Highlights of our week:
- Started off rather poorly, actually. E’s been having trouble just getting the daily work done in a timely manner without complaining. This is one of the downsides of homeschooling and not having peers around to ‘perform’ for. It’s just you and mom and you don’t feel like it. So you can schlump in your chair, answer with a sigh, poke and poke and poke, etc. You get the drift. When things get tough, the tears start immediately. Again- it’s just mom. No one to impress here!
So we had a few talks this week and J had a couple bible studies on self-discipline, self-control and complaining. I’ve also re-evaluated what we’re doing as each time we have some sort of ‘block’ I always ask myself if we’re doing too much. And 9 times out of 10 we are. I continually have to weed…when you’ve got one kid you tend to just throw everything you’ve ever wanted to learn or teach at the poor child and wonder why they don’t want to sit and school for 8 hours a day nonstop. Ok- not quite that bad. But still. Bad enough!
So this weekend I went back over my Homeschool Tracker software and rearranged items, freeing up some writing weeks so the programs don’t overlap as much. Spread Science out a little more. I would have removed one of the vocab programs, but the Building Language Lessons is almost through anyway, so I just pushed off our other one until it’s done. Although E has been complaining about NOT wanting to finish that program…high praise! We’re almost done with our regular handwriting program so that frees up more time too for the rest of this year. There are only 2 health lessons left and I spaced those out further too. I am combining the Writing With Ease into 2 days/week instead of 4, but we’ll be dropping the dictation exercises in lessons 1 and 3 that go along with the reading and summarizing. Overkill, esp. since we have other writing programs.
There’s probably more, but that’s what I can remember right now. All in all, I think we’re both feeling better about going into this week.
- We did manage to get about 70% of our items done last week. The rest I’ve rearranged throughout the rest of the school year and the ones I haven’t I hope to have caught up by Wednesday. The biggest catch-up will be in Story of the World…we can’t push that any later this year! That's always been the area that we drag out- there are so many resources we like to go through! But we can’t keep doing that or we’ll be in Ancient History until she’s 19.
- We enjoyed making our Valentine cards and projects this week for each other- we spent a few hours doing that on Tuesday. We exchanged with friends during a playdate on Thursday. Here's a few pics of Emily sewing up cards and the like, and of my deck of cards I made for J. I got the idea here.
- It was a rough end to the week as well- Emily’s pet rattie Silvermist died. :( They really are such cute pets, and so smart! She was Tink’s bff too, and she’ll be missed greatly. She came down very suddenly with a respiratory illness- Emily had held her Friday a.m. and when she brought her in to visit us, I noticed how odd she felt. Lightweight and lethargic- not good. We got an appointment at the vet for that afternoon. They couldn’t tell for sure but diagnosed it as a respiratory ailment. I verified that it was later on, as she got really congested (that’s finally what ended it all). At any rate, she got some meds but it just worsened throughout the night and she died early Saturday a.m. Luckily I was able to wake J up and get Tink out to be with her…she licked her and stayed close the whole time, chattering with her ears laid back. Really sad. :( Emily is quite bummed.
- We’d missed our Omni at the Science Museum to take Sil to the vet and unfortunately that was the last day Omnifest ran. So we only made it to Shackleton. We also skipped our monthly naturalist class as it was snowshoeing and there’s zero snow out. I heard they still had fun, but we were finishing up our cards for people and getting a few things done after the slow start to the week and didn’t mind missing this month.
- Other highlights of the week- it was my sister Cassie’s birthday on Friday and we celebrated Saturday with a delicious meal and dessert (poppyseed cake, of course!) at Mom and Dad’s. Had nice conversation as we sat around the table…never did crack open a board game. We were all quite tired heading home that night. I’d stayed up with Sil- partly to watch her and partly to fix my schedule; E was up later than usual b/c of Sil too and J had the post office that day and was bit on the leg by a dog! He’s never been wary of dogs before this job and I doubt that helped!. We zonked as soon as we got back.
Well- I’ve got lots of tweaking to do to this homeschool weekly wrap-up. Who knew it’d be so hard to get the week’s highlights down?? I seem to have skewed the other way now and included lots of non-school, personal updates! That’s ok though- in homeschool the line between school and home is quite blurred anyhow. :)
Can you see my new shoes?? Target $5.74 :D And yes, I cut off my head :P
