Maybe A Little Break.

We've kept pretty busy lately and I'm feeling the need for a little break. We've got 3 events next weekend, a wedding, a baby shower and my daughter's 10th birthday, so we'd better rest up between now and then, right? I have not too much planned for this week and we may go ahead and gently start school on Wednesday when the county school kids do, just so we'll be on the same schedule as them.

A part of me thinks we should clean and organize the house completely before we start, but that probably won't happen! We'll probably just do the minimum and start. If we waited until everything was perfect, we'd never get started!

When to start, when to start?

The public schools are starting here on August 2nd. My oldest son is ready for us to start school too, but I'm not. I am still not sure what curriculum I'm going to use with him! Somebody please make a suggestion! For my younger kids, I have KONOS and my daughter has requested the Obedience unit, not because she wants to become more obedient, but because it has a subunit on Kings and Queens. I have no reason not to do that unit, so we'll do it. Now I'll probably sit and down and carefully write out a schedule that we won't follow, LoL.

No School But ...

We're still not doing scheduled school but still, there's some educational stuff going on. My youngest son is still as always) relating everything to math. He subtracts days on the calendar counting down to things. He talks about things like if we had a million cookies, how many could each of us have. Last night he was trying to figure out how many seconds are in a year. I'm not sure if he ever got to the answer or not but he just finished 2nd grade and he was trying to figure it out in his head, so I think any progress was pretty good. Last I heard, he was trying to multiply 60 x 60.

All of the kids decided last night to go through our modest collection of DVDs and watch some they hadn't watched for a while since our DVD player was broken for a while. They ended up watching a Leapfrog video that I got to help my youngest with reading and then a kid's exercise video called Kick to Get Fit Kids (which they exercised along with). Then they got out a yoga DVD of mine that I've only done once and did a little yoga. After that, they did Kick to Get Fit again.

So, there was a lot of PE and some reading going on at my house last night, thanks to our DVD player. It was all for fun and I didn't count it as a school day, but it was good.

Where's the T?

On the post below, I left out the T in printables, making it prinables. I'm leaving it as it is, as a reminder that we all make mistakes. Even though I type for a living, as a medical transcriptionist, I still leave letters out (and worse!). Fortunately, the person who invented the software program that I work in for my job, built in an automatic spellcheck at the end, which is a very good idea. Now I only have to really watch myself for those mistakes that the spellchecker won't catch, like the one I almost do, all the time; "die" for "diet" and the opposite, "diet" for "die". This interchange of words can make for some very funny sentences. I once typed "The patient was feeling very depressed and stated 'I want to diet.'" Not funny for the patient (whom I hope is feeling much better now), but funny for me, because I hate diets! The other really goofy typo I make is sometimes typing the word "head" for "headache". I'm not sure why I do this but it does make some hilarous sentences as in "The patient came into the ER claiming that she has had a head for 3 days."

Anyway, mistakes happen. We're still not back to school yet, so no homeschool news at this time.

Free Phonics Prinables.

This is a good site if you have a pre-reader or one who just needs to brush up on reading skills when you start back to school this fall.

Busy, busy ...

So much for the lazy days of summer. I don't know who that pertains to, but it is certainly not me. Today, I worked the morning on my day job, picked blackberries and then spent the afternoon working on my Cafe Press store. I am going to count that as a second job because it does take a lot of time. So, I worked at my first job, then my second job and now I'm going to take the kids to VBS. Last night I stayed and helped a little but tonight, I just don't want to. I'm tired. I'm one of those people who has a hard time saying no, but sometimes you really need to. I need a nap! Hey, does blogging count as my third job? (Although, as you can tell, I only spend a few minutes blogging each day, so probably not!) Where does homeschooling fit in? Third? Fourth? It doesn't sound like I have my priorities straight, does it? I'll probably slow down on the Cafe Press work when school starts again. Hopefully, I can have the store in pretty good shape by then.

Yesterday.

I think I should count yesterday as a school day. We had 2 field trips, 1 to the library and 1 to the vet. The vet had just done an emergency c-section and delivered 12 baby puppies and the kids got to see them! We were waiting in the exam room for quite a while and we studied the wallpaper, which had paw prints on it, and tried to estimate how many there were (math). We went to McDonald's and tried to figure out how to get everyone something to eat or drink for $2.14 and 2 coupons. (economics?) After the library trip, my youngest son had to sit down and read 8 books because the summer reading program at the library is over today and that's how many books he needed for the rewards (reading). This one should also be a lesson in not procrastinating, but I doubt it will take. Last night they went to VBS at a friend's church and played badminton afterwards (PE).

Summer.

Summer is a fleeting thing around here, at least for the public schoolers. They are on a "year-round" schedule that basically means a shorter summer break, about 8 weeks, and a longer fall break, winter break and spring break. We try to follow the schedule somewhat so that on fall breaks and spring breaks, we can do some field trips and fun stuff with the kids public school friends and cousins. That means we need to start back with school the first week of August! I'm not ready! Help!