Weekly Wrap-Up

Really? A whole week since I last blogged? I don't know what is happening to me. Between regular life, teaching 4 classes for our co-op and running to activities, I can't seem to find blogging time. I have so very much to blog about, truly.

But for now, here's what's been going this week.

On Monday, the rest of our co-op program began, adding the preK-8 classes into to high school classes that had already begun in mid-August. I have only a vague idea of how many people participate in our classes—probably 130 families out of the 250 families in our support group. It's big. I teaching or co-teaching three classes: Mission to Mars (24 kids grades 5-8), Extraordinary Adventures literature circle (13 kids 4th-6th), and basic essay writing (18 kids 5th-8th). All of our classes went really well, and I am really looking forward to this semester!

Needless to say, we are zonked on Mondays when we get home at 3:45 p.m.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we continued on with our regular studies at home. Duncan and I are still studying Japan and reading The Master Puppeteer together. We also added in The Indian in the Cupboard this week for literature circle.

Laurel's been working diligently with all her co-op homework. Randy's been helping her as needed with physical science, which is lovely for me.
Laurel's seeing the big jump from the middle school 4 hours/day to this year's 6-8 hours each day. But for the most part she is doing a good job of finding balance. Last night we were working on her Excel homework until 10:30, so that was a little rough.

Duncan asked a lot of questions about 9/11 this year. He was just 9 months old when it happened so obviously doesn't remember anything. I saw a link to a short movie in a Simple Homeschool post that turned out to be fantastic. It's only 11 minutes long, but it really captures so much of the heroic measures of ordinary people in the face of tragedy. Definitely OK for kids. As Duncan said, "This is our history lesson today, isn't it?" We also watched a compilation of news broadcasts about the attacks. It was strange to me that he was asking all about what happened. It's so much a part of our recent history that somehow it never occurred to me that he didn't know all the details.

What else? Well, we took advantage of homeschoolers' week at WonderWorks, which is always fun, especially with friends.



The special rate allowed us to go for only $11 total (2 free and one discounted). Normally this would have cost over $40 for just the three of us.

On Friday we have our British Lit and European history classes, each meeting for 1.5 hours. Duncan gets to go hang out with a friend during this time. In Kate's European history class, the kids made mini-trebuchets and had a marshmallow battle. A history lesson they'll never forget!


And that's about it around here this week! Randy and Duncan are at a Boy Scout camporee. Laurel is going to spend much of the day preparing sets with her drama class. And so that leave me doing.... lesson plans!

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