It's the first curriculum we've actually bought in over 2 years. I was trying to make do with what we already had, but it wasn't working too well. I like my stuff lined out for me. I want to know that they're getting a good education. I want it to be easy to do, but still challenging. I want them to learn values along with it too. (In addition to what we're teaching them outside of school) I also know that others are either getting new curriculum or looking into what they'll be using this next year. So, I thought I'd do a series about what curriculum's I've used. How they worked and how we liked them. I would like to see a lot of comments on these too. Tell us what you've used and how they worked and how you liked them!

So first up...

Abeka

So first I guess I should say that I grew up homeschooled. I went to kindergarten and part of 1st grade and was at home the rest of my schooling years. Because that was a LONG time ago (not really cause I'm not that old) there wasn't much in the way of choices. My mom used a few different things, but mainly Abeka. We used Rod and Staff for a few things for a while. Then we ended up doing Abeka with Bob Jones for Bible and Spelling.

As you can guess I was pretty confident in Abeka. I knew how to do it from doing it myself. I started my first year of homeschooling with Abeka. I also tried to use a reading program that bombed. I had a baby half way through the year so by first years end my son had learned 2 letter sounds and done all his Abeka books, but not really learned much. I had him tutored over the summer (he was reading in 2 weeks) and then put him in a private school. We moved after the first semester. So I again did Abeka. This time we used the videos. At the time I only had 2 kids doing school and it worked great! They watched their videos. Did their work and liked it, but I wasn't doing anything more than checking work. So after another move and another baby we again enrolled them in a school (using a curriculum I hate which I'll explain about in another post).

When I had only 3 kids doing school we did awesome with Abeka. I would get all their papers out the night before, and put them in their folders. I would give a quick explanation to my oldest and get the other two started on doing what they could do by themselves. I would then take turns helping them with what they couldn't. I was doing school work with them so I knew what was right or wrong for the most part so correcting was very easy. All done at night. It worked so well at the time. Unfortunately we moved halfway through the year and I got pregnant again. During the moving process all my teachers books got lost. Being so exhausted from the pregnancy and move I couldn't keep up with school. So again we put them in a school.

Finally 3 years ago we started at home with Abeka. I had tried another curriculum in there too, but since this post is about Abeka I'll talk about that one later too. So my kids, while changing schools and curriculum frequently, had actually learned quite a lot and were testing really well on the STAR testing. I was sure after all the flops that I could do Abeka. I had a baby, but not a newborn. I wasn't moving again. I was very confident when we started. By this time I had 4 kids who needed to be doing school and 3 that were too little. We started out very excited. By the end of the first day I wanted to scream and throw the books in the fire. I spent the entire day trying to help each person do their work. They couldn't do anything without my help. There was so much work to do and so many books to do it from we were confused about what to do. We kept it up for a few months. My kids would cry everyday. I wanted to also. While I think Abeka videos were great, we couldn't/can't afford them. Abeka is made for and geared towards a private school. There is so much work to be done, because at school they need something to do to fill all those hours they're there. We didn't need that. The work is meant to be taught to them. They can't read it and do it without lots of in depth instruction in most subjects. While I think they're great academically, I don't think they're extremely homeschool friendly when you have more than 2-3 kids doing them. If you have a smaller size family, and you like an extremely in depth teaching type curriculum then this would work for you. If you have lots of children or children close together, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the level of involvement necessary for them to learn the subjects. We quit and I'm now in the process of trying to sell the curriculum and curriculum guides.

If you have any experiences with this or other curriculum please give us your insight! No nasty, rude or hateful comments will be published :) Thank you!

Goofiness

 I was looking at something the other day and I read the words on the page and then I looked at the instructions...It was a word scramble, I didn't even realize the words were scrambled! I keep transposing letters in words and not even noticing. And I keep saying the wrong words, or reading words that aren't there. Today I was reading to the kids and was supposed to say "following the vowel" and it came out "following the browned"!!! Seriously!?! We all died laughing! That word was nowhere on the page, nor was anything like it!


I am doing a classbook of Genesis with the older kids. While helping one of them, I was asking a question to prompt a memory. What did the serpent say to eve? was the question needing an answer. So I said "do you wanna..." and Makenzie pipes up "A banana!?!" LOL!!!


Later while Madison was doing math, she was doing some multiplication. The story problem was "if 3 monkey's each had 1 banana, how many banana's were there?" Her answer was "the answer is 3, cause if you gave monkey's banana's they'd eat them and there'd be 3 monkeys!" No, even as a female myself, I don't follow her logic! It was quite funny though! Don't know what all the banana's were about that day either! Maybe we need to eat more banana's or something? LOL!!!


So I don't know about anyone else but I LOVE TO READ! I have been reading books my entire life. I was know as a child to go hide in the bathroom to read. (It was preparation for motherhood, where else can you get privacy? ok, you're right, I don't even get privacy in there, but it's always a hope of mine!) I love to read books over and over again. They never get old. My husband doesn't understand that. He doesn't like to read much and if he's read it once, that's enough to him. I can't seem to get him to understand that the people in the books are my friends! I know I'm weird! But it's true, they are. It's like visiting them again every time I read a book. Making sure things are the same for them, ya know? The people in the books are real to me. (Not in a real life sense, but a real in my head sense :)  I also cannot stand to put a book down if someone is in a situation. I need to make sure things are all right first ya know! 

I am currently re-reading "Safely Home" by Randy Alcorn. I love his books! If you ever want to read some really good books, I highly recommend his. They're not study books, just novels. Deadline, Dominion, Lord Foulgrins Letters, The Ishband Conspiracy, Safely Home, and Edge of Eternity are the ones I've read and LOVE!


We are so ready for Christmas vacation. I think we're all caught up on school, so we don't have to do anything next week. I'm planning on just doing some devotions, Christmas studies, and fun reading the next few weeks. We have a very full Christmas day coming up. It's also Emily's birthday. Then New Years day, then Zachary's birthday. Fun, Fun!


Speaking of Zachary, He's doing much better now. Recovering pretty well from his pneumonia. I've been giving him blackstrap molasses and I think it's really helped his anemia too! He seems to have so much more energy. Crawling around and Happy! Now we just have to work on Kathleen's food allergies...

Happenings

I was feeling really down the other day, but then the very next day I was reminded again what an awesome God we have! We had 2, yes TWO, poopy toilet over flows, Not fun cleaning that up, but then we also had a very funny homeschooling day, the kids and James made me laugh so many times today, it was hard to be down. I tried to not be too irritable, didn't quite succeed, but I'm not mad at least! Then here I am all discouraged because I can't get the things I really wanted for the kids for Christmas (silly since I don't want them getting a ton of "things") and the first box of stuff from my MIL got here. She ordered the stuff I had told her we wanted from Vision Forum. Now I gave her a very long list of things, mind you. The things that were in the box were the 3 most important things I was wanting right now! Of course you know that's how God works! I can't wait for the kids to get them, I'm probably more excited than they will ever be, but that's ok, because I love it when God reminds me He's bigger than my silly little problems!


Otherwise, things have been going O.K., Zachary is getting over his pneumonia. Kathleen is very cranky, but getting over her croup. She was so bad Sunday night she was throwing up from coughing so hard. School is getting down, albeit slowly. There are some things that I'm still tweaking to work for us. I want school to be simple and enjoyable. We are getting to that point :)


 We are having friends over this Thursday and a church Christmas dinner on Friday. Alissa (my step-daughter) will be here next Tuesday. The kids are looking forward to Christmas. I am looking forward to some relaxing...hahaha, that's not too likely ;) The kids are enjoying the new dogs. We have a 2 yr old female lab/pyrenees, Buttercup, and a 14 week old male lab/pyrenees, Prince. I don't really like animals that much, but oh well. We are going to start with training them this week. So much to do, so little time to do it. 


I still want to make some diapers. I need to switch back to cloth full time. Antibiotics and rashes made me go disposable. I am making some diaper cream that's cloth safe, hopefully it'll turn out. I am trying to slowly go more homemade with things. I make my own laundry detergent, cloth diaper, now the diaper cream and making diapers. I am thinking of making my own mascara as reading the side effects link with using it kind of makes me wonder if it could be causing my hormonal imbalances. Thinking of making my own soap too.


Well my break is over, I need to finish eating so we can start on school.

Jumble of Thoughts

How's that for a title?! That's what this post is going to consist of though so, it's appropriate! We are still on the road. Day 3! Almost home, about an hour left to go, YAY! I'll be so glad to be out of the car, and in my own bed at last! Of course that also means unpacking, cleaning out the car, getting the house back in order, grocery shopping and getting back into our routines. : P

As for routines, school is the number 1 thing we need to get going. I am going to continue with what I'm already doing, although I'm going to alter it slightly. We will be changing up devotions. I found a cool website with daily kids devotions I may use for the boys. I will be doing a Proverbs a day, as well as a Bible story. I am going to have the girls keep writing books of the Bible and Madison's going to start copying out Proverbs 31. I am not sure what I want the boys to copy, but they all need to keep working on their penmanship. I am going to start using the Practical Mathematic books I have for them and I think we'll be getting the DIVE into Math dvd's for the boys. I am going to be using the Harvey's Grammar and McGruffey's readers for all the kids. As well as the Progressive Speller for all of them. I am not quite sure what to do for History and Science, but I'm thinking of using some of the free online books/curriculum. I'm not sure if I want to do it more unit study or individual studies. Hmm?

One thing is for sure, I definitely need to make sure to have my relationship with the Lord right! It is utterly impossible for me to be a normal nice person without His help! I am so cranky without my focus on Him. Can't seem to be patient with anyone. More like extremely uptight and flying off the handle over everything.

My kids are in some desperate need of major discipline! Which will definitely include punishment, but mainly going to be focusing on direction. They need to learn immediate obedience, kindness, thankfulness, happiness, to be helpful, to be a blessing to others, and so on and on and on and on... : )

I am going to really try to lose weight as well. Mainly by getting rid of cokes, candy, cookies, cakes and sweets in general. Also going to start some sort of exercise program. Whether by dvd's or by doing stuff with the kids. And by that I mean working out with them and playing games like tag, kickball, and such. I am so tired of being tired. It really stinks not having energy to be happy with your kids.

Going to work on cooking too. Not that I'm a bad cook : )   Just  need to do MORE cooking and more from SCRATCH! I do too much quick and easy box types meals and I'm sure that we'd be healthier if I didn't!  I just hate not knowing what to cook, feeling like we constantly eat the same thing, and feeling like I'm in the kitchen all day long when I cook from scratch!

The kids are all getting so big. We're going to be getting rid of Kathleen's binky's ASAP! She is biting holes in them, NOT GOOD! Zachary has 7 teeth now. Four of them came through at the same time. That wasn't fun. And now his molars appear to be coming through. He is walking along furniture, so it won't be long til he's off and running, literally! The girls (Makenzie and Michelle) are doing really well with their reading. Emily is recognizing the letter's she learned most of the time, and writing them pretty well. Madison and the Boys are getting very tall and are progressing in school.

We think we might possibly have a buyer for our house, which would be great! We desperately want to be able to move to CA so we can be close to our family and friends. Hopefully things will fall into place quickly and easily.

School Cabinet

Well, I didn't do everything I was supposed/going to. But I did at least get my school cabinet set up, filled and organized! Personally think it looks pretty good too!

Even the messy shelf to the left is actually clean compared to what it was...So tomorrow I'm gonna try again! I will do my best to get dressed, read my Bible (if nothing else), do school, keep my food journal, clean my living room and Shine my Sink!

What we're doing!

Well, today wasn't such a good day :( I think the steroids are definitely helping and I felt so good yesterday that I over did it. Today I could barely get off the couch. And I had such plans for the day too. Didn't even do school! Oh well, guess we always have tomorrow! LOL! 


We are going with Konos for school this semester. We'll see how it goes before we get more. Right now we are just focusing on Reading! We haven't done anything with the Konos except look at it! (we all like the way it looks and are excited to start) I really want to make sure they all know how to read really well before we get started. I think we'll just keep it this way for the rest of August and get started with the rest in September.
We are starting with a devotion time. We read a verse and discuss it. We sing songs. (whoever's day it it gets to pick the songs) We do our ABC verse cards and we pray. The kids really like the way we have "theme" prayer days. Today was Family, then each day is different...Friends, Church Needs, Missionaries, USA, and a Country. They like picking out of the theme to see what they will pray for. And it seems that they are really trying to pray harder that way too! Not just a generic thanks for the day and help us to be good type of a prayer! I am so glad. I have such a hard time with praying out loud and it is helping me too! Having something specific to pray for and knowing they're listening to me and learning how to pray from me!


After devotions we do reading. The girls do a learning to read book with me and James Michael and Jason do an in-depth Phonics book while we're doing that. Then the 2 younger girls do their writing books and the older three have a read out loud time. It's really helping them improve their reading skills as well as their public speaking and expressive reading skills. We do 1 chapter all week and not only do they learn a moral/character lesson from it, they are comprehending it. At the end of the week we have a voting session (everyone listens to them read) and they either pass or work on it again and add another chapter. 


Then we do a book called "The Fallacy Detective". It is helping them learn to think logically and to reason through situations. They are really enjoying it. As am I! It's fun and challenging and really makes them listen and think so they get the correct answers!


All in all I think it's going well! Just as soon as we're all feeling better I think it will go even better!