School Bells

Hey, hey, hey!!!

I hope to find you guys all happy and well!  Things here haven't been too bad.  Mostly homeschooling prep.  My brain hurts.  Chris and I created a vision a couple of weeks ago.  We wrote down what type of adult is standing in front of us as that child is about to leave our home. I'm really happy with the final list.

Chris has some training where he won't be able to call for 3 weeks.  It is happening sooner than we thought.  So I revamped our homeschool schedule, and we are starting a week earlier.  We are lightly schooling right now.  Pushing 2015-2016 up a week should not be too bad.  I just have a few things to nail down before Monday.

Making a saint choir between lessons.

We are adding to what we were doing last year.  We never started Classically Catholic Memory last year.  There was some resistance on the kids' part, and I had a hard time getting into a groove.  Last night Chris and I introduced the first week of memory work and the kids did AWESOME!  I can't believe I heard Owen reciting his Latin while we were in Target this evening!  And that wasn't even his favorite subject.  The boy really loves the science and geography!  Amelia loves the poetry.  Their brains are like little sponges that can absorb so much information.  So cool.  Anyway, my plan is to introduce new memory work every other week on Sunday nights as a family.  I started CCM a week early so Chris will be here and to give us some time getting use to having memory work on our homeschooling plate.

Tea Party

 In an attempt to be "fun", I have also made an activity loop.  We will have an activity once or twice a week.  The loop is just a rotation of the activities.  We have nature study, poetry tea party, show and tell (kids' request), and a cooking lesson.  Now that I am typing this post, I might add trip to the library to make sure we are going a little more often than we are now.

I am well aware that this post is a little all over the place, so if you made it this far...you're awesome. Anyway, school will be broken into blocks: Math block, Language Arts, Circle Time, Read Aloud, and Activity. Circle time will cover memory work and religion.  The other blocks are pretty self explanatory.

Reading aloud

We have an emerging reader.  It's so awesome to watch him develop this new skill.  When I would think about the pros and cons of homeschooling, watching them day in and day out as were learning was on my pro list.  Never did I imagine it being as awesome as it actually is.  It's so different, then when he would learn new things at preschool and hearing about it later.

The two younger ones are making things tough, but nothing we can't work around. Simon wants to be apart of the action.  And when he is not apart of it in the way he thinks he should be, he becomes very distracting and sometimes destructive.  Becket seems to be always be destructive.  Lots of winning happening in the under 3 crowd.

Ok, time for bed.  Peace, interwebs!