If you’re new here, you might not know that I am a homeschool mom.
I am homeschooling a fifth grader (my daughter) this year since my oldest (my son) graduated last year. We have homeschooled since 2018.
For the sake of the blog, I refer to my daughter as Little Miss.
Little Miss and I started some lessons in early and mid-August this year and then jumped into lessons more earnestly in September. In Pennsylvania, school can begin any time after July 1. Some parents homeschool all-year-round and then take breaks in the middle of the year around the holiday seasons. As long as students are taught for 180 days or 900 hours throughout the year, then homeschool parents are meeting the requirements under the law.
I started lessons early to allow for a longer break around Christmas and in case our school days were thrown off at all by my parents health, which has been steadly getting worse lately.
Part way through September I rediscovered Outschool and signed Little Miss up for a painting class, which she absolutely loves. I say rediscovered because I did purchase one class on there for my son years ago. I’m not sure why we never tried it again.
Little Miss loves her painting class so much I added a drawing class last week with the same teacher.
First, though, what it is Outschool? Second, I am not being sponsored in any way by Outschool to mention it in this post. I’m simply sharing what we are doing for homeschool this year.
Outschool is a site that offers online, live or pre-recorded classes, for students of all ages.
Classes are held through Zoom and there are a variety of topics and subjects offered.
The teachers are independent contractors of sorts so it’s important to really study what the teacher is offering and if it is a good fit for your student.
Each teacher requires they be able to see the student at least once at the beginning of a live class to be sure that they are really talking to a student. There are other security measures in place to keep the learning environment safe. Little Miss likes that the classes are live and she can interact with the teacher and other students during the classes.
We do have to pay for the classes. With my son I took one class and paid for the class I wanted to take. Now the site offers a monthly credit program and then you can purchase extra credits as you go along and each class is worth a certain amount of credits.
The credit program works okay but sometimes some of the classes are quite a few credits and that can get a bit expensive.
In addition to the art classes, I also signed Little Miss up for an animal club that meets Thursday nights. She liked that class so much we went with a Zoology club that is held earlier in the same day, with the same instructor.
I also added a hands-on science class which features a very enthusiastic teacher and a lot of information. Little Miss enjoys the projects but not listening to why the experiment works.
So, altogether Little Miss is taking five Outschool classes, mixed in with the subjects I am teaching her — three science classes and two art classes.
I am also teaching her math (well, actually CTCMath out of Australia teaches her math), English (reading, grammar, spelling, handwriting), and history.
For history we are using the Beautiful Feet curriculum, which focuses on teaching history through literature. I’ve gone a little rogue for the Civil War section of the curriculum because the book they recommended seemed very, very depressing. But, in their defense, the curriculum is aimed at children a couple years older than Little Miss. She’s a bit advanced in her literature, though, so I decided I could use the curriculum as a jumping off point and make it our own. I remove books or supplement with additional books where needed.
The Civil War-themed book we are reading is about two young girl friends — one from the South and the other from the North — who exchange letters during the war. It’s called Secrets of Civil War Spies by Nancy LeSourd.
We also will have classes with our local 4-H once a month, but they haven’t started yet. I tried to get her into more classes or programs in other 4-H programs, but the 4-H program from the county next to us won’t pick up the phone or return my calls. I looked at 4-H because I liked the idea of “clubs” that would meet once a week or even a couple of times a month. Instead, the 4-H in our county holds clubs that teach one thing only for a couple of months. In the winter certain classes (which they refer to as a club) meets maybe once a month. It doesn’t really make it possible to form friendships, but I am sure it will still be nice to attend them anyhow.
Little Miss also attends a church program once a week at our former church.
Writing all of this out helps me to feel a little less concerned about our homeschooling line-up this year. I sometimes worry we are not doing enough for school but when I really look at what we have planned, I realize we are.
What I like about how we homeschool is that we participate in a variety of different styles of education while also having the flexibility to spend more time with Little Miss’s grandparents and for her to spend time exploring the subjects she enjoys. Right now, that subject is art and animals.
I’m excited to see what other subjects she will like to expand on as the school year continues.
Good afternoon! Welcome to another Saturday Afternoon Chat.
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Yesterday we met with our homeschool evaluator and school is now officially over for this year.
We drive 45 minutes one way to meet with her each year.
This week it was a long drive after a week of driving to VBS 20 minutes one way and spending two hours there each night for a few nights. We missed Tuesday night because of a flat tire on our car and Thursday night The Husband drove her. This was VBS at a church we don’t belong to.
I appreciated that because I’ve been having pain in my neck and driving around the windy roads and curves and hills we live on flared it up quite a bit.
I enjoyed taking her on the days, though, because we were able to chat about different things and watch for animals together while we were driving to and from VBS.
Little Miss is fairly independent and usually attends most events without us but lately she’s been a little clingy. She wanted me to stay with her during VBS since she didn’t know anyone, but she got involved easily and most of the time didn’t mind if I was there or not. I didn’t follow her around. Instead, I simply sat in the back of the sanctuary on very pretty, but uncomfortable pews.
She would run up to me off and on and get a hug, almost like a reassurance. The next day I told her I would probably sit in the car and read that night instead of sitting in the church, but she said she wanted me to be in the church.
“You don’t need me,” I told her. “You were having fun without me.”
“Yes, but it’s just nice knowing you’re there,” she told me.
That definitely got me in the heart and left me feeling emotional. I didn’t mind sitting in the church as much after that and enjoyed the hugs she gave me when she ran back to me. Plus, the church has beautiful stained glass windows and it was nice to look at them and watch the sun pour through them.
Two of the days of VBS were very hot but the rest of the week the weather was pretty much perfect. The hot temperatures are gone again for now, but it is not as cold as it was in May. I prefer the cooler temps, though. Not freezing, but cooler. The heat and humidity really takes a toll on me. Much worse than simply feeling too hot.
Yesterday our drive to the homeschool evaluator was uneventful. It was a little emotional for me because it is the last time The Boy will be evaluated now that he has graduated. This marks the end of our six-year homeschooling journey together, and he’s thrilled, but I’m going to miss it.
I loved picking out a curriculum for him and learning it with him. The last two years were pretty hard because he was pretty much over school, but we made it, and he’s ready for his next steps..
Little Miss and I will be continuing homeschooling for this next year and I’m planning to use a curriculum but also be open to more deviations from strict curriculum, as long as it is still educational.
I’m looking forward to our school year and to using art and literature even more than I did last year. I also have my eye on a really interesting music curriculum. Looking for different curriculum is a highlight of my summers, so I do feel a sense of loss not looking for curriculum or books for The Boy this year.
There is another VBS at another church this upcoming week, but we haven’t decided if we are attending it or not. There are two or three other VBS events this summer we hope to attend as well. And there are also 4-H events coming up. So we might have a busy summer, but maybe also a relaxed one at times.
So what have you been up to this past week? Any vacations yet? Family gatherings? Shopping. I’d love to know. Let me know in the comments.
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I am absolutely floored that this school year is over and I know I say that every year but this year really did fly by.
As I always do at the end of a school year, I sit here feeling as if I didn’t do enough, teach enough, or find enough educational opportunities. Looking back through photographs and the paperwork I’ve gathered together for our end-of-the-year portfolio, though, we did a lot more than I realized.
This was The Boy’s final year of school and he did a lot less for me than I wanted to but he was also enrolled in a building and construction class at the local technical school and gained way more experience and education there than I could have offered him.
We did work on some English reading, including Sherlock Holmes and Beowulf, but he also read or listened to several books independently throughout the year. He also researched quite a bit of history on the Byzantine empire on his own and then learned about how to paint Warhammer models.
Many afternoons were also spent helping his grandfather with various home DIY projects and property upkeep and he helped the local cemetery association clean up the cemetery, including the gravestones
While he isn’t yet sure how he wants to use the education he received there, he will always have that knowledge in his future, whether it is for an occupation or in his everyday life.
He’s taking some time off and easing into his next step, something his dad and I support.
He still has a couple of things to write up for me and then his portfolio, which I will present to our state-certified evaluator next week, will be done.
Little Miss and I had a lot more variety in our education this year with not all of it focused on worksheets or physical curriculum. We studied subjects in a more relaxed way, spending more time on subjects that interested us instead of feeling like we had to quickly move ahead.
We did use some curriculum, such as BJU for English and The Good and The Beautiful for science. We also accessed an online curriculum called CTC Math for our math course, and combined that with The Good and the Beautiful, Math with Confidence, and worksheets.
For history and literature, we read historical fiction, including The Sign of the Beaver, Johnny Tremain, The Littlest Voyageur, and Caddie Woodlawn, while watching or reading supplemental material for the subjects each of those books dealt with.
We mixed lessons about Pennsylvania history in with our regular history. We are required to teach history about our state at some point during our children’s elementary school years, but I focus on Pennsylvania and local history at some point in the year, every year.
This year we had the added information about our family fighting in the Civil War, which I researched more of as I wrote a couple of blog posts about that subject.
In the beginning of the year, we attended a two-month art class sponsored by the local library and led by a local artist. He honestly did not teach much at all (and I probably would not attend a class with him again), but having the chance to interact with other children was the main benefit of that experience.
We also attended a couple of field trips with the local homeschool group. That group only met once a month, though, so the opportunity for socializing was not as strong as I had hoped.
Next school year we hope to join a local co-op for some more hands-on learning and interaction with other homeschool students.
There was a time of adjustment for Little Miss that is continuing because one of her homeschool friends was sent to public school this year. That left her without friends to interact with, which is one reason we have signed her up for VBS events, 4-H clubs, and library events this summer.
She participated in a 4-H cooking class in the spring, which she thoroughly enjoyed.
We read books either together or separately throughout the year. Little Miss read two and a half Harry Potter books this past school year. She’s almost done with the third.
Together we listened to Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink and The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis. Out loud to her, I read The Saturdays and The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright and Miracle on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson, as well as Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes (later learned this is usually read by eighth graders), The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare, and The Littlest Voyageur by Margi Preus. We also listened to part of Miracle on Maple Hill on Audible.
In the 2025-2026 school year we plan to use some curriculum but also leave ourselves open for more exploration and relaxed education. This doesn’t mean Little Miss will be left to do whatever she wants, when she wants, but she will have more of a say in what she learns and how.
She will be in fifth grade, and I want her to have a more relaxed educational experience that will let her feel less like education is a chore and instead make it feel like it is something fun and exciting to do.
I’m researching curriculum now and have already been given some great ideas in groups and by Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, who homeschools her son Wyatt.
We are also starting homeschooling activities in July this year, instead of August. In Pennsylvania you can count any activities held after July 1 toward the next year’s hours/days so if we participate in anything remotely educational this summer, I will be counting that toward our final hours. This will allow Little Miss and I to take breaks throughout the school year at any time we need to, without losing educational time.
Honestly, every day offers some sort of education, but I am not the kind of parent who can do something very minor and count that toward school. I know some parents would count a walk down the street as PE and call it a day, but I feel there needs to be active learning of some kind going on for it to count as a full day of school.
What is nice about homeschooling is that there is no real wrong way to do it (unless you sit your kid in front of a gaming device all day, every day, and teach them nothing). There are a variety of avenues to reach the ultimate goal of homeschooling, which is to provide a child with a well-rounded and complex educational experience that goes beyond the four walls of a classroom.
I am excited to see what the 2025-2026 school year will bring us and I’ll try to keep my blog readers updated on it better than I did this school yar.
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Welcome to my weekly chat. I can make you a cup of tea, pour you a glass of juice or milk, or hand you a water bottle. Which would you prefer?
Today I thought we’d chat about my week last week and then you can share about your week in the comments.
I’ll start with yesterday and work backward.
Yesterday was a somewhat long day so I am glad that it is raining today, giving me an excuse to stay home and read, write, and watch some comforting shows.
I really didn’t have to do that much but for some reason it felt like a lot. I dropped The Boy off at my parents to help Dad mow the lawn on their large property, picked up groceries and a prescription 20 minutes away, dropped off a few items my mom had asked for, came home and unloaded the car alone (something The Boy usually helps with but couldn’t because he was still at my parents), cooked dinner and relaxed for a bit, and then finished out the day by taking Little Miss to her first Horse and Pony Club 4-H meeting about five minutes from our house.
I don’t mention my chronic illnesses a lot, mainly because I have not been officially diagnosed with the one illness (Fibromyalgia), but it’s that one that leaves me so dragged out after driving a lot and after a busy day.
When I have a busy day one day, I find I need one or two days afterward to recover my energy and get my muscles to stop burning or aching. I am better off than a lot of people but if I do too much in one week, I actually end up with what is called “a flare” and that sometimes takes me out for a week.
A few weeks ago I had a good week where I felt like I could do a lot. I kept going and by Saturday of that week, I was having stomach issues, exhaustion, brain fog, aching, and all kinds of other odd symptoms. My mom, who has Fibromyalgia, said it sounded like a flare and she may have been right but a couple of weeks later (if there are men here, feel free to skip the lady talk coming up), I started my period, which I have not had in a few months. In other words, I’m not sure if it was a full-on flare of just hormones. Whatever it was, it was annoying and frustrating.
I push through the days even when I have flares, though, and I’ve had more good days than bad in the last several months so I’ll take it. I never have a day where I am completely pain-free or without having to rest through a period of exhaustion, but I do have days where the pain is better and the exhaustion is a little less intense.
In addition to possible fibro I take medicine for hypothyroidism and that is a mess – trying to balance out side effects from the medicine and also get my levels to where it will help the low thyroid issue. I’ve dealt with that for over ten years and it is not fun at all.
I don’t ask anyone to diagnose me with fibro because I’ve tried to mention it to two primary doctors who dismissed me – with one sort of laughing at me and telling me it’s not hereditary when I told her my mom and grandmother both had been diagnosed. Mom says that there isn’t much doctors will do for you anyhow, unless it gets bad enough for them to give you pain meds but the pain meds can also lead to some very debilitating side effects so she doesn’t use them often. If it gets to the point I can’t function at all because of the pain, I will push harder for a diagnosis.
Now, back to the horse and pony club I took Little Miss to yesterday. We’ve been looking for some activities for Little Miss to become involved with and in this area, 4-H is one of the main activities. We don’t live on a farm so we can’t raise a farm animal, but luckily the program offers several different types of clubs for young people to participate in. Little Miss doesn’t have a horse but she is hoping to learn more about them and be around them so we decided to try the horse club.
She is also interested in the Lego Club, a baking club, and maybe a knitting club. A couple of those only meet in the winter. We are waiting for more information on when their meetings will be.
I knew a couple of the parents who were at the meeting last night, but I don’t know them well enough to talk to them and they were all in their own little chat groups so I sat in my car and texted my “online friend” (she’s a real friend that I hope to meet in person soon) instead. While sitting there I noticed that every car around me was a jeep or SUV and all of them were either white or black. It was a bit weird actually.
It was also a reminder to me that a lot of people in my area who are in programs like this have a lot more money than me. Those were some expensive cars. I’m sure many of them have car payments but I still felt out of place with my beat-up 12-year-old Lincoln with the left front still mashed in from the deer we hit last year because we couldn’t afford to fix it.
I also have a headlight that isn’t working because the brackets have broken off the one we purchased that my dad was going to replace for us. That’s a long story but hopefully, we can get it replaced soon.
None of the people there made me feel like a redneck outsider, by the way. They were very polite and kind people who answered questions when I asked. I felt like a redneck outsider on my own because of the damaged front end of my car and the fact I was drinking rootbeer out of a brown glass bottle, making it look like I was kicking back a beer in my old beater car.
Honestly, I’d rather be in the old beater car because it’s not bad inside with heated and AC seats, Bluetooth capability and a built-in GPS.
It also provides me with a comfortable creaking sound that comes from the undercarriage as I take turns. That creaking keeps my life exciting and me on my toes because I’m never sure when the car might fall apart underneath me.
Because of the broken headlight, I needed to get out of there before dark and I thought the meeting was only about an hour but it was going on two and I was starting to panic.
Little Miss still hadn’t had a chance to lead the pony around and she really wanted to do that so I had to wait because she would have complained the whole way home how she had to sit through them talking about how to take care of a horse and when it came her time to actually lead a pony she didn’t get that chance.
Driving home in the dark on one headlight or listening to the 9-year-old whine about how she never gets to do anything. Hmmmm….I chose the one headlight which then resulted into my humming that 90s song by the Wallflowers. “We can drive it home with one headlight…”
I’m like that character in the British sitcom Miranda when certain words or phrases in everyday conversation make her think of certain songs and she just belts them out. Well, she isn’t just a character since the sitcom was based on the life of comedian and author Miranda Hart.
Anyhooooo…. Need an earworm? I can provide that for you:
The farm where this meeting was held was gorgeous, by the way. There was a small barn/stable and four or five horses in the field, beautiful views and the clouds were amazing last night.
There was also a random guinea fowl wandering around that I thought belonged to the people who owned the house but later learned had just wandered onto their property earlier in the week.
They had no idea who it belonged to. These birds are great in our area though because they eat deer ticks which can help to cut down on the population. We have a high number of Lyme disease causing ticks in our area so the less of them, the better.
Earlier in the week Little Miss and I visited a greenhouse near us that is open for about a month out of the year. They used to be open all summer and longer but the children of the original couple who opened it run it part time now since their father passed away a few years ago and their mother is older now and can’t easily help run it.
I was so excited to see her this week when we visited, though, because she is a beloved member of the little community where I grew up and she has one of the best smiles and the most cheerful spirits I have ever seen. Seeing that smile of hers was just heartwarming and I almost hugged her but since I don’t know her that well, I held back. My mom would have hugged her, though, so I at least told her Mom said ‘hello.’
It began to rain while we were there so we didn’t stay long and for one of the first times in the last few years we’ve visited, I didn’t take photographs during our visit.
I did take a couple of photographs as we drove over the hill to my parents, however. Well, Little Miss took this one.
And then I took one as Little Miss planted one of her flowers later that day in the rain, with her winter coat and gloves, even though it was not that cold out.
We’ve actually been having warmer temps this week. These are the temps I would love for us to have all summer because I do not do well at all in warmer temperatures.
Speaking of flowers, the lilacs in our backyard bloomed, but only on one smaller bush.
It appears that our big, very old lilac bush has actually died and will not be blooming this year. That was heartbreaking. I’m not sure if the early frost got to it or what happened, but for some reason the younger bush did bloom. We may have to eventually remove the older, gnarled tree that probably has seen a lot of history. I wonder if it as old as our large rose bush, which my neighbor told me is over 100 years old. Her grandparents or aunt and uncle, one or the other, used to live here and she lived with them for a while.
I am looking forward to when those roses start blooming in June, around the same time as the peonies. Our backyard is alive in the early summer and it’s exciting. I couldn’t believe how one day in early May the trees were naked and then suddenly they were green. It was really exciting to see this year.
Watching things bloom the next couple of weeks will be a nice respite from homeschool which is actually a little more stressful this time of year as we try to finish up units and testing before June 4 comes. June 4th will be our last day of school. The main thing I have to complete is a standardized test for Little Miss, which is required in third, fifth, and eighth grades in the state of Pennsylvania. We can use a standardized test from another state so we are using the California Assessment Test. It is an untimed test so we can take breaks from it, which we did a lot this past week because there were so many multiple choice questions to answer.
The grade on the test doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we do it and my homeschool evaluator sees it and says, “It was done and you met that requirement.” The local school district does not have access to the scores. Only I do. What the scores help me with is learning what areas of math and language arts we need to focus on next year. These tests only test those subjects. I have already learned, through the test we did Wednesday and Thursday, that I need to focus more on punctuation with Little Miss next year. She reads wonderfully but does not know much about punctuation.
Getting both of the kids to the end of the homeschool line has been like dragging a stubborn mule which has rolled itself on its side in the mud and closed its eyes. I can’t wait until the final day and will be glad for our summer break.
In closing, I thought I would mention that I have been trying to share videos of myself on social media to connect with my readers and I hate it. I hate how I look, sound, and talk. Still, I’m trying to push forward and connect in a different way with readers. I may chase some people away but some people might actually like placing a face with the account and following along on my writing/author journey. I have met new readers and writers and bloggers after posting new videos and that’s been nice so I guess I’ll keep doing this from time to time. I even set up a – gasp – YouTube Channel, but I don’t plan to be posting my face on there very often. I actually don’t know what I’ll be doing with that yet. Maybe nothing. Time will tell.
So, how was your week this past week?
Is the weather getting nicer where you are?
Have you been drinking any nice teas? Taking any hikes? Sniffing any flowers?
The fire in the woodstove just would not cooperate Monday morning when I tried to get it to light. I am convinced something is wrong with our draft, like maybe it is stuck or something. I gently wiggled it a few times and the fire finally started to take off after burning up a ton of cardboard, papers, and even the box for some caffeine-free Diet Pepsi my son picked up the other day.
We will have to light a fire all week with the cold temperatures but soon we will be able to light a fire less and still turn the heat down. Having the fire helps us not to have to use as much heating oil and kept our heating oil usage down from mid-October through last week.
It is actually progress that my son purchased that soda I mentioned above since in the past he wouldn’t pick it up because it reminded him too much of his great-aunt, my aunt Dianne, who he loved immensely. She passed away in 2018. Talking about her was very painful for years but now he’s able to talk about her more, sharing the good and happy memories he has of her with his sister.
Buying the Pepsi was a chance for him to show Little Miss a version of Dianne’s favorite drink. Dianne drank Pepsi for years, partially because it was what she was used to since my grandfather worked for Pepsi in North Carolina for 30 years.
It’s Monday when I am starting this post and I have given Little Miss the day off from school since her brother had it off from the technical school he attends for President’s Day.
Tomorrow we will be back to our regular lessons.
This year she and I have been studying a lot of history through a variety of different ways, including a textbook through The Story of Our World. Like last year we are learning about history through historical fiction as well.
This week we will be starting a historical fiction book about Pocahontas.
I actually have two books about Pocahontas but decided that the one book may be for older children so have decided to go to one written by Jean Fritz, who we have read books by before, including The Cabin Faced West, which we finished a couple of weeks ago. The other book is written by Joseph Bruchac, who wrote Children of the Longhouse, which Little Miss absolutely loved, but seems to be written for teenagers. I am sure it is a clean book but it just seems a little older so I decided I am going to read it this spring and see if it is something Little Miss will like.
Reading historical fiction books helps us to branch out into other topics that are brought up in the stories, including information about historical figures or events. The textbook provides us with fairly dry facts only.
The subject I have struggled with the most this year for Little Miss has been science because I’m never happy with the science curriculum we have. I also never have the supplies we need for experiments. I always feel like I’m not teaching her enough science or the right science. She, however, has learned a lot of science from the educational shows she watches so I often find her correcting me when I am teaching her science from a book.
We really liked The Good and the Beautiful science but it is a bit expensive so I have decided to wait until we have that extra money to purchase curriculum and will probably purchase from there toward the end of our school year and then finish up the curriculum in our next school year. While their sets are expensive, they are nice and thorough.
We have used their energy, birds, and ecosystem curriculum and enjoyed them all.
Homeschool for The Boy is more stressful for me these days because he will be a senior next year and I feel like I have taught him nothing this school year.
For him it’s English where I feel like I have really dropped the ball. We have bailed on almost every book we have started this year because it has either been too wordy, too old-fashioned, or just didn’t hold our attention. That will change next week because I have decided we are starting A Tale of Two Cities and plowing through the difficult beginning and flowery writing to get to the story.
That way I can at least feel like I have exposed him to some more classic writers.
We have already read books by George Eliott, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Crane, William Golding, and Mark Twain.
I hope before I am done with him (so to speak) we will read books by Dickens, Steinbeck, and maybe George Orwell. I’d really like to add Austen in there as well but we will see. We will be starting, or re-starting, A Tale of Two Cities next week.
For history I decided to purchase a book called A History of the Twentieth Century by Martin Gilbert. This has a comprehensive list of facts that will provide us a look at history that we can then use to jump off from with videos and further study.
The Boy will be a senior next year as I just mentioned and I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. He’s already checked out of schoolwork pretty much but I’m not ready to let him go. How is it possible he will be 18 in November? The thought has me weepy beyond belief these days. How does the time go by so fast? I should probably stop thinking about it or my computer screen is going to be soaked with my tears in a moment.
This is totally a topic shift again, but do you ever find yourself without a pen and paper or your phone and you have to remember something for like, say, your grocery list and you keep repeating what you need to add to the list because you’re afraid you’ll forget it?
Well, I have because for about half an hour this morning, I found myself repeating “maple syrup and hot dog buns” as I did other tasks around the house. I didn’t have my phone next to me to add it to my Instacart list.
I finally added it to my list but now I’m still singing “maple syrup and hot dog buns” to myself.
What I should probably add to that list is mouse traps, but I am hoping our hunter cats will finally get all the mice out of our house this week. A few months ago Scout (our youngest) had a mouse pinned in our heating vent but never got to it. This weekend The Boy reported a mouse ran across his feet while he was playing a video game because both cats were chasing it. He then watched them double up on this mouse with one of them hiding under the couch to scare it and the other one waiting at the end to grab it. Then they batted the thing around for a while and apparently lost it because they were more interested in toying with it.
Sunday we left them in the house together while we went to visit my parents and when we came back I joked with them that they had better have caught that mouse. I was saying all this while I was reaching for the light. It was dark in the kitchen and when I felt something squish under my boot while joking, I thought, “Oh, Lord, let that be a grape we dropped earlier in the week.”
It was not a grape and I was very glad I hadn’t kicked my boots off yet because it was indeed a dead mouse and my foot on it made sure it was even more dead – let’s just leave it at that.
That wasn’t the end of the story though, because yesterday Scout was chasing another mouse and it came running toward me, resulting in a lot of screaming from me because I didn’t want it to scamper across my bare feet like it had my son’s the other day.
I can’t believe it but the intrepid huntress lost this mouse too and as far as I know it is now hiding under our stove and The Husband has declared he’s searching the house this weekend to “find where these creatures are coming from.”
As I write this, the sun is pouring in our windows and the temperature outside is the warmest it has been in a week, but still at a chilly 40 degrees.
I’ll be lighting the fire before I get ready to take Little Miss to Awana at a church 20 minutes away to try to stretch what wood we have left into March, since Pennsylvania doesn’t believe in early springs no matter what the groundhog says.
So how is your week going so far?
I hope it is going well.
Let me know in the comments, even if it isn’t going well.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.
What’s Been Occurring
I did not share a Saturday After Chat post yesterday because I was out of the house both Friday and Saturday and did not have time to write one.
On Tuesday last week, we traveled to a town near us to pick glasses up for Little Miss and The Boy. Yes, Little Miss is now like the rest of us in the family and has glasses. I don’t really like that she’s had to get them at such a young age, but if she can see better, that’s great.
I wanted to blame too much device usage on her need at such a young age, but then I remembered that I was only a couple of years older when I got glasses, and I didn’t have devices back then. I did a lot of close work with sketching and reading but I did not have a phone or Kindle or anything else that might cause me to be near-sighted. I suppose it is simply bad genetics once again.
Luckily, she looks absolutely adorable in glasses.
The Boy looks absolutely adorable in glasses too, but he doesn’t pose for photos anymore.
The Husband would probably pose but his glasses are old so I didn’t take a photo of them.
After we picked up the glasses we went to the local library for a gathering with the local homeschool group. It was a lot of fun and nice to finally meet other homeschooling parents. I had met a few of them at the end of February but several of the children were sick that week. We missed the next couple of meet-ups because of Little Miss’s dental procedure, weather, and Little Miss getting sick one week.
During this meetup, they had a birthday theme and exchanged gifts between the children to help encourage them to get to know each other. This didn’t really work as much with the teenagers who simply looked at the floor while they handled each other gifts, but it was a good idea.
One of the members brought their pet pig and then there were birthday party type games (Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Musical Chairs, and a pinata). Little Miss had a blast but by the end she told me she was all socialized out and wanted to go home and not talk to people for the next five months.
Yes, she is very similar to me.
After interacting with other people I need a downtime of not talking to anyone or going anywhere for at least a day, if not more.
On Friday, Little Miss and I grocery shopped, which I hate doing but it went well, even though I had to have our van looked at by an exhaust specialist before we went because we have a hole in our exhaust and then grocery shop. I actually very much dread going to the grocery store. My weird health issues seem to kick in during those visits. My legs get weak, my head feels odd, and my lower back hurts by the time I get halfway around the store.
I prayed all the way to the store, though, calling on Jesus’ many names – Elohim, Adonai, and Jehovah Jireh, my provider. I rebuked anything coming against me and by the time I left the mechanic to head to Aldi, I felt so much better. I was able to get all of our shopping done and when I went home I even carried in all of the groceries, something I’m usually too tired to do.
In full disclosure, I did take a l’theanine before I left. It is a natural supplement to help with relaxation but there is no way it had time to kick in and not only that, it does not give me energy or take away the vertigo I experience in stores or in fluorescent lights. Only God can do that. Don’t be afraid to ask him for help in even the smallest situations in your life.
Yesterday we visited a comic shop as a family for Free Comic Book Day.
We traveled about an hour to get to the comic shop, visiting a town near us that we had not visited before. It was full of old houses that dated back to the early to mid 1800s. I honestly felt like I was in an old neighborhood in Philadelphia or something.
The kids and The Husband went into the comic book store and I wandered down the street, admiring the old buildings and beautiful churches.
There was a Little Free Library at one of the churches in the town with the comic book store and I found what I think is a cozy mystery. I replaced it with a book that was in the van.
After our visit there we stopped at a GameStop store for The Boy and visited a park/playground afterward.
It was a nice day, especially since we finally had a sunny, warm day for the first time all week and also because the views were so nice.
I am trying to talk my dad and son in building me a little library that I can install across the street from our house. I think it would be fun for people who are walking or driving by to see and know that they can find good books in.
What I/we’ve been Reading
While I was not a huge fan of M.C. Beaton’s writing style, I couldn’t help reading through Death of a Poisoned Pen, which is a Hamish Macbeth Mystery. I gave up at one point and said I couldn’t put up with her choppy writing any longer, but I needed to know what happened so I went back to the book and finished it Friday night. This was a later book in the series so maybe it wasn’t even written by M.C. Beaton by then. Maybe ghost writers wrote it like they do James Patterson’s books.
Now that I have finished that book I am free to focus on Fellowship of the Ring, which I have a goal to finish before the end of May but will probably finish earlier. I need The Boy to finish it before the end of May as well because I would like him to write a review of it and Huckleberry Finn before our meeting with our homeschool evaluator.
I am also reading a cozy mystery by Amanda Flower, a new-to-me author. The book is called Flowers and Foul Play. It is a Magic Garden Mystery so there is a bit of magic mixed in.
Little Miss has been reading a collection of Charlie books to me. Charlie was Ree Drummond’s (The Pioneer Woman’s) dog and there was a series of I Can Read books written about him. I found the collection at a library sale, and she’s been reading a chapter or two of the books to me before bed. Then I read from The Miss Piggle-Wiggle Treasury to her but I am telling you, I am ready for that book to be over. The stories really do drag a bit and I find the solutions this woman has to common childhood quirks a little irritating. It was written in the 1950s when children weren’t supposed to be imaginative, I suppose because the latest story had a mother trying to figure out how to get her son to stop daydreaming and dragging his feet and instead hurry up and do what he is told.
Little Miss likes the stories though, so I push through for her sake. I can’t wait until we can move on to something else, though. The book is due back this week, but, sadly, I can renew it again.
On our trip yesterday, Little Miss read an entire Imagination Station book by herself – they are about 80-100 pages long and around 12 chapters. They are books produced by Focus on the Family through the Adventures in Odyssey series.
The Husband is reading Peril at End House by Agatha Christie.
What We watched/are Watching
We watched a lot of Newhart this past week and I watched Holiday with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which I loved.
Little Miss and I watched some Mary Berry.
I actually did not watch a lot this past week because I was either revising my book or reading a book.
What I’m Writing
I am in the revision process for Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing so I worked on that a lot this week.
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
We are on our last month of homeschooling before summer break and to say we all have summer brain is an understatement. Not even the teacher is focused all the way in on school right now. Because of our lack of focus, I have decided to dial down the strict workbook and textbook-heavy subjects for this month, but we will still be doing them twice a week.
I got to mid-April and realized I hadn’t focused as much on the arts as I need to in order to meet the requirements for the state we are in so I decided we would make May an art month. That means more lessons on artists (Monet, Cezanne, Picasso) and musicians (composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart) throughout our week and fewer lessons on math, science, and history. We will still be doing those last three subjects, just not every day.
This is a relief for Little Miss who is so dramatic when I tell her it is time for her math lesson. You would think I would have told her it is time to clean the toilets at a frat house.
She often runs and hides, pulling a blanket over her head in a homemade fort she made by turning our couch to face the wall and hanging the veil-like curtains across it.
Once she sits down and does it, however, she really doesn’t have any major issues with doing the math.
She isn’t a fan of having to write letters either so that has also been a struggle this past year. I need this summer break as much as her.
However, I have told her she will need to do some math during the summer so that she doesn’t have to jump back into it cold in August when we start up again. I’m also considering starting school a month early this year. This will allow us to take more breaks throughout the school year at times when we feel beat down by the mundane routine of daily lessons.
I have been the most relaxed about homeschooling this year than in any previous year. I have finally started to accept that homeschooling is not simply school at home. It is not bringing the traditional idea of public school into your home.
We homeschool so we can break away from a system we do not feel is conducive with the need for children to be free to focus on their passions and to learn at their own pace. Homeschooling parents bring their children home to learn for a variety of reasons, but at the core of it is that the child is not thriving or might not thrive in the traditional environment.
For us, homeschooling has offered more opportunities for learning beyond the scope of a daily lesson. It has allowed us to take a subject my child is interested in and explore it beyond one moment in time in their education. It has also allowed us to go visit or go help my parents whenever is needed, which has been invaluable to us, especially to my son who is very close to his grandfather.
Resting on my newfound acceptance that homeschooling doesn’t have to look like a traditional public school day, we started taking a much more relaxed approach to our homeschool days sometime in March. We did math and reading lessons, but history was reading historical fiction and watching videos and then simply talking about history. Math was lessons in our book but also on ABC Mouse for the youngest. The oldest does his math online so there wasn’t much of a change for him. Reading or English has been some actual lessons about parts of speech and grammar but it has also been simply reading books out loud to each other, discussing hard words when we get to them or discussing what we read.
I read a post on Facebook recently by … that reminded homeschooling parents that homeschooling can happen at any time of the day. She wrote that you don’t have to read to your child only during the day and count that as a time of learning. Read-aloud sessions can happen at night before bed while waiting in the car, or pretty much anywhere at any time.
Life lessons and skills can be taught throughout the day.
Homeschool is a 24/7 type of education that doesn’t require a desk or a book or four walls around a child. It is a constant flow of information and knowledge that can come through the everyday journey of life.
With all that being said, yesterday Little Miss and I watched videos about Mozart while she made slime. We read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle before bed for our English reading.
Today we have a homeschool gathering at the local library.
Tomorrow we will be painting in the style of Monet while watching videos about him and the other impressionists or while listening to Mozart. We will also probably read some from The Cabin Faced West for history and do a math lesson or simply go on ABC Mouse and have her play some games there related to what we’ve been learning in Math.
The Boy will be reading Fellowship of the Ring and working on a research project and also preparing some Minecraft creations for the art requirements under the homeschool guidelines for our state. Then he will go to work as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, which I see as another educational opportunity and an activity that fits in well with homeschooling.
Later in the week, we will be watching art history videos, and videos about famous composers, and I will be encouraging him to continue bass lessons at home since we are taking a month off from his formal bass lessons (which were 45 minutes away and a bit expensive for us this month).
This month, both The Boy and Little Miss will also be studying music from a book I ordered that is set to arrive today.
I am absolutely loving this freestyle type of learning that incorporates music and the arts into our academic lessons. It’s something I plan to do more of during our next school year.
If you’re new here, I’m a homeschooling mom to an 8-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son. I shared a little bit about our homeschool journey in a brief post last week.
On Sunday I was going to the kitchen for some hot cocoa when I looked at a book on the table that Little Miss had picked up at the library sale on Friday. It was a level two chapter book.
“Ooh,” I thought to my homeschool mom-self. “I can use that for reading aloud this week during reading/English lessons.”
Immediately something Little Miss said to me the week before came to mind right after that thought. It was something she said when I asked her to read two poems out loud for me.
“Mom, you already know I know how to read. Why are you making me read this out loud?”
Ahem.
Well, she had a point.
Why was I making her read it out loud?
Practice, I suppose.
Because reading out loud helps to make sure you are saying words right, I guess.
Or is it really because the curriculum said to do it and I’m – as I told a friend this week – a rule follower.
Rules are good.
Rules are often necessary.
Rules aren’t always made to be broken.
Buuuut….
I am homeschooling for a reason and part of that reason is to allow my children to learn at their own pace – whether that is fast or slow.
If Little Miss or The Boy already have a concept down, then it really isn’t necessary or conducive to their learning to keep making them repeat that skill over and over. The exception to this is in math, of course. I think the repetition of math lessons is important to keeping facts straight and fresh in the mind and to build up to other concepts.
Now, I don’t mean that I shouldn’t keep repeating or showing her grammar rules and similar items, but, yeah, if she already knows how to read, I need to stop making her read out loud to prove that she can do what she can already do and has been doing for two years now.
And, yeah, she had a point.
What am I doing? She gets the concepts. She knows it. Review the spelling rules with her and .. yes… move on. We’re good.
Homeschool has been trucking along fairly well this year. Our days have been filled with more book learning than hands-on learning for the last couple of weeks.
Little Miss and I are still working with math and reading/English curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful. She’s not fighting me as often as she was last year when I say it is time to do our lessons.
For Science, we are using the space curriculum from Apologia’s Creation series.
We finished our history and are now doing individual unit studies. Last week we finished a book about George Washington Carver which I combined with videos and an art project where we recreated paintings of his. Well, I tried to recreate one, but she sort of did her own thing, which is fine as long as she was enjoying herself.
Next up is a unit on Native Americans and I have ordered a fiction book — Children of the Longhouse by Joseph Bruchac — that I hope will tell a Native American story in a creative way and allow us to talk about real-life events. I looked up a bunch of picture books about Native Americans but our library only had one of them so I’ll either have to buy them or look at larger libraries.
A couple of weeks ago when it was still nice enough outside for Little Miss to jump on the trampoline, we had an assignment in our reading/English book for Little Miss to orally relay to me a story she made up.
One day she spent three straight hours working on the book, using my computer, even with my messed up “s” and “w” keys which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Since then she’s asked a couple of times to work on her book and wants me to publish it for her at some point, which I hope to do next year.
The Boy is still working with his grandpa a couple of days a week, which is part of his life skills education, in addition to his regular schoolwork.
For his book-based schoolwork, he is reading about Medieval History via The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer, Biology through Apologia, and classic literature in the form of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he is actually enjoying. He also has math through CTC Math, which is an online program and grammar through FixIt! Grammar.
We have been trying to secure him a place at a school near us for next year that is similar to a trade school but seem to be being stonewalled because he is homeschooled and not enrolled, even though under state law we are supposed to be able to access those programs as well. The local school district will not return phone calls and it is very frustrating.
Hopefully it will work out.
The Boy is 16 now so we will be starting driving lessons soon, but first we will be studying the manual, which is now online. My husband printed it out for him, but The Boy isn’t in a huge hurry to get his license so we will take our time in that area.
I need to find a field trip for us in the next month or so and I think I’ll look into a couple small museums near us that have Native American artifacts. Winter seems to have started a little earlier with temperatures already in the high 20s or low 30s and our first snowfall coming yesterday, so any field trips will have to be inside at this point.
If you are homeschooling, how is it going for you? If you aren’t, how is school going for you children or grandchildren?
