Our Weekly Amble for February 1-5, 2016

Despite N-boy’s sickness, we had a pretty good week.

I think there are several reasons for this.

The first is that for my personal weekly goals I included “Play two games with each child this week. They can overlap.” Because I put it on my week’s to-do list, I gave myself permission to play games. I played some Qwirkle (my favorite), Uno (not my favorite), Swish, Jenga, and Suspend.  Even thought I didn’t win everything, we had fun playing. We had fun laughing when Jenga and Suspend crashed down. I think this will remain on my weekly goal-list.

Another pathway to success has been what I’m going to be calling “incidental school.”  We had a couple of examples of that this week. N-boy was given an Eco-Battery Vehicles kit for his birthday and I didn’t really want to read the instructions or mess with it. The kids were like, all we need is some salt water, so we can put salt in tap water and that’s all. They didn’t believe me that hot water was necessary to dissolve the salt. So, we did an “experiment.” Impromptu. And I didn’t have to read the directions. Bonus.

At the opening, I mentioned that N-boy had been sick this week. He felt awful on Wednesday and Thursday. It was disappointing on Thursday because he didn’t get to go to Disney on Ice which had been one of his birthday presents. Everyone was disappointed by that particular predicament.

On Wednesday, we finished Circle Time (which we did our four formal lesson days). I did some extra reading aloud that day and only assigned the girls math and piano beyond Circle Time. Then, I went to the kitchen to work on dinner – pot roast. I was making two so I could freeze some shepherd’s pie fixings, so I cut the end off the celery. It makes a nice stamp for making roses, so I offered the girls an opportunity to paint. They had a wonderful time.

The only paint we had was fingerpaint … maybe time to buy new tempera?

Finished products. They had a ton of fun with this!

R-girl started making her own artwork during Circle Time. Keeps her hands busy.

The girls did math each day; N-boy whenever he was healthy. We did other regular lessons – penmanship, mapping, piano, organ, etc. with a minimum of fuss (not none). We started working on Lesson 20 in Latin For Children A. It takes us about 2 weeks per lesson, but I’m not in a hurry with it as long as we’re progressing.

I think we’ve only read one chapter of our current family readaloud, Emma this week.

We also continued our breakfast experiment. You can see many of them with the hashtag #uppingmybreakfastgame on Instagram. I’m @ladydusk there. Would love to have you join us and/or follow!