in pursuit of wild things

We celebrated the beginning of our new academic year with our second annual promotion party. I officially now have a fifth grader, two third graders, and a little preschooler. Over the long weekend we went to the park, a family July fourth cookout, to Dairy Queen for ice-cream and a Chinese restaurant. We made tie-dyed t-shirts and blackberry syllabubs. The crew also enjoyed double video game time which is a big deal to them.

Littlest likes to amuse himself these days by hiding our shoes or even himself! I could not find my favorite flip-flops for two days! We really have to watch him outside because if you do not have your eye on him he will hide. The first time he hid while we were outside really frightened me! We know where most of his hiding spots are now and can find our missing shoes. One of his hiding spots is in the master bathroom. My husband is often amused by the variety of items he finds in there when he gets home from work. On a few occasions I’ve even found Littlest asleep in his hiding places.

A couple of weeks ago I removed all of last years art work from around the room. Sparkles thought an empty art display board was a very sad sight to see. She filled the emptiness with drawings from Doctor Who. Our wall is covered with images of the 10th Doctor, Donna Noble (my favorite companion), Martha Jones, Daleks and Weeping Angels.  Middle Boy also wanted to get in on the fun and covered his math lesson with alien space craft, explosions and an Ood…yeah, that’s from Dr. Who as well.

On Monday we jumped into our new school books and schedule. Our days have been a bit long as we adjust to the new workload and subjects. Oldest is working on his own for history this year while the younger two continue with The Story of the World. He also  has typing and a critical thinking/pre-logic

workbook added to his studies. Oldest struggled this week under the weight of his studies and the heavy reading schedule and is already behind. I’m sure he’ll adjust and thrive very soon. The logic stage has hit him hard. Despite the volume of work he told me he liked everything.

We’ve only completed two lessons in science so far but I can tell my little scholars are going to really love the study. We spent an hour discussing the ancient Greeks and Archimedes’ inventions. They made their own scrolls in Greek, hand drew a map of the known world (to the Greeks around 500 BC). We spent our next lesson time discussing Pythagoras

and his theorem. The science guide does not give me the answers so I actually had to know the theorem or where to find it. I couldn’t believe that I was actually able to remember “a squared plus b squared equals c squared”! I remembered the formula but had no clue what it meant! The really wonky part is that my husband was thinking about the theorem on his nightly walk the evening before. If I had to guess what he was thinking about on his walks I never would have imagined calculating the hypotenuse of triangles…

Every morning we’ve been outside watering the garden and picking blackberries. I juiced the first batch of blackberries to make blackberry fizz and syllabubs. The next quart (all ready in the fridge) I’ll use to make honey-blackberry syrup for waffles and make a batch or two of muffins. The garden is still growing and I hope to harvest a tomato or two by this weekend’s end. Due to the continuous spring rains and then sudden dry spell the tomatoes ended up with flower end rot. The same thing happened last year. If

we have a really rainy spring season next year then I am going to pick off all of the flowers. The rot is so discouraging. The jalapeno and bell pepper harvest is starting to pick up and hopefully I’ll be able to make some roasted tomato salsa soon…yum! I’m waiting for my cucumber plant to produce more fruit. We had some high winds a week or so ago and the plant has had a hard time recovering. It is covered in blooms now so hopefully I’ll have cucumbers again soon.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers. Next week the some of the participating blogs in the Weekly Wrap-up will be sharing our curriculum choices for the year. I’ll post mine as well and I look forward to learning what everyone else will be using in their homeschools.

James at the river in Paducah

ZZ-Top

The Columbia in Paducah

at the prk