September 2018 Homeschool Happenings

I’m pretending to start off our September homeschool happenings by actually sticking to my plan of writing out what we did week by week. Or at least I’m doing that for the first week, mainly because I’m sitting at the hotel tonight and it’s raining outside, so we can’t swim at the pool. It was a fun month of homeschooling.

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(Oops, forgot to schedule this for the morning, and so it is going out now)

Week 1 Homeschooling in September

We started off the month getting ready to go to Universal Orlando and the kids were all frantically rewriting their Nellie Bly story for Byline because they’d misunderstood the assignment. Once they understood it better, they all did very well rewriting one of her stories.

Monday was Labor Day, so we spent the day having lunch with my brother and watching a movie, then Princess and I headed off to go see Crazy, Rich Asians, which was lots of fun, and the boys went to go see Skyscraper, which I heard was just what you’d expect and had the boys convinced you can fix anything with duct tape.

In the actual school stuff, we completed the experiment for chapter 3 of their Geology book. That meant they needed to try out different rocks to see how hard they were, so we used this rock science kit. It was actually a really fascinating experiment, which led to us digging up more rocks from the backyard to test their hardness.

Friday we set out for Florida and spent the rest of the weekend in the car driving across half of the United States. It was rather amusing to learn we spent a good six hours getting out of Texas and then another six hours driving across three states.

 

September Homeschooling week 2

Harry Potter World! We spent the week at Universal Studios Orlando and finished it off with a visit to Clearwater Aquarium and visiting Winter the Dolphin.

But to details….

We rode almost every single ride there once. After riding one Simpsons ride my kids flat out refused to ride any of the others. We even rode the little kid rides over in the Dr. Seuss area while Jeff and Superman went back to the hotel for something.

Of course, we rode the Harry Potter rides at least once every day, and I had a blast just soaking in the ambiance. It was pretty amazing. I blew through my budget but got most of our Christmas presents for the year there, so that was a nice moment.

Our hotel was amazing, for the first time ever we stayed on site, and there were lots of fun perks with that. I spent a lot of time wandering around both our hotel and the parks just taking pictures of things that amused me. I turned dozens of those pictures into writing prompts for the kids.

Saturday we saw Winter, and because of the way the aquarium is set up, it is just about impossible to get many good pictures, however, Princess was through the roof ecstatic to finally get to see Winter. She said that was one item crossed off her bucket list (which Jeff found absolutely hilarious).

We drove back to Texas with our usual spate of people getting sick after too many late days and not enough sleep. It didn’t even matter we took it much easier than we did when we traveled to Disney.

 

September Week 3

Our third week of September was a mixed bag with lots of sick kids, but nothing that was officially sick.

I don’t know quite remember what all is going on. I need to get my pictures uploaded.

Yep, uploaded pictures, and still, there’s not much there…

 

September Week 4

This week was our simulated public school week. It was a lot of Facebook status updates for me looking like this.

It was exhausting, but we all learned a lot from it, and the kids are writing a paper for me this week, so I can see just what they need to learn more about.

The other plus side to it, we got a lot of science experiments done and got to redo earlier science lessons from Real Science 4 Kids Geology, building a model of the earth and plate tectonics. I was finally successful in creating brittle candy for the plate tectonics lesson, but it was painful as I got molten sugar on my hand, and generally showed why I don’t make candy at home.

We learned about Singapore, and just have to finish putting together our lapbooks from the Case for the Orchid, we ate the meal last night, and it was mostly a hit.

Oh, and we barely eeked out a win for Game 5 of the Battle for Hogwarts, the difficulty level definitely goes up as you get further in the game.

We ended the week with more generic sickness and lots of really bad allergies. I’m actually typing this up as I sit here drinking my Defend Tea and feeling vaguely icky.

I’m so tired of allergies.

Our 2018 Homeschooling year so far