A Week, Briefly (1/8/18)

Cold, cold, cold temperatures mean there has been lots of fort building of late.

The best thing we did this week was NOT get rid of Symposium.

I'd been fretting over my inability to meet with the teens as a group, and I was thinking that it was simply time to turn all of their studies over to them as individuals.

But it didn't sit well in my heart to basically ignore them all day . . . and then with our falling apart evening read aloud time, I felt that I'd be turning them over to their books and phones and music with not nearly enough motherly care.

I prayed about it.

And in a flash on Monday morning I knew what to do.

By the time the girls came home from seminary, I was ready for Morning Meeting and an announcement:

Symposium would be held first thing after breakfast each day!

This test week has been outstanding (minus Rose Red who refuses to join us), and I have no intention of changing it up until circumstances demand it.

The littles are used to playing or doing independent school (Nature Angel and Little Princess) after breakfast while they wait for turns at One-on-One time.  Now they simply do the same while I conduct Symposium.  I have time after Symposium to meet with 1 or 2 kids One-on-One, and then we have snack and Academy at the same time we've been having it for the past several months.

After Academy I can sneak 1 or 2 more kids in for One-on-One time, taking turns during Outdoor Play time, and then I can get a late lunch on the table.  (Basically we have 2 lunches--our snack is substantial and allows for us to have a really long "morning.")

After lunch we have Documentary School and Quiet Time, and I can round up the last kids who need One-on-One time with me then.

I've also brought our teen read-aloud book to the table for Symposium, so even though the older teens are running to classes and activities all evening long, we're still reading together.  It's not as cozy as gathering in the living room before bedtime, but at least it's happening.  (I can tell that at least Super Star and Belle miss the bedtime gathering because they kind of seem lost at the end of the day.  I may have to start a book just for the two of them.)

How grateful I am for inspiration!  How grateful I am for the solution to a problem!

These two take their school time very seriously.

The temperatures got above freezing for a couple of days, so we went to the zoo, but apparently all we did was play with the photo boards . . .

Oh look!  We visited the snakes!

Nature Angel and Little Princess and I had meetings this week to help them flesh out their school work load.  With all of the books they've finished of late, their individual work time was getting thin.

For Nature Angel I found the second half of Analytical Grammar, Jr. and we added some science:  She'll read and do the workbook for 2 chapters each week in Exploring Planet Earth and she'll read and narrate (and probably sketch pictures) a Ranger Rick book, Endangered Animals.  In addition, her library request of Usborne's First 1000 Words in Portuguese came through, so she'll work on that for as long as the library will allow us to keep it (up to 12 weeks if there are no requests from other patrons to borrow it).

Little Princess is still waiting for me to print her next installment of spelling exercises.  But Usborne's First 1000 Words in Mandarin came through, and she's happily practicing that each day.

She saw a sunset that she simply HAD to capture on film. :)

We've had some really good library reads of late.  Nature Angel just finished Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George.  She says it is the best book ever!!!  Mister Man tore his way through Charlotte's Web and McBroom's Zoo and The Seven Wonders of Sassafrass County.  Little Princess tried The Remarkable and Very True story of Lucy and Snowcap (one of my very, very, very favorite tween books ever!), but she felt it was too grown-up for her.  We've had a hard time making time to continue reading Little Women together.

Ladybug finished her Free and Treadwell reading Primer, and she's gone on to read A Fly Went By and start Owl at Home this week.  She needs lots of support, but she's truly reading!  I've ordered the next book in the Free and Treadwell series because The Primer was such a good fit for Ladybug.  We also found The Good and Beautiful K book that we put away last year when it got too advanced for her.  It's just right now, so we've added that to her daily work.

Undoing our efforts to fold laundry as they engaged in imaginative play . . . I think they were pretending to be laundresses working in a river.

Rose Red's epiphany about wasting time didn't help her change her ways.  I'm sad for my beautiful, wonderful, impossible girl.

Pixie is now taking 5 dance classes each week; she feels she's died and gone to heaven.

Super Star is kind of a mess right now.  She's been refusing to follow the GAPS diet, and she's not taking any thyroid meds.  This week I gave her an ultimatum to choose one or the other because the rest of us are suffering.  She says she'd rather follow the diet that start meds again (they have disastrous side effects), so I'm really hoping for success with food as medicine!

But good news about Super Star is that Rose Red's Constitutional Literacy books have caught her attention, and she borrowed about a million books from the library about the constitution and the founding fathers.  She's chosen a 900 page monster of a book that is "hard to read but really interesting!"

Belle is training Theo more and more each day.  He did growl and snap at Little Princess one day a couple of weeks ago when she tried to get him out of the trash where he was pursuing some thrown out soup bones.  That scared me again, but Belle is faithfully working with him, and we have hope that he'll get better and better behaved.

In Academy we finished The Corn Grows Ripe, If You Lived in Colonial Times, and Come Look With Me: Animals in Art.  We've added Viking Tales, The Bible Smuggler (I brought this one out because Mister Man has been chock full of questions about how the Bible came to be--we're having to talk a lot about good secrets versus bad secrets!)), and Elementary Art Curriculum by Redemptive Artistry. 

This week we did a project using shapes.

The biggest news in Academy is that Beowulf is starting to be able to narrate a single sentence about what he's listened to.  He can't always do it, but he's starting, and that's really, really exciting!

And he's still able to pick up a writing implement and use it!  He thinks writing is so fun!

Nature Angel is working on a submission for Doodle for Google.  She's never without paper and pencil these days, practicing various drawing techniques and perfecting styles for her final product.  On Thursday alone, I picked up half a dozen different papers with sketches and scraps of drawings on them . . . and that doesn't even include what she took care of herself or what others picked up for her.  She is an artist to her very core.

All of the kids are convinced her drawing will be selected by Google, but I know the realities of a contest this huge.  I'm just grateful to see my girl developing the remarkable gift God gave her.   (Her drawings are amazing!!!!)

We had kind of a changed up day on Friday in order to watch President Thomas S. Monson's funeral services.

And we have some sort of upper respiratory bug going through the house.  Lots of coughing and sleeping  . . . but not at the same time.