Friday Mash Up: Feudal system, Owl puke, Speech Therapy, and a Leaky Roof

I sat down to write about our week and it felt a wee bit redundant as I shared this post Thursday about many of the things we've been learning. So go read that and come back, okay? I'll wait.... are you back now? Great!  Let's move on.

The younger kids (6th grade on down) and began learning about the feudal system of land ownership this week. We pulled If You Lived in the Days of the Knights off the shelf to go along with our King Arthur book. They helped me create this white board of the levels of people in the feudal system along the way.

We really did dissect owl pellets Thursday and the kids had so much fun taking them apart and discovering the bones inside. We used a chart to try identifying them and came to the conclusion that our particular barn owls had a mostly rodent diet with just one small bird skull in the mix. We added a skull or two to our insect collection hanging on the wall (I don't remember how many, daddy took care of that task).

Thursday also had Samuel and mommy's very first speech therapy appointment. He had an evaluation four months ago and they just this week got an opening for him. At the original evaluation he had zero consonant sounds. He simply used all vowels. Strange, but true. Over the last 4 months I have worked with him at home on speech therapy and he has progressed to putting together sentences but is still missing a lot of consonant sounds. Hooray for progress!

It was an underwhelming experience. The speech therapist and I didn't get along from the get go. She introduced herself to Samuel and I and told me I could walk to the door with them but then to go sit back in the waiting room. She assured me that parents were not allowed in the room for therapy because kids get distracted. I assured her that I was going to be in the room because I'm the one who can work with him on a daily basis while she'll only see him once a week. I sat quietly in a corner of the room until she asked for my help. Samuel was great, sat at his table and tried to do what he understood, but she didn't explain anything to him or speak in sentences to him at all, so he was confused. She held up cards and said one word repeatedly hoping he would mimic her. He named what was in a picture and even tried reading her the letters on the back of cards (naming them all correctly, I might add), but she didn't notice because she was aiming for a specific word for each card that was a concept (in, on, whoa) when the picture he would happily identify was more like cat (on a table), mouse (in a box), horse (with a rider who was saying whoa). I pointed out she needed to treat him like a person and talk to him in complete sentences to explain what she wanted him to do. And that he had been reading her the letters of the words, if she would take the time to listen to him. She seemed pretty young and inexperienced with kids. We committed to go back for a month or two and see how things go. If they don't make progress with her methods we will request a different therapist or just continue working at home.

Friday was one of our favorite days - Homeschool Book Club! We were supposed to have read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Honestly, our family only made it through half the book and none of the families finished the book. It was weird. We have done Jules Verne in book club twice before, Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and loved them. We just didn't fall in love with this book. We had a fun discussion anyway and the kids created a gallery wall that was a collection like Captain Nemo had on the Nautilus. We also introduced our next book club title - Rascal by Sterling North. Only Makayla has read it before of all the kids. We talked about baby raccoons and what it would be like raising one, tried to guess what could happen in the book, and then just had a great visit.

In other news we finally have a working dishwasher after 6 weeks, 4 visits from the repairmen, 3 parts, and some fairy dust. To balance that out we have a leak in our roof. In a place we can't get to. Of course. Waiting on insurance seems to be a past time around here lately for one thing or another.

Next week is the end of September. Tomorrow Makayla shadows a veterinarian. We have a couple medical appointments for Mason next week, speech therapy for Samuel, Boy scouts, Cub scouts, youth group, activity day girls, and it's time to get ready for General Conference! It is one of our favorite weekends of the year and my kids have been making plans already. They have food plans, snack plans, and activity plans. They're ready to decorate their notebooks for taking notes and drawing pictures. I'm trying to decide what our special display will be for making notes about each talk. In April's spring sessions we did paper flowers and wrote the theme of their message on one side of the flower and their name on the other. Then we use those for Family Home Evening topics or morning devotionals, and so on after conference.

A few more posts from the blog this week:

• All Things Capsule Wardrobe Part 1
• All Things Capsule Wardrobe Part 2
• Unplanned Drawing Lesson: Snails

How has your week been? Are you ready for the last week of September? Do you have any family traditions for General Conference?

Linking to Weekly Wrap Up.