Weekly Wrap-Up

What an incredibly fun week this was! We started with a vacation day, so that's always good. We have a tradition of taking birthdays off. Since Laurel's feel on a weekend, we took Monday off. (Come to think about it, we took the previous Friday off, too!) Some friends had invited us to go to the indoor waterpark resort Wilderness in the Smokies, so we spent the entire day relaxing with friends.

As for our academic world, everything went so smoothly this week. We are nearly done with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and enjoyed lots of good discussion. Here's a picture of my jelly roll from last week, which didn't taste terribly exciting but it was fun anyway.

My new commitment this year is to do math the very first thing each morning. (Please understand: first thing means 10 a.m. for us.) This has been working out beautifully for us. Duncan is moving quickly through his math book. I skipped a whole year in Saxon because it seemed terribly repetitive, and so far it's a breeze for him. Laurel was thrilled to get her math program started this week. Actually, she has been enjoying it thus far. My friend Amy offered to let us borrow her Teaching Textbooks Pre-Algebra, and we finally managed to connect this week. Laurel heard a rumor that the first three chapters are tedious review work, so I've promised that I'll look at it and let her skip if appropriate.

In science we read about the astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, and fortunately this coincided with our first monthly trip to the Heritage Planetarium. Duncan especially loved this show on stars. Laurel enjoyed hanging out with her friends but wasn't crazy about the show itself. I actually found it interesting, although I must admit that Earth and Space Science was pretty much my least favorite college course ever. I don't let my kids know that, though, so shhhhh.

Friday afternoon brought our first meeting of the hiking club. A couple other moms and I thought we needed to start an official one. We live in one of the most amazing spots in the U.S., and so many people have expressed that they would love to hike more regularly. With only a few days' notice, we had a nice group of 30 adults/kids on the hike. Some people got lost and ended up on a different hike, but that's OK; there will be more to come! After the hike, there was lots of time to play in the river.

Saturday I had a most unusual and wonderful day: I had the house to myself! Randy and Duncan went hiking, Laurel was babysitting, and I was outrageously productive. I got all the lesson plans done for the Readers' Theatre and Creative Writing classes I'm co-teaching/teaching at our co-op, as well as getting various things ready for American Heritage Girls, which kicks off this week. In fact, yesterday was so productive that I took a nap today. One more week until our co-op classes begin, and then our weeks take on a whole new dimension!

Linked up with the Weekly-Wrap Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers