Category: Week In Review

Highlights of our week learning

12/3/2015

We've had a somewhat unusual week here so far.. For a variety of reasons, but learning happened, it really did. :) These are some of our highlights.

Today we did some learning abit about Russia. :)

My son's delight in learning that he can work ahead in his dailies. :) A decision made that I will be making a list of what needs to be done each week and if he works ahead in it, it means free time to do other stuff. He was so happy on Monday that he had to bring hardly anything with him to gramma's on Monday since on Wednesday he worked ahead. Just his reading and his math were all he needed.

My delight in knowing that he is delighted to work ahead on his materials if it means I can get work done out in the garden, or prepare a lesson without having to be right with him to keep him on track. :) This week I needed two hours to prepare a garden plot for doing an archaeological dig. My lad CHEERFULLY worked on his dailies and got ahead on his reading.

The wonder of learning that such interesting creatures live in our world such as the Sea Mouse. It's a type of annelid and doesn't it just look like an underwater mouse should look? My lad and I grinned. :) Learn more about the sea mouse HERE.

Ooh...ooh..ooh.. I must not forget. My son earned his advanced white belt in Karate this week. The picture below is him receiving his new belt from his Sensei. He told me the Sensei said he was doing a really good job learning. :) As we went out to the car "Mom, how long before I can get my yellow belt you think?" Looking forward is as good thing eh?

And the picture of the whole gang who moved up. I found it interesting watching what each of the next levels needed to do to earn their belts. Gives us something to look forward to in training.

This past week reviewed

9/14/2015

One of the questions I am hearing from my homeschooling friends is... so...how'd your first week back go?

I just shake my head.   This first week is NEVER what I hope it will be.

I feel so much pressure this time of year.   And I SHOULD NOT.   We school year round. Granted, our summers are much lighter, but still, we are not a high pressure family and pressure just makes us all shut down. (hence removing pressure by schooling year round).

BUT even for those who kick things into gear for the start of the year I find them shaking their heads too.

1. Their children don't want to be back in school

2. Parents aren't really ready to start

3. Distractions of Back to School Picnics

4. The.. uh.. it didn't go so well, I was so disorganized.. :)

So then I don't feel so bad that our first week was really first two days. :)

So just what did we accomplish last week?   We did another composer from Gena's music lessons :) (Click banner to learn more)

21 Lessons in 20th Century American Music Appreciation

We accomplished three lessons in Veritas Press. Two on the Middle Ages, one on The Explorers.

We did some math.

We started reading Stone Fox and learning how to do book studies. This was a definite challenge for the lad. It was a challenge to help him try to think through the questions because then it was MY thoughts and not his own. And he wanted it to be his own thoughts...

Phys Ed was accomplished two ways
1. moving some big stones out of our once rock garden to a pile under the hedge.
2. Karate class.

We also did lots of reading. So far our Dragonets book is proving to be quite interesting. One more chapter mom.. one more chapter!!! and the lad continues to read his own way through Deltora Quest.

Linked up withweird, unsocialized homeschooler.

Busyness, time to prepare...A week in review

8/23/2015

Over this past week I've been busy.. so has the whole family.     My hubby with struggling to feel well as he's fighting some type of bug.

My lad in keeping up with his mom. :)   We've been gone from the home TOO many days and it kind of caught up to us today...so we had a relaxing day just fiddling at home.

So what all have we been doing?

My son has done some schooling with Stinky Kid math...he's got a firm grip on Associative, cumulative and distributive properties now AND has done some learning about stopping and starting videos until he understands what people are talking about... breaking it down into smaller bits.   He still has some work to go on it, but he's starting to figure it out. :)

I've been a tough mom this week too.. making him work on his Veritas Press course as well. He enjoys it but we got diverted too much last year, so he's got some catching up to do. :) He's doubled up most days this week except when he was working hard helping mom clean the house.

This is a pic from last year, now he uses a laptop. :)

We needed to make an unexpected EXTRA trip into the big city this week so I chose to make a detour at one of our local museums. We went to the Donnelly Museum and spent about an hour there. The Donnelly Museum is part of the Lucan Heritage Museum. Half is devoted to the Donnelly Story, the other half to the Black Pioneer Village. Interesting place, I'll be doing up a separate post for it.

Here the boys are checking out the difference in the map from the Donnelly Days to today.

We then headed up to London and stopped into see our French student who had to leave us due to severe allergies to our cats! The lad had made him a gift and he had forgotten a few things at our place so he got them all back. Tuesday he had archery and had a blast. Apparently the instructor did some shots as well "FROM WAY BACK MOM! AND HE GOT THEM IN!!!!" This means of course that his instructor is REALLY good. :) (at least in one lad's mind). It still makes me smile at how much this boy loves going to archery, I suppose it shouldn't though, as solitary sports are what he likes best. :)

What else did we do this week?
In all my spare time I cleaned our school room. This room is the dumping ground for everything we don't know where else it goes at the moment. So it gets tools, and paper and books and all kinds of interesting stuff dumped in it, and then I get fed up and clean it out. Took me quite a while to get it done this time, usually one day of concentrated effort gets the job done, this time it took three... but part of that was due to the "hmm, where can I put the stuff from the guest room"???? I finally figured out putting a book shelf in the lad's room was the answer, which meant the Lad's room needed a thorough cleaning. And since that wasn't done well since end of May... it was a fair effort as well.

The biggest stressor for my boy was that his snake skins remain undisturbed. So on one side we have the snake skins, then a book shelf, and pictures on the wall. Our book shelf has a rather unique placement (on top of a storage unit). But it's all good, the lad is happy and I'm happy too! AND all my lad's creative element stuff is safely ensconced in the book room. So our guest room is ready for our Brazilian student, our book room is mostly ready AND the bonus of having my son's clean as well. Job well done for a week eh?

BUT our week was NOT over!!

Yesterday was the Zurich Bean Festival. Our here LOTS of white beans are grown and one of the local towns hosts an annual festival. The highlights for my guys are two fold.... the classic car show and the frog jumping competition.

Get down and yell JUMP! and the frog 9 times out of ten will jump! My lad's frog came in about 10th of 30 children.

They had lots of neat cars there. Here's my hunny checking out a corvette.

Today I needed a relaxing day at home, so after church this morning, instead of making a trek out to the Pinery for lunch and a swim or walk, we stayed close to home. I was feeling a bit "off" so tried reading for a while, tried resting for a while but was feeling to jittery overall for that.. so I cleaned the kitchen cupboards. I KNOW I KNOW.... as my mother would say "OP SUNDACH!!!" (ON Sunday!!!!).

But my cupboards are clean, my family is blessed and I no longer feel jittery. I don't think that God will be disheartened by my working on the Sabbath day. I even made myself some tea and yes.. I've a post coming on my favourite tea maker too!

A Week in Review: May 2

5/5/2015

This past week was a terribly busy one for us.
The lad needed to do a lot of bookwork and by Thursday he was just done with it.

Monday: Gramma's for the afternoon as Jim and I were having our afternoon together.
Tuesday: Fun with the KICK group. Group games and a library tour.

this was a fun game where a group of children gathered on either side of a sheet and then had to pick one student out of the pack to sit at the front. That person had to race to name to other person when the sheet dropped. They had FUN with this. :)

Wednesday I had a doctor appointment. The lad and Dad went to gramma's to work while I had my appointment.
Thursday: Dad had an appointment (he had stayed at Gramma's overnight to save on the driving back and forth to town). He had a good report but come home with his hand very achy from being examined. It's been sore the rest of the week.

Thursday. Enough with riding in a car and doing paperwork. Just enough was his cry. AND since it was such a nice day, we decided to make a day of it outside.

When the lad went in after we did all this work, he wanted to play his hour of minecraft and he had worked hard so it was a good way to relax for him. Though I have to admit, he wasn't pleased when I told him to shower first. :) I continued working. I turned over a bunch of dirt on our muddy pathway in an effort to get the soil loose to get some grass growing here. :) as you can see, as i work I'm adding some stepping stones. Next year I will have the rabbity tents organized differently so I can walk in from the shed through the hay tent to where the rabbits are. :)

Off and on throughout the day we took time to enjoy some flowers and to enamel our "words of Christ" board.

I love my daffodils. I have a variety of colours scattered over the yard

click image to go to review on Knowing God by Name.

We finished our week on Friday going to HOPE days. I'm teaching a chess class and afterwards we had fun playing and visiting in the park with some of the other families.

the children had a lot of fun playing two on two chess.

Week in Review for October 27-31

11/1/2014

0 Comments

First off I need to say thank you to Homeschool Freebie of the day for introducing us to Classics for Kids. My son is thoroughly enjoying them. So far we've listened to Bach and Mendelssohn. On Wednesday my son did a good part of the worksheet they provide as well... Verbally as that's what he was up to. :)

This week has been busy with fixing a truck (dad did this). On Monday was homeschool gym. We needed to go into London early for dad to fix the truck so rather then just sit around, much to my son's chagrin we did some of our bookwork. Not as much as I wanted to as he fought me on it, but enough to say we did something. Then off to gym where he worked on ropes and rock climbing skills.

We've done work this week with IXL, CTC Math, Essential Skills,Veritas Press and Standard Deviants. The picture below is from Standard Deviants. My son actually asked if we could do this today. :) We are learning about the plates of the earth and how they move.. causing mountains and volcanoes and what not.

We also did some STEM work. A while back I picked up some K'Nex Education Kits and we started work on them this week. First up.. a paddle boat. My son wanted to get it to float and therefore managed to do so. :)

We fit in volunteering at the Food Bank (which was good but rather slow) and tried to volunteer at the Rummage Sale, but they didn't need us there :( Skating twice this week with two different homeschool groups which was fun. No time this week for going to museums. :( There is always next week though so that will be nice.

Oh, and we had some time to go visiting with friends of ours. Their son managed to bunge up his foot a bit so was unable to go skating with us. Visiting for a bit was goo to do. Gave my son a chance to really see that his friend would be okay.

0 Comments

Our week, reviewed

9/27/2014

Our week went a bit different than anticipated. Monday we headed to London early so we didn't do a lot of schooling beyond "lad, make sure you do your page in our reading book". (which he did in the car on the way to London).

The lad complained mightily about the need to do so until he chilled out and just did it. They take perhaps 5 minutes to do per page and he totally gets to choose what page he does, so it does work for him. He loves it if I do the reading for him, so when he does it in the car it takes that aspect away from him. :) (sneaky aren't I?) :)

The remainder of Monday was filled with hanging out with Gramma and going to see some friends of him with her. They had a whole lot of fun together.

Tuesday, oh my what did we do Tuesday oh right.. we did computer work. UberSmart (fives times tables are now down pat, working on 6x's). CTC Math (Mom, I'm starting to understand division now!), Picking our hymn of the week and listening to it play through via YouTube. This week we are doing Rock of Ages.

Ah, we also started to work on the lad's "Boy Shed". It took us a couple of days to get it complete, but today he was able to move most of his bug containers out into it. Took him a full hour to do it, which earned him more time on the xbox. :) It was really sweet of some friends of our to give him a couple of shelves to put up in it for storage. I may need to make him another shelf as well, he's waiting to see how it all fits in well.

On Wednesday we were unexpectedly called into to work at the Food Bank. We've been wanting to help out there for a while now, and well... we got our chance. We were able to help stock shelves, sort for expired food items, and generally make ourselves very useful. The lad asked "When can we go again mom? Can we go every week?". So I may look into doing that. :) I have to admit to being a bit hesitant to commit to going every single week so I need to talk with the organizers for a bit and see how we work it if he's ill or we need to be away or just what we can do.

When we got home we did some work onMapping with Art. We did another map, this one of the Nile River, I'll have to link that in later as right now I am not sure where I downloaded it to. :) We also did some work out of our bible books.

I know we did something on Thursday.. book work i think, and finished up our mapping (doing compass and protractor work). Then I just needed to get away from it all for a bit so I headed out for the afternoon. The lad and his dad hung out at home together and I just got away. I tried to find some dress pants but nothing suit me well and the salesperson was grumpy so I said "fine" and just left. Had a nice talk with hubby's mom for a bit so that made it worthwhile. :)

Friday was HOPE days so we headed off for that. I'm teaching a class on survival skills and yesterday was our fire day. :) The children had so much fun learning how to light a fire, first with a flint and steel and then with matches. They learned to make a signal fire and a small heat fire. They really wanted to roast marshmallows but the church we were at wanted small fires not a bigger one.