Homeschool Highlights - The Merry Month of May

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Welcome to Homeschool Highlights! 

This weekly link-up is your opportunity to share some highlights of what is happening in your homeschool and in your world each week. If you write a wrap-up post at the end of each week, like I've been doing, we'd love to see what you're busy with from week to week. If you'd like to pick a favorite post from your week that spotlights a resource or activity in your homeschool that you'd like to tell others about, we're interested in those too. I'm keeping the guidelines as simple as I can, and they will appear at the bottom of each post, along with the link tool. I look forward to getting to know you, and I hope this will be a source of encouragement and good ideas for all of us.

Grab a cup of coffee and let's get started!

Homeschool news  . . . I think this turned out to be a pretty good week overall. Kennady's mostly been working on Science and Math, and I hope she hasn't neglected History, but I didn't check on that this week. She's got a biography of Milton Hershey from YWAM Publishing she's been reading, so at least there's that. Of course she continues to work on Music and Art - but that's not usually considered "work"!

Next week we'll be sharing our review of the High School Essay Intensive from IEW, so we've been watching the DVDs and working on some essay practice.

By the way, for Biology it's been really helpful to use Nature's Beautiful Order from Memoria Press as a supplement to make sure we've got a bit of structured reading and written work to add to Biology 101. We're reviewing Nature's Beautiful Order in a few weeks. 

Other news . . . Last Friday I was at the Open House for our high school and middle school co-op which starts in the fall. The parents that came to the Open House were mostly interested in middle school classes, so there wasn't a lot for me to do other than schmooze! I'll be teaching a non-fiction writing class for high school age. We do know that we have enough students enrolled for that class that it's definitely happening, so I guess I'll be prepping as much as I can for that over the summer.

The guys all worked Saturday morning, and I took Kennady to her choir dress rehearsal and then did some shopping. She found the dress she wanted for Junior Senior Banquet so that was pretty exciting. We relaxed a bit more than we should have in the afternoon, but in the evening she and I went out for dinner with our mother-daughter besties. Our menfolk were all having a Wild Beast Feast at the church, so we figured a Girls Night Out was in order.

Sunday afternoon was the Spring Celebration Concert by the Children's Chorus, which was excellent as usual. From Monday on, the week has been pretty much like usual, except that gym class is over, so Kennady hung out with friends on Tuesday afternoon while I ran errands. So basically, that socialization aspect still happened on schedule! 

My Canada 150 Tulips are blooming!

What's New . . .  I'm going to try adding a new feature, although I'm not sure I'll remember to do it weekly. A fellow Homeschool Review Crew blogger is starting a weekly link-up called Friday Funnies, Flops, and Fails. The idea is to share the inevitable goof-ups that happen in our real-life homeschools, because we all know that we do have flops and fails and sometimes they really are funny.

Okay, so here goes with my Fail of the Week . . . it's actually no different from most weeks, because this is a big weakness in my homeschool. I have been lazy about checking and grading Kennady's work, and changing the calendar over to May and realizing how close it is to the end of the year has made me despair of ever getting into a good routine and staying caught up. What made me laugh though, is that one of my homeschool mom friends told me about a "discussion" she had with her student in which the student accused mom of being the problem with the student not getting schoolwork done. As in "you're supposed to motivate me" and "if you checked on me more often I would get the work done". Riiiiight. I've heard that line too, and while it is MY fault I don't check more often, if my kids is old enough to know what the deadline was and didn't do it, it's certainly not my fault for not motivating. Maybe my fault for not making the consequences sufficiently negative, I guess. And also? I have a feeling that if I or my friend were checking on our kids every day, we'd only be accused of nagging, micro-managing, and not trusting our kids. We can't win.

I recommend . . . the Art in Our Homeschool Round-up on the Homeschool Review Crew blog, where you'll find a collection of art resource reviews, tutorials, and ideas related to including art in your homeschool.

On my blogs last week . . .

Here on Homeschool Coffee Break:

Owl on a Pacific Northwest Totem Pole
And Then There Was One - How Homeschooling Changes as Students Graduate
Virtual Refrigerator - Chinese Horse
The Secret Bridge (A Homeschool Coffee Break Book Review)
Draw the World with ArtAchieve (A Homeschool Coffee Break Review)

And on my book blog, Just A Second:

Recent Reads - The Secret Bridge
Wordless Wednesday - Canada 150 Tulips
Teaser Tuesday/First Chapter First Paragraph - The Chapel Car Bride
What I'm Reading - May 1, 2017
Bookshelf Review - April 2017
Scripture and a Snapshot - Morning
Book Blogger Hop - April 29, 2017

Just A Second is where I share book reviews and other book-related things, and update on what's on my bookshelf. This week I finished All the Blue of Heaven by Virginia Carmichael (review is coming), and I've been reading:

The Chapel Car Bride by Judith Miller
All in Good Time (The Gilded Legacy) by Maureen Lang

A parting shot . . . Not surprisingly, the finches abandoned the feeder one day recently, due to double jeopardy. The feeder was basically empty, and a neighborhood cat was helping himself to the birdbath.

Grab the button and link up with Homeschool Highlights!

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Homeschool Highlights guidelines:

• Your blog should be family-friendly content, and your post should include something about homeschooling.
• Please link directly to your post, not your blog's homepage.
• Please include a link in your post to Homeschool Coffee Break - you may use the graphic above if you wish.
• Visit a couple of the other bloggers and comment or share.

An InLinkz Link-up

I will be linking up my own posts at the following weekly link parties that you may also be interested in: Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers; The Homeschool Nook Link-up Party hosted by Chaotic Bliss Homeschooling and Busy Boys Brigade; and Homeschool Blog & Tell at The Homeschool Post.

  

  

This post is linked at the Encouraging Hearts & Home Blog Hop hosted by Learning Table.

This post is also linked to the Homeschool Mother's Journal, hosted by iHomeschool Network on the first Friday of the month.

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