Our Week in Review

My husband and I spent several hours at our annual homeschool book fair today. It is like a mini-convention, with two large rooms of vendor booths, and smaller rooms for seminars. I have gone to this book fair for years, and usually buy the bulk of our daily work for the following year ~ things like grammar and handwriting and phonics and math. This is the first time my husband has come with me, and that was fun! His job was to decide on our daughter's science curriculum for 7th grade next year, and my job was to window shop and talk to friends! :-)

I didn't buy a whole lot this year due to our employment situation, but thanks to a gift I was able to purchase this pile of math books and dvd's, which will see us through the rest of this year and all of next year. We love, love, love Math U See!

Here are some scenes from earlier in the week:

(I just love watching my children READ, knowing that I had the privilege of teaching each of them this important, life long skill! As a true book lover, few things warm my heart like this does! And on a side note, even though our couches don't match, isn't it great that we have 4 corners to curl up in?)




Preschool activity time!


Helping make blueberry muffins.




Furiously trying to wash off the crayon marks which he scribbled allover our kitchen floor. I am happy to say that they are finally all off. Our daughter G mopped the kitchen floor today and she did a great job! I was so happy not to have to do it myself, I paid her $2. And you have to admit, those are some pretty great squares Little Man drew!


We started spring classes at co-op on Friday. All of the children love their classes, and I am continuing to enjoy teaching my Zoology classes. It is a bit of work to prepare, but we are loving learning about flying creatures (currently studying insects) all together this year. It is our family's first experience using a science textbook, and I have to say it has been a good one. In fact, we are planning on using Zoology 2 with the boys next year! That one covers swimming creatures, and I'm sure they will love it.

And in case anyone is wondering what my husband chose for our daughter's science, he decided that we'd use Apologia's General Science book. Apologia is the "giant" of science curriculum in the homeschool community. Don't know what their market share is, but I'm sure it's huge. Because they are a distinctly christian science curriculum we wanted to make sure they handled the science well. Sometimes christian science textbooks can be really heavy on the "christian" and not so good on the "textbook". After reading through the general science book for 2 hours, my husband felt that Apologia was very balanced in their approach, while also being very christian in their worldview. I'm relieved that decision has been made.

Tomorrow afternoon I must write lesson plans and menus for the week. I seem to focus more on one than the other at any given time but have a hard time doing both, so wish me luck!