So this was the week with all the running around. No, wait — this week just begins all the running around I’ll be doing this year. Ack. I need a nap just thinking about it all! I made notes during the week so I could attempt to be somewhat coherent in this post since we’ve been w-a-y busier than usual and it has taxed my little brain!

This week went well, all things considered. Lindsey did not hate school, did make new friends, and said she actually liked it better than she thought she would. One thing that really helps is that she feels the teachers are actually there to help her, rather than to try to make her life difficult. And Kathryn says I am more fun this year; evidently I was rather boring last year.

One afternoon each week this semester, Lindsey takes a driving class, required in our state before she can get her license. When I picked her up this week after the first class, she said she never wanted to drive and wished we didn’t even have to be in the car then. It hasn’t truly scared her off of driving forever, but I do think it made her take it much more seriously. The teacher of the class is a police officer whose job it is to knock on the doors of parents to tell them their teen has been killed in an auto accident; teaching this class is his way of trying to reduce the number of teens that die from careless driving.

While we do school, Lacy the WonderDog is usually laying nearby, pretending to be lazy but secretly learning everything we discuss in our school days. Seriously, she’s a genius. Ask anyone who has ever spent any time with her.

Kathryn wrote a letter to her new penpal this week. I think their first letters crossed in the mail, so we waited a little while before sending the second letter in hopes that wouldn’t happen again this time. She keeps one box with her stationery, stickers, and stamps for letter-writing, and another box for letters. Sometimes she and her cousin Cullen exchange letters, too, even though he only lives 20 minutes or so away.

Maps will be a big part of Kathryn’s studies this year. We plan to make them all look sort of old-fashioned, so I print them on parchment-style cardstock, then Kathryn colors them with watercolor colored pencils, and goes over them with a wet paintbrush. This week she did a world map (shown in the photo below) and a Ptolemic map, which are both part of our Time Travelers study. Lindsey made a 12-gore map for her Geography class this week; once cut out and taped together, it looked like a slightly-warped globe. Pretty cool.

Kathryn’s history studies this week had her reading about explorers, and coloring flags that some of the old explorers would have flown on their ships. She also read about native American homes, and began reading a book called Naya Nuki about an Shoshoni girl in the early 1800′s.

In science, Kathryn reviewed a Christian Kids Explore Biology unit on plants (which we did last school year) and we began a unit on Birds. She defined vocabulary words in the lessons, colored a bird picture, and did a word-find from the unit. In an unplanned but relevant nature study, we observed birds out our living room window; this week was hot, humid, and we had an air quality alert most days this week, so I did not take my sniffling, sneezing, coughing, wheezing, allergy-flaring-up girl outdoors for a “real” nature study. We’re looking forward to fall weather so we can get outside more often!

Kathryn and I also began using Simply Grammar, a Charlotte Mason style book written by Karen Andreola. I’ve had it or a year or two but never used it until now. It’s just simple little grammar lessons we can do mostly while sitting on the couch together.

Lindsey has done well with doing her at-home work assigned from the Academy, and I’m still getting the hang of how the teachers want me to document that I have reviewed and checked her work. I do like that they require me to be involved. Lindsey also had her first at-home test, administered by me but to be graded by her teacher. If you’d like to know about how we’re doing homeschool with Lindsey this year, please see my previous post where I explain it all more thoroughly.

As for extra-curricular stuff: Lindsey has Color Guard practice two evenings each week, and she is participating in high school choir at church; Kathryn began Girls in Action at church this week, and will begin her weekly chess class next week.

This evening is Lindsey’s first public Color Guard performance, at the first football game of the season. She needs to break in her new uniform shoes, so she was wearing them around the house this morning with knee socks and her pajamas. I laughed, and then took a picture.

Some stressful, unrelated-to-school things are going on right now, but I am very pleased with how we managed in our first week of school, and looking forward to next week — AFTER a Saturday that, I hope, will allow me to just plain relax and spend some time being still.

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Somewhere along the way this year, we got behind schedule. There is no way we’re going to make it eight more weeks of doing what we’re doing (without somebody — like me — going bananas), and we have an out-of-state wedding to shoot at the end of May, so I’ve decided to double-up on what we’re doing with the goal of finishing our school year before the end of May. Technically, we will still have a few more days to make our required 180, but we can do those here and there with different non-curriculum-ish sorts of days. So we’re on the home stretch!

Our studies this week took us to Iraq and to India. We learned a bit more about oil and gas production, read about child labor in the rug-making industry in Iqbal, and read about Muslims in the Encyclopedia of World Religions. In India, we began reading The Biography of Silk, and read a little about Hinduism and Buddhism. We did some map work, read about missionaries in both of those countries, and virtually toured Turkey and India on the Time for Kids website.

Kathryn had a little help with math from Lacy the Wonder Dog. We are convinced that Lacy is smart enough to do math; she just can’t hold a pencil to write.

We’ve all been battling pollen in one way or another. I feel like my throat is three times it’s normal size. Kathryn has had another flare-up of asthma because of it (and another doctor visit this week). Lindsey battled it in a different way: she earned some money by working hard to help our neighbor scrub down all her outdoor furniture, which has been coated yellow for weeks from the worst of the pine tree pollen.

We didn’t do an official nature study, but we did see a pair robins mating in the yard, and have been watching a mocking bird carrying twigs and such into a large holly bush to build a nest. It’s springtime!

I had plans to do our standardized testing this week (CAT), but with Kathryn not feeling as perky as usual, I decided to wait until next week.

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We’re traveling (virtually) in Asia now, in our “Children Around the World” program from WinterPromise. The girls’ travel notebooks and passports are getting quite full! After Asia, we have Oceania/Pacific Islands, and then we are done. That will still take about seven or so more weeks.

This week in our geography study, Kathryn labeled the major landforms and bodies of water on the Asia wall map, and we’re “visiting” Saudi Arabia, which necessitates learning about Oil and Gas. We’re also learning about the persecution of Christians in other countries, with the help of these two websites: KidsOfCourage and PrisonerAlert. We’ve started reading Iqbal, the true story of a boy who became sort of a poster child against child labor.

One day this week, we babysat for a friend, and Kathryn and Lindsey did a great job at entertaining the little ones. Having a toddler and a preschooler in the house livened things up for a while! I consider that a little lesson in home sciences.

Lindsey finished her Life of Fred pre-algebra book last week, and was dreading what sort of evil math I might have for her after that. She was relieved when I had her start Money Matters for Teens, and says she likes it. She’ll do about two chapters each week, which should have her finishing it up right at the end of our school year. Since she has been focused on doing odd jobs to earn money for a mission trip this summer, I think she has a keen interest in the topic of money management. Kathryn is doing about four lessons each week in Horizons 4, but there is a Money Matters for Kids book, too, and she thinks she’d like to do it. I might get it for her to work through during summer, as she loves to have a little schoolwork throughout our “off” months.

For creative writing this week, the girls’ assignment was to write instructions on how to care for a pet (in this case, Lacy) while we were gone on an imaginary trip; the point of the assignment was to be very specific.

Kathryn finished up her little handiwork project, a stamped cross-stitch monkey. Lindsey is close to being done with her butterfly cross-stitch project.

Kathryn finished reading Alice in Wonderland, which she said deemed simultaneously “cool and creepy.” She’s also been reading through the rest of the Anne of Green Gables series I don’t have a specific book assigned to Lindsey right now, but she is enjoying reading a couple of novels by Ted Dekker, who is one of Ken’s favorite fiction authors.

Although we have been greatly delinquent in nature studies, the springtime is inspiring us a bit. This week we studied one of our garden flowers, columbines. We decided we’d study songbirds next week.

Honestly, my mind is already on next year. I’m doing research, trying to decide what will work best for us. Getting through the next couple of months seems like it will take forever! There are quite a lot of things I want to change about our curriculum, our schedule, our attitudes, and our school days in general. But we’ll get there!!

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