A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 On Monday we hiked and we finished two books. This one for the teens and me-- Then I went back on my word regarding reading Steinbeck and started Of Mice and Men .  It's a very painful read, but it's shorter, and the terrible decisions that have to be made are somehow more comprehensible to me . . . even though they are still incomprehensible . . . sheesh!  Steinbeck is just so hard! This one for the kids and me-- It marks the end of Unit 3 in Playful Pioneers 2. . Hike 7: Little Blue Trace The pictures loaded backwards, so the hike story is told in reverse order. 🤷 Fort building Changing to a game of "Pooh-leaves" Ready for a game of Pooh-sticks! She refuses to wear mittens, so she keeps her hands warm in her pockets. I love his version of cold-weather clothing! In the afternoon, the kids wrote biographical narrations about Sacajawea. On Tuesday we took Hike 8: Cave Spring. More fort-building Because we finished all of our Unit 3 reading, and I didn't want to ...

 I didn't want to write last week because I felt too whiny. "Our days are hard." "I don't want to do any school." "What are we going to do?" "Everyone fights everything I ask them to do!" "There's no joy in our journey right now." I didn't want to fill a whole post with those feelings in my mind as I wrote. So I made a change. I worked hard to get the kids outside for many weeks, but the effort was exhausting and then the time change came. I love regular time, when the cold evenings are dark early, and we can gather around as a family together. But my children are bigger. It was this past year that my little boys turned into big boys. Three of them grew about a foot and put on lots of man-to-be weight. They take up so. much. room. I've been treating everyone as if they were old enough and ready to do more studying and less playing. But they're huge, and they're still kids. If I reduce all of their ages by 3...