Kittens are growing

The kittens are growing!  They are fast and bouncy and fun!  They chase ping pong balls and feathers and anything that looks like a toy or a game.  They have learned to use the litter box outside and Kaylee is learning how to scoop that!  They get to take turns coming inside for some cuddle time and play time throughout the days.  Mittens will sneak her way inside whenever she can as well. 

There are 3 boys and one girl.  Felix, Covey, & Gravy are the boys.  Rona is the girl. 

Mittens brought her kittens a dead baby bunny 3 times in one week.  She brought it up to the kennel, put it in, and stepped aside for them to eat.  She knew they needed more than just her milk at this point in their growth.  What an amazing motherly instinct.  So it was at this point that we decided to buy kitten food.  We bought some canned food and dry kitten chow and they eat that stuff up!  Some of the kittens are territorial when it comes to food.  One of them, Gravy, would not let any other kittens touch those dead baby bunnies and he would NOT let go when we tried to get it away from him.  Another kitten, Felix, the largest of the bunch, is territorial about his kitten chow.  He puts his paws over the entire container to make it harder for his siblings to get to the food.  And sometimes he will intentionally and forcefully stick his paw in the way of his siblings or on them to stop them from getting a share. 

Its likely that the 3 boys will be heading to the Owen's to join their household.  Madison wants one kitten and Melissa Owen wants 2.  We will see!! They head to the vet in a week to get shots.  This has been so fun for all!

Messy Games 2020

The Lower Elementary at Oak Farm has a tradition at the end of every school year to do Messy Games.  The third graders come up with the game ideas and they go to station after station of messy races and games.  With "homeschool" happening, messy games had to also move to home.  So we participated :-)

Our messy games were compiled by favorites from each kid in our household.

We had raw egg on a spoon races.

Throw the raw egg as high in the air as you can contests

Shaving cream on the head and cheetos throwing

Ice cream sundaes built on top of our heads complete with chocolate syrup and a cherry

Whipped cream in a pie tin shoved into faces

Popcycle sword fighting

Find the bubble gum with your mouth and no hands inside the whipped cream pie on the table

And run around getting more whipped cream on each other and then dipping in the pond to wash off!!

Fun times!!  It will be a "messy games" to remember forever!

Homeschool & e-Learning

We spent about 10 weeks doing homeschool due to the COVID-19. This has been a whirlwind adventure. Oak Farm, being a very hands on learning type of school, had to scramble to figure out a plan of how to function as a school and support the learning from home. It has been difficult on everyones' part. The school created a website that held all the resources for every class and grade level. Each set of teachers put Montessori works onto the site for parents to print off or follow or accomplish online. Many materials needed printed in order to function as a learning work. Many teacher lessons were placed as recorded videos online with follow up work to print. Many "zoom" meetings were scheduled for each class at different times and for different subjects; from middle school all the way down to the toddler classroom. I spent my Sunday evenings going through the upcoming weeks' calendar of zoom meetings and the teachers' lessons and options for work, printing materials and worksheets and other resource materials. 

We created Montessori-like shelving by subject and placed works on the shelves as "choices." Later we rearranged the shelves by child, keeping all that childs' work from all subjects in the same vicinity. Owen had his own cupboard of "works" that I would change up daily. The kids would start the week with a work plan, learning what works were available to them and choosing how they would spend their work cycle. Even Owen got into routine with this "work cycle." He knew everyone was doing "work" and he would go to his cupboard corner and pick out works to do independently. Middle school was very independent and we did not see a lot of Jaxton through all this work cycle stuff. He had his regular middle school classes one after the other all over zoom. Thankfully the middle school curriculum did not have to change much through all of this. 

 This all was very challenging because all the kids would have questions for me or need help with a work, it seemed like constantly. I continually encouraged them to do work that they could do with no help. Often, however, it was rather boredom or loneliness that they wanted to work with me or could not focus without encouragement. Their learning did continue, and we did our best. It was fun to watch them learn things and see their brains working hard. I enjoyed those "aha" moments they each had when a concept clicked or a math solution was found. Or when a book or project was finally complete. I also enjoyed doing "3 period lessons" for Owen and watching his cute eyes light up to learn that when the caterpillar came out of his house, there wasn't all of a sudden a new bug, but he had actually turned into a butterfly! These were special moments. 

 Other special moments included the kids teaching the kids. Kaylee would take the opportunity to work with Nathan on his numbers, cursive, or math work. And she would see Owen getting distracted and create a "name tracing work" for him to do at his table while I was busy with another child. Cooper took Owen on a color scavenger hunt while I was busy with Dawson and he was waiting for me to help him with math. It was a well rounded effort and all of us were involved. 

 We struggled with focus some. And we struggled with not wanting to do work at all. We struggled with choosing a morning work cycle and then switching to an afternoon work cycle. We struggled when the work cycle just didn't work at all. We struggled with fighting, arguing, kids bothering kids. We struggled when I could not find myself a good "teacher" and needed space. We struggled with emotions, frustrations, messy kitchens, lunch and multiple snack times, rainy days being stuck inside, and a constant messy house. 

 We did Cosmic Kids yoga for PE. Yoga as Trolls, Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, and others. We did work with friends virtually over personal zoom meetings. We learned from Mo Willems, the author of Elephant Piggie books, how to doodle, write stories, and make games. We learned about the weather from the Fort Wayne Channel 21 Weatherman who gave us lessons over you tube. We learned many recipes as we did virtual cooking classes with Kids Taste Buds Kitchen. We learned how to draw cartoons using you tube Art Hub and we did art projects over zoom with Grandma in Utah. 

 Boy am I glad this is all over with. School has ended and summer is here. A mix of positive and negative emotions revolving around COVID-19 homeschooling.

Chef Dawson

Dawson is our chef!  He loves to cook. He has been cooking a lot during our homeschool days. He made pretzels from scratch one day using the kids kitchen zoom class. Another day he made a yogurt parfait that looked like a professional! He loves to cook pancakes, eggs and bacon. Whenever I’m cooking he wants to cook right alongside me. He wants to own a restaurant when he grows up and he has named it the fast cookers! Go Dawson!  You have so much potential!

Owen writes his name

Owen was signing Grandma's Mother's Day card and he truly wrote his name the way he understands it.  He made a big circle for the O.  Then he made a zig zag line for his W.  He intentionally made a squiggle for each letter E and N.  I was so impressed!  He is such a sweet and smart boy!

The Friendly Porcupine

This was a story that Dawson wrote that he is so very proud of.  His teacher was brilliant in coming up with this method of story telling.  She broke out the process into several steps.  First, Dawson was to choose creature pictures, cut them out and color them and put them on a popcicle stick.  Then we were to go outside in the trees and grass and play with them.  As we play with them, we come up with a story line of what is happening, making sure that there is a problem our creature has that we can solve for them.  Dawson loved this!  He and Kaylee and Nathan all printed and colored them and played together and naturally there were many "conflicts" for the characters that the kids pretended to solve.  As they played and replayed, Dawson came up with his storyline that he liked best.  We took a picture of each piece of the story with my camera. 

The next step in this process was to write down the "beginning,"  "middle,"  and "end" of the story; the middle portion containing the conflict.  After getting this done, he was to read it over and captialize all the beginning letter of a sentence and all the proper nouns of characters' names.  We had to look for periods at the end of the sentences and change them to questions or exclaimation points as needed.  Last he used some quotation marks in a few places where he noticed his characters were speaking.  After these edits, he separated his story according to the photos we took and wrote the corresponding sentences on a single sheet of lined paper.  Once each of the pieces of the story were written, we added the photo that went with each piece, and his storybook was created!!  

I was so proud of Dawson's hard work on this project, as well as his teacher's efforts to make this fun and exciting.  He worked so hard on this project that we actually printed his book out for him to keep.  Great work D!!