And The Rain Keeps Coming Down...

image courtesy of littlefarminthebigd

It has been pouring for hours now. Our family room roof started leaking in two spots last night, which is very worrisome. On my way to work, city workers were getting ready to close off a couple of roads where the creeks had started to overflow their banks... thankfully there are multiple choices for roads to take back home! I do wish the rain would stop for a little while, so that things could dry back out a little. My backyard is a mud pit at the moment, and the chickens barely venture outside their hutch--when they do, it is halfway sad and halfway funny to see them apparently mystified by all the wetness! Poor things look so bedraggled when they've wandered out of the relative dryness of their hutch. We also miss our Friday park days :(

On to education...

With my more relaxed approach this week, school seems to blend more into life, which is lovely, and more or less how I idealize homeschooling. As a family, we played more Apples to Apples Junior, read about Ruth Law, Mark Twain, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and of course, more of Harry Potter and our Oz books! The kids played a lot of Hangman and Tic-Tac-Toe too.

The Boy spent a fair amount of time reading: Greek and Egyptian myths, The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case, various books on codes and ciphers. He tried out IXL for math, and said "It's pretty good, but I like our books [Life of Fred, Zacarro] better." He wrote his letter to Santa (yes, we believe in Santa around here), and brought it to me for spelling/grammar corrections, then copied it out quite nicely. He worked on textures and light sources in his self-guided (with the help of you-tube tutorials) computer animation lessons. He's been drawing a lot too, playing around with math doodles primarily. He watched some Mythbusters and some Smash Lab, always fun! He checked up on his self-designed science project - so far nothing much has changed, except he noticed the shininess of one test piece is all gone. He made another couple of short films at my mom's house, spent some time snuggled up on the couch with Calvin & Hobbes... good times!

The Girl helped out with a lot this week--grocery shopping, cleaning (we're "deep" cleaning in preparation for Christmas), cooking. I am reminding myself regularly that she loves to be helpful. Okay, sometimes her helpfulness is a little on the unhelpful side, but she really tries! She read to me from Reading Pathways, helped write and then copied out beautifully her Santa letter, and played with math on Khan Academy. I am still trying to get the knack of that website! We read a few short stories together, and spent a lot of time looking through E is for Ethiopia, which has fascinating photographs, and a wealth of information! We're very much enjoying our relaxed "journey" through Africa so far.

 
We're also enjoying the stories in The Girl Who Married a Lion. I finally picked up Welcome to Kaya's World at the library yesterday, so we'll be delving into that now as well. Today she's going to try out the TV show Wild Africa.

Speaking of the library, we also picked up a good stack of holiday books, and other books recommended in A Picture Perfect Childhood. Over the next few weeks, we'll be learning about winter celebrations around the world (including Hanukkah and Kwanzaa), Sitting Bull, Pearl Harbor, Rosa Parks, moles, Saint Nicholas, and much more! I picked up another couple of books on Africa for The Girl, and The Boy got several books on the history of codes and ciphers. We're going to read a couple of versions of The Nutcracker--both the ones illustrated by Michael Hague and Maurice Sendak--in preparation for a trip to the ballet next week. We're taking a brief break from Percy Jackson's exciting adventures to listen to Jim Dale, one of our favorite narrators, read A Christmas Carol.

Other bits and pieces...

We made a trip to the feed store this week for chicken supplies. The kids love checking out all the chickens, pigeons, doves, rabbits, and ducks for sale while I load up on chicken feed...

I signed up for my spring classes. One is Advanced Shakespeare, and the other is Teaching Multilingual Writers. I may be taking a couple of units in directed writing instead of Teaching Multilingual Writers, but we'll see. It would be better for my schedule right now, but I have to get the professor's permission for the writing course, and am waiting to here from her as to whether she thinks I am a good fit for the class.

I have officially finished almost all of my Christmas shopping! I have historically spent too much time right before the holidays rushing around like mad buying last minute odds and ends, and am trying very hard to get away from that this year. I also always end up spending the last couple of days before Christmas cleaning the house for company, so this year, and I kid you not, I wrote a cleaning schedule. Just a couple of (mostly) small tasks a day between now and December 17th, and I will have a clean, shiny, holiday-ready home! I'm taking vacation this year too... two whole weeks, one before and one after Christmas. The one before is time for baking cookies, making fudge (and I want to try this recipe), and, at long last, M dug up his family recipe for homemade taffy! I might have him work with us on this taffy recipe too--I have always loved Bit O' Honey candies, but they are hard to find these days!

Hope you all had a week as good as mine!