Homeschooling Musings

I haven't talked much lately about homeschooling because for us it became just a way of life quite a few years back. I thought some of you might enjoy a short "day in the life" post about this though. First, my early bird used to be our son, and the one sleeping in was the middle child. Now, that's flip-flopped and slightly bizarre as things are even more quiet in the morning now.

My son detests handwriting and that includes signing his name and dating math worksheets. He detests being laughed at even more though, but sometimes we just can't help it. This afternoon for example when I asked to inspect his math sheet, of course, it had no name and no date. I've tried to tell him that at the least he must know how to efficiently sign his name and write the date on things. He tried to tell us first "I can't figure out the calendar" then says "I'm not stupid." which promptly brought up belly laughs from his sister and myself....it might have worked as an excuse if he weren't almost 12. Even he had to laugh though when he realized how ridiculous that claim was just after attempting to claim he couldn't read a calendar.

Katie rather seemingly spontaneously got in the kitchen and started whipping up a cake to which I had to inquire "what's up with you in the kitchen?" Her response with a grin was "well, you said you would only give me a 'B' in home ec." laughter again from me. She's working on a high school transcript to turn in with her application to the computer/office skills program at the vo-tech and trying to earn a better grade. I even saw her doing math on her own again.

We're reading aloud from Around the World in 80 days and enjoying that together, finally traced the journey on the world map in the kitchen. Interesting thinking of travelling around the world using the ocean so much. This morning we had a morning 'shout a long' that really wasn't much shouting using some marvelous I Am confessions. This afternoon I picked up dd#2's very own violin from the music store, where they very kindly and affordably re-strung and tweaked things/rosined those knobs, and tuned it. This was really a fab bargain from ebay and I was scared it would sound like a bargain from ebay, but it actually sounds decent! It's beautiful, black, came with a nice case, brand new bow, and straps and chin rest too! DD#2 had taken lessons for a season or two on a borrowed violin, then gave it up for a bit and took painting lessons, and just recently decided she missed violin after we got the piano. Now we're set to attempt some piano/violin stuff, just as soon as I get that piano tuner back to fix the middle C that went quite sour shortly after he tuned it.

Some older friends of ours stopped by around lunch with some beautiful and tasty potato garlic bread, fresh green onions, and some beatiful red potatoes and garlic. They enjoyed walking out to the pasture to see all the baby lambs and seeing my flowers, roses, apple trees, and cherry trees in bloom. The cherry trees came from their garden, so it was nice for me to have them see the nicer one in full bloom right now. They took home a couple sage plants from my garden as sage really likes my garden and has multiplied nicely. My thyme has really taken off and is covering about 3sqft now! The mint would take the whole yard over if I let it. We've got our first large asparagus stalk up out there too.

Now on to the rest of the evening with a ham in the oven, bread dough to set out to rise for rolls, 2 to take in to TaeKwonDo practice, and I might just squeeze in an hour or two of knitting on these two at a time socks for dd#1's birthday that was back the end of Jan.