Carpenters This Weekend

This weekend we decided we can make things out of wood. We had a big piece of thin wood in our shed in the back, but its always foggy in the morning and rains like a rain forest here that the wood had green mold powderish stuff all over it. It was so gross! But I wiped it down with Vinegar and waited till it dried and then we got to work.

My son has this mental rank in his room, but if you put anything on it, it just falls through the holes, so the boys decided to make shelves for it to make it more useful for his games and stuff that he thinks he needs. 

So Joshua (my oldest 12) learned how to you a jig saw, and he was so excited. My husband Israel showed him how to measure the area and how to cut. I was pretty proud of Joshua of how focus he was on this project. Anyone who has an ADHD kid even on meds knows thats something. So here are some pictures.

Of course, what ever Dad and Big Brother is doing, Isaac is sure to copy

Joshua and Isaac

Keep in mind, it was kind of chilly outside!

Joshua learning how to measure 

Now Joshua is going in for the kill, with his awesome TMNT Glasses

Our chickens came out to see what all the fuss was about. They have been hanging out in our front yard lately.

Poor Isaac hated the noise. 

Daddy and Joshua

 Isaac being silly

I mention it was cold outside right! Well my husband still was outside in shorts and sandals SMH, only my husband. The kids wanted to come out only in shorts and nothing else. I still control them, so I made them put clothes on. 

They boys are still working on the finished products. It got way to cold today and now football is on. LOL, so I will post the new pictures of what they made.

Home Schooling a 7th Grader

We are finally into our 3rd week into of homeschooling. It has been a challenge to homeschool a 7th grader, and trying to also teach a 3 year old. Lets just say a ton of multitasking is involved. 

Not only do I get the challenge of dealing with 2 kids nine years apart, but I get to deal with a hyper 3 year old and a 12 year old with ADHD. But thats a whole other subject. So to get started on why I am homeschooling, it came to this. The school my son is attending is somehow making him fall behind in the learning curve and my son has learned that he can get away with half ass work to get good grades. Which in books shouldn't be allowed! Not to mention the children at the school my son was attending were so bad that the teacher was unable to teach the children, so no one was learning anything. Last was the kids at the school have been picking on my son, and that as just the last straw. Me going so many times to his school and seeing no results I had to take him out and figure I will homeschool him till my husband gets station somewhere else. 

Now the crazy part that no one tells you is how in the heck to start things, and how expensive homeschooling can be. I had no idea that it would take so much out of my pocket! So before I jump into those expensive curriculums, I figure I would go to the teacher store and buy workbooks to start him off at home. 

I went off the subjects he was already learning at school and then looked at his progress reports to see where he was falling behind in or where I thought he should get more one on one time and then got very lucky the lady running the teacher store was a prior teacher and helped me pick out some books.

^^  ^^

These are the books we bought, I went back on some grades to see if he really understood the information. I already knew last year the school was not a good one. 

Whats also great about these books, is that each story is a nonfiction one. So its like two birds one stone kind of think. (I'll post pictures later on of the infor inside the books)

This here is a blank Lesson plan that I also got at the teach store. 

I filled in the info on what subjects we hit each day and what we did. Pretty simple after you get the hang of it. 

We are going to switch to an online curriculum after January so its more structure.