A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

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. One activity that I found

  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. She actually told people th

  . . . 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 a

 We were too boring for words. :) That always makes me happy. The teens and I finished Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave . It was emotionally exhausting to read about his life.  What must it have been like to live it!?!?!? The kids and I kept reading  Basher Science: Chemistry: Getting a Big Reaction, A Child's Garden of Verses, and D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. Everyone but Nature Angel (she's done) did math every day. We cleaned, read library books, played games, and started a new tradition (I hope!) of having the kids do "cash envelope stuffing" with me.  We walked to the bank (.25 mile walk), withdrew cash, walked home, and then gathered around the table together to go over the weekly budget and put actual cash in each category. I was inspired by Mama's Bank Account --how the family gathered around to make sure they could pay all of the necessary bills with what they had in front of them, or come up with adjustments. I