A Week, Briefly (In Which we Work on Our Morning Routine and Start Math)

Monday morning we (mostly--I can never count Rose Red in these things) started our school-year morning routine.  We're starting half an hour later than we will be starting in a couple more weeks, and I still have a few habits to get better at, but I'm still enjoying morning running, and I am just not ready to give it up.

Besides, it's still too hot for afternoon exercise.

(It's starting to be too dark to be out at 6 am--I'll be shifting to afternoon running once the temperature drops.)

Lola loves combing long, smooth hair.  And Belle is so patient with her.

I still get up between 5 and 5:30 am and start my day with scripture study, journaling, and prayer.  Then I get on my running gear and hit the pavement with one or two teen daughters while another teen daughter gets the privilege of mindless internet time in return for babysitting the babies.  If I get home fast enough I can get a shower before throwing on my clothes.

Everyone else is to be up by 7:00 am.  We spend the next half hour getting everyone through their personal grooming routines and (hopefully) tidying their rooms.  If we're efficient, the littles go outside to play.

I start breakfast at 7:30, and everyone but Rose Red and Pixie (because they'll be gone to seminary) has a pre-breakfast set of chores to do.  I've slotted an entire half hour, but none of them take that long, so there's more free time for kids or time for me to put out fires without getting stressed.

We're doing our Morning Meeting at breakfast time now.  When the kids' mouths are full and their hands are busy, Morning Meeting just goes more smoothly.

This year our Morning Meeting has been shortened because we'll be having a second family study time later in the morning.  It is now focused on our family devotional time:

A Bible story from Egermeier's Bible
Primary Song
Prayer
Memorizing primary scripture of the month
Memorizing a New Testament scripture
Reading/discussion in the Book of Mormon
Poetry memorization (this will move to the later family study time soon)

After breakfast we break for another brief set of chores, but again I've slotted an entire half hour, and this gives me a chance to change the babies, load the dishwasher, and handle the inevitable disciplinary issues that have come up by this time of the day.

The littles are sent outside to play while the teens and I settle in for our daily hour of listening to the Book of Mormon.  While we listen we knit (me, Pixie, Belle) or color (Super Star) or do nails (Rose Red) or take care of the babies (me!).  We only have 5 days of reading left to finish our 30 day challenge, so we're close!  I'll miss it when we're done.

We began working on this much of the schedule on Monday of this week.

One afternoon Nature Angel brought some cut fabric to me and asked me to help her sew a purse.  Instead Belle jumped to her aid.  Hooray for Belle!

The finished bag and a happy Nature Angel.

 After our morning routine and running a bunch of errands on Monday, a visit from Sir Walter Scott's sister and her family joyfully filled the rest of the day.  They were passing through on their way to take their daughter off to her first year of college.

Tuesday held Rose Red's first battery of learning assessment tests.  She said they were grueling.

We held to our Wednesday tradition of Breakfast at the Park, then we added Math to our daily routine!

Rose Red is working in Principles of Mathematics.  It is listed as 7th grade math, but it is a solid overview of good mathematics skills and so far feels like a good fit for my math-challenged girl.

Pixie is in Saxon Algebra 1.

Super Star is in Saxon 7/6.

Belle is in Saxon 8/7.

Nature Angel started Saxon 5/4.

Little Princess doesn't have a math curriculum because I don't usually do formal math this early.  However, because of Mister Man's and Ladybug's unique educational circumstances, they ARE doing formal math, and now Little Princess feels left out.

Rats.

I'm considering this math book or this one.  I'm not sure which one, but I'm leaning toward the first.

Mister Man and Ladybug picked up where they left off in the spring in their Horizons K math books.  Belle is still their math tutor.

Mister Man built this during one quiet hour session.

And he was very proud of this construction during another quiet hour.

 Wednesday afternoon was full with haircuts for Sir Walter Scott and all of the boys.  They are all dapper right now!  After that, Nature Angel and I spent several hours positioning stumps along the edge of our sand-pit-to-be; Sir Walter Scott worked on our septic system; Rose Red went to work (her last night at her current job because she's found a new one); and the rest of the kids made mud pies, climbed trees, and watched bugs.

Lola likes mud . . . daily baths take place outside in the wading pool.  We keep a bar of soap in the cubby of our hose keeper.

 Pixie and Belle made dinner for us, and we picnicked outside.

Last week Nature Angel and Little Princess were super interested in doing their language arts curriculum.  This week they didn't ask at all.  Instead Nature Angel spontaneously wrote an 8 page story called Stay With Your Own Fairy Tale.  It is about how Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Rapunzel grow disgruntled with their lives, switch places, then discover that their own problems and lives aren't so bad after all.  It is darling.

After hand writing it out, she spent all day Friday typing it up.

 Little Princess' library holds of the Billy and Blaze series came through on Tuesday, so she spent lots of happy hours reading independently.  On Friday she got bored, so she did some work out of her language arts curriculum, including an All About Me book.

(Mister Man has already read a few of the Billy and Blaze books, too.)

Baymax is starting to like books.

 Pixie cooked and baked awesome meals and treats all week long.  She also took scads of photos.  We've begun to look up photography contests.

Pixie, busy studying photography--either editing photos or watching a lesson on creativelive.com or looking up a contest to enter.

Pixie hasn't edited all of her photos, so I'm not posting them here, but this one she took of Lola cracks me up--so bored of the photo shoot!

Thursday was busy with our morning routine, math, and then disciplinary issues with Ladybug.  Once we finally got her settled and able to play without damaging people or property, Rose Red and I had a mentoring meeting.  She's finally open to project-based learning, and she's got some interesting ideas.  I'm working on facilitating her efforts.

On Friday afternoon, Rose Red filled out an application for a passport and looked up the costs for one of her dream travel adventures.

Reality hit her hard.

During our Book of Mormon reading, Pixie has been working on a play mat quilt to be a baby gift for a church friend/leader.  This is a tentative layout for the final quilt.  The squares have lovely textures, and she'll stick some crinkly and squeaky surprises under some of the squares before she's done.

We managed to read aloud together from David Copperfield about 3 nights this week.  We're reading it on my phone with my kindle reader, so I don't know how many pages we've read, but after at least a dozen nights' reading, we're only 25% of the way through!  This is quite the investment, and we can hardly imagine where the story will go from here, but overall we're enjoying it.

I'm grateful to say that I finally know who Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep are, and I can understand literary jokes about them. :)



Linking here.