A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

We had a good week--with lots of informal learning.  It is a good season for us. Monday We started with watching coverage as early as possible. I put off buying eclipse glasses until it was too late (and too expensive).  We had resigned ourselves to watching the live stream from NASA, but then our computer didn't support the broadcast.  We were disappointed, but then Rose Red, our mad scientist, gathered half a dozen pairs of sunglasses and a balloon, and looked at the sun.  A perfect view!  We all took turns using our homemade viewer, and we all oohed and aahed.  It was really cool! And then, during totality, a cloud arrived.  But we all enjoyed the rainbow effect through the cloud. The best moment of the eclipse came after it was over, for me. Before the eclipse, I used Beowulf as the moon, Mister Man as the sun, and Little Princess as the earth (because they were wearing appropriately colored shirts) to model how the mo...

No family of 14 can survive without a system for maintaining the home, and we had a system that had worked for a number of years, but we'd fallen into a slump.  For some reason, our system just wasn't working, and I'd already been contemplating making some changes when I had opportunity to review The Everyday Family Chore System from Everyday Homemaking . I received a physical copy of the book because I really prefer a hard copy that I can mark up as I read, but it is also available in PDF format for those who prefer working directly from their computers and who like printing documents over copying them. The book consists of 5 parts: 1.  Introduction (in which I found out that Vicki Bentley, the author, is not only an experienced mom, but also a foster mom to almost 50 children over the years!) 2.  Laying a Foundation:   She discusses child training in a loving, standards-based fashion 3.  Implementing the Plan:   She explains how to use the ...

Last August I was not ready for school to start, but I did it anyway because I thought I should. And in September I had mental health crisis of the most serious kind. This August I am not ready for school to start. And I'm honoring that. However, I am ready to document brief moments of the beautiful learning that my kids engage in when I'm not running school. This week Rose Red is in Florida at a surfing camp.  She's with a sweet friend.  I could not be happier for her to have this experience away from home, at the beach, out-of-doors, physically active, and just plain cool. As far as I'm concerned, this is a quarter of a credit of P.E. The rest of us are at home.  My teens are reveling in their last days of bizarre teen sleeping schedules before early morning seminary begins next week. Pixie has been working on memorizing the dances she's choreographed for our dance team.  She'll be teaching the 10-12 year olds and dancing with the 12-17 year o...