Here we go again!

Gone are my plans of no/very limited school until the move. Lucy finished up the bulk of her exams Tuesday and then both kids did the "dad portion" of exams after dinner last night. He looked over their portolio with exams and samples of their work, they read to him, recited their pieces and we sang our favorite folk song and hymn. Even Norah recited a poem this time. (Ooey Gooey - a classic!)

I'm giving Lucy the rest of the week off but will probably start her last term of Year 4 next week sometime. And Jonah started Year 2 on yesterday. I forgot how much I like year 2 but I'm excited to go through it again.

I'm realizing how nice it is have curriculumn consistentcy now that my second kid is doing a year I'm really familiar with. It makes it so easy to just jump in and go. I had all the books set aside and the schedule printed for the move but even so, I wasn't prepared to start but I realized I didn't really need to be. Last year was also a repeat year for me but as it was Jonah's first year, there was still a learning curve for him when it came to 1) doing school consistently and not just when he wanted and 2)  narration. But now we both know what to expect and the transition these past two days has been seemless. He even liked Little Duke right off the bat!

Year 2 still doesn't take very long and since Lucy's free, we have been taking advantage of some of the many freebies and doing lots of art. It's not that I just want to fill up all their free time but its been rainy and mudy so outdoor time is limited and when I saw this quote in my current read, Undaunted Courage, I couldn't help but replace the words captain/soldier for Mom/kids. It's amazing how many months in the winter wilderness with soldiers isn't that different from social isolation at home with kids. They probably didn't have toilet paper either.

"..because they were good officers who knew for certainty than an idle soldier is a bored soldier heading for trouble"


We've Doodled with Mo.

Sorry for the blurry Jonah...i have more but be's blurry in them too.

Norah's Pigeon climbing a ladder to reach some cookies. 

Her elephant

Jonah's Elephant and (flying) piggie. 

Jude has roseola this week. It was a particular bad case but I'm very thankful for video chat appointments with our family doctor to reassure me that I was doing the right stuff but just needed to wait it out a bit longer. His skin was pretty hot so he took lots of baths and enjoying playing with water even when a full bath was too much. 

Did this always result in a giant mess. Yes. Would it probably have been less messy to just let him take another bath. Yes. But when he's at the sink, I can supervise math. Homeschool life is all about trade offs.

Lucy setting up some independent art.

I made a double batch of soft pretzels. They were delicious but I've got to learn even a double batch doesn't last very long in this house.

 More art - chalk pastels. Otherwise known as the messiest art supply I allow in the house (as opposed to glitter, which I do not). You'd think paint would be messier but somehow the chalk pastel just spreads and turns up later on walls in other rooms. But they love it so it stays. And it does produce pretty results.

Ir probably wouldn't be quite as messy if Jude didn't participate. 

Not shown was puzzles, read-alouds, a bit of mud-pie fun and some backyard basketball, a new batch of playdough, more handicrafts, some band-aids to cover up the wounds from handicrafts (needle felting is not for the fain of heart), an an impromtu St. Patty's day celebratinon. With Jude's roseola hitting a peak on Tuesday, I dropped the ball  but Lucy's picked it up and baked us some delicious Irish Soda bread (and a lot of Irish Soda bread is decidedly NOT delicious) and an aquitance of ours held a streaming irish folk song and folk tale concert that my kids' loved that inspired me to pull out Trial and Triump and read the St. Patrick's day chapter which I had help back for that day. 

 My goodness, has it only been a week?

In all seriousness, we're pretty blessed in that probably 80% of our regular routine is intact. And I hope that doesn't come across as a snarky "welcome to my world, you non-homeschoolers" way. I won't be inserting any memes here. I feel for you families where that is not the case. Yor're not homeschooling after careful delibration and thought and planning and making decisions on what curriculumn will work best for your family. You've been thrown in the deep end. With no warning or choice. And your kids haven't had any warning or choice in it either. 

When a mom (or dad) brings home a kid from school, even under totally normal planned circumstances, the standard advice from most of the moms in my homeschooling circle is to de-school a bit. Breathe, set up a routine, and life life - read, get outside in nature, bake. Don't try to immediately jump in full steam ahead. I know some of you, depending on the school work being sent home and the age of your kids, don't have the option, but if it is an option, I'd take it. And if it isn't, just rest assured that what you're doing is really hard. So be proud of yourself and like I always say JUST KEEP SWIMMING. 

* really, I say it A LOT. It's not as profound as something like "do the next right thing" or other phrases I've seen passed around but it works for me!

The best of plans

I really had hoped to be writing more here but February had us all down the flu which seemed to cause a flare up of my health issues which left me unable to use my hands very much. But now, I'm back and typing! Yay!

We've been trying to wrap up school for the year . My plan was for Jonah to finish year 1 before his trip to Disney World with his grandparents.  Mission #1 - Check!

Looking back on his first year of real school, I'm quite happy. It was a year of tremendous growth for him, both academically and in other ways. He loved exams and it was so fun and encouraging for us to look back over his portfolio together. It took us a little over a year to finish AO Year 1 but he actually did a term of 3.5 with Lucy in the middle and we speed up the last term of year 1 just a but (basically doing 2 readings daily) so I'm excited to start Year 2 with him as I think he is more than ready for the challenge it will bring.

Then while he was gone and last week once he was back, Lucy and I finished up the last couple week of her second term of Year 4.  She started exams today. Mission #2 - Check!

Year 4 scared me because of all the new subjects but she's done so well. She just finished Grammar Island and Practice Island and she'd tell you she is so happy to be done with Grammar until the fall but I've loved the MCT program and really, she does too. I won't do a full exam/term write-up like I normally do but if you go back and find what I said we were starting with, basically we loved it all! No major switches coming up with is lovely.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the kid's efforts with what I gave them. But I want to be real, this term did not end up being all I planned. We didn't do together time basically at all after January. We didn't get to meet up with our other CM family to do things together weekly like we had planned either (I think we met for lessons twice? But maybe only once). I don't feel guilty for that because it couldn't be helped. We were sick. And then as soon as someone recovered, we were sick again. And again. It was ridiculous. I'd say we're past it now but Jude and Norah had fevers this week and this weekend Jude woke up looking like this

It's just roseola. He'll be fine. And I'm not trying to complain because germs happen but we couldn't sing, we couldn't meet, we couldn't recite. So those plans lay in their spots, "Gone but not forgotten is the perfect phrase" springs to mind (the kids have been listening to Mary Poppins Returns lately). So, despite a decent term we didn't do: Swedish Drill, Picture Study, Recitation, the planned handicraft more than twice, over half the planned tea times, map drills. We did listen to the hymns and folk songs but didn't sing much because - voices. And nature study, well, we did one outing. Shocking, I now. And I call myself a Charlotte Mason homeschooler!

So when I pulled up the exams, I ended up having to delete a number of questions and I was so tempted to be discouraged. But I'm not. Education is a Life and we need brain food to sustain that life but it doesn't always have to look the same. When we were sick, I feed our bodies pretty simple. Lots of chicken soup. Fruit and Sandwhiches. More chicken soup. I didn't make big fancy meals - even ones that would have been really healthy and delicious. I wouldn't say that's the idea for every day for one's life but what we ate was nourishing and tasty and sustained us while not depleating me of my tiny remaining energy.

And when we were sick, we used a lot more audiobooks that usual (my kids love Audiobooks for free reads and extra time but I don't normally use them for school books), we cut things that involved sitting up and talking/singing or having people over.

But we did do:

Lots of drawing, mostly from nature guides or non-fiction books.

Poem writing - Lucy entered a local poetry contest - and won! She wrote several before picking this as her favorite. I don't assign creative writing but I do count it as school when it happens spontaneously ;-) She was supposed to read it at a poetry reading but i'm pretty sure that will be canceled.

Half of Hamet - Lucy hates listening to the archangel production that everyone else (including myself) seems to like so we only did it on days when we both coudl talk but hey, we did half of it! And watched select scenes thanks to David Tennant and Youtube.

An art project- We had to cancel on our teacher multiple times but they did get one bigger project completed. And it turned out great.

A trip to the symphony. Luckily this one happened after the flu but before the second round hit us so we could attend. This particular kid's show focused on rhythm and meter and how changing those changed the style of the song. We had just been working on rhytm and meter in our Music of the Hemispheres book which was perfect timing!

And we took exactly one nature trip but at least it was a good one. We went  to the world bird sanctuary and got there just as one on of the workers was starting to feed them. So we followed him around and got to watch all the daytime birds get there meals. He was very gracious to tell us about each one as we went along too. It was one of the few times we saw friends and I got some good pictures but since the friends were in them too, all I'm going to show you is this nice bird. 

We didn't make it far in our handicraft lessons but we did do lots of free time as individuals. Some needle felting. Lucy got a kit but I had some extra roving for Jonah and Norah. 

Jonah actually figured out how to use a cookie cutter as a mold and make solid shapes and taught Norah. I've got a couple needle felting books on hold from the library. It's a lot of fun although a bit challenging when Jude wants to crawl in my lap everytime I look like I'm having fun without him.  

I'm trying my hand at it too.

Soap carving was our planned handicraft. We only did it once with our friends before we all got sick but last week I wasn't feeling good but decided to just give them the book and let them experiement without me and they did pretty well. They made a huge mess and I'm pretty sure Jude tasted the soap several times before giving up on the idea but you can't say it isn't a timely handicraft!

Lucy also did some basketweaving from a kit she got for Christmas. 

So we finish exams tomorrow and the plan all term was to celebrate and have fun -  to not only do the last minute moving prep tasks but to have tons of play dates and time to visit our favorite spots around the city. Of course now that won't be happening. And we aren't quite sure when the move will be happening either. So here I sit, with more plans that will need to be adjusted on the fly. But I'm getting pretty good at that!