2015-16 School Year Blogging Bust...

This school years blogging was a complete bust! School was not, thankfully! We are in our final 4 weeks of our school year which is behind when we usually finish up. But you know those "Homeschooling in Crisis" articles and posts. Well this year we have lived it. We have had plenty of hard years, some which could even fit the "crisis" label in the past, hard pregnancies and new babies, moves, unemployment, homelessness (without our own but family took us in)...we have run the gamut of life experience. Going into this year I knew we would need to be flexible, in April of 2015 my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She did treatment all summer, we went back and forth to help through those months, I expected to do that through out the school year. We pushed back starting school a couple extra weeks when she needed more care, I spent two weeks with her leaving my family behind at the end of August/beginning of September. With this in mind I was proactive and prepared everything ahead of time, including my handy dandy book I make each year. But I was not prepared for a phone call two weeks after retuning home saying I needed to come now. The three hardest phone calls I've ever had to make and an hour and a half later my kids and I were on the road for the 10 hour drive. And then she died. That was not the plan. The plan was to take care of her all school year. Not for school to be interrupted with death and estate needs and memorial travels. But it did. And we have four weeks left.

That said I have something more to share. All those crisis articles were good, it was stored up knowledge I had but there is something they did not cover. Homeschooling was an anchor. Yes I gave myself permission to be easy with myself, yes there were days I could not even muster enough to feed my family but schooling was an escape of sorts. We could compartmentalize the grief and open a book to escape and learn. I could be ok for that time I taught Leili the letter families, I could be ok while dusting off the parts of my brain that use to know how to do 5th grade math, I could be ok while learning about the beautiful art of the Renaissance. And those moments of being ok got us through. Homeschooling is an added responsibility when crisis comes but it can also be comfort and and anchor.

My handy dandy school book!

The kids on our first day of the school year.

This was an instagram photo of mine dated just 10 days after she died. I captioned it, "The tornado of a homeschooling morning and it's effects on my family room. Whew...I survived. This time." Looking back on any kind of journaling is interesting, I can see that I was not talking about homeschooling I was just surviving. But I was doing it through homeschooling.

A smattering of books from this week.

This weeks pages of schooling, Riley's are blank because he was taking online classes and finished the week before.

And the kids now...older, wiser, and more compassionate for the year we have had.

Oh the good times are rolling along! We have had a good rhythm going all winter after a rocky start last fall. One of the things helping that is we (the kids and I) have not traveled or had many other distractments.

Fern has been all excited about math since I introduced her to horizontal problems! She asks to do math EVERY day!

Jake has been my reading machine! And being an awesome big brother has been reading to Leili often! She just loves that! This book was a big hit here last library run Llama llama mad at mama.

Science is always popular around here, impromptu experiments are often going on in various parts of the house!

Here is our biggest science experiment recently... Riley got a rat... for a pet! Yes I am crazy, but so far everyone is enjoying Cookie (Cookies & Cream)!

I also have a few links to share!

:: The new Oak Meadow Journal Live Oak is out!

:: This genius of a homeschooling mama collaborated to make these great Living Learning Lists, seriously if I could homeschool like this for everyone through every stage I would!!

:: Recently the local elementary down the road had their science fair, I am thinking we need to have a homeschooler science fair... now just to find some willing participants!

:: And last but not least, I am not a big fan of computer games for learning but I do like Starfall and these Cool Math Games for kids and Cool Math Games for Little Kids looks like we need to explore a bit!!

AP

Fern has started working on her Word Families! She is so excited! It is wonderful!

So I made Fern some cards to make some of the AP words and then after she had sounded them out she showed me the words!

She came up with all of these by herself I was just the photographer!

And Leili wanted in on the fun too!

Wouldn't you know it, after having a nice long holiday break Mom is sick on the Monday we were diving back in!!

That's ok, we make it though our morning studies. I did not go all out but we got some good stuff in. Riley thought he might die... SO FUN! ;)

But also we are having one of those freak, "it's Jan. 2 and 70 degrees outside!! Oh it was so good for my cold to go lie in the grass and be warmed in the sun! The kids are running around outside BAREFOOT using their imaginations and fresh air!

The picture up there is of some stone soup Fern and I made recently. She and I recently read the story and she was so excited to make it! I love stone soup and the magic involved.

How are you easing into this New Year? Any changes or tweaks?

Well we have not gotten quite back to regular schooling yet, but we have been finding a little time to do a little formal learning! Riley has grumbly been working on his cursive, yes we live in a digital age why would kids need to learn cursive?? Some schools have stopped teaching it, but sorry babes in our family your not getting out of it!! I think it is still a valuable talent and so I continue to annoy my kids! :)

Jake has been VERY interested in watches and telling time lately, so the other day when I got a lovely quiet hour with Jake we sat down and he learned how to tell time! He did AMAZING and we had tons of fun together. Today we bought the coveted first watch! It helped that he LOVES to count by 5's, now he has a reason to do it all the time!

*cool clock stamp from Lakeshore, I bought it way back before Riley learned to tell time! I TOTALLY scored at Goodwill last week in the book department! I went to get some good books to donate to a kids shelter in town, but I found a few that needed to come home with me too! :) I found this set of Beatrix Potter books, they are not all there, but there are plenty of good ones! Today we read Mr. Jeremy Fisher! I love that one!! I also found The Twits by Roald Dahl, I love his writing. The boys and I finished The Twits last night, they loved it. I also found old copies of Cricket Magazine from the 70's, I think I may go back for more! Talk about making modern kids reading look like "twaddle", "twaddle", "twaddle"!! ~ Did I type "LOVE" too much today or what!? Better than hate I guess!!

Jake and I have been working on word families!

We have done; AD, AG, AN, AP, AR, AT, AW, AY, & ED! Generally we draw a simple picture from our short story in our main lesson book then write the letter combination and the words from our story. But on AW day I surprised Jake and we played pin the tail on the donkey! There was a donkey in our story that said hee, HAW. I cut out tails and wrote on them our other AW words, saw, law, caw (what the crow says), & haw. He had such a fun time playing this with me, then he pasted the tails in his main lesson book and we will put one of these photos in there too! This chalk board was one a family friend made for my dad and my uncle when they where kids, I use to draw on it with my sister at my grandma's house when I was little, and now my kids have been enjoying drawing on it!

Jake loved using my handkerchief as a blindfold, I think only kids think it is fun to be blindfolded! :) Dan and I were discussing that this is a much more gentle and just plain better way to start on the reading learning than what we ended up doing with Riley. Jake does not even realize we are learning the foundation for reading, we are just doing word families!! :)