We hit the road running after our Thanksgiving Break! That Sunday evening we had our church's Hanging of the Green service and I directed my kids' church choir. Monday we were busy with CC all day and then J had his dress rehearsal for his Christmas concert. We had gymnastics class and we all had choir rehearsals at church on Wednesday night. Thursday was ballet for B and a holiday reception for D's work. Friday we had our 4H Christmas party. My husband was on call all weekend. Saturday we had Nutcracker rehearsal and caught part of my nephew's swim meet and ate lunch with my sister's family. We also got out all of the Christmas decorations and the tree is lit and fully decorated! Sunday morning I directed the children and the adult choirs at church and then I spent most of the day chaperoning my son's Christmas concert with the children's choir and the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic. Today was our CC Christmas celebration potluck luncheon and then we gathered for end of the semester class presentations. Whew! Tonight I just relaxed and watched a movie with the family!
In our homeschool this week…
Wow! We are wrapping up our first semester of Classical Conversations already! We just completed Week 11 and began Week 12 today. We have learned about the Civil War and learned all of the math skip counting songs. This week, we also begin learning the Latin translation of John 1 after working on memorization of Latin vocabulary for the last several weeks. My class was excited today to say a whole sentence in Latin! We also completed our My Body models and our unit on music theory and the tin whistle. I had my class play "Hot Cross Buns" in two different keys on their tin whistles and then we sang the skip counting song for the 9's. They did a great job of presenting these to our whole CC community after our Christmas Celebration luncheon!
Helpful homeschooling tips or advice to share…
I like making lists and checking things off of them! It does help me to get things done. However, I hope to relax a bit and take the time to just enjoy having my children at home with me. School work needs to get done, but don't pass up the opportunities to enjoy family Christmas traditions or to begin new ones during this December!
I am inspired by…
Jesus Calling by Sarah Young has been an inspiration to me ever since my sister-in-law gave it to me for my birthday this summer!
My favorite thing this week was…
My husband was exhausted from a hard weekend of call and had to be back at work this morning at 7am. He worked really hard this morning to finish up in time to drive 20 minutes to our CC Christmas celebration and surprise us there! He finally met some of the other families there, at lunch with us, and even participated in part of our afternoon class with us. The kids and I were so excited to have him there with us!
Questions/thoughts I have…
In the past, we have had a full curriculum for all 36 weeks of the school year. (We are required to have 180 school days each year.) However, one of the things that is nice about CC is that we only have 24 curriculum driven weeks. So after this week, we have several weeks "off" and I am trying to plan out exactly how to use that time. We will still have another two weeks of school before Christmas and then we will have about two weeks in January with a fun vacation trip too! I am hoping that with our school time freed up we can do more focus on just the basics, review our memory work, add in more reading aloud, and definitely come up with some Christmas crafts or projects for us to work on. We will still be busy, but it will be nice to have the freedom to structure our learning a little bit differently for a short time.
I am cooking this week... Well, my fine, chef-boy-ar-dee husband actually does the best cooking around here and he made a delicious crockpot full of taco meat for our Christmas Celebration potluck today for our CC home school community! We also brought tortillas, scoop taco chips, salsa, sour cream, shredded cheese, and lettuce! Yum! We had it again for supper!
I’m reading…
I am just happy to have a few minutes to "read" some blogs and check up on facebook during this busy season! I am reading Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, again and the The ADVENTure of Christmas, by Lisa Whelchel. It is a great resource for explaining many of the symbols that we use to celebrate Christmas and it also has directions for an activity for each day to go along with the reading. We have not had time to do any of the activities just yet.
A photo, video, link, or quote to share…
We found a way for both children to help place the angel on top of the tree together this year!
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