Our Homeschool Journal: Celebrating a Birthday

This week my baby boy turned seven.  Considering his current tank obsession much of our celebrating revolved around tanks.  I made little tank cakes, and his gifts included many tank-related items.  His fascination with tanks is completely self-driven, and we just supply the tools.  He can rattle off the names of tanks, which country used them and in which war.  He’s learning so much and he’s proud of his expertise.  It’s a joy to watch our children develop into such unique individuals!

In our homeschool this week…

The three R’s rolled along smoothly (hooray!), but with scheduled events and a birthday celebration we didn’t accomplish a lot of extras.  A little history (a great book called Old Ironsides: Americans Build a Fighting Ship), a little nature study (we found grubs, the larval form of Japanese Beetles that are wreaking havoc on lawns), reading aloud, and preparing for our weekly geography club (we learned about rainforest animals).

I am inspired by…and therefore am working on…

Colleen at Raising Lifelong Learners wrote a great series of posts on a “Back to Basics” approach to family life and homeschooling.  I enjoyed all of the posts, and plan to implement many of her ideas.

Step 1: a family mission statement.  I pored over her ideas and also posts from Simple Mom and Confessions of a Homeschooler (she has a pretty printable one) and have been discussing it with my family.  My boys (both my son and my husband) like to crack jokes during serious discussions, but I’m going to persevere and get ideas from everyone to include in our mission statement.  Coupling this with a revamp of our chore chart (inspired by Mary) and Colleen’s plan for Easy Discipline (earn an extra chore to make it up to the family) and I’m hoping things will run a little more smoothly in our home.  Or at least I’ll nag less and the bathroom counters will get wiped down more often!

Places we went and people we saw…

We had many of our scheduled events this week: library book club, Cub Scouts, piano lesson, Geography Club, and a homeschool group playground meeting.  Dentist appointments filled up an entire afternoon.  Add to that celebrating a big boy turning seven and we had a very full week!

My favorite thing this week was…

The morning of my son’s birthday as we sat working on building a tank I heard the bus coming.  I yelled, “Oh no!  You’re going to miss your bus!”  He played along and pretended to run to the door.  We both grinned and realized how happy we were to be together.  And perhaps he was happy for the no-schoolwork-on-your-birthday rule.

My favorite resource this week is completely working for us!

Teaching Textbooks.  One week into it my daughter and I both love it.  You can read my full post on our curriculum change from Khan Academy to Teaching Textbooks here.

We’re reading…

Still the same books! I am moving through For the Children’s Sake slowly–partly because I don’t have much reading time for myself, and also because I read it slowly, going back over sections that are especially applicable to our homeschool.

We’re well into the voyage to Treasure Island, and I’ll share a picture of a little cheat sheet I made for us to keep the characters straight.  My son has an especially hard time remembering names so I made this character map with stick figures to remember who was who.  No laughing.

I’m grateful for…

Our healthy baby boy born seven years ago, who tells me I’m the best mommy.

Thank you to the wonderful hostesses with fun link-ups on Fridays. Be sure to join the fun and see what other homeschoolers are up to!