Our Week in Review

I need to say, again, how much I love home schooling.  These last two weeks we have had the BEST discussions during and after our morning devotions.  I so love the opportunity to hear the perspective of my boys, to discuss life issues from a Biblical worldview, and together, to apply Biblical truth to things in our culture and our lives.  LOVE IT.  So, so thankful that home schooling affords us the luxury of time and opportunity to do this.  It makes the hard days totally worth it.

Another reason I love home schooling is the opportunity our boys have to spend time with each other during the day.  Son G and Little Man are no longer room-mates, but had shared a room for 10 years and have a really strong bond.  Here college man is explaining fine points of the Star Wars movie franchise to Little Man.  All our boys are anxiously awaiting the release of the next Star Wars movie in December!

Last weekend daughter G came home.  Yay!  Here is the artist in her studio space at college.

Some of her recent work.

This is what a "printing" station looks like....

....and it produces work like this.  Basically you paint the glass with black paint, and then wipe OFF the "picture" that you want, then lay paper on top of this and transfer the remaining black paint to the paper.  It is an interesting study in looking for the "white" instead of the "dark."

Daughter G came to both her brother's soccer games to cheer them on.  Her cheering must have helped, because they came away with a win and a tie!

Also while she was home we took the opportunity to do our annual tradition of painting pumpkins.

I love this time amongst the siblings!

Their finished work!

For son C's Spanish class, they were to draw and label (in Spanish) all the parts of a house, and the teacher said she would give extra credit for a 3D house rather than a sketched one.  Son C rose to the challenge and spent hours building a lego replica of OUR house!  It was two stories, and the top story lifted off to show the kitchen and all the other rooms on the ground floor. It was amazing!

Here is the sliding glass door from our family room to the patio.  The door actually slides!

In his brother's bedroom he even put a guitar in the corner. :)

I absolutely loved this little detail....on a shelf in his own bedroom he put a tiny replica of a Pinewood Derby car and a soccer trophy.

In history last week we learned more about the presidency of Andrew Jackson.  Boy, he was a super popular "man of the people" president!  After his inaugural speech he invited regular people into the White House to celebrate with him, and they got so rowdy (climbing on furniture to get a better look at President Jackson, and breaking glasses, etc) that White House staff had to carry huge tubs of ice cream out on the lawn to lure all the people out again!    Can you imagine if that kind of thing happened today?!

He had some really big issues to try and resolve during his presidency.  Two big ones that did not get resolved completely were the United States' relationship with Native Americans, and the slavery issue.  As we know, the slavery issue would grow more and more tense until a civil war broke out over this issue about 30 years later.

Little Man read all about the history of the state of Texas, from American settlers first going there, to Mexico's independence from Spain, to Texas's War of Independence from Mexico.  Very interesting, with lots of interesting characters.

In other news, our beloved youth pastor got married.  He is 38 and had given up on the hope of marriage, when the Lord completely surprised him by bringing a lovely, beautiful, caring woman into his life.  We are all so happy for them!!  Here are our boys at the wedding....they clean up pretty well, don't they?

God is good!  Looking forward to what this next week holds.

Thursday's Thankful Things

Today I am thankful for....


My wonderful counselor, and the opportunity I have to pursue counseling.  It is so helpful for me during this intense period of transition.

The Bible Study I have joined on Wednesday nights.  We are doing this study, and I am gleaning so much each week.

Fall.  I love that God made four distinct seasons for us to enjoy!  They are each so beautiful in their own way.

My husband.  His job has been very stressful of late, but he is the same even-tempered, patient man we all know.  I love him so!

The new office I created for him.  The children nixed calling it the "study," claiming that made it sound like a room for an old person, so we are calling it just the office now. :)  It is almost completely done (waiting on the rug and window shade I ordered).  It's peaceful and calm and clean and beautiful.  I love it and hubby does, too!

Our Week in Review

Reason #67 why I love homeschooling....on an 80 degree day in October, you can do your school work outside!

This week in history we focused on the presidency of John Quincy Adams, and all the reasons why even though he was an excellent and experienced statesman, his four year presidency was pretty ineffective.  I absolutely love history!  It's so amazing to find connections between current events and events of long ago.  We tend to think that political events and contentions of our day are unique, and they really aren't!  When John Quincy Adams was elected in 1824 he ran against 3 other men, and none of them got a majority of electoral votes so the House of Representatives had to declare the winner!  Sound familiar?  Hanging chads, anyone?

After his term as President was over, John Quincy was elected and re-elected to the House of Representatives and served there for 18 years.  He was the first former President (and only one other has done it since) to later serve in Congress.  He also practiced law in his retirement, and as a very old man was co-counsel on the landmark Amistad case that was heard in the Supreme Court in 1841.  If you are not familiar with the Amistad story, you should be.  It was a Spanish slave ship whose slaves broke free, killed many of their captors, and forced the surviving sailors to head the ship back to Africa.  But the sailors secretly managed to steer the ship north instead, and it was captured off the coast of Long Island.  The slaves and the ship were then held in Connecticut while people tried to sort it all out.

The Spanish government claimed the slaves as their property and wanted them returned.  The ship owners claimed them as THEIR property and wanted them returned.  At that time, even though slavery had not yet been abolished in the United States, slave trade from Africa had been.  So some compassionate U.S. attorneys realized that the slaves, having been born in Africa, were actually free men and should be returned to their homes.  The ensuing trial was an important step toward the abolition of slavery in the U.S.

We watched the excellent movie "Amistad" for movie night.  It is rated R for violence and brief nudity, so be forewarned if you decide to watch it.  The violence of the slave revolt on board ship is very graphic, and so is the violence of the slave captors toward the slaves while aboard ship (that is also where the nudity occurs).  It made me weep to see the injustice of it.  I'm so thankful that we can learn and talk about such important historical moments together as a family.

Also this week Little Man finished a story about King Arthur and is now working on an original Medieval themed story about a boy named Ben.

He also began working on his home-made Halloween costume with my hubby's help.  He is creating a robot suit out of cardboard and some $2 goggles. :)

I spent a lot of time prepping and taping walls to prepare to paint daughter H's bedroom, which we are turning into an office/guest room.  I have decided to call it the "study."  Pics coming soon! 

Wordless Wednesday

Our Week in Review

We are slowly settling into our new school rhythm.  I say "new" because each year is new and different than the one before.  Our weekly studies are a combination of work we do for mom and work we do for co-op classes, but history remains our "spine."  This week was kindof interesting because I combined three weeks of our Year 3 Tapestry of Grace curriculum into one discussion.  We wrapped up our reading of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, learned about the push for independence in South American countries, and studied President Monroe and his famous speech which became known as the "Monroe Doctrine."

Whew!

Three days this week we just sat in the family room and read history books together.  Much of our high schoolers' work is rigorous and intense, so it is nice to be able to just sit and read with each other sometimes, and spontaneously share what we are reading about.  I love that as a homeschool mom I have control over the curriculum, and not the other way around!

Before discussion today I prepared a lunch of some foods that Lewis and Clark would have eaten on their long journey west to the Pacific Ocean (beef jerky and sausage, which they would have made from buffalo intestines, but we just bought at Kroger!), as well as a traditional Chilean food called stuffed empanadas.  For the empanada recipe, go here.  We ate, we read, we talked.  Delightful!

It was hard keeping the dogs away from our food, haha!

Science and foreign language classes are all taken at our co-op now, but I am still the primary English teacher for all my boys, and I absolutely love doing IEW writing with Little Man!  He is working on a narrative story of King Arthur and doing a fabulous job.  He is quite a good writer already! 

He is also doing IEW's "Fix It" this year, where every day he fixes a sentence or two that has deliberate spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, and then rewrites the correct version in his best cursive handwriting.  By the end of the year he will have an entire story, perfectly edited and written out by hand!  Fix It spans five years (six now, but my old version only has five), so he has four more stories to do after this one.   Here is a sample of his corrected Fix It writing from this week.  He is working on "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer":

This weekend we are looking forward to two soccer games, painting a bedroom, and singing in a worship choir this Sunday.  What are you looking forward to this weekend?