So much for routines ...

We kind of threw ours out the window this afternoon. We started out okay. We all did our morning school lists which consist of chores, personal hygeine and exercise. So you could say we had PE and Health classes this morning. There was a short lecture on how a family is a team and even if you didn't make this particular mess, there are plenty of messes that you make that other people clean up. I guess that's a bit on citizenship/social studies right there. Then we started working on American History. I read one chapter in the text we're using and the kids made a notebook page. We're working on the war year by year and we are at 1941, so it was about mostly Pearl Harbor. We did a mini-biography of the Japanese leader at that time, Tojo. (I can't spell his first name without looking it up.) Sometime during history, I developed a splitting headache. Youngest son has been wanting to play Risk the game of world domination and strategy for weeks, thinking we should do it and count it as school since we're learning about wars. Today, I said okay and they played it with their Dad while I took a headache-relieving wonderful nap. The younger kids also invented 2 games, their own kind of bowling and a nerf shooting gallery game during the breaks from Risk because sometimes it's a long time between your turns. (Yes, I can sleep right on through nerf shooting and water bottle bowling.) Now they are watching Fetch with Ruff Ruffman on PBS and learning about the structure of the human brain.

Let's see, PE, Health, Citizenship, Social Studies, History, Geography, inventing a game, which goes along with our game/baseball mini-unit (I just made that up!) and Anatomy. Got a lot covered today, didn't we?

Back to work and school.

We were just off over the weekend and yesterday, but it seems like a long, long time since we've done school. I've got our lists printed and we are just brimming with enthusiasm to get started.

Not really.

Anyway, the field trip to the baseball museum went okay. I was not all that impressed with it, for the price, if you know what I mean. It was just okay. We can say we've done it now. For a long time it's been on a list of local museums we haven't visited, so now we can say we have. The kids all got the miniature baseball bats, and my youngest has hardly put his down. He's invented a game with the little bat and a little foam nerf ball called "mouse ball" for some reason. He and the girl played it quite a bit last night. It's similar to baseball but there's only 1 base. We learned from the Homeschool Physical Education book how to adapt baseball for fewer players was to remove some of the bases and it does work. That way you don't have players stuck on base with no one to bat them in.

The good news around here is our flooring and other home improvement projects are finally getting done. While we were gone to the museum, Dad got some quality at home time in and got some things done. Yay!

Now back to our usual routine.

Getting up at the crack of dawn.

We've gotten spoiled, as homeschoolers, especially since right before Christmas. We have been pushing our bedtime further and further back and sleeping in. I've quit getting up at 7:00 and now get up around 8:00 or even 9:00. I get the kids up anywhere from 9:30 to 10:30. So getting up on Sunday mornings has become a struggle even though they only need to get up at 8:30. Tomorrow, we have a field trip to the Louisville Slugger museum and we have to meet the homeschool group at 8:45! We'll have to leave at 8:15. The kids are already antipating getting up at the crack of dawn and not with joy. I guess we need to go to bed earlier tonight?

Occasionally I talk about homeschooling ..

Sorry about the work post yesterday. I just needed to whine a little. Since this is primarily a homeschooling blog I'll tell you what we've been doing in school this week. Today, everyone did their morning list without any complaining, whining or bargaining, which has been happening a lot lately. After finishing his morning list, my youngest went to his reading corner to read. (It's a corner of my bedroom that he's equiped with a blanket, pillow, light and fan.) He read for probably 45 minutes this morning on his own. In the afternoons, he and I are working on word attack skills, so he can not panic when he sees a big word and guess, he knows how to break it down. It's taking a while, but he's getting better at it each day.

My daughter has also been reading a lot lately. She did something that got her grounded from her favorite thing, beading, and so had to spend a couple of days doing other things. She made about 10 pot holders and read a couple of books during that time. ;-) She's been a good reader for a long time, but is still a reluctant writer. I've been making her write paragraphs each day and also added a grammar workbook to her daily list.

Oldest son is doing better with his history since he's been doing the notebooking with us as well as the reading. He's an artist and so his notebooking pages have been really good. I brought home a bunch of books on spying and codes and ciphers from the library and he's been reading those and then showing them to the other 2 kids and this morning they were all making secret ciphers and trying to get their siblings to decode them. That's the tricle down theory of education being put to use - just give the book to the oldest and let him share it if he wants. If he finds it interesting, he'll show it to them and read passages to them out of it.

I've got a Mom's Night Out with the homeschool moms tonight so we spent part of the time this afternoon chopping vegetables for a veggie pizza for me to take tonight and then we ate the leftovers that wouldn't fit on my decorative tray. Yum.

Testing out Murphy's Law.

I'm trying to prove out Murphy's Law today with my job. You know the one that says "Everything that can go wrong will go wrong." When I first started this morning, my computer was running very, very, very, slow, so slow that I really couldn't work. So I ran some Spyware scans and got that working better. Then, I started to download work, but there was no work in my 4 hospitals. My company sent me a packet to initiate a fifth hospital, something I didn't want to do because I don't like having to keep up with all the little quirks the different ones have. I'm old and I should be allowed to stay in a rut, doing what I know, right? One hospital does not allow abbreviations. Three of the hospitals expect abbreviations as long as they aren't in the diagnosis part of the report. One hospital never allows you to type the phrase "emergency room", it has to be "emergency department". It goes on and on. So anyway, I tried to initiate the new hospital which took a long, long, long time because of our terribly slow internet. Then, just as I got ready to get started, I had to leave and take my son somewhere. When I got back, 3 out of 4 of the company's servers were down and I had to switch servers 3 times and then reboot and finally, finally, finally (I'm into triple words tonight), at 8:47 p.m., I am ready to get some work done. But now I'm tired.

On the other hand, school (which we did while waiting for the files to initiate) went well, I guess. World War 2 is a difficult subject but we're getting through it. The other subjects, math, reading, grammar, writing and spelling are all going okay. Thank goodness something is.

Writing.

Yesterday, we started our discussion of WW2 by reading a chapter about Hitler and then each child wrote a mini-biography of him for the notebooking page on the war. My youngest son's was really 'mini'. He drew a picture then wrote "This is Adolf Hitler. He was mean. He had a funny moustache." This child has always had a lot of trouble with writing so this was good for him. I noticed when he was little that he didn't draw and color like the other 2 kids had. Now he does like to draw but still does not like to write. It has crossed my mind to take him to an occupational therapist to work on his pencil grip and whatever other issues he has but I'm not sure insurance would pay for it, if he really needs it or if he just needs more practice.

I don't seem to have any more thoughts in my head today and my computer is delaying and driving me crazy, so I guess this will be my whole blog post for now.

Hey!

I've been reading the Carnival of Homeschooling. It's big this week, with tons of entries. It's here.

The Carnival led me to a list of the 50 best homeschooling blogs and guess who is on there! Me! Can you believe it? Here's the list. I'm not sure how I ended up in such a list of fine bloggers. A lot of my blog is taken up by discussing motivation or my lack thereof. Lol. Anyway, I'm honored to be included in this list.

The Carnival also led me to this really interesting site. It has free study guides which might be very helpful for my oldest when/if he does his literature Clep tests.

I've been updating/downloading for work while I've been blogging and reading the carnival and now it is mostly done, so I'll finish here and get back to work. We are going to do school today, amazingly. Hopefully. I would like to report that the foster care meeting went well yesterday. I was a little worried about it, but it turns out some numbers were transposed on our financial statement, making it seem like we had a lot more money going out than we do and we've cleared that up now so we should be okay.

Have a great day, everyone!

Snow!

It actually snowed a tiny bit last night! We probably will still do school this afternoon. I have no idea if the county schools are out or not. I really don't miss getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning and watching TV to see if the kids have school. DH and I have a meeting this morning for foster care (pray it goes well!) and then we'll do school this afternoon.

A dear reader asked about art projects - I'm not sure what we are going to do but I did find this wonderful page a while back. Art Lessons.
We'll probably do some of these. Here's a paper mache one.