School Was Harder This Week, But It Was Still Good

 Brother's behaviors ramped up a notch or two.

I think it's because school is putting more demands on him than the freedom of the last weeks of summer offered.

One day of school was interrupted so much that it lasted until dinner.  In truth, most of the kids had lots of free time, but Brother and I had a long, hard day, and he even missed a large part of our reading because he just got up and walked out.

And it was Sarah Whitcher's Story--the favorite read-aloud of the week!

Another day, he refused to participate in the science experiments because he was mad at Beowulf.

Nothing helps him through these times of irritation but time and space--which is not conducive to a family homeschool.  Our choices are to go on without him, in which case he misses school, or to stop and wait him out, in which case our days get sooooo loooooong.

We've tried both ways this week, and neither was very satisfying.  

I am reminded that no one style of homeschooling fits our family for very long.  In spite of my prayerful preparation and cautiously joyful anticipation, if this goes on for much longer, we're going to need to switch gears to independent work for each kid, so that Brother's mental/emotional breakdowns don't force the rest of the kids to wait all day for him or force us to leave him out.

Otherwise, we had a really good week!

Our magnet study had us testing how magnets work even through matter like paper, plastic, glass, and wood.

We got passes for two free visits to the zoo--one for any weekday in July, and one for any weekday in August.  After we went to the zoo in July, the kids made me promise to take them back in August.  The only day I could find to work was Tuesday of this week . . . which turned out to be the hottest day of the week!!

But I kept my promise, and we went!

The zoo is setting up for a 3-month-long special event. 
We stopped for a picture in front of a dinosaur so we could show The Munchkin.

Our first real stop was the aquarium.

1.  Nature Angel and Little Princess had never seen it.

2. It was air-conditioned.

Cleaning the tank?

Sugar Bear loved her zoo map!

Little Princess seems to be a goat-whisperer.

We stopped at the lorikeet enclosure exactly at public feeding time!

It turns out that Baymax is a lover of tropical birds.  He fed birds, but he got down low, so they ate from the ground, and he was so, so, so disappointed to not have one land on him.  I've promised to bring him back for public feeding time, so that he can try again.

Photo credit:  Little Princess

Though for some reason, I took most of our pictures when we were indoors, we spent a lot of time out-of-doors walking and looking.  We took full advantage of every water-mister the zoo had set up!!

Arriving indoors for the first time in an hour, everyone collapsed in the coolness of the penguin exhibit!

Next stop, the shark and ray touch tank!

We visited the gorillas, the warthogs, lots of birds, and so much more, but I just didn't take my camera out for those experiences.  I'm not sure why.  

We spent 6 hours at the zoo and came home happy, hot, and exhausted.

Field trips are honestly the best school days.

That evening we finished The Witch of Blackbird Pond amid exclamations and squeals of happiness about how perfectly everything turned out.

Wednesday was one of those hard school days that I wrote about at the start--even though we did good things, I didn't document any of them with photos.  I do know that the kids did copywork, wrote a narration about the Mayflower, and did a watercolor project based on an N.C. Wyeth painting.

In the evening, we started Sign of the Beaver.  The kids are already wholeheartedly invested in Matt and his homestead.

We woke up to a rainbow on Thursday morning!

photo credit:  Little Princess

It was a dance day, so most of the kids did math while Nature Angel and I reviewed our choreography before heading to rehearsal.

While it's a rather boring photo, it is going to be very useful when the kids try to remember their closing positions for the opening number.  It took about 15 minutes to get them all organized into place!
(Though we are missing 2 toddlers who were too tired to cooperate!)

Church activities on Thursday evening rounded out the day for the youth.  Nature Angel headed to the library with her age group; Little Princess and Ladybug decorated cakes; the boys played old-fashioned playground games in the gym.

Ladybug worked on The Tower of Babel at the top left.  Right below it is Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace that Little Princess helped make.

Lola and Baymax watched a movie while I organized family finances.

Which reminds me that Nature Angel has been working very hard on her personal finances.  It's all part of her Personal Finance class, and I'm so impressed with this class because all of the work is entirely relevant and hands-on.

The teens and I finished Macbeth and dove back into their American Literature textbook.  We're reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and continuing to follow the adventures of Uncas, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans.

Both teens are making good progress in their math courses.

Little Princess is happily delving into her science courses.  We changed her astronomy text from Masterbook to a slim little paperback from which she needs to select 75 projects to read about, do, and write answers to the included questions.   At two projects a week, she'll definitely complete the necessary hours for a full credit of high school science this year.

On Friday, we finished Sarah Whitcher's Story.  I cried as I read aloud (even though I've read the book half a dozen times), and the kids were pretty teary as well.  They were especially pleased to find out it is a true story.

I'm feeling good about how the early colonial days of America are coming to life for my crew.

We still need to light the lamps we made last week, though!

It's going to be cooler in the coming days, so it will be easier to tolerate lighting small fires. :)

I also assigned the kids another magnet experiment that engrossed them for so long!  I cut them off at 45 minutes, but they could have kept going for much longer as they considered variables and retested what they'd already done to see if they got consistent results.

Why is a picture of kids recording experiment results so delightful to me?

After this, we sat and read together for well over an hour, including oral narrations. Then I told them they could be done for the day if they did their copywork--no other written work to celebrate Friday.

You never saw kids pull out notebooks and pencils so fast and so happily!

Little Princess was up and out of the house by 7:00 am on Saturday morning because she was teaching a course to new cadets about uniforms.  Apparently, there is a (new?) program for new cadets that provides more support than previously offered, and she was invited to be a teacher at this Great Start event.

In the evening, Nature Angel had to go to work, but the rest of my youth-age kids got to attend a huge church music festival that included games, a (free) raffle, treats, dancing, a foam pit, and more.  

I was not there to take pictures, but I received a few fun photos from people who were there.

I'm hoping more pictures are shared in the coming week. :)