My Daughter's Brain

On Friday, our homeschool group meets for co-op (I plan to discuss our co-op in a future post).

During the winter session, my girls attended classes on the Iditarod and the Human Body. It was a funny moment when we got in the van today and DD(10) yelled, "Wait, I forgot my brain!" They made a model of a brain and she had left it behind.

Slow week

It's been a very slow week around here. At the beginning of the week, we started reading Fairy-Land Science, The Princess and the Goblin, and Anne of Green Gables. The girls also worked on their math in the beginning of the week.
On Tuesday, I went to Wal Mart to make prints of Rembrandt and Van Gogh for our artist studies and got into a confrontation with the Wal Mart photo center manager about copyright. It seems her only understanding of copyritght law was what Wal Mart told her. She had never read or studied the law herself. She refused to sell the pictures to me and was rude to me by yelling at me, being sarcastic asking if I got permission from Van Gogh to print the pictures and telling me that she didn't care if I was a customer there. It was a very ugly scene and I left extremely upset. There are many more details that I won't go into here, but her ignorance of the law is a shame. If it were me in that position, I would research the law before spouting it off to customers.
So that threw my entire Tuesday off.
Later that day, dd(9) had a fever. She was still feverish Wednesday morning, but seemed better in the afternoon. Thursday morning she woke up with a fever again. Then little brother age 3 developed a fever of over 103. So Thursday was spent tending to him.
Today I am supposed to go out of town for a scrapbooking weekend with my mom. We are under a winter storm warning all day today. So I am a little nervous about driving an hour away. I hope the roads clear up. This is something my mom and I do every year and we look so forward to it. It's time we get to spend together by ourselves.
So this week, life happened. We didn't get much done academically. Yet, I'm okay with that.
According to Pa Homeschool Law, we have to get 180 academic days in each year. So we sometimes get cretive.
On Tuesday, we discussed human psychology, public speaking skills and copyright law (civics).
On Wednesday, we covered health - what is a normal body temperature and what it means to take care of yourself when you are ill. We also covered math with taking temperatures. DD(9) is very math minded and she kept figuring out the difference of her current temperature with a normal temperature. It snowed on Wednesday, too. So we got to do some nature study. We didn't record anything in our nature notebooks, but we observed and discussed nontheless.
On Thursday, we continued our health studies to include proper nutrition and "fun food" (our mild word for junk). We also took out the Legos and built towers and houses and such. I think that may be art.
Who knows what today will hold.

"This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." -Psalm 118:24

Mom's Night Out: Personality Assessment

Apparently I am part Beaver and part Lion. At our Mom's Night out last night I learned (or it was confirmed for me) that I am a leader, am organized, a task master, and am introverted. This part doesn't make sense to me. I want to be around people, am dying to make friends but have difficulty making friends because I am introverted. For a few years now, I have been working on being more extroverted, but it is so hard. I can organize and run a homeschool support group complete with a small co-op,but when I am invited to someone's house for dinner, I have a tendency to freeze up.
The visual that came to mind last night is that I am sitting on a park bench alone and am waiting to meet that friend who can sit with me and just observe the world with me while we talk about deep things that make us think. Someone who will talk with me and is interested in giving her point of view but is open to hearing others. Someone who would enjoy going to a bookstore with me or for lunch in a park. Oh yeah, if this someone has kids, she likes my kids and I like hers and they aren't interrupting us a million times as we try to talk.
The other part of the personality assessment is that I am a perfectionist. Could be why I'm so lonely all the time.
Hmmmm....

Building Relationships

Okay, this is spooky! On Monday we started reading Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by Charles and Mary Lamb. I was worried that it would be too much for dd(10) and dd(9). On the interenet I found (I believe at the recommendation of somebody on Ambleside Online), pictures of costumes for a play of Twelfth Night. I printed out a set for each child and they cut them out and laid them in front of them.
I started to read. They rearranged the characters according to the story and we discussed the story as we went. I planned to read just small portions each day and take two weeks to read it.
Here's the spooky part - Each day when it was time for me to stop reading, my children begged me to keep reading. They startled me the first day with their screams of "No, no. Read more!!!!"
What's that? Read MORE????
We finished the story in 3 days and they said they can't wait for the next story.
In her blog, Happy Heart talked about building relationships in the New Year. It inspired me and here we are. Building relationships with Shakespeare of all people. Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU!