HNR Academy's Weblog

A fun field trip.

hnracademy — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:00:47 +0000

We took a fun field trip last week.

We are a bit behind in school, so we finished up a couple of classes and then left for the aquarium. I managed to get lost, but eventually we got there and the timing worked out that we got free parking. How cool is that? We went through the aquarium and the girls really enjoyed all the fish. Kiddo kept saying, “Take a picture of that one, Mom!” I took a lot of pictures. It was a great trip, but we were done by 3:00pm. It seemed so early, and we were already in town, so we decided to go on over to the Creation Museum. We know that one pretty well, so the kids decided to do the petting zoo and then walk through the museum. When we got done we decided to see a show in the planetarium. We made it home by dinner time, but dinner was late because dinner had to be made. It was a big day, but a good one.

I got an interesting new book in the mail yesterday…

hnracademy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:00:06 +0000

I am on the mailing list for a publishing company. Every now and then they send me books to review. I only get a couple of books a year, but it is fun to get them. I haven’t figured out how they decide which books to send me. This one really doesn’t make much sense. Its about educating children, but educating children with a special need that none of my children have. I do have a friend with a child with this special need, and several of the blogs that I follow have children with this special need, but the publishers wouldn’t know that. It does look very interesting though and I will read it and review it. I have already started it and am enjoying it. So look for another review in the next couple of weeks.

Fun Math books…

hnracademy — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:12:37 +0000

I was at the library yesterday. As the kids browsed through the books looking for what they wanted, I wandered over to the math section. (Yes, I know right where it is.) Dearie was talking last week about how much she liked some of the fun math books she has read. I was looking for something similar, but it was hard. Most of the books were either for little kids or for adults. Not much in the way of books for middle school kids. (She CAN read books written for adults, but many of them are VERY boring. I know. I’ve read many of them.) I found a few that I thought might work and went and found the kids and went home.

That night Dearie read the first five chapters of a statistics comic book. She said that the math was too hard and that she wanted to read it with me so that I could explain it to her. No problem, I can do that. We sat down and started with chapter two. It didn’t seems so hard, so I skimmed through the next few chapters. Wow! Wait a minute. This is comic book, not a college statistics book. Well, I guess it was written as a supplement for college statistics. The math in chapter five is calculus. Yep, calculus. (Maybe pre-calculus, but I don’t think so. However it has been a long time since I took calculus and I don’t think that I ever took a class called pre-calculus.) No wonder dearie was a bit lost, LOL. Guess I need to screen those books a bit closer.

To be honest, I am impressed that she got that far in the book. It has a story, but it is not that interesting. (She said that she gave up on the math and just read the story.) So anyway, that is how I keep my mathy kids thinking. We skip “real” math and just read books from the library, LOL. (Disclaimer: We did skip her math book today to read this book, and it has happened before, but it is not an everyday thing. I do teach her “real” math too.)

Where does the week go?

hnracademy — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:04:21 +0000

It seems like we just got home from camp, but it has been almost a week. What a long week it has been! No one really wanted to get back into the swing of things, but somehow we managed to…almost.

I took the girls roller skating today. They are getting pretty good at it. No one was hugging the wall today (a first). We try to get to the skating rink a couple of times a month, and they really enjoy it. They see a lot of their friends there, so that helps. It is usually not very crowded, so that helps too.

We also did the girls’ science experiment today. They had a lot of fun with it. Turns out that everyone liked the lemonade made with honey best (no surprise since it is the sweetest) and the lemonade made with white sugar came in second. No one liked the one made with powdered sugar. I thought it tasted a bit weird. I don’t know why.

While there doesn’t seem to be much science in lemonade, they learned a lot about the scientific method and a bit about taste. I think that it was a good week for science. I can’t wait to see what experiment they choose next!

Some cool school stuff

hnracademy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:31:43 +0000

Today we there was a couple of cool moments in school.

The first was in Honey’s math. She didn’t want to do her math (like always), so I decided to change it up. The page that she was supposed to do was about the different names of 6. (Things like 24 divided by 4 and 12 divided by 2.) I took all the facts and wrote them out on note cards and then added a few more (whose answer was not 6) and laid them out around the room. I pulled out the bug stickers and she decided to put a bug on any answer that was not 6 and a butterfly on any answer that was a 6. She was running all over the room trying to get back before I could find the next sticker. She was laughing and having fun! She also seemed to understand the math! It was a good math lesson. Hmmm… I wonder what tomorrow will hold for her math.

The other cool moment came in Honey and Kiddo’s science. They do science together and it works well. They are doing a science program that I designed for Dearie a few years back. It is all about the scientific method. We read from the book “How to Make Your Science Project Scientific” and then work through the process of doing a project. I made up worksheets for Dearie, and we are using those. On Monday the girls picked an experiment to do. (They are going to try to figure out which sweetener works best in lemonade.) On Tuesday they stated their hypothesis’ and stated the procedure for the experiment. Today was cool. We researched some aspects of the experiment. (I know, what can you learn about lemonade! That’s what I thought.) The girls had to come up with three things that they wanted to know more about. (This was in the worksheet. They know that I created it but they have forgotten. It holds more weight to have to fill out a paper than to just answer Mom’s questions.) They wanted to know which sweetener was the sweetest, more about the sense of taste, and something about the history of lemonade. They learned a lot today. They tasted all of the sweeteners that we are using (honey, raw sugar, white sugar, and powdered sugar) and agreed with what I found on the internet. Honey is sweeter than the others, but the others are about the same. They learned that taste buds are not just on the tongue. They learned two different stories about how pink lemonade came about (not much about the history of plain lemonade out there). It was cool seeing them come up with their own questions to answer and then finding the answers. Of course, they just want to get to the making of lemonade! They still have a couple of days to wait. Tomorrow we will learn about how to record results and then finally on Friday they can do the experiment. That will be a fun day!

While we were doing science, Dearie barged in. She was practically yelling as she told me all about what she had just learned. It wasn’t all that exciting to me, but it was something new to her. (Yay! new info is what she lives for.) She was excited about science too!

I enjoy the lessons where the kids are excited about learning. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen everyday. Maybe we can see more of the good stuff in the coming weeks.

Back to school!

hnracademy — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:39:31 +0000

We spent last week at Life Action Family Camp. It was a great week! This is the fifth year that we have gone and it is still just as good as the first year. We had a great week. We went canoeing, hiking, played a survivor like game, ate all our meals in a cafeteria (of course I had to supplement some, but with fresh fruit and an entire salad bar at every meal it was easy), rode bikes, shot paintball guns, went geocaching, painted pictures, painted fingernails, and a lot more. The kids have classes everyday (think VBS), and there was worship time and preaching. It was a good week.

Then came Monday. The Monday after vacation, ugh! No one likes to go back to work after vacation, and none of the girls wanted to do school today. Some more so than others. It was a long day, but I’m hoping that tomorrow will be better…

We lost a rabbit yesterday.

hnracademy — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:16:14 +0000

One of our rabbits, “Day,” has been sick for a couple of weeks. In the last few days, I knew that she wasn’t going to make it. I tried to prepare Dearie, but I didn’t tell her that Day only had a few days left to live. Dearie was pretty upset as she was the one to discover the dead rabbit, but she bounced back pretty quickly. So now we are down to only one rabbit. Will we get more? I haven’t decided yet.

Math Lesson

hnracademy — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:17:27 +0000

We didn’t do school yesterday as we had a family obligation, but Kiddo got her math lesson in anyway. We were sitting at the breakfast table and Kiddo asked me what was half of 12 and 1/2. I asked her what was half of a half and she said a fourth. Then before I could ask her what was half of 12 and 1/2 (she knew that and so was on to the next thing), she asked me what was half of 1/3 and what was half of 1/6. I grabbed a bowl and drew imaginary lines on it to divide it into thirds. Then we used our imaginations to divide the thirds in half. She could easily see that half of 1/3 was 1/6. I asked her what half of 1/6 was and she thought about it and said 1/12. But she still wasn’t done with math for the day. She wanted to know what was half of 3/4. Yikes, she is only 8yo. For this one I grabbed a paper and pencil. I drew a pie and divided it into fourths. Then we divided each piece in half. Then we could see that half of 3/4 was 3/8. She was done asking questions for the day, but she was not done thinking about it. She told me a bit later that half of 6/4 was 3/4 and half of 3/4 was 3/8. Oh, and we are not doing anything with fractions in math right now. I don’t know why she was thinking about it.

(I just asked her why she wanted to know. She said that it was because she likes to do halves. Half of 100 is 50, and half of 50 is 25, and half of 25 is 12 and 1/2… But she didn’t know what half of that was….)

Bible Bowl Season has begun!

hnracademy — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:37:24 +0000

We had our first round robin last weekend! Our older kids (the Bible Bowl team) were the only ones to attend. Next month the younger kids (the Beginner Bible Bowl team) will get to play too. Our Bible Bowl team took first place, and one of our players tied for first on the test. Dearie scored 11 points too low (out of 150 points) to make the top ten on the test. Considering that this was her first Bible Bowl test (it is a bit different than the Beginner tests) and that she didn’t even come close to finishing, I was thrilled (Dearie, not so much).

I am happy with how the Beginner team is doing. I am coaching them again this year, so I know pretty well how all of the players are doing. The thing that I am most happy with is that when we practice, all of the kids buzz in. They compete to beat each other. I am not an expert at this game, but it seems that if your kids are competing against each other, they will get faster. (When one child does all of the buzzing, the others often give up and don’t even try to buzz in.) It is fun to coach a team where all them members are participating! The only thing that I don’t know is how well they will do in competition. When it comes to buzzing in, a half a second can make a huge difference. While our kids are buzzing in earlier than in years past, I can’t tell if it will be early enough to win. I guess that I will have to wait until next month to find out.

When the week doesn’t line up with the schedule…

hnracademy — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:59:17 +0000

I managed to hold on for five weeks. That is probably a record. But now, due to being sick, our schedule no longer lines up with the schedule book. (Today we did the last day of week four, that would/could/should be a Friday?) Its not a big deal. I know that. I have never, ever managed to stick to a schedule, so I’m not sure why I thought this year would be different.

But ever since I realized that we were off, I have tried to figure out how to finish week five by the end of next week. Why do I bother you might ask? Well, lots of reasons. The main one is that we get more done in a week if we do one scheduled week in one calendar week. When we are way far off from the schedule, I don’t worry about it as much as if we are “on” schedule. This means that I am more likely to take extra days off because we are already way off schedule anyway so what difference will it make? But those days add up and by the end of the year we have more school left than time and we don’t finish. I have never finished a Sonlight Core in a year. I know that it doesn’t matter, but this year I WANT to finish before summer. I don’t know why, but I really WANT to stay on schedule.

Its not like it is a terribly rigorous schedule. We only do Sonlight four days a week. This is totally doable. So with all of that in mind, we probably will get back on schedule next week. I did a (very) little extra today, and should be able to complete tomorrow’s assignment, and maybe do a bit extra the next day. Then with doing a little extra each day that we do school next week, I should finish week six by the end of next week even though we will only get in three days of school next week. Maybe….maybe….