Weekly Wrap-Up 8/23

I love having this blog to use as a type of journal of our experiences together. It's so fun to browse back through posts and photos with my kids and relive all of the fun things we've done. It also works out great to highlight only those shining moments so my children are all "Awww! I remember that, that was so fun" and are left with those warm, fuzzy feelings of schooling together. It's my secret ploy to make them forget all the "grrrrrrr" moments we may have had as well!

Here are our highlights this week:

For me, a major highlight this week was having my science lesson plans featured on Free Homeschool Deals! Wow! I had more than 3,000 visitors here yesterday and those plans were downloaded by nearly 1700 people! I am completely in shock! Many of you are reading this post as a result of finding me there so I'd like to say WELCOME and thank you to all of you who are following my blog!


Miss 7th Grade and I had some chats early on this year about having to really work hard now that she's older. Her load this year is much heavier and I was honestly worried about how she'd handle it. She loves geography so much, she decided to take on the high-school level instead of the mid-level I offered her. Well, this little lady has used her "Quiet Time" (a tool for mom's sanity in our house for an hour each afternoon) to study and has even taken photos of her study sheets with her iPod so she can study at night if she can't sleep! I am so amazed at how independent she has become with her school work and how willing she has become to give it her best! What an overwhelming transformation in this sweet young lady!


Miss 5th grade is my "just let me rub the book on my head and I'll totally get it" kind of kid. She truly amazes me. She normally struggles with her vocabulary so this year we tried something new. We are using English From the Roots Up and I think this is really appealing to her more logical brain. She can use word roots together to truly understand words and has even asked about words not covered in her lessons cause their meanings "just make sense" now. It is such a relief to know your kids are really learning and you've found something that works well for them! Also this week, little miss decided to start reading Lord of the Rings. This is a 450+ page book, so I'm really proud of her!



Mr. 2nd Grade had such a great week! We learned about habitats, double-digit addition with regrouping, characters, setting, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs! We made a Complete Sentence Buddy as well to remember those important parts of a sentence! I hadn't officially tested his reading level yet, so I was curious how he would do reading the story The Best Thing In The World which has all 220 Dolch sight words through the third grade list. He read through the story well and only got tripped up on two words (both 3rd grade level) Since he just started second grade, I thought he did excellent! Amazingly, he keeps thanking me for teaching him to spell so he can write all kinds of notes to everyone! So fun! However, this guy has hit a stage of getting really frustrated over things not going his way and has an incessant need to pester everyone! He’s always been all boy and rowdy, but obedient and my sweetheart, so this has been tough for both of us. If anyone has a boy who's been through this, I would love some advice to help him deal with this more constructively!

So tell me, what were the highlights of your week?