Homeschool Mother's Journal: Family Fun Edition

In our homeschool... we are still struggling to get to everything and manage our time well, so this week we had a little teacher-student conference and sketched out a new basic schoolday calendar. One of our challenges is that we have the mom/teacher using the computer for blogging, research, record-keeping, and other school related tasks; and we have two students who need the computer for at least two subject areas on most days; and all this is in addition to all of us wanting to use the computer to check email and calendars and do all sorts of non-school things of varying degrees of importance. We do have a second computer, but it is not connected to the internet, and it is pretty old, so it is of dubious value, at least for school. Ideally, we'd buy a laptop that could handle at least some of this stuff so that we could have two computers in use at a time. So far we've only considered that, but haven't felt that we wanted to spend the money on a laptop. I think we'll consider the possibility again this spring.

In any case, Landon and Kennady and I think that we have worked out a basic schedule that should work, and we will start following it as best we can on Monday. By the way, I asked them to list out their core subjects and an estimate of time they would spend on a day's worth of each subject. Here is the list of subjects they gave me:

• Maff
• Ingrish
• Ecomaniacs
• Shiensh/Animal-ology
• 'Merica!
• Writhing
• Muzak
• Lit-a-chure
• Arte 

*sigh* They're regular comedians, aren't they?

All kidding aside, we did do a bit of study on Mexico; both kids worked on English and Math; Landon worked on Science and Economics; and Kennady worked on Music and Art.

In other news... Sunday was a rather busy day, as my oldest son and I helped a friend with music at another church for morning service. So we attended our small groups (aka Sunday School) at our church and then scooted over to the other church about 10 minutes away in time for morning worship. We had lunch with the friend's family after that, and I had enough time to pick up the other two boys to join us. Hubby took Kennady to her first softball practice of the season while the rest of us were at lunch.

The rest of the week went fairly smoothly, although it came as a shock that the public schools had closed on Tuesday because of the weather. It was cold. That's all - cold. Fortunately, Civil Air Patrol and Kennady's choir practice carried on as usual, although my own choir practice was cancelled. The nice thing about it was that I had time to run some errands after dropping both kids off, and then could take in a little of the Civil Air Patrol Open House myself.

One of my favorite things this week... we finally found a way to get the pictures from my parents' 50th anniversary dinner onto our computer so we can see them and share them! Mom sent me a CD with all the pictures their friend took at our family dinner, but for whatever reason my computer refused to acknowledge there was even a disk in the drive. :shrug: We finally figured out that the old computer would read the disk, so we put the pictures there, then transferred them to this computer with a flash drive. So, almost five months after the event, I am finally getting a good look at the pictures!

My siblings and me - in our traditional family picture pose!

where do you suppose our kids got it from?

I recommend... checking the Schoolhouse Crew Review blog for our latest reviews (Talking Fingers, Motivated Moms, Science4Us.com, and KinderBach are there now, with many more to come!) and for round-ups like this one, Toys and Games for Homeschool, in which crew bloggers shared great ideas on how to use fun and games for the whole family as part of education.

On my blog this week...

• Virtual Refrigerator: Using a Viewfinder
• Motivated Moms Chore Planners (a Schoolhouse Crew Review)
• Eating the Americas: Guatemalan Hot Cocoa
• First Day: March 2014
• Beauty Captured: Days 209-215
• Scripture and a Snapshot: March 2, 2014

On the bookshelf...

• The Scarlet Contessa - Jeanne Kalogridis
• City of Jasmine - Deanna Raybourn
• Gods and Kings - Lynn Austin

A parting shot...

   

This post is (or will be) linked at SoYouCallYourselfaHomeschooler.com, at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers,  and at For the Display of His Splendor -  see what family fun other homeschoolers enjoyed this week.

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