A whole year went by

I can't believe it's been over a year since I came on this blog. Where has the time gone? Well, instead of mom to 4 boys, I now have 5 of them. I had a baby boy in June 2010. He is simply gorgeous. He is 9 months old now, and as spoilt as can be. My other boys are now, 15, 12 ,and the 10 year old twins. We are still homeschooling and I am in the middle of planning for next year. I'll have a 10th grader, a 7th grade , 2 5th graders and a 1 year old. Lord, help me!! I am going to try to post at least once a week, and keep this blog going.

It has been so long

School has been hectic as usual. No time to post. We still have 150 days of school, but who is counting. Some of what we originally started out with has been dropped, we have added new things and I think we finally have it right. More to follow.

This weekend, dh has been organising and arranging my school room- we have a lot of books and I am not the most organised 'gal' around. School can't start with the chaos it ended with, so this is our - or should I say 'his' weekend project. As for me, school was supposed to start this week on Monday but of course , that ain't happening. I completely changed my twins curriculum and the new one isn't even here yet. I am mostly ready for C, my 5th grader, except for science. You would think with a Maser's degree in Chemistry, science would be my favorite subject to teach and it is. The kids love it but I just hate planning for labs. We will be using Holt's Life science this year in 5th ( I think this is a Middle School Text) and my 8th grader is going to be doing Conceptual Integrated Science which I saw was for grades 11th-12th. Oh well! It will give him a good overview of Physics, Chemistry, Biology and earth science) which is what I want before he starts high school. There is a Conceptual Integrated Science Explorations which I saw was a 9th-10th grade text and probably would be more appropriate but I have these books already at home. I am not shelling money buying a book for $60 plus . J will start maths and do a Connect the thought course on Monday.

I just discovered Connect the Thoughts and the kids will use them to supplement their studies. They look like fun courses and the kids would have to think a lot with them. They are kind of expensive for me though so I am not sure if the younger ones would do these. J will start with Information: Right or Wrong on Monday.

Well, that is all for today. I am cooking Cassava Leaves, a typical Sierra Leonean dish which my husband and my 3 younger kids love. Poor J. He eats our food but it is not a favorite and struggles through them. But I try not to torture him more than 2 or 3 times a week. Not so the other 3. I took them to Sierra Leone for 9 months 5 years ago and all they can remember now was the beaches and eating cassava leaves every week. I cook it like once a month and I am always hearing,'Mom, when are you going to cook cassava leaves next'. I have no idea why they like it. In my opinion, that is one of the least 'pleasing' to the sight Sierra Leonean dishes.

SUMMER WEEK

So my dh has this week off and we planned all these day trips. But the kids are all sick. Monday, we took them to Seaside Heights and even though 3 out of 4 were sick, they had a great time swimming in the sea, walking on the board walk etc. But you could tell that they were really not feeling well. When we got home that night, we had throwing up galore from them all. Yesterday was supposed to be our Cape May zoo and dolphin watching trip. Dh and I left them at home and we went to NY Chinatown. We took the train to NY and got the subway to Chinatown. It was a great experience. I love NY for day trips but I can never live there. The noise, the crowd, the traffic and yes, in Chinatown the smells were all in a class of there own. We walked around for hours, then I had a massage, we walked someone and had dinner at a Singapore restaurant. The food was spectacular, and the great thing was : We DID NOT HAVE THE KIDS WITH US. We got back home around 9pm, kids were doing much better. Today, I am spending the day by myself and I will post me about it later.

Pictures from Seaside Heights.

I saw a musical Singin', Dancin', A Little Romancin' at the Hunterdon Hills playhouse in NJ. It was alright but the important thing for me was that I was out of more house and there were no kids ( or husband for that matter)

Parent-Cub Scout Weekend

Dh and the 3 younger kiddoes went for an overnight parent-cub scout weekend. Here are some of the pictures that they took.

SUMMER!

Well it's here and so far the kids seem to be enjoying it. If only for the fact that they get to play on their 'electronic systems' for an hour a day, not just weekends. My 14 and 10 yr olds had 4-H camp for a week- sleepover for my 14 yr old, 8 till 5pm for the 10 year old. I don't trust him to do a 1 week sleep away from home yet. He did a 1 night away on the Friday and we picked him up on Saturday with his brother. This weekend, the 3 younger ones are away on a cub scout parent weekend with their dad, then on Sunday my 14 year old goes away to a church camp for a week. After that, it is Vacation Bible School for 1 week, then I have 1 week to clean and organise my school room, and then it's 1 week away at Wildwood , and then BACHK TO SCHOOL. Not looking forward to that. After the summer, the kids never want to start, they are whiny, they have forgotton almost everything, and the first 3 weeks back are a nightmare. When they were younger, I never gave them more than 6 weeks off in the summer. But I just need a break. Complete time off from school. So they are getting 10 weeks off this summer. And it will be a nightmare starting again. I have some pictures to post about some of what we have been doing so far this summer. I'll try to do this over the weekend when I have a quiet house.

So, we are not required to do any testing in our state, but I do anyway for those just in case.

My twins took the California Achievement Test a few weeks ago and I just got back their results. I looked through the tests and went over it with them. They made a lot of careless mistakes but even with those, they were above average in everything. L was in the 91st percentile for reading vocab, 99th for reading comprehension, 97 for maths computation, 96 for maths concepts and problems, 99 for language mechanics, 80 for language usage and structure and 85 for spelling. This is exactly what I expected for him although I was a little disappointed with his maths scores. I expected 99 for both of these. This was where they made a lot of errors. The 8o percentile for the language usage and structure was not very suprising. We used CLE LA but I found that they were not retaining much with it and added Rod and Staff a few months before the end of the year. We will try to do a bit more grammar this coming year, and with Lively Latin , they should do a bit better next year. R also did exactly as I expected. He is a bit more advanced in Reading and Spelling than L, but retaining those math facts is a problem sometimes. He got 98 percentile in reading Vocab, 99 in reading comprehension, 85 in maths computation(yep!), but 98 in maths concepts and problems. 93 percentile in language mechanics, 80 in Language usage and structure, and 91 percentile in spelling. The percentile scores mean that he did better than that percentage of students in the norm group. The long and short of it all is that they are above average in everything and I haven't ruined them another year.