Week two in the bag...

...and things that helped get me through it well. 

I am not going to recap every week of school, but since we made it through the dreaded second week, I feel the need to celebrate.

Yee Hoo!

We did it.

And I didn't nap once.

There were firsts. The middle kid helped the little kid. Granted, I had to tell him to. He's an amazing kid, but nurturing doesn't come naturally to him. We've worked on that a lot. It did my heart good to see him helping his brother. 

(You may also notice the big kid sticking her tongue out at the camera. We may have another thing or two to work on with that kid.)

It took a full twelve days of school until the little kid said he didn't want to do school because it was "boring." 

I really thought it would be more like on day three.

He did draw this picture with his first and last name on it all by himself. And this is him and me, and we both have smiles on our faces, so it must not be all that bad.

And even though I never bothered to had the time to teach him to read before now, he's doing pretty well. 

 Fluffy doesn't think school is fun. People do terrible things to her ears while listening to Family Worship.

(I mean, does her face not scream, "Help me here, please!"?)

They played school one morning waiting for the real school to start. I don't get that, but hey, they were happy. 

Doing math first thing has been a great improvement to our year. It never gets pushed to the next day, and they are fresh and semi-bushy tailed. 

Whew.

And we laugh. Jude continues to forget to put cent marks after his numbers when working with adding and subtracting money. So me, being the smart aleck that I am, would say things like "Twenty-eight what? Cowboys, houses, watermelons?" 

He'd deadpan, "No, cents."

Then one day, I looked down and the apple that didn't fall too far from the tree was drawing watermelons after all his numbers instead of the cent marks.

So I couldn't say, "How many what? Watermelons?"

 I really don't know where he gets it.

Sunday Planning

(link)

I stumbled on this page when a friend posted it on another friend's page on Facebook. (Thank you, friends!)  I chose one from the meal planning section and printed it off grayscale. It really helped to plan out my week's worth of meals and made shopping a lot easier. 

Thanks to doing laundry through out the week, I was only left with two loads of laundry to do on Saturday. And that's because I didn't do laundry on Wednesday or Friday. That is huge.

I also used  Abe Books to order some books from school. Their prices were amazing. I got four books for $16 shipped. And several of these were big books, and they were expensive on Amazon. I am not buying a lot of books for school, but there were ones that would get used for several weeks.  And for those prices, I don't mind. I am actually about to go through my Amazon wish list and order some of them from this site. 

I am also loving a show that we found called "The Kratt Brothers." I DVR it, and they get to watch a show in the afternoons. They love this show. They take turns following me around telling me facts about whatever animal was featured that day. 

Drives me crazy, but I'm glad they like it, and that they're learning stuff.  

Two of our textbooks this year are paper back. They were dog-eared after just a week of school, and they are going to need to last us for years. A genius friend of mine told me to go to Staples, and they would break the bind for two dollars each. They have an industrial three hole punch, and I punched them in about ten minutes. I then bypassed their $7.50 binders and hopped over to the thrift-o-rama and grabbed some binders for 59 cents (watermelons). I will put the first and last five or so pages in page protectors to keep them in good condition. This makes photocopying pages easier also. (One book allows it. A dear friend of mine is married to a a copyright attorney, so I have to make these disclaimers, though I'd never ever copy something I wasn't supposed to, right? No home schooler ever does that.)

We are adding geography this week, and I love love love this geography cd. We used it with Sonlight, and made it through half of it. Another friend of mine used it, and we would laugh about how we'd sing the Middle East song in our heads over and over again. (I'm singing it right now.) 

And may I humbly say that God used it to prompt my prayers for the Middle East, because I actually knew all the countries that were there. Good stuff. We need to work on the rest of the world, and by the end of this cd, we will know nearly every country in the world. 

Amazing. 

I also like this Map Skills for Today book. There are several on the market from different publishers, but this one is my favorite. It's from Weekly Reader Publishing. It's kid friendly, yet challenging enough to teach them well. I'm excited about it.

I'm trying to decide whether to do geography one day a week or a little each day. We'll have to play with that to see which is better.

I'm praying that this week is even better as we add geography and then the next week history. We've been doing some history in that we're reading about Helen Keller and the Wright Brothers. (I found "The Miracle Worker" at the library, and the kids actually watched it. I am a little worried, though, because one kid, who shall remain nameless, asked me if we were going to get another baby ever. I shrugged and said, "I'd like that."  They  then sighed and said, "I'd like that too, but I hope it's not blind and deaf like Helen Keller..." Maybe I need to go back and talk about how God makes us in His image and being blind and deaf is not a bad thing, and there's a story in the Bible about a blind man and the disciples asked if he was blind because someone sinned and... But I'm a little tired to think about that now.) 

Full on history will come next week! (And I said that without a panic attack. Yay! Go me!)

I also started a grown up class, and I have homework. I'm excited and terrified. I think all my brain gets sucked out during the day. What if nothing's left for a grown up class at night? I'd better just be very, very quiet. 

My kitchen floor still isn't mopped, and we're headed for gas station bathrooms if I don't intervene this week at some point. But overall we are all working together, and the kids' help has been an invaluable contribution to our keeping the house neat. And somewhat clean. Scratch that. Just neat. 

Sort of. 

Mostly.


Well, we tried. Really, we did.

And that was week two.  

***I would also like to add that doing school on Monday afternoons is a huge and wonderful thing. We get our chores done (ie cleaning up from the whirlwind weekend) and ease into the school week. It allows the kids to sleep in a bit, and I get to get our school stuff organized and ready for the new school week. And we aren't rushing. It makes Monday bearable. And dare I say we try to make it joyful. try...