Another Monday...

A picture of the sunrise from last week

The last Monday of the month is my longest... staff meeting, followed by a committee meeting, followed by my class... and then off to meet The Girl at The Boy's fencing lesson (my mom will drive them there). Thank goodness M is cooking dinner after he gets off work tonight!

Happenings This Week...
The Girl's derby season has come to an end, so no practices until January's Derby Boot Camp! I have promised to take her to some afternoon skating sessions in the meantime so she doesn't lose any skills. The Boy's fencing continues year-round, so he doesn't have that worry. I'm meeting with a high school student tomorrow afternoon, to tutor her in writing, focusing first on a research paper. I am a little apprehensive about this, as she suffers from anxiety, so I need to tread carefully.

In Our Homeschool...
The Boy will be trying a different math approach this week, with Jacobs Elementary Algebra, which we got on an inter-library loan for three weeks, to try it out. Our main issue with AoPS at this point is that the explanations tend toward the confusing side, and so there is a lot of resultant frustration. Jacobs seems a nice compromise between the discovery approach of AoPS and a more traditional text. The first half of the book is basically prealgebra, so I don't mind him jumping in to this new (to us) book. The Boy took some time to look through it yesterday, and did set I of the exercises from chapter 1, with no complaints. He likes the cartoons and quotes the author tied in as well!

The Boy will also be finishing his essay this week, final draft and all.

The Girl is continuing on her steady learning path at the moment. She does a lesson twice weekly from Reading Horizons, each one followed by the vocabulary work the next day. Math Mammoth is still working well for her. We're about halfway through our multiplication studies, and then she'll move into division work, followed by place value work. We'll also be tackling some fractions, measurement, and geometry this year.

What We're Reading & Watching...
Our family movie this week was Hocus Pocus, which was pretty fun. The Boy is enjoying The Maze Runner, and has just about finished up Dandelion Fire. The Girl is making slow but steady progress with Charlotte's Web, though we failed to get back to The Girl Who Could Fly last week. We're still enjoying The Marvellous Land of the Snergs! I still need to pick up The Paris Wife from the library as well, since I really want to read it! We also failed to get to most of our documentary watching last week, so I am just putting that on this week's agenda, though we did watch some Wild Africa, and Families of the World: Ghana.

Cooking...
The Girl and I did make the ndole, and served it with millet. It was pretty tasty! I've been reading books (Whole, by T. Colin Campbell, Forks Over Knives, The Jungle Effect) and watching documentaries (Forks Over Knives for example) on plant based diets, so am trying to work even more produce into our daily diets (not that we'd go vegan, ever, because, well... bacon for one thing). We're making one of our favorite lunch time soups -- roasted eggplant & tomato -- this week. We made gluten-free and grain-free brownies for a bake sale to benefit junior roller derby. And M is making his amazing mac & cheese tonight.

Odds & Ends...
The Boy has taken apart, cleaned, and rebuilt a two-stroke engine (rototiller) over the last week. Now he's taking apart, cleaning, and rebuilding a larger engine for a go-cart. He's been studying tutorials on changing oil, so he can give our car an oil change. And yesterday he checked the brake fluid, the brake lines, etc.

The Girl is working on the creation of a couple of board games. This involves a lot of cutting, pasting, writing, drawing, and so forth. She also wants to work on making some how-to crafting videos for you tube.

Have a good week!