Sheep

Inspired by reading the book "Mountain Born" for school.

Flowers, trees and clouds

Wizard of Oz

Addy reads to storytime kids

I read to storytime kids at the library. I read Puppies in the Snow. My storytime reader said she has that book and it's a really good one.

It goes up to 10 puppies, but Mama said maybe the storytime kids would get restless, but Miss Jane knew them a lot better than I did and she said just read 1 to 10.

The kids enjoyed the book. They counted with me. At the end, their mama dog was there to see them and she counted all the puppies to make sure all 10 were there, and we did the same.

When I was finished, they all clapped for me — the moms, the kids, grandmas, storytime teller.

Addy's turkey patch

This is my turkey design. This is for a contest. I had fun making it and I also hope I win because the winner gets $100.

If I win, they will make it into a real patch.


Note from Mom: Addy loves entering contests and I like that they give us a focus to learn something new in addition to our regular schoolwork. We read about this one in Farmers' Advance. The contest is to create the design for a Wild Turkey Management Cooperator patch. The DNR will give the patches to hunters who bring in a wild turkey for inspection in 2010.

Addy's patch is in the shape of a tom turkey, complete with beard. She added another turkey inside the design, at the bottom. Within that is a yellow turkey footprint.

Cutworm

I helped Daddy get enough cutworms to prove that cutworms are travelling into Michigan. I helped him prove it by giving him my cutworm moth out of my bug box. I went with him and looked for some more in the trap in a corn field.

Daddy gave me a cutworm moth to put in my bug box that I took to the fair, but I had to give it to him to prove that they're travelling into Michigan. He promised me that he'll get me one for next year.





Note from Mom: Addy said she felt proud of herself when she saw the results of her trips to check the trap with Bob published in the Pioneer ad, above bottom, in Michigan Farm News. Their trap is the one in the county at the tip of the Thumb (mustard color). Bob made the trap out of a milk jug, antifreeze and pheremone as an attractant. Addy sometimes went along this summer when Bob checked and emptied it. We sometimes wonder why schoolchildren are made to do meaningless, made-up projects when there is so much real and meaningful work in which they can participate. Not everyone has a father doing Extension research, but ...

Why I Want to Become a Farmer

by Addy, age 6

I want to be a farmer because my favorite part is going in the pens and helping my Uncle Duane to feed the calves. I also would like to be a farmer because I like nature and I think if I were a farmer I’d be around nature a lot.

I like to be a farmer, too, because you get to decide how much food your animals will eat and without getting too much or getting not enough.

I would like to be possibly a maple syrup farmer or a dairy farmer. My Grandma and Grandpa B. do maple syrup and my Grandma and Grandpa S. do dairy farming.

I have been practicing a lot. I am in 4-H and I also have some little corn plants by my turtle at home. I have been raising a bunny, which is really good practice, and I am going to move into the country and in the early spring help my B. grandparents with the maple syrup. I think when you’re making maple syrup it smells really good in the air.

I think that being a dairy farmer, the barn always smells good with manure. I have smelled when people are harvesting sugar beets, and I think it smells really good, but it doesn’t smell as good as fresh sugar beets. I’ve eaten a sugar beet before. They taste really good and crunchy.

I am going to go to Michigan State to be a farmer.

I would also like to be an astronaut. I think if there is any life at all up there, that I will be one of the first ones to discover it.

I am independent. Even though I am a girl, I would like to be a farmer.

Addy on the Horses Count web site

Thanks to Aunt Nini's work with the Horses Count in Michigan project, Addy's picture and short story are on this web site, also copied below:

http://www.horsescountinmichigan.com/YourHorseCounts/tabid/56/Default.aspx

"I don’t have my own horse, but I rode Sam for my sixth birthday. Horses are fun to ride and fun to look at and fun to pet. They’re good animals. I like all animals."

Butterflies

by Addy

A butterfly is like
a beauty-fly, a beauty-fly.

Oh butterfly, oh butterfly,
won’t you come and play with me?
Now go call all the butterflies you know;
call all monarchs, call all painted ladies,
call all swallowtails, call all leafwings.

And tell them to come play with me too.
I will not hurt you, don’t worry.

I would like to see how beautiful they are,
see all kinds.

I love butterflies.
I love all kinds of nature too.

The Ants in Pants Dance

by Addy

There once were these pants,
legs of ants,
feet of ants,
that always did the ants-in-pants dance.




Inspired by reading "Dancing Pants" by Shel Silverstein.

Addy and Dori

This is me and Dori. We made necklaces out of paperclips. We learned that each paperclip is one unit.

Note from Mom: Hey, who has my name for Christmas? I could use a new box of paperclips. This project took them all and now the girls don't want to give them back. We were doing a unit on measurement in our Singapore Primary Mathematics 1A book. We learned about measuring by household units, then progressed to standard measuring tools such as a ruler. And then we made paperclip jewelry. Why not?

Addy makes words

This is me, Addy. I am building compound words out of the cards that Mama wrote — the beginning and the ending.

Note from Mom: We use Explode the Code for our phonics learning. We're on Book 4. Addy was bored with the worksheets that day, so I turned the same thing into something a little more interesting.

Addy finishes books

I finished Homer Price. After that, we read Mr. Popper's Penguins. Now we're on Mountain Born.

I would recommend Homer Price to a kid who likes to read about adventures. I would recommend Mr. Popper's Penguins to a kid who likes to read about penguins.

Homer Price is a kid who is good at building TVs and saving people from robbers and finding out who other people are. My favorite chapter was about when Homer Price found some formula to making medicine.

Mr. Popper's Penguins was a book about Mr. Popper got a penguin sent to him in a little box with holes in it and then that penguin got kind of sick and he called someone who had another penguin and his was a little bit feeling sick, too, and they both wondered if it was because they had no one to play with, and then they had 10 eggs and then Mr. Popper and Mrs. Popper trained all those penguins to each do something special. The penguins performed lots of times.

I read classic literature to Addy as part of her Sonlight Core 1 curriculum. We study about two per month.

Addy's shapes math

Hi, it's me, Addy. I've been doing shapes on math. And I'm doing really well! This next exercise is going to be really fun. I just did a really hard one and I got them all right.

I like doing shapes math.

Note from Mom: I'd like to tell the entire homeschool community how thrilled I am with Addy's math curriculum. She just completed an elementary version of a Sudoku puzzle, using shapes instead of numbers. We use Singapore Math, which published even its U.S. edition long before Sudoku became popular on this side of the ocean. Addy is finishing up Primary Mathematics 1A and will soon move into level 1B, then go onto 2A and so on.

Yes, she's doing school wearing her pajamas and a giant cow head. Doesn't everybody?

Addy and Dori raising money for Mission India

Mission India is way to raise money for Mission India. We collect money and put it in a little rice bag and send it to somewhere so it can be turned into India money. Women and girls in India can't go to school so we are putting our spare money into the bag to send to Mission India.

The top picture is us picking up tomatoes to raise money. Each tomato we picked up the more pennies Mama would give me for the bag.

This is us returning bottles for Mission India. We found these bottles at the farmhouse.

Sending stuff to Iraq

This is me and Dori after we went and got a few things for soliders in Iraq. Mama gave me a budget to work with and I kept track. She didn't want to spend any more than $20. I chose most of the things. Sometimes Dori wanted some M&Ms for them. We bought them and then we sent them.

Summer soccer camp

Aunt Anita took me to soccer camp. I stayed at her house and every day we had to wake up early and go to soccer camp.

A British man taught me. He was a really good teacher. He could even throw the ball down and bounce it on his shoulder.

I learned some of the ways to turn the ball around and we even played some games during the breaks. He was even nice enough to give us water breaks every once in awhile and Nini packed food for me to eat during the water break.

Now I have an AYSO team and Mommy and Dad are my coaches. My AYSO team, I'm the blue. Someone from my church is on my team.

Addy is in the middle of the pack in the yellow shirt.

Addy and Dori, Declaration of Independence

This is me and Dori dressed up as people in the Declaration of Independence time. We listened to the Declaration of Independence. And we sang a few songs about America.

There's an article about it, too.

This was on July 4th.



History remembered in Lapeer on Fourth of July
by Shena Abercrombie
The Flint Journal

Adele B., 5, didn't just watch American history come alive on the lawn of the Historic Courthouse in downtown Lapeer, she got to dress up in it.

Mom Sue B., dressed up Adele and Dori, 2, in period garb to attend the reading of the Declaration of Independence staged by the Heritage Research Institute Friday morning.

"We're homeschoolers and we've been reading about it at home," Sue explained, while loading the girls into a mini-van following the event. "She helped do the sewing on her outfit."

The girls donned near identical ensembles modeled after period pieces she found on historic Web sites -- then fashioned petticoats, bonnets and Colonial-era scarves from old bed sheets and other discarded fabric around the house.

The B.'s drove from [town] to visit the girls' grandparents, and happened to see a notice for the event in the local paper. (Actually we learned about it from a homeschool e-mail group and planned for it a few weeks in advance.) They joined a crowd that filled the courthouse lawn, and included local Boy Scout troops. Ervin said the color guard and Honor Guard from the Flint Central High School Junior Naval ROTC even made the trip to downtown Lapeer for the program.

"I thought it was great," Sue said. "There was something of interest for everyone. The girls got something out of singing patriotic songs and the setting was just wonderful."

It was perfect weather for the roughly 30-minute ceremony, which included an opening and closing prayer, a brief history lesson on the meaning behind the one of the country's most sacred writings, and of course the reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Turns out that's exactly how they used to do it in the old days -- in Colonial America.

"Historically, Independence Day was a day of worship that was celebrated with church services and prayer, public parades and fireworks," said Brian Ervin, president of the Heritage Research Institute, a Metamora-based nonprofit organization.

The group formed four years ago to educate citizens about the importance behind such documents, and the founding principles from which this nation and its government evolved.

"That's why we do it at 9 a.m., so people can still do the parades," said Ervin, who was dressed as a colonial officer for his part in the reenactment - the reading of the Declaration of Independence. We know that just reading some of the founding documents is educational. This helps us connect to history."

Rick and Linda Gualdoni of Alba Township try to make the Fourth of July observance an annual event. Self proclaimed history buffs, they took the time to greet Ervin and shake his hand following the reading.

"I think it's accurate as far as the historical perspective is concerned," Linda said. "We came to the very first one."

Rick's favorite portion of the document, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"I like the fact that there is the acknowledgment of a creator in the Declaration of Independence." The HRI will stage another reading of the Declaration of Independence in September on Constitution Day.

Addy and Dori first day of school

This is me and Dori, our first day of school.

First-grader school is very fun, except when we stopped kindergarten I was used to playing outside every day so I'm kind of tired doing some of the kind of school that you have to pay lots of attention. That makes me tired. But otherwise, it's very fun and we've started cursive early, but I kind of want to get back on manuscript because I'm starting to forget how to write some of manuscript.

When I was in kindergarten I was doing first-grade reading, and now I'm in first grade and I'm doing second-grade reading. I'm doing something called the Beginner's Bible. That means I read a Bible to my mom instead of her reading a Bible to me like we did when I was in kindergarten. But we're also doing a Bible that Mom reads to me, another one that's a little bit more adult-ish.

Math is actually fun.

I actually like science because it's telling about a long time ago, and one of the things I'm learning — it's really cool. People weren't invented back then, so there were little things that were like monkeys, but they had feet like we do and hands like we do and pretty much everything that we have except they live in the trees. And they hunted for small food and picked berries to eat.

2007-08 Curriculum

Copying this here to archive it:

History and geography: Sonlight Core C, “Introduction to World Cultures,” a literature-rich program, we also use a timeline and globe
Phonics and reading: finishing Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons in first semester, reading the books it recommends all year, plus lots of other independent reading
Phonics and reading: Starfall.com Learn to Read online activities, plus Level I Reading and Writing Journal for phonics practice
Math: Singapore Earlybird Kindergarten Math 2B, then Singapore Primary Math 1A
Handwriting: Handwriting without Tears finishing Letters and Numbers for Me, then Handwriting witout Tears cursive using own lessons generated with StartWrite 5.0 software
Science: Sonlight Kindergarten Science, in which we use Usbourne books and “Discover and Do” DVD to guide hands-on experiments
Art: Come Look with Me: Enjoying Art with Children, then Animals in Art
Music: Calvert School “Melody Lane” video program plus The Usbourne Story of Music
Sunday School: “Seasons of the Spirit” at Immanuel, “Witness” at Cross
Also learning through life: lots of reading, real-life writing, practical life activities, crafts, nature walks, field trips, helping Mom teach sign language classes, taking care of Dori, participating in community life with Mom and Dad, etc.

Extracurricular activities
Homeschool co-op, meets weekly: fall classes are exploring the human body, sign language, U.S. geography and crafts
AYSO soccer, Saturdays August–October
4-H Club, monthly meetings
Public library story times, weekly plus pajama story times monthly
Considering other classes or lessons, such as piano, swimming, gymnastics or dance

Addy’s Nature Adventure

I like exploring nature. Like in my Grandma and Grandpa’s maple woods. But sometimes I help in the sugar shack.

Nature is one of my top favorite things. But God is my very, very, very top favorite thing. Nature is my second.

Sometimes, when I’m walking in the woods, I pick up a stick to pretend it’s a cane.

And once, when I was over at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, they were making maple cream and I got a couple of tastes. It tasted great, kind of rough, kind of smooth. It was double sweet. And sometimes she also makes maple candy. The maple candy is sweet—almost, but not quite, double sweet. The shape of the candy is usually maple-leaf shape. When you’re in the sugar shack, it smells great. This year, late spring, we were in the sugar shack making maple syrup and I got to taste it right hot out of the pan they cook it in. It is great fresh out of the pan.

What I sometimes do when I want to help, is bring in some wood to put in the pile. When Grandpa needs wood to chop up and put in the pan, I take it out and give it to him. I also sometimes climb up the ladder and see how much sap is left in the bulk tank to make maple syrup. When it’s sap, it looks like water, but when it’s maple syrup, it’s brown and looks rich.

More Butterflies

4/18/08 Friday (9:30 p.m.)
The big ones are between 5/8 and 3/4 of an inch, but the little one is only exactly a half of an inch.

They have grown a lot in 12 hours!

4/22/08 Tuesday
They are huge. There are lots and lots of webs on the outside now.

They are huge! They are about 1-1/2" all stretched out.

4/25/08 Friday
They are 1-3/4". And on is hanging. And others aren't hanging, but they are flat at the top of the bottle.

Wow, and their webs — one went all the way to the top of the bottle!

Their food is messed up now, but I think they've all had enough for when they pupate.

Their heads are hanging down and they're trying to put their heads to each other. Now one is crawling down.

They have greenish sides like a string woven in them. And one tried to eat the web that they made.

They're just doing a lot of amazing stuff.

4/26/08 Saturday, 7:40 a.m.
Two of them have spun chrysalises, and all the others are down, but they don't have chrysalis.

5/6/08 Tuesday, 3:29 p.m.
Two butterflies have hatched. We gave them a slice of orange because they'll suck the juice out of of it with their proboscis.

The ones that have hatched, their chrysalises are empty now and they look pink.

I have caterpillars!

Thursday morning
I have caterpillars! They will turn into butterflies.

There are six. At least three will stay alive. And three might die.

They are really really tiny black caterpillars.

Friday morning
They have shedded some skin now and there's a lot more balls of food so they've been eating really good.

The webbing has gotten shorter and there's a little bit of shedded skin in the webbing. There's a little bit of webbing on the other side, too.

They're all a little big longer or a little bit shorter than a half of an inch.

Friday night
The big ones are between 5/8 and 3/4 of an inch, but the little one is only exactly a half of an inch.

They have grown a lot in 12 hours!

We completed a unit about butterflies and moths and now we're raising a batch of six Painted Lady caterpillars. We ordered this kit and they were shipped to us from Carolina Biological Supply Company. Addy had fun tracking their FedEx delivery route on Google Earth from North Carolina to Ohio to our house with stops in between. Unfortunately our camera is broken so we can't track their growth with photos yet.

Sonlight catalog

Two pictures of Addy appear in the 2008 catalog of our curriculum provider, Sonlight. She wants you all to see them.


Caption:
Five-year-old Addy B of Reed City, MI, does Singapore Math with her dolls and shoes. “Sonlight’s Singapore Math really works for us,” writes Addy’s mom Sue. “Addy has started to demonstrate number concepts in her head that apply to everyday living. “Earlybird Math 2B gives a gentle introduction to the concept of subtraction with an example of children removing their shoes. To make the concept more visual, we grabbed some of Addy’s dolls and shoes to practice.” For Addy’s first year of Sonlight, she’s using Core K with all the electives.

Caption:
“After reading the story of baby Moses in Sonlight’s Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, my five-year-old daughter Addy wanted to make a basket just as Moses’ mother did,” writes Sue B of Reed City, MI. “I like that Sonlight does the planning work for me so we can spend time using our creativity to fi gure out fun ways to extend our learning. Every morning after breakfast, I open my blue Sonlight binder and know that the day’s lessons are planned out for me. It allows me to concentrate on the children rather than lesson planning.” Addy has studied all Sonlight’s K programs in her first year with Sonlight.

Dairy Foods: Barn to Cow to Table

This is my barn poster. I made a pie chart and two kinds of bar graphs. I also took pictures of cows.

Thank you for answering my question about what is your favorite dairy food.

From Mom: What a farm girl. This hat was my door prize at the county corn growers' banquet. I gave it to Addy and she has been wearing it ever since.

We used this opportunity to learn about math and Addy entered her poster in the American Statistical Association's annual competition for children in grades K-3. She was given the opportunity to choose any topic and her choice was: cows.

Spinning eggs

This is me spinning eggs for an experiment. The experiment is that I have to spin the eggs and figure out which two eggs have been cooked and which one didn't get cooked — which two are the hard-boiled eggs.

I figured it out by spinning the eggs and I had to put my hand on it and take it off right away. And if it kept spinning, it wasn't hard-boiled. If it stopped spinning, then it was hard-boiled.

Because the hard-boiled eggs were cooked, so the shell inside wouldn't spin around.

Mom's note: The white and yolk wouldn't continue to spin in the cooked egg.

Spices

From Mom: Addy didn't feel like writing, but she learned about the explorers tasted the spices that they travelled the world to find. The cinnamon in her mouth is bark that Liz and Marc brought back from their first trip to Thailand.

My picture of a duck

I made this picture of a duck for a contest. It was very very fun, although getting the outline of the duck was a lot of work. Once I got to put the colors in it was getting funner and funner and funner. After I got the duck all drew in I drew water around it and the trees, little island. That's what I did.

This is a mallard boy duck.

Addy entered the Junior Duck Stamp contest, which we heard about when checking into good places for nature walks in our new area. It is put on by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Children learn about conservation, then create a portrait of a North American duck, goose or swan. We use the Usbourne "First Book of Nature" as part of our science learning and happened to be reading from the section about birds anyway, so it was a nice tie-in.

Earlier this winter we had twice tried to see the wildlife artist Michael Glenn Monroe at a book signing in Big Rapids, but his visits were postponed both times (once he was commissioned to create ornaments for the White House and went to meet President and Laura Bush as if that is somehow more important than going to Big Rapids, and the second time a snowstorm kept him away). Addy had been looking forward to it, so we found a signed copy of his "The Wonders of Nature Sketchbook: Learn About Nature and How to Draw It" at a local bookstore. In the book he demonstrates how to put together simple shapes to create animals, including a duck. She practiced his method to make her duck, then used bird books to figure out how to color the mallard.

Addy titled her work "Nature Picture of Boy Mallard." Students are encouraged to write a conservation message to submit along with their picture. She wrote, "Take care of the earth, and take care of the things in it and around it."

My first time watching lunar eclipse

One day I watched the lunar eclipse. And at first the left bottom side of the moon got darker and darker and darker. Then when the lunar eclipse was actually starting I saw it got bluish-blackish, and then it was getting kind of orangish. And then it got red. Then it was finally almost over and I had fell asleep.

Temptation in the wilderness

This is me and my friends and we're coloring Jesus in the wilderness.

This day in church we learned about temptation. Temptation is when you really want to do something, but you know you shouldn't. Once we learned about a lady who made cookies and she told her son to wait and he didn't wait. He was feeling temptation. But he snuck one, and then him and his friend snuck another and another and they said that wouldn't be too much. But they didn't eat their dinner. Her mother said, "You ate some cookies, didn't you?" So what I learned is you should wait.

This is the picture we were coloring: Jesus was really hungry, but he knew he shouldn't use his powers to turn anything into food. And the devil came down and said, "If you are the son of the Lord, then turn those rocks into bread."

Whoa. This was taken our last day of church in Big Rapids and Addy dictated this to me 4 weeks later. I can't believe her recall. I barely remember talking about the cookies — and I was the teacher. It sure is nice to know that when I feel like I'm herding cats in the Sunday School classroom, something is actually sticking.

Making teepees

This is me and Dori making teepees. First you take a half piece of a circle and then you like fold it into a cone shape and leave a hole in the top. And you put the straws through the hole. And then you tie the teepees together. Then you stick it onto a piece of paper!

We really like the Usbourne book "Living Long Ago," which is part of our history and geography curriculum. This was part of the unit about houses and homes people lived in. The book offers lots of fun activity ideas for trying the concepts learned in the reading. Of course Addy wants to do every single one. It's nice that Dori can start to participate now, too. This was back in Reed City.

I went to see John McCain

I went to see John McCain, but I ended up seeing Mrs. McCain. We had a book for John McCain to sign, but when we found out Mrs. McCain was there we didn't ask anybody to sign it because John McCain wasn't there. I learned a lot. It was very very very very very fun.

The night before Michigan's Super Tuesday, it was more important for John McCain to be at the Auto Show in Detroit rather than in Grand Rapids, so we met Cindy at a rally at the Kent County Republican Headquarters instead. The next day Addy wondered if we could go door-to-door campaigning in Reed City for McCain. We let her hang a poster in her room instead.

At the rally we made her shake hands with U.S. Sen. John Thune from South Dakota and with Cindy McCain, telling her she would appreciate it later. At left is Addy with Cindy, at right we're standing in front of the Straight Talk America bus.

Pilgrims

This is my Pilgrim village. Their boat to get here was the Mayflower. Actually the Mayflower wasn't the first boat to get here.

I built this village by myself. I put everything around where I wanted. I let Mommy and Daddy help me. It was very fun, but after we took a picture of it we had to throw it away.

We're obviously behind on the blog; she made this village before Thanksgiving with a paper punch-out kit Aunt Carol found somewhere. I did make her sacrifice it when we were packing for the move. : ( It had been up for three months by then.

Note from Mom

It has been wonderful to watch Addy learn and grow this year. We were off school a couple weeks while I was in and out of the hospital, so once we got back into things it allowed me to see her in a new light. I suppose it's sort of how you never notice your own kids getting taller, but the kids you see once a month shoot up each time.

It's the little things this week that shed light on what's going on in her mind. We opened her art book and she recognized a painting by Picasso, something I couldn't do until ... oh, about three years ago. So what if she called him Kipasso?

Bob and I were talking to each other and mentioned something about the numbers 7 and 5. Addy, who wasn't really part of the conversation, piped up in what I did not believe was enough time to do any addition and said, "Oh, so there are 12 of them?" I had to use my fingers — no kidding — to figure out what she was talking about.

I read from the Bible and began to tell about a famine. She interrupted me: "Oh, I know this story! It's about the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows and the seven fat cows meant seven good years and the seven skinny cows meant the people would be hungry!" This happened to be a different famine story, but I was amazed at her recall. Soon enough she'll learn there are plenty of famine stories in the Bible!

I went to a spelling bee.

I went to a spelling bee. Everybody had fun watching me and I had fun in the spelling bee. I spelled mop, M-O-P. I spelled hat. And I spelled dad.

It was really hard to wait for my turn because I like spelling words. There were two kids who talked a little bit loud.

I won first place and I got a certificate and a coupon to Pizza Hut and M&Ms. I ate the M&Ms right after the spelling bee.

Maggie and Nini came.

Thirteen Grand Rapids area homeschoolers participated in the kindergarten spelling bee. They were all so very cute and all improved a great deal since the practice in November. They were given a list of 120 three- and four-letter words to study, ranging in difficulty from CAT to PUMP. After each round, any child who misspelled two words got a round of applause, certificate and prizes, then sat down. They didn't do a spell-down to the end as they would with older kids. Addy was one of five of the 13 who made no spelling mistakes, so they each received first-place stickers on their certificates.

Link to the results: http://www.homeschoolbuilding.org/Item.php3?id=7062