We Have a New Driver!

Hurrah for 16!

Hurrah for independence!

Hurrah for Little Princess!

She even took her driving test in the rain!  

Even though Sir Walter Scott took her to take the test and then get her license, her absence dominated Tuesday.  We skipped literature and Eastern Hemisphere that day, but the rest of the kids and I had a whopper of a good school day, and then everyone had church activities that night that were somewhat educational in nature--crafts, cooking, sports, scripture trivia, and speech/debate were the variety that were offered.

Also, on Tuesday, we got permission from the neurologist to take Ladybug off her anti-seizure med!  

She was undergoing a complete personality change--a dangerous one.

Her neurologist seems to be a good one.  As we talked over her situation, I feel that he listened and made thoughtful judgments.  The plan he presented makes sense to me and feels right.  

She's on no meds at the moment.  

And I am very grateful that she's coming back to herself.

Our little buddy came to visit us while his mommy took the NCLEX exam.
She passed!
He will be a regular visitor while she works starting in October!

For literature, the high schoolers and I read 3 more chapters from A Girl of the Limberlost.  I gave them two writing assignments responding to the text:  

1.  How do the Sintons show love to Elnora?

2.  Wesley and Margaret Sinton voice two opinions about child-rearing.  What are they?  With whom do you agree and why?

Ladybug told me that her child-rearing essay would be bad, but it was not.  😀

We are completely finished with our Eastern Hemisphere unit about China.  I have to say that both Li Lun Lad of Courage and Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze were outstanding books, and I recommend them heartily.  

We're moving on to learn about North and South Korea next.

Beowulf was done with his chores and just quietly enjoying the cool morning.

We did not do a lot of anatomy.  Ladybug's behaviors precluded a lot of the work I would have done with the kids, but she and Mister Man did finish a study guide page in their workbooks, Mister Man studied some bone flashcards, and then we moved on to begin the next chapter which is about muscles.

In our Loop Rotation the kids and I:

*reviewed US Presidents #1-14

*enjoyed 3 new poems from All the Small Poems and Fourteen More  (seriously, such cute poems!)

*read chapter 3 of The Mapmakers (Eratosthenes and Ptolemy)

*practiced old and new signs for ASL

*made 2 new sketches for Studio Art

*explored fish and amphibians in The Golden Treasury of Natural History

*started Henry IV in Shakespeare Stories

In addition, the kids are doing copywork, math, and grammar on their own.

Ladybug and I took a break from her math text in order to practice some basic skills.  She'll pick up with the next workbook on Monday.

Just drawing together

Brother and I spent the week practicing finding nouns for his grammar exercises.  Because verbs can be nouns and because nouns can be verbs and nouns can be adjectives, he felt really frustrated.  (I don't blame him!  It's instinctive knowledge for me--I don't know why.  But when it came time for me to explain how to find nouns, I realized just how fluid such understanding really is.)  I typed up paragraphs out of a book, and we sat together while he read the sentences aloud and explained his thinking while I alternately encouraged and explained my thinking so that he could get a feel for how to find them.  

By Friday, he was ready to handle his workbook again, and he successfully identified subjects and predicates on his own.

(I'm listening to a couple of my daughters talk about AI and how scientists say that humans are doubling knowledge about every 13 months, and I wonder why I'm having my kid divide sentences into subjects and predicates.  There is much to ponder about education these days.

But I guess I'm having him divide them so that he learns about how language is structured.  The facts can be looked up, but the structure needs to be internalized.)

The 3 big boys went to CAP on Thursday evening (Little Princess went to her sister's house to puppy-sit instead), and then two of them, Mister Man and Brother, got up early to play basketball with friends at 6 am!

On Friday afternoon, Little Princess volunteered at a CAP community function.  Beowulf was sick, so only Lola worked with our neighbor at the gardening apprenticeship, but Brother got to go over and mow for her for pay.

Soccer filled Saturday morning, and then the teens were able to drive out to a church member's farm for an astronomy lesson and night games.

Picture by Little Princess

Apparently, the presenter had a powerful laser pointer that she had to be careful with in order not to burn the audience or environment.  It was able to reach pretty far into the sky so that the kids could find the constellations.  Little Princess was delighted by the presentation. 

The rest of my kids liked the night games best!