WR: good tired and visually rich

The 5th Annual Winter Warm-Up was last Saturday. Basically is a morning of food, good speakers and door prizes for homeschoolers. I figure if stay-at-home moms are the "lost" women of our society, homeschoool moms are even more so. This year, again, we had 2 awesome speakers, lots of laughs and good fellowship. But it was the week after the One Act Play and frankly, I got bone tired on Saturday afternoon. Not really great timing because our SD TeenPact State Class is in a week and a half, with a lot of little details still to get sorted.

We have an amazing team this year, as well as a decent sized class. 41 students from all over the state for the 4-day class and over 30 for the 1-day. It's all coming together and we are going to have an AWESOME state class this year. Tim Echols (see picture below), founder and prez of TeenPact is our camp dad and we have 6 staff and interns coming to spur the class on to growth in the areas of leadership, citizenship and spiritual maturity. If you don't know about all of the great TeenPact opportunities check them out at http://www.teenpact.com/

Besides all of that we worked on math and phonics. Flower has 10 lessons left in AlphaPhonics and is recognizing more and more words everywhere. She is doing simple addition and subtraction and just loves to count any and everything. She continues to skip the number "15" just like College Woman always did- fortunately Miss R's grown out of that so I'm sure Flower will too.

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KB and Feche Boy did Latin, IEW and Math. What a difference it makes to have the TM for Latin! Feche-boy and Cub worked on TP homework for alumni- great rhetoric questions this year comparing Hebrew, Roman and Greek cultures. Love it. It fits in great with the History of the World MegaConference that we have been watching. Watched 2 more of those DVD's this week on the Puritans and the Founders.

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We also watched Biology 101: Biology According to the Days of Creation. Not sure that I would count it worth a full credit of high school bio without supplementing but it is engaging, informative and has beautiful pictures and graphics. The kids were going to watch a segment while I worked on TeenPact stuff and ended up watching a couple of hours worth, all four of them, from the 6 year old to the 18 year old. They producers plan to add Chemistry and other courses and we plan to add them to our collection.

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We also watched a short movie produced by 40 homeschool students in conjunction with Patrick Henry college called Come What May. Well done. Someone gave Viking Man a copy of Fireproof and we watched that as well. I have to say, knowing what we do about the church that produced it, we are impressed. So, while we didn't get a lot of reading or history done, and it felt like a slog-through week, we were "visually rich."

Co-op tomorrow and we've made some changes. We are including time for math games for the youngers, phonics games for the pre-readers. IEW, the new Shakespeare program and we are going to fit in Francis Shaeffer's How Shall We Then Live for the upper grades.

My big win this week is getting the vacum cleaner fixed. Our Akita (80 lbs of beauty and fur) is shedding and my house has a fine film of fur over ALL of it. Looking forward to applying suction power to every surface on Saturday! It's the simple things, isn't it?

How was your week? Are you surviving mid-winter blahs?