Tag Archives: NaBloPoMo

This week in homeschooling: A lot of unexpected free time

11/20/2015 Nichole 3 Comments

When I sat down to write this week’s homeschooling wrap-up, I initially thought that we hadn’t done much at all. Looking back at our daily to-do lists, though, the kids did get a lot of their work done. They were just so expeditious the first four days of the week that it was all easy and breezy. They finished their schoolwork before lunchtime almost every day, and a lot of our regularly scheduled activities were canceled due to weather (tennis) or sickness (piano & guitar). The rain was dreary and I felt bad for the ailing music teachers, but it was nice to have a lot of free time.

Today has been … less breezy. We’re getting there, though. Here’s a bit of what the kids worked on this week:

SOCIAL STUDIES

History

This week in history we learned about opium! More specifically, how the opium trade led to China being forced to open up to the Western world. I was going to make poppyseed muffins to go along with the theme, but Pete spent most of the morning rolling around in his chair and whining about math, so it hasn’t happened yet.

Geography

I have once again given up on the grand plans I made at the beginning of the year regarding geography. Maybe someday we’ll complete a 50 States study, but this is not the year. I was being too inconsistent in actually working on that project, so I bought a long geography workbook and we started on it this week.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Reading

Pete finished the “Star Wars” book he’d been reading, and we haven’t been to the library to find him something new. Do you have any book suggestions for the energetic 8-year-old boy?

Poppy’s current literature study book is “Black Beauty.” She’s been enjoying it, and she’s gotten to ride a horse twice since she started the book. That was pretty much coincidental. The first time was at her friend’s birthday party, and the second was when her aunt took her while we were on vacation.

Writing

Poppy is nearly at the end of her “Writing Strands” book, and she actually asked me to order the next level. She has a wonderful imagination, and I love that she’s starting to put her ideas to paper. She’s currently working on a story that involves a great gust of wind, a cupcake and a lion.

STEM

Math

This morning Poppy told me that the work she’s been doing with fractions “is starting to make sense.” Yay! Less than “yay,” however: Pete started his math test this morning at 11, and he still hasn’t finished it. He’s currently at his make-up guitar lesson. Hopefully he’ll have a bit more focus after he jams for awhile.

Science

This week we studied mirrors, using a Young Scientists kit. The mirror we tried to make out of foil and cardboard didn’t work so well, but the kids really enjoyed the symmetry drawing exercise.

How was your week?

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!

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Pley is a great way to feed your LEGO habit

11/19/2015 Nichole 1 Comment

LEGO is a pretty big deal in our house, mostly because of Rockford and Pete. Pete’s floor is always strewn with LEGOs, and he always warns me not to move them because there’s a battle underway. Poppy, though, builds the set and then it sits on her shelf forever. She enjoys the initial construction, but she isn’t really into deconstructing and building anything new. (She may have Lord Business tendencies, just like her father.) Perhaps I bought into the “Toy Story” lore a little too much, but I find it a little disheartening to see the toys just sitting around, unplayed with. So I was pretty interested in learning more about Pley. It’s a toy subscription service, and they have a ton of LEGO sets. You sign up, and Pley delivers a toy to your house. When your kids are finished playing with it, you box it up and swap it out for a new toy.

The first question I had was “What happens when we lose the steering wheel from the LEGO Friends Adventure Camper or a tiny blaster from Jabba’s Sail Barge? Not to worry, says Pley. They won’t charge you for missing pieces.

That wasn’t enough to sell me on the plan, though. So I made a list of Reasons to Give Pley a Try to convince myself.

Five Reasons to Give Pley a Try

Your child can quickly tire of his new toy without you worrying that you’re raising an over-privileged, under-appreciative human. Or maybe you will still worry about that, but at least you can just mail the most recent cast-off back to Pley instead of stumbling across its remains when you go to kiss your offspring’s angelic brow goodnight. So even if you aren’t saving yourself any psychic burden, at least you’re saving your soles. It’s better for the environment this way, too. The toys from Pley aren’t going to go to the landfill when your kids have had their fill of them. They’re going to go back to Pley headquarters, where they’ll be sanitized, repackaged and shipped off to another family to enjoy.

Don’t the children in those photos look happy and contented? That’s largely because their off-camera mothers and fathers, with their tidy and organized home, are also happy and contented. I’m not saying I’d deaccession every toy my children own in favor of a monthly box from Pley, but that living room is so clean. Maybe that is what I’m saying. With a Pley subscription, you can have a rotating cast of toys in your home rather than a never-ending need for more storage.
You’ll save money. If your kids know they’ll get to play with a new toy every month, they’ll be less likely to ask for everything they see at Target. OK, maybe that’s not entirely accurate, but when they do ask for things, you can deflect them with “Hey, your Pley box should be here soon!”
Pley can expand your child’s horizons. When I go to the bookstore, I tend to look for authors I’m already familiar with or books for which I’ve read glowing reviews, because I don’t want to spend my money on something that could be a bust. At the library, though, I’ll pick up just about anything. Knowing I can read it and return it frees me up to explore genres and authors I normally wouldn’t check out. Likewise, exploring Pley’s toy library will give your child the chance to try out toys he or she might otherwise have skipped over.
It could be the perfect gift for your spouse. Rockford has always wanted to build one of the Architecture LEGO sets, but he doesn’t want to spend $200 on one of them. A Pley subscription would allow him to build Falling Water and bask in its glory for awhile without feeling like he needed to kragle it and store it under glass.

Lest you think it’s all LEGO, Pley also toys from Knex and other companies. They even have the new “Star Wars” droid! Pley’s pricing plans run between $20 and $25 a month, depending on whether you want to make a months-long commitment or just take it month to month.

I probably won’t decimate the kids’ toy holdings anytime soon — even though you can trade your old LEGOs in for credit — but we may give Pley a shot anyway. I’m pretty sure Rockford would jump for joy if the Death Star showed up on our doorstep, and I always enjoy it when Rockford jumps for joy.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Pley, which means Nichole was compensated for this post.

Diversions, National Blog Posting Month

Notes from the underground

11/18/2015 Nichole 1 Comment

The last time we upgraded our computer, we went from a laptop back to a desktop so the kids wouldn’t have the illusion of privacy. Of course that means I too lost the illusion of privacy, and I’ve had first-world, neurotic difficulties writing anything since then. I’ve never been able to write comfortably with the feeling that someone is staring over my shoulder, let alone with someone actually staring over my shoulder. And with the computer in the corner of the living room and two children always around, someone generally is at my shoulder.

And so because from time to time one yearns for a room of one’s own, today’s National Blog Posting Month dispatch comes to you straight from The Back Of The Basement, where the spiders and stinkbugs roam free, the laundry whooshes about next to me and a circa-2003ish iMac sits atop a giant metal office desk that came with the house. I can’t imagine how they maneuvered it down the stairs and into The Back Of The Basement. I imagine they lowered the behemoth into the basement-to-be with a crane back in 1956 and then built the house around it.

The iMac still runs, obviously, but I haven’t updates the operating system since before Pete was born, because it’s too old to go beyond OS 10.4 (that’s Tiger to you). It’ll open some very simple websites, but it will only sort of open my WordPress dashboard, which is why I’m typing this in Word on my clackety, yellowing keyboard.

I am not, in fact and however, alone in the basement, as I had expected I would be whilst trying to write today’s #NaBloPoMo post. There is one corner of the house that allows the rain into the basement when it’s rained all day. That corner is beneath the stairway, and we have yet to decide how to deal with that beyond putting down lots of towels and hoping it stops raining. It has been raining all day here, and so Rockford and the Basement Towels are also in the basement, valiantly attempting to hold back the deluge. He and the towels are, at least, relatively good about not standing directly over my shoulder.

Anyway.

I found a few pre-blogging documents on Ye Olde Macintosh that I’d forgotten I’d written. Here is one of them:

Dinners Poppy Likes
Dec. 9, 2009
Spaghetti
Pizza
Chicken parmesan
Grilled chicken
Grilled cheese
Butternut squash ravioli (with or without maple syrup)
Macaroni and cheese
Rice
Mashed potatoes and chicken
Quesadillas
Taco night

I’m sure that in 2009 I was hoping that by 2015 she would’ve expanded her list of acceptable food items. Alas I think the list has diminished, if anything. She will not longer eat mashed potatoes, she’ll occasionally eat rice if it doesn’t “taste different,” and she’ll only eat chicken under duress.

(I apologize for all the italics. I’ve been reading John Irving’s “Avenue of Mysteries,” and that man leans heavily on italics. I think it might be a contagious issue because I seem unable to stop.)

Having sat here at the giant metal desk in The Back Of The Basement for a few minutes now, it has become clear that JJ T. Cat sprayed his angst somewhere nearby in a location that eluded my previous stench-eradication efforts. And so for now I bid you, Ye Olde Macintosh and The Back Of The Basement adieu.