2025-26: The First Week

 
For our first day, we had a field trip to the Nelson-Atkins art museum.






  Our history/literature focus this year is the Eastern Hemisphere, so we spent a couple of hours in the Asian wing of the museum.

Granted, the Eastern Hemisphere is comprised of more than Asia, but that's what we had access to on this day!

We picnicked on the museum lawn, and then headed home so that Little Princess could be available for a Zoom meeting for CAP as well as her second-to-last Chinese class.

I put the kids to work writing a paragraph about the experience.

Lola wrote:  "Everything was boring because I am not the kind of person that enjoys this."

Once I got her to add a sentence about where the art was from, I accepted her work.

She's something else!

🤣🤷🙄🤣

For the rest of the week, we stayed home, practicing our schedule and starting just a few subjects.  

High Schoolers:
*Received their planners and some time management instruction
*Started literature with Otto of the Silver Hand
*Set up a few individual study subjects like EIW and Physics for Little Princess, and Copywork for Mister Man and Ladybug

Everyone:
*Started Eastern Hemisphere studies with the text and 2 read alouds:  Sweet and Sour (a collection of Chinese folk tales) and The Year of the Dog (by Grace Lin)

Everyone but Little Princess:
*Started Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology with a coloring page of various body systems and some reading from the text
*Started our Loop Rotation with Studio Art (Under the Home), The Golden Treasury of Natural History (picked up where we left off last year), memorizing the presidents of the USA with flash cards, and a poem from All the Small Poems and Fourteen More.

During the week, the high schoolers did at least one written narration per day for history and/or literature, and the younger kids did 1 written narration on Friday about one of the folk tales we read during the week.


We had library day.
Lola finally got to go swimming for her church activity.
I had a meeting with our dance director to set up plans for the dance year ahead.
I did a lot of choreography.
Little Princess led an aerospace lesson at CAP (she said it could have been better/could have been worse).
Ladybug and I saw her psychiatrist who listened well, gave thoughtful advice, and told us to check back in in 3 months just to make sure his medical referrals were working for us.

And on Tuesday and Wednesday Baymax had massive emotional melt-downs over school that took hours of physical, mental, and emotional energy to see him through.

But we saw him through them, and we're ok.

Nature Angel finished out her trip to Greece and came home with "only" a 30 hour(!!!) delay . . . but that 30 hours meant she got to spend an unplanned day in Athens!!

So, cool!





There are hundreds of pictures from this trip, but here are a very few of the group.  It was a trip with highs, lows, adventures, shopping, learning, serving, and growing.  

It was definitely a good experience for Nature Angel.

I'm proud of her for daring to go and do.

Also, Pixie got her acceptance letter to BYU Provo!!!!!  

Another kid to be proud of. :)

She'll head off to school sometime in early January.

The week ahead has so many events in it that I'm actually not sure how much schoolish school we'll do, but that's life, and I had to choose an official start date with no ideal, quiet weeks on the calendar at all.

We'll do our best to balance it all.

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