Our Weekly Amble for September 21-25, 2015

I feel like every week I tell you how crazy my week was.

This week was, well, it was crazy.

Shocking, I know.

But I really mean it this time.

GroveTime went well.  We accomplished it all five days. Total win!

We did not finish all the reading I had planned for the whole week including the reading during GroveTime. We did not quite finish memorizing Sea Fever which was my goal for this six week term.

We did finish what we were memorizing in John 1. We finished reading in Handbook of Nature Study about various lizards, looking them up online for color pictures and/or videos. We learned about pronouns and did some exercises about which pronouns replace which nouns. I did a periscope today about the Memoria Press grammar that I love using during Circle Time. We read some Emily Dickinson poems from the Poetry for Young People Emily Dickinson book. I love that series.

We read some more from George Washington’s World and enjoyed that.  We learned a lot. I’m getting better about looking up on the tablet paintings they refer to. On Wednesday, we read about Japan and the Great Wave by Hokusai.  We also read about haiku and talked about it as a poem. When I suggested that we try some, there was much complaining and choruses of “we can’t.” So I gave them a first line on the white board and they finished it out. Then we wrote another.  Then, they wrote some more on their own. It was great. I loved that we could work together and take the fear out of it and have some success.

We did read from Madam How and Lady Why, one chapter out of two from Kidnapped, and Venus and Adonis from Age of Fable.  Adonis showed up this week in our reading of Taming of the Shrew; we read the Induction.  We looked at a Corot painting on Thursday, did some drawing putting shapes together to add dimension to drawings. We listened to a little Brahms in the car one day.

We worked on a way too difficult studied dictation this week:

As once with prayers in passion flowing,
Pygmalion embraced the stone,
Till from the frozen marble glowing,
The light of feeling o’er him shone,
So did I clasp with young devotion.
Bright nature to a poet’s heart;
Till breath and warmth and vital motion
Seemed through the statue form to dart.

It was much, much too hard.  Everyone struggled with it. I need to select more carefully.  I also need to select ahead.  Something to do on our off week next week.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that this was the end of six weeks? Yay!

Monday, we had the great joy of having Anna and her children over to do school while they had work done on their home. We did school in our school room, they used our dining room.  It went great!  The children and I loved having our friends here for during break times and for lunch and snacktime. Such fun.

Tuesday, we had dentist appointments in the late morning. It is also Fair Week here in our town/county.  The County Fair is a big deal here.  Jason worked from home on Tuesday and we went right away when his day was done.  We had a great time at the Fair.  We went for dinner and ice cream in town. Both were delicious. After that, we came home to our sweet, adorable new escape artitst dog having eaten our loveseat: the arm of the couch and one of the cushions. This did not make me happy. Understatement.

Wednesday, during our C25k time, I tripped and fell forward on gravel.  That is no bueno when you’re 40something.  I scraped up my knee and hand and stressed muscles that weren’t expecting it … including discombobulating my mental state.  So, after GroveTime, I scrapped the plan and we watched A Midsummer Night’s Dream as we hadn’t had a chance to watch it after finishing reading it. R-girl had a soccer game.

Thursday was Art with Friends day, so we did GroveTime and went to our friend’s home for that. N-boy had a soccer game.  He got to be goalie. The most nervous position at any soccer game is the goalie’s mom. He did a great job!

Friday we only walked with our friends instead of trying to run. We did some math. We got a little more reading done after GroveTime today; we have a little bit of reading to catch up on, but we can and it was more important that we be done today than trudging to “finish the plan.”

So ready for break week.