It's Over...Mostly

School is done!!! Can I get a woot woot? Now you get the quick run down. Lucky!!

• When we started this school year, we were coming off a not so stellar year before. The year before I was depressed. Meds probably would have been appropriate, but you know how stubborn I am. That was during the whole moving, holding, not moving stage of our lives. I wanted this year to be different, so it was. We got alot accomplished, even a new schedule and some new extras. We are exhausted.
• We had to make some rules. Blech!! Up by 8, working by 9:30. We still need to tweak that. I have a hard time remembering that what could take me 10 minutes to do will take the kids a while longer. I'm hoping over the summer to get rooms cleaned, maybe move a piano, and get the kids a good work space in their rooms. There was too much distraction some days and giggling galore when there should have been work going on. Hopefully, we can change that.
• Our schedule got harder to manage when we added music. It has been worth every second. My kids are such great musicians. You should hear my sweet girls play piano. The boy gets better and better every day at guitar. Those lessons will continue over the summer. We've changed the time of both piano and guitar and I think the times now are great. Hopefully we can keep them when school starts back in the fall. We also added a weekly bible study that I facilitated. That threw us for a loop at first, but I feel like we hit a groove eventually.  
• The baby finished a grammar workbook, 3 reading comprehension workbooks, and a logic workbook. That may not sound like much, but for a 2nd grader, it's a bunch. She worked ahead with some of her stuff. She follows the lesson plan unless she likes what she's doing, then she goes ahead. She really likes to read. I was afraid I would run out of reading comprehension for her. Have you seen how many workbooks I have for that? She got further with the math curriculum than the boy did when it was his. But once again, when she enjoys the work, it's not work. I wish I could get her to like cleaning her room.
• The boy finally ran into math that was a little harder than he was used to. He is my math smarty. He got frustrated a couple of times, and this is what makes me glad we homeschool. Don't understand the way it's explained, let's try this a different way. And it works. Yea! For his language arts, we used the rest of his workbooks from the year before. The curriculum we were using comes with 10 workbooks and a teacher's guide. Last year he only finished about half of them. See what I mean about slacking? He finished the rest this year. Next year he starts a couple of book studies. 
• We changed the big girl's math twice. The math we started with just didn't give her enough info to do well, so we moved to something else. It was good, but there was not enough review of previous concepts. Ok, there wasn't any review except the chapter test. I did like that it showed the solution instead of just the answers. The last one seemed to be much better for her. She also finished her language arts. She did creative writing this year. We found she has quite the talent for poetry. Who'd have thought? Then she started her curriculum for next year. It was a great preview of what to expect. 
• No science this year. We just couldn't get to it. I had high hopes, but it didn't work. We did art instead. I had downloaded a freebie about cartooning. I was a little leary at first. It was so much fun. The kids did an awesome job. We supplemented with an art DVD that had four or five lessons and those corresponded with our cartoon study. We could actually see the concept work and understand it a little better. It's easy to fit a 10 minute art lesson into our day, but not always easy to find a half hour to 45 minutes for science. Next year, though, I get to teach science twice in one day. Good thing I like science.
• We ditched our history curriculum and studied American history. We had the best time. We started by watching America: The Story of Us. We would watch an episode, then build lessons from that. One of the best parts of the day was watching our history while having lunch. We learned so much this year. We took a little time to do a unit study on some Indian tribes. I even found some movies based on each tribe we studied. Sometimes they had a lot to do with the tribe and sometimes it didn't. Indian in the Cupboard doesn't have much to do with the Iroquois except that the Indian was Iroquois. But it was a cute movie. 

Next year is still up in the air. We have to get our dance schedule to know what our other schedules will be. I hope the baby will be able to participate in girls club again next year. She had the best time. The big girl's style is cramped a little. The boy is now in youth with her. This should be interesting. We have a few summer plans, but not much. The big girl is teaching herself calligraphy. That is perfect for her. My two oldest will go to camp for a week. This will be the boy's first year at camp. The baby will be spoiled rotten. We may do summer dance this year. I have fun math for the kids. Just a little, to keep their skills up. And we always join the summer reading programs at the local libraries. We are close enough to three libraries that we could join them all. And lots of lazy. OK, probably just a little lazy. You know us, we don't sit still for long.

Have a great day.