Week 6 ~ Hitting the Mark

It is usually around week six that I look around our little homeschool and see where we are. It is a period that sometimes involves a bit of despair if things are going awry and then I spend hours searching homeschool catalogs and Amazon for what will fix my little homeschool. This year is different. Everything is flowing along well. The house is afloat, the kids are learning and enjoying their studies, there are few arguments, the schedule is working and doesn't feel hectic (even though it kinda is), and we are eating home cooked meals most days. What's more, the eBay and consignment business that helps finance dance classes is hitting the financial goal almost every month. So what is different this year? I would like to say it is that I have been homeschooling for 18 years and I got this! Ha! But that would be a lie. Things are constantly evolving, and what my homeschool needed 18 years ago or six years ago or three years ago isn't what it needs now. However, I am doing one major thing differently this year. If a program, book, or technique doesn't work, it is out the door immediately. I am not giving more than a week trial of tweaking. If it is causing stress, we are not using it. Enough said! In the past, I have hung in there with programs for six weeks to a whole semester before giving up on them. One of the blessings of homeschooling is being your own boss and crafting your own little homeschool, so I do not have to do that. That said, I do not advocate throwing out all that you are using, just because you are having a rough week. You know your family. But for us, this technique is working. Also, after 18 years of homeschooling, my home is filled with alternative programs. It is not like I am breaking the bank making changes.

This is a list of what we are doing this year to keep our homeschool running smoothly ~

• Keep it simple, sister. ~ If my crew can learn the same information from a workbook, textbook or graphic novel instead of a full curriculum with lots of fluff, we pick the workbook.
• Learn how to get the information you need. ~ Instead of having my kids memorize everything about every subject they are learning this year, we are focusing on knowing the basics of each subject and how to delve more deeply when they need to know more. 
• Consider priorities and how to accomplish them in the simplest fashion. ~ We are really concentrating on getting the most important things out of the way each week before any projects or fluff. The fluff is great, but it comes second.
• Just say NO! in a nice way. ~ For us, this means saying no to things that might become commitments that are hard to break should it become necessary. For example, three families asked me to homeschool their children one to two days a week this year in addition to Rose, who I already homeschool one day a week. All of these were kids that had never been homeschooled until recently, and all these students really need to "de-school" and fill in the gaps in their education. Every day counts for my crew, so I can't slow down and fill in gaps for others. However, I am doing  all I can to help these families from a consulting point of view. 
• Rely on services that help your home life. ~ I don't mean a maid. That would be nice but I do not have the budget for such things. However, I am relying heavily on Walmart groceries this year. Their service is free. I order online and pick up the food when it is ready without ever entering the store. Love it. I need to see what other stores have this service. We are spending less, too, because there are't many distractions. I am also buying things from online more and more. I really like to keep my local shops afloat, but this year buying local just isn't what I need to keep us afloat. 
• Get rid of excess. ~ We started this summer really getting rid of stuff in our home. We started this partly because of thoughts of moving (who wants to haul all of that stuff?), but mostly because everything that we see in our home needs to be maintained and I don't have the time to maintain it. So we are working on reducing. I am really starting to see a difference. There is tons more to go and I think we will really be in good shape by the end of this school year. 
• Take care of yourself. ~ We have a cut-off time at night where there is no more work to be done -- no matter what! We are focusing on getting sleep, nutrition and laughter into our days.

Well, that is enough talking for this week. Here are a few pictures of our week.

Home Economics ~ 

Science (Biology and Earth) ~ 

Making red onion slides

Blessings, Dawn

Vacation in Rochester, New York!

We spent the week in Rochester, New York. We have only been back for a matter of hours, but I really want to get my weekend post up. My brain is still swimming with all that we did. It was a very big adventure for our family. We are strongly considering moving to Rochester in the next year, if my husband can get a federal government job there. This trip was part vacation, part research and part visiting family that lives in the area. It was a tremendous undertaking for us to travel 11+ hours from our home, while managing a family filled with special needs, including taking the 75+ pound dog, Grandma and one teen boy who is relatively devastated by the idea of moving. However, we made it and there was lots of fun along the way. So this is going to just be a snapshot post of our adventure.

Hamlin Beach ~ Lake Ontario

We were not able to see Canada, but it is on the other side of Lake Ontario. What a gorgeous place!

Lake Ontario (Hamlin Beach)

Running like the wind...

Garbage Plate with White Hots (a Rochester Food Tradition)

It was actually good. There was enough food in one serving to feed an army (lol). The kids weren't brave enough to try it. 

Niagara Falls and the Cave of the Winds

Amazing, stunning, humbling! Niagara Falls is not to be missed and is only a little over an hour from Rochester. We went on the walking trail called the Cave of the Winds that winds through the falls. Anne, Dean and I braved the hurricane deck and were pelted by 60 mile an hour winds and droplets of water that hurt a bit. We got drenched and it was awesome!

George Eastman's Home

Since we are a family of photographers, we had to see George Eastman's home and photography museum. He is the Father of Amateur Photography, bringing cameras and photography to the common person. Some members of our family have worked their whole lives at Kodak. My uncle is still an engineer with what is left of Kodak. I hope Kodak survives and rises again to glory. It was a lovely combination of photography galleries and how his home looked at the time of his death in 1932. 

High Falls 

Did you know there are falls right in the center of downtown Rochester? We were a little worried about losing the beauty of the mountains if we move to Rochester. It looks like the beauty we will lose of the mountains will be replaced by so many water features. 

Genesse Country Village and Museum

Wow! This is where I want to work when the kids grow up! This living museum has 68 historic buildings to investigate. There are costumed interpreters all throughout the village. This was fantastic!

Neighborhoods

One of our missions was to check out the many varying neighborhoods in Rochester. We wanted to see the difference between city living and village living. We will have to research more and digest all that we saw. It made the possibility of moving much more real in our minds. Would we prefer  the heart of the city or a village on the Erie canal with in 20 minutes? Choices...choices. 

Only God knows what the future holds...

Blessings, Dawn

Week 5 ~ The Old Lady, the Mouse and the Princess

Irma blew into town as a rather old lady, but she was feisty and determined to destroy all that she could until the very end of her days. She raged about our town, knocking down trees and power lines, leaving many in our county in the dark. She was a force to be reckoned with even in her dying days. Unlike so many who had met her before us, our family was left mostly unscathed. She brought down a great deal of dead branches on our property and made driving very hard for a day or two, what with so many street lights out of order. However, we have no complaints and are blessed to have come through her bluster unharmed.

The rest of the week was calm in comparison to Irma but still filled with some excitement. I went out to run a few errands one day and returned to find that my teens had caught a mouse in our dining room! Not only had they caught it, but they had placed it in a my largest cooking pot and fed it all kinds of lovely nuts, celery and bread! They also named him Alfred. While they were cooing over their new found friend, I studied what diseases Alfred could be carrying and plotted the demise of his potential siblings who were likely lurking somewhere in my home. Alfred moved to the woods, much to the kids dismay, and the house has been laced with toxic mouse treats. Hopefully, our unwanted guests will have moved on soon.

Lastly, this was a stellar week for Anne. She was picked to be the princess in the performance of The Nutcracker and The Mouse King. Our dance theater follows the original story of The Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffman which you can read about here. There is a story within a story and Princess Pirlipat is one of  the pinnacle characters of the within story. Anne is delighted to get this main character role, which has been reserved for adult dancers in the past. The role doesn't interfere with many of the other junior company dances, so she will get to do several other characters in the Nutcracker as well. The family celebrated with a small cake from Whole Foods.

The rest of the week was uneventful. There was a family cold to contend with, lessons and appointments. Dean is the sickest at the moment, and the rest of us are in different stages of recovery. Hopefully, we will all feel well soon, since we have some very exciting events planned for next week.

Blessings, Dawn

Week 4 ~ The Week Flew By

What a quick week! We added in the layer of dance with a second dance studio and also chores this week. Anne was asked to be a teacher assistant to a ballet level three class. Helping teach this class will pay for her to add one more class to her schedule, bringing her total hours to 11 at the one dance studio. She will still be studying Cecchetti ballet about four to five hours a week at the other dance studio. She is over the moon with delight! She is only behind in one math lesson and one history lesson for the week and plans to make them up today. She is happy to do school seven days a week, if necessary in order to dance more. We will see if that feeling holds all year long. Honestly, I won't be surprised if it does. She loves dance that much.

Cecchetti Ballet Class 2017

We did manage to do a great deal more than dance this week. The children had an art class with Grandma on Claes Oldenburg. My mother goes all out with these classes and does hours and hours of extensive research. She loves art as well as researching, and it shows. She always does a great presentation. The kids listened to the hour or more of presentation and then created clay sculptures, using the Oldenburg style. We invited our favorite twins over as usual and they loved his art work. Oldenburg is famous for creating huge sculptures of everyday items, which are commissioned as public art works and placed in various landscapes.

Anne's super-sized flip flop creation dangling over a bridge.

Dean's scaled large sculpture of a Canada goose on a small island in the middle of the lake.

My sack of birdseed would be very large, lying along the pathway.

They placed their creations on a scaled map that Dean made earlier in the week of a local lake. The landscape model was created at a 1:50 feet ratio. We measured only about one-fourth of the lake we walk around once a week. This was a complicated math lesson for math-challenged souls like Dean and me. We were glad to have my husband along on Labor Day to help us measure out and convert the numbers into a smaller scale. It really did feel like labor doing those two hours of math. HaHa!

Dad and Dean doing the math for our scaled map.

This is the final landscape with our Oldenburg creations. One of the twins made a fishing pole
pulling a fish out of the lake. The other twin attached a tall lollipop to the picnic pavilion. 

In biology this week, we reviewed the chemistry that helps with biology. Not our group's favorite subject, and it stretched their minds more than they wanted them stretched. I knew they weren't going to care for the lesson, so I made sure to have a really fun hands-on project at the end. We pulled out the stereoscopic (dissection) microscope and explored how to use it. We even learned how to take screen shots and save them to the computer. I am sure both of our microscopes are going to get a lot of use this year.

We also started learning about George Eliot. My husband started reading aloud her book, Silas Marner. During story time each evening, Anne worked on and finished another puzzle while Dean sketched.

We also did all of our math, history, home economics, science, English and writing lessons. Dean attended his weekly art class with a local artist, physical education class and guitar class. It was certainly a full week. We even squeezed in a round of miniature golf. 

Lastly, the rest of life kept us busy. My new oven arrived this week. I have been without one for EIGHT months, almost to the day. I am so blessed to have one again. I can't wait to bake. No more crockpot meals -- at least for a few months!

We are busy getting ready for Irma. We are well into the mountains but still in her predicted path. She will probably be a tropical storm by the time she gets here, but with the size of her, they are still predicting 50+ mile an hour winds and 6+ inches of rain in a short period of time. We are securing our outdoor belongings and making sure the basement is super clean, so that if it floods, we can just sweep the water toward the sump pump and hopefully have minimal loss of belongings. In 2004 when we had back-to-back hurricanes, we lost water and power for a week. We hope that doesn't happen again, but if it does, we are ready.

Blessings, Dawn

Week 3 ~ Getting in the Groove

So, we didn't manage to introduce the new way I want to do chore time this week. The days just rolled by with 15 minute "sweeps" on the kids part. A sweep basically means they pick up and sweep a room in the house. Hopefully, I will get it together next week. My intention is to take over the daily chores (laundry, dishwasher rotation, kitchen cleanup and bathroom wipe down) and have the kids do project chores each day (dusting, painting a door, cleaning windows, mopping floors, etc.).  The house is afloat and week 3 of school is complete...that is what is most important.

We did successfully introduce biology and British literature into our days. Our friend Rose joins us for both subjects. I think biology is going to be wonderful this year. I have so many fun experiments planned. This week they learned/reviewed how to use a microscope and learned how to make a slide of a printed letter. I am sure British literature will be fun, too. We just need to get into our groove on that subject.

Dean had teen art club this week. He invited a few of his friends over for dinner and games before art club. He has found a lovely group of homeschooling friends. They had a wonderful time playing Quelf.

We also started our literature movie club. We saw The Call of the Wild with Clark Gable this month. I must say it was an extremely poor interpretation of the book, but we had fun getting together with friends. I am so glad the school year is getting off to such a good start!

We didn't make anymore changes to our curricula. I think we are squared away. Next week we will be at full-time school, with the addition of eight more hours of dance for Anne.

Our prayers go out to all who have been affected by Hurricane Harvey.

Blessings, Dawn