I Am a Polygamist

Happy Wednesday, friends!

Did the title of this post catch your eye? I thought it would.  :) But it's not what you think. Let me explain...

A few weeks ago, I found this fun graphic somewhere on internet.

I saved it to my laptop and emailed it to my children. They loved it and it was alot of fun hearing them trying to determine what kind of reader they think they are.

Then I wondered..what kind am I?

It wasn't very hard to figure it out.

Other than my daily Bible readings, I am reading Great Expectations..(love, love this book, but I just finished Tale of Two Cities, which I also loved! Charles Dickens makes it so hard to choose a favorite, doesn't he?)

Volume 6 of the Charlotte Mason series..

And for poetry, Emily Dickinson..

So according to the above graphic, looks like I'm a grade A bonafide polygamist.  And loving every minute of it.  :)

Which kind of reader are you? Do tell!

Nature Exchange #3

I am on  a roll, friends - 2 posts in one week!  :)

In spite of the time crunch here, I just had to share some photos from our recent Nature exchange with Silvia.  This is something we do once a year with Silvia and her family. I have shared previous Nature exchanges here and here.

My children and I have always thought that collecting and sending the Nature treasures to Silvia is the best part...

..until the box from Silvia arrives and we discover what she and her family have sent us....

Books! Lovely, living books!! Take a peek..

Not to mention sweet notes from her girls, a yummy Texas fruitcake, a volcanic rock from Italy, a fridge magnet from Malta, beautiful journals,

And these gorgeous tablecloths..
                                     

The children are devouring the books, and we are all devouring the fruitcake. Thanks again, Silvia! I am so thankful for our friendship!  :)

"As iron sharpens iron, 

So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend." ~Proverbs 27:17

Our First Weeks of School

Hi friends,

Wow! I haven't blogged since right after our computer crashed. I know I promised a post about our first week of school as soon as our computer was repaired, but after we got it back, there was an issue with our camera card and I couldn't upload photos from it.

I finally found a way around that issue and can upload photos now. Whew, this has been an electronically challenging 3 weeks!

During the first week while our laptop was in the hospital, we used Kindles and the old laptop when it let us use it. It has a mind of its own and turns on randomly. But we have hard copies of books, too, so all in all, the week wasn't too bad. Besides, for our family, the first week of school is a week of adjusting to the new schedules, getting used to the new books, etc, so adjusting to not having the laptop wasn't that big of a deal, since we were already in adjustment mode.

So, what have we been doing the past few weeks? Well, I would give a play-by-play of our recent goings on, but to be completely honest, there isn't time for that. I can't figure out why, but for some reason, schooling this year is more time-consuming than in previous years. Maybe because the children are each a year higher in AO and it's getting to be more of a load for each child. Maybe because my energy levels have bottomed out because of sleep deprivation. Whatever the reason, there is very little time for me to be online at all..which could actually be a good thing, right?  :)

However, I can squeak out a few minutes to share some photos of what we have been up to.

Math lessons..

Of course, Kim had to get back on the Math bandwagon, too.  He needed to brush up on the months of the year. ;)

Readings..

Narrations..

Online Spanish lessons..

Nature sketching..

Musical instrument practice..

We also had our annual Nature exchange with my dear friend, Silvia. That's always a thrill.  :)

There it is in a nutshell , a very small nutshell, mind you. :) I hope to be back in a week or two to share some of our handicrafts with you.  

Until then, I hope you are having a great year so far!  :)

Crash!

Happy Sunday, friends! I hope you are having a lovely Lord's Day.
I have been awol for the past week. There has been so much that I have wanted to share about last week- our first week of school. The week came in not with a bang, but a crash...as in the hard drive on our newest laptop, which we bought in April of last year, crashed on Monday morning.
Now, we have Kindles and an old pre-historic laptop that operates at will, but all of my AO bookmarks were on the newer laptop! Ack! And being the techy illiterate person that I am, I googled how the laptop was acting -or not- to diagnose the problem. After some research, I guessed it was the hard drive. So the next day, I dropped it off at the local computer fixer upper and he confirmed it was the hard drive. He performed the necessary surgery a couple of days later, and I am going to pick it up tomorrow. But all of my bookmarks, photos, downloads..basically everything is lost!! Ugh!!
I am trying to remember "in everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." (1 Thess. 5:18) But sometimes it's hard to be thankful when things go wrong, isn't it? *sigh*
Anyhoo, I am posting this using my phone, so please forgive any grammatical  and spelling errors. I have never done a blog post on my phone before. But desperate times call for desperate measures, right? ;)
I hope to post about our first week of school sometime this week.
Until then, have a blessed week!  :)

Nature Study - Natty and Her Butterflies

We have been having alot of activity around our Butterfly Bush lately. Butterflies of different colors and sizes have been stopping by for a visit. All of us have been enjoying watching these beautiful creatures,

but Natty, in particular, seemed especially interested in them. She began catching them in a net and looking them up in our butterfly field guide to identify them. The other children got in on it, too, by looking outside and letting her know when they spotted a species she hadn't identified yet.  It became a family activity!  :)

Next, she wrote down her discoveries in a notebook: the date, the species, and the location.

Then, she sketched several of the species in her new Nature journal.

By the way, her butterfly study continues: she is filling up her notebook and can identify virtually every species that she sees!  :)

Now some people might  think all this independent Nature study is no big deal, but I do.  Why? Because I am seeing some of the fruit of a Charlotte Mason education. Stopping, observing, sketching  - in a word: keeping. Natty will always remember these days of catching, identifying, and sketching her butterflies. And I will always remember the thrill of watching her and thanking the Lord for leading us to the CM philosophy of education.

"Let them once get in touch with Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life. We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things."
~ CM Series, Volume 1, page 61

sharing with Celeste (Keeping Company)

Prepping for a New Year

Well, friends, it's that time of year again - our school books for the new year have arrived, and I am in a planning frenzy! Actually, the frenzy has died down a bit, and I am in the process of re-organizing our school room to make room for the new books. We have been in dire need of bookshelves for a couple of years, and, thankfully, my mom recently gave us some cedar lumber that belonged to my dear Dad. So hubby and the boys are planning on making new cedar bookshelves as a fall/ winter handicraft project.  I can't wait to see how they turn out!  :) 



But back to the books. Our children will be in yr10, yr8, yr7, yr6, and yr3 this year.  Here is a peek at some (not all) of their books, in no particular order. As I mentioned above, we in the organizing stage, so the books are here, there, everywhere! But here are the ones I could track down.  ;)

 We have Kindle books, too, and some online readings, as well. But I really want the children to have hard copies of the books. So I make sure that they each have hard copies of some of their books.

Now for scheduling...for the past 3 years, I have printed the AO weekly schedules. But this year, I decided to try the pdf versions of the schedules. They are smaller and use less paper and ink!  :) And I have the entire term on one page. I like that. If I need to look ahead for some reason, I can easily find the info on the chart. Now, will the children like them as much as the other schedules? That remains to be seen. Hope so.

I also print the Composer study, Hymn, Folksong, Shakespeare, and Plutarch schedules so that I don't have to keep going back to the AO website to look them up.

For Artist study, I print a copy of the painting and place it under our clear vinyl  tablecloth. 
It's always in view so the children become very familiar with it.   I also have a way of Keeping our Artist study, for those who may interested, but more on that in another post.

Now for the binders..we have previously used these folders (one for each child), which contains their schedules, maps, calligraphy paper, etc.

But the folders became worn, as you can see, and by the end of the 2nd term, they were overflowing with papers.

So I decided to buy each child a binder this year...

 Now, there is plenty of room for all their AO stuff!   And they had such fun decorating their cover pages.

Each child gets a new Nature journal this year. (There is nothing quite like a fresh, new Nature journal, is there?) I got these from Wal-Mart. They are smaller than the ones we have previously used. But the children picked them out, so I went with their suggestion.

Of course, my children aren't the only ones who get all the goodies at the beginning of the new school year. I get a treat, too. And this year it's a hard copy of the Charlotte Mason homeschooling series! All six volumes! No more highlighting on the Kindle! No more endless note-taking!

Happy homeschooling! :)

"All your children shall be taught by the Lord, 
And great shall be the peace of your children."" ~ Isaiah 54:13