And... the Holidays are Over!

Not that I don't love the holiday season.  All of the family time with great food and lots of fun things to do.  Everyone sneaking around trying to hide their gift plans from the recipients.  That's one of the challenges of homeschooling.  It's really hard to shop for presents when the kids are always around.  That's one of the reasons my kids don't believe in Santa - I am just not sneaky enough to buy all of those presents without the kids knowing what I am up to.  Anyway, so I didn't mean to but we took off all of the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I counted a few days in there because they were learning a lot of cooking and home organizing stuff and other life skills. 

So now we're back in school and we've actually managed to do formal lessons for 6 days in a row.  I don't think that's happened since we before we spent that year unschooling! Monday through Thursday last week we managed to stay pretty much on schedule.  Friday was our monthly board game day at the library with a bunch of other homeschoolers so we did bare bones school in the afternoon.

I also spent quite a bit of time last week planning the homeschool class I've started.  Once a month, we are going to get together with 10-15 other families at the library and learn about a specific country. Everyone will have chosen a topic and prepared a short presentation ahead of time and will get a chance to share what they have learned with the group.  We are doing Mexico for this first month and my kids have chosen to do traditional Mexican clothing and Mexican art. I'm very nervous about doing something like this but I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Today, we did our mapwork lesson for history.  We've been reading about the early settlers of New England and New France, including William Penn, the Quakers, Louis XIV, and Metacom.  I got a laptop for Christmas that I can hook up to the TV, so I use that as a white board to aid in teaching lessons.

I talked to Emmy about her science lessons and she told me she's just not getting anything out of the program she's using.  She finds it way too boring.  I think I'm going to do what we've been doing in history and just have her use the elementary books and do some extra work.  I do worry that it won't be rigorous enough for her but I try to remind myself that learning something from an easy book is better than learning nothing from a boring one.  Maybe eventually I will find a high school science curriculum that will not bore the pants off my kids but it took me 7 or 8 years to find the elementary ones so I'm not holding my breath.

I started to do a grammar lesson with Miri but she just couldn't focus on it very well so we only did half and we'll save the other half for tomorrow.  Another great thing about homeschooling.

Then I read a science lesson to the little girls and we learned about which kinds of birds travel in flocks and which ones prefer to be alone.

I worked on Explode the Code with Sarah (She's learning about the letter "K.") while the middle girls finished up their science minibooks. 

Now everyone is at lunch and after they clean that up, they will all do the independent stuff that I've assigned. 

What did you learn today?