April 2018 homeschooling

April started off with a bang, but we got a lot of homeschooling in, and a few fun side trips. I’m discovering as my kids get older we don’t see as many super fun looking pictures. They’re doing some good work, but pictures of them editing papers just are not as interesting as pictures of my kids doing a cool experiment. Though if things go as planned this first week of May, I’ll have lots of science experiments to talk about.

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Week 1 of April 2018

April started off with a bang as we had Easter on April 1 with my brother and his kids. My kids had just as much fun hiding eggs for their cousins as they did finding eggs.

We watched Sign of the Beaver on Amazon Prime. I’d been so excited to find this movie because I remembered loving the book as a kid and being fascinated by it. This movie I spent most of it yelling at the Mom (who wasn’t in the book), frustrated with the Dad (who was barely in the book), and generally annoyed by the changes they made. Usually when changes are made to a book, I may not like them, but it makes for a strong story. These changes had me yelling at the movie, and so amazingly frustrated with the screenwriters.

In my never-ending quest to get some good bluebonnet pictures we stopped by the bluebonnets after going to glow in the dark mini golf, the kids put up with me, and I just have to edit pictures before putting up my annual bluebonnet pictures. You also get a couple of shots of the strangeness of my kids, who either ham it up for the camera or hide from it. There is no in between.

Week 2 of April

The second week of April saw us learning about the turn of the century, which meant the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, and that had been one of my planned big activities, so we attempted to hurricane proof Galveston. Which the kids thought was the most amazingly awesome plan ever.

The second weekend of April saw us camping with Princess’ American Heritage Girls Troop, but we also got an amazing cold front through that weekend that saw the weather dropped below freezing. Since none of us were prepared for that, the campout ended early.

Superman has started working on his independent project more seriously, we found our first solid project: EEME (I missed out on my favorite deal from Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op because I didn’t talk with Jeff soon enough, so back to the drawing board).

Princess met with our children’s director at church to tell all about her PRAY award from American Heritage Girls (bottom left picture) and did an amazing job talking about it.

Week 3 of April

We went up to Dallas to visit Jeff’s parents and help them with their house, they’re downsizing, and on the way back we stopped by the Texas Rangers Museum because we all agreed Jeff would love it (we were right).

We played a super fun World War 1 file folder game to review that for Texas history, and the boys then took it and played it with their friends that night.

That Friday we went to our local baseball team, and Princess got to see the national anthem with her troop, which was super cool. She also made an amazing strawberry cake that I ate large amounts of.

Oh and Batman made the most AMAZING honey bread that was cooked to look like a beehive. We had friends over the night he made it (for a dinner Superman cooked, it made for a very hectic afternoon in the kitchen with three kids in there, but the results were awesome).

I have to say I’m really proud of how all of my kids are stepping up in the kitchen. Batman is baking bread twice a week for his independent project and all three of them are taking turns cooking a meal for the entire family. It’s really cool to see.

Week 4 of April

The kids decided they wanted to finish Texas history in 2 weeks instead of four weeks, so we doubled up on history chapters, that means I need to get busy reading Texas history, so my kids have some notes to write on today.

We got a bit of swimming in even with the lots of busyness with extra schoolwork, and friends over, and gardening.

I need to sit down and write out how their independent studies went this year, there were some rocky starts, but I finally think I have it all figured out.

 

2018 homeschooling months in review