Blogger Slacker

I can't believe I haven't blogged for over 4 days. You think I fell off the face of the earth or something. nope. just busy.

here's what has been going on:
1. Nothing much more than usual. Matt was gone from Tuesday to Thursday, so I held down the fort.

2. We are getting into a grove with homeschooling. I know I keep saying things are getting better, but they really are. EVERY day we have school in the morning. I either take Courtney to preschool and come home and teach Megan (MWF) or we get up and get school going right away. (T TH)

We usually start with our read-alouds too (wouldn't you want to be read to first thing in the morning?). We are currently reading "White Stallions of Lipizza" and I would highly recommend it to anyone! I can't wait until Monday when we get to read the next two chapters. Megan is enjoying it too because it is all about horses and her favorite animal right now is horses!

Math is also interesting lately. There are things presented in her math book that we did not learn until pre-algebra in 8th grade. Such as 8+n=11. This is algebra! But she's doing it in 2nd grade math!! I looked ahead into the 3rd grade book and some of those problems are (3+7)+ n= 15, rounding to hundreds and thousandths place, 519 X 4 = n, 7 x n=56, and 2/3 is less than or equal to 8/24. I know the answers to these problems, but was I taught this stuff in 3rd grade? No way!

We usually get a couple of hours done before lunch and then finish after lunch. Right away- I don't let the girls play an hour anymore. We clean off lunch and get right back to it.

This has worked much better- My theory is "Let's get school done so we can be done for the day, then you have the rest of the day to play and I don't have to worry about it!"

3. I always save our Bible lesson to do with Courtney. We are going through the book of Joshua now and we have had a GREAT time! The girls draw a picture to illustrate the passage, so we have had some great pictures from Joshua 1,2,3, and 4!

4. Courtney has wanted to join us for math too, so I always give her something to do. Oh, and handwriting. She doesn't want to do her reading lesson anymore, but she wants to do everything else. I figure as long as we are doing something one-on-one with her, I don't really care what it is (well, as long as we are close to reading by the fall, so I can start her in 1st grade readers!)

I really think Courtney is going to be my hands-on learning. She brought me an art book yesterday and said, "Let's find a project mommy." So we did. We found what we needed and made her project. It was cute! A little out of the box for me because I am just used to reading to Megan all the time, but this is the nice thing about homeschooling, I can cater to their learning styles. I have also had to come up with creative/hands-on ways to teach her reading and math.

5. Christian has been a busy boy lately. For the first time today, I heard "ape" which stands for "grape." He has added some new words lately, "O" means "no" but you have to imagine him saying "OOO" with his arms crossed (gee, I wonder who he learned this from!) and of course "mine" is very popular these days.

"Tractor" and "choo-choo" still seem to be the favorites.

6. Matt is busy working on the basement- he has almost all the framing done, so hopefully we can be done by...perhaps Christian's birthday in June.

7. My house is a COMPLETE disaster! You can tell the girls have had more time to play together because the house is destroyed...oh and maybe I am no so strict and am not so good at encouraging them to clean it up at night. :)

8. I do manage to keep up on the kitchen and laundry. Those are my two goals and now that we are done with school by early afternoon, I have some time to get some housework done. Yay for me!

9. Matt is done at the end of March with going to Iowa. It will be nice having him home full time again, but he won't be able to work from home anymore. But his new job isn't far away, which means a short communte, which means he will be home more in the evenings and even some in the mornings.

10. We are taking a little vacation this week with Iowa to Matt, it will be a lot of work, but will be fun. Courtney does not have preschool Wednesday or Friday and since Megan is homeschooled, we have the freedom to take off. We are going to stay at a water park by where Matt works. It will be a nice break for all of us!