Year: 2004 Page 3 of 8

Yesterday I found a writing program that sounds like it will be just perfect for the kids. The book comes from a larger program called the Wordsmith Series. The first book in the series is called Wordsmith Apprentice. It is for 4th-6th grades. The idea is that the students should get their grammar from another program, but need a place to put it all together with a series of writing exercises that make use of the newly learned grammar. The kids have a good grammar program with Easy Grammar, but nothing really so good for writing.

This will be perfect for Kelly and I believe Christian should do well with it, too. The premise of the writing exercises is that the kids take the different parts of a newpaper staff: editor, reporter, writer, etc. They need to write everything for the newspaper including ad copy, want ads, letters, articles, etc. This should be super for the both of them. If it works well for them, there are two additional programs: Wordsmith for 7th-9th grades and Wordsmith Craftsman for 10th grade and up.

We are getting to the point now where the program is filling out with all the materials we need to cover. We still need to level out a little in terms of how we do our day to day scheduling, but that is a lot better than when we started and improving more and more every day. I have been hand writing their assignments for each day, but I think I will switch that over to the computer now that it is starting to stablize so that I can do the scheduling more quickly.

On Saturday afternoon Kelly, Christian, and I went down to the hobby store in Corvallis to buy some projects. Kelly got an ant farm. Christian got a plastic model of an F-16 that he is putting together. He absolutely loves the project, but needs to have some paints before he can move forward. I will try to get them for him at lunch time today if he sends me the colors. Kelly is going to order ants for her farm today via mail. We are excited to start watching that, too.

The weekend was very busy with the workers coming over, lots of yard work, and some new school projects for the kids. On Saturday, I mowed the lawn and Lorena was able to get four azaleas planted in the front yard, some weeds pulled and some of the lawn edge converted to flower garden bed. It looks very nice. On Saturday night, Lorena put some beef into the crock pot to cook over night. We had Tony and Martha over for lunch on Sunday to have some tacos and they were some of the best tacos we have had in ages.

We really are not doing the best we can with Kelly’s writing yet. I plan to look into that more today with the hope of getting a program coming to us within the next few days. Hopefully, I will be able to find something for Christian, too, although I do not think that is as critical.

I found a GREAT link that shows kids how to do some VERY cool things. It is named HowToons.

Joe Layman and Lyle Waldo came to our house last night. The will be staying with us through the weekend. It is nice to have them. It is a little hard on Lorena because she is having to balance her Intermediate Algebra class with everything else. Hopefully, things will slow down a little after the weekend so we can get focused on all the educational stuff going on in the house.

I gave the kids a very light school load today because of all the things that are going on. They will do some grammar, reading, and letter writing along with there bi-weekly visit to the home school play get-together at a local church in our neighborhood.

Right after I received Al’s confirmation that he is going to go skiing with us this year, I got a note from Lauro that he and his family will come, too. Doug got the reservation all set up so we are all set for skiing in Bend later this year.

Tonight our new workers are coming over to spend a few days with us. That will be very nice. Joe Layman is back from last year and his new companion is Lyle Waldo. Last night at meeting, Nancy Ramsdell and the kids were not at meeting. Mark was there and he told us that Nancy’s cousin Kayle Smith had been killed in a motorcycle accident. That family has had a pretty rough time over the last year. I have always thought that riding motorcycles is fun, but it is very, very dangerous. There is no way I will let the kids have one as long as I am in control.

Lorena’s class seems to be going ok. I was a little worried that she was not understanding the material, but last night when we sat down to go over her homework, she had done most of it properly and was mostly just rusty from not having done it for awhile. I think that as long as she gets the homework done, she will do great.

Home school continues to go great. The kids are working hard and we are still trying to get the work load balanced. We made a new rule yesterday that Kelly cannot read any books other than what is required for her home school assignments until all her assignments are finished each day. Reading her “fun” books is just too much of an attraction for her. Christian did his second experiment last night and will write it up today. I am looking forward to seeing that.

Yesterday was Lorena’s first day of class at Linn-Benton Community College. Last spring she took a ceramics class just so she could get into the system. This fall she is taking intermediate algebra. If she passes this class, she only has one more math class to complete for a bachelors degree. It is going to be tough, but she is very focused on getting through it. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Lorena drops the kids off with me at work to go to here class between 4:00 and 5:50. I will come in a little early and get off a little early so I can take care of the kids while Lorena is in class.

Yesterday we found out that the kids who live across the empty lot in front of our house are buying the house that will be in the empty lot! That is great news. Halley is four years old and tells us that she is going to “home preschool.” Jacob is seven years old in the second grade and Hannah is eight years old in the third grade. Hannah and Christian were in the same class in the second grade last year at Fir Grove Elementary school. The family has been living with Hannah’s mother’s parents as they were in a bad neighborhood. Word has it that the house will be completed by some time in February.

I received an email from the Rizo family this morning letting us know that they can make it up to Oregon in late February for our annual skiing trip at Mt. Bachelor. That is VERY exciting. I sent a note to my brother Doug who will make the arrangements for a great timeshare in Redmond. Now we are only waiting on Lauro and Dayana. We surely hope they can make it.

Cayatano came over yesterday to work on the yard. He finished digging the trench under the sidewalk to bury the drain pipe and will bore a hole into the curb so the water can get out the next time he comes with the right tool. He also put some seed on the lawn where there are some holes and put a frame around the wet area by the faucet behind the house where we have concrete pads and filled it with rock between the pads. When we have a little more money, we need to have him come back again to clean the new patio with acid and put on a varnish to make it shiny, bore the hole in the curb, put in a fence in the back yard, and put in some trees around the property.

Yesterday, there was so much stuff going on, the kids did not really have a chance to get all of their homework done. Today will be a little bit of a “make-up” day. I am going to start backing off on their work load a little so they are not so stressed about getting it all done. They are doing super on the math and it looks like the Easy Grammar program is going to work very well.

Lorena starts her intermediate algebra class today at the Corvallis Linn-Benton Community College facility. She will drop the kids off at my work a little before 4:00 this afternoon so she can get to class between 4:00 and 6:00. I will take the kids home with me and have them to myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays through the end of fall term. We are going to cancel the art class for the kids in Corvallis because we are so busy now, we really do not want to be adding a whole new place to go. We have a good art program and there are some opportunities for art within the home school community so we will not really be missing anything. The atmosphere at that art center did not look so healthy for our kids anyway.

We are starting the new grammar program from Easy Grammar this morning. The first part of the program for both Kelly and Christian entails memorizing a list of prepositions. When that is done, they systematically go through a grammar program that appears to be quite complete. The last hole we have to fill is the writing program. I really need to start looking for a good writing program.

We talked to both Al Rizo and Lauro, Jr. last night. They are going to let me know in the next couple of days whether they can go on the skiing trip to Mt. Bachelor at the end of February. The place we would be staying is named Eagle Crest and it is a Gold Crown resort. Lauro’s daughter, Dayanita is excited about it so we are really hoping they can make it.

One thing I did not really talk about yet is what a great job Christian did on his first Chemistry experiment writeup. He did it all by himself and did an absolutely stellar job of writing up the experiment description, methodology, and observations. Today, I called him at home and asked him if he wanted to wait for me to get home before he did his experiment so that I could watch him do it. That really should be fun.

This weekend, we read the entirety of Henry Reed, Babysitters, Inc. It was great. Fortunately, an additional Henry Reed book that we had ordered from Amazon came in the mail on Friday and there are two more on their way. We are really looking forward to reading them. Kelly asked what we would read when we are through with them all. I told her that we would go on back to reading The Fellowship of the Ring. That is a great book to be reading, but we have been having an exceptionally good time reading Henry Reed. We have enjoyed them just as much as we enjoyed The Little House on the Prairie books, but in a different way.

I got a webcam hooked up to my office computer and running at my desk, so I took a couple of pictures of myself to post here for the sake of posterity.

Dad at Work

Dad Talking to Mom at Work

I at home on Saturday. Lorena, Kelly, Christian, and I all went down to eat lunch at Jack in the Box early today and now Lorena and the kids have gone off to walk around the booths at the fall festival in Corvallis for a little while. I am mowing the lawn and, as soon as the grass is wet, I am going to put down the fall fertilizer/weed killer. I am planning and lobbying hard for Lorena’s brother Laurin to bring his family up to go skiing with us and the Rizo family a the end of February.

Here are some pictures taken from around Christian’s birthday

Grandpa Milo and Kelly in Grandpa’s Kitchen

Christian Smiling

Kelly Smiling

Christian – Face Paint from Corvallis Fall Festival

Kelly – Face Paint from Corvallis Fall Festival

Today is my birthday. I am 49 years old and life is great. Home school is progressing well. We are waiting for our grammar books and I have to get the kids going on some more structured writing assignments, but other then that things are progressing very, very well.

Tonight the whole family is going to drive up to Newberg for a birthday party with all my siblings and another couple. On Saturday, we are planning to work on the yard to reseed the areas where the grass is not growing like we would like.

After a couple of weeks of getting the system worked out, home school is now moving along fairly smoothly. Christian is going to do his first chemistry experiment for home school with the Smithsonian Chemistry Kit Grandma Sarah got for him. He did an experiment earlier just for fun, but this one he is going to write up. All of the reading, math, and history are going well, but I am in the process of making changes to grammar and writing because I can not get it as organized as I would like due to the Sonlight system and when we have time to work together. Even the kittens are going to home school now!

Both Kelly and Christian are blasting right along with Singapore Math. We love the program and it works really well for us. Ditto with Spelling Power, science, cursive handwriting, and the literature and history books from Sonlight that the kids are reading. The biggest challenge now is to find the best way to teach grammar and writing. I have found some good books on grammar that appear like they will be perfect for those topics, but I still have not found just the right thing for writing. Kelly is such a high level writer and is so interested on doing that, that I need to find something specifically for her that is more structured than what we are currently using from Sonlight. While I am at it Christian would be well served with a similar program.

Christian has a lab notebook he will be using to write up his experiments. Right now, we will not be doing the formal hypothesis development and experiment write-ups we will be using with RealScience-4-Kids. Rather he will just write up what the experiment is supposed to demonstrate, his methodology including required materials, and observations he makes while he is doing the experiment. We will do this for quite awhile while Christian is interested in the Chemistry Set Grandma Sarah got for him for his birthday. In addition, we bought a copy of the book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chemistry. It is very well written, very funny, very interesting, and both Christian and I love it. Christian is reading it aloud to me about 3-4 pages per night.

Kelly called city hall yesterday to find out when the next city council meeting will happen. There was one last night, but we had to go to meeting. Hasso Herring, the editor of the local newspaper, The Albany Democrat-Herald, wrote an editoral extolling the educational virtues of students attending and learning from local government events. Kelly would really like to get something published in the “Young Voices” column of the paper that is reserved for the writings of local students. Her plan is to attend a meeting, write about her experience, and submit the article to the Democrat-Herald to see if she can get it published. It is a great idea.

We started potty training the kittens today. We are going to keep a calender of what we are doing and spend 21 days training them. I really hope it works. The kids are going to take pictures and keep a journal of our efforts.

We have been home schooling now for about two weeks. Life has been so crazy with convention and so many other things happening at work I have had little time to update the blog, but now I am going to try to get back into it. I will start today with a short description of how things have gone with our classes so far then go on in the next few days to talk about the dynamics of what we are doing.

We started out trying to explicitly follow the Sonlight program is really quite good. Kelly and Christian both like the books very much, though I think Christian would rather be reading about science. While the grammar part appears to be OK, it does not really provide the kind of structure I would like. I have ordered a program called Easy Grammar that appears to be much more well suited for the way we work. We will continue to read and report on the Easy Grammar. Kelly appears to be very interested in a book that came with Sonlight named Writers, Inc.. We will probably start working through that book with her, too.

Science seems to be going fairly well, although I would like it to be much more “hands-on” with Christian. We have misplaced the RealScience-4-Kids program, but as soon as we find it, I think we will switch over to that program, at least for Christian.

I will try to talk about some of the extracurrricular activities we are doing tomorrow.||We have been home schooling now for about two weeks. Life has been so crazy with convention and so many other things happening at work I have had little time to update the blog, but now I am going to try to get back into it. I will start today with a short description of how things have gone with our classes so far then go on in the next few days to talk about the dynamics of what we are doing.

Grandpa Lauro, Grandma Conchita, and Hectorin have come and gone. Convention is over (except for one more weekend of Saginaw II. Last night, I made a list for both Kelly and Christian to do a practice run on their homeschool. We are missing some of the Handwriting materials we need, but everything else is on track.

The big surprise was that when I gave Kelly and Christian their Spelling and Placement Survey tests, they had did much better then I might have expected. We are using a book called Spelling Power. I am not sure who is the author, but the tests I gave the kids, put Christian at mid-seventh grade level and Kelly at mid-tenth grade level.

The table we purchased for homeschool turns out to be way to high for writing comfortably, so Lorena went down to Costco and bought a couple of smaller tables and folding chairs to go with them. Everything is set up in the living room, but we have decided to set everything up in the Bonus room for now.

I wrote out the lesson plan for today for each of the kids. They have a light math assignment, some reading, and a couple of other things to do while I am here at work. After work, I will spend time with them on spelling, math, dictation, and anything else they cannot do themselves. Lorena will listen to Christian read from a couple of different books.

Yesterday, Lauro, Conchita, Hectorin, Lorena, and the kids ran down to the mall to do some shopping, cleaned up the house, and shoveled gravel from the driveway. I had to stay late at work to fix a device driver written in QNX for a machine we are making for Raytheon. I did not get it last night, but when I came in this morning, I figured out what the problem was based on some messages that were printed out from my work last night. I really DO love my work. That is a blessing I hope I can pass on to Kelly and Christian.

On Friday night we invited my cousins Tim and Dave Meekum over to our house for dinner along with Jim and Joanne Waldo. Jim is the elder of our Sunday morning meeting. On Saturday, we ran over to spend a little bit of time at Nye Beach in Newport, then ran up to Depoe Bay to have some clam chowder at the Chowder Bowl. The chowder was not to good, but the day was a lot of fun.

On Sunday, the Ramsdells and the Meyers came over for dinner after meeting. Mark had to run to Portland so he could catch a plane to Singapore on Monday, but the rest of us went down to Saginaw to gospel meeting at the convention grounds. Christian got sick on the way home, but the rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We did see Tony and Martha at the meeting who are back from their wedding and honeymoon in Texas.

Here are some pictures of our visitors from Mexico as well as the work that is being done on our new patio.

Everything went as scheduled yesterday. The patio is poured and all of us went to Dorothy Harris’ funeral and then on to our Wednesday night bible study. We still have to pressure wash down the patio in a few days and we still have to do something about a fence between the properties, but the whole patio area looks a lot bigger now and more complete. Today the kids are all going swimming at the really nice Corvallis swimming pool. Hopefully, Lorena will bring me some lunch on the way there, too.

Grandpa Lauro, Grandma Conchita, and Cousin Hectorin all made it to Albany in fine shape yesterday. I ended up working until about 9:00 pm, so I really did not get to see them much. I will try to get some pictures of them up on the web in the next couple of days. Today, we are going to all go to the funeral of Dorothy Harris. It seems like every time Lauro and Conchita show up, we have a funeral. Coupled with that, we have the good news that Grandpa Milo is going to come up with Cayatano to pour our patio TODAY!! I will have Christian take some before and after pictures to post here.

The big event of the day today is that Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita are arriving at the airport today. Lorena and the kids will go to pick them and Cousin Hectorin up this morning at Portland International Airport. The sad news today is that Dorothy Harris died two nights ago. Her funeral will be tomorrow. She was 93 years old and a great christian woman. We will miss her. If we can get concrete to the house, Dad will come up and finish our patio tomorrow. I surely hope we can get that to happen.

Grandpa Milo turned 75 years old today. He is in great shape and very, very active. He has slowed down a little, but not so the normal person could tell. This weekend, all we did was hang out the whole weekend. On Saturday we ran to Salem to go to the Borders bookstore. I bought myself a book on Fedora Linux and four books on Space, Bugs, Gardening, and History for the kids. It was really nice just to spend time with them.

Jay y Karen Nelson nos mandaron unas fotos de la boda de Tony y Marta. Aquí están!