A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

  This face! This beautiful, smiling face! This kid has had a seriously hard life.   He had a seriously hard 9-10 months or so this past school year. But now . . . But now he is stable and  . . . look at that face! He's happy. He's stable. He's thriving. Grateful, blessed, awed, amazed, thrilled . . . all of the adjectives aren't enough to describe what I feel over seeing Brother happy, stable, and thriving. A significant portion of our year was spent tweaking his med regimen to help him get to happy, stable and thriving.  How grateful I am for his psychiatrist, our case manager, and our FSP for helping us get to this point. He loves math. He whipped through Math 4, 5, and 6 this year.  He'd be working on Math 7 right now, but I'm still saving up our homeschool budget so that I can purchase the various maths the kids need from Teaching Textbooks.  I plan to purchase both Math 7 and Math 8 for him for the upcoming school year. He hates drawing/art. Hate...

  It was a weird week.   I took a ton of pictures, but they were mostly for the moms of The Munchkin and Little Mister Frog.  (I stole a lot of the pics in this post from Nature Angel.)   We had Morning Meeting every morning.     We did independent school.   We had our kind-of-sort-of Academy.   We read together at night.   We played outdoors.    We walked our neighborhood trail for Hike #44 of 52  97.51 miles + 3.4 = 100.91 miles   I tried so hard to get us on another hike, but . . . I couldn't. In many ways we are so very blessed.  Nonetheless, I fought a decided spirit of discouragement. It's a good thing we're practicing gratitude every single day! Belle has found that immersion in one subject at a time is more productive than trying to balance many subjects.  She's settled into a routine of leap-frogging through her subjects, doing several weeks' work at once in one area of study, then putting it away to ...

The days continue to follow the same pattern they have for several weeks. We continue to thrive. The days are marked by moments. I put away Caddie Woodlawn as a read-aloud for the young ones.  They hated it.  Baymax even asked to be put to bed before story time.  I switched to Tales from the Brothers Grimm , and I have happy, eager listeners again. On Wednesday it rained.  We were outside making the most of the day before we had to go inside, but when the rain came, it came quietly. So, we stayed outside. Playing Follow the Leader Jumping in puddles Discovering the water pouring out of the downspout The boys' hair was wet--fun to style   When everyone was wet and cold, we came inside for warm baths, jammies, and board games until dinner. Dinner is often not eaten until nearly 8:00 pm these days.  A far cry from the dinner-at-5-baths-at-6-bedtime-at-7 routine we keep in the winter.  We're outside making the mos...

We're knee-deep in the "finishing" stage of school. Though we've been in it all along because we've worked intensely on one or two subjects at a time instead of doing a little bit of each one each day. Ladybug learned a lot from this phonics/spelling resource, and now she's reviewing her skills with Book 3 1/2. Ladybug's cursive is really quite lovely, and now she's working on another book by another publisher to keep her skills up. Beowulf and I only worked on the reading pages in this book because he's doing Memoria Press handwriting and Rod and Staff arithmetic.  This kid grew in his reading skills by leaps and bounds.  He's super excited to start reading regular storybooks next week. This curriculum is definitely geared toward a younger audience than these two, and I'll probably use the books next year with my Academy crew (adding the activities I skipped for these two), but the stories are engaging, and my middle s...

While ever so many others struggle, we continue to grow in joy. We're not perfect. :) But we're so freakin' awesome that I feel like I'm living in a dream. Every day school happens.  We have behavior issues that we need to deal with, but they're  minor (to us), so we deal with them and pass them by.   Everyone is growing and learning. The teens and I finished all 722 pages of The Histories of Herodotus !!! It was simultaneously incredibly dull (too many names and details) and hilarious (Herodotus is wry) and fascinating (ancient cultures were crazy!).  I'm quite glad we read it; Belle is quite glad we read it; Super Star is okay with having read it, but she wasn't overly impressed. :) We're on to The Oresteia next week. Little Princess has added YoYo Chinese to her daily studies because they offered one course for free for a month! Little Princess and Nature Angel each got a Book of Mormon in her foreign language of choice--Mandarin ...