TOS Review: Mango Languages

For the past six weeks or so, three of my older children and I have been using Mango Languages and their Homeschool Curriculum for teaching languages as part of the Old Schoolhouse Review Crew. For ages 6 to adult, I chose to do this review with Sterling, 6, Eden, 9, and Liberty, 10. Mango offers over fifty languages, so I chose French since my husband has a bachelor’s in French, has spent time in France, and his knowledge gave me courage to tackle a daunting subject. I’d thought we’d avoid it for a few more years, until high school, but when I researched Mango before the review, I couldn’t help but get excited.

Mango lived up to everything I’d hoped for.



The setup for Mango was a bit complicated, but once I figured it out, we were off. We do school four days a week, so we added this to our daily schedule and did it four days a week as well. The very first lesson, the kids met Blaine at the door after work with “Good Evening, Daddy” in French. When he responded in French… oh, the excitement. And we were off.



I found the lessons myself hard to absorb. Nothing to do with Mango and their teaching attempts, I’m having a hard time getting myself back into learning mode. My pregnant brain, plagued first by bronchitis, then the flu, and now a looming due date, does not want to absorb anything. It’s pathetic. The kids can talk me into a corner. Liberty and Eden have absorbed it pretty well, and while I do not expect them to be fabulous at French in the coming year, I am thoroughly enjoying listening to them learn and talk to each other and their Daddy with enthusiasm.

Sterling… that was a whole ‘nother story. He’s learned plenty, don’t get me wrong. He really wants to learn French. He gladly does his lessons each day. But. Getting him to talk to the computer was a little like pulling teeth, and once we got that far, I thought he was doing fabulously. One day, listening to him rattle off French from the next room, I thought he was making fabulous progress. Then I got closer and heard what he was really saying. With great French finesse, he was rattling off, “Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah?” He even had the uptick question cadence.

Really?! Oh, dear boy. Once I got over my desire to laugh, I corrected him at his less than stellar attempt to copy the French speaker on the computer, and we’ve moved on. He’ll learn plenty this year, to be sure, but I don’t anticipate it will be as much as he could if he were a bit older. I wouldn’t say he’s too young, but he’s easily frustrated when he can’t remember phrases properly and, unfortunately, gives up his attempt to be accurate instead of trying harder.

When Sterling spelled “pass” on his spelling test “pas” instead, he blamed the French lessons. He claimed got confused at the spelling, since “pas” is a French word (Meaning nothing close to the English word ‘pass’ and pronounced very differently.) That time… I did laugh. Poor boy, trying to learn these crazy things Momma throws at him and actually expects him to stretch his math-brain further than numbers and multiplication.

While we’ve been thrilled with Mango and all that it offers, I found out recently that even more is coming. I haven’t had to try those things yet, but to sum it up, here’s a list of what’s there and what’s coming:

What is currently available on the site:
Over 60 different languages
Progress Assessments

Built-in journals, discussions and wikis
Collaborative learning spaces
eNote messaging
/chat rooms

Access to embedded/downloadable content

Support from other community members

Calendars to schedule meetings or study groups

Over the next several months, they’ll be introducing other exciting features like:
Enhanced Tracking and Progress Monitoring - including seat time (for students and parents)
Goals and Personal Lesson Plans (both stand-alone and tied into Mango courses)

Resume and Portfolio Builder

Mango Languages offers the following introductory pricing:

• 1 subscription - $18/month or $125/year
• 2 subscriptions - $28/month or $175/year                   
• 3 subscriptions - $38/month or $225/year                
• 4 subscriptions - $48/month or $275/year                 
• 5 subscriptions - $58/month or $325/year
• Anything over 6 subscriptions is a special group rate that will depend on the number in the group.

 

To read more reviews from the Old Schoolhouse Review Crew, check out the Review Crew Blog.

Liberty’s Snow Slushi

Liberty decided to use the snow to “cook” up something. Here’s her recipe:

1/2 tsp lime juice

1/2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp water

2 T sugar

2 cups snow

food coloring (optional)

Mix together: lime juice, lemon juice, water, sugar, and snow. Add drops of food coloring according to the food coloring box. Stir it up. Add a straw and spoon and ENJOY! :)

Momma’s note: something tells me, from the amount of sour and sweet going on, her estimates of lime and lemon juices and sugar were a little low. Or a lotta low. Or, if you ask Pierce, not even on the chart low. He couldn’t get enough. Judging from the amount of lime juice left in the fridge… it was closer to 1/2 a cup per serving. The first batch contained a ridiculous amount of real vanilla as well. I found myself explaining the benefits and drawbacks of vanilla with citrus… all agreed it was better omitted. My vanilla stash and frugal side appreciated their omission.

I never imagined this.

These days are hard. School seems to drag on forever, co-op has become a stress like no other and keeps me awake at night, it’s all I can do to keep up with the house somewhat and laundry, Pierce is tearing the house apart as fast as I can put it back together and refusing to take naps many days, and my belly is bigger and causing me more pain than it’s ever been at just shy of 23 weeks.

It’s funny, as a kid, picturing motherhood didn’t include absolute exhaustion. It didn’t include frustration or anger or sticking to the floor when I stumble into the kitchen after consoling a child with growing pains at 3am. It didn’t include repeating myself over and over and over or searching for lost objects that I didn’t lose or potty training a single child for six months with limited success.

Strangely enough, I pictured lovely children, well-behaved, without all the work. I imagined clean, pressed (HA!) and smiling children. This just wasn’t what I imagined.

Messes. Oh, the messes. The laundry, the mountains of work without the energy to climb anything more than the path to the couch. The pure exhaustion and achiness that pregnancy brings. The unending meal preparation and the inability to feed my children one helping of anything that fills them up.

But.

I didn’t picture the discussions either. The talks of sin and Christ’s love. The discussions of those painful growing up moments that are inevitable.

The laughs. Oh, the laughs. The hilarious things that a child comes up with. The heart stopping moment when you find your two year old standing high in the air, perched on a tiny patch of instability. The baby kissing “his baby” in Momma’s belly, loving someone so unconditionally that they’ve never met, don’t fully understand, and who is taking up more and more of “their” lap space.

The different personalities. The ones I see myself in clearly, and the ones I don’t understand in the slightest because they are so unlike me. The ones who are word oriented and the ones who crunch numbers like nobody’s business. Outgoing. Shy. Energetic. Quiet.

If I had to describe them each in a word…

Liberty… perfectionist

Eden… scattered

Sterling… mathematical

Ruby… passionate

Charlotte… imaginative

Pierce… hungry

Yeah. I never pictured any of this. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest thing I’ve done, and the only thing I can’t quit. Day after day, new struggles face me in the lives of these children. I never imagined this. But I’m having the time of my life – on the good days and the bad.

Today:

• Pierce threw two new rolls of toilet paper into the toilet.
• Someone left the toothpaste, uncapped, on the bathroom rug. Charlotte stepped on it.
• The rug’s in the washing machine. Fourth load for today.
• I took the kids grocery shopping at two stores and to the library.
• A random man asked me when I was going to be done having babies. I sputtered but remained polite.
• I found out Liberty had a huge amount of homework to do for co-op. Due tomorrow. It’s still half done. Three maps to color and label takes a long time.
• I found out Eden had a report on Laura Ingalls Wilder to do, among other things. Also due tomorrow.
• I remembered once again that I’d rather homeschool than deal with daily homework.
• I took the kids to the library. I’d borrowed Courting Cate by Leslie Gould and liked it so much I went to see if she had other titles. None were there. Read Courting Cate if you like Christian Fiction. It’s really good.
• I didn’t have to throw even one kitten out of doors. They seem to be learning. I took Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to speak softly and carry a big stick to heart.
• Floppy rulers qualify as big sticks.
• I counted four gallons of milk in the fridge when we got home and sighed, realizing we’re not going to make another week. I thought we had six.
• I sprayed the tub down with Comet spray at 9 am.
• I finally got the tub scrubbed at 9 pm.
• The tub soaking for that long doesn’t help out anymore than soaking for three minutes.
• Pierce made it to 8 pm before he pooped in his pants. I was just thinking that we’d had an accident-free day.
• Sterling couldn’t remember what lines of symmetry means on his math assessment. Seconds later, he informed me that 22 x 10 = 220. I don’t know what to do with that boy.
• Ruby maybe, just maybe, has caught onto reading. She’s getting faster. It amazes me what personality and a little bit more time means at the ripe old age of five. Thinking back, the older the child was, the easier it was to teach them to read. The oldest one was 5.5 years old. That beats 4.5 any. That’s nearly a quarter of their life difference.
• I stayed up way too late typing this, because I walked into the bathroom and saw the two rolls of tp in the garbage and it was just enough aggravating to write about.

Dreams, projects, and the messes they can make.

I woke up with a start at 3:00 am with a dream. My dear son, having been potty training since June, still has a LOT of moments. In my dream, I was sitting on the floor folding laundry and he decided to relieve me of my chore, relieve himself on the laundry, and save me the steps of folding and putting away.

It actually made me jump.

While Mr. P has had accidents in a multitude of places, on clean laundry, thankfully, has not been one of them. But I couldn’t help but laugh. I got a three hour nap yesterday, went to bed at 9pm, so a total of 13 hours of sleep later, mostly uninterrupted, I was finally sleeping hard enough – and long enough – to dream. (Uninterrupted until 7:18 am when Pierce hit me in the face with a cheese stick and asked if he could have it. Hello, morning.) But what do I dream about?

This motherhood thing is getting to me.

We’ve had sick kids this weekend. It started Friday afternoon with Liberty, Eden started complaining Saturday, and today, they’re asking if co-op is still on for tomorrow. We shall see. From the sounds in the kitchen, Liberty’s eating real food again. Hooray for the small things. Eden never did get it very bad – I’m still not sure if she got it or she just wanted the opportunity to read all day. When I dictated it would be only toast and no books during her illness, she felt better quite quickly. Amazing recovery.

I spent Saturday sewing. I’ve decided that’s my spend-little-to-no-money method of not shopping when stressed. Of course, looking around the house and seeing my sewing mess and the mess made by many small children while I didn’t pay them 100% attention is enough to send my stress levels back up to where they were. But, for a little while… I sewed a maternity dress that turned out a little less fabulous than the photo in the pattern. I’m trying that again, a little differently. I shocked and amazed my children at my ability to twist fabric strips into rosettes. Sew for hours and make slings and dresses and blankets and doll panties? No big deal? Make a flower with a strip of fabric in 32 seconds? Now that’s amazing.

After that, I sewed doll clothes for another review. Liberty’s doll got two new items. Liberty joked her doll hadn’t gotten two new things in one day since the day I sewed a heart on her behind to patch the hole and sewed a patch nearby to patch an even larger hole. I love it – my daughter has quite the sense of humor developing these days.

Then… I looked at my house and had the brief thought that it might be easier to just move than to clean up the mess that had taken over every inch of my home. But, after an hour in the kitchen trying to find my tile floor under the dirt, and an hour in the living room, putting things away and cleaning that floor, it started to look manageable again. And then Pierce woke up from his nap. It was nice while it lasted.

Liberty's making pancakes - from a mix. She's over an hour in and I just heard the first oil spray hit the pan. I can teach them how to cook… but how on earth do you teach them speed?!

Sterling asked me how big a yard was. My reply was, “3 feet. 36 inches. A yard stick. You know, that’s why we call it a YARD stick.”

My son just snorted at me. In that brief second, he realized he’d asked a very stupid question. I love it. (If you saw how they play with yard sticks around here, you’d understand better. We have about 10 of them, from the farm show and from Blaine’s parents’ hardware store. They frequently become swords, roads, and, with the help of bread twist ties, bridges. Yard sticks are something he knows VERY well.)

Yesterday Sterling learned about nickels. We sorted out 2 quarters, 10 nickels, 5 dimes, and 50 pennies into four piles to make a point on the value of each coin. What Sterling got out of our piles? “We have $2 here!” I’m not the least bit math minded. My son is scaring me.

Pierce is back to his normal self. Temper tantrums, requiring lots of correction, and eating everything in sight normal Pierce. Thankful. Even for the exhausting job of the constant need to correct him. Funny: I dropped a butter knife onto the tile floor with a crash that sounded worse that it really was. Pierce took the opportunity to correct me back. “Momma! No no!”

Ruby was told that today at co-op she has PE and needs to wear jeans. She came back with five jean skirts for me to choose from, insisting that a jean skirt with leggings is really easy to run in. She just can’t stand it.

Eden is the first child I’ve ever had to tell to write out her math answers using numbers, not words. She had an entire lesson that she wrote answers like “five hundred twenty six thousand nine hundred fifty two” – in cursive. I’m sorry. I’m glad you know place value and how a number reads in words. But my brain does not want to convert that to numbers, so you’ll have to indulge me and use numbers next time.

Charlotte insists she’s three now, so she’s big. Until last night. When asked why she wasn’t helping to clean up supper, she informed me she’s not that big. It went into a several-minute dissertation on why three years old is pretty big, but she’s not quite big enough to do work, because she’s still pretty short. With the ability to have a discussion like that, she’s being recruited into service. She’s a fabulous “Crawl under the table for any runaway cups, silverware, napkins, or large pieces of food picker-upper”.

The pancakes were worth the wait. If you have the chance, the pecan-glazed mix from Aldi is pretty darn fabulous. And a ten year old can make them. If they have an hour and a half.

Lazy summer days…

Ruby gets full enjoyment out of the swing.

You know, as opposed to the lesser enjoyment she gets out of other things in life. No, not so much. Life is full speed ahead and quite the fun game for Ruby. (And she wears this dress about three days a week. As in, every time it’s clean. It is, according to her, the cutest thing she owns.)

Sterling has been playing with wood lately. He asked me what I wanted him to make me. I told him I’d like another bedroom and bathroom added on to our house. He informed me he’d have to break a wall out to connect it, and he’d probably just build me a new house instead. Um… okay! He hasn’t realized the value of a good demo job. If current talk around here turns into more than talk, he might just get to try his hand at both demoing a wall and building. We’ll see!

Sigh. It’s such a rough life.

The garden is doing well. We’re eating broccoli, beans, zucchini, peppers, kale, and yesterday brought the first tomatoes.

This is (one of) my lavender plants. It’s the oldest. It moved in a pot from one place to another many times, before finally going in the ground when we bought our house. Turns out, planting it over the septic tank does good things for lavender. It’s huge!

Brady thought she needed in on my photos the other day. All 8.5 pounds of her, she’s much loved and believes herself to be human, I think. I haven’t found her eyes in a while, though…

Oh, for cute.

Four new circle skirts

made from this pattern

slightly edited on the waistband for ease of knowing where the back is (and covering my sewing machine’s hatred for sewing two piece of elastic together)

and four new necklaces, made from matching fabric from this pattern,

made four very happy girls. Four very cute very happy girls.

With skirts that spin out like every little girl’s dream,

it makes my shorts/leggings under every dress/skirt rule very, very important!

Kitchen ponderings.

Liberty watched as I cut the cantaloupe in half. I handed her a spoon, she scooped out the seeds, then handed it back to me and watched me cut off the rind and slice the fruit.

“Why is there always a hole in the middle of the melon?” she asked.

I stared at her. My dear ten year old daughter, capable of so much more than I ever was at her age, having just scooped out the seeds out of the hole in question, was really asking me this? All of the sudden, the light dawned. She clapped her hands over her face and said, “I can be so DUMB sometimes!”

And in that moment, I couldn’t help but think that the beginning of knowledge is the realization of the lack thereof. When you realize you don’t know all there is to know, you have something to work with. When we can admit we’re wrong, or that we don’t have a clue, or that we just said something really dumb, we can only go up from there. Learn from mistakes, move on, and be better for it.

Then we both laughed. Because sometimes, ridiculousness is pretty funny. And darn it, those holes those grocery store people that put holes in the middle of the cantaloupes rob us of a whole lot of fruit that could be there.

You know those weeks where you’re stressed to the max and nothing is getting accomplished properly? When I have those, blogging falls by the wayside.

I’ve been having those kinds of days.

On the bright side, we had the rest of the older kids eye appointments yesterday and Pierce didn’t poop on the floor again.

It’s the little things.

Sterling got new frames for his glasses that M. P broke for him. He chose black. When he wakes up and gets the sleep wiped from his eyes, I’ll take a photo.

The kids went to a nearby church for VBS last night. I ended up in the nursery with Charlotte and Pierce. When the workers in there asked if I had an older child in the program, I said I had several. The one worker asked how many children I have and when I said six, he replied,

“I figured.”

What does that mean? How on earth, by seeing one woman with two children – children close in age, to be sure, but two children nonetheless – can you come to the conclusion that I have many? This has me entirely curious.

Tomorrow my oldest daughter hits double digits. Craziness.

I’m starting Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred today. I’m writing that so I’ll be held to it. If I die, you’ll know what happened.

Education: beginning again.

These four children started back to school today.

Ruby’s in kindergarten.

Sterling’s in first grade.

Eden’s in fourth grade.

Liberty’s in fifth grade.

Momma’s in shock.

These two have the sole responsibility to keep themselves busy – and out of trouble – during our educating hours.

Deep breath. I can do this. We did it today. We got done before supper time. Laundry is four loads deep but didn’t get started until 4 pm. Supper happened, late, but it happened. The house… yeah, don’t ask too many questions about it.

I can do this.

Camping: Stump Lake, ND

 

While the kids spun around on an old-fashioned (read: super fun) merry-go-round, my mother took these photos:

In order to get said photos, she did this:

I’m nearly positive it is the first time I have ever seen my mother on a merry-go-round. Go Mom.

 

 

 

 

In other stories, Charlotte gave it her best attempt in learning to ride a bike. She was marginally successful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And since Sterling learned how to do this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and do it fabulously well, Ruby decided to do this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

although she’s not quite so fabulous at it. Give her some time. She’s not about to be one-upped by her older brother.

Farm education, wooly style.

On my parents little sheep farm























near a small town in South Dakota

the kids got to watch the sheep sheerer
























one rainy morning in June.
















Educational stuff, to be sure.


(Can I just throw in there how bad my back would hurt if I were bent over at such an angle for hours on end each day? Ouch.)