March 2018 homeschoolings

Can you believe we are already 1/4 of the way through 2018? I’m in a bit of shock, and it’s even stranger to contemplate being almost done with this school year. I looked at our homeschooling curriculum for this year (I’ve only vaguely stuck to my 7th-grade plans) and realized we’ve got about 6 weeks left. How did that happen?

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Week 1 of March

The first week saw the boys turning 13! How did this happen? They had a blast organizing their birthday party (Nerf gun wars, somewhat inspired by our Splash War party). Then on their birthday itself, Batman cooked a turkey for us from his World of Warcraft cookbook. It was amazingly good.

I started on a fairly ambitious attempt to organize the schoolroom, and I’ve got it all rearranged, and all of the various containers labeled. The kids are still not sure about the current arrangement, but I think it’ll be an improvement long term. Since I finished that fairly recently, I don’t have pictures yet.

Sometime in January, the kids had all finished the Knowre pre-algebra, and while I was having them go back and correct all of their old lessons up to 100%, I decided to have them try out the PAC 7th grade math for the rest of the year. I’m loving it because it’s going over some terms they needed review on, and brushing up on some other skills before we launch into Algebra next year. The kids are grumbling because they’re having to work harder at reading comprehension.

 

Week 2 of March

Left me feeling discouraged in our Physics lessons. After several lessons of easily succeeding at the demonstrations and showing what we were learning, we hit a problem in showing how to build a battery. I complained about it to Jeff, who said, “Why didn’t you call my Dad?”

My father-in-law designed batteries for his job. So Jeff talked to him for quite a while, and we tried out the experiment again and were mildly successful.

This would also be the week we watched Judy Moody. We’d listened to the first Judy Moody book on CD, and in my completionist bid, I insisted on our watching it. It was a huge bust, the kids hated the book and constantly said, “She’s like Ramona, but not as much fun to read.” Then our disc of the movie was scratched and the kids were so frustrated with it (at one point we all left the room because we were all cringing at the idea of what she was about to eat, no clue if she actually did), it’s the first movie we didn’t finish.

Week 3 of March

In our local schools it was Spring Break, so in a bid to let my kids set up lots of playdates with their public schooled friends we took the week off. You know what they did? They set up play dates with all of their homeschooled friends.

Okay, so the primary friends they tried to set stuff up with were out of town, but it was still funny. So we had friends over. We played one of the games the boys got for their birthday, Forbidden Island (which we agreed we like better than Forbidden Desert).

I did a bunch of work on the blog, and writing notes like crazy for our Texas history. I ended up completely updating my Geography notebooking pages (you can get that for free if you join my newsletter).

The week ended with Princess’ American Heritage Girll Camporee. I got to teach the Aviation Skills badge with a couple of other moms from the troop. A Pioneer from another troop had made an amazing simulation cockpit for the girls to try out, and all of these super cool gears to use. I was super impressed (a Pioneer is a high school student, for those you without an AHG kid).

 

Week 4 of March

Again with AHG, they had a talent show, and our entire family practiced a whole bunch and performed the Rude Mechanicals play from Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a huge hit and had the audience laughing like crazy.

Wednesday we went on a field trip to the Waco zoo, where I got the brilliant idea to take loads of pictures of the animals to make a bingo card for field trips, kind of like what I did for the Zilker Botanical Gardens. While there Superman decided to buy a sippy cup because it amused him.

Thursday we watched my niece for the day, so in theory, my kids did schoolwork. What that meant was they took turns entertaining her as the others did school work. It was not the most productive day you can imagine.

Friday, my kids all begged for an extension on their opinion piece paper, something about not being home enough to get their work done. I took pity on them and gave them an extension.

Do you know how they repaid me?

That afternoon Batman fell at park day and gave himself an impressive gash above his eye, so we went back to the ER. Now he has 3 scars in his hairline, one on his left eyelid, and another right about his eyebrow. It’s quite impressive. As a bit of a funny story, there was a dad there who explained to me it’s not as bad as it looks. He was an amateur boxer and had gotten a cut or two like that. I was more worried because it looked like the injury had gone in, not out, and I’ve heard that’s particularly bad for head wounds. Batman and I loaded up and headed off to the nearest Urgent Care, and we were in and out in about 20 minutes. They just put some steri-tape on it, and I don’t even think they glued it shut (it did end up becoming a note in one of his daily paragraphs).

 

Week 5 of March

Right before Batman got his big huge head wound I’d stopped to get a few bluebonnet pictures. I wanted to update our “About Us” page to pictures that are a bit closer to their age than they are right now. I’m hoping to get them out again because the bluebonnets are amazing this year.

Sunday our family split along gender lines, and I went with Princess to see I Can Only Imagine, and the boys all went to see Pacific Rim Uprising. The boys highly recommend Pacific Rim Uprising as a great robot/monster movie. I highly recommend I Can Only Imagine, but it’s also not one I’m likely to watch again soon because it’s very emotional, and reminded me too much of my Dad and his death. After that we all met up to go see The Apostle Paul, I HIGHLY recommend going to see that, and as a matter of fact, Jeff and I went to go see it a second time with our homeschool group a few days later. It was a lot of fun.

I decided to go ahead and finish up our Clash of Swords lapbooks, we’ve been slowly reading the book all month, and it was time to be done with it all. We made the meal last month, which was a big hit (the kids especially liked the shortbread, go figure). It was funny as we were working on it, the roof guy came by to talk about the hail damage, and we had a great conversation about different Scotish foods.

We got another one of our impressive Spring rains on Wednesday, and Princess happily ran through the resulting river, and the boys had a blast damming up a portion of our backyard to create a small lake.

Friday, the kids and I went to a “nearby” nursing home with AHG to help at their Easter party, it was crazy because they hosted a community Easter Egg hunt and we were not prepared for the sheer number of people who came after to get cookies.

Friday night we watched Sign of the Beaver. We’d listened to the audiobook, and we were very excited to watch it. I am very sad to say the movie did not live up to the book. In my mind, it might have replaced Bunnicula as the worst movie ever. They took two characters who were practically non-existent in the book and made them into major characters. Not only did they do that, but they made them characters I despised, and in order to give them screen time deleted most of the best scenes from the book.

 

And that’s our March homeschooling. It was quite busy with stuff, but nothing super interesting.

2018 Homeschooling