Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The big picture of the littlest big town.

So here is a question for you, how do you keep the "big picture" when in the daily trenches of homeschooling?

There are good days and there are bad days. There are days we are excited about learning, and days we just want to make a nest and forget about it. There are times I feel good about the educational path we have chosen, and times when I question. Overall homeschooling is good, I feel like this is what we are suppose to do as a family, what my kids need. I wish I had all the answers and alot more patience. I like to make plans but I also know plans are made to be broken in the name of doing what our family and our kids need. I long for stability, I pray for it.

Sometimes the best thing to do is to step back, look at the big picture and breath in the awe of it!

I thought THIS was an excellent article and THIS too!

Thursday, May 12, 2011



While I am not a big fan of all the moving around we've been doing it does lend to some great field trips we would have otherwise never seen!



Riley was recently learning about fresh water biomes, now we have a house full of beach babies with the exception of transplant Dan and our Connecticut babe so we headed over to Lake Tahoe! It is relatively close, we had to buy chains which was a little crazy (after living in New England and never needing them)! It was beautiful, the kids tasted the water to prove it was indeed "fresh" (I am hoping they did not get some weird twitching disease). We learned that most of the pines up there are Jeffery pines, but there are also Ponderosa pines! We are looking forward to going again when it is warm!

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We are finishing up our Oak Meadow books with the boys (Fern still has a bit more), and then the boys and I will be working on a few things that they need extra work on, things we did not get to, and things we just plain want to do! Since getting here and s-l-o-w-l-y unpacking I threw up my hands and simplified things. If you remember when we started this year I had grand ideas for Family Studies along with our Oak Meadow, I also choose not to do a couple subjects from Oak Meadow but to incorporate those in our family time. Well I have just stuck with our Oak Meadow and so we have been actually doing and enjoying our school time as I am not so stressed and busy (aka: overwhelmed). :) When pondering about this I recently thought of the Conference talk by Elder Oaks, Good, Better, Best. All the things I want my kids to learn are good, but sanity is even better!

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Oak Meadow is having their Spring Sale through the end of the month, every year I procrastinate and think I'll get a better deal on Amazon or Ebay. But really it's not that much better and lately it seems that there is less and less to find. I really do prefer to buy used books for many reasons, but with the new editions being near the same price of the old and the thought of less run around for me... I think the sale will win out for the first time. It is also nice to think of having the new books all summer to become familiar with, and just yesterday I found some of the chapter books on Riley's reading list at Goodwill for .65 cents each! 3 more to watch for!! Oh and we found this AWESOME book store this week (scroll down to the photos-just the store)!!!