Homeschool Coffee Break: Homeschool Mother's Journal: In Which I Am Sick and Tired

This was not one of our better weeks in many regards, because I was sick during the latter part of the week and as a result, I was very tired!

In our homeschool... We kept up our pace in History, with Landon and Kennady finishing up the Revolutionary Ideas unit study we added, and continuing with the lessons in America the Beautiful. We were learning about the Lewis and Clark expedition this week so we took some extra time with that.

In astronomy, we got started with the next chapter and starting to learn the constellations. The kids each made another two volvelles - one for the northern stars and one for Orion - before I ran out of cardstock to print them on. They also did an activity to visualize the movement of the Earth and the resulting sunrise and sunset meridians. Pictures were difficult because the room was dark! I took a couple with the flash and a couple without.

We weren't able to get our sunrise and sunset observations done this week because it was too cloudy on our scheduled day (Thursday) and we all slept in on Friday because I wasn't feeling well!

I basically trusted the kids with all the other subjects that they work on independently, which means I will be scrambling to catch up the grading and see what they did - and didn't! - do from their assignment lists.

In other news... Incredibly, Landon hadn't signed up for anything with CAP on the weekend. But he got up early and went with Spencer and Dad to work on a project at the church. It's fascinating to me that this boy who has no interest in getting up for school by 8:30 on a weekday can sit straight up in bed and be ready to go "to work" before 7am on a Saturday.

We booked our trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia!

On Monday evening, our homeschool moms group held the first Encouragement Group meeting of the year. Unfortunately, the restaurant we had been meeting in no longer has a private room but we didn't find that out until we got there! It made conversation around our tables a little more challenging, but it was a fun evening out anyway and helped me get some ideas for planning the future meetings.

Helpful homeschooling tips or advice... go ahead and take the sick day if you need it, Mom!

What's ~~working~~/not working for us... despite all our good intentions, we still are not fitting our Latin study into our schedule regularly. I guess it's one more thing in our school schedule that needs a bit of tweaking.

Thoughts/questions I have... any suggestions for activities or resources for teaching consumer math and personal finance to middle schoolers? I am helping with this class in our upcoming spring co-op and would like to have some ideas to contribute.

One of my favorite things this week... remembering our trip to the Bay of Fundy as I (finally) got those pictures posted. You can see them here --> A Low Tide Photojournal (Bay of Fundy)

A photo/video/quote or link to share... because yesterday was International Coffee Day, I feel compelled to share this...