Crazy Busy September!

Things have been so crazy busy the last few weeks! I just realized I never even blogged for all of September! It's been a little bit rough getting into the swing of things this year. We have one day a week we are out of the house from 8 to 8! Long days indeed. Those are the days I do my best to get my coffee before we leave as it's unlikely I will see my precious coffee again before bed time. I freely admit I am a coffee addict!

Those extra long days start with Community Day, followed by the library and then to meet up again with friends from Community Day and others. At some point we have dinner whether at home or in town before the boys head off to Cub Scouts. Busy. So un-socialized my poor little home-schooled kids! All of that is just one day! Don't forget church is a whole other day of being with others. Every. Single. Week. The other five days? There is no set schedule and we have a little wiggle room. There could be another park day, a field trip, time with mama's old military friends and their kids, visits to family and friends in other states. Really, the possibilities are endless.


So September. It flew by! The boys decided reading the Little House series would be fun this year. It sounded good to me so I agreed and we went on a search for all the books. I'm still missing two I believe. I decided it would be best to do as a read aloud together project, so that is what we have been doing. We finished Little House In The Big Woods and I am waiting for their projects based on the book. I can't wait to see what they decide to do. About one-third of the way through we did paintings of our favorite scene which they enjoyed (although I think I need to find some good art education materials!).


9/11.

We really studied September 11th. I mean, we literally did nothing else that day. Everything we did was related to the events of the day. There were a couple worksheets and coloring pages but mostly there was plenty of discussion. We read speeches from GeorgeBush, we listened to the music created about 9/11 and discussed the meanings of the lyrics, we watched the original news coverage of the planes hitting and the collapse of the towers. We discussed terrorists and what they did, how they changed our lives. We talked about what I was doing when it happened. Yes, my children are young but history is history and I don't believe in making things nice and rosy when they aren't.


Last weekend we went to see the Memphis Belle at an airport near us. We arrived while it was still in flight so we were able to watch it come in for a landing. Take note, this is not the original Memphis Belle, but the one used in the movie about the real, and legendary Memphis Belle. At the same time, this aircraft was built in the 1940's and just didn't make it to war. It is one of only 13 or so B-17 Bombers, or "Flying Fortresses" that is still in flight today out of around 3,000 built, so regardless it is absolutely worth seeing! The kids loved it! After it landed and they had it situated we were able to walk all around it and tour the inside. I took many pictures of course!


There is a ton more I could share, but I need to be up in time for coffee before school!

Field Trips

Field trips.  We spent a day in Amish country, starting with an Amish style lunch at Good N Plenty.  Roo immediately made friends with the lady sitting next to him and managed to have her serve him the whole time while Bugs hollered down the place thanking the waitress for cooking for her!  The food, oh so much of it and so good!  Someone forgot to tell me there were FIVE desserts to try.  I never give my kids dessert.  It's not because I'm against it, it's that none of us are ever able to eat it after dinner.  After we rolled out of there we headed on to the Amish Village to tour the house and learn a little about the Amish lifestyle.  We took a quick tour of the outbuildings before boarding the bus for the tour of the countryside stopping at one of the Amish farms for a few minutes.

Our next trip was to Fort McHenry.  My favorite part? Locking the kids in the jail cell of course! Bugs was very upset we made her quit washing laundry with the reenactors to actually see the inside of the fort.  Two year olds, they are so concerned about chores!  Apparently we wandered into some kind of kid fun day with all sorts of hands on activities.  Bucko and Roo hand-stitched a few stiches of the American Flag that was being worked on, wrote with a feather quill and all three colored paper dolls that were wearing 1814 dress.  Roo tried on some period costumes, he was adorable. 

We left Fort McHenry and headed straight to D.C. as we were staying a few days with friends we hadn't seen in ages.  While in D.C. we took the kids to the National Air and Space Museum via the Metro.  I'm not sure which activity was the favored one.  The boys begged to stand which we did allow on the ride back.  We headed home a couple days later after an event filled trip that turned out to be a lot of fun.

Car Schooling

Field Trips, who doesn't love them?  I know I prefer them to doing school work myself!  We've already taken 3 field trips for this school year.  School barely started you say?  Well, I guess that's true,  officially anyways.  My hubby had an extra long break between semesters this month so we decided to take a trip or several.

 Traffic sucks so we spent an extra bit of time in the car on the way to Baltimore.  The boys had their flash cards and spent an amazingly long amount of time quizzing each other, their sister too.  I noticed they liked the insect and animal flash cards the best, but the Presidents came out of the pack a time or two.  I think the multiplication and division cards stayed safely ensconced in their pretty box, but the addition and subtraction cards were used..  When they got tired of that they read through their kid's road atlases that I found at a truck stop a few years ago, they colored, put stickers on my windows (grrrrr not real happy about that!!) and read their books and Boy"s Life magazines.  We previewed our Latin lessons for this year by listening to the music CD that accompanied the book and our memory work from CC.  All of this took place prior to reaching 695.

We spent about a week with my husbands grandmother, the kids played, fished, ran and enjoyed themselves.  They learned how to bait hooks and pull the hook out with some tool before tossing the fish back.  My two year old caught a fish and ran around with it squeezing so hard. She squeezed that poor thing so hard the next thing you heard was, "fishy poopy!!! Mommy fishy poopy!".  When she didn't have the fish she was cradling worms and shoving them in your face telling you "he likes you!".  Or sticking cicadas on your shirt.  We had a blast.  Somehow several pages of work were squeezed in among the fishing and fun with family.

I'm fading and I really should get up early tomorrow.  This will have to be followed up later.  In the morning after coffee maybe......

Week 2

This is the first day of the second week of school and my kids still are not up.  Why can't they do this on the weekends?  There are no plans to go anywhere today so I guess it doesn't really matter that they are still in bed, that's one of the beautiful things of home school.  The other is that I can change curriculum when something I like better appears on the horizon.  We do have a main curriculum we will follow this year, but the other stuff? I already decided after a week I have to have these new books too.  Really they are supplemental to the main program this year, but I fell in love with the books I found over the weekend, particularly the map section.  It uses real maps to teach the kids map skills.  One uses a map of the BART system in California to teach kids to read transit maps.  There's how to read distance on a map, landforms, actual city street maps and not just those make believe ones they use in school.  Map skills using real atlas maps.  I like it.

I think I hear movement.  Surprisingly I've actually had my coffee already.  Time for school!  Coffee before school - always.

School Time

It's that time of year again. The start of school.  Not just any school though, it's the start of  real home school in our family.  Technically my kids have been doing school at home since kindergarten - but it wasn't home school.  Huh?  How's that?  They attended a public charter virtual school so everything they did still fell under public school. Tests. Deadlines. Teachers.  All of that, they just did their assigned work at home just like every other student.  Last week I changed all of that.  We withdrew from the realm of public schools to do what's best for our kids and our family.  What is that?  Ha. We're still figuring that out.  Baby steps. Never before coffee though ;)