A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 We started our week at our friend's pool. This sweet friend not only invited us to spend half a day swimming with her, but she provided a beautiful lunch for us all.   Then she invited us back again! (In a couple of weeks) We sat down to write thank you notes the next day. And Nature Angel drew this pencil sketch as the main card and gift. I'm of the opinion that our friend should frame this signed original and hang it in her cabana! I love that she included the three mom friends (the friend with the pool, an old homeschool friend, and me) in the left loop of the pool. Several of the kids learned to dive on this day, so not only did we have lots of fun, we had P.E. as well! For our Summer Baking Bingo activity, we made homemade lemonade. Nature Angel interviewed for and got her first out-of-the-home job.  She'll be working for an Eldercare community.  It's huge--covering acres and acres of land--with services from apartments for seniors who live independently ...

This is Little Princess in her element! I love that she found her people! She rocked her 9th grade year.   This is a screenshot of a portion of her official transcript. I did apply 1.5 credits from her 8th grade year to this freshman year.  The first semester of Survey of American History and World History: From Christ to the Printing Press took place spring semester 2023.  These are both on Nature Angel's high school transcript, and I know it is legal to apply some 8th grade work to high school.  She did the same work Nature Angel did, and she did it just as well. Her English 9 is the same as Nature Angel's English 11 because I taught them as a "class."  They worked on grammar, writing, and literature with me.   Little Princess has rigorous plans for the future, and she will need to meet advanced standards.  For this reason, we are leaving American Rhythm off her academic transcript; we will include it as an extracurricular activity instead....

  This photo would not be her first choice for me to include in this end-of-school-year post, but I love it. Yes, she can be more traditionally pretty--gorgeous, actually--but all I see is really real beauty.   And she's in her element. (This location happens to be the Chicago Art Institute.) Nature Angel completed her 11th grade year with almost too many credits to record on one form. This is a cropped screenshot of her official transcript. There is one blank line left, and she's actually still working on that credit.  I told her I was closing out her 11th grade transcript, and that I'd save the credit for that course for 12th grade.   This year she spent time recovering from our hard summer of 2023, and she spent a lot of time coping with the ongoing effects of that hard summer that have only been resolved in the past month or two. She says she wasted a great deal of time at the start of the school year.   She says her time management was poor. ...

  . . . The rest of us played. We went swimming at a friend's pool.  (No pictures because we were swimming .) We spent a morning at the park. playing with my reading glasses These little kids aren't little anymore.  They spent almost all of their time skating, scootering, and exploring the pond and almost none of their time on the playground equipment. (I think I might be starting to have a bit of an identity crisis!) We did learn about two of the transitional elements, read half a dozen poems from A Child's Garden of Verses , read about Orpheus and Jason in D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology , and read about herons in our Conservation magazine. Then, another day, we met up with our American Rhythm friends at a spray park.  The big kids ran all over the place, chasing each other, spewing water from their mouths or their canteens.  They raced up the big "rock" for a safe zone and jumped off it to run around again. Little kids happily filled cups with water and du...

 Somehow, my brain made a connection on Saturday evening, and I realized I could go to Girls' Camp instead of Sir Walter Scott as Ladybug's chaperone.   48 hours later, I was on my way! Before I left, though, we read about 50 more pages of Powerless, and the kids said they would probably die while they waited for me to come back to read.   *shameless self-promotion start* I told the kids that Dad could read, and they vetoed that immediately. :)  Ladybug said, "Mom, you are a very good reader, and it's just better when you read." *shameless self-promotion over* So we settled on finishing the book when I got home. I'd planned only easy little meals for 6 people while Sir Walter Scott and the girls would be gone, so I just passed the menu over to him, showed him where a few key items were located in the kitchen, and asked him to take them to the park often. He did. They had a most excellent week. at the swimming hole at MLK park at the spray park They watched...