Two Weeks Worth of Wrap-ups

I’m not really sure where to start here as it’s been a few weeks since I did a homeschool wrap-up. For the most part, we have been steadily plodding along on our required work. This week we took Wednesday off to celebrate a certain birthday girl, but otherwise our days have been filled with normal math, language arts, and memory work for Classical Conversations. Just to hit a few highlights:

Our morning routine has smoothed out more in the last couple weeks with the addition of a calendar notebook to our routine. I spotted this idea at Half-a-Hundred Acre Woods and we all work on it together along with our CC memory work first thing in the morning. It was a bit of an epiphany for me – all three girls have “meeting books” as part of their Saxon math. I think this is a great feature of the program and the N’s can do most of this part of their lesson on their own. B, however, is just learning some of these calendar skills so to add this into our morning routine where big sisters can coach and help has been huge (and reduced some of the time I spend later in the day going over and reviewing this kind of memory/calendar/math work with each child individually). Using links from the Brandy’s post linked above, I put together several pages that I thought would be useful and laminated them. I found dry erase crayons at Walmart (best invention ever!) and we use those to write on the pages. Inside our binder, we have monthly calendars, weather charts, charts for tallying how many days of school we have done, a page so that the girls can memorize their address and phone number(s). (N1 has got all this info down, but I realized my little girls don’t know our phone number! Ack!)

Anyway, this has been a great addition to our morning to get us all together and off on the right foot for school (at least for the last two weeks). : ) I have slipped our CC memory work in the back pocket of the binder and after we got through our binder pages it’s easy to roll right into our memory review. If there is interest, I can post more pictures of our binder, one of these days… : )

Other highlights:

• Story of the World, chapters 5 – 7 have been listened to on audio and discussed through questions from the study guide. This has turned into a good afternoon pause for all of us to come together and listen after lunch while I’m getting the boy down for an afternoon nap.
• We are working through this Creation Science for Kids (also found at Half-A-Hundred Acre Woods). Three to five pages of science that tie directly into our CC memory work and have Bible verses to look up. For this year, it’s just enough science, combined with our CC Science Cards to flesh out our week. Next year, I’ll need to step it up some for N1, but since we’re spending much of this fall acclimating to CC as part of our daily work and weekly schedule, this fits very nicely.
• We finished another lunchtime read-aloud – Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson. Absolutely wonderful! I have hopes to do a Read-Aloud Thursday blog this week. (Really!)

A non-scholastic highlight of the last two weeks included a small get-together for N1’s birthday. She wanted to have a few friends over to play board games, eat pizza and pudding, and make popcorn and watch a movie. I could handle that. I served pizza while T coached the girls through a game of Clue, then it was my turn to supervise a fun game of Pictionary. (Not so much supervision of girls as making sure that the boy didn’t get ahold of the dry erase markers and run off with them. His new favorite thing.) N1 isn’t a cake and frosting person, so we made large quantities of chocolate and vanilla pudding and broke that out in time for the girls to curl up under blankets and watch Dolphin Tale together. A fun night for all of us.

 

We are still doing our CBS Bible study as part of our school work – I am absolutely loving this study of 1 Kings (where we are right now, but we’ll eventually be all over the minor prophets). The girls look forward to going every week, as does the boy – he LOVES his class and teacher. I’ll be honest that while I’m so glad we are part of the CBS program, I’m having a hard time getting my work in during the week. In spite of getting up (what I think is) well before the children, there is usually a boy someone that wakes up early to join me and sometimes doing my study with him up works. Other times … not so much. I feel like I have just the right amount of things on my plate right now, however, trying to balance all that sometimes is tricky. I’m finding that as the girls are getting older, as workloads are changing for them, as we are involved in different activities in different seasons, my time is becoming more and more valuable and free time is hard to find. (Lack of time to sit and just read has been hard to come by of late and I miss reading.) This is a very hands-on season with the kids right now, and I’m so thankful to be home and homeschooling them … it’s just a season where I have been working on changing my expectations of what I can accomplish and sometimes that’s hard to let go of when you are list maker and box checker. : )

 

Happy Saturday! We have a soccer game this afternoon is some decidedly fallish weather (I think our high is the mid-50’s today!) and I’m excited to bundle up little people to go cheer on our B. Tomorrow we celebrate a certain little guy turned TWO (sniff, sniff) so birthday pics next week I hope. : )