Gardening Time

We've been keeping a compost for a few months. It was time to put the compost on the garden beds in preparation for planting. We did not have as many Red Wigglers this year in the compost like we did last year. However, we have some huge Night Crawlers in the beds already. I only found one grub which was great b/c last year we found close to 100 grubs (June Beatles).

The girls did not help much with preparing the beds. Instead, they enjoyed playing in the mud, up to their legs, arms, and face. It amazes me after all these years that they still love to play in the mud. I wonder when they will grow out of it. They had a blast and it was fun for me to see them have so much fun. They made up songs about pigs in the slop, songs about mud, songs about mud and worms. It was hilarious. It was a lot of work to clean them up, not to mention the porch and the inside of the house after they tracked it in.

We have seed packets ready to plant possibly next weekend if the weather stays nice and if the soil is workable. We were blessed this weekend to have workable soil.

I won a math prize

Yeah! Mammoth Math has a free promotion going on. I received two free electronic math books by posting a link to her website.

Math

At my last homeschool meeting we spoke about math curriculums. There were several discussed: Bob Jones Math, Singapore Math, Saxon Math, and Math-You-See. We also discussed the types of math: linear and spiral. Math-You-See is linear, meaning, you do not repeat the concepts instead you master them then move on. Spiral math is when you learn several concepts at one time like time and addition. In each lesson you will learn a little bit more about time and more about addition. This is learning a few concepts at one time and they are repeated, just on a different level, thus you always come back to them like a spiral.

When I got home from the meeting I did some Internet search for homeschool math websites. I found one called http://www.homeschoolmath.blogspot.com/. The website has a RSS feed that I subscribe to. The woman who keeps the blog does an excellent job. The information she provides is interesting and pertains to all ages. She developed a math curriculum called Math Mammoth. I'm interested in obtaining the Math Mammoth Add and Subtract 2A and 2B for Adira. She has free sample pages you can print to use in your homeschool.

Another website I like is maintained by a mom in my group called http://www.math-mom.com/. I really like her math book recommendations. These are not math text books, rather, reading books about math. I ordered some from Amazon and will post my thoughts after we read them.