Weekend Update No. 3

Last Friday was the final day of co-op for the school year. This is the first year we have participated in this, or any, homeschool co-op, and we have been so pleased with how it worked out. The kids loved the experience of packing and taking their lunch to eat in the "cafeteria" (the gym of the church where co-op is held), the opportunity to make some new friends, and their classes. They went every Friday for two classes and lunch. It is a big enough program that, while I had to fill a few volunteer lunch duty hours here and there throughout the year, for the most part I just dropped them off and picked them up every Friday. As an extra bonus, it sometimes worked out that Brendon and I could have a lunch date on co-op days--something pretty unheard of for us! Shayne took "Brain Games" (learning more about chess and other games of strategy) and choir; Gracie took a cooking class and choir; and Aubs and Alex took music and P.E. together.

Since it was the final day of the year, the music and choir classes combined for a spring concert. I don't anticipate that anyone but immediate family would want to watch these videos of their performances, but I'm still putting them here for us to come back to.

(If you want to watch just a snippet, I would suggest skipping to 6:22 in the first video for just the last song by Shayne and Gracie's choir. Impressive! And in the second video, with Aex and Aubrey's class, I recommend skipping to the songs either at 1:00 or at 4:15. Heart-melters!)

On Saturday we went to Corsicana to celebrate a birthday in our friends' family, the Dixons. It was also Derrick Days in their town, and one of the sponsored events was a giant slip and slide down a hill, which our kids took full advantage of for a solid two hours. Up and down, up and down. It was "epic," according to Alex.

Sunday went at a much slower pace, a caterpillar's pace you might say. Late in the afternoon, Gracie and the littles put on a dramatic presentation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

That's Gracie in the green sleeping bag, playing the part of the hungry caterpillar about to eat the smorgasbord of food in front of her. Ignore the tent in the background...What? That's not a totally normal thing to have a tent set up in your living room?

We finished off the day with Family Home Evening, and the activity was a family game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit (which Gracie and I won, naturally), followed by a viewing of the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars crossover episode. We are officially a family of geeks--in case there was any doubt.

30 Days of Thankful: Sonlight

Today I am thankful for not having to re-invent the wheel. For the first five (5!) years of our homeschooling, I cobbled together our curriculum from a variety of sources. It worked, but it was also work. I seriously needed a break from both the time and stress of planning, so this year we invested in a new, total-package curriculum from Sonlight.

Even before our first year of homeschooling, I attended a conference and fell in love with Sonlight's literature-based program, but resisted because of cost and the idea that I could do it on my own just as well. Well, I could just kick myself for not starting with it at the beginning. My planning now involves only printing, highlighting, and putting the schedules in the kids' notebooks. It is a dream. And our year has run so much more smoothly as a result.

One page of Gracie's weekly schedule. One color tells her what she can do on her own; the other shows what we do together. I only add in our math and a few extras on the bottom.

Sonlight is based on great books. The Witch of Blackbird Pond has been the favorite so far this year. (And you can see that I still couldn't totally stomach the cost of Sonlight, so we get many of our books from the library.)

---

"When life's got you down, gratitude can seem like a chore. Sure, you'll go through the motions and say the right things -- you'll thank people for help they've provided or try to muster a sense of thanks that things aren't worse. But you might not truly feel grateful in your heart. It can be like saying 'I'm happy for you' to someone who just got the job you wanted. The words and the feelings often don't match.

"This disconnect is unfortunate, though. It comes from a somewhat misguided view that gratitude is all about looking backward -- back to what has already been. But in reality, that's not how gratitude truly works. At a psychological level, gratitude isn't about passive reflection, it's about building resilience. It's not about being thankful for things that have already occurred and, thus, can't be changed; it's about ensuring the benefits of what comes next. It's about making sure that tomorrow, and the day after, you will have something to be grateful for."

From "Gratitude is About the Future, Not the Past" by David DeStano

Before I begin

let me just say, "Yes. I know this is crazy."

And also, "I don't have any expectations of keeping it all up, so you shouldn't either."

I have started another blog. Wait, make that two more blogs.

(Please re-read the first two statements again, now.)

The first is the one I've been mentioning here and there for awhile now, about our homeschooling. This is both for anyone who wants to follow along or is curious about this adventure/experiment, and to help in my own record-keeping of our activities. I will try to post there one or twice a month with our plans, favorites, and even failures.

The second is what I am calling my "someday" blog. When I am cruising around the Internets and stumble upon a great project or idea, I usually bookmark the page and save pictures to my hard drive for some other day. This is all fine and good, but if you've been on my computer before, you can attest to the fact that my favorites list is out of control, and I'd rather leave the room on my hard drive for my own pictures, not someone else's. So from now on, when I come across these great ideas, I'm just going to post them over to the new blog immediately with links and pictures. Basically, this means that my Christmas countdown and other craft posts that used to be here will now be ongoing over there. I've started emptying my favorites onto the site with several posts already.

Here are the links (I put them permanently in the left-hand sidebar as well):

Someday

Our Schoolhouse Rocks

Yesterday when I told Jenny what I was doing, she said, "Yeah, because you just blog so much as it is..." of course I need to expand!

So...we'll see what happens, and whatever that may be, I'm totally blaming it on Spring Break last week and having just a bit more time on my hands than I have had in the last nine months.

So how does that work exactly?

I've had a couple of people ask me recently (and I'm willing to bet there are more of you wondering) about how I am able to both work and homeschool.

Well, to start, I only teach two classes, two days a week. I do have to hold some office hours, but I also do that on the same two days, so the kids are with a babysitter for about five hours on those days. (And, as I have lamented here too many times, any extra grading work gets done in the evenings after bedtime.)

We have a great babysitter who has been a lifesaver for us this year. In the past, when the hours have been even shorter, we've shuffled the kids around with family, traded babysitting hours with friends, etc., but it has been so much better and easier this year to have someone come to our house. She is a college student and friend of ours from church (one of my former Young Women), and, most importantly, the kids LOVE her. They were counting the days until she came back after Christmas break. (And I tried not to let that hurt my feelings!)

As far as how that all affects our homeschooling...we are able to do the bulk of the work on the other three days of the week. We still do some basics--reading, math, handwriting--on the other two days, plus the kids are to complete a lesson on the computer (we use an online phonics program called Click-N-Kids). But all of our other "big" unit activities are managed just fine on the three days I am home all day.

It might not always be the case (we are just in Kindergarten after all) that this schedule works for us, especially after we add the new little one this year, but for now, we're good. I really enjoy teaching both at the university and at home, and the kids are progressing as they should; plus, I tend to be more organized and efficient when I have a tighter schedule. It's a win-win all around.

So, that's how that works exactly!