Homeschool Discoveries

Wow…it’s been three weeks since my last Collage/Week-in-Review post!  Two weeks ago at this time we had just finished up our Vacation Bible Camp at our church.  It was my third year organizing/directing the program:

After VBC week we had our family vacation/staycation.  You can see a few photos of that in this post. 🙂

That brings us to this week:

I like how the collage turned out but I didn’t quite get them in “order” as I wanted to tell the story of our week.  (In other words “sorry for the weird # order in this post”).  😉

Of course after a week of vacation/staycation. we had piles of laundry, bags to unpack and some overdue dishes from quick meals eaten on the way to and from our family fun.  So most of Monday was devoted to “vacation recovery.”  And with the busyness of VBC and summer fun in the weeks prior to VBC, I didn’t quite get all my intended school year preparations done.   A lot of Tuesday and Wednesday were devoted to that effort.

The kids were more helpful than usual in getting chores done around the house, and also did a great job amusing themselves with efforts like building the “world’s tallest duplo tower” (#8) and getting some very early Christmas preparations done by making some painted pine cone ornaments (#9).  We also enjoyed some impromptu nature observation as a very large (for around here, anyway) spider made a web about 2 ft. in diameter between the deck/part of the house. (#1 & #2).

Finally on Thursday I hoped we would be ready to “officially” start our school year with the first full day of school.   My mom visited on Wednesday, and stayed overnight since she had an obligation nearby on Thursday morning.  Having grandma around first thing in the morning was, of course, a bit distracting.  The kids found out on Wednesday about a book-making contest sponsored by our nearby Little Free Library, and they were eager to work on their books (#4 and #5).  Taking our back-to-homeschool pictures took a bit longer than I expected (#11 — see the rest of our “student photos” in this post).

So, needless to say, we didn’t accomplish our new “regular schedule” much at all on Thursday!  We did have some fun with handwriting practice outside (#10).  Mr. E is learning his lower case letters.

On Friday we did something my kids have been asking about all summer after reading this book — “Backwards Day”!   Tony was getting back from a short work trip on Friday morning (flying home on a redeye flight from the west coast), so it seemed like the perfect day to do it.  Usually the day ends with daddy coming home, but on Friday that’s how our day began.  We actually started Backwards Day with “lunch for dinner” the night before (aka a really easy dinner since daddy was gone!).  Then we had “dessert” for breakfast (apple crisp with a bit of ice cream on top — #6), “dinner” for lunch (meatloaf — something we never eat for lunch), and “breakfast” for dinner.  And of course the kids wore their clothes backwards!

We also completed our first “regular day” of school on Friday, trying out the new daily schedule I created.   I’m trying out short subject blocks of about 20 minutes each, with some five or ten minute breaks interspersed through the school day.  It felt a bit frenetic switching from topic to topic and kid to kid so quickly…but I am not sure how else to get to everything, not finish too late in the day, and also give enough attention to my 3rd grader AND my K’er.   I’m sure I’ll be writing more about our new daily schedule in an upcoming post.

I didn’t take many pictures during our first full school day (I was too busy trying to keep moving with the lessons and make sure we sort of stayed on schedule).  I did take photo #7 of Mr. E practicing his reading outside…and #3 of baby J creating chaos while I worked with the older kids.  🙂

Even though it was a little funny starting school with just a day or two before a three day weekend, I’m glad I had a chance to run through the schedule as tweak as necessary before we start an almost-full week.

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend!

I’m linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly-Wrap-Up!