Teaching the Turrell Tribe

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

First Field Trip

Our first field trip every year is a picnic at Bird's Park and play time at the Splash Pad. This year the weather was perfect and we had the Splash Pad to ourselves. Check out our fun!

Here are candid shots:

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Oh what an awesome sight - new book bags all in a row. It means another new school year has begun with little people eager to fill those book bags with new projects, packets, and artwork.

Our first week of school was full of reestablishing routines, fun projects, and fun games. We decided to take advantage of the warm weather and swim in the pool, too.

"PE" time in the pool on the first day of school

Watching a storm roll in - got out of the pool just in time

Pass the water game

Studying Creation

Everyone's favorite time of day - LUNCH

Reviewing handwriting

Starting their letter of the week project

Setting up their sketch books for this year

Doing science time outside

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Who's Who?

To make it easier for you to know who's who when you read our blogs, we thought we would introduce you to everyone in our school. The teachers are Grandma (Debbie) and Sarah and the kids are:

Sean (21) twin to Aric - School to Work

Aric (21) twin to Sean - School to Work

Ellana (17) - HS Senior

Keirstyn (13) - 8th grade

Cadance (Cady) (10) - 5th Grade

Alex (8) - 3rd Grade

Natalie (6) - 1st Grade

Kenzie (5) - Kindergarten

Joshua (5) - Kindergarten

Genesis (4) - Preschool

These smiles are why we do this mix of families, ages, abilities, talents, likes, and dislikes. We get to delight in these children every day. We get to plant God's Word in their hearts and explain the Gospel to eager minds. We get to teach reading, writing, math, history, and science in a way that makes them excited to learn. We get to teach to the strengths of each child and yet build up the weaknesses with one-to-one direction. It is such a blessing to teach all these smiling faces. It is our ministry and our passion. God cleared the path for us all to be together and we are looking forward to see what He has in store for us in this journey.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Let's Try Again

We started this blog a few years ago to map our homeschool journey. We began well, and then life interfered. We ended up with a very sick family member who derailed our homeschool blog but, thankfully, not our homeschooling journey. Our sick family member has gone to be with the Lord, and so our spare time can now return to the more nonessential things, like blogging.

Like any good reality TV show, we will begin reporting the news from our homeschool a little behind the actual events (at least until we catch up). Hopefully, you will enjoy the posts of our learning adventures.

If you know our homeschool at all, you know that we have a homeschool made up of several different families. And how did that come to pass?

Well, it all began with Grandma, who had seven children. In the beginning she was a normal, working parent who sent her children to school. The oldest 3 went all the way through Christian school and public high school (except for one year of homeschool for one older child between jr high and high school). Then, when her special needs sons (children number 4, 5, and 6) who could not handle the school environment, she made a decision to homeschool first one son for a year alone, and then to bring home the next two sons, also. Her youngest was a toddler when the boys came home to do school, so she joined them and never went to traditional school. So, for 11 years Grandma homeschooled her four youngest children. All the while, her older children were having their own children and the family business grew.

Since Grandma made homeschooling look like so much fun, other family members wanted to join her school. Sarah (the oldest) planned to homeschool her children from the beginning and since she was already always at Grandma's house to work in the family business, it worked out great for Grandma and Sarah to homeschool together. Sarah had just come out of teaching in a public school classroom and Grandma had years of homeschooling experience, which turned out to be a great combination since Sarah had lots of unlearning to do to become a homeschool teacher.

So, Sarah's toddlers began tot school, while Grandma continued teaching her youngest children. Then, son number 2's family and extended family wanted to be a part of the homeschool. So, we added two more students full time and two toddlers part time. Those toddlers have since turned into full time students, as have Sarah's toddlers. So, for two years we had 10 students, until sickness took one away. This year we lost that one student to heaven and gained another student from a cousin's family.

So, now, three years after we started with all the families combining into one school at Grandma's house, we have two school-to-work, special needs adults, a high school senior, an 8th grader, a 5th grader, a 3rd grader, a 1st grader, 2 kindergarteners, and 1 preschooler. That is a grand total of 10 students everyday for 2 teachers. To steal from the opening of the Duggar's reality show - it isn't always easy, but somehow we make it all work.

Here is our first day of school picture.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Wheat Week

After you taste test most of the possible veggies and fruits, the next thing to taste test is grains. So this week we started with wheat. We checked out different flour types - whole wheat, bleached, unbleached and also wheat germ and the whole wheat plant. Since there isn't much to taste with raw flour or wheat, Tasty Tuesday included feeling the different flours, playing with cloud dough, and making paper mache pumpkins. The pumpkins were later used in our program. The little ones used them to sing songs about pumpkins for family and friends. Cloud dough is flour and baby oil. It creates a wet sand like texture that packs and yet cumbles. We were going to make bread or other baked good but time got away from us and it was the day of Evan's surgery so we were down a few hands. So we ate a meal of hamburger gravy over noodles as our tasting part instead of bread. Sean took the paper mache pictures. He did a great job and it was the first time he used a camera. Now that we know he does a good job we are going to encourage him to take pictures more often.