A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

  I have no idea why this is such a tiny picture.  I took it with the same camera as the rest of the pictures in this post, and I did not edit it.  If I enlarge it, it is nothing but huge pixels.  I'm including it because, even though it is tiny, it has about 3 of my kids during one of our Couch to 5K running sessions. We've now run consistently for 2 weeks!!  Several of the kids and I opted to repeat week one, and if we keep that pace, we will complete the 6-week program in 12 weeks instead, but I don't care about taking so long.  I'm just happy that we're getting out and being consistent. The kids have the 50 states and capitals memorized (not Lola, though, I hope she's absorbing what she can by listening), so I printed blackline maps and assigned the kids to trace the shapes of the states.  Over the course of the rest of the week, I had them fill in all of the states and capitals. Lola was working.  Beowulf was struggling. Working on their map...

 Obviously, our homeschool goes on as planned (mostly) when the weather turns bad, but the extreme winter weather has caused most--if not all--of the kids' activities to be canceled. We're starting a round of winter colds. But we dove into regular school all day Monday.  Nature Angel finished her star blanket while I read To Kill a Mockingbird to the teens. She hasn't blocked it yet--hence the curling points--but isn't it so pretty? It used to be half of another blanket that she started.  When it turned out much bigger than she thought it would be, she searched for more yarn, but it turns out that this yarn is now "vintage" and costs an arm and a leg per skein.  It sat half-finished for a year or more until she was inspired to do this star. It was so funny to watch one blanket unravel and turn slowly into another blanket. The teens and I still have most of To Kill a Mockingbird to finish, but we did complete the quarter 1 exam for The Mystery of History v...

 I'm not posting pictures of the rashes, but we've got Hand, Food, and Mouth Disease here.  All eight babies and 3 of my own. Some have had light rashes and hardly any fever; some have had dreadful rashes and have been utterly wiped out by the fever.   We didn't know what it was until everyone had been exposed several times, so we just rolled with it the best we could. But it did make for a looooonnng week. And a low-energy week. When we did anything, we read, but we rested most of the time. *The teens and I had mini-Symposium 4 days. *The younger kids and I read Joan of Arc and Mary's Garden . *We've stayed devoted to Hans Brinker , in spite of the agonizing chapters about Dutch history and geography, and now we're near the end and the interesting adventures of the Brinker family. *We've read several more pages of The Children's Book of Virtues .  It's funny to see the kids' faces as I read a story that applies to one of them in particular. :) ...