CHRISTEPHI

Hello, my lovely blog readers!  Did you miss me?  It's okay if you didn't because your life is probably as busy and insane as my own. Can you believe I didn't blog at ALL in 2017? Not once!  An entire school year in the books without a single post documenting it. But that's okay, because I gave myself permission before the year began to not blog. Sometimes we need to cut things from our schedule for a season in order to put our focus more fully in other areas. But, I'm back for 2018! A super quick recap of what we did last year..... We used My Father's World's Rome to the Reformation for Bible, history, science, music, and art.  Both kids used Singapore Math . Mister E worked through Language Lessons for Today and part of Spelling by Sound and Structure until I realized he already knew how to spell all the words in the book and dropped it. Miss M used the final one third of Intermediate Language Lessons , All-in-One English , and Writing Strands ...

Somewhere along the way I learned about a scheduling method called Sabbath Schooling.  In order to prevent burnout (for the kids or for the mama!), the idea is you schedule six weeks of school followed by one week off, the Sabbath Week! When we first started homeschooling I didn't set out planning to make our school year match the calendar year, but both the kids birthdays are in November and we like to take off plenty of time for the holidays to be with family and attend Thanksgiving and Christmas events.  So it works out best for us to school through the miserably hot summer and have extra time off in the spring and fall when the weather is nice. We finished our last school year just before November and took a 3 month break (our "summer" vacation).  We started our new school year a couple weeks ago, but before I tell you how it's been going, let me share with you our curriculum choices for our new school year. Our core this year is My Father's World's ...

I started the week by sorting a whole bunch of library books I got for the next couple weeks.  I love our library!  And so far this year I've only had to pay less than 50 cents in library fines.  Considering I consistently have over 50 books checked out at a time…that's pretty good!  It helps that I can manage our books, due dates, holds, and renewals online!! We learned about the Santa Fe Trail, Oregon Trail, and the Gold Rush this week.  Many people in our area made a lot of money outfitting wagon trains headed west.  William M. Paxton, who recorded the history of this area 150 years ago, said that of the many people who left our county with gold fever, most were never heard from again.  Very few returned, most died, a small handful made it rich and stayed out West.  He lamented the loss of so many of the county's fine people. We have two student desks, a child-sized table, and a spacious kitchen table…yet Miss M consistently choos...

We started our week with a bit of disciplinary action.  Do your kids do incomprehensible things such as wiping boogers on the wall?  I think having had to scrub them off, Little Guy has learned his lesson and won't be doing it again.  I hope! We continued with Level E in Spelling Power.  Miss M seems to grasp spelling concepts very quickly and constantly surprises me with the words she can spell. In history we learned about the Pilgrims and how Squanto taught them to plant corn and fish without hooks.  We read about how the Pilgrims built their homes and covered their windows with oiled parchment in the absence of glass. We made some oiled paper by rubbing olive oil into regular printer paper with a paper towel.  Little Guy enjoyed joining in on this activity.  We held up oiled paper and regular paper to the window to see which lets through more light. Oiled paper on the left, Regular paper on the right. We also tested the oil...

We had another fun week of adventures!  We learned about Jamestown, came up with a chant to help us memorize Matthew 1:21, and learned more about air! Jesus means the Lord saves We learned last week that the name Jesus means the Lord saves, and this week we learned that if we say we belong to Jesus we should live like Jesus would.  I gave Miss M a bracelet from when I was a little girl with the letters WWJD? on it.  Little Guy wanted to know: "Why is there a mystery on it?" which is what he calls question marks. On Tuesday we did an experiment with a cup of water and a piece of cardboard. We were afraid it wouldn't work, but it did !  I queried on Facebook whether it is really air pressure that keeps the cardboard in place and my uncle responded: "In order for the water to come out of the cup, air has to get in. A hole anywhere into the cup would allow air in, which would then cause the system to collapse. But as long as it's sealed, the air p...