While homeschool is progressing quite well, it seems like our little family is running in place to a certain extent. There are a couple of decisions that we will have to make about where we are going to live, what kind of work we will be doing, and even whether we will buy a new car. The one thing that is unlikely to change is that we will continue to homeschool for the foreseeable future. I should know a whole lot more about all of this by the end of the week, but until then, we will all just be waiting to see what happens.
Month: August 2005
Our new writing program Igniting Your Writing, has proven to be a big hit with the kids. I kind of figured our sixth grade daughter would enjoy the program as she is an avid writer. She faithfully keeps a daily journal, writes letters to the editor, and generally takes advantage of every opportunity to express her thoughts on paper. Our fourth grade boy, although an avid reader, tends toward math, science, and hands-on activities that do not require too much writing. We were quite surprised with his enthusiasm for the program, even more, with the product of his efforts. We are just starting into our third week, so we will report again when we have more experience and can see results. At this point, though, we highly recommend “Igniting Your Writing.”
I did not work on Friday because I had to go up to Portland to meet some people. I had a nice meeting and I got home early. On Saturday, we went to a wedding reception at the neighbor’s house and then to convention at Saginaw on Sunday. I saw my old friend Jonathon Wright for the first time in over a decade. He really had not changed much.
Uncle Lauro just sent us some new photographs from some old events. One of them was an abstract painting of the sea that I believe is his best effort yet. He also sent us a great picture of his daughter Dayanita with Kelly. You can see it all in our photo gallery.
Cousins Dayanita and Kelly
Homeschool continues unabated. The kids are jumping right into it and doing great.
We are continuing forward on refining the way we are doing homeschool this year. Both Kelly and Christian finished at a pretty good time yesterday, but there were five pages of a book they needed to read that they did not get read. After one day, I am cancelling the “bible” program supplied by Sonlight. They are way commercial and filled with platitudes for both of the programs. Since Christian is reading through the bible, I am going to have him continue to do that and get Kelly started on it, too. We will continue to do the things we normally do as a family and they will continue their memorization. Other than that, everything is just fine. Their first piano lesson is today, so they will start getting up at 7:00 to do piano practice tomorrow morning. We will try to get to bed earlier tonight than last night (10:00).
We really had a pretty good first day of school. I think I might have loaded up Kelly a little bit too much, because she worked straight through until three (not including lunch) and still did not get everything done. Christian got everything done by around nine in the morning, but he had to redo quite a bit of work. One of the things he likes to do is find shortcuts. Instead of writing down answers, he draws arrows. We will work on that. We should be able to get all the workloads tweaked to something reasonable within a week or two. The kids have a summer piano lesson on Wednesday, so they will add piano practice to their plans starting on Thursday. Lorena is planning to sign them up for swimming lessons again starting after Labor Day so they will be getting plenty of exercise. It is great to be going again, but it will take a little while for a new organization to get worked out.
We got back from our church convention at Saginaw last night at around 6:30. Christian stood up to profess his love for Christ in the meeting on Saturday evening, so we were all quite happy. Everyone was pretty tired last night, but the kids cleaned up the bonus room and took care of the twin cat sisters before going to bed. Today is the first day of homeschool and the kids are quite excited to get started.
We are going to run down to Saginaw after I get off work today to go to a church convention. I will be out of the loop until Monday. We are all very much looking forward to being inspired and seeing old friends and family.
Jay and Karen Nelson invited us to go see their daughter Lenore play in the Corvallis Junior Symphony. We had an absolutely great time. We are going to have to do more of that. There is a very famous band that plays a lot of Latin music in Portland that will be coming to Corvallis to play with this same orchestra later in the year. We are planning to go. A whole bunch of our friends showed up at the performance. Everyone enjoyed it very much.
I just finished buying the tickets for our trip to Puerto Vallarta. It is going to be a great time, too.
I installed Fedora Core 4 this weekend and it only took me a couple of ours to get it networked and working properly with the printer. I really struggled with that previously. I think I am getting better at this and Fedora is getting much easier to use. I have the first week of class for each of the kids entered into the system, printed out, and in their binders. We are pretty much ready to go.
Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah sold their farm in Newberg. I do not know how soon they will need to get out. They plan to rent a place in Portland for six months to a year to decide what they want to do. They seem to be pretty up beat about the whole deal. I am sure Grandpa Milo is tired of taking care of the place. It is seventeen acres with a half-acre pond, two waterfalls, a beach, a cabana, a Japanese garden, etc., etc.
Last night we all went outside and sat on the lawn between about 9:30 and 10:30 to watch the meteor shower. We all saw several magnificent falling stars. We want to make this an annual event. Maybe next year we will to out to some place in eastern Oregon so we can get a clearer view with less light pollution.
For the most part, I worked on Christian’s lesson plan last evening. He is going to be studying some amazing stuff this year. We went through it and he feels pretty good about it. The main thing we are doing right now is get ready for convention at Saginaw. I got us a hotel close by so we will not have to drive so far.
Last night I sat down at the computer and punched in a weeks worth of lesson plans for Kelly. I do not know why I did not think of doing this before. One of the biggest chunks of work I had to do every night last year was to write up the daily lesson plans each night for each of the kids. If I can do a week of lesson plans at a time on the weekends, that will allow me to concentrate more on just teaching the kids during the week.
Kelly saw the first lesson plan and was very worried that she will not be able to get everything done. I sat down with her, and we went through the lesson plan for the first day. We agreed that she should be able to get through most of it before lunch. She showed me that on Wednesday, she had a HUGE math assignment. We will leave it like it is and see how she does. I told her not to work past the point of frustration. If it is too much, we will pencil the changes in this weeks lesson plan and move Friday’s (and possibly Thursday’s) work out until week two. She has a ton of reading to do, but she really loves to read and the first books are just super. One of the big time consumers from last year was that Kelly needed to spend a lot of time reading on different countries around the world from the
I will work on Christian’s lesson plan tonight. He has been working very hard to get the money in his piggy bank up to $100. I told Kelly and Christian that when they got that much money together, we could start their savings accounts. I have changed my mind a little bit about what I want them to do with their money. For now, they will be saving 30% of their money for school, 10% will go for retirement savings, 10% will go to charity, and the remainder, they can spend on whatever they would like.
We had a really nice night last night. Lorena made us a wonderful dinner of fresh corn on the cob, a seafood salad, and some quesadillas for the kids. After dinner, Kelly, Christian, and I worked on our drawing while we listened to classical music. It really is a wonderful drawing program for beginning artists (Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad). We are getting to the point where we might want to post some of drawings here to show everyone what we are doing. If we have enough time, we are going to try to continue our drawing during the school year.
Christian and Kelly (especially Christian) has expressed a strong interest in earning money, so I have given them some extra stuff to do. They washed the cars so far, but I think I am going to have them start spreading barkdust, too. At the very beginning of the school year, Lorena is going to take the kids down to Washington Mutual Savings and Loan to start savings accounts. I am going to teach them how to administer their money using GnuCash on the Linux system. We will start out by teaching them how to divide their money judiciously . Fifty percent of their money will go in the bank for college, ten percent will go to charity, ten percent will be saved for retirement, and the will be able to spend the remainder.
We are starting to work on getting the bonus room ready to start for the new school year. I have already prepared the lesson plan for the first day of class. I am going to start trying to do a week at a time. At the beginning of each week we will put all of the plan and the necessary materials for the week in each of their binders. At the end of the week, we will file their work in the filing cabinet so they do not have to carry all their work around with them all the time.
Today, I am going to try to get us a hotel room for Saginaw convention in Cottage Grove. We are very much looking forward to going to convention. I got the approval on Monday for the time off at work. Lorena is going to buy new outfits for all of us. Christian, Kelly and I will go to Staples to buy school supplies and notebooks for notes and drawings at convention this weekend.
Louise and Malia Doolittle dropped by yesterday evening for a visit. We talked for a couple of hours. I am working on getting a motel for us for going to convention at Saginaw. We are getting ready to start homeschool in a couple of weeks. Everything is really pretty quiet.
We had a pretty uneventful weekend this weekend. I worked with my friend, Roger Morgan, from ATS to make up some rosettes with apple, star, and jalapeno shapes on them on Saturday. They came out great. On Sunday, we tried to go to gospel meeting in Boring in the evening, but we got half way there and got stuck in a traffic jam, so we had to turn around and go home.
Yesterday, Ron was supposed to have a CNC laser vendor give him a demo of their equipment at our Quality Corners facility in Idaho. The guy showed up, but could not get the demo to work because of some driver issues. I have been working with a friend here to get some sample parts made using a CNC router. We are planning to cut the parts on Saturday morning.
I have also spun back up my effort to develop a Linux based machine vision project. I loaded Fedora Core 4 onto an old computer at home, loaded the software I had written previously, and it ran perfectly. I think I will keep working on it as I have time. I am going to define a minimum level of functionality I want to have before I put the code out for public consumption. Then, I will define two or three other additional levels of functionality that follow a logical growth path. It was pretty fun getting the code going.
Lorena made a good sized batch of peach freezer jam yesterday. She is going to make another batch today. The kids enjoyed picking blueberries so much, they are planning to go out and pick wild blackberries at Jim and Joann Waldo’s house today. They are thinking of making some jam.
I installed Fedora Core 4 Linux on one of the computers at home last night. I set it up with the KDE desktop and KDevelop C/C++ programming development environment. It keeps getting better and better. In addition, I posted a couple of photos of Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah from the birthday dinner here.
Grandpa Milo’s 76th birthday
Yesterday was Grandpa Milo’s 76th birthday. In the morning, I called him up and aske he and Grandma Sarah to come over to our house for dinner. They came over and we had a very nice time. We got a cake, made tacos, and just sat around the table and talked. I took a couple of pictures that I will post here over the next couple of days.
We had a fun night drawing last night. All we really drew was flying saucers with people and stuff in them. Today, though we are scheduled to draw some new stuff. I think the key word for the next lesson is contour lines and one of the items we draw is a snake. Lorena took this picture a couple of weeks ago when the kids picked their blueberries. I just love it.
Picking blueberries
I mowed the lawn this weekend, but did very little else other than go to work for a couple of hours both on Saturday and Sunday. The kids played. Lorena worked in the yard. We went to the fellowship meeting at the Waldo’s on Sunday. I did, however take some time to post a few pictures. Here is a great one. Notice the hula dancer doing her thing to attract customers.
Hula dancing and lemonade sales