School

 Ah, the school year.

I'm not gonna like. It's been a rough start.  We've been going strong with school for about 6 or 7 weeks now.  But wow, has it been a busy 7 weeks! We started into what was pretty much our full schedule the week after cousin camp.  I love being able to start early in order to give us opportunities to take a break here and there and still be done at the first part of May.

The problem with this, however, is that not everyone else back in school.  There are still get-togethers and end-of-the-summer parties to work around. School is so much easier to do when everyone else is in school, too!

We also had lots of appointments the end of the summer, too.  Dentist, eye...you name it, we had it. I need to plan those better next year and get them over during the summer when we are not in school mode.

So although we were doing school, I didn't feel like it was my main focus.  This past week was really the first week that I felt like I was focused and in general, it was a good week.  The kids had a bit of an adjustment to get used to.  With me more focused, that meant I expected more out of them and they had a bit of a rebellion at the beginning of the week if I gave them any critical thinking assignment.  Thankfully they got over that quickly and we finished the week well!

Maddie is working on her own for all of her classes this year.  I love seeing her learn on her own and have her share with me what she's learning.  Taking "real" tests, learning study skills and having more responsibility has been a big change for her, but I'm happy to say that she's getting there!  Math is not nearly as much of a struggle this year as it was last year.  She's pretty excited about being in Pre-Algebra!

Here she is performing one of her experiments.  Safety glasses and all. She's such a rule-follower:)

And yes, she has on my old BHS cheerleading sweatshirt!

Kinslee and Braden are learning about weather and water right now in science. We made a tornado tube the other day.  I always  joke that I am terrible at making science experiments work, but even I couldn't mess up this one:)

All three are doing the same history curriculum.  This week they were learning about early American times and made marble sets from Sculpey clay.  They loved this activity.  

Today Braden put together a weather station that we got in a kit.  It seemed like a cheap set, so we're going to pull out a better kit tomorrow and see if it will hold together better in the wind. 

We did more projects this week than we did the past 6 weeks combined, so hopefully that means we're on a good track!