October Homeschool Happenings 2017

I have been planning for October 2017 since January. October 15 my husband had a milestone birthday, and I planned a big huge surprise party weekend with out of state guests, and I first brought up the idea to some of the guests back in January. I feel pretty proud of myself to not only keep a secret for 10 months, but to have pulled this off. As a result this first couple of weeks of October didn’t feel like we got much homeschooling done.

Week 1 of October, it’s finally birthday bash week

This was the week before Jeff’s birthday celebration. That meant I was busy writing an entire storyline for this weekend for how the King came into power (I’m working on putting it up on our gaming blog, I’ve got the stuff that happened before the session written out, kind of, this is my big goal for NaNoWriMo), and planning all of that, not to mention how to pick up and deliver out of town guests.

Princess and I went on an excursion to map out a trail for everyone to follow at night with flashlights. I thought it would take them about 15 minutes to find it, but in reality they were about 45 minutes. They had the map upside down from what I’d intended.

Way back before Jeff and I had kids I created a language. It’s a visual language, sort of like hieroglyphics. Then we moved a few times, and the notebook I wrote it in disappeared. Then I found it again last spring, so I had a blast giving them a note written in the same language they had to translate. I gave them the notes one of our former players had made of his attempts at translating for their dictionary. They spent about three hours working on translating it. It was awesome.

They failed the dexterity check for the #dandd campaign

A post shared by Ticia (@ticiam) on Oct 7, 2017 at 4:58pm PDT

I had a physical challenge for them, inspired by a video I saw on Facebook for a classroom exercise. Kids had to follow a taped line that curves back and forth while holding hands. I did the same thing except it was a chalk path, about the size of a footprint, and it was full grown adults holding hands. They kept missing the path, and having to defend themselves against monsters that showed up.

Week 2 of October, we really homeschooled, kind of

Actually, we didn’t the entire week. Tara was still here on Monday, so we didn’t then.

Tuesday I randomly remembered a fun “game” (dice rolling simulation) I’d gotten for the Spanish explorers, and so I decided to backtrack a little bit and have us try to get to America. We were not really good at getting there. We got lost a lot, or had ot keep going back for more supplies. It’s a good thing we weren’t the explorers, Texas would never have been founded.

We settle back in for some serious writing time and getting back into our Cover Story writing, though now I’m not worrying as much about sticking to their theme as I am their writing something good.

We learned about Madagascar by listening to the Countries for Kids Podcast, reading a few books, and of course cooking a meal (where I again forgot to check for important things like marinating time).

We play some Fools Gold, Math Gym, Shadows of Brimstone.

Oh, and Batman manages to get hit in the eye with a swing disc, so we had to go to the ER to get stitches. I was greatly amused by the sign outside the ER warning us to look out for poisonous snakes.

Week 3 of October, no really we’re homeschooling

The third week of October I refused to do anything outside of the house so we could seriously get something done, because I felt like we hadn’t had a single week of just schoolwork.

Only to have a field trip on Friday and head down to the Austin Gems and Minerals show. You know, the field trip where my kids dragged their feet about going and acted like this was a horrible idea. Then we got there and they had a blast and we stayed there for four hours, and they spent all of their allowance on random rock, and now want their own rock tumbler.

Yeah, that field trip.

We also continued to work on our future flower garden. We finished digging the trench and started pouring the concrete. The kids also got to work on repairing the plumbing as we kind of broke a pipe when we dug the trench. Oops…..

Week 4 of October, I’m almost done for the month

Princess and I went back to the hospital, but this time we were volunteers, as she was manning a booth at the Trunk or Treat festival the hospital had. I dressed up as Dorothy, and she was Rapunzel. Our booth was storybook themed with her American Heritage Girl troop.

Monday we had a field trip Batman and I were particularly excited about, The Blue Baker. We got to learn about how they make bread, what their commercial bakery is like, and each kid got to mold and add extras to their own loaf of bread. They had a few extra loaves, so the parents got to make some loaves as well. It was super fun!

The next day we all did an Oregon Trail simulation, which we used as the basis for our writing for the week. We were laughing so hard at some of the results of our dice rolls/card draws. I started calling the people in my wagon train “piggies” because I was rolling so horribly for how much food they ate. Like we ate 628 pounds of food in one of the legs of the trip. It was crazy.

We finished the week with our next book and a movie of Alice in Wonderland, one of my faovrite books and movies from my childhood.

Vaguely unrelated side note, I want to point out the difference a petticoat makes in your costume. On the left you can see my dress with a petticoat, it’s one of those super full ones for square dancing and the like, with lots of fishline in the seam to give it body. On the right you see the dress without the petticoat. This is why there’s a joke in the costuming community: if you’re not sure add another petticoat. This amuses me, it probably amuses no one else, but it amuses me.

Week 5ish of October, Halloween

We attempted a family costume this year, the Weasley family, well a subset of it. We had the parents, the twins, and Ginny. Only I ran out of orange hair spray, so it’s not super obvious in the family pictures (poor lighting).

I’ve been going over to my brother’s house every Sunday night to watch Discovery together and film a review of it. He’s got a YouTube channel, and this week we filmed a video of our favorite TOS episodes. In anticipation I attempted to make an original series inspired hairstyle, only I didn’t have quite enough bobby pins, and really the skill to do anything. Either way I had a blast.

Monday, Batman was sick, so I spent part of the day cuddling with him.

We finished up October with Halloween, eating scary face pancakes, carving pumpkins, and trick or treating with friends.

All in all a good month. If quite busy.