Homeschool life in November

I’ve come to a comfortable conclusion. I’m never going to do a weekly homeschooling round up, or a general one of my week.  I always come up with stuff I want to add in, and I’m getting ever more behind on what I want to share.  So, my compromise is a monthly post.  Which hopefully I’ll get done on a regular basis.

So, what have we been up to?

We had a fun Halloween with friends.  The kids went trick or treating with another mob of friends, and happily gathered large amounts of chocolate.  We then allowed them to keep a gallon sized bag of chocolate provided they could close the bag.  I was quite amazed at the sheer amount of candy they fit in that bag.  We of course had another round of flooding down here in Texas, which has been amusing to all of us because we are technically still in a drought.  Though, I think that might finally be lifted after the Thanksgiving rains we’re supposed to be getting.  We’ll see.

 

Homeschool Science

This month we learned about botany, and so I took the excuse to head down to Zilker Botanical gardens and have the kids draw a few plants they saw.  They quickly decided to draw the first 5 plants they saw, and happily spent the next hour or so playing in the gardens.  I had no problem with that, since we spent a good 30 minutes talking with the gardener for the Japanese gardens and learning all about koi.

I have one last activity I want to complete for botany, because we didn’t really do much, but I need to remember to buy flowers when I’m grocery shopping for that one.

 

Homeschool History and Homeschool Geography

Most of our history this month wasn’t super exciting, but we had quite a bit of fun with our geography this month.  We learned all about France, which meant quite a long time spent on artist studies.  I’ve got the first post on that scheduled to go up on December 1.

I’m planning on going back and reviewing what we learned about in history this past month because I’ve been feeling rather unenthused (which spell check says is not a word, I quite disagree), and then we got sick, and generally the month didn’t feel very put together.  So, the plan for December is to clean the house like crazy and concentrate on writing and math.

General life

We celebrated Princess turning 9, but the poor girl was sick on her birthday, and then her brothers and I got sick on the rescheduled birthday party, so we’ll try again this coming Friday (hopefully).

We had a fun Operation Christmas Child packing party with the kids’ AHG/Traillife USA troops, which included making lots and lots of cards for soldiers serving.  I think there were 95 boxes packed, and I have no clue the number of cards that were made.

I spent large parts of November working on a new skirt for my dress (if you’re following me on Instagram you saw lots of pictures of it in progress), and finally got it all done, only to cancel the trip because Princess was sick.  Good news is I can finagle a few more details and then wear it to Sherwood Forest in the Spring, so it’s not a complete waste, just a delayed one.

To generally cheer up the rather downcast kids, we went ahead and painted our wrapping paper early this year.  Which made for a great big mess, and lots of cleaning afterwards, but it was quite a lot of fun all in all.  Games being played in the pictures: 5 Crowns, Europe puzzle, 10 Days in Europe (the last two are from the Hands on Geography Unit).  Oh and up in the France geography collage is my favorite puzzle: Talking Puzzle (it’s a logic puzzle and a jigsaw puzzle, you have to figure out where the scenes go by the conversation, sadly they are out of print).

Aunt Tara and Uncle Josh got in to visit on Wednesday, and the kids had quite a lot of fun playing with them on a walk before they headed to South Austin to visit Aunt Tara’s sister (we get them back on Saturday).

 

What’s been popular here this past month

• Tips on Teaching Distractible Children
• Christmas Story Bracelet and Poem
• World War 2 movies
• Joseph’s Coat activities
• Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream

 

Random Fun Stuff I’ve been reading

• Perfection is Not the Target– I’m actually heading off to reread this as I head into my usual Christmas mania.
• Which “sexy” uniform stands out the most-An interesting commentary on the tendency to give the men normal clothes and the women tight and skimpy.  Of course some of the comments are rather…. sexist themselves.
• How I made $500,000 with Amazon affiliate marketing– I’ve been finding this podcast amusing, and it always gives me something to think about.
• The Promises Advent Study– I printed this off to do, and am debating about printing it for the kids as well.

 

Oh and for everyone here in the United States, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!