Wishing You All...

 A very happy Summer Solstice!

We'll be celebrating with our friends at the park today. It has been about a month since we all made it to our Friday Park Day, and we're really looking forward to seeing all our friends again!

Yesterday was M's birthday. We spent a quiet day at home, barbequeing, gardening, relaxing, laughing through Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail... it was really calm and nice. M said it was the best birthday he's had in a few years!

Overall, it has been a good week. We got some light homeschooling done, and M is enjoying his new classes. Here's a quick run-down of the accomplishments this week!

The Girl
We didn't do much in Reading Horizons this week. She did do one lesson, but struggled a little with it, so I set it aside for just this week, and instead she just read to me from various readers we have on hand. She wrote my grocery list (I loved "x10shun cord"!), and we played several rounds of Hangman. We're refreshed now, ready to start up Reading Horizons again next week. I made some cards to go with the lesson she struggled on, so that we can first work with the words, then start the lesson and go back over the rough spots. Her reading this week was, by and large, the most fluent I have heard, so I feel good about what we got done. We finished Heidi, and are now reading The Garden Princess, which is quite good so far.

The Boy
He did some more multiplication and division work with Khan Academy. I find that I have to remind him often, too often really, to write out his work. Otherwise he gets really confused by division. He read a lot this week, worked on his model car and his photography skills (I'll have to post some of his work!), and watched a few episodes of StormChasers.

Both
We read about the Vikings, Columbus, early Spanish explorers of South America, and the Jamestown Colony this week in the Rainbow Book of American History. We also read the first couple of chapters in To California by Covered Wagon, and tried to imagine how hard it would have been to wait your turn for the single small ferry crossing the Missouri River, which could only take one wagon at a time. When the hero of this book went across, there were around 40 wagons waiting to cross, and all in all, it took about 3 days!

We're nearly done with The Trumpet of the Swan. We spent some time on the Cornell Ornithology website learning more about these magnificent birds, listening to them, watching them in flight... and we looked up the Red Rock Lakes, which had a lot less trees than I had pictured!

We finished the first Harry Potter book, and are now reading The Thirteen Clocks at bedtime. If you haven't read this book, and enjoy strange humor, I cannot recommend it highly enough! We are really enjoying it so far, and the word play and humor is enough to keep us giggling much of the time.

Other
I am definitely ready for the weekend! We have fencing (Wednesdays and Saturdays), and roller derby on the agenda, and then one more week of work to get through before I get six long, lovely weeks almost completely off from work!!! [I have to go in twice in July, 4 hours each time, to open the new purchase orders or the upcoming year] My general plan during my time off is an hour each of housework and homeschooling per day, 4-5 days per week. I want the whole house clean from top to bottom, and maybe we'll get the walls primed. I plan to continue offloading books, old clothes, and more. I also want to start exercising regularly, and I figure that is a good time to try, since I won't have the distractions of work. My mom will continue taking the kids one morning per week, so that I can work on reading, etc. for college in the fall.

Hope you all had a good week, and enjoy the beginning of summer!