August 2017 Homeschool Happenings

The main thing I remember about August is busyness. It seems like everyone was trying to fit all of the last bit of summer fun into this month and see how much we could get together. So, here’s what we did for homeschooling this month.

 

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August Week 1

We snuck in a bit of homeschooling to start off, and learned about Native Texans. The kids each picked a tribe and created several scenes about them. The Lego scene in the middle up there is Superman’s village scene.

The kids are still working on daily lessons using Knowre, and it greatly amuses me to see all the positions Princess sits in while doing her work. The novelty has worn off, and now they’re realizing it’s work.

In other news, I cut out my World War 1 era corset for a ball our local historical museum is having in January (to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the United States entering the war). I also took a bit of time to enjoy a “cuppa tea and a book” (because that’s super important, I read the entire Dresden Files series over the months of July and August).

We played a round of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Princess is really throwing a stink about playing games right now, which has really cut down on our game play recently.

 

August Week 2

Part of the way through the week Jeff got called off to the far off lands of New York City (I’m really getting my weeks messed up, so this might have happened earlier in the month). I got to solo-parent for a week, and it was immensely stressful. Of course it didn’t help that he got back in town, and immediately headed up to Dallas with Batman for a special, long-promised, weekend with the grandparents.

But as to what we actually did, besides me being tired out of my mind. We went on a field trip to Longhorn Caverns, I’d heard there were pictograms from a local tribe and it had a lot of history related to Texas Natives.

Which was partially true. It does have an insane amount of history, and I want to head back there later on, but the tour does not have a lot of Native history, just a lot of history, with one story happening to be about some Comanches who were on the hide from Texas Rangers. It was a fascinating tour and I want to go again when we don’t have to hurry back to pick Jeff up from the airport.

We watched Charlotte’s Web for our book and a movie (after reading it for Reader’s in Residence). Oh, and that picture of Superman covering his ears is because he was convinced the Fablehaven* book we were listening to on Audible* was about to have a kissing scene.

 

August week 3

This summer we’ve been watching the cousins for a few hours on Mondays, and the kids have loved it. I particularly love this picture of Batman carrying C out to the car.

For actual homeschooling we learned about the explorers of Texas, including my absolute favorite: Cabeza de Vaca (literal translation: Head of Cow, let me just say that amused my kids way too much, and me if I”m honest).

Then we headed off to the Blanton Art Museum for a field trip with our homeschool group. The moms were all surprised when our kids were fascinated by this weird 30 minute video art piece about nothing. Like it was supremely surreal, if we’d been at home they wouldn’t have sat still watching it, but now they were fascinated by it.

That Saturday we went to my friend Sam’s parent’s house for our annual birthday memorial dinner. Back before he died we would go there every year (since high school) to celebrate his birthday, over the years the number of attendees has changed and grown as people have had kids, but it’s been a great way to keep up with his parents. In the bottom right picture Batman is learning how to play Sorry on their super cool game table (yes, for all that we love to play games we don’t have Sorry).

The final two pictures are a random picture hanging out watching movies, I don’t remember why I wanted to take it. The final picture is notes about a new ministry position I’m involved in: Bible Skills for kid-min.

 

August Week 4

I feel like I’m missing a week in here somewhere, but we’re at the end of my pictures. SO here goes. We kicked it off with some eclipse viewing with our super scientific homemade eclipse viewers.

We got bits and pieces of Hurricane Harvey last weekend, which is really what has fried my brain this week as I’ve looked at the devestation. The middle top image is our local retaining pond filling up to overflowing. If you follow me on Instagram, there’s a short video of our backyard lake. The big shocker has been the grocery stores. There’s very few families up here that don’t know someone down in Houston, and we had a lot of friends suddenly housing several other families, and the grocery stores were all insane. Our local grocery stores have all put limitations on bottled water purchases. We’re actually stuck at home until local gas stations have gas again because there are no gas stations within 20 miles of my house that have gas.

Side point, for those wondering why Houston wasn’t evacuated, imagine a land mass the size of the state of Delaware, that’s how big Houston and its surrounding cities are. Now in that area put the population of New York City, and give it roughly 12 hours notice. It just wasn’t physically possible to evacuate that many people. Here’s a great size comparison of Hurricane Harvey over other states.

I’m updating our curriculum picks to republish on Monday because I’ve significantly changed several things since I published it in March (or April?). One of the reasons is the picture of Superman at the computer, each of the kids now have an independent project they are working on for the year, somewhat inspired by Angellic Scalliwags.

 

My brain is really fried, so hopefully I regain a brain for this coming week to really get school going. This past week was rough, really rough trying to transition back to full-time school.