Lovin' Summer

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In my life this week…

Cleared the brush pile in the south field and leveled the dirt left behind by the huge animal diggings.
Sanded, primed, painted, re sanded, painted the buffet. I chose Graphite by Benjamin Moore. It's a bit too grayishy/blue for what I was thinking. I'm not convinced I like it yet.
Weeded and planted in the garden, all of holes are filled ; )
Harvested pounds of organic, fresh strawberries, lettuce and spinach.
Wrote a couple of articles for Heart of the Matter on-line and The Homeschool Village.
Daily walks.Nightly Thunderstorms.

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In our {summer} homeschool this week

Rod and Staff Grammar 3, 5 and 9. Feeche is finishing up Alg I and working on lines for MacBeth. We still haven't hit a good scheduling groove as far as adding in the TC DVD's but we'll get back to those next week.
The notsolittles are going through the Stargate Atlantis episodes with out Wraith and are full up of techno questions such as "What is a nanite?" Good thing we have plenty of Science News mags lying around.

*3*

My favorite thing this week was…

putzing around the yard. 6 flower beds and our large veggie/herb garden, plus the continued reclamation of our property gives us plenty to do. After our long winter, it is great to be outside doing it!

*4*

My burning question of the week....

When did thorough and fun become mutually exclusive? There's been several on-line discussions on homeschool forums about the dumbing down of homeschool curriculum, how to make homeschooling "fun" and "how thorough should one be?" Here's my humble opinion. Sometimes learning is.not.fun. In fact, often, learning is hard.work. Everything we learn ultimately is filtered through our understanding the grammar of the subject(grammar stage), really getting ahold of the complexities of it and putting it into our grid of understanding (dialectic stage) and then owning it and being able to share that knowledge with others (rhetoric stage). We might not choose to get to the rhetoric stage with everything, but if we do, it will usually entail hard work. The belief that learning should be fun is self defeating because that definition crowds out the reality that learning can be satisfying, challenging, exhilarating in ways that go beyond fun. It's like being wrung out from a hard physical work-out. No one who works out that hard really calls it "Fun" and yet they go back for more...for that adrenaline rush sense of accomplishment that goes deeper than fun. But speaking of which...

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...Fun links....

Darlene at Time Warp Wife is hosting a "My husband rocks because..." contest. Check it out here.


Zero Tuition College is a new web-site that supports auto-didacts who are skipping college and Nike at Thrive has some fun ideas for th 4th Star-Spangled S’mores 4 ways. and ...

*6*

...Father's Day

First Thing has a list of Best Dad's in T.V. and Film. Fun list. Viking Man is getting a snow blower. It's actually already gotten and sitting in the garage goat shed (seriously, our property was advertised as having a "2 car garage" when we first looked at the house. 2 car  IF you are driving Model T's).
Speaking of celebrations, we've been married 26 years already. Time flies when you are birthing babies, gathering degrees, homeschooling, moving around the country,  working like crazy, having fun!

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What's Working

I've been way more on top of menu planning. Last month's food/ household supplies/dog food cost $475, plus we ate more variety. My fav web-sites for good main dishes are $5 Dinners and Martha Stewart.

What's happening in your corner of the world this week?

Linking up Hop, Homeschool Mother's Journal, Conversion Diaries