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!