It's Friday!!!

Photo courtesy of inspiredbycharm.com

I am glad the weekend is almost here, although it promises to be a busy one--I have papers to grade and a three-four page paper to finish writing. Add that to housework, cooking, grocery shopping, etc., and yes, I will be well occupied over the next few days.

So lately M has been feeding an addiction, literally. He cannot stop eating Bush's Baked Beans, which I swear must be some of the priciest beans out there. In interest of keeping on budget, I am attempting to replicate (or better) those beans in the crockpot today. I googled recipes, and found a couple that claimed to be "better than Bush's", amalgamated those recipes, and now they are simmering away. Wish me luck! If this turns out well, I can get an entire big pot of beans cooked up for nearly the same price as one 28-ounce can. And mine are organic! With M unemployed, we are having to be careful with our grocery dollars. I am finding that it is true - the more you cook from scratch, the more you can save, and the better your food can be. For example, I bought a 4 pound chicken last week. We had roasted chicken and veggies one night, then pesto-drenched pasta with chicken and veggies (I made mine with spaghetti squash and it was delicious!), and finally I made a big pot of chicken-barley-veggie soup that lasted through one dinner, and several lunches. Not bad!

A Few Homeschooling Highlights From the Week

Zaccaro Primary Challenge Math is fantastic! You can read more about this week's experience with it here.

We had fun watching Fantasia and talking about music... I was [pleasantly] surprised that The Girl could identify which Nutcracker Suite pieces were used in the film! We also discussed animation methods, as that greatly interests The Boy. He was impressed at the quality of animation pre-digital age, and we talked about inks, paints, transparent layering, and more. He then spent a lot of time drawing this week.

Speaking of The Boy, my once-scared-of-writing boy asked if he could have a prompt from Unjournaling this week! I think by next year he'll be ready for NaNoWriMo!

Other highlights include: The Girl's work on long vowels; plenty of good reading from A Picture Perfect Childhood and The Graveyard Book; playing with Emily (The Girl's mouse) and Athena (The Boy's water dragon); and The Boy's as always silly sentences in Writing Skills.

And of course there was plenty of political talk--we discussed previous presidents and the current candidates (please note that while I did not care for one of the candidates, I was very careful to not speak negatively of him in front of the kids). We also talked about the electoral college, the popular vote, amendments, and propositions.

We also "traveled", through the words of travel writer Richard Halliburton, to Fort Jefferson, reading the unfortunate story of Dr. Samuel Mudd.Was he innocent or guilty of conspiring with John Wlkes Booth? I suppose we'll never really know. Anyhow, we enjoyed reading about the fort, and as always the plethora of [black and white] photographs really added to the story, as did the letter published in the book. It was written to Mr. Halliburton by an elderly woman who as a child had actually lived at the fort with her soldier father!

Where We Could Improve for Next Week

Getting around to schoolwork! I had plans aplenty for this week, which didn't happen. One afternoon it was because I spent a lot of time dealing with car repairs... again. Another afternoon my mother-in-law showed up four hours early for dinner. Yes, FOUR hours. All of the time I had planned for homeschooling.

I was re-reading Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. I think if I rearrange my flow charts a little, I could totally make this work for us in conjunction with the fabulous Reader's Digest How _____ Works books and Janice VanCleave's _______ For Every Kid series. Add in some Bill Nye videos, and I'll have two happy science-y kids! I do really want this program to work for us, as with all three volumes it is one of the most thorough science programs I have ever come across.

Plans For Upcoming Bits and Pieces

I plan to read about Veteran's Day to the kids this weekend. I'll be picking up this library book on the way home from work today...

This weekend, I also hope to tackle art with The National Gallery of Art: Activity Book. And we'll finish watching NOVA's Becoming Human. The Boy has expressed interest in watching documentaries related to the universe/astronomy, so we'll watch one of those too.

Other homeschooling goals for the upcoming week:
~ get through chapter two in The Magic of Reality
~ read a few chapters in The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
~ read another 2-4 chapters in The Early Human World and add to the Books of Centuries we're working on
~ finish listening to The Lightning Thief and start book 2 in the Percy Jackson series
~ 2 lessons from each Life of Fred and Primary Challenge Math
~ A couple of lessons each from Primary and Intermediate Language Lessons
~ Getting around to the science project that M gathered all the supplies for, and that we didn't do (thank you MIL!)

Finally, personal goals for the upcoming week:
~ more exercise!
~ planning next week's menu and shopping appropriately
~ getting through at least a few chapters from one of the book's I am writing my long (seminar) paper on this semester
~ getting caught up, again, on laundry!

Hope you all have a good weekend!