May Homeschool Happenings 2016

May was an odd month for our homeschooling life.  The first half I was desperate to finish school because I was DONE with school for the year.  The kids may not have felt like that, but I sure did.

The second half was me second guessing myself if I hurried through too much, and also desperately trying to organize myself for the summer.  All in all a very confused month.

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National Game board Day

Apparently National Game Board Day is in May, and we were invited to a friend’s house to play games at his house all day long.  And there were occasional door prizes as the day went along, so we also won a new board game (which we of course had to play once we got home).

But we played this month: Fearsome Floors, Talisman*, We Didn’t Playtest this at all*, Commissioned*, Forbidden Desert (and won!), Mysterium*, Quiddler*, King of Tokyo, Shadows of Brimstone*, and there were a few others but I don’t remember them all.

But, it was lots of fun, and I rather want to host one for ourselves sometime.  It’s been a while since we hosted a board game day like that.

Our Fun Schooling for May

As I mentioned, I spent the first part of May hurrying through school so we could start on Fun-schooling.  Which has been awesome.  This month we watched James and the Giant Peach* (which they all hated the movie) and My Side of the Mountain* (which got the comment “At least it wasn’t as bad as Bunnicula“).

We did some fun-schooling around My Side of the Mountain, and the kids had a blast making jam and eating acorn pancakes.  We’re in the process of trying to make char cloth, which is going…. okay.

We also finished up our studies of California.  I updated my old California unit with our more recent studies.  I still want to properly do our gold hunt, but we had fun with that.

We also learned about Ireland.  I finally remembered what the picture of the kids building Lego stuff is!  It’s their Loch Ness Monster traps.  When I looked up books on Ireland the Loch Ness monster showed up, and I started to read the first book and said, “WAIT!  The Loch Ness Monster is from Scotland, pretend we’re doing this as part of our United Kingdom study.”  The kids dutifully nodded their heads and then about fell over laughing.

Happy memories from May

Jeff took me out to see Captain America: Civil War, and then we took the boys to go see it and had a great discussion with them afterwards about responsibility, government oversight, and all sorts of other things.  Then a week or so later we took my Mom to go see it for Mother’s Day.  Yes that was three times to see it.

Princess leveled up in AHG, and is now officially an Explorer, which I’m rather excited about.  She also earned the Gold Presidential Service Award for earning over 75 hours of service.  Pretty impressive if I do say so myself.

The boys also got their level awards for Traillife, but being boys didn’t pose quite so well.  They probably would have been eligible for the Bronze Presidential Service Award, because I believe they had 50 hours of community service, but I don’t know the process for submitting the paperwork.

Princess also had her ballet recital, and did a spectacular job.  She’s been going out with me on Friday nights and writing.  We both bring our laptops to Barnes and Noble and drink tea.  It’s a rather fun Mommy/daughter time.  She writes “Peckie stories” about a duck she made up as part of a writing assignment Jeff gave the kids when I was sick.  Ever since then she’s written all sorts of adventures for Peckie, there’s an entire world related to this duck.

The boys have discovered the joys of pretending to be each other, so I’ve got a few shots of them trying to mimic each other’s facial expressions, it’s really quite hilarious.

Oh, and as part of our summer fun-schooling the kids all have daily chores they’re randomly pulling.  But, there’s a few special surprises in amongst the lists, so one day we got frozen yogurt instead of doing a chore.

What’s been popular this month

I forgot to do this last month, but it always amuses me to see what ya’ll are reading.  The order changed up slightly this month, so I’ll include the ones I usually leave out because they’re always there.

1. World War 2 movies to watch with your family
2. Paul’s conversion Sunday School lesson
3. Tips on Teaching Highly Distractible Kids (this has been #1 for the past 2 years, so this is a big change)
4. The 20 Minute Homeschool Schedule
5. Joseph’s Coat Sunday School lesson