Homeschool Mother's Journal: Cold Weather Edition

In our homeschool... the intention was to get right back at school this week, almost like a homeschool boot camp. The reality was that we did get back into our routine (mostly), but still struggled with late starts and disruptions; and I wasn't nearly as tough a taskmaster as I'd threatened to be.

Social Studies - since we are doing very well in this subject, we didn't spend a lot of time on it this week. We took some time to do an overview of the islands of the southern Caribbean on one day, using a Fodor's Travel Guide as our sourcebook! On another day, we browsed through the list of recipes I'd collected for consideration and chose a few that we might be able to try sometime soon. And on Thursday it occurred to me that we hadn't finished going through the review questions on the book about Christopher Columbus that the kids had read, so we took the time to get that looked after.

English - the kids worked on Student Writing Intensive lessons on a couple of days, and Kennady continued working on her Literature study.

Science - finally, we got back to Science. Seems like the break in that subject has been rather long, but maybe that's just me. The good news for Kennady is that she is getting more comfortable with notebooking all on her own, so she can work on Science assignments when it suits her, and not just when I'm available to help out.

Music/Art - music lessons and choir resumed, and Kennady did a silhouette project for Art.

Helpful homeschooling tips or advice to share... Plan to take a break from some of your regular classes during the Winter Olympics. There's plenty of social studies, geography, history, science, and math to be learned with a unit study based on the Olympics. Visit the Schoolhouse Review Crew Round-up post on Wednesday to check out all the resources shared by Crew members.

In other news... Sunday evening - despite what amounted to an ice storm during the day - we had a farewell at church for our pastor and family, as they will be moving to another state soon. An awful lot of bittersweet going on there. We will miss them a great deal.

The hubster went to hockey later in the evening. He still isn't cleared to play after his wrist injury, but his team won the championship. He is the manager and "coach" while he is sidelined. So the "Tinley Cup" is in residence with us until the next season finale.

We were supposed to get the tree down and the decorations packed up on Monday, but with the unusually cold temperatures and snow and ice, no one felt like going out to the garage to fetch the boxes! We basically avoided going outside as much as possible. The Christmas stuff did get packed up and put away - it just took longer than it was supposed to.

We were glad that the winter weather wasn't bad enough to prevent activities from starting up again this week. Landon was back to Civil Air Patrol, and Kennady was back to choir on Tuesday night. Kennady's piano and guitar lessons resumed on Wednesday, as did midweek church activities. 

Landon's birthday was on Wednesday. It is almost impossible to get a decent picture of him, even when he is the birthday boy. He had a couple of friends over on Friday evening to celebrate the birthday, and even then I didn't have an opportunity to get a good picture. Oh well. Happy Birthday anyway!

One of my favorite things this week... Food. We had some lovely treats this week - King Cake on Monday evening, and Waffles and Awesome Sauce for lunch one day. (I'll post that recipe on Monday or Tuesday!) Sausage gravy and biscuits twice, because it's Landon's favorite and was requested in honor of his birthday. And there are Nanaimo Bars for tonight.

King Cake

Waffles and Awesome Sauce

Things I'm working on...
My posts this week included:

• Weekly Photo Challenge: Languages
• Virtual Refrigerator: Silhouettes
• Winter Games and School
• King Cake
• New Years Cookies
• Looking Forward and Adjusting Course
• Beauty Captured - Days 153-159
• Scripture and a Snapshot - January 5, 2014

A video to share...


On the bookshelf...

• The Gossamer Cord - Philippa Carr
• The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
• A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters

Updated a little bit on my book blog - Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, June and Faith, both by Lori Copeland.

A parting shot...

This post is linked at SoYouCallYourselfaHomeschooler.com, at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers,  and at For the Display of His Splendor -  see how other homeschoolers dealt with the weather this week.

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