Homeschool Discoveries

Here’s a little bit about what we’ve been up to this week:

1. & 2.  Happy 3rd Birthday to Mr. K!  His birthday was on Monday, and we had a small party on Sunday afternoon. Our family tradition is to let the birthday boy/girl pick the menu for the day and a fun activity on the day of his/her birthday.  Mr. K picked donuts for breakfast, Cars soup for lunch, Cars Mac and Cheese and chicken for dinner, and bowling as his fun activity.

3.  We had a Valentine’s party at co-op this week. Miss M wanted to make her own valentines this year for her co-op class, but wasn’t sure what she wanted to make.  It was the perfect use of pinterest! I showed her a number of links I had pinned to homemade valentines, and she picked the one she liked best.  I printed out the template, and she took it from there!

4. I haven’t had much patience lately to let the kids help me in the kitchen, but this week I let them help me with the dumplings for our chicken and dumplings in the crock pot.  Miss M made most of the dough balls, but the boys helped a bit too.

5. We scrubbed off the old exersaucer and brought it out for baby J this week…he seems to like it a lot.  It’s nice to have one more way to keep him occupied while we are doing school or I am cooking.  He’s getting more interested in trying to play with his toys every day!

6. Mr. K got some new play-doh this week.  I really, really hate the smell of play-doh (yet, somehow I never quite get around to making my own).  After Miss M was finished playing, I let the boys continue mostly unsupervised with the play-doh, since they were quiet and not fighting.  The result — one entire container of play-doh cut up into tiny chunks and spread out over the table and floor.  Sigh.  At least it swept up pretty easily.

7.  We got out the Right Start fraction chart for the first time this week.  The lesson called for folding and cutting strips of paper, but I am glad I remembered I had this instead!  We only made it through three lessons this week, having gotten bogged down in the warm-ups on two different days.  The geometry/fractions portions of the lessons were only mildly challenging for Miss M, but we discovered a particular subtraction strategy that had been forgotten, and some of the multiplication proved more challenging for Miss M than I had expected.  It was good to slow down both for the purpose of review and reinforcement, but also to deal with the character issues this brought up.  Miss M was not happy to hear that she had given me the wrong answers on these warm-ups.   We took the time necessary to deal with the heart issues.  While I don’t “love” these moments as the occur, I love these opportunities homeschooling brings us to work on Christ-like character (for mom and children alike!).

8.  Arts and crafts completed by Miss M and Mr E this week.  While sometimes I think to myself that we should be using some of the art curriculum materials I purchased for this year…other days I look at the projects my kids complete of their own volition, and remember that they have many, many good art/craft experiences with very little involvement from me at all!

9. We had a very short morning of school on Friday, leaving most of the rest of the day for fun.  We enjoyed a gym playdate, hair cuts for Miss M and Mr. E, and a trip to Half-Price Books.  I brought a huge box of books in to sell (mostly some pretty junky books that were really dead weight on our bookshelf), and of course still spent well beyond the credit I received for the books I brought.  🙂  Each of the kids got to pick out some books for themselves, and I found a few titles I was looking for.   After our outings, the kids packed their bags and went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for the night so mom and dad (and baby) could go out for a fancy early valentines date and then our church’s annual marriage retreat.  What a fun Friday!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday @ Homegrown Learners and the Weekly Wrap-Up @ Werid, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!