Gearing Up For School :)

For the last little bit we've been getting ready to start school. Sounds a bit early doesn't it??  I want to get the 3 month reading program done before our newest little Miss gets here in Nov so we're starting early. Yet another reason to love homeschooling :)

We have a old dresser in our dining room/living area that is our School Dresser. We also have some stuff in a 3 drawered orange walmart plastic 'thing' for lack of the correct name for it. It has deep drawers and can hold a lot of stuff!! We call it the 'orange thing.' Anyway, the other day we took EVERYTHING out of both the dresser and the orange thing put it all on the table, sorted through it, threw some of it out, re organized it, added to it and put it all back in. Sounds confusing.. it was. :) We did it with organization and ease of use in mind, placing tape 'nametags' on several drawers so no one gets too confused or forgets where things go.

The orange thing now holds a drawer for CRAFTS which is not all our craft stuff but whatever we use on a weekly/daily bases. It also has a COLORING drawer which holds just coloring books, crayons ect. The last, top, drawer is a drawer for me called EXTRA's. It holds things like flashcards, booklets, counters, ect. It will also hold my schedule book and everything else I need close at hand.

The Dresser has a drawer for each of these : J's grade 2 math marking paces,  books, the reading program, J, L and E. In that order. E can open the bottom drawer but not the other two so it made sense to put hers on the bottom. The kids drawers have all their paces for the whole year in them. That's a LOT of paces!! E was VERY excited to find that some of hers were PURPLE.. :) Word building :) All three of the school aged children did notice that R did not have a drawer and ALL THREE of them thought that wasn't fair. SO I'm going to get a R tote and put all her 'to do' stuff in it. She'll want to be at the table with the others if Baby J isn't up and so I'm going to make her up some fun stuff to do while the others work on paces.

Last year I kept all J's finished work in a medium sized red and clear tote that sits on top of the orange thing. I'm not too sure what I'm going to do this year. I might use the same tote or a slightly larger one and then make dividers in it, top to bottom, and each of them will have a section?? Or something... I'll probably figure it out before too long.

Then today I REALLY NEEDED to get some sort of a chart, schedule ect written up. Now that Papa is back at work it's time to get everyone ready for a scheduled day setting before we start school full time.. which may be as early as next week.. or maybe the week after.. we do still have chickens to butcher. Oh and no worries we'll still have TONS of time for summer activities as 'school' will only take a couple of hours every morning we'll still have our afternoons and 'PRO D' type days. Anyway I went online this morning after writing a very rough draft of what I was looking for and I found it on here... www.dltk-cards.com  
Very cool website with a very elastic chore chart that you can retro fit into just about anything. I made Morning Chore, Afternoon Chore, Daily Chore, School Chart (which I'm not sure I'm going to use) Weekly Chore charts as well as a blank time frame fill in chart that I'm going to use for a weekly 'thing' chart. You know like Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we'll do a extra 1/2 hour of P.E or lego or something and Tuesdays and Wednesdays we bake cookies.. Those are just examples but I find it's really helpful to write this kind of stuff down as I have a bit of pregnancy induced sieve brain.  Each chart has an area to check off though I think we are just going to use them as reminders. Now I make a list every morning and it's always got the same stuff on it.. or very close anyway, these charts will just help everyone know what we're doing and give us some structure on when and what. I'm going to tape them to the wall and use them as references.. if we start having trouble we'll try making up new ones every week and marking them off... but that sounds like a lot of paper to me. I may get them laminated and just use a washable marker if it comes to that.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/user/Desktop/Unused/Morning%20Chores%20chart.htm This link SHOULD take you to one of the charts I made up this morning. I've already added bread to the bottom of the chart..  If I find I have too many changes I can always go make a new chart SUPER easy :)

Papa's sister Auntie R said she'd see if she can figure out some kind of a PE program for the kids so that's another thing off my lap :) Some sort of endurance building running/biking/stretching/strength building umm.. Chart.. so I don't have to figure it out day by day :) Thanks R!!

So now the only thing, that I can think of at the moment, we need to do before we start school is find the CD with all the ABC's songs on it. I apparently have the songs saved on our external hard drive we use to back everything up if I can't find the CD. Normally I would just go get them off the computer but our main computer took a deadly nose dive awhile ago so we are only using the laptop.  I also haven't checked my main teaching books for the course and it might be stuck in one of them. Hopefully I'll find it somewhere as it belongs to the school :) I know it's around here somewhere as I clearly recall getting it back from Mrs. T. I probably put it some where 'safe.' Oh dear!!

Separating the Cream :)

We bought this cream separator several years ago and because we've been low on butter for months now Papa dragged it into the house and set it up. I've had VERY little to do with one ever. In fact the only time I'd ever seen one work before was watching Grandma Griggs use hers the 1st couple of years we were married.. I'd never used it or cleaned it or anything. So this was Papa's baby!! lol. The 1st night he got quite a bit of cream with minimal mess. COOL!! Here he is, above, working the machine. From what I understood, you put the warm milk in the top open part and crank the handle and cream comes into the white bucket and milk into the metal milking bucket. Papa made that handle MOVE!! The cream was SO thick it took FOREVER to get to the end of the spout, never mind fill the bucket (which is about how much cream I would have gotten from 3 almost 4 gallons if I'd hand skimmed it. ) We got half a bucket full... 

And the next morning it was HARD. Hmmm.... somethings wrong here?? LOL.

So the next night we tried it again... still hard cream the next morning and not super lots of it. Now two things started running through my head.. our cow is really weird with her cream.. or we're doing something wrong! I figured it was probably the second one.. how strange could Maggie be?? 

So Papa started asking around. My uncle thought he was doing everything right as long as he put it together right. So we checked the system.. changed one little thing.. nope the cream is still sparse and SOLID the next morning. Then we happened to go to my folks and Papa and I were talking about it there and my Dad pipes up and says 'Your going to fast! Slow that thing down and it'll work a lot better.. there should be a bell that tells you how fast to go.' There is no bell. BUT bonus we now know what is up!! So Papa goes SLOW. We get LOTS of cream.. and lots of milk in the cream. So he speeds up just a bit. Now we can SEE the line of milk and cream coming out of the cream trough!! So he speeds up until it's just cream!! YEAH!!!

I have to admit though I'd rather skim off the cream later when the milk is cool.. lol. I only washed the machine once and that's not why.. what a MESS!! Go to fast and cream and milk squirt out holes everywhere!! Papa, after several weeks, is finally getting the hang of the thing and he's the only one who uses it. 

 The milking area all cleaned up! Under the table you can see Papa's carboy of beer waiting to be kegged. That metal tall thing is a keg but it's broken or something so he's only using one at the moment :) The clear box of colored things is the bath toy box.. when the kids get an inch to have a bath they get one in that big sink!! 

A Tired Monkey.

He was naked because he kept getting his clothes wrapped around his feet when he tried to walk across the floor and it was nice out so nice and warm in the house. Papa snapped this picture just before he put him to bed. Walking really is hard work!! Even in his sleep he DID not want to give up his toys :)