A Week, Briefly (In Which Autumn Arrives)

Blessed, blessed autumn weather!

I love autumn with a love that is all the brighter and more glorious in contrast with the tremendous struggles I had all summer long with my own body chemistry.

I'm 2 weeks on meds, and I've made at least a 140 degree turn around in everything.  I still have a few bad habits to work on, but I love the blue skies, cooler temperatures, shorter days, orange pumpkins, snuggly hoodies, footie jammies, and early morning stories with my littles.

I love being alive in the autumn.

I love being alive.

(I could not say that 2 weeks ago.)

What have we done this week?  The blue skies and sweet breezes are calling me, so I have very little desire to do record record keeping. :)

The littles played outside--now that it is cooler they are learning to put on socks and shoes and jackets.  They still watch the sun come up each morning, and in the coolness they now have energy enough to venture to the bottom of the hill and play make-believe on the fallen tree.

Mister Man finished reading If You Lived in Colonial Times and started Can't You Make Them Behave, King George?  We're still reading Wild Places together.  Belle reports that he's restless and uncooperative during math lessons, so I said we'd drop them for a few weeks and see if he misses them.

Ladybug cooperated enough to get 4 days of school time.  She does about half of a math lesson each day and is now happily working on the beginning readers in her reading program.

Little Princess wrote an acrostic poem about birds, learned about prepositions, and practiced lots of spelling words.  She also read dozens of mermaid and fairy books.  After one of them, she looked at me and said, "These are starting to not be so good . . ."  Kind of like a kid glutted on sweets.

That's why I call books like that brain candy.

She's happy, happy to practice addition and subtraction facts with online drills, and she's on week 7 of her math program even though she's only been working on it for 4 weeks.  (She quite likes math!)

Nature Angel is writing her first essay.  She's not returned to her creative writing endeavor yet, but she spent the week making a "story" quilt.  She made the blocks (including applique and embroidery) and assembled the finished product all by herself--seriously, no help other than learning how to fill the bobbin.

She said, "Some of it wasn't straight."  I said, "That's okay.  You learned a lot this time, and next time you'll figure out how to fix it." 

I can't bring myself to tell her how to spell "tale" yet.

3-D--she made some of her appliques 3-D!!

I'm boggled.

Because she's 9.

And she hasn't had any sewing lessons.

She completed 5 math lessons, and she's really thriving with Saxon math.

Belle is faithful in completing her schoolwork each day even when I am not faithful about checking it or filling out her assignment book.  She writes down what needs to be done and does it.  She finished Invincible Louisa and started The Windy Hill for literature.  Otherwise she just keeps on plugging away at her regular work and devouring favorite library books.  We're supposed to have a writer's conference in just a few moments.  I love reading her work.

Super Star is almost as faithful as Belle, but she needs more parental support to keep going.  Though her school assignments are set up the same way Belle's are, a few days of negligence on my part leads to a breakdown on hers.  Today we got back on track together.

Pixie continues to work very, very hard.  Her pictures are so beautiful!  She takes hundreds of pictures each week, and I rarely even know where the camera is.  She's working on essay writing; learning how to effectively use quotations from the book to support her ideas is proving to be difficult for her.  She's doing quite well in Algebra and keeps plugging away at science, spelling, and grammar.

photo credit:  Pixie

photo credit:  Pixie

photo credit:  Pixie

photo credit:  Pixie

Rose Red is working slowly and only with continual parental pressure.  She's so bright, and she's so convinced that school work is a waste of her time.  She's reading, writing, researching, and practicing math skills though, so she's not stagnating.  I really like her math book because it is so very practical.  In recent weeks she's practiced balancing a checkbook and worked on story problems related to various business/accounting concepts.

Monday afternoon we visited a friend who is a pilot.  He gave us a tour of his office area, the hangar, 2 airplanes and 2 helicopters.

We all had fun in the pilot's gym, and most of us did a pull up or two, but Ladybug did a whopping 14 in 2 sets of 7!

Inside the cockpit of a Lear jet

Little Brother believed he was flying--truly believed!

Walking from one hangar to another.

Pretending to be the medical team on the helicopter

Mister Man was the most excited of all of the children to be a part of this field trip.  We may have a future pilot on our hands.

Watching airplanes taxi and take off.

Ooooh, Super Star is so strong!!! :)

photo credit:  Pixie

On Wednesday afternoon we jumped up and went to the zoo just for fun after school was done.

The camera died within seconds of arriving, so this picture must stand alone.

 On Friday Ladybug caught a monarch butterfly.  It spent nearly an hour on her hand while she sat in the sun with it allowing it to warm up enough to fly.

The littles observed crickets, grasshoppers, daddy longlegs, spiders, and all kinds of butterflies as they spent time outside each day.

The preschool book of the week was Corduroy.

I've forgotten to mention that we're reading daily from On This Day as part of our symposium.  Each day has a brief story/lesson from American history.  Some days are so exciting, and some days I wonder why I even purchased the book.

We had 3 history lessons about The Dead Sea Scrolls, St. Valentine, and Diocletian.  The kids wrote poems about St. Valentine--bonus points offered if they could incorporate Lupercalia into their poems.  They all did it!

We studied Africa for our Geography Through Art lessons--it took 2 lessons to color a map, study textiles from various parts of the continent, listen to a variety of African music, learn some interesting (and fairly random) facts, and make our own African-inspired textile designs.  (Only a few of the kids have finished--creating textiles is time-consuming work.)

Mister Man

Brother (This is a big deal--before this summer, he could only scribble randomly.)

Little Princess

Ladybug

Our Spanish lessons are still focused on Harold y el Lapiz Morado.  Focusing on a few new words each day is helping. (La luz, la luna, caminar, el bosque, la playa, pensar, las manzanas, etc.)

We studied Hunters in the Snow and The Land of Cockaigne as we continue to focus on artist Pieter Breugel.

We're 65% of the way into David Copperfield.  We're all dying inside to find out what happens with Dora because we're all waiting for David to think of Agnes as more than a sister!





(Linking here)