Homeschool Coffee Break: Weekly Wrap-Up: In Which I Take a Hiatus

Homeschool: Our school week started out with great promise, but by the time all was said and done, we didn’t quite get through what I had planned. On Monday we had some time for a Science lesson, and talked about the chemistry used in fireworks. On Tuesday I had planned that we would go to the library in the afternoon for a home school science program about “chemistry you can eat” but unfortunately they called to cancel that day. So instead we did the final lesson in our book - the chemistry of rocket fuels - and the last quiz. On Wednesday we were able to do two of the four suggested chemistry experiments for the final project in our Science book - demonstrating how liquid dish soap molecules caused food coloring molecules in milk to move (soap molecules attract the fat molecules in the milk, allowing the food coloring to dissolve)… And demonstrating chromatography with different colors of ink on a dampened paper towel (the inks are made up of different colors with different weights of molecules, which move up the wet paper towel at different rates, allowing us to see the different colors) There is still a final exam to do in Chemistry. I had hoped to complete it on Thursday morning, but got busy with other things (see “In Other News”)

Of course there are always Math and Language Arts to work on, which we did. And Spencer made it successfully to the end of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and spent some extra time on English and History. He doesn’t need to spend a lot of time each day on the Technical Drawing course, so that one is easy to keep on schedule, and he enjoys it much more than Algebra (no surprise!). He and I discussed how we can adjust his schedule a little bit to help him stay on track, so we will test drive those tweaks a little this coming week.

On Friday the kids were going to catch a ride with a friend to gym class, but snow hit our area several hours before it was expected and the roads were just not good. She decided gym class wasn’t worth the anxiety of trying to make the drive under those conditions, so we skipped class. I doubt we were the only ones.

In Other News: I’m very close to being finished with Christmas shopping, but sadly not much has been accomplished as far as decorating. The kitten is still climbing and chewing and generally causing chaos with the decorations, so I’m going with a minimalist look this year, I guess. LOL

Our new fridge was delivered on Wednesday morning, and is proving to be somewhat of a nine-days wonder. On Thursday I had a plumber come to hook up a waterline so we could enjoy the benefits of having a fridge with an icemaker and water dispenser. It’s amazing how exciting this was to most of the family. I hope it means we will all be drinking more water. Anyway, getting that done on Thursday meant that I didn’t have much time to teach, so we didn’t finish the Science as planned. Also, on Thursday afternoon I went to Baltimore to pick up Harrison.

On Friday morning, Harrison was doing a project for his school that involved visiting the radio station in Greencastle, PA, so I went with him to do that. (which is why I arranged another ride for the kids to gym class) The drive to Greencastle went extremely well, and took less than an hour, even though the snow started as we were about halfway there and there was a pretty good dusting of snow by the time we arrived. Harrison went in to do the interview while I waited in the van with my coffee and good book. We were ready to hit the road back home by just after 11am, but we hadn’t gone very far before we wished I’d chosen the take the Interstate rather than our more direct route home. The snow and ice was wreaking havoc on drivers, and it was slow going to say the least. There were many places where toiling up or down even a slight hill was accomplished only by sheer luck. We finally turned aside from that highway when we saw that the road was completely blocked ahead by cars either stuck or collided. We didn’t know for sure where our roundabout route would lead, but it did get us to Hagerstown eventually - still slow going and plenty of slippery spots, but at least we made it to a place where I had a choice of three eastbound highways I was familiar with. I took the first one we came to, and we came to regret that decision as well, because that saw us arriving at a hill where there had been some kind of accident completely blocking progress. So once again we turned around and took the next southbound highway we could find. We wound up going to Harpers Ferry before getting back on a passable eastbound highway! At last we arrived in Frederick, where we stopped for lunch, thinking the worst was well behind us. As luck would have it, just about 3 miles from home, we began to fishtail wildly and wound up in the ditch. Thankfully the van did not even stall, and there were no dents or scratches of any kind that we could tell. It was surprisingly easy to maneuver my way out of the ditch and back onto the road and we made it home without further incident. There were many other drivers that day who had not been so lucky! So that was our Friday adventure - an outing that should have taken a grand total of three hours took us literally all day. It kind of reminded me of the theme song for Gilligan’s Island, but I haven’t rewritten all the words yet. 8-D

Saturday evening is the second performance of the kids Christmas play at church, and my final choral concert of the season. I finally got to see my kids in their Christmas play on Sunday night. They did a great job!

And finally, I have decided that I will have to take a break from most blogging and other internet activity for the remainder of the month… We bought DH the Civilization V PC game for his birthday, and unbeknownst to us at the time, in order to actually have the game work, you need to download all the rest of game components from the website. This is a file approximately the size of Texas. Which is fine, unless you have a limited number of GB usage in your ISP like we do. Not only that, but the file downloaded in the background without us knowing until it was too late, and it is about 75% of our monthly GB allowance. So… with most of the billing month left to go, we are nearly at the limit, and I hate paying for usage over that allowance. We will be complaining to the makers of the game, and I am going to be stepping up my research (by phone! LOL) for a different ISP. But in the meantime, internet use will be strictly limited. 8-(

On the Bookshelf: