Slices of Life

I stumbled upon this article written the other day about how to foster reading comprehension in students.  And while I agree, in theory, with what the article is saying I can't help thinking that this isn't the only way. There is a whole other school of thought ( that I apparently fall into ) that believe we shouldn't ask kids a million and one questions to see if they're comprehending what they are reading and to try and increase their reading comprehension. When my boys are reading a book or listening to a read aloud (either myself or an audiobook): I don't ask them questions.   I don't prompt them for predictions I don't ask comprehension questions when we're done the story I don't ask them why they think the author wrote the book I don't ask them anything else really.   I usually don't even ask them why they like(d) the book or what they thought of it.  Maybe that makes me a bad teacher, I don't know, but I really don't think so....

Today we had a whole entire day at home.  I can't remember the last time that has happened. I spent a portion of the morning on the computer with Ian.  My husband had worked with him last night to disassemble the VCR even more and go over the various parts of the machine with him.  My husband explained how the circuit boards are made, why when Ian shines his flashlight on them he can see through some sections and not see through others and even helped us find a few pages of information to read on VCR's for Ian to write his report with. We have officially changed his science fair project at this point and even though my husband joked that Ian was reporting on 20 something year old technology neither one of us could say he wasn't passionate about it.  I haven't seen Ian this engaged in anything we've done in a long time. The fair is just under two weeks away and we still have a lot to do.  Alec worked on adding a few more facts to his Venn Diagram while Ian and I ...

We had our homeschool Halloween party today and spent a portion of our morning preparing some snacks to bring with us. It's supposed to be a healthy Halloween party and after making an adorable monster mouth fruit salad last year I was looking for something equally adorable this year.  We decided on making wizard hats .  While not really a healthy snack, I didn't feel like it was complete and total junk food like candy either, besides it was easy to make with few ingredients. I cut out large paper circled and handed one to each boy.  I told them that to make our snack we needed to cut a pie crust into 16 equal triangular pieces so I asked them to see how we could do that.  They tried drawing triangles on their circles but I pointed out that they weren't equal triangles and that it might cause some problems when making snacks.  I encouraged them to think of math and all the ways circles have been divided into equal pieces in their math books.  They...

We had such a great day of school today.  The boys eagerly dove into working on their science fair projects and we managed to squeeze in a quick trip to the grocery store and our boxing classes at the gym too for some great physical fitness. I need to brag a bit and tell you my oldest started the washing machine this morning!  He did all of his laundry today on his own without my asking! At that moment all I could think was "I must be doing something right!"  After all homeschooling is not just about the school work but about raising a well rounded child with plenty of life skills too.  The boys all settled down to eat a late breakfast and I put in the movie Turtle The Incredible Journey .  Evan is researching sea turtles for his science fair project and this movie was just perfect for him.  The other boys wanted to watch it too so I figured that was great.  We all learned about the loggerhead sea turtles and their long journey...

After completing our schoolwork and heading to karate we came home for an early lunch.  We needed to eat early since we were heading out for yet another field trip today. We piled back into the car to head to a bison farm. A fellow homeschooler had arranged a tour of a local bison farm complete with pumpkin picking and decorating!  There were supposed to be 40 homeschoolers going and I wanted to get there a bit early to make sure we'd have a decent place to park. We had a great time at Creamery Brook Bison, even if we barely had the 15 people required to host the event.  I felt really bad for the woman who put all her time and effort in coordinating the trip since she was thinking she would have a turn out of 40 people and by the time I arrived we were questioning if we'd even have enough to bother hosting. Luckily we did end up with around 15-20 of us and we had a ball. We took a wagon ride out to the field where the bison were out roaming and got ...