this week in homeschooling

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 highlights of the week:

• the kids were excited to start back at their Missionettes and Royal Rangers classes
• Dave fixed the CD player in our car which had been broken for years (he discovered a penny in there which is something we had suspected happened. Hmmm...I wonder how that got in there?)
• going to our favorite county fair on Labor Day

Ben LOVED the carosel

Jack (my nephew) gave this year's fair a thumb's up

Ben and Luke practicing their driving skills

Reese enjoying the "yo-yo" swing ride

  what we worked on:

• reading our breakfast devotionals from the book, "10-minute Timeouts for You and Your Kids"
• our 3D large-scale map of Australia (see this post for how we did a similar one on Mexico)
• math drills
• finished listening to "Where the Red Fern Grows" and started listening to "Bless This Mouse"

  

  our map of Australia

what I need to work on:

• more patience and grace

behind the bullets:
Last year I tried doing devotions after breakfast and before we started school, but sometimes it was hard to get the kids to settle down and listen- especially with Ben and Luke being in the very wiggley phase.. This year I decided to try it while we eat breakfast and it's worked much better. I also feel more relaxed during devotionals because I'm not watching the clock as much and worrying about devotions pushing back the rest of our school time.

I love doing these large-scale maps with the kids - at least the painting part. I ended up shooing them away from the table for the gluing portion after the temptation to play with the glue and rip the tissue paper became too much for the three biggies (Ben was napping). I also discovered thin tissue paper doesn't stand up to the watery glue solution - if you try this, use a thicker piece of tissue paper.

We started Horizons math for the first time this year and with it comes drill work - something I failed to recognize the importance of in the past two years. I've made a couple of games out of it to keep the interest up for Brie and am grateful that already it's helping along her addition and multiplication skills.

I put a lot of pressure on myself during the school year - making sure we get a good amount of school work and hours in each day. Which causes me to have shorter patience with occurrences that come with the territory of having young children - like multiple spills of water and cereal a day and purposeful tipping over of chairs. I think I need to pray more earnestly that I would be able to rest in God's grace so that I may extend that and a whole lot more patience to my children.


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