A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 My teens turned in their thesis paragraphs for their "History of Anything" essays.  They both write so well.  I helped with an edit or two for each of them, and then I began pondering how on earth my kids write as well as they do.   Several of them need help with spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but their ideas and their expression are so good. Then I remembered that we're a reading family.  Even the ones that refuse to read much on their own are read to every day.  They're exposed to the best written language possible, and it has influenced how their minds have developed. I love it. Anyway, Nature Angel and Little Princess both have solid thesis paragraphs to work with, and this week they are developing their outlines. We have fewer than 2 dozen lessons in this volume of The Mystery of History, and I am looking around for what we will work on next.   Perhaps some more Shakespeare. Little Princess is over halfway through Algebra I, and she's made really good

 It was a house divided here on Superbowl Sunday .   There were our devoted Chiefs fans. There was our devoted 49ers fan. There were those of us who didn't care one way or another. So it was the best of times and the worst of times almost constantly for the whole evening. But there was popcorn. So that was good. The shooting at the parade (which we did not attend) was bad, though. It's been a bit of work around here to process it. We had a good, solid school day on Monday .  Nothing special.  Nothing awful.  I always appreciate a good non-descript day. Lola helped cut potatoes for dinner. Everyone was wired on Tuesday .  I don't know why! However, it was a beautiful day, and I decided that rather than try to wrangle the younger 6 into schoolwork that they were clearly incapable of, we went to the park. A few kids took kites. It was beautiful and breezy and just warm enough. We stayed until people needed to eat. I was going to do school after lunch, but then Brother boiled o

 I'm trying not to focus on my failings . . . but that very sentence shows how I'm feeling about this week. Except that we did do some really good stuff. The high schoolers got to "Stump the Teacher" with a 32 question quiz for me. They spent many times more time reviewing their history notes than they would have if it had been a regular unit quiz.  And they had so much fun doing it!!! I did quite poorly at the start, but as we moved to more recent units, I started to do much better! Later in the week, they had another review that was hilarious for me to watch. They had to match each pink post-it with an orange one--all of the post-its having some historical figure, event, time, or definition on it. I love how I accidentally caught Little Princess in a moment of excitement as she and Nature Angel made a connection that had previously eluded them. The younger kids and I are doing well with our marine biology unit.  We are currently on track exactly with our readings, n