Homeschool Notes Week 35

We started the week off on Monday with homeschool, a dentist appointment, a doctor appointment, lunch, and surprising the kids with a trip to the zoo in the afternoon for Family Home Evening. It turned out to be a bit rainy but we had fun and saw a lot of animals in the hour and a half we were there. A short list of animals we saw:

•  sheep
• goats
• pigs
• chickens
• miniature horse
• swans
• elephants
• rhinos
• langur monkeys
• sloth bear
• python
• two kinds of bats
• water monitor
• all the fish and sharks in the aquarium
• manatees
• pelicans
• sting rays
• the reptile house full of frogs, turtles, lizards, and snakes
• alligator
• flamingoes

Tuesday dawned with pouring rain and stayed gray and chilly all day. We read the last of Esperanza Rising aloud today. It was a good book, but not a happy one all the way through. We had a lot of things we could talk about during this read.

The kids were thrilled to see that our caterpillars were all beginning to hang upside down and make their chrysalises. In the afternoon was piano lessons. Evening had my sister and her kids coming for dinner (Taco Tuesday!) and visiting.

Wednesday held homeschool in the morning. I made a couple yarn dolls as examples for our Book Club craft this Friday. In the evening I went bowling with my Cub Scout pack. Those boys are a riot!

Thursday I was out of sorts and overwhelmed. I just woke up feeling off and it lasted all day. Let's face it, sometimes that is just life. I'm almost 3 months postpartum and hormones are still shifting as cycles come back. Add in mothering a large family with diverse ages and needs and some days are overwhelming.

Mason and I had a challenging day at physical therapy (hard work for both of us, in a good way) and he's got some things going on that are going to lead to another surgery. We see his full team of doctors and surgeons next month but probably won't schedule surgery until September so he can enjoy the summer without a cast.

Friday my hormones were on a more even keel. We spent the morning preparing for Homeschool Book Club. Two families came over which put us at 20 kids ranging from teens to almost 3 month old Rebekah. We talked about Esperanza Rising, a good book that not everyone liked, but that gave us lots to talk about. Then we had two activities. Kids could make yarn dolls, which played a role in the book. They also had two fleece blankets to cut and tie, that will be donated to Project Linus. As the crafting finished everyone ate together and visited for a while.

It is now Friday afternoon and I have a partial grocery list in front of me, I've made a few necessary phone calls, and have a few more to make. It's also time to check in with each child and see where they are in their year's school work and choose our last day of school. Over the summer the only 'school' we do is simple:

 

1. Keep reading great books as individuals and for Book Club. Our next title is The Happy Hollisters. 

2. Do math 2 days a week. This is really just to keep everyone from forgetting what they've worked on all year.

That's it for our week! Happy Friday everyone!

Homeschool Notes Week 34 - Just the Highlights

Saturday's highlights started with a library book sale. Who doesn't love browsing books and coming away with an entire paper grocery bag full for just $5? We find a lot of fun books this way. Mid-morning was the weekly grocery shopping trip. It's always amazing to me just how much food I need to get to feed my family for a week.

Makayla and Colton

If you ask Makayla what Saturday's highlight was, she would say going to prom.

She found a great dress, a cute date, and they had dinner with friends and went dancing. How is my daughter already old enough for this?!

Sunday we started the day with church. That evening was the family birthday party for April. This month happens to be my husband and my birthdays. He turned 40 this week and at the end of the month I will be 37. We had chocolate éclair, lemon éclair and no bake cookies.

Monday the weather moved back to cold and snow. We hit the homeschool week hard and then had lunch a little early. Then we surprised the kids with a trip to the bowling alley at noon for Family Home Evening.

Today was the first day of their Kids Bowl Free program in our area. Every day between now and September our kids can bowl 2 games for free. We also paid for the family pass ($30) so that Jason and I, as well as Makayla, who is too old for the program, can bowl 2 games every day with the kids. The only cost is shoe rental, but we find it is much cheaper to just buy bowling shoes online and pass them down to younger kids as feet grow.

The day only got better because a surprise science kit arrived. It has been years since we have raised caterpillars and watched them change into butterflies. We've got 10 little caterpillars in the house now from Insect Lore.

Tuesday it was still cold and snowing off and on. It was a perfect day for a slow start to homeschool, lots of reading aloud (Esperanza Rising), and playing all sorts of board and card games.

Wednesday we rocked through homeschool before the kids insisted we open up our Art for Kids Hub membership and do some drawing tutorials. We had kids draw Black Panther, a scorpion, and pea shooter from Plants vs. Zombies. In the evening was the usual Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and youth group.

Oliver's current reading book.

Thursday I didn't get any notes written down. I know we had a pretty typical homeschool day. Mason had physical therapy. Oliver was telling me about the book he is currently reading while I made dinner. That's really all I remember!

Friday kicked off with a few kids sleeping in and others diving into school right away. Mason is working hard on his handwriting. He's had a lot of challenges with fine motor control that relate to his spina bifida and other diagnoses. When we started this school year he couldn't draw a circle or a straight line. Really. Everything was super wobbly and difficult. While he still has a ways to go, I was so proud of him today. This week he has been doing some drawing one on one with me, because it is another way to work on his fine motor control that doesn't feel like "we're doing handwriting' to him.

He's been fascinated with the circus ever since we say The Greatest Showman so today he requested we do a circus drawing. One thing I've learned is that you can't give him the option to erase! He needs to write or draw with pen, marker, or a pencil with no eraser. If erasing is an option he will erase over and over to get things just right. When he knows he can't erase, like with the markers he drew this tent with, he just does his best and accepts it.

Late in the morning Joseph started packing for his campout. He packed his food, including making 40 cinnamon rolls from scratch. We ate part of those for lunch today, he packed some for breakfast on the campout tomorrow, and the rest will be eaten as a snack by the family. Grandma came too visit in the afternoon. We had a lot of fun talking and laughing.

It is now nearly bedtime. Joseph is off to his campout. Makayla is out watching another play that two of her friends are in. We're heading into the weekend and it's time for some relaxing!

Homeschool Notes Week 33

I haven't been great at getting pictures but I'll sprinkle a few in with captions.

Mason peeling oranges as a lunch

helper one day this week.

We started the week out with Monday off of school. #perksofhomeschooling Jason had an appointment in the morning. Before he returned home Mason and I left Makayla in charge of the siblings and headed into the big city to visit the wheelchair vendor. We picked up a seat cover (warranty replacement) and he had the technician do a couple adjustments to his chair, including lowering the seat back.

In the afternoon we did some family projects organizing things (closets, laundry, a bit of the attic). For Family Home Evening we did round 2 of the General Conference Jeopardy game. This time I had Emma as my accomplice. She was tasked with passing out candy whenever an entire column/category was finished. We didn't explain to the rest of the family the key to getting candy passed out. It was a fun evening!

Rebekah is smiling and laughing now.

Tuesday I was up and exercising with my Fit2Be membership - I love their Roku channel. It makes my life easy. As kids got up and moving we did our homeschool work. Caleb was excited today to draw a porcupine. He really enjoys using Draw Write Now for his copywork. Each week he draws a picture from one of the books. Then on a different day or two he writes the four lines of copywork that go with that picture.

While the kids did piano lessons I baked our extra large pizza pan full of oatmeal chocolate chip cookie dough. It made the house smell delicious. It became our movie snack because today our dvd of The Greatest Showman arrived. We turned out the lights, closed the curtains, and dove in to the music and story.

My oldest daughter and oldest son.

Wednesday was a pretty typical day. Exercise at 6am. Homeschool all morning. Makayla worked 8 hours. People sang and danced along to The Greatest Showman - because it is that good. Food was prepared, eaten, and cleaned up. There was Cub Scouts and youth group.

When I have lots to do as a mom

I love bringing Rebekah along

in my Ergo baby carrier.

Thursday started at 4:45am when Rebekah woke up and decided it was a great time to poop, the silly baby. Once she was back to sleep at 5:30am I headed downstairs for some quiet exercise time. Makayla was on her way to Seminary already and it wasn't quite 6am when the other kids started waking up and trickling down the stairs for the day. Homeschool was off and running after breakfast. Makayla took Joseph to his orthodontist appointment instead of babysitting the rest of the kids, then they went to the grocery store and picked up a few things. This having teens and a teen with a driver's license is interesting and pretty great sometimes!

By lunch time it was heating up outside and by evening the temperatures were upper 70s inside and outside of the house. We set up fans and spent some time in the attic pulling out shorts and short sleeve shirts for everyone. The kids played outside after dinner.  Of course, we didn't put away all our winter clothes because it is supposed to snow again in a few days.

Friday the house was warm when we woke up and it just got hotter. Because of a medication Mason has to take for his neurogenic bladder his body doesn't sweat like it should and he can overheat easily. That means we had to turn the a/c on in the house today to cool it down a bit. (It also makes for a lot of challenges outside during spring/summer/fall when temperatures rise... )

Homeschool was pretty straightforward as usual. Makayla had an interesting chemistry experiment today. She's been learning stoichiometry (expressing the quantitative relationship between reactants and products in a chemical equation). Today she took copper sulfate, a vibrant blue crystalline compound, and heated it on her lab burner. It began to crackle and pop as water evaporated from the copper sulfate and turned white. She compared the mass in grams from before and after the heating to find out how many molecules of water were attached to the copper sulfate. Just before cleaning up her experiment she added drops of water back into the beaker and we watched as the white compound turned bright blue again.

Over the last few days the kids have been pulling out a lot of games to play again. They go in phases and this week they have played:

•  Othello
• Clue
• Life
• Labyrinth
• Hi Ho Cherry O
• Harry Potter Triwizard Maze
• Life Junior

It is a lot of fun seeing them play and watching as they teach younger siblings how to play or let them be buddies to 'help' them play when a game is too old for them.

One last picture because this shows one thing I love doing every day: snuggling my baby!

Week 32 Homeschool Notes

Monday was full as usual. There were homeschool lessons to do. Daddy and Makayla had a visit to the dentist. Mommy had blood drawn for thyroid labs (everything looks good, no medication dose changes) and renewed her driver's license - between those two tasks I was gone for 3 hours because both places were very busy. Meals were done. Chores and car repairs happened. The list just keeps going.

Family Home Evening was General Conference Jeopardy. I think the absolute best part was hearing my children during our game. Children who I was pretty sure were listening as little as possible during the 8 hours of General Conference and were so excited to share answers. One child had spent the entire weekend saying Conference was boring as we watched each session. I knew they only stayed with the family because of the candy (anyone who is in the room for the talks can grab a piece of candy at the end of every talk from a large bin we fill up just for General Conference). When Jeopardy started this child looked at me and said, "This is boring. I'm not playing. I'll sit here but I don't want to play." I have been working a lot to have positive interactions with this particular child who tends to butt heads with me, so I just welcomed that child to stay on my team and we started playing. When it would be their turn to choose a category I always offered the turn, and for a while it was declined. About 1/3 of the way into our Jeopardy game we hit a question for our team that this child knew the answer to and cared enough about to speak up. From that point on they were in the game and it was obvious that they really had been listening to General Conference and thinking about the things they had heard. (happy mom sigh!)

Tuesday there was no running around to do. We had a great morning of homeschooling. We got back into reading Esperanza Rising aloud for book club. There were our usual piano lessons. Dinner. And then the tornado sirens started going off. We had a major storm come through with tornado warnings for almost an hour. That makes some of my kids very edgy and unhappy, but we got through it.

Wednesday and Thursday the only notes I have say school, Cub Scouts, physical therapy, and hives. Samuel is still getting a few hives randomly. Bodies are just weird.

Friday I giggled at my life a few times. I was sitting between Caleb and Mason, who were both reading aloud to me from their All About Reading lessons at the same time (different lessons, so I was listening to different stories simultaneously). At the same time I was helping Oliver, Joseph, and Emma with math problems when they had questions. There are days where it would really help to have three of me! The other big thing to note is that Rebekah is now 2 months old. She's adorable and I'll try to get a post up with pictures soon.

Saturday was prom dress shopping with Makayla, grocery shopping, going through clothing and taking a load of things to Goodwill, chores, family time, and lots of school work for Daddy. I had a very long to do list and there is still a lot on it that needs done. I'm hoping to tackle a lot of that on Monday after a 3 hour trip to the wheelchair vendor to get some adjustments on Mason's chair.

That's it for this week. It's Sunday evening and I have a sweet baby girl who is ready to snuggle.