STEM class

The girls took a STEM class at the local Christian school this year for their science requirement. I just ran across this video which features the different units and projects they covered.

Visiting Stonehenge

We are studying ancient history in school this year, and we were reading about Stonehenge one day. I had the girls make a replica out of playdough, and then remembered that there is a life size replica not too far from us. We grabbed our coats and camera, got coffee at Starbucks and headed east. 45 minutes later were were across the river in WA and standing here....

This was built 100 years ago as a WWI memorial.

These girls are SO goofy!

And this was the view...

First Day of School

When I opened the blinds this morning, I noticed a beautiful, full rainbow in the sky. We ended up seeing a couple throughout the morning, and at times there were double rainbows. 

We are starting back to school slowly this year. I'm not quite ready and the core of our curriculum has not yet arrived, so we just did a little work today. We also have to go back to Fairview/Gresham twice this week, so that makes things a bit tricky as well. Unfortunately all our medical/dental care is in or near Portland and because of insurance we can't change it to anything closer. So this week it's back for an orthodontist appointment one day, and back the next for some personal appointments with friends.

As far as school is concerned, we are trying several new things this year - a new math curriculum, a new core curriculum, and on Fridays the girls will take 3 classes at the local Christian school. They offer homeschooling classes and this year they will take conversational Spanish, Language Arts and Marine Biology. I'll drop them off at 10 and pick them up at 3 each week. I'm really hoping they connect with other kids their age in this community.

Sydney Grace

8th grade

Kayleigh Alexa

7th grade

The day ended with a beautiful display of clouds and a touch of color in the sky.

Presentation Night

We have wrapped up our Classical Conversations year....our third (and final) year! I'm so grateful we were able to be part of this community the past three years. It runs in a 3-year cycle, which means we participated in all 3 cycles! We had planned to continue, having the girls go through as many Challenge years as possible, but doors have been closing and we've made the decision to end our time with the Classical Conversations group.

This year Kayleigh was in the Foundations and Essentials classes. She worked hard to become a memory master, which means she memorized and recited (several times) ALL of the year's memory work. This included the following:

• 161 Timeline events
• 45 Presidents
• 24 History sentences
• 24 Science sentences
• 24 English grammar definitions
• Multiplication tables 1-15, squares, cubes, laws and formulas
• John 1:1-7 in Latin and English
• Latin vocabulary
• US states and capitals / major mountains, rivers, territories, lakes, bays and other geographical features of the US

Here is Kayleigh receiving her award with the other two students in our community who accomplished this goal.






Sydney participated in the 7th grade class called Challenge A. She had a great year and I'm amazed at the material they covered. They studied 6 different strands and did the following in each strand...

• Latin - memorized at least 150 vocabulary words and covered noun declensions and verb conjugations
• Science - wrote 10 research papers, participated in science fair and studied anatomy
• Math - lots and lots of equations!
• Rhetoric - learned about creation and began studying logical fallacies
• Geography - learned about every country in the world and learned to draw the entire world (see her final map below)
• Literature/Writing - read 10 books and wrote 10 persuasive essays for each book

Here is Sydney reading one of her persuasive essays at Presentation night. If it sounds a bit formulaic, it is. They learned the form of writing a persuasive essay and started with a very basic outline. As the year progressed, they essays developed and sounded less and less formulaic. This particular essay is from about halfway through the year.




I will miss the structure and accountability of being involved in this program. It really kept us on track and was far more rigorous than we would have been on our own. However, it seems God has different plans for us next year so we are once again stepping out on our own.

Faces of History - Betsy Ross

This was our third year participating in a local Classical Conversations community. Kayleigh was in a Foundations class in the mornings and in the Essentials class (which I taught) in the afternoon. The final writing assignment for the Essentials class is to write a "Who Am I?' paper, and our time period this year was American History. 

Pictured above (back row left to right) William Penn, Sacajawea, Amelia Earhart, Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy and Alexander Hamilton.
On the floor....Pocohontas, (another) Benjamin Franklin and Barak Obama.

my Betsy Ross....

I was recording her presentation, but accidentally stopped the recording. I missed a little bit, but here are the two videos of her reading her paper to the class.

Science Fair

This past weekend was the Science Fair for three different Classical Conversations Challenge communities. We joined forces and combined our students so there would be more competition. In the Challenge A section, there were 11 students and Sydney placed 4th with her "A-maze-ing Plants" experiment.

The experiment was to determine whether or not a maze would affect the growth rate of a plant. She took shoeboxes and painted them black on the inside and cut a hole in the top to introduce a light source. Then we created a maze in one that the plant would have to grow around in order to reach the light source. She planted runner bean seeds in pots, placed the pots inside the boxes and shut them with the lids. Each day she would open the boxes and record the progress.

She kept a lab journal, writing down everything she did during the past 10 weeks. She also had to write a final research paper and create a display board for the science fair. Each student gave a 5 minutes presentation to the judges and answered any questions they might have had.

Eva and Sydney - the two Challenge A students from the Gresham community

giving her presentation to the judges

School - Community Day

Every Monday we attend our Classical Conversations community day at a local church. Sydney's class starts at 8:30 and Kayleigh and I lead the rest of the community in worship at 9am. I have the morning to watch Sydney and/or Kayleigh's classes and also prepare for my afternoon class. At noon we all break for an hour of lunch, then at 1pm we return to classes for another two hours. 

Sydney and her classmates explaining a math law to the rest of the community.

I teach the Essentials class in the afternoon - we focus on grammar, math games and writing. I put on too many accessories as an example of what happens when we use too many dress-ups and decorations in our writing.

Back to School

Another school year is upon us....this one brings some changes now that Sydney is a 7th grader. We still go to our Classical Conversations on Mondays, but Sydney has started the Challenge Program and her curriculum is pretty intense. I'm hoping we find a good groove quickly. Right now it feels like we are drowning a bit (but some of that is due to the timing of our trip and the fact that she missed a week). 

Sydney Grace - 7th grade

Kayleigh Alexa - 6th grade

Last Day of Classical Conversations

Every Monday (24 weeks) for this past school year we have gone to our homeschool group called Classical Conversations. We meet at a church and the kids break up into classes by age. For 3 hours in the morning we cover new grammar (memory work in 7 subjects: history, timeline, science, math, latin, english and geography), a science experiment, fine arts, presentations (public speaking) and review. This was our second year participating, and my first year tutoring a class.

On our final day this year, we had the local fire department come and help us out with the "cages" the kids had built to protect their eggs. The fireman took the egg cages to the top of the ladder and then dropped them one by one to see which ones would actually protect the egg. 

my class 

During the afternoon, the girls participated in another class that covered English grammar, math and writing. Their final project was called Faces of History - they chose a person from the Middle Ages and wrote a paper about them. Each student dressed up like their person and read the paper in class, while the rest of the class tried to guess who they were.

Kayleigh was the artist Berthe Morisot

Sydney was Eleanor of Aquitane

Kayleigh and her good friend, Annakate (who is moving to Sunriver this summer)