This homeschool year has been different than the past nine years I have been homeschooling.
One, I’m only homeschooling one child this year. Of course, I was only homeschooling one child for a year or so before I moved Little Miss into official lessons when she was about 5.
But this year, my oldest has already graduated.
Little Miss is in fifth grade, and this year we added online classes to the lessons we were doing from our physical textbooks.
We were already using online videos/curriculum for math, but this year we found Outschool and began to add art classes, two science classes, and three clubs where Little Miss can interact with other students and an instructor.
Little Miss absolutely loves the art classes. We will not be giving them up anytime soon.
She also enjoys the other classes — even the science, which I thought she might want to give up over the summer, but doesn’t want to.
She actually wants to continue all of her classes this summer, so we are becoming semi-all-year-round homeschoolers.
Doing that would actually be great because it means we can take breaks whenever we want and still hit our required 180 days of school under the Pennsylvania homeschool law.
In addition to the online classes, we recently enrolled Little Miss in art classes once a week about a 45-minute drive from our house.
She’s really enjoying this.
Mixed with online and in-person classes is the curriculum-based work we do.
This year we are using Beautiful Feet’s literature-based history curriculum, Evan Moore worksheets for grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and The Good and the Beautiful for science unit studies.
We have read The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy this year and excerpts from a fiction book about the Civil War.
The Singing Tree focuses on World War I from the perspective of Hungarian-Austrian farmers.
We usually read more books throughout the year. I’m not really sure what happened to us this year but since we are continuing to homeschool during the summer (at least part time anyhow), we have plenty of time to dig into another one.
We meet with our homeschool evaluator in the beginning of June, but before that I have to give Little Miss a standardized test online, which is required in Pennsylvania for third, fifth, and eighth grades.
Yesterday, Little Miss, The Husband, and I stopped at a book sale at a library in the town where Little Miss takes her classes.
That visit resulted in me breaking my book-buying ban for March and April. I am, however, going to try to restart the ban on April 1—no fooling!
I did not institute a ban on myself because I think it is bad to own books but because I have plenty I want to read and I’d like to get through those before I buy anymore.
There was a nice selection at the sale this year but I stuck to authors I knew, for the most part, and even bought two books I already own.
They were both Jan Karon books. One of them is a paperback version of a huge hardback collection I own, and I thought it would be nice to have a “lighter” version of that one.
Of course, Little Miss needed to pick out a couple of cozy mysteries for me, a tradition when we visit this sale. I was very excited she picked up Cat Who book I haven’t read yet and then I found another one I hadn’t read yet as well.
The Husband found three books I might read after him, including a Raymond Chandler one, The Big Sleep.
Here is my stack, without The Husband’s books:
The only problem is finding places to put these books we keep buying. Luckily, I have a plan to rehome the ones I have read and don’t think I will read again. That went very well last time when I put them all in a bag for my husband to distribute to the many free little libraries he drives past. Sarcasm alert because both he and I forgot about the books and I’m fairly certain they are still sitting in the trunk of my car.
I’ll keep trying to find homes for these little guys.
The weather has been so crazy for the past month, but the last two weeks have taken the cake. One day it is 70, the next 32 and so on. My sinuses are miserable from it all. Today the high is going to be 34 and I won’t be doing much other than taking some groceries to my parents.
This upcoming week shouldn’t be busy at the beginning of the week, but definitely will be after Thursday, which is when my husband is having dental surgery. I’m not looking forward to that day because we have to get up so early and because I am just nervous about the procedure itself. We aren’t sure how he will be feeling afterwards but he is calling Monday to get more details.
Completely off topic but I just watched Ilia Malinin win his third World Figure Skating Championship and fell into a YouTube spiral of watching his videos afteward.
I’ve never seen anyone skate the way he does, pulling off those quad axels and jumps like he’s just skating along on a frozen pond somewhere. It’s like nothing for him. Of course, I know it has taken years of practice, discipline, and work to get there but it just feels like it’s nothing for him.
The height he gets on those jumps is like nothing I have ever seen before. I’ve been watching skating for more than 30 years and I definitely have my favorites from way back. Some were stronger in artistry and some in technical skills but they were so entertaining either way. With Ilia you have someone who is strong in every aspect of skating. He is outstanding technically but also artistically.
When he does those jumps it is almost other worldly — beyond human capability.
In case you haven’t seen him yet, here is his program from today’s World Championships and a then video that shows you how amazing his quad jumps are.
How have things been going for you? Anything interesting going on or going to go on?
