Fast, Fast the Fall doth Fly

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My goal for regular blogging has meet my schedule and regular hasn't happened. What happens is that we start the week out have a solid day of homeschooling on Monday, go to Classical hit Conversations on Tuesday, have staff meeting on Wednesdays, have our in -home co-op on  Thursday, hit Friday, at which point we have no food in the fridge, I'm behind on work, the kids have papers and lab reports due, there is no laundry in anyones drawers and we are hitting the week-end, which is its own kind of special busy. So, yeah. We are mainly keeping up. Sort of. 

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Cub and Flower finished their Bridgeway Academy on-line classes this week. Cub just finished up a 1/2 credit Chem Lab and Flower finished up Architecture with Brick Building The Chemistry Lab was every minute worth a 1/2 a credit. The Architecture class was just that and twenty over 7 of the 20 principals of Architecture- both classes included homeschoolers from around the globe, knowledgeable, encouraging teachers and challenging coursework. If you'd like to know more about BW's Learning Labs and get a discount code for the next couple of sessions: 

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The Grammar of Poetry is still a blast. So far, we have gone through the following tropes: personification, pun, simile, metaphor, synedoche, and iambic, trocahic and anapestic meter. Found William Shakespeare's Star Wars by Ian Droescher in iambic pentameter. Thanksgiving break read-aloud for word nerds.

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So, the kids have been blasting through books- Cub has read The Giver (after seeing the movie, which he liked), Tuck Everlasting, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Doom Wyte. Flower has read Little Women, Little Men, Ana and the King, the Narnia series, and is currently making her way through Pride and Prejudice, Lydia, Indian Captive and Alone Yet Not Alone. I have read very little but book reports of late.

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The kids and I went to see Interstellar yesterday. Great CGI, fine acting, fantastical tale that stretched believability over and over again, relying heavily on deux ex machina for one false ending after another. Personally, I thought the graphics and the thought experiments on time were worth the price of admission, even if the story left a lot to be desired believability wise. Some interesting dialog on mortality and family thrown in for good measure. A fun holiday flick.

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Classical Conversations continues to rock our week. Foundations is what it's always been - a rock solid memory program that gets the kids memorizing a ton of facts in 7 subject areas. New time line cards this year, but the CD is worth it's weight in gold. 

Essentials is where we are all really growing. The charts are brilliant- making a LOT of information completely accessible to anyone who can write. We are learning a ton and (generally) having a great time diagramming complex and complex compound sentences. 

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Latest finds for fun: Byrdseed for amazing academic helps. We've been doing mental math, ala Essentials daily, and there are some great exercises on here! 

I've been kind of going nuts with free printables lately- my desperate search for a creative outlet in my little world of staring at the computer screen. 

There are so many gorgeous graphics out there and are perfect for simple decorating as he couple of Secret Santa's exchanges we are part of .

Silly but good, clean, simple fun, I'll be making coffee filter pom poms with to compliment the coffee filter snowflakes she created for the windows (yes, we've had snow already). 

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