Homeschooling, The End is near!!!

 We are in the last two weeks of our homeschool adventure! I'm so excited (much more than the kids actually, lol!!)  It's been a year of growth, adventures, learning (mostly for me!) laughs and tears (oh yes, also mostly from me!) 

We are now in the End Of The Year Assessment phase and I'm optimistic that we will be at grade level or above. I have learned that even though I'm not perfect, I know my kids and what they need, how they learn, and how to trust my gut and when I can push them harder or take the afternoon off, go outside and let the kids play or read in the sunshine!

We chose to learn American Sign Language, and that has been really fun. The kids caught on quickly, we also studied early American history and ended the year with the Constitution, Bills of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. We will continue to learn and cover more in depth next year, yes we're doing it again!

We took these back in Sept on our first official day of school, they have grown so much both physically and mentally. 

My lil Man, now knows the whole alphabet, can count up to 25 by himself, can sign the alphabet in Sign Language, and can read 23 of 100 sight words! 

Miss J, is the dark horse this year. She jumped a grade in reading and has been a whiz at math! Hallelujah! She is the first to make up and write a story for her English, and is a great little artist when we worked on art projects. 

Miss E, This year has been a....adventure for both her and I, she is at a 7th grade reading level and wants to read EVERYTHING! We have to check and make sure somethings are age appropriate, she has jumped into 6th and 7th grade math, because when she gets it, she wants to keep going and do more and when she doesn't understand and need help, we both have to really work it out (Daddy usually helps and in the end saves the day!) 

The girls have decided they wanted to learn to play the piano. One day while looking on YouTube for a music video for one of our music lessons, we came across a video of someone teaching the basic chords on a piano and then playing Let it Go from Frozen....The girls who are now very self motivated and with the motto "If you want to learn about something, look it up" they have become quite good little self- taught pianists! Thank you YouTube!! 

Miss E is working on playing Let it Go, because of course we skip the whole basic Mary had a little lamb! They each have learned to play at least 4 to 6 songs, I'm so proud of the amount of time and effort they are putting into this! I will post some videos when we are ready for our first "concert"!

The kids having a snack of scones that we made while learning about fractions (learning into real life!)

My stylish ladies! 

 So one day while I'm helping Miss J on the computer work on math, Lil Man wanted to "write a list" in literally 4 minutes I turn around to find this....

 He told me that he wanted to draw pictures of what we need to do this week! As you can see his favorite letters are E I X O P! 

We went on a field trip to the Pacific Science Center...I'll post more about that soon! We're laying down to watch the Micheal Jackson Laser light show. It was awesome, the kids are now huge fans!!

The Butterfly House was a balmy 89 degrees and 85% humidity, within 3 minutes the kids wanted out, it was hot and they got sweaty. I told them that's what Hawaii felt like, they aren't quite as excited as they were before. 

 Touching sea urchins

 Miss J working on an art project.

I had the kids do a bird report and poster, they were so excited to do this! Miss E chose the American Red Robin, after our fave restaurant. Miss J chose Hummingbirds, of course. And lil' Man wanted the Bald Eagle. 

They had to each do their own research, I helped copy and paste lil' Man's notes and he cut them out and glued it to his poster.

They're bird reports, all done! 

The girls working on the Assessment. We have another week of testing and hopefully we will all pass and start summer break. We will still continue daily reading and they will have to work on math through out the summer, but we are all ready for that!