Our Weekly Amble for September 7-11, 2015

Four day weeks are so very long, aren’t they? Sometimes I think they feel longer than five day weeks. I was exhausted today, but we have started going non-stop, so that is probably why.

I usually write Our Weekly Amble by subject area, but I thought it might be fun to do a day-to-day review.

This means, I will try not to highlight each subject area in bold like I usually do, and I’ll probably not talk about every subject.

I will separate out math because you don’t care about each individual lesson. We did math on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday this week.  R-girl is working on multiples of 7, N-boy is doing three dimentional objects with unit cubes, and M-girl is still in the review portion of Year 4 and today reviewed measurement (and place value!) for length, capacity, and mass. [phew] I remembered them all.

Here we go:

Monday:  A friend and I are texting between 6-6:15 to be accountable to being up and moving. I’ve been getting devotions done better than ever in my life. I’ve gotta learn mornings; so thankful for Meg! I let the kids sleep in until 8AM, but it was going to be hot, and I thought we should still do our run, so we did that.

Daddy was home, so we enjoyed coffee on the back porch, I cleaned the house, we did some other work.  After Quiet Time we went to a local park and walked, taking Buck with us. It was a beautiful park. I wish I had some of Jason’s pictures because I dog-sat and read some more about Teaching from Rest while everyone else did a walk and saw the natural concretions that are in the park. You can see some of my pictures on my Wordless Wednesday post.

Jason and I enjoyed the Ohio State victory over Virginia Tech (Go Buckeyes!) in football that night, but it was late.


Tuesday: We got up at 7 and got our grocery shopping done. Can I say that Tuesday morning at 7:30might be *the *perfect time to go grocery shopping? No one there, the checkout lady has taken groceries to her own home before and bags appropriately. That makes me inordinately happy.

We struggled into GroveTime when we got home, but got it done.   I decided to go with Mystie’s Mottos, the first of which is “Obey right away, all the way, with a good attitude, every day.” We’ll do that one next week, too.  We finished our passage from the children’s least favorite AO read, Madam How, Lady Why. I like it a lot better than they do, but getting it overwith early in the week is important to them. If you’d like to see more detail about our Grovetime, you can see previous “Our Weekly Amble.”

Oh, so here’s the real of our table during Grovetime.  [phew]

We did math and piano and penmanship. For geography, I decided to start with a US map and have them label it.  They all knew almost all the states (but not their abbreviations, that was kinda fun!). Later in the week they began tracing the maps. The children conned me into reading Abigail Adams aloud for them (which wasn’t a great hardship, I love her and I’m loving this book!) They read Stories from the History of Rome.

Labeling the US Map with state names.

She was not happy everyone didn’t get ice cream.

R-girl had soccer practice Tuesday evening and Jason had a meeting at church the same night. We always have breakfast for dinner when Daddy is not available, so I loaded my crockpot with my variation of Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Baked French Toast (Cinnamon Raisin bread, no extra sugar, and rolled oats in the topping) sprayed my crockpot and put it on low for about 4 hours, it could have gone less.  Right before we left, I put frozen, precooked sausage links in the crockpot on top of the casserole. When we got home, I spun up a quick smoothie and we had dinner.  One of my favorite ways to Survive Sports Seasons Sanely.

The children set out their running clothes before bed, shoes and socks too, so we could get out the door faster. Yay.

Yogurt Parfait Popsicles after running in humidity? I was the best mom ever.

Wednesday: It was wonderful that we got out the door quickly on Wednesday morning. Just as we went around the corner during our 5 minute warmup, we met a mom and her son who saw (frankly probably heard) us coming and thought, “they must be homeschoolers.” They too are homeschoolers and live in the adjoining neighborhood.  Super fun. So we walked and ran with them, passed their house, and exchanged contact information. What’s really miraculous: there was zero complaining about the running portions. There was no wrangling about who was in front of who or next to whom. Woo-hoo!

We had a good Grovetime on Wednesday. Our memory work is coming along. We enjoyed reading about turtles in the Handbook of Nature Study this week.  The children – especially R-girl – were happy to recite ‘Singing Time’ which was an early favorite poem.
 We read the story of Pygmalion from Age of Fable and the children enjoyed that. We, during the week read quite a lot from George Washington’s World. I’ve enjoyed how they handled many things, but the section on King George III was very well done, we read that on Wednesday.

On Wednesdays, I can schedule a little more reading because the children have piano lessons in the afternoon which means they needn’t practice in the morning.  They, again, conned me into reading aloud, though, and asked me to read Chapter 12 of Minn of the Mississippi to them. Again, I didn’t really mind.  They did read from their favorite AO read, Storybook of Science, about Catania.

They also traced the US Map. I’m struggling with getting from blobbing to drawing more detailed maps.  For the rest of the year, I think I’ll study that and have them work on predrawn maps both labeling and tracing.

The first week of Drawing IA from Donna Young.

Thursday: Thursdays are a short day of lessons. I’m working on making Thursdays Home-Economics day and may move grocery shopping to that day.  We are doing housecleaning on Thursdays, too, as we prepare for the weekend with Daddy home on Saturdays and worship on the Lord’s Day. The plan, for now, is house cleaning, Grovetime, piano practice, and Art with Friends every other week.  Well, and soccer. Around 3pm Eastern, I’m trying to do a Periscope recapping Wednesdays with Words. That’s fun!

So, I got all of the bathrooms cleaned but since I had just cleaned on Monday, there wasn’t much else that needed to be done.  That was kind of nice.

We did Grovetime, finishing the AO book of Emily Dickinson poems. This week we included art lessons from Donna Young (which I see she has now made subscription only. Glad I printed several week’s worth.) and  Art for Kids: Drawing.

We had our Art with Friends group, too, where we did self portraits. Part of the assignment was to write one thing about themselves for each year of age … up to 10. That was fun. We listened to our chapter of Kidnapped on the way home. I’m very thankful for Librivox on days like this!

From Art for Kids: Drawing.  Draw four abstract panels, cut them out, and figure how they go together.

We got to have a little Quiet Time when we got home. M-girl had soccer practice at one field at 6, N-boy at the other at 6:30.  I’m taking a class at church which starts at 7:30, so Jason had all of the driving. Before the season started (and N-boy’s practice was changed from Wednesday to Thursday) I signed the children up for a butterfly class at the local parks at 8 pm.  Jason and the children enjoyed it very much. I packed their lunch (you can see it – and most of my pictures – on Instagram.)

All of us got home around 10pm, which was really late for the children, especially.

Friday: The mom and son we met on Wednesday came to our house for the purpose of running with us.  We took Buck with us.  Once again, there was no complaining or wrangling. It is magic I tell you!

R-girl with her studied dictation. And my feet. Oops.

When we got home, we had a nice break with breakfast and chores (and a shower!) We did Grovetime. No Handbook of Nature Study or Emily Dickinson. We did read from George Washington’s World and Trial and Triumph.  We also did our Studied Dictation for the week.

The children did math and readings.  They had been tracing their maps during Grovetime and on days with studied dictation I don’t assign penmanship.  As lunch was heating in the oven, I read our chapter of Kidnapped.  While we were eating, we listened to Scene V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and finished the play!

Then, exhausted, everyone went to Quiet Time and I slept for two hours.

Strawberries and math? A good combo.

We’ve been reading some Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone most evenings at dinner. Tonight, we read some while awaiting the pizza to be delivered and finished our chapter after it was delivered.

I am so ready for the weekend … of course we have two soccer games and First Lego League tomorrow …

What? You don’t see 3 seven headed dragons and 42 pears? Why am I teaching art again?