Homeschool Discoveries

This week started out like any other…and quickly changed in a way that will define our next two or three months.  Tony called shortly after he left for work to let me know he had taken a nasty fall on his bike and needed me to pick him up.  I quickly shuffled the kids across the street to the neighbor’s house, and left to pick him and his bike up.  It wasn’t but a few minutes later that he called and said I would just be picking up his bike — he couldn’t put any weight on his leg and thought we should call an ambulance.  I took the bike home, and he went to the hospital.

After Tony spent many hours in the ER, the verdict was both bones broken (quite badly) in his lower left leg.  He had one surgery Monday night, and then was able to come home Wednesday night.   He’ll have a second surgery next week.  Needless to say Tony is taking it easy and spending nearly all his time with his leg elevated at the moment (and there are lots of pins sticking out from his leg right now, making it tough to do much of anything!), and he’ll have to keep weight off of it for up to 12 weeks.

So, the kids and I have a new focus over the next several weeks — helping out Daddy, getting him what he needs to be comfortable, and picking up the slack around the house to make sure everything still gets taken care of!

We really have a lot to be thankful for given the circumstances — the accident could have been so much worse, it happened pretty close to home, we have tons of family and friends offering to help us out, and Tony is able to do much of his work from home (his employer is being very helpful in getting things set up for him to work remotely as long as is necessary).   I’m finding a lot of little things to be thankful for too — I had just done a lot of “stock up” grocery and Target shopping so I have most of what I need at home, we had most of our fall “outside chores” taken care of, we recently got a larger dishwasher and our first snowblower, and it didn’t happen in the summer when we would have been expecting to spend a lot of time doing outside activities as a family.

Despite the unexpected turn in our week’s schedule, we still got a lot done.  All four kids had their well child appointments, I voted on Tuesday (Tony sadly missed out — we learned too late on Tuesday that he should have requested an absentee ballot on Monday, as soon as he knew he would be staying in the hospital over election day), and we went to co-op on Thursday where all three big kids were in the talent show:

Miss M sang and danced to “Dem Bones” (an act planned before the events of this week!), Mr. E played a mouse in a skit of Aesop’s fable “The Lion and the Mouse,”  and Mr. K sang a fall song with his preschool class.

Despite everything else going on this week, we did manage to get a surprising amount of regular school work done — Tuesday was the only day we took completely off from school:

Family Science Saturday:  Last Saturday, before Tony’s accident, the kids spent the morning with daddy playing with dry ice!  They haven’t gotten to do any science activities with daddy in a long time and they have been begging for weeks to use dry ice, so that was a perfect way for them to spend the morning while I was doing my grocery shopping.  My rock and mineral samples arrived yesterday from Home Science Tools, so I am excited for us to start a new family science study on rocks and minerals next week!

Miss M’s learning highlights this week (3rd grade):  Miss M read about Australian animals in Sassafras Science Adventures, including reading several library books about marsupials.  She was so excited for me to take a picture of her reading, don’t you think.  😉  We also did lessons 25,28, and 29 in Right Start Math D (plus some earlier worksheets for independent work — we’re skipping around to just cover lessons that are new to Miss M), and we started lesson 16 in Logic of English Essentials.   For History this week, Miss M read a few Jean Fritz books about key figures in the American Revolution this week, as well as a biography of George Washington by the D’Aulaire’s .

Mr. E’s learning highlights this week (Kindergarten):  Mr. E and I kept things pretty simple — He read to me every day, we reviewed his LOE-E phonograms that he has learned so far, and we did some RightStart B math, finishing lesson 45 as well as doing lessons 46 and 47.   In the lower right picture above, he is calculating the number of days in a year.  We get to use the math balance for his RS-B lessons next week.  We’re looking forward to that!

Probably what suffered most in our distracted school week was read-alouds.  I still fit in my bedtime read-aloud with Miss M most nights (We are loving Sophia’s War by Avi), but we were at a standstill with our other history read-alouds all together, and in general I didn’t do nearly as much reading to the boys as usual.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’m Linking Up With: Collage Friday and The Weekly Wrap-Up!