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January 2020 Homeschooling in Review
January happened. I think that’s a good summary for it. The first week was no fun, and then I was sick for a good week and a half, and then I was in catch up, and now I’m finishing writing this 4 days late. So, yeah, January happened.
Week 1
I almost didn’t include the picutre of Princess pulling Mac, because I’m just sitting here crying as I type this.
But, at the point I took this picture, Mac wasn’t walking too well, but he loved being pulled in the wagon as we would take him on a “walk. Sadly we had to put Mac down a few days later because he wasn’t eating and was in a lot of pain, and that was super hard for all of us.
Yeah, that sucked.
A lot.
But, on to more cheerful things.
For our New Year’s Eve movie marathon this year we watched Firefly, and then finished it off with Serenity. Of course, that was long enough we watched it over two days. I spent the time watching it sorting through my fabric stash because….
I joined the Murder Mystery Quilt Club, and I’m having a lot of fun putting together my quilt block for the month and choosing the fabrics for the quilt. Of course, I put that together on the 8th, so technically it’s in the second week, but I was sick on the 7th and so I’m writing this on the 7th.
New Years Day we had the cousins over, and the kids got to see that babysitting toddlers is not all fun and games. They’ve babysat a baby and enjoyed that. They’ve watched their older cousins and enjoyed that. But a toddler…. that was not the fun they were looking for.
Princess led an event for American Heritage Girls, a mother/daughter tea party. It didn’t go quite as smoothly as she wanted, neither her, nor I, were quite as organized for putting something like that together as we would have preferred. When she volunteered to lead this in August, it didn’t seem crazy, now it was a big stress for both of us.
And the final picture in the lower left, last semester we didn’t keep up with all of the labs in our biology class. We all agreed with Mac’s death we weren’t up to jumping full throttle into school, so our first week of school is scheduled with lots and lots of labs.
Like 7 chapters of labs.
No really. I started with lab 3.2 and we’re going all the way through lab 10.2.
Of course, Monday was the day of Princess’ event, so we didn’t get labs done. Then Tuesday I was sick. I didn’t even leave my room. I pretty much slept all day long. During which the kids slowly worked their way through the labs using prepped slides.
Yep, while I lay in bed sleeping and miserable, the kids did their school and figured out how to do the labs we hadn’t done.
It was pretty awesome.
Week 2
Princess and I both wrote books during NaNoWriMo, and for Christmas she wanted to give a copy of her book to her Dad, so I edited it and put it up on Amazon for her, so she could get a print copy of it. We finally got her copy last week (I’m having her work on editing it some more and releasing an updated version later). She’s super excited, and was even more excited when she heard some of her friends bought the bok and read it.
We’ve been working our way through Write Shop 1, and I found out there is a video add on to the course, so I’ve been trying that out for the last couple of lessons, and we’re having fun discussing if we like the videos or not.
I found a vocabulary game, that works on SAT/classic literature vocabulary and spelling called Vocabulary Quest. The graphics and idea behind it greatly amuse me, and I’m loving the vocabulary words they’re working through.
The final lab we did for biology was learning about osmosis. So we did the incredible rubber egg, or a variation on it. Only since I was sick most of this week, we accidentally left the egg in the corn syrup too long, so we took it out and it had collapsed in on itself. It was weird.
I’m trying to figure out just what this picture is. I think it’s one of the boys working on one of the labs, but I really don’t remember.
Isn’t that sad, it only happened a few days ago.
And this last picture is a fun one. I joined a mystery quilt club! Each month I get a chapter for a murder mystery book and instructions to make the quilt block. At the end of the year, I’ll have an entire quilt and theoretically could ahve solved the mystery.
January Week 3
The third week of January started with me mostly not sick, but still without a voice. It was another busy week filled with Court of Awards for Princess (center picture). Random texting of fun history memes (center top). Then lots and lots of rain (as you can see from that bottom right picture).
In between all of that, we had a field trip to the local fire station. We had so many kids on the field trip they split us up into two groups: older and younger kids. The older kids got a chance to talk about what it takes to become a fire fighter, which my kids were intrigued to learn about.
We watched both Phantom of the Opera (which was the December book and a movie) and Princess Bride which Princess was allowed to read in place of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was particularly proud of the ballet dancers for Phantom of the Opera, I modified a ninja gingerbread cookie cutter to make it.
And for a bit of silliness, this is what our homeschool day is often like.
To wrap up the week, we had friends over to play Shadows of Brimstone. We finally successfully finished the campaign we were in the middle of and successfully regained the poor guy’s soul.
And that heads us off to the final week of January!
January Week 4
Okay, and here’s the end of the month.
We participated in a geography fair with our homeschool co-op, and the kids each had to research a different state. I filmed their presentations (and no I’m not sharing those at the request of the kids), and afterward we watched the videos and critiqued them. As part of it, they had to make cookies, and it was really interesting to see how each of the kids approached this. First, they all planned to make their cookies at the same time. So, I had to explain they couldn’t all use the oven at the same time, so that took some revising. It was interesting.
Other pictures for the week, Princess has been watching a cooking channel on YouTube a bunch, and so she decided she HAD to make that super fancy dessert you see in that top corner. It was delicious.
That little bitty picture in the middle was a cookie mishap I had. I was trying to make some sugar cookies for our Hidden Figures movie night (for the “segregation snack”). However, we were out of butter. I thought I could do a 1 to 1 substitute for coconut oil because they’re both fats. Yeah… That didn’t work quite so well, instead I ended up with a blog.
The boys spent their Christmas money on DeadZone, and since playing it, they super love it and are planning how they will get more factions for that game.
I’m taking a look at the ByDesign Science curriculum. I’ve used their stuff before, and I’m looking forward to playing around with it some more this year.
And that was January.
It was a hard month for all of us. Insanely emotional. The kids have dealt with death before, but before they were younger. Now, they’re almost adults. They processed it in different ways.
They took to carrying Mac’s collar around, so I kept thinking Mac was walking into the room, and then getting sad again when I realized no it was just the kids carrying his collar. Batman ordered a schnauzer cap, which he now wears everywhere. Superman, just seems to be ignoring it.
I’m glad January is over, it both like it lasted forever, but at the same time, when I came to the end of January, I wasn’t in the least bit ready for February. I’m still not ready for February and I’m halfway through the first week.
9th Grade So Far
Comments
One response to “January 2020 Homeschooling in Review”
That quilt club sounds fun!
Losing a pet is so hard, but the photo is sweet and I think it will be nice to have it as a memory, even if a hard one.
You always get so much done!
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