Friday, June 17, 2011

Lovin' Summer

*1*
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.

*2*
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...
*5*
...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!


*7*
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

5 comments:

Karen said...

I absolutely agree with you about learning being fun. It should be more than that.

I'm glad you're getting good weather and having time to enjoy it.

Unknown said...

Absolutely! I do try to listen to what my kids would like to study, choose interesting, but thorough books/curriculum, and add in some creativity, but ultimately there will be subjects and lessons the kids (and sometimes even myself) don't enjoy! Math needs to be done whether you like it or not! LOL Stopping by from THMJ!

Jessy

G said...

I agree. I think parts of learning can and should be fun, but then learning should also be challenging.

I've been happy to get back out in the yard too! Lots of flowers blooming, and weeds to be pulled.

In Everything said...

I love when learning is fun and I'm disciplined enough to find or come up with something "Fun" to do with our lessons. But I totally agree that there are some things that are HARD.WORK and aren't really fun in that season:) Like teaching my middles to read... but when they take off reading it's super fun to explore and be able to read books on their own:)

Dropping by from the Blog Hop:)

Little Badgers Academy said...

Is not it wonderful when learning is fun?
Our weather is way too hot, yard got neglected over our vacation time. I need to go back and check our plants!
Enjoy your summer!