Wow, this blog has languished for almost three years. A lot has happened since I posted last, so there is really no good reason to try to summarize that long period of time here. I'm guessing that stories will come out as appropriate.

To jump right into our school day today, it is now 4:10pm, and we just wrapped up about ten minutes ago. My daily goal, when we don't have anywhere to be, is to finish by 3:30pm. Unfortunately, we've not been meeting that goal last week or this week. Wednesdays are half days, so I'm hoping we can get everything in tomorrow before we have to wrap up. My kids go to a Christian homeschool P.E. program, where they also get to be part of a large group of kids and learn social skills along with their physical education. Tomorrow they will be doing their President's Challenge tests, if the weather allows. Last week they got rained out.

One of the reasons I stopped blogging in 2009 was that it was taking a lot of time to keep up with everything--school, extracurricular activities, housework, and at the time school. Fortunately, I completed schooling back in 2010, but now I'm working and have just as little time for blogging. However, I have been realizing that there is a greater purpose to my blogging here than to just satisfy my own desire to record and write. This blog is really a school record for my children, who may one day appreciate reading about the different things we participated in over the years. So I now have reminded myself of the purpose that I started out with on this blog: to write for my children.

This year, my son has been working on a 4th grade level (5th for math) and my daughter at a 2nd grade level (2nd & 3rd for math). His reading is probably at a 5th grade level and my daughter is reading at a 4th grade level. This is our second year of using The Mystery of History as our history spine. We're currently using Vol. II: The Early Church and the Middle Ages. For science we've been using the Apologia Exploring Creation series. This year we've been using Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures. For Bible we have returned to Bible Study Guide for All Ages after trying several other approaches. I really like how thorough BSGFAA is but also how it helps younger children to process some of the stories and concepts in the Bible. We've continued to go through Sonlight readers. My son has been using Teaching Textbooks this year, our first year. It's been going pretty well. He does get frustrated with doing the problems, but I think it really has more to do with laziness than with actually not understanding a problem. My daughter is working through Miquon Math, an excellent program. She is on the fifth workbook now, so I imagine she'll be wrapping up the series in the middle of the next school year.

We are still participating in American Heritage Girls (our third year) and Cub Scouts (our fourth year). My son switched dens after Tiger Cubs, but we've remained at the second den since them. He is now a Webelos I and will cross over into Boy Scouts in November! The girl is a Tenderheart (2), and I have been her squad leader since the beginning.

Our church community is different from the one we were participating in the last time I posted. We are participating with a wonderful fellowship of mature Christians taught by an amazing pastor. I can't imagine participating in worship with anyone else. Our church recently began home groups, so we started attending one about five minutes from our house every Wednesday evening. That has been a great experience, although all of the other children are from the host family and are younger than both of mine. My younger one does fine but the older one is less happy. He's learning to interact with younger kids though, an essential skill.

We've also moved into a different house from the one we were living in in 2009. It's only fifteen minutes away from the old house, and we're in the old neighborhood all the time anyway. I do like our new neighborhood so much better. My son was having neighborhood gang issues at the old place, and we have had peace here. Praise God! My daughter has also found a friend who lives in the neighborhood, so she is happy. Our old neighborhood provided her only one little girl to befriend, who was there only part-time with her dad.

I guess I need to come up with some nicknames for the kids. The Kitty Cat and the Transformer are long gone. I guess right now I've a Ninjago or Mr. Minecraft and a Monster-High girl. But I don't like those for nicknames. Instead, let's go with something a bit more long term. How about the Engineer and the Artist? I'll be the Writer and Editor.

This year has been so educational for me! The kids moan and groan, no matter what we do, it seems. But I've really enjoyed our studies. A lot of it has been the history and the literature that we've been doing, along with poetry and hymns and composer study. So I am particularly excited about next year. We'll be moving into the Renaissance in Europe and explorers, which means the beginning of U.S. history! We'll continue with The Mystery of History (MoH) as our spine for the next two years. This year we also added some TruthQuest History guides (TQ) as a supplement and have been reading the essays by the author--no books from the book lists yet. Along with that we've been reading A Child's History of the World (CHOW) alongside our MoH studies and reading books from the All Through the Ages history guide and book list. We'll continue using all of these resources over the years, just switch the focus. Once we wrap up MoH V. 4, we'll use the TQ guides as our driving curriculum. I am planning to add Notgrass's America the Beautiful to next year's history. It sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Well, I'm planning on structuring next year's school into more of a unit study-type approach. Still Charlotte Mason but making a greater effort to synchronize the different subjects to relate to the same time period.

The next step to this, of course, is to add appropriate literature selections. I'll be relying more heavily on the book lists noted above for this. I want to add in more different media too, however, like movies. If we have time. I always overestimate how much we can get done in a school year!

Well, I am prattling on because of my long absence here. I'll wrap it up for now.