Tentative Fall Semester Plans
I called this one tentative mainly because I am not sure how much we will be able to do given how busy the boys are at school and how tired they get by the end of the day. I am very laid back about this – we will only do as much as is enjoyable and not much more.
The main thing I am hoping with Woody this year is that he continues to develop friendships while being challenged academically. I wrote his teacher a longish email outlining his strengths and also outlining what we hope he will accomplish on the social front. She wrote back almost immediately – “his academic strengths are too many to list. I see as my challenge to keep him interested and motivated academically while at the same time giving him many ’social occasions’ where he can practice some social skills that do not come naturally to him” I remain very happy about this teacher! I suspect she is an introvert herself and genuinely seems to understand Woody. We’ll see how this goes through the year, fingers crossed!
The main goal for Buzz this year is to get him happily transitioned to the new school and to be comfortable and excited about the new class, teachers and friends. It is quite amusing because he is desperate for homework because Woody starts regular homework this year and Buzz asks constantly “can I also do homework Mommy!!!”I wonder how long that will last 
Math: With Woody, we hope to continue with EPGY twice a a week this semester. I am debating asking the teachers if he can be pulled out of Math class to do this but I am also conscious of the fact that this will make him feel more different. Woody’s teacher also suggested Marcy Cook as a fun resource to use with math and this is something I will look into using with both Woody and Buzz.
Literacy: Woody’s school is using Learning Headquarters in school and this is something I want to look into some more. We will continue charging through our general reading list this semester. In addition to read alouds to the boys at night, I am asking Woody to read aloud to Buzz on Fridays and Saturdays. Woody is so proud to do this and Buzz is equally thrilled that his cool brother deigns to read aloud to him! New this semester – spelling! This has not really been something I have thought about because Woody has his own strange way to learn spelling (and Buzz shows signs of being the same). I can’t quite explain it. It’s definitely not phonics. They just seems to be able to picture the word. We’ll do spelling the old fashioned way with flashcards and we will create word lists periodically depending on the themes being taught at school. With Buzz we will be using a combination of a games on the computer for spelling basic words (that he loves) and I will also be using Scrabble tiles with him to create simple words together.
Science: Topics that the school will cover this semester include insects, plants, life cycles, weather, nutrition, animals in our local habitat and their adpatations, dinosaurs and creatures of the tidal pool. We will likely pick a couple of these and go deeper on them depending on what interests both the boys. I suspect that Buzz will be more interested in some of these topic than Woody. Woody and insects do not go well together! He is convinced that they are all germ-carrying-stinging-menaces and I have an uphill battle ahead of me to convince him otherwise! I will post on these topics separately.
Social Studies: I realized when we were going through Story of the World last spring that both boys were fascinated by the individual personalities in history. While we will continue to listen to SOTW on the ride home from school, we will be taking a slightly different tact in learning history this semester: learning history via biographies. I am hoping that we will cover one ancient/world and one American biography this semster. Biographies tentatively planned are Tutankhamun and George Washington.
Spanish, Art: Woody has two classes a week at school that cover these and I am not planning on covering this at home. Huge relief for me because I am so not artsy or remotely craftsy!
Music: Woody will be taking piano class twice a week. Buzz starts this next year, if he is interested.
PE: The kids have PE classes at school, again twice a week. I also have Woody and Buzz signed up for swimming once a week at a local swim school.
Homework: Woody will have homework from school and we now have the homework hour from 5:30-6:30.
Chores at Home: I have been lax about them putting away toys over the summer and will now start to enforce this. They continue to be in charge of setting the table for dinner and cleaning up after dinner with DH. In addition to this, I also want them to get into the routine of helping me get their clothes, shoes and socks and books ready for school the next day.
Phew, I got tired just writing this but quick thing to point out (to myself more than anyone else!) is that much of this is outsourced to school and apart from some of the Math and the flashcards for spelling, the rest we will mostly be doing by reading books on the topics.
We will be putting our county and school library cards to very good use this semester!
First Week @ School
Woody and Buzz just completed their first week back at school and it has been a bit of a struggle moving from the slow-as-molasses pace of summer to the frantic get-up-at-6:00-and-get-out-the-door-by-7:20 sprint that is the school term!
Woody was 20% nervous and 80% excited headed into 1st Grade. He was thrilled to find out that his two good friends were in his class this year. All summer I have been secretly petrified that Woody would find himself separated from these two lovely boys and so I have to say that I was greatly relieved when I saw the three names grouped together on the class list. As I walked by his class on Thursday, I heard a familiar gurgle of loud laughter and as I peeked around the corner and I found him playing some game with his friends that ended with all three boys on the floor laughing hysterically. Not sure what the game was and what triggered this spontaneous fun but this is the image that I will cherish for a while.
Buzz started preschool at the school Woody is in. The big worry with him was not whether he would fit in with the other kids but potty training. He surprised us over the summer but getting potty trained over a weekend and has surprised us again but doing just fine on this front at school. Unlike his introverted older brother, this social butterfly already has many friends but talks a lot about one particular boy and girl. Coincidentally the little girl is Woody’s good friend’s younger sister and Buzz’s boy is the younger brother of a girl who is also in Woody’s class. So one big family!
With the boys back in school, I am trying to settle into a routine and includes daily exercise class for me (much needed!) and I have also starting to finalize “enrichment” plans for this semester. More on that in another post because I am headed out to watch the boys and their dad in the pool and continue to enjoy this gorgeous weather we have been having!
Weekend Trips with Grandparents
With school starting on September 1st, we have packed in a lot of fun activities into these last few weeks.
Woody just finished a week at NASA: Journey into Outer Space @ Mad Science. The neat thing about this was it was a mixed age class with kids from 1st Grade through 5th Grade. Woody really got along well with the teacher who had this wonderful sense of humor. She effortlessly handled a roomful of science mad boys! It made me want to adopt her and offer her a permanent place in our home! He made a rocket in the class which he was quite thrilled about. We now need to buy a motor for the rocket and plan to take it to the National Association of Rocketry in Livermore and will launch it soon.
At the end of summer (for about 6 summers now) my mother-in-law has rented a lovely beach house in Bodega Bay and we just got back from a couple of fun days there. The house has a great pool table in the upstairs loft and eveyone spent a lot of time there. Woody got to play golf with daddy and Grandpa. This is turning out to be one sport that he just loves! Buzz was too young for the course. Quick aside about Buzz. When he found out that he wasn’t going to play with his brother and dad, he said to me “I am not going to be maudlin about not playing golf”. I asked him if he knew what maudlin meant and he said it meant “being sad, crying all the time”. No idea where he picked this up but this is the sort of thing that happens all the time with the little one.
This week, Ammama and Tatha (my parents) arrive. The boys are pretty exicted and have vowed to stay up late to greet them! They already have declared that they are sleeping with their Ammama the whole time that she is here. (Mom — I hope you are prepared for a very crowded and loud bedroom!)
We are then headed to the Gold Country with my parents for the weekend. To prepare the boys for this I bought GoldFever: Tales from the California Gold Rush and we will be reading this over the next few days. That is if they can tear themselves away from their Captain Underpants series! We will get to take some tours of gold mines, visit some old gold rush towns, pan for gold, take a train ride but mostly just enjoy hanging out with the grandparents.
We get back on Sunday and school starts for both boys on Tuesday. I know that probably everyone is saying this about now but boy did the summer go by in the blink of an eye!!
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
I grew up not watching much TV. We would watch the news and perhaps a few shows over the weekend but not much else. My husband on the other hand grew up with a lot of TV. He still remembers at 7 or 8 watching a Time-Life Series on WWII and then with his dad researching details on every model of aircraft deployed in WWII.
With two such different TV viewing backgrounds, we are trying to reach a happy middle ground with our boys. They do tend to watch a lot of TV but we try and balance that with lots of books. We also see if we can link some of this TV to learning.
One show that all the boys in the house (yes, DH as well) LOVE is Spongebob Squarepants. Woody and Buzz can recite entire episodes of Spongebob and there is usually raucous laughter coming from the family room when the yellow sponge and his pink starfish friend are on TV.
I have been on a quest to see if there are some fun ways that Spongebob can be linked to learning.
The first thing to point out is that there are all kinds of Spongebob books available. I find that Woody likes to read aloud to Buzz the episodes they have watched together.
How Spongebob Squarepants Works: This site from How Stuff Works describes how the show came about and the production process. History of how the show came about is also described in Square Roots: The Story of Spongebob Squarepants. It gives the boys a real sense for how an animated series is pulled together.
The Science of Spongebob: This site poses some interesting questions for kids about characters in the show but than can then be used to learn more about life under the sea. I found this really interesting link to this homeschool resource that with a curriculum for high school level Marine Biology and Oceanography using The Seaside Naturalist by Deborah Coulombe.
Spongebob Science: This blog post about the various scientific inconsistencies in Spongebob and that got me thinking that I could get the boys to play a game to point out these inconsistencies, things that really cannot happen underwater.
But today, we are happily spending a lazy Tuesday morning enjoying one of the many many episodes of Spongebob that they have recorded and the boys are talking about what they love about each of the main Spongebob characters and I am shamelessly evesdropping:
Spongebob: Because he is so so funny. He’s hilarious!
Patrick: Because he’s nuts and funny. But mostly nuts!
Mr. Crabs. Because he just loves money. It’s crazy.
Sandy. Because I love her Texas accent
Squidward: Because he is grumpy. He is such a grouch.
Plankton: Because he is the world’s smallest bad guy. He is small but thinks he is big.
Mrs. Puff. Because every time she is in trouble she puffs up
Digestion and Beyond!
Image from laughingsquid.com
Woody was talking about the path his bagel would take down his digestive system over breakfast this morning. His interest in anatomy has been rekindled because he spotted this book at his grandparents house. At which point Buzz interrupted and said “yes, its like an elevator”.
That got my attention and I asked him what he meant and he said “food gets in the mouth and the first stop is the tummy. Ding! Then it goes down some curly pipes and then the next stop is the butt. Ding! Then the toilet. Ding! Then it travels down some more pipes under roads and the last stop is the sewage. Ding Ding!”
At which point Woody got into this and argued that it could also be like a railway system or the BART. When Woody started to associate different BART stops with parts of the digestive system, I decided that this was all getting a bit much for me at 8:00 in the morning! I exited gracefully with my half eaten bagel and coffee after asking them to please finish their breakfast.
We’re Back!
Just got back in last night. On the car ride back, the boys declared it was the best time ever. It really didn’t feel like we had been gone 10 days and this in my mind is always a sign of a great vacation. DH and I are also marveling at how much easier it is traveling with the boys now compared to even a couple of years ago when we were carting around strollers, diapers and all the other paraphernalia that seem to accompany babies and toddlers.
The 24 hours before we left for vacation must have seemed interminably long to the boys. Buzz kept asking if it was tomorrow yet and Woody wanted to know why we were waiting to leave the next morning? Why not leave the minute DH got home from work? I love these two photos of the boys because it shows how ready they were to leave on vacation. In the first, they are sitting on our packed suitcases and Woody is telling me the route to take down to Newport Beach. The second was taken the morning we were to leave. I usually have trouble getting the boys in the car and out the door but they were both ready 20 minutes ahead of schedule and were in the car with their seat belts on, ready to hit the road!
When DH was in college he sang with a really cool group of guys in an a capella (sp?) group. One of the group had a family home down in Balboa Island and every summer the guys would head down the Newport Coast for an annual road trip. They would spend the week hanging out, singing and generally having a lot of fun! This year was the group’s 20th anniversary and the entire group had a reunion of sorts at the same family home on Balboa. The guys now are older and they are all married with kids that range in age from 14 years to 10 months. And boy can they still sing!!! It was remarkably relaxing because the house was right on a very very calm beach and we could watch the kids play from the front patio porch. The older kids in the group watched over the little ones which added to our relaxation! All the moms were perfectly content watching the great sunset from the front porch sipping some wine and listening to the guys sing!
We spent the rest of the week doing nothing at all. Woody and DH played many rounds of golf and on the last round, Buzz and I went along to watch and cheer on! The boys hung out by the pool or were on the beach a lot. Woody surprised us all by getting on a boogie board and he seemed to really enjoy himself (until he got caught off-guard by a largish wave!). He now really wants to understand waves and my challenge this week is to find a bunch of stuff about waves that we can read together. Buzz LOVED pretty much all the rides in Disneyland and kept going and going at the happiest place on Earth much like the Energizer Bunny!
Now we are all back home and I am staring at some suitcases full of dirty and sandy clothes and am trying to get motivated to do the many many loads of laundry and to get ready for this week. Which would probably explain why I am at the computer writing and looking through all the lovely vacation photos!
Sigh!
