This week was a week of celebrations. Fat Tuesday, Valentine's Day and Rob's Birthday kept us partying three out of five days. It's a wonder we got anything done!
We are all settling into a work and school at home routine. I have to admit that it's going much better than I expected. Not only is it nice to see Rob during the day, but he's relaxed and pleasant to be around. Bonus, today when the cows got out he was there to help us get them back in the barn.
We finished studying WW2 this week. It involved lots of hard discussions. It's difficult to explain to children how normal people can kill other normal people, whether in war or concentration camps. The idea of war is a difficult one to grasp.
As a parent/teacher, I found myself struggling with how much to expose the children to as we did our study. I opted to skip graphic footage. We'll have another go at this era in history in four years. Everyone will be older then so it may be more appropriate to dig deeper. We did watch The Diary of Anne Frank. H13 read The Hiding Place. S11 read Survivors. We listened to Number the Stars together.
In math, M8 is working on multiplication. We played with dice today to review 1-6 x 1-6. I'll get out the 12 sided dice next Friday. S11 is working on word problems building on percents, decimals and fractions. H13 is working on graphing and slope-intercept.
Our Valentine's Day began early with a party at co-op on Tuesday. We took 7 dozen sugar cookies to decorate and 150+ valentines to pass out. Each valentine contained a Valentine coloring page and a heart shaped crayon made from recycled crayon bits. It was a fun project. You can find directions here.
We celebrated Fat Tuesday with jambalaya, corn bread and chocolate chip cookie dough covered brownies. You can see more of that celebration here.
We began our Valentine's Day by writing love stories. You can read those here. For our family Valentine's Day dinner we enjoyed pizza and more sugar cookies. M8 decorated the dining room for Valentine's Day so we had a very elegant pizza dinner in the fancy room.
With so much celebrating, it was hard to concentrate on the work at hand but, for the most part, we had a pretty successful week.
H13
High - History. I think WW2 was a very interesting and scary time.
Low - Bible. I'm way behind so I had to do a lot of it.
S11
S11 had his birthday last Thursday. His big gift, a Kindle, didn't arrive until Monday. He was pretty pleased.
High - History. I thought the information about WW2 was cool. I know that kind of sounds wrong.
Low - Math. It was really hard to figure out how to do the problems.
M8
High - Math is my high because it's my favorite subject.
Low - History because it's too long.
Me
High - Getting so much done this week, with school and with life. Things move pretty fast around here and I feel good about most of it.
Low - H13. I feel worn down by the resistance she continues mount. I know it's "normal teen behavior", and it's exhausting. She is so talented. Yet, without forceful insistence, she'd spend all day every day+ in bed. She's bright, but not accountable for the work that she needs to be doing. This one area where I haven't gotten homeschool figured out. How do I hold a stubborn student accountable and still have a homelife I can enjoy?
No comments:
Post a Comment