in pursuit of wild things

This past week flew by in a rush of business. I had a hard time keeping up and even forgot to get my wrap-up written and posted on Thursday night. I am so looking forward to putting the busy summer behind me and it has barely begun! Saturday, Sparkles and I attended a baby shower. She loves to go and chat with just about anyone that will listen. Sparkles also looked over all of the baby gifts approvingly and told me how useful all of the items would be. She wasn’t impressed with the superhero dolls and thought those were “less than useful” gifts for a baby. I did my best to keep a serious face and nod accordingly.

We managed to finally get back into school this week for the first time after returning from the convention. Oldest loved the Life of Fred (math) book that he finished the entire book in one day. Yikes!!! I only bought the first four books…maybe I should have sprung for more volumes. He enjoyed it so much he asked to read it again. Of course I told him yes. You are never going to hear me complain about reading a math book. We also covered several science experiments in our weather study this week. Their favorite for this week was trying to find out if they are stronger than air. They all thought before the experiment that they were stronger than air…turns out they were wrong! Next week we will study the water cycle and make clouds in the kitchen.

We spent more time at the hospital this week. My husband’s stent was removed and hopefully this will be the end of the kidney stone chapter for a long, long while.

In American history we are starting to finish up the Colonial era and American Revolution. The crew really enjoys the books by Jean Fritz. We also found a history show called American Ride. The show follows a biker named Stan Ellsworth who rides around the country and talks history. I plan for us to start watching these shows through the summer. My husband found the series on Roku…some sort of internet TV service.  This week we read about Samuel Adams and the Boston Tea Party. So on Friday we invited

some friends over for tea…Colonial style. We used an old fashioned tea brick (available on Amazon) to make our beverage. We scraped about a teaspoon of tea into the cups and then poured hot water over and let it steep. The crew and guests then passed the cream and sugar and enjoyed…or didn’t enjoy their tea. We also had some little cakes and bread with strawberry butter spread. I really wanted to make a traditional Election Day Cake to go with the tea but…sometimes life gets too busy. I’m sure I can find another lesson to make the cake. The boys thought the tea was so awful they decided to throw it into the creek…in honor of the famous Boston Tea Party! One of the party goes said the tea was very good and she would have gladly paid the tax to enjoy her tea! We may have hosted a Loyalist at our soirée!

The crew made progress in their swimming lessons this week and are looking forward to a race with the swim coach next week. I also promised to take them out for milkshakes afterward.

The last of my orders from the homeschool convention came in this week. So today this kids started their new math with Christian Light Education. Oldest happily completed two math lessons (he really likes math these days!!!) while the middle two only completed one lesson each. I am hoping we can complete these lesson and get them into their grade

level math by Christmas break. Changing math curriculum is not easy but I can tell the change will be good and worth the foreseeable hiccups. MathUSee is a good curriculum but it was just too easy and not challenging at all for my crew. My favorite part of the Christian Light math so far is the daily speed drills and flash card practice that is built into the daily work. I knocked them down a grade to help them cope with the change and build up their confidence in the new program and themselves. The Christian Light math is also more involved than their previous curriculum. They are changing over from mastery style learning to spiral based learning and I am sure we will experience a few kinks.

My crew is asking me to go outside and see the snake they found…oh yeah!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Leaving Spain

Sparkles

lesson planning

my crew playing in the yard

Gospel study

Spanish for Sparkles

just a few of our biographies

Writing with Skill and Lee biographies

history of westward expansion

art, poetry, Shakespeare

essay volume 3 from Blackbird and Company