2018-2019 Homeschool Week 7

Can we just cancel Mondays? I feel like I'm always running behind on Mondays with multiple kids asking for help with new lessons at the same time. Then there is hubby needing time to do his own school work, so I'm running interference to get kids to stop talking to daddy (we don't have a room he can go to with desk/table space other than right where everyone is already homeschooling). Add in appointments like today's bloodwork (me) and surgeon appointment (daddy). We learned that Daddy needs surgery on his shoulder and may have to take a full 3 months off work after surgery due to lifting restrictions. Rebekah also started climbing stairs and cruising furniture. It just feels crazy.

We did get all our school work done, as usual. We are still listening to Wonder and will finish it just before Book Club on Friday.

Tuesday was the day of phone calls to doctors checking on test results, reordering prescriptions, setting appointments, and getting information. School work happened. Brainstorming budget ideas for taking 3 months off work happened. I cooked some yummy pork fajitas for dinner. By evening Caleb was laying around with a fever and saying his head hurt. It's never good in a large family when someone gets sick. Just waiting to see how many this takes down.

Wednesday it was still just Caleb feeling sick. We took the day off of school to celebrate Mason getting his cast off (and to facilitate the 3 hours during the morning that I was gone with Mason to get that done). He now has a knee immobilizer (basically a Velcro cast) that we will use for a while, decreasing as healing continues. He was so happy to be able to take a bath today! One child DID do some school today because he is in the middle of a project and wanted to work on it.

Thursday was back to the usual learning routines. Kids juggled their Thursday and Friday schedule to even things out. Caleb's fever was gone but more kids started them. We cancelled Book Club for Friday so we don't share whatever mild germs are working their way through our house. Grandma (my mom, the kids call her Gwa) came over just before lunch and visited for a couple of hours.  It was so nice! Some weeks I miss adult conversation and having it randomly one afternoon was wonderful.

Friday's highlight was a date in the early evening for dessert with my husband. It was so nice to get dressed up and go out together without kids. I don't even have any other notes for Friday beyond more kids having fevers and laying around in blankets.

Saturday was grocery shopping and laundry and homeschool prep and an afternoon nap and family movie night. We popped popcorn and watched A Wrinkle in Time because it has made it onto Netflix. It was good and weird. It is Saturday evening and time to hit publish on this post so I can get kids to bed.

2018-2019 Week 6: Routine and Cast Problems

I left off last Thursday with the fact that Daddy was homeschooling most of the kids on Friday while Makayla and I were going on a college visit. Friday went well, everyone learned a lot and had a good day. The college visit was great, we got some questions answered, had a lot of information given to us, and it made it seem a little bit more real that my first baby is almost finished with her homeschool journey (sob).The weekend was quiet and home based - just the kind of weekend I love.

Monday Daddy's college semester began and the kids and I got busy on another homeschool week. We started our study of the Middle Ages with an overview of the Ancient Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and some of the mythology of King Arthur. We looked at maps and enjoyed the stories.

I am seeing definite patterns emerge in the scheduling styles of my children. Each week I have a few kids in each of the following groups:

• Spreading all work evenly over the week, not overloading or making light any days.
• Concentrating their work in mainly over the first 4 days of the week, leaving a much lighter Friday. One child takes this to the extreme, with all possible subjects done every single day until the last two days of the week, where Thursday becomes lighter and Friday has even less. 
• Keeping Monday's workload light, to start off their week a bit slower.

I love that they can take responsibility for this. It makes for great life lessons as their week unfolds. 

Other Monday things: Dinner was chili and cornbread. It rained all day long and just felt like a good  soup day. After dinner was cleaned up we had Family Home Evening. For the family business portion of the evening everyone shared their ideas for food and snacks for General Conference weekend. I wrote it all down and we will refer to it the grocery shopping trip before conference weekend. After that we played Pictionary with a set of cards I bought a while ago from Chicken Scratch and Sniff. It has great themed cards like temple, prophet, Bible, King Benjamin, Joseph Smith, Jonah, and prayer.

Tuesday morning was filled with reading lessons, language arts, science, Latin, and math. There were many children to teach, help, and listen to. By lunch prep time I was ready for some quiet. I banished everyone from the kitchen while I made lunch and ate a pumpkin chocolate mug cake. For total transparency, I doubled the recipe for the mug cake and used a bowl. It was my lunch and totally worth every bite. I didn't share with my kids either. During lunch and again later in the day we listened to Wonder, our book club read aloud.

The rest of Tuesday involved emailing a college about how they prefer to receive homeschool transcripts (and if they have any other specific things they require for homeschoolers beyond that), sitting on the phone on hold with a medical supplier for way too long, and piano lessons. Daddy got home an hour after dinner time (remember, he is up at 2:15am and out the door for work by 3am) and basically sat down at his computer the rest of the evening because the new semester has started and he's doing college 1 or 2 classes at a time. It feels like it will take forever (he's been doing classes for 3 years I think) and I'm not a huge fan of being a single parent during the school semesters but you do what you have to do, right? This semester is an accounting class (last semester was too). I sat down with several of the kids to watch part of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Wednesday rolled out with a tired momma. Rebekah was awake more than once last night so my sleep was less than stellar. We did school and I just took a deep breath whenever I got frustrated with something and plastered a smile on my face, reminded my kids they are great at learning and that mommy was tired but loves learning with them.

History was a really fun lesson today on the spread of Christianity into Ireland and Saint Patrick. My little boys, who don't always choose to listen to our history stories, loved that pirates were involved in the story. My other kids (and I) loved listening to the story told with a beautiful Irish accent. We had an interesting discussion afterward. A few things we touched on:

• God speaking to people in dreams. We brainstormed examples from the scriptures. This tied in well with Joseph, son of Jacob/Israel, who also had dreams and was sold into slavery like Patrick.
• Sharing Jesus and the gospel message with others. Again, we came up with a list of examples, ranging from Ammon in the Book of Mormon and the Apostle Paul in the New Testament to daddy, who served a 2 year mission to Nevada. 
• The reality of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as separate individuals, united in purpose. This meant explaining what 'trinity' means to some Christians (as referenced in the story) and discussing why we believe differently. We also reinforced our recurring discussion that when people don't agree on something or believe differently we still love them and are friends because we are all children of God and that matters most. We can disagree without being disagreeable. 

In the later afternoon I finished watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with some of the kids. We got to watch some of the bonus features as well and it was fascinating to see the way they put robotics and puppetry together in the scenes for some of the actor work with dinosaurs. In the evening was youth group, Boy Scouts, and Cub Scouts. Fun and tiring all in one.

Thursday felt super relaxed at first. The learning unfolded one lesson at a time. Kids got along all morning. I didn't feel like we were in a hurry to finish something. Kids wrote poetry, created watercolor pictures, made maps, and generally just enjoyed their school work. Then Mason's toes started swelling on the leg that is in a cast. A lot. We ended up making the hour drive to the surgeon's office so they could bivalve his cast (cut it from top to bottom on both sides, loosen, and then tape at the bigger size). We go back again next week to get the cast removed and see what things look like and decide what to do next (another cast for a short time or a knee immobilizer).

On Thursday we also made reservations with an Airbnb place for a family trip next summer for 14 of us (grandma and grandpa are coming with us). We're going to Palmyra, NY to see the Hill Cumorah Pageant. It's amazing. I went as a teen with my own family and we went many years ago when Makayla was a tiny tot. The Pageant focuses on sharing stories from The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. It is on a 10 level stage with more than 650 costumed actors. There are also historical sites in the area from our own church history to visit, and a beautiful temple. It is going to be a lot of fun!

Friday afternoon is here already. There have been science experiments, Latin parsing, math problems, reading lessons, and more listening to Wonder. Our routine has carried us through the day smoothly and we have just completed our first 6 weeks of school. Last year we did a 6 weeks on and 1 week off schedule. Right now nobody seems in need of an extended break yet so we'll just keep plugging along. I know in winter we are likely to need more breaks for illness because large families can take a month or more to get through one cold being passed around the family.

I suppose that's enough typing for now. I'm off to enjoy some family time!

2018-2019 Week 5: Post Surgery Week

I left off last week with the day before Mason's leg surgery. Friday was surgery and Mason and I were at the hospital until Saturday afternoon. Surgery went well and he's in a long leg cast for about 3 weeks. Sunday Daddy took most of the kids to church. Mason needed to stay home and keep his leg elevated and ice on an off, so he, Rebekah, Tobias, and I were home. It is a pretty quiet, trying to keep him entertained life right now.

Monday was a school as usual day. Mason is not thrilled with sitting around on the couch so we're trying to vary where he is at and what he is doing. School went just fine. We also had a dentist appointment and an allergist appointment. In the evening was Family Home Evening with a fun game (LDS Shout Out) and a chance to learn more about the Prophet and Apostles leading up to General Conference next month. We learned some fun facts about them.

Tuesday was a slow start for some of the kids while others were up by 5am and 6am. School work happened as usual. My favorite thing has been listening to Mason the last week or so do his reading. It has started to really click and he is sounding out a lot less and just reading words a lot more in All About Reading 1. He read a funny story about a boy named Frank who drank pink milk and shrank. There are adventures and then a return to regular size. Mason decided he would not want to shrink like Frank. Over lunch we listened to more of Wonder, our book club title.

Wednesday the majority of school went fine. History, however, not so much. For some reason half the kids were loud, chatty, and not interested at all in listening. I dragged them through the lesson. I totally looked at one child and said, "Just sit down and don't talk for 5 minutes please. Not a sound and stay sitting!" That was the last subject of the day. Tomorrow's plan is to do history earlier in the day. The rest of our afternoon and evening were family time, youth group for the oldest 3, and lots of play on the couch with Mason. Dinner was vegetable beef soup in the crock pot with some French bread.

Thursday kicked off with kids sliding right into school. I made the general announcement that we would do history at 9am and they would all be expected to meet on the couch, pausing whatever they were working on. It went really well today. We finished Unit 1 in The Good and the Beautiful History 1, which goes from the Creation through Ancient Egypt's history. Today we talked about Moses and the Israelites, then an overview of the conquering nations and dynasties in Egypt's history from 600BC to modern times. Next week we move forward in time from Ancient  Egypt to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. We will hit some of the following topics for unit 2:

• Early Britain
• Stonehenge
• Spread of Christianity in Ireland (Saint Patrick)
• Christianity going to England
• Saint Augustine
• Feudalism
• Life of a Knight
• Life in a Monastery
• King Alfred the Great
• William the Conqueror
• The Magna Carta
• Chivalry
• Joan of Arc
• The Black Death
• The Scientific Revolution
• Isaac Newton
• Galileo
• The Huguenots

We have one field trip planned during this unit, to the Ohio Renaissance Festival. We have gone the last few years and it is so much fun! Real life jousts on horseback, shows, shops, and a queen - the kids enjoy it almost as much as the adults.

Mason has graduated to less time sitting with his foot elevated and more time in this borrowed wheelchair that has a foot rest for his cast.

Tomorrow Daddy is off and taking over the homeschooling while Mommy and Makayla make a college visit for Buckeye Preview. Then it is the weekend and family time!

2018-2019 Week 4: Sick and Surgery Tomorrow

Dragon fruit

I left off last week sick and that was really how I spent the week, slowly working through my summer cold. Monday I felt pretty miserable but we carried on anyway. There was a new week of school work to do. Yes, it was labor day, but we planned to take Friday off instead (surgery day for Mason), so our morning was school work. Just before lunch we headed down the street to watch the Labor Day parade in the heat. The kids enjoyed it and that is what matters, right? In the evening we tried a new fruit - dragon fruit. None of us had eaten it before. We cut it open, spooned some out to eat, then blended some up in a green smoothie to try it that way. The texture is reminiscent of kiwifruit.

Tuesday: A normal school day, mommy feeling a smidge better, piano lessons. I got on the phone today and made 13 medical appointments, including eye checkups for 9. I still have 9 dental cleanings to schedule. It truly is never-ending.

This Week's School Books

Wednesday I'm still having headaches (sinus pressure). It poses a bit of a challenge when listening to child after child after child telling me things, asking me questions, or reading to me because it simply makes the headache worse. Reading aloud is also a bit challenging. We made it through school anyway, because routines carry us through. The only modification today was I paired Joseph and Emma to read aloud to each other instead of reading with me.

The bins that keep each child's school

work organized. Total sanity saver!

Thursday was our Friday for school. Kids diligently worked through each subject. There was a failed science experiment with Joseph and Emma (twice!) and a successful one with Makayla. There were math lessons and reading aloud and grammar and spelling and on and on. It was wonderful!

Rebekah turned 7 months old today. She's crawling all over and into all the things. She sits herself up and plays and if she gets too excited still falls. She's tried sweet potatoes and liked them.

We got the official surgery time for Mason tomorrow and it is in the afternoon. This is good and bad. Good because we get to sleep instead of leaving at 4:30am to drive to the hospital (our usual for an early morning surgery time). Bad because Mason will be awake for hours and hours without being allowed to eat while surrounded by kids who are able to eat. We head to the hospital an hour before lunch. I don't know yet how many hours the double surgery will take.

The rest of our Thursday will be packing for the hospital, meal prep for those left at home, and family time.

2018-2019 Week 3: Random and Routine

Sunday evening I reminded the kids that I would be gone part of our school day with Mason for his pre-op appointment, so they needed to do school right after breakfast or in the afternoon if they needed me. Most of the kids chose to schedule their Monday as a lighter day of work and we were able to get through their lessons that needed taught by 10am (other things, like independent reading or handwriting could be done while I was gone). Mason and I got back from his appointment 3 hours later.

For Family Home Evening we did a bowling and junk food dinner trip. Bowling happened before dinner time and when we finished we picked up a bunch of French fries at Wendys along with their 50 cent frostys. Yes, dinner was fries and ice cream.

Tuesday and Wednesday were a continuing of the routines. Each morning kids pulled out their self-designed schedules and got to work. I sat at the table or in the living room available to help as needed with lessons. There were also piano lessons on Tuesday and we have one new student - mommy. I took piano lessons for about 6 months in my late teens and then life happened and I never got back to it. I decided I can surely fit 30 minutes of piano practice into my day around mom and wife life. It may be early, late, or broken into 10 minute segments, but it will happen. My goal is to be able to play from our church hymn book. I have a long way to go!

Dinner Wednesday evening was beef stew in the crock pot. As soon as dinner was finished I gathered up books and made a mommy-only library trip. I posted about it HERE. Makayla and Emma helped host a family history and indexing event at the church while Joseph went fishing with the Scouts.

Thursday felt like one eternal round of reading for me, homeschool, chores, piano, reading to kids, cooking, and more reading. In the evening Daddy and I spent 40 minutes with the three youngest boys going through clothing bins from the attic to find what fits and what we need to buy for fall and winter. It was a good regular day.

Friday I was exhausted before the day began. Rebekah is following the pattern most of my kids have followed - when she is going through a large physical developmental leap she stops sleeping well. She woke up three separate times last night (11:30pm, 1:30am, and 5:30am) and Tobias added a random wake up in there at 4:30am so I was up a lot. Thankfully the kids were motivated to get school done because the cousins and aunt (my sister) were coming over in the afternoon. Thank goodness!

We had a fun visit with the cousins and then it was dinner, veggie pick up, library book pick up, and crashing hard for mommy. I managed to get a summer head cold.

Saturday morning I finished going through clothing in the attic to check what we still need for each child for this fall/winter. Later that morning Makayla and Emma were my helpers on the fall clothing shopping trip for the family. Thank goodness for the girls, because I still wasn't feeling great and they did a lot of the shopping. We hit several stores including Once Upon a Child, Plato's Closet, and Target. We found almost all the clothing needs for 10 children, stayed under budget (spent $395), and will finish filling in the last few items later this month. Then we will look at who needs new shoes...

 It is Sunday morning as I get ready to hit publish and I'm still feeling really sick, so I'm sending daddy off to church with the older 8 kids and I will keep the 2 year old and 6 month old home with me.