Wednesday, May 25, 2011

School's Out, sorta

Just posting like crazy today. Lots to catch up on. . .

The kids and I were very excited to finish our SWR for the year. I had hoped to get through list O for this year, but we DID make it through list N instead. Pretty darn close and M and N lists had all the review words, yay!! And not only that, we were able to do 40 words a week [ OR more, shsh, don't tell] AND do a couple of enrichments for each list. The kids have progressed so much in their reading ability and in their stamina that it is just easier to do the assignments. I feel like next year the 2 of them doing SWR will need to be done separately. They have different needs to work on and I found they either distracted or held up one another. I also need to see if the little one could do some things. I am never real consistent with having older kids teach younger ones, so here's my chance to try again. The next 2 could easily play phonogram games, read pre-school books, and stuff with the youngest. I will have to remember to plan that in- maybe while I do SWR with one and they can switch off. Lots of time to think about it. . .

At the end of our year we did a final spelling diagnostic. I don't do them every month, because one just doesn't test well, yet. . . If I don't count the obvious letters he confused the sound for [f for v, r for w etc] then he spells fairly well. They are both solid second graders in reading and spelling, and this is with one that seemed would NEVER learn to read. So it is a great big HUGE accomplishment. We will start back again at the end of August. For now, we will just enjoy reading, work on some vision therapy for one and handwriting review for the other.

I would still like to finish up some of the history we didn't get to, some of the science and continue to work on the math until done, but in reality, this is purely optional and probably not likely. . . but you never know. . .

Science Project

Here is the kids' science project display.


I am sorry to say that the cracked egg did not make it. We opened the egg and there was a full grown chick inside, so he definitely survived the crack, but I don't think he survived being rolled around by his earlier to hatch siblings. :( live and learn.

The Final Cut!

Here are the long promised movies we made of our chick hatching!!
We ended up with 10 baby chicks. 2 eggs never developed and 6 died before hatching. 1 of the 10 needed 'help' to hatch. He is the little yellow runt. Half way through the hatching process I put the rest of the eggs in cartons. I will always wonder if we might have saved a couple more by doing this at 'lockdown' [the day you stop turning them]. I think I might also have the hatch in the bathroom, so we can easily bring the temp. and humidity in the room up to the incubator level so that opening and removing chicks from the incubator would be more doable. I did not like hatched chicks pecking on the in progress chicks. The kids won special recognition at the local homeschool science fair for being the most fun exhibit. [Yep, took laptop and showed the videos, live animals not allowed.]
I highly recommend the backyardchickens.com forum for information and support! A great group.

Here's an overview movie:


Here's a nice hatch:


The kids made their own video of one of the hatchings.
We had many friends over that day to see the amazing miracles!

They were such cute fluff balls and fun to watch and play!
This was the best 'science project' ever, I highly recommend it.

next post: rats.