July 2019 Homeschooling in Review

Can the crazy busy train stop please? Of course a great deal of this is coming from the last week, where I had a theory I would write a quick book and a movie post, only to not even have the time to finish that. It’s just been that kind of week. So, what all happened this July?

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July week 1

The first week consisted of lots of hands on projects and movie nights. We watched Superman’s book and a movie choice, Death on the Nile with lots of fun with how I presented the snacks.

We worked on two hands on projects from our ancient history last year, the kids each made shadufs and the boys made a canal (Princess was sick). Their ideas for the shaduf was absolutely hilarious.

 

Week 2 of July

We got to sit down and celebrate Father’s Day, and I ran a fun little campaign for them from Rolled and Told, a D&D 5e magazine. I had fun making up little potion bottles for them to try out.

We played a few board games: Wisdom of Solomon, a fun worker placement game, and then the boys played the World of Warcraft card game which Superman picked up used from Half Price books.

We had the cousins spend the night, which led to Princess painting toe nails with her cousin. She also had fun pretending to be Cousin It, which makes me laugh.

Oh, and we found one of the kids very first projects I wrote about on this blog, making a monster doll, which has been rolled into our monster preschool unit.

I’ve been drawing all of the pictures for our history, so this is Tycho Brahe for when we study Renaissance scientists in a few months. I’m actually ahead of the game for drawing, and now just need to get serious researching the people, so I’m not literally sitting down to research topics the night before I talk about it.

 

Week 3 of July

We went to the Austin Aquarium, and were amazed by this little creature in the gift shop, is it a dragon with a giraffe head? I don’t know, but it was kind of cute.

The boys and I played Tiki Topple and Fearsome Floors. Tiki Topple is a fun 10 minute game where you can easily go from sure you’ll get lots of points that round to, “what happened to all of my tikis?” in a matter of seconds. It’s hilarious. I wrote a review of Fearsome Floors, and it’s a fun game to play, and I still maintain it would be fun as part of a monster movie night.

We watched our second book and a movie (or it may have been third for the month, because at some point we watched Beauty and the Beast, not the live action monstrosity, I really disliked Emma Watson’s Belle, also but it’s not in any of the collages).

The boys organized a Nerf gun war with their friends and had about a million Nerf guns laid out.

For whatever reason, the kids decided I needed every pillow and blanket piled on top of me, which meant I got that crazy action shot of my son dashing at me.

The last picture is the random turtle Jeff found in the road and brought home. He hung out at our house for a day or so before disappearing from our backyard.

 

July Week 4

This would be the reason I got nothing done this week. Starting at the top from left to right.

I started working on an update to my books made into a movie by grade level, I’m separating out the high school into different grades because I have 30 books per grade level now. It’s slow going.

The kids had friends over, and had a great laugh carrying their friends and pretending they were parrots sitting on their shoulders.

I don’t know, my kids are weird.

I took Princess out for her pre-school conference to discuss her plans for the year for her independent project. I put that picture up on my personal FB page, and got a lot of, “What happened, when did she suddenly get 5 years older, which amused me.”

We played Shadows of Brimstone, which I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to write aobut it, because a review of how to play would be a massive 2000 word tome, but how we organize this massive game, that is something I can totally do. Also, I’m rather proud of our solutions (we have all 3 core sets, about 7 different expansions and uncountable mission packs and villain expansions).

We went out to eat at Joe’s Crabshack for my birthday, which was…. terrible. We had a horrible waiter, and when I got frustrated and went in search of someone to get us more drinks, he gave bad excuses. As you can tell, a few days later, I’m still frustrated with him.

Finally, we went back to the Austin Aquarium for Sleeping with the Sharks, we got to spend the night there and interact with ALL of the animals. So, we got to “hold,” hold is a generous term because it just runs like crazy, the kinkajou, and have the lemurs climb on us, and actually really feed the sharks. It was pretty amazing. If we hadn’t won this I would never have thought to do it, but it was totally awesome and well worth going. I loved every second of it.

Well, not the rooster who decided 4 AM was the time to crow about every 5 minutes. You know, just enough time between them for me to start falling asleep.

If you want to see more, check out my Instagram, I saved all of my stories into an Aquarium Instagram Story.

 

The rest of 2019 so far

And with this last post, I’m going to officially say my kids are in 9th grade, because we’ve started, in a rather unofficial capacity, our next school year. That’s weird to think of.

• January 2019
• February 2019
• March 2019
• April 2019
• May 2019
• June 2019
• July 2019

And, now I’ve got that written, now to the next item on my list, I meant to finish this last night, but……