August 2019 Homeschooling in Review

Soooooo….. I had this theory we would slowly ease into our first year of high school, and add a subject or two each week. Then, EVERYONE, and I do mean EVERYONE, was like, “School’s about to start, let’s get together!” and suddenly I was looking at a packed calendar where I did not neccessarily make the right decisions on that front.

Someday I’ll learn.

I’m also pretty sure I say this every month.

I’m not learning.

Oh well, there are a few affiliate links in here, and I’ve got all sorts of other stuff crammed into here, so let’s get going!

 

August week 1

This week was our slow week. It also apparently didn’t have lots of pictures, so you get to see my most common view of my kids right now, working at computers.

It’s interesting how homeschooling changes through the years. Way back when they were just starting it was lots of projects and moving around, now it’s computers and submitting work online.

Which means so much more grading for me!

As to what we actually did, we got started on the book and a movie for July (they each read different books) with War of the Worlds, which was a truly atrocious movie. ATROCIOUS. I refused to watch the Tom Cruise version that came out the same year as the one we did watch, and it was pretty horrible. You’ll have to wait until I write about the book because  otherwise I’d hijack this post with the awfulness.

The drawing is from our family campaign. Jeff ran a campaign where we were all pixies, but we wanted to blend into the crowd so I had transformed into a human, but both of the boys stayed in their pixie form (and Batman was a pixie dragon). I got a new ipad for my birthday/Christmas/lots of other things, and it has an amazing drawing program on it that I’m playing with.

August Week 2

This was an incredibly busy week, the first of a few.

I’m going to talk about this in order of the pictures, not necessarily in the order they happened.

First picture: We watched Princess Diaries and Princess was wildly amused how different the Princess Diaries book was from the movie.

Next, Princess threw a “surprise party” for her friend, which the friend helped plan? I really don’t know how that’s a surprise. It was Harry Potter themed and the two girls happily worked together to make the cake, decorate it, and get all of the supplies.

We went out to eat with my Mom and then all the cousins joined us. The kids had a blast getting that pose with all of them piled on top of each other like that. Batman was quite proud he’s visibly taller than my Mom now. My Mom is in a bit of denial on it. Which makes me laugh.

Princess and I went to see the Little Mermaid musical down in Zilker with all of the 8th grade girls, and it was a blast to do that together. Though it was insanely hot.

On the bottom, and I accidentally put in the same picture twice is a picture of my boys at the teen hangout for our homeschool co-op, there were about 20 teens there, we rather took over the coffee shop, and it was fun to see.

We got the Italy Adventure from Case of Adventure, and started working our way through it. We’re pretty much all in agreement the Italian cheese mentioned in the book is never going to be served in our house (it involves maggots, enough said).

Next is the Trinian book. It’s an epic fantasy book written by a former homeschooler. She reached out to me asking me to review it, and telling me all about how she wrote it, and it took me awhile to get into the book because it’s been a bit since I read a true epic fantasy. I quite enjoyed it. I’ve got a review planned, and potentially an interview from the author.

 

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I have now posted every single event I know about for the year and added in color coding. I’m tired just writing it. #homeschoolingteens #iliveinthecar

A post shared by Ticia (@ticiam) on Aug 20, 2019 at 12:53pm PDT

Last picture is our calendar. With August I got all of the dates for events for the next calendar year, so I started adding it in. It’s been a little crazy.

 

August Week 3

This was our craziest week. I really don’t remember much of it. I think we had a field trip that week, maybe?

Wait no!

It was the Not Back to School Party, which I got zero pictures of.

Then Gaming that night for the adults, it’s a wild ride, but if you’re curious, here’s the storyline for our D&D group.

Saturday morning was our annual church training conference, and the boys were allowed to serve for the first time, so they spent all day there. We actually left early for our annual pool party in honor of my friend Sam who died several years ago.

Every year we do exactly what we did when he was alive and go over to his parents’ house and celebrate his birthday. Of course it’s changed a bit over the years as the kids have grown older. When we first did this, my kids were the only ones swimming and we were in the pool with the kids. This year not a single adult was in the pool, we all sat back, talked, and caught up for the past year.

In honor of our Italy adventures we made homemade pasta and the meal from the Italy Adventures book (which was delicious).

The kids continued their fondness of randomly putting stuff on the overhead.

Oh, and I continue to text my kids various history memes I find that are funny. This one is about Australia in the 1930s. I’m also continuing to get pictures for our history notes, that particular picture is for the Council of Trent.

We’re using Google Classroom this year for our gradebook, and I love that they submit their work on the computer, but I’m still working out the flow of how to make this work well.

And finally, I made Batman pose for a picture of the Starship Troopers book before we turned it in.

August Week 4

I think I may be slightly off on the weeks here, but oh well.

I got my birthday present from Tara, and it’s amazing. It’s a Beauty and the Beast tea chest, and it arrived at just the perfect time because I was in the process of reworking my kitchen desk into a tea area. It makes me so happy. After I took this picture (you can see it as that big picture) I added a small heart shaped bowl with a bunch of tea diffusers including my brand new sloth diffuser, you can see it down at the bottom with the Moriar tea cup. This whole area makes me smile now.

But actual events? The boys had the second level of black belt testing, and they did amazing, and both of them got their new black belts, well actually it’s not a new black belt, so much as some new bits added to their current uniform.

I got together with my friend from high school and we celebrated our mutual summer birthdays and got a special dessert, which was insanely delicious!

We watched Starship Troopers while Princess was over at a friend’s house, which was a very good decision on our part. It is made much more watchable while listening to the Rifftrax. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the Rifftrax live, because that would have solved the whole shower scene problems.

Our monthly field trip with our homeschool co-op was down to the Austin Science and Nature Center. It really is interesting how different their reaction is to it versus when they were four.

Superman had to fix his laptop, so he helped Jeff with that, which was a fun break from his usual 42 Electronics work (my review of 42 Electronics).

And finally we finished up the Father’s Day campaign I started with everyone weeks ago. I found a fun D&D5e magazine, Rolled and Told (the link is to the compendum of the first 6 months)  that has a couple of quick dungeon crawls in each issue, and this one featured twin dragons.

Finally, we subscribed to Artist’s Toolbox for the month because of the Famous Artists lessons she’s adding in now. We had a big laugh over our attempts to draw the Mona Lisa using chalk pastels. It was a lot of fun.

 

It’s the start of a brand new grade, so I don’t have any previous months yet. What were you up to this month?