Snowfall Homeschool

*1*

From the lovely Valentines Day Tea Party last week!

Is anyone else having a hard time keeping up with their life besides me? We are down to a mere 3 kids (count 1 of those as a driving, $ earning, vote casting, functioning adult, and it's really just 2)- the least amount of dependent children we've lived with in a decade. You'd think my life would be less hectic. The reality is that I have been busy. Busy, busy and having a hard time keeping everything done.
On an unrelated note it snowed today. Lovely, fresh, big as quarter's snow. 6". Woot!

*2*

That being said, we've been rocking our homeschool world. What a difference it is directing a couple of kids instead of a bevy.  I've tweaked my management system yet again. Each kid has one 5 x 7" blue card with all of the curriculum on it that they are using. Certain things get done daily, others not always. The beauty of it is when the kids "run out" of something to do, they just check the card and pick something from it. The true beauty of it is that more days than not we get the entire card done. Woot!

*3*

Sequential spelling. They're all on different lists. Just keep swimming. Flower has been reduced to tears over spelling on more than one occasion. For one, I've had only 1 natural speller in my bunch and it isn't her. For another, she has left-over spelling/ writing anxiety from a comment a girl in a past writing class made - over and over and over again- about how she was a really terrible, horrible, no good, very bad speller/ writer. Nice. My sensitive souled, non-natural speller was given the "get over it" pep talk this week by Moi. The sensitive, compassionate I understand pep talk just wasn't doing the trick. And I've been given the lists to her to spell outloud, rather than to write down. This girl is auditory, baby. If she hears it, she has it. If she writes it or sees it, not so much.
Why do my kids think that they should have been born with all of the educational downloads they were gonna get already installed?

*4*

Math, Perplexors, Quarter Mile, World Geography- finishing up the Balkan States and still loving the simplicity and efficiency of Memoria Press, Rosetta Stone German, Science- Apologia General and A & P MP3, Tiner's Biology, pre-physics, , Horatius, Famous Men of Rome, Lone Start Learning. This week we threw in some Rod and Staff Grammar and Mary Daly's First Book of Whole Diagrams. We're fun like that.

*5*

Dr. Dh is better. The bronchial/ asthma/pneumonia combo that has crashed his system for the past 3 months is finally backing off and he grows stronger by the day. If you've been praying for him, Thank-you!! He's still not 100% but he is working more and getting through the day without crumping.

*6*

Been reflecting on the Book of Jonah this week; you know, the one ingested by a whale?  I'm realizing that Jonah was one tough, stubborn, hard as nails cookie. It wasn't so much that he was afraid of the Ninevites (and who wouldn't be?), it was that he believed that they should pay for their brutality. He didn't want them to get right with God, he wanted them to get annihilated.  At the end of his infamous story and the end of his book he did what God told him to do, but he's still having the discussion with the Lord and raising the battle cry;  "C'mon, God - Justice! Kill the killers; death to tyrants!"  And the good Lord says it's Mine to decide who gets mercy, who gets justice, who has favor, who lives. I'm liking Jonah more and more. He engages with God when things don't make sense. In the end, he is obedient, but he's still asking. And God says,
“What’s this? How is it that you can change your feelings from pleasure to anger overnight about a mere shade tree that you did nothing to get? You neither planted nor watered it. It grew up one night and died the next night. So, why can’t I likewise change what I feel about Nineveh from anger to pleasure, this big city of more than 120,000 childlike people who don’t yet know right from wrong, to say nothing of all the innocent animals?”
(love the bit about the innocent animals- the NKJV talks about the hierarchy of plant, animal, man- with no apologies for being species-ist.)

*7*

Finished "So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport last week. So many thoughts regarding ed and child rearing and living. A post is coming, just have to coalesce my thoughts.
Reading The Ramsey Scallop by Temple to the kids. One of my very favorite books, set in the Medieval Ages. A beautiful story of journey, faith restored, and young love. This is the 3rd time I've read it out loud and the youngers are enjoying every bit as much as my older kids did.

Don't forget to stop by Saturday and link up with Share It Saturday!
And could you, would you please hop over and vote for DS 18? Thank-you ; )!

How was your week? What'd ya do?