Some days the kids wake up cheerful and ready to tackle their schoolwork, and we sit down and knock everything out by lunchtime. Sometimes those days are strung together and we have a whole week of easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy schooling.
This hasn’t been one of those weeks.
It hasn’t been a terrible week, though, despite a couple of trips to the doctor for a mystery Pete illness — he seems to be fine now — and Rockford being out of town for a few days. It’s just been day after day of doing schoolwork in slow motion. I feel like I’ve been herding cats all week, and my brain is a little worn out from it.
Spelling
Pete has nearly finished All About Spelling’s Step One, which is learning all of the letter sounds. I’m guessing we’ll be able to move on to Step Two sometime next week. One curious thing we noticed about the curriculum: They supply a sheet of paper listing all of the letters of the alphabet and some cute little bee stickers so you can mark your progress, but there aren’t enough stickers to cover all of the letters. We’re going to be one bee short. Which isn’t the end of the world, but it definitely struck us as an odd oversight.
History
OK, so one ink cartridge in my printer ran dry a few weekends ago, and last weekend I bought the wrong cartridge to replace it. And I haven’t been back to the store since, so I’ve been unable to print any of the kids’ history-project stuff. So we didn’t do any projects for the Inventors and Inventions section of the Time Travelers curriculum.
Instead, we read short biographies of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell. Did you know that Ford gave his son $1 million for his 21st birthday? Or that Bell and Edison were both homeschooled? Or that Ford and Edison (along with naturalist John Burroughs and tire magnate Harvey Firestone) used to go camping together?
I didn’t know any of that until this week. So I guess the week wasn’t a total loss.
Extracurricular
It was a busy weekend, especially for Poppy. She tested for her yellow-green belt in tae kwon do on Friday, we went to the kids’ season-end celebration for basketball on Saturday, and on Sunday she had a piano recital.
Tomorrow is our only free Saturday between sports seasons, something I did not take into account when I signed the kids up for basketball a few months ago. It’ll be nice to have sports-less Saturday before soccer starts, at least.
Reading
We finished “The Penderwicks at Point Mouette
Our next read-aloud is “The Mysterious Benedict Society
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I can see myself doing the wrong print cartridge thing. We had new cartridges left over after an old printer died, and I tried so hard to find someone who could use them. They’re too expensive to just toss!
I’ve had those weeks where it felt like I was herding cats for sure! Glad you managed to overcome it and get something done. Those were interesting tidbits about the inventors.
So, when you finish by lunch, what do you do for the rest of the day?
Laundry, mostly. 🙂
They spend the rest of the day doing pretty much whatever they want, within reason and unless we have errands and stuff. They have some kind of afternoon activity almost every day — tae kwon do, soccer practice, etc. — so they don’t always have the whole rest of the day free. We might go bowling, or Poppy will get to watch back-to-back episodes of “My Little Pony,” or they get extra time on the Kindle, or we make a bonus trip to the library/playground, or (if it’s nice out) Pete and his light saber spend the afternoon protecting the backyard from villains, or I might call up a fellow homeschooling family to see if they want to come over and hang out. Or all of the above.