Our first day of school went well, i still have to cover math with the Princess and have the boys review their Latin but everything else got done!!!! With good attitudes!!! Hope this trend continues throughout the year.

has made a reputation for himself with my neighbors. One of our neighbors yesterday asked if he would go over and let her dogs in and out of the house while she was away over night. He earned $10.00 and she says she will be hiring him again, that now she can go away knowing that the dogs will be well taken care of. She will also be hiring him for leaf raking in the fall. In case you don’t know this our lot in this neighborhood are 51×204 with LOTS of trees which = lots of leaves to rake, we do have curbside leaf pick up but still. So he will be getting paid to do 3 neighbors yards most probably. I hope the word continues to spread as he gets older and then the others can join in as they get older.

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A real covered bridge, the kids thought it was cool

We were in the landing path of many airplanes that day.

Our walk wouldn’t be complete without the outhouse.

NO!!! You may not creek walk today in that skirt…..I don’t care if all the other kids are, they are not wearing a skirt.

Can you say lignan?

I love the look of moss on rocks.

So the Princess has been taking art lessons for the last 4 weeks and I just had to show off her talent. She was 6 in January and really wants to be an Art Teacher when she grows up. I think it is great and hope she does, then if she homeschools her children she can make extra $$$ by teaching other homeschoolers. Yes, I’m trying to control part of her life, but I so want for my children what I never had. So the first project was a fur seal and background.

The next week she tie-dyed but I haven’t taken that photo yet. So on to the 3 rd. week’s project:

Then she tie dyed yet again….no photo of that one either, only to finish with:

Her Rainbow Fish chalk drawing. Her 16 year old sister was quite impressed by her artwork and that is saying a lot since Jassy is quite the artist herself.  We will be continuing with her lessons for next session.

We will be starting our new school year on August 17th. I’m going ot be spending the next two weeks planning and scheduling. I have The Ark’s reference book done but need to do the others, yet. Still trying to decide if I will make their student planners or if I will just go the easy route and buy them. Will be back with the finalized plans in a few days.

So today instead of studying for my history class I got distracted by planning art lessons for The Ark who will be in 6th grade this fall.  I’m very blessed because I know of this really cool blog that has lessons already planned for you. Most of the lessons are for 5th grade and under, but since we haven’t done much art we are doing the 5th grades ones that we like. so here are our plans:

• August~ An Eye for Magritte
• September~ How to draw King Tut
• October~ Positive/Negative Pumpkin
• November~ The Scream Painting
• December~ Tinted Christmas Tree Painting
• January~ Snow Man Drawing
• February~ Paper Chain using Valentine paper
• March~Cut-n-Tear City Scapes Collage
• April~ Marker Drawing of Squires Castle
• May~1point perspective drawing
• June~Handpainted Etchings

We have Abeka’s  Art Projects for third grade and plan to use that for Ace. While the Princess will be taking art lessons with the lady down the street, once a week. While my boys tolerate art, they do not enjoy it enough for me to pay someone for lessons, however my Princess LOVES art. She is forever talking about becoming an art teacher, possibly for the deaf community as she also loves sign language.

We only planned one project a month for The Ark, he will be drawing almost daily for the rest of his art. School starts on August 17!!!! I”m so not ready.

In spite of the fact that I’m supposed to be taking time off form doing schoolwork with the kids, I’ve been working bit by bit on planning for next year. My head keeps hearing ” fail to plan, plan to fail”. I truly want this year to be a wonderful year for us, even with all the chaos that is our lives right now.

So I’ve started gathering my forms for planning our year. my favorite resource is of course,  Donna Young . From her cd and at times website, I’ve printed off a school calendar, attendance forms, a course of study, a quarter planner and subject pages. Oh yes, I forgot, I printed off monthly calenders for the kids, we write short notes on them for an idea of what we did daily.

I also started printing off things for their history course, I did decide to only do half of MOH this year, thereby easing my workload, guilt and letting us really delve into the ancients. There is so much fun stuff to learn for that time period.

So once I get this moving I will post some photos of it for you to see.

So today we met with our favorite teacher to go over our school year with the boys. We have always used her and love her so much, she can’t quit until my kids are grown!!!! I’m not sure I’ve told her that yet though

As always she was impressed with how much we did this year. In spite of all the personal chaos going on in our lives for the last 10 months. My personal opinion of our year is both positive and negative. We truly did do a great deal of work, the boys were exposed to a great deal and a few things did stay with them. On the negative side of things, we were very stressed out, didn’t really enjoy our days, forgot much of what we covered and we didn’t have as much to show for everything we did do. After awhile the boys didn’t want to write or color or document anything of what we read for school. We took field trips but didn’t document them at all.

The teacher~ Diane, suggested we go back to writing one or two words on our daily calendar, we talked about how I’m concerned about the boys decoding abilities and she suggested using sequential spelling so we will be switching to this and see if that helps us. A plus is that both boys can do it at the same time. Another suggestion she had was only focusing on a few things this year until we get to some sort of mastery. Giving us a much needed reprieve from trying to do it all and then suffering from major guilt because we didn’t get it all accomplished. So I have some major thinking to do. We are taking off for the month of July to regroup. I’m hoping to take a trip to visit friends in Va and NC in early Aug. providing we have the funds, giving us a much needed break from the stress here. She also suggested covering something only once a month! I’m thinking that poetry might be that once a month thing.  We are supposed to go back to the Ancients in history using MOH this fall but I’m seriously thinking of covering it over a two year period and really taking the time to delve deeper into it. Plus we have so many great fiction books that go with this time period that it would be a shame not to be able to read them.

She told me in front of the boys that the only thing she really requires on a daily basis is reading!!! Yea!!! Diane!!! So with that in mind, the boys won’t be allowed to not read daily and I can use her as my reason. I know evil mom, but we do what we must. Another suggestion was to go back to requiring the boys to write a bit more. She wants the Ark to write at least 1 paragraph with a topic sentence 3 supporting sentences and a closing sentence. At whatever frequency I decide, while Ace is to start learning that process this upcoming year.

So, my tentative plan is focusing on reading, writing, spelling, math on a daily basis, with a much reduced history and science. One thing I’m not sure I’m ready to let go is the boys Latin studies, I really want them to learn it, so that might be on our daily list. Another item I want is daily drawing, I think the boys like to draw and I want to encourage them in it. My only problem is that they don’t want to have any instruction, just draw. I would like to see their drawing improve.ONe thing I did this year was i had a self evaluation and had the boys look at it, the Ark filled his out and it was interesting to see what he felt he did. I think we will do one at the end of each semester to help evaluate us and hopefully keep us on track. Another thing Diane suggested was to make sure I write down our goals so I don’t forget them and freak out mid year. Which I definitely plan to do.

She loved our lapbooks but suggested that we only do a few minibooks and that the boys be able to pick out the minibooks that they want to do, so that they each are invested in what they are learning and giving them each a different look to their work but still learning about the same subject.

So that is the end of the year evaluation. We have some educational videos that we borrowed, I want the boys to watch and then notebook what they feel is important. So in August when we start again I will have a 6th grader, 3rd grader, 1st. grader and a preschooler.  I need to make up certificates for them.

Check back for the schedule….

• A daily schedule for those who like to have a plan or would like their children to complete the book on their own
• Templates for written narrations, the notebooking activities and experiments
• Review Questions
• Scripture Copywork, with both print and cursive practice
• Reading lists and additional activities, projects, experiments for each lesson
• An appendix with beautiful, full-color, lapbook-style Miniature Books
• Field Trip Sheets to keep a record field trips
• A Final Review with fifty questions the students can answer either orally or in writing to show off all they remember and know at the end of the course.

We will be going back to schooling year round, since there is too much I want the kids to learn in a year. Ace will be doing latin starting next week, we had panned it for The Ark after 5 lessons because of his dyslexia, but now it is improving to the point where he shouldn’t get confused. So hopefully next week we will begin again. I told The Ark he had to listen in to review his vocab and the grammar. Then once Ace is on chapter 6 we will just keep going. I truly believe that our 2.5 months of summer vacation is outdated in our society. After all, adults don’t get that much time off unless they are public school teachers.

We switched Ace to MUS and I made him repeat the second grade math as he just wasn’t getting the concepts at all. So here we are after the first week of MUS and he really likes it, did his daily work without complaining and correctly in a decent amount of time!!!! He will not get a summer break for math since he now has to catch up. But as long it is continues this way I think he will be fine. I think the best difference is less problems and no pictures or color to distract him. Senory Integration Disorder is a different teaching challenge for me but I think we are finally getting it right.

The Peanut and the Princess still have way to much creativity going on lately. I won’t share the latest but it was interesting, just not as safe as I would like and I had to put a stop to it. *shakes head* where do they come up with these things? The Ark and The Princess want to start their MUS as well but I told them to finish what they have and take a short break from math, so we could do some other things for a bit. The Peanut told me today that he is going to bury me in South America. Why there I have no idea and we haven’t talked about SA for months now.

We took a hike this week and had a great time but the kids were sad to come home. I hope to be able to take a hike every other week. Since we are doing Zoo 1 we are paying lots of attention to birds these days. I really need a better lens for distances though. I am going to price them but it will be awhile I think before I can get one.

We have listened to the Magician’s Nephew on cd in the van while driving to the kids chiro appointment and now have new Jonathon Park cd’s to listen to.  After that we might listen to the other Narnia cd’s and we have Island of the Blue Dolphins, the Sign of the Beaver, and a couple of other’s that I can’t remember the name of right now. I’m really trying to get them to look at learning in a different light.

Well, I’m off to unwind it has been crazy here lately.