Well Here We Are.

Another Christmas is over and New Year begun. You may have noticed the change again in our design. Never to remain the same I like change. I picked this fresh face for our blog and hope you like it as much as I for the New Year. I will likely change the template up a little for holidays but will return to this design as the main look throughout the year.
Currently I am downloading a free reading program for the month of January. For those who are interested in trying it out for themselves the site is Funnix as I understand it was created by the same man who made Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons. I took a peek at the first lesson, as I said I am currently downloading the whole thing. It looks pretty good so far. I will say this you need 2GB of free space to put the download and it is a slow download in four installments for all 220 lessons.
We continued schooling throughout the holidays when there was time. DH was off and took over teaching so I could manage to make up a curriculum to cover Oceanography. Bless him he handled it with flying colors.
The lesson I have made up is really comprehensive and I will likely post more on that unit later after we have had a chance to cover more of the subject matter.
We are also tackling measuring both in imperial and metric. Review for my son and new for DD. The unit is a light introduction using the pages from Learning Pages . You can become a member there for free and it is a small but useful site.
I have decided to bite the bullet as they say and buy a curriculum for math. I have decided on Life of Fred for my DS as it seems like it may be more independent and less repetitive then other curriculum's. He can pick math up quite readily. So I will keep you posted on how that goes also.
Our Christmas card exchange with other homeschoolers through a Yahoo group was a success although we are still waiting for one or two stragglers.
I wish I could say the same for our Christmas swaps with homeschoolers through another Yahoo group. My DD again did not get her swap in return, this makes it her second failed swap from that site. And she has gotten nothing back that we have done through the mail. I pray that she gets her second flat traveller back that we sent out at Christmas time as I organized it with other women on a Christian forum.
I have decided I really need to pull the stops out on the kids as they are eating their way through all I give them work load wise. So awhile ago I had printed out some 'popcorn' words on popcorn shapes. I can't remember where but it was really cute and they were just sitting there collecting dust. So I cleaned off a bulletin board and pinned all of them up. Then I made a paper popcorn bucket like you would get at the theatre on the wall below. I told my DD who loves popcorn that I would take her to the theatre for some of their popcorn when she had learned all the words and filled her 'bucket'. Well you can't have something like that going on without the other wanting in on the action. So I told my son I will make up a list of words equal in number to hers. When he learns to spell them correctly he can pick out a small prize also. I think I will make the words revolve around the vocabulary we are doing for Oceanography and that may also be on the list.
So we start 2011 off with a wonderful school day full of hope and promise of wonderful educational opportunities for the New Year.