This week involved home improvement and preparing for the school year. I finished painting the walls for S9s Star Wars room. It looks great and once the stickers are up I'll take pictures and post them. I still have the closet doors to complete and plan to finish those this weekend.
K14 and H12 were so inspired by the painting of their brother's room that they decided to paint their own room. I taped the trim for them and gave them a lesson in using a roller and some tips on painting and left them to it. By the end of the day they had a beautifully painted room. Frankly, I was surprised. The mess that they made while helping paint their brother's furniture made me wary of turning them loose with paint and brushes again. I suppose my ranting and raving after the last episode had it's effect and while there was paint on clothes and skin there was no paint on floors or furniture.
As a family we cleaned out the upstairs closet and rearranged things, decluttered and organized the laundry room, moved seldom used items to the attic, found a pile of things to donate to the football league yard sale and hung a bunch of pictures. We also cleaned and organized the school room and all our supplies. The shelves are tidy and in a few weeks we'll be ready for the start of the school year.
To celebrate successful completion of the summer reading program our library sponsored a pool party at the community pool. We all completed the program but only S9 and M6 were interested in the pool party and they both had a great time swimming last night. We'll be writing thank you notes to the library for such a fun way to celebrate their accomplishment.
S9 started football practice this week. I'd forgotten how that throws our family time off. He doesn't get home until after 8:30pm. M6 loves to go play with her friends while their brothers practice so practice ends up involving half our family which makes it impossible to eat a family dinner or spend time as a family except on the weekends. Once school is in session he'll only be practicing two nights a week but our weekends will be totally tied up with practice and games.
I mailed M6's registration for soccer today. She'll begin playing mid-August. Thankfully, football and soccer are held at the same school on neighboring fields. At least the practices and home games are. The away games will have us traveling far and wide. M6 will have her games on Saturday and S9 will have his on Sunday.
Finally, I ordered our materials for the last two subjects for the coming year. I'd been debating over the best route to take for H12's math and Bible for all of us. After much discussion, H12 decided that she'd like to try algebra and that a teaching DVD might be a good way to go. I purchased a 36 week Algebra class from The Great Courses. We both liked that each class was 30 minutes. We envision watching the class on Monday then spending the remainder of the week reinforcing the learning before moving on to the next lesson. It's wonderful that my math hating child feels confident enough in her ability and understanding to want to tackle algebra this year. Frankly, I figured she'd take it in 9th grade when she started high school.
Bible was another tough choice. We are all missing our Community Bible Study program. The only similar thing here is Bible Study Fellowship but it is a day class and BSF doesn't offer a day program for school age children so that wasn't a good fit. Community Bible Study doesn't offer their materials for sale outside their class setting. I've been looking for something similar. I value the Bible study and the way we were all learning the same thing at the same time. The kids liked the straight forward nature of the materials. I'm hoping that the Explorer's Bible Study programs will satisfy all of us. We'll be studying God's Wisdom this year. I thought Job, Psalms and Proverbs was a great place for us to go after our last two studies.
I got our homeschool letter and test scores sent into the school system last week so now it's just a matter of getting the acknowledgement back and waiting for the first day to arrive. I'm happy to hold onto these last days of summer and hope they crawl by.
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You had a productive week! Although I can't agree with the last sentence. :-) How fast can we get to cooler weather?
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