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May 2018 Homeschooling in Review
The first week of June is almost over, and I’m finally sitting down to write what we did in our May homeschooling learnings. It was a busy month of wrapping up things, and getting life figured out.
May week 1
Our first week of May saw us finishing up our last bits of book learning for the year, and going on a few super fun field trips. Oh, and a fair bit of silliness.
We finished up our first semester of Byline with an assignment on James Connolly, so we watched The First Modern Olympics, I highly recommend watching it. The only downside to this plan was my discovering the boys quoting exact incidents from the movie as major points in their biography….. That’s not so good.
We went to the most amazing field trip put on by our local history museum, Williamson Museum and got to see all sorts of amazing crafts and projects, as well as learn from some pretty amazing people. We went back to the park for Saturday for their open to the public event and showed off our favorite parts to Jeff.
I’m trying to go back in and finish off some younger readers book and a movie to complete it all, so we read Harriet the Spy and then watched the movie for our movie night. The movie was a big hit, and then a week or so later we watched a modern adaptation that was absolutely horrible, Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars (they changed the time period, obviously, aged her character up, and generally violated every character in the book).
As to just life in general….. Well, I bought a Nerf gun to shoot my children when they act stupid. You know, those times they deliberately answer wrong or suddenly forget they’re old enough to know better. It has wildly amused my kids, to say the least. I remade the seed sorting activity I did for my kids way back when they were in preschool, and Princess was intrigued and sat down and played happily sorting seeds for a good 20 minutes. Just goes to show even older kids like simple activities.
Batman got to work on some home-making skills and sewed up a giant hole in his pants, which I teased him mercilessly about, seriously it was like a foot long.
Games played: Smash Up because the boys bought two new expansions for it: It’s Your Fault (the one where the fans voted on factions getting you gun toting grannies), Monster Smash (because who doesn’t want to play Vampires and Werewolves?)
May week 2 homeschooling
We made what I thought was going to be one final field trip to the Bob Bullock for our Texas history for the year, but we only did half of what I wanted to go through, so we have at least one more trip there this summer, maybe more.
Then we found out about a semi-local science museum hosting a homeschool day, so we made the trek up to Johnson City and spent the day at The Science Mill. After that, we did a mini-tour of the President Johnson’s childhood home national park. The kids completed their ranger badge, but it’s in two different locations, so we didn’t see the Texas White House this time. It’s still on my “Must go see this” list because it also has a living history site for the mid-1800s.
I’ve started planning out our history units for next year, if you follow me on Instagram you’ve seen the sketches I’ve been doing for our notebooking pages. So far I’ve got part of the Sumerian Empire planned out, and what I’m calling our “pre-history unit,” which is how 5 different worldviews see how the world started. I’ve got the kids working on that one right now to get some of the history out of the way since we plan on completing what’s the equivalent of two years of Mystery of History in one year.
Yes, I might be crazy.
For Mother’s Day we spent the day doing whatever I wanted, so we played the Star Trek deck building game I found at Half Price books, it’s out of print, but if you like deck building games and Star Trek, it’s worth trying. The directions aren’t the best, but it was fun. Then we went down to Zilker to watch Merry Wives of Windsor, which was thoroughly hilarious, and while waiting played a round of Pirates, Zombies, Ninjas.
Games played: Star Trek Deck Building Game; Pirates, Zombies, Ninjas
May Week 3 homeschooling
As I look back at my pictures, I’m discovering May was the month of field trips. Maybe that’s why it felt so busy.
We started off the week by “cleaning the kitchen with shaving cream.” I put that in quotation marks because it also makes a huge mess, and then means you have to rinse off the kitchen a few times from the shaving cream. It does, however, get off lots of stuff, and the kids love it.
Then we headed off to Laguna Gloria to examine their outdoor sculpture exhibit. It was a lot of fun, but constantly filled with yelling at kids, “Don’t climb on or touch the statues,” because so many screamed, “TOUCH ME!” “CLIMB ON ME!” but you weren’t supposed to. After the kids had their fill of the statues we headed to a nearby park for a picnic lunch and fun wandering about looking at the gardens and peacocks.
We started back to reading through Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each day we read through one scene three times, and that night when Jeff comes home we act it out for him, complete with very rudiementary costumes (sometimes we’re playing 2 or 3 characters in a scene, so we need something to show who we are).
I saw this shirt on Facebook, and now I REALLY want it. They’ve got a whole bunch of great Shakespeare shirts, and I kinda want all of them.
That Friday night we had the Court of Awards for Princess at American Heritage Girls, a bunch of her friends bridged over into Pioneers, so that was bittersweet to see them move into a different group, but she had an amazing year. For the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW she earned the Gold Presidential service award. You have to understand that is 100 hours of service at her age. She’s made it her personal goal to earn that award every year she’s in AHG if she can. It’s going to take a lot of work.
The dog in the middle of the picture is one she designed all by herself. It’s super cute, and she had to try a couple of different iterations to get it to look like what she wanted.
Since we’re done with the major schooling for the year I headed into doing some serious United States geography because we slacked on it this year, and we learned all about Colorado for the week with some amazing books (some of the activities were completed as they sat next to the pool so they could more quickly get into the pool).
Jeff and I got a new mattress, which meant we moved the old mattress up to our movie room, and they re-enacted the famous “Hi” episode from the boys’ toddlerhood when they first got big boy beds.
I read my friend Anne Marie’s book, Prayer Warriors (see my review) and it got me thinking of all sorts of great activities to do with it.
Oh, and I broke one of my teapots, the thing just cracked clear through, it was very sad. This one was great for making pots of loose leaf tea, which I’ve been known to do….
Games played: we went through our stash of games and separated them into: definitely keep, definitely give away, and play at least once more to see if we want to keep it. So Batman got out Transamerica just to play with, and just as we were trying to cut down on games the boys went out and bought Boss Monster, a game inspired by early Nintendo games.
Week 4 of May homeschooling
We had one last field trip for the month, a local “ranch” had a riding and games field trip, which let us check them out for how their lessons might work and what she does with them. Unfortunately for us that was the day a huge heat wave came through and the temperature was in the 90s with the sun beating down on us, which made for a less than a great time to try it out.
Our co-op had an end of the year celebration at a local splash pad, and we have now transitioned into pools and splash pads for our weekly get-togethers, because it’s HOT.
We remade one of our cooking around the world dishes, Finnish oven pancakes, and the kids loved it just as much this time as the last time.
Jeff started up a family gaming campaign set in the modern world, but we’re all on an island as kids, and the kids have been loving this and eagerly do any homework assignments Jeff gives us to get extra experience in the game or brownie points. It’s made them insanely happy to try this all out. It’s made me happy to see them researching Greek mythology to learn more.
The kids started researching their pre-history units and I at least partially achieved one of my goals when Princess said to me, “Mommy what _______ religion believes about how the world started sounds pretty weird to me,” and then she paused, “But I guess if you weren’t a Christian what I believe might sound weird to them.” So at least that goal was achieved partially.
Oh, and I ended May with a horrible allergice reaction to something, which I finally got medicine for this Monday because when you break out over the weekend I’ve learned the ER doesn’t give you the right dosage.
Games played: Torres, which we decided to keep, Shadows of Brimstone, one of the Hellfire Succubi missions (and not one we’d play with the kids) and we barely escaped with our lives.
And that’s our month of May….. June’s gonna be interesting because my kids are gone for half of it……
2018 Homeschooling In Review
Comments
4 responses to “May 2018 Homeschooling in Review”
Sounds like a really fun month! I want to hear more about Jeff’s campaign, and the research assignments. Sounds awesome.
Whenever you talk about your local history field trips, it reminds me of how much I want to come to Texas. My son, Sam’s middle name is Houston. Need I say more?
Wish I could sit and sip a cup or two of tea with you. I know I would be inspired.You’ll have a bed to crash on if you ever came here.
This is going to get long.
The kids and I are a family of siblings. Up until 2 years ago we were homeschooled by our Mom, but she died (maybe disappeared) in a car accident. Our Dad lost it, and became obsessed with finding our Mom and lost his job. So during that time the kids took over keeping the family together, cooking, and paying a lot of the bills. Then about 6 months ago he pulled it all together, and about a month or so ago (from the start of the campaign) he got a new job on a mysterious island that had recently been found and claimed as his by the owner of the Grimm Company. He went out there 2 weeks before school ended, and we joined him by plane and boat once school was out.
The island is a lost Roman colony in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (or I should say, it’s built in the style of Roman cities, but there’s no explanation for why it’s there). It is divided into lower and upper town and has a cheap energy source, there is some element of an archeology dig there, as well as a large expanse of uncharted and unexplored island.
There is a sort of charter school there that goes for a half day that’s divided into large age groups of kids. Our class has the kids above 10 and the teacher gives us “homework assignments.”
Assignments my kids have gotten so far:
Before campaign: describe who your character is, what do the like to do, what is a special item they have, what is your character’s biggest fear. > Jeff used this to start a basis for our characters and to give some special things to do with our item. For example, Superman said his artifact is a spear he dug up on an archeological dig and has restored. That was used as a plot point one day and his character went into the campaign with 2 levels of archeology skill.School assignments:
research a Greek god- find out how it was born, it’s symbol, and a story about it
the Iliad- major characters, what sides the gods were on, what happened to the characters (that one had to be split up because it’s a BIG assignment)Other assignments that came up from gaming events:
how much would it cost to create a chemistry lab- they found a fire breathing bird and wanted to figure out how to replicate the process
put together your “emergency kit”- each of the kids claimed to have a stocked backpack they were carrying with them, so Jeff gave them the job of creating it, either in miniature or in full size. That was a big hit as I agreed to buy my kids some “emergency gear.”We’re also using a home-brewed system that Jeff is writing that uses D8s, rather than D&D, so you don’t have levels, but experience points. Skill costs are 2 for 1st level, 4 for 2nd level, 8 for 3rd level, etc, so you have to of bought the lower levels to get the higher levels. That means to be level 3 in a skill, you’ve spent 14 points on it.
It’s still rudimentary, but I’m enjoying how the system is building out.
Wow, your monthly report make my head spin. You certainly lead very busy and full lives!
May was kinda crazy. June’s worse, but it’s going to sound easier because most of it the kids aren’t here with me, but off at various camps, which is a weird feeling.
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