October Flew Past: Here's a quick review.

October is over and I didn't get to blogging as much as I had planned. Life is full and usually I am just too busy living it to stop and take time for pictures and writing a post. Our internet has also been very spotty for 6 weeks. That should be changing tomorrow as we switch providers. I hope. We've had two birthdays so Joseph is now 12 and Daniel is 9. In November we have two more birthdays (Tobias turns 1 and Caleb turns 6). Emma rounds out December turning 11 and we will finish the year with children ages 15, 12, 11, 9, 7, 6, 4, 3, 1. Until January when the birthday rounds begin again.

We have been plugging away at our fall homeschooling plans. The kids have read more books than I planned for literature, which is not unusual. We lost some time reading aloud history while I was sick and coughing for several weeks so I need to take a look at what we want to do about that. Our morning basket also needs reworked a bit for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's on my project list for this weekend.

My kids have been loving our current book club title - Prince Caspian. We've read it before but it has been long enough ago that many of the children do not remember it. It's making me want to have a Narnia party.

Writing has been going well. Most of the kids learned about writing a letter of invitation in October. November we're focusing on using humor in writing. Makayla kept working through The Power in Your Hands during October. At the end of the month we made a deal, one we often make for November - she can drop her writing course for the month of November. Why? Because she loves to participate in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. She dives in to the full adult program and gets 50,000 words written in 30 days on a new novel. It is one of my favorite months because I get to hear her agonies and ecstasies as she writes and wrestles with her characters to tell their story.

Our first art class for November happened today and I'll try to share more about that soon. For now, just peek at the collage of pictures at the top of this post to see what we worked on.