A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

Monday The first day of school in a new month mean we changed our opening song and scripture for Morning Meeting; now we're memorizing Joseph Smith--History 1:17 and Praise to the Man .  We're still studying Mosiah; we worked our way through chapters 24-part of 26 this week. This was our first day of doing double math lessons.  No one loves it, but no one is dying from it either.  The end of our school year is in sight! On the flip side we started a math book for Mister Man and Ladybug.  Belle is math teacher to them both.  In a complete reversal from my usual approach to math, I felt prompted to start them both in a Kindergarten math program, and I felt particularly guided to Horizons .  I showed Belle the teacher's guide at our homeschool convention a couple of weeks ago, and she fell in love with the idea of becoming a math teacher.  So, just as the older girls are ending math, 2 of the littles are starting. And they LOVE it. Belle is a p...

It has been a wretched week. Too wretched to describe. So I won't. But I will say that Ladybug, Brother, Little Brother, and Lola visited their birth family this week.  I believe that having a relationship with the birth family should be a blessing, but our littles are too broken and too fragile for it right now.  We'll send updates to the birth family, and we'll try to keep lines of communication open, but we cannot have real contact until they are better healed from the years of trauma they've experienced. Here's what we did for school: Morning Meetin g --same as last week.   Preschool --almost nothing.  We spent the days dealing with trauma.  We did, though play with rainbow rice on Friday afternoon. The 4 preschoolers each got a rainbow array of rice in jars, some spoons, some scoops, and a big bowl.  They happily scooped and mixed colors for a full hour. These two (and Little Princess) layered the colored rice into pretty bottles to ...

I feel as if we've hit some sort of milestone . . . week 30!  I guess it's time to start thinking about how to wrap up our school year.  In our state, we have to reach a goal number of hours rather than days or weeks, and we so easily reach that goal that I rarely think about it any more.  The defining boundaries of our school years depend more on us than on legislation. I'm grateful for that. Our Morning Meetings continued much the same as last week with one addition:  now the older girls and I are doing some brain teaser puzzles together using this book that I picked up at a second hand curriculum sale last Saturday morning.  Pixie and Belle love it; Rose Red and Super Star not so much.  We definitely get thinking each morning! We've studied Mosiah chapters 19-21 this week, and we're finally getting the hang of The Family Proclamation paragraph 6 . In Math news, Super Star finished her Saxon 6/5 book!  This is big news for our math phobic,...

I took my daughters and got out the door for a jog/walk every morning this week.  It has made a tremendous difference in my ability to see clearly and handle the vicissitudes of life. PE for my girls; anti-depressant for me. Win-Win. Morning Meeting this week included: *A family celebration song taught to me by the parent educator at Ladybug's therapy office.  We're singing about one family member each day. *Article of Faith #3 *I Lived in Heaven *Isaiah 5:20 *Paragraph 6 of The Family Proclamation *Mosiah chapters 17-18 *The Clock--a Mother Goose poem *Bedtime Math We spent the whole week reading about Joseph--from his coat of many colors to bringing his whole family to Egypt--during Bible story time. The preschoolers started making homemade books about colors, worked on knowing where their bodies are in space by weaving themselves through this "web," had a sensory experience with colored shaving cream, played on the water table, played in the san...