First Day of School... Again

So, not long after my last post, we found out we are going to have a new addition to our family in October so that kind of messed up all of my plans for the summer and fall.  I took off the rest of the winter and spring to deal with morning sickness and do some planning for a new school year.  I rethought everything I had planned before and decided we needed to get back into academics this summer.  I just haven't taught the kids enough self-discipline to be able to unschool - and I need to keep them busy in school so they're not making as many messes.  They are doing most of the chores because, as usual, pregnancy has been miserable.

All of that said, today we started school - for the second time this year.  I am trying to figure out a schedule that will work with Rock's and Kjeri's work schedules as well as chores, meals, moods, energy levels, and William's nap.  I'll post that here when I figure it out.

Before I had to take Kjeri to work at Arctic Circle, we managed to talk about plans for the yearbook this year and Miri volunteered to do the first week.

After I got back from taking Kjeri to work, we did a history lesson - that took about three times longer than necessary because of an uncooperative child or two - and we managed to do a science lesson each as well.  We are using Story of the World: Volume 3 and I made minibooks for lapbooking for all of the lessons.  We'll do a minibook and glue it onto a sheet of cardstock each day instead of a folder-style lapbook.  When a page is full, we'll get a new sheet of cardstock and file the full one.  At the end of the year, we'll bind the cardstock pages together with my binding machine.

We also managed a science lesson each.  Emmy is doing the Virtual Homeschool Co-op online with Exploring Creation with General Science so I don't have to do much with that.  Eli is doing Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics pretty much on his own with the workbook I created for it.  Miri and Josie are doing Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Animals of the Fifth Day.  I read the lesson aloud to them and then we have minibooks/lapbook activities to go with.  Sarah just kind of listens in on whatever else is going on.

The kids all exercised together on the Wii for P.E. so that is one more subject we got accomplished.

Hopefully things will get better as we get into things and I figure out a schedule.

What did you learn today?