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February 2020 homeschooling in review
Okay, I’m starting to this halfway through the month. Let’s see if I can get everything written up week by week. It always makes me smile when I can pull that off.
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Week 1
The funny part of having teens is sometimes they randomly take your phone and get pictures. Like that top left picture. I’m assuming that’s Princess under a pile of blankets, but I honestly have no clue who took that or when.
We had a random cold snap this first week, and so I was having fun texting the kids a joke about Elsa making Texas cold. However Princess is now at the stage of “Frozen is stupid,” so she didn’t think it anywhere near as funny as I did.
Speaking of Princess, for our Writeshop lesson (check out my Writeshop review) there were to interview someone for a memory. The advice was to make the person you’re interviewing feel at ease, which means she made me a pot of tea and we sat and talked. It was quite well done.
While out and about we saw that middle picture where they had some problems with homophones. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a pet rabbit.
I still need to deliver (as of writing this on February 16) the Encouragement hearts to the 8th grade girls. I’ve got them all printed off, but haven’t brought them to church.
We watched Hidden Figures since we’d read the book the month before. I opted to make snacks based on the time period rather than the book because it was hard to think of good snacks for the book. One snack we made was Party Mix, apparently Chex Mix was wildly popular at the time.
That last bottom right picture is from the youth retreat we went on that weekend, which was a nostalgia fest for me because I went there when I was in junior high and the bunk rooms are completely the same from when I was 13. The retreat had an amazing speaker, my only downside was not being able to go on a hike.
Week 2
I don’t have a lot of pictures from the week showing any of the stuff we did, instead, it’s lots of random observations.
First, I’m pretty sure my son took this picture, and it rather amused me to see it.
Next is the next block in my quilt for the month. Overall I’m loving the colors, but I’ve got some points that aren’t quite aligned.
I really have no idea why I have two pairs of scissors on my stairs, I was so unsure of it that I had to take a picture and share it with everyone on Instagram. No one had any great ideas of why my kids left two kids safety scissors on the stairs.
Did you know there’s a history fakebook you can create and put together fake Facebook pages for historical figures? I had a lot of fun putting together a page for Henry VIII.
As I’m going through my Bible study, I’m trying to share what little bit I’ve learned for the night on Instagram. I love to read what other people are studying, and this was a random one of the things I shared for the week.
We stream our Writeshop videos from my iPad onto the TV, which means I screen-mirror, and the kids discovered that if you take a picture of the screen mirrored going on over and over again looks pretty cool.
Finally, the boys and I go to Barnes and Noble for an hour each week while Princess volunteers over at my Mom’s church. For some reason I took a picture of Superman, but I have no clue why. Something must have amused me.
February Week 3
Sooo…. I spent Friday of this week hiding under the blankets and crying because my head hurt so much I was throwing up. With that, I don’t remember much of this week. These pictures are mildly helpful, as I’m writing more is coming back, but it’s been a long week. Also, none of these pictures are in chronological order.
The kids are continuing to work their way through the end of Writeshop 1 (my Writeshop review), and it amuses me when I see them pulling out the textbook to verify some of the writing they were going to do. In theory, they turned their papers in on Friday, but since I was hiding from the light, I couldn’t do the teacher rounds of editing, so that’s a bit behind.
Technically the next picture happened at the start of the 4th week, but I needed one more picture to fill out the collage, and I really like this picture. Princess LOVES to swing. She probably spends an hour or so each day outside swinging and talking to the trees and singing along with her music. She has worn through two sets of swings. She was about to wear through another pair, and it was discovered before she broke the swing while on it, so she’s been waiting patiently for Jeff to fix the swing, and now it’s fixed, so she can go back to swinging again. This is all good.
On the subject of Princess, this next picture is of her working on a going-away present for one of her friends. This past year has been a year of changes for her friend group, and it’s still working its way through just what that means, including one of her friends moving overseas.
The funny part about the kids having phones, is I take pictures like this pan. I sent the picture to whichever kid it was that was supposed to of cleaned this obviously diry and still covered in grease pan. Said child did come and clean the pan, but it was with a dose of, “Really Mom?” Yes child, really.
Princess’ AHG troop had their annual talent show, and so we contributed our usual comedy to share with them. This year it was Romeo and Juliet, abridged. My Mom did the filming and she started off filming it vertically, which meant when she switched to horizontal, it was just all filmed sideways…. Sigh.
That picture is, of course, me wearing Friar Laurence’s wig, which my son thought was hilarious. That wig spent a lot of time randomly appearing on people since we finished the play and I finally allowed them to play with it.
That bottom left picture is our most recent teen hangout. The boys turned out strong, but sadly most of Princess’ friends were sick and unable to attend. But, it was quite amusing to watch this giant table of teen boys playing different card games they’d all brought.
And that last picture is from our family campaign when I was given that to extrapolate, but the problem is, I don’t speak Greek. It’s literally Greek to me (thank you Shakespeare). After quite a lot of work, I eventually figured out it’s essentially “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
February week 4
We started off the last week of February with a visit to the local community college to find out about Dual Credit. A fair amount of it I already knew from my research, but some of it I learned about then. Afterward we took all of the kids out to dinner and talked about their questions and their fears.
While we had lots of schoolwork going on, my main memories were of silliness with the kids.
Silliness like folding our spill towels (a collection of older towels not in the best of shape we use for cleaning up spills and cleaning) while blobs under blankets. In case you’re wondering, it is not very effective. Also, Superman tried to fold a towel using only his mouth. Also not very effective.
Superman and I had a running prank going between the two of us, hiding the dust broom for the other person to find. I’m not even sure why or how it started, but it kept showing up in so many weird places.
The top two pictures on the far right are from the boys randomly piling stuff on me. One is Batman throwing a blanket on me, and then Princess saw me attempting to get a picture from underneath the blanket, so she took my picture for me. I also may have been laughing so hard, that my hand was shaking.
The one below it I took as the boys, in particular Batman kept piling more and more blankets on me, finally topping it all off with a box. This one I actually took.
We played a bunch of games this week, but it looks like I only captured them on Instagram stories, so the only game I have proof of playing is Torres, but we also played Fools Gold and then Ex Libris, which will let me finally write up a review/how to play. I got it for Christmas a few years ago, and super love the literary puns in it.
There also came the point where I barricaded myself in the office so Superman couldn’t poke me back. I think? I honestly don’t remember what I was trying to keep him from doing, but if you’re wondering that was not an effective barricade if I didn’t literally sit there holding it in place, but it was funny.
I’m sure that’s the goal, right?
And for that last silly picture, Princess and I found a unicorn doll that looked like it was designed to be thrown at your brothers. We had great fun laughing at that one.
But to actual schoolwork……
We did a facetime call with Aunt Tara which I streamed on the TV as we discussed Frankenstein. She came up with much better questions than I ever could have. If it had been left to me, I would have come up with questions like, “So, how emo was Victor Frankenstein?” “What time was Frankenstein the most whiny?”
In case you can’t tell, I recognize what Frankenstein did for literature, but it was really not my style of book.
Instead she had great questions like, “The subtitle is a Modern Day Prometheus,” who was Prometheus in Greek mythology, and what did he do? Which character is like Prometheus?” There were a whole slew more of great discussion questions she had.
Friday, the kids turned in their last paper for Write Shop for the year. Well, for Write Shop 1. I’m debating what we’ll do for the rest of the year. Right now I’m debating between jumping right into Write Shop 2 or using the PAC English Language Skill curriculum. We’ll be using PAC English Language Skills for March, and after that I’ll make my call.
And that’s all of February.
9th Grade Months in Review
2020 in Review
Comments
One response to “February 2020 homeschooling in review”
I just love these summary posts. It makes me feel like I can peek into your lives. I think it’s so cool that you are still so close to your teens. It’s kind of disappearing slowly here 🙁
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