Oct. 23, 2007: Long Overdue Update

It's been a long while since I've posted. We've had a bug travel through here and back again. :( The Pirate has been coughing for a few days now but it never seems to affect his energy level! He had requested that we expedite his MFW studies so that he can get to the unit studies that he wants to do so we are now on Butterfly and Frog lessons. We skipped Rock and Jewel because the Painted Lady Butterfly caterpillars that we had sent for arrived! Our lessons had gotten delayed so the estimated time when we would need the caterpillars was a bit early. Anyway, they are in their chrysalises now (5 of them). We've probably got less than a week before they emerge as butterflies! Should be pretty exciting.

The Princess is done with the Farm Unit and now onto the Pond Unit which we never got to with the Pirate before switching to MFW. It's exciting for me too not to have to do all of the same stuff over again - especially after just having done them the year before. (I don't think I could be a schoolteacher! For various reasons, but also because of the tedium of teaching the same things over and over again.)

For field trips, we had gone to the Lombardi Ranch in Saugus for the pumpkin patch. Got a nice pie pumpkin there which we transformed into pumpkin pies (first try with real pumpkins!) last night. We'll get to try them today after lunch. :)

The Pirate's ceramics class has been going well. His teacher has been doing well with giving the kids themes to work on for their clay creations. So he's got a lot of food items (i.e. spaghetti and meatballs, sushi!, oatmeal) as well as some other things like dinosaur footprints, a bug, and a fish. (I have got to start putting pictures on this site!) I think there are 3 more classes scheduled.

AWANA is going well. The kids are doing great learning their verses - I've been quite impressed. I've been learning them too but haven't tested myself as of yet. :/

We have a Harvest Party coming up with our homeschool group but I'm wondering if the current wildfires all around the southland will affect it over the next few days. Last year we had a great time and I know the kids are looking forward to it. Their dad is supposed to make this one which should make them very happy.

I've been getting so many links lately to free unit studies, esp. for Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons that I'm getting anxious about doing them! We are going to take some detours from their current curricula to do these studies but I haven't marked much time for Thanksgiving since we will be traveling for a week afterwards. If we take too much of a detour, the Princess won't finish her curriculum until July (which I can envision will probably just be aborted as things get crazy for summer).

The Pirate should be done with MFW by the end of January. We got a used copy of Explorabook: A Kids' Science Museum in a Book by Klutz Press. Expect for some agar packets, I think we have everything to do the activities in each chapter. This book would make a great science unit study - lots of hands-on. He still wants to study pirates, of course. His other picks (as of a month ago) are Robots and Machines, Inside the Human Body, Film, TV, Media Production & DVD/CD Recording, and Food Processing and Production. Of course these are all titles that I gave to paragraph long descriptions of each topic.

Depending on his interest level at the appropriate times, I've also added Rocks (and other collections), Gardening, Superheroes, and Trains to the consideration line-up. That's a lot of topics to cover from February through June (5 months)! So that might work out to about 2 weeks per topic. We'll see how it goes.