first week of school

We just finished our first week of school.  We're adjusting to a different schedule this year.  Since Joe works from noon until 8:00pm, we take the mornings off to be with him.  We start school at around 11:30, take a lunch break after a couple of subjects, put Mercy down for a nap, and get the rest of our school day done while she's asleep (which makes it easier).  It's a different schedule to get used to, as before we always enjoyed being done by lunch time.  But it is nice to have the mornings off, and we've just started a running program.  So a couple of days this week we've put Judah and Mercy in the bike trailer/stroller and Joe and I run/walk while Brooklyn and Zeke ride bikes, scooter or skateboard alongside us.  During the school part of our day, Judah sleeps for a while, then hangs out with us.  He's pretty mellow and content.  Yesterday he was sitting with Brooklyn while she worked on her math drill.

Brooklyn has been so excited for weeks because she asked if she could teach Mercy preschool this year.  She even went shopping with me the week before school started to a teacher supply store and bought some things with her own money that she could use for teaching Mercy.  Mercy loves the one on one time, and I use the time to do Language Arts with Zeke. 

When Zeke and I finish, he plays with Mercy while I work with Brooklyn individually.  It works out great.

We're enjoying our studies on Exploring Countries and Cultures.  This week and next we're studying about maps and globes, and getting ready for our trip around the world through books and food.  I'm really excited to try new recipes for each area we learn about.  My sister is going to Russia in a few weeks on a missions trip (and I get her kids while she's gone.. Yay!!!).  It will be fun to be learning about and praying for Russia while she's there.  This week we drew the continents on an orange and then tried (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) to peel it in a way that we could flatten it out, to show how map makers have to distort things a little to put a round world on flat paper.  The kids also filled out passport applications and we took pictures for them, so they'll have passports to stamp for each country we visit.  They also learned about scale and made maps of their rooms, measuring everything and transferring it from feet to inches for the map.  They love the activities that we're doing.  It definitely makes learning fun.

Here are a couple of pictures of our school room.  We each have a table for individual work, and lots of floor space for reading together, activities, etc.

looking forward

I'm looking forward to school starting in a couple of weeks.  I thought about starting a new blog at homeschoolblogger.com specifically for school related posts, but I'm still kind of a rookie at this whole blog world so I thought I should keep it simple and just do it all in one place.  Besides, our homeschool life is really intertwined with our regular daily life since school and home occur together for us.

After posting the other day about needing to get our school room unpacked and organized, I got to work.  I finally ordered the curriculum we'll be using this year from My Father's World.  A friend told me about it a few years ago, but I was already using Heart of Wisdom at the time.  I loved Heart of Wisdom for me.. it was great for Bible study and I learned a lot, but since it is designed to be used with older grades, I found I was having to adapt a lot of the lessons and come up with my own hands-on projects to keep my kids' interest.  So for now, I've decided to switch gears and go with something that already has a lot of fun activities planned out, as well as good, sound teaching.  We'll be doing the unit on Exploring Countries and Cultures, which I'm super excited about, because I have a heart for missions and love geography.  I think we'll have a lot of fun with it and when you're passionate about something, it makes it that much easier to teach.

Speaking of passion and teaching, we've set up an art room in the house too, and Joe is sharing his love of art with the kids.  Judah and I have been sick for the past couple of days, so we stayed home while Joe took the other three kids to church and then to an art store in Minneapolis to get some supplies.  They've all three started painting canvases.  I'll post pictures soon.  We've decided not to get cable here because we all tended to watch too much tv before and we'd rather spend our time more purposefully.  I really wish we had at least a few basic channels right now so we could watch the olympics, but overall I'm thankful we opted not to get it.  So far we're all reading more and the kids are drawing and playing outside a lot.  Once we finish getting everything set up, we'll be doing more art projects and crafts, and I'm really wanting to sew some things.  Stay tuned for updates and pictures of our creations!