Homeschool Wrap Up – Feb. 16th-20th

The week started off a little weak, still fighting  fatigue from a nasty, little cold.  We took a sick day on Monday.

Tuesday we were back on track.  Both boys had some difficulty with math this week, but it wasn’t content that was giving them trouble.  It was their trying to get it done too quickly.  Even when they went back to do corrections, there were careless errors again and again.  So we made up for lost math time by doing math on Saturday.  (I don’t really believe in falling behind or getting ahead when it comes to homeschool.  You spend however long it takes for your child to master the material.  I just wanted to encourage them to invest the time in their math during the week.)

We were getting ready for our coffee break in the photo below.  (Somehow our coffee breaks have begun to include a snack for the boys too, which is kinda strange since it’s usually right before lunch.)  We’re still reading The Titan’s Curse:  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  First book in a very long time that I honestly think the boys are really enjoying!  (so much fun when they get into it!)

Yes, the picture below is of The Walking Dead.  It’s a guilty pleasure of mine and my youngest boy.  I love it when he doesn’t have pressing Xbox “business” and he can find the time to watch it with me!

As for school…  this week we watched science videos about: 

Bats and Spiders of the Amazon

What’s a Pangolin?

Scurvy, Polio and Vaccines

Muons – Traveling So Fast that Time Slows Down

How Old is The Earth?

10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Human Body

10 Facts About Memory

Disease and the Likelihood of a Zombie Apocalypse

Can We Make a Plant that Absorbs More Carbon Dioxide to compete with Fossil Fuel Emissions?

For history we watched a video about  The Siege of Tuileres, we researched Versailles and Hameau de la Reine (Marie Antoinette’s country chateau, which just for the record is my DREAM HOME).  We watched a short video about the Marquis de Saint-Fargeau. 

We finished up our studies on The French Revolution and Napoleon with an authentic French-inspired lunch at Blue Rooster Cafe and Bakery today.  Even our picky kid said it was fun!

And now we’re moving onto The War of 1812.  We watched most of a documentary about it this week.  (we’ll finish it up on Monday.)  And now the boys have told me the places and people they’d like to learn more about and I’m on a mission!  I’ll be looking for information about:  Montreal, Tecumseh, The Shawnee, The War Hawks, Sir Isaac Brock, William Atherton, Dolly Madison and The River Raisin Massacre. As we learn about these, inevitably, other names and places will come up too.  That’s how it works.

I must also mention a perfect Thursday afternoon of playing outdoors, blue sky, sunshine and talking.  The weather was so perfect that we decided to take advantage of it and soak up some Vitamin D.  It might have been the most valuable lesson all week!

Ten on Tuesday: 10 Things I’m Looking Forward To Right Now

1.  A long overdue road trip to Georgia.  (The last time we visited family in Georgia, Will was almost 3 years old.)   We’ll be taking the camper in March to Savannah (where Scott and I met) and we’ll be doing lots of homeschool field trips (lots of cool historical places to visit) and detours to show the boys where it all started for our family. (Asheville, North Carolina, hopefully at the peak of “Pink Tree” season and maybe a tour of the Biltmore mansion.)

2.  Losing the last 10 lbs! (It’s proving to be very difficult.  My half-ass dieting turns out to be “maintaining.”  Hmmm…  maybe there’s a lesson here.)

3.  Planting time!  I see people already starting seeds and it’s giving me the bug.  I’m already thinking about what I want to plant this year and where I want to expand.  We’ll be building a protective pergola over the Three Sisters garden this Spring.

4.  My next cup of coffee!  Mmmmmm…

5.  Starting the cabin build in Big Elk Meadows.  (The ball is in the engineers’ court again.  We’re waiting for drain field design.)

6.  My upcoming girls’ shopping day with K.  (She’s expecting in May, so we’re going for a day trip, to have fun before the new boy joins them.)

7.  My birthday cake!  (I’ll be baking it next week.  Yes, it’s late because I didn’t want to eat cake again so soon after Will’s birthday.  Mine is going to be a new carrot cake recipe with coconut, pineapple, walnuts, raisins and cream cheese icing!  Yum!)

8.  Getting the last of the furniture from Big Elk out of storage and into Mama and Daddy’s new house in Fort Collins!  (This is going to happen next week!  We have movers scheduled and cleaners scheduled.  So awesome to have it completely done and over.  The picture above is one corner in the new house.  The photograph, hanging on the wall is of the front steps to the house we lost in the slide.)

9. Kissing my husband again.  I’ve been sick with a nasty, little cold for over a week now and there’s been no smooching…  sniff, sniff.

10.  “Boo, you ready to go read?”  I love to go to bed 30 minutes before time to really go to bed.  Boo-berry sacks-out on Daddy’s side of the bed and I turn my electric mattress pad on high and read ‘til I can’t hold my eyes open anymore.

 

Homeschool Wrap Up : Feb. 8th-13th

We were in Colorado for most of the week and with lots going on, the boys were more “independent study” than normal. They did great!

I accidentally left the book with our lesson plans at home, so there was a period of figuring it out again, but it was ok.  They did math everyday and are still doing remarkably well with fractions.  So happy about that!

We watched science videos this week about:  Ebola, How Many Heartbeats Do We Get? and What If There Were No Sharks?

We watched history videos about Antoine Lavoisier, the Chemist and Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat, finishing up our studies of The French Revolution.

We’ll be starting on The War of 1812 on Monday.  I’ll also be starting my research on the new Assassin’s Creed Victory game.  I think it’s set in Victorian England and scheduled to be released in October of this year.  We shall see.  Will is pretty excited already!

The weather was beautiful much of the time we were in Colorado and we got to do our reading and coffee breaks outdoors.  (a habit that I’d like to continue at home when the weather is good.)

Sadly we’re expecting snow again starting tomorrow and into Monday – so indoor coffee breaks it is! (which, truthfully, is really nice too!)

Will got a pretty traumatic haircut this week.  He wasn’t convinced that he liked it AT ALL until his friend, Madison told him it looked nice.  Here is the before and after:

I LOVE IT SHORT!  (he does too… now.  And he says he’ll try to get used to it this way!  Woo hoo!)

I’ve also talked Scotty into letting his buzz cut grow out.  It’ll take at least another month.  I’ll keep you posted.

It was a light school week for us, but we got the basics done.  We came home on Thursday evening and I promptly started getting a nasty little cold.  So I’m taking it easy this weekend and we’ll be ready to start again on Monday.

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Right Now

making : Project Life, One Little Word, TRIED to make beeswax candles

cooking : birthday cakes.  Will’s two weeks ago and mine in two more weeks.

drinking : COFFEE…  what else?

reading : Spiritual book loaned to me by a friend and a not so spiritual book called Sixth Grave on the Edge.

wanting : The weather to hold out for Wednesday so the boys and I can go to park day in Colorado.
 
looking : through pictures to see what we were doing in February the last few years.

playing : With Photofunia (new picture app) at Mcdonald’s yesterday with Scott and Will.  (Bee stayed home.)

wasting : Maple syrup, which is a crime and I’ve threatened to never buy it again.  The boys have a pool of it on their plates when they’re done with waffles.  Ugh…

sowing : Friendships and feeling very grateful for them.
 
wishing : for health for all of us!

enjoying : knitting again.

waiting : for gardening time!

liking : my Instax camera more and more.  There’s a learning period for this basic little camera that surprised me, though.

wondering : If getting Will ANOTHER haircut will make us all happier.  (The first one was useless. She didn’t cut enough off to tell he had had a haircut at all.)

loving : Some good t.v. is starting up again:  The Blacklist and The Walking Dead!
 
hoping : To break a weight plateau this week!

marveling : always marveling at my husband, for one reason or another.

needing : More than one cup of coffee per day!

smelling : a candle (ordered some beeswax candles on Amazon and Esty after my failed attempt at making them.  I hope I like them.)
 
wearing : less and less.  We’re going through a pleasant warm spell right now.  Winter isn’t over, Mother Nature isn’t fooling anyone.
 
following : along with school pretty closely right now and participating a lot more.  It’s working way better!
 
noticing : My hair is dramatically thinning again.  Whatever.  I’m tired of worrying about it.  If I have to buy a wig, so be it.

knowing : I’m way more blessed than I deserve
 
thinking : I really want to go to Georgia in March, but I’m not going to be heartbroken if we don’t because we don’t have the money this year.
 
bookmarking : blogs of Instagrammers whom I like.  I get so much inspiration and spark from these ladies!
 
opening : A brand, spankin’ new package of San Francisco Bay Fog Chaser K cups this morning.

giggling : with my husband on Saturday mornings makes my heart sing.

feeling : happy, mostly healthy and very thankful.

Homeschool Wrap Up: Feb. 1 – 6

We started out the week at our first Maker Faire.   The boys and I had no idea what it was all about but Scott had seen them before and was very excited.  What we didn’t know is that this was a MINI Maker Faire.  The Mini doesn’t mean that the faire is small.  It means that it’s geared to SMALL children.  So there were A LOT of small kids milling about and most of the booths/makers were geared toward them.  (Kind of a bummer for us.)

The boys were able to find a couple things that interested them.  Will built a computer board that plays Star Wars music, Scotty bought a necklace with a Skyrim symbol on it.  It didn’t take long to see everything and move on.

In preparation for starting a new book for our coffee breaks (The Titan’s Curse:  Percy Jackson and the Olympians), we decided that we didn’t remember the first two books well enough to move on.  Amazon to the rescue.  We bought the two movies of the first two books and watched them this week and started the new book on Thursday.  We highly recommend the movies!  I watched AND knit!  It was a fun, more relaxed way to spend a “Snow Day”.  (public school had a snow day on Wednesday.  We didn’t, mostly.)

We watched some really interesting science videos this week!  Several so interesting that we wanted to know more and so we did some searching on the internet. 

We watched one about what happens to your brain when you “space out” (one of our boys is really good at spacing out, so he was happy to learn that it actually is a period of increased brain activity.) We watched a short video on how honey is made (Youtube channel is Minute Earth).  I thought the boys would find it interesting but warned them that they’d probably be grossed out.  Will has sworn he’ll never eat honey again…  WHATEVER!

We watched a video about why the sky is blue.  I liked this one because it was a review from the first year we homeschooled.  I remember learning it, they don’t.  Now they’ve heard it again. 

Then we watched one entitled:  How Big is Our Solar System in which the narrator did a scale model of the solar system at the park, using little signs to represent the sun and planets.  The visual was really good for the boys’ comprehension of distances. (Youtube channel is It’s Okay to be Smart.)

For history we watched some interesting videos but when the boys strayed from the topic, I asked them if they were ready to move on from the French Revolution.  (they had questions about World War II and Pearl Harbor.) 

We talked about it and they decided that they’d like to learn history chronologically, so we’ll continue doing what we’re doing.  We did stray a little today to watch a video about Pearl Harbor. (They remembered Umpa telling them how scared he was when Pearl Harbor was bombed, because my then 7-year-old father had thought that they were bombing the harbor close to his home in New Jersey.) We talked a little about The Holocaust (which they couldn’t even fathom) and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We looked at pictures of the Pearl Harbor Memorial.

We talked a bit about the Civil War this week too and the difference between a civil war and a revolution.  But in the end, we returned to the French Revolution and plan to go on to the War of 1812 after that.  We watched videos about the Flight to Varennes , The Champ de Mars Massacre, Lieutenant General Rochambeau and his work with the Marquis de Lafayette (one of our favorite men from the American Revolution).

Both boys are doing really well in math and I couldn’t be happier about that fact!!!  We were going to bake this week (I was going to tell them to make 1 and 1/2 recipes of blueberry zucchini bread, so that they’d have a fun way to practice manipulating fractions) but we ran out of time.  We’ll do it next week.

They’ve both done treadmills with me this week and on Friday we went out to lunch with friends and to Gym Day with our Nebraska homeschool group.  I was very proud of my little introvert for getting out there and playing this week!

Next week is going to be a little challenging for school, but we’ll get it done.  We’re taking the 12th off for their teacher’s birthday!  Should be a fun week!

Finishing up 2014–Project Life

In 2014 I began doing Project Life monthly rather than weekly.  And although I cover more time per session, I find it easier to do this than to carve out time every single weekend.  I like the fact that I can fit an entire year into one album too.

I don’t do much embellishing anymore.  I focus on pictures and words.  But unlike Ali’s focus on pictures and words, I still like to include the “stuff” of life too.  I’ve noticed, sadly, that she’s gotten away from a lot of that…  Her Week in the Life books used to be filled with labels, mail, receipts, ticket stubs.  Not so much anymore…

Below is my December Daily photo challenge pictures:

December wasn’t a particularly good month for my family.  And as I put this book to rest, I’m glad to start clean in January, but also I’m struck by how many happy pictures there were for December.  In the midst of so much stress and sadness, we still managed to find time to smile and love each other.

I didn’t have time to do a lot of my normal Christmas activities this time.  But I learned that I didn’t miss them as much as I thought I would either.  (And honestly, the boys have really outgrown lots of it.)  Next year my mission is to simplify the whole event even more.

All said and done, this book shows a pretty trying path this year.  There were some pretty dramatic highs and lows.  But it’s still my path and I’m thankful for it everyday.

Closing this volume: