Starting School: Stoked and Over-Scheduled

It's so good to be home for school. I have such an amazing support group. A group that I love. Seriously these women are my best friends:

This is us getting organized. Up to this point we could get things going over a few texts on Messenger: "Hey, I think I'll do science club on Tues. is that going to work for everyone?" etc. But this year, we could no longer ignore the little children.

You see, we all have kids about the same ages, and we all have big families. So we were teaching our oldest kids, and we were kind of ignoring our younger kids, but they are getting too old to ignore anymore.  We have about two younger kids each that need clubs now. That's at least eight kids! A huge influx. We needed to get together and get organized.

And when we got together, there were lots of additional classes people wanted to teach, and then there was community opportunities, and of course classes at Westwind. I was so worried about getting reading, writing, and math done with my kids that I was hesitant, but I spent forever on a schedule to work around everything, realized I could fit it all in, and I signed them up for it all.

Because seriously, I have to embrace the seasons of my life when they come. Who knows when I'll be on the other side of the world again without all these amazing resources!  So we are doing all of this:

Art classes
Seminary (Maxwell)
Choir
Westwind Classes
Westwind clubs
Literature Club
Science Club
Robotics
Gymnastics
Hip hop dance
Temple Trips
Service Club
Writing Club
Language Club...not sure about this one
French Language Family Home evenings
Monthly Field Trips
And hopefully Acting Class (although they haven't gotten back to me to make sure)

Yep. We're crazy.

What's really weird to me this year, is that although my "in town" group of friends are getting more stoked than ever about homeschooling, my "on the land" friends and family are NOT homeschooling!!! CRAZY! These are all the moms that I started homeschooling with that showed me the way!

For various reasons their kids are going to public school.  I was asked to tutor them for the last two weeks of summer to help them get ready. Emma was the most consistent at coming, and she passed off all her times tables! Timestales saved the day!

And yes, I've already delved into our crazy schedule, and yes my kids are LOVING IT!

The first thing we did as a group was to go to Devil's Coulee Dinosaur museum and dig site. I wanted to do a dinosaur theme trip because we're doing ancient history this year, and we start with dinosaurs.

(I just had a thought-I bet Vanuatu didn't exist in the day of dinosaurs!!!)

It was a pretty small and underwhelming museum, but they had some hands-on things I was planning to do with my kids anyway (and now I don't need to hehehe) They had the kids make dinosaur foot prints that they made moulds of, and they also chipped away at plaster to find bones.

We also went to the dig site which was pretty cool. It was a site that was a nesting area for dinosaurs, so the kids actually found chips of dinosaur eggshells and they also found dinosaur poop. There was a bone or two, but since it was a nesting site, Dinosaurs went other places to die.

We've also gone on a field trip to the Heritage Museum in Calgary, which is a living museum where all the workers dress up in era clothing and help you step back in time. It was the Proffitt's idea, and I'm so glad we went.

One of the best parts about this park, is that it has a carnival from the 1920s. The kids loved all the rides, but I (with my weak stomach,) decided not to go on any.

My favourite shops were the blacksmith and the printing press. We saw this awesome machine that would take a whole line of text and melt it into metal letters which you could put on your press. It was so cool to watch in action.

On Sunday, we did our annual start-of-the-school-year father's blessings. I love this tradition.

And the first classes that got off the ground was robotics and science. I have TWO science classes, and Cayleen does TWO robotic's classes. We do them at the same time. While one of us is teaching the Youngers, the other is teaching the olders, and then the school bus (Peavoy's van) comes and we switch. It's worked out really well so far.

There have been about 30 (THIRTY!!!) kids in total!!!

Here's my older group that are mostly veterans of our clubs:

Our first week we introduced the atom. I finally made a video of my song I made up 15 years ago (I'm getting old!)

And we talked about the magnetic properties of atoms and got rid of some electrons on balloons and showed how they repelled each other after that:

FYI you might see some blurred faces in some photos because moms want their kids off the internet which I totally understand.

The next week we learned more about the atom and it's parts, so we made atom models out of candy! Shockingly they all thought that was a hit.

We also started doing art classes which my kids LOVE. Even William and Abraham are part of classes now.

Abraham is turning out to be quite the artist. Check out this car he did on his own:

And he loves colouring too. Like this colouring page from church. Funny story: The kids came to Dustin and said "Dad! Abraham broke some glass on purpose!" and Dustin had someone clean it up. Shortly after, Abraham ask Dustin "How do you spell sorry?" And Dustin saw this page:

This is a story of a little boy who brakes some glass and then says he's sorry. SERIOUSLY!!!! Abraham acted out the story for real!!! Later, without me knowing what happened, Abraham asked me to write on here about how this was Abraham's story! The little monkey!

We did a little bit of art for family home evening last week as well. We came home and the Smiths were doing  chalk work of the plan of salvation, so we did too. Don't you love the severed man? Hyrum said that death was an important part of the plan of salvation, so he showed a dead guy..... yep.

But for a few Family home Evenings we've been having FRENCH family home evenings. Our Quebec-qua neighbour is teaching our family French! Isn't that sweet? She's an actual French teacher, and here we are playing Uno but we can only use French to play:

And I forgot in all those extracurricular things we're doing to mention that we're doing social studies as a family. This year is our ancient history year. WE WILL MEMORIZE THE TIMELINE SONG. This is my goal. Classical Conversations has an awesome grand sweep of the whole history of mankind, and we are going to do it. I made a movie, but the song is copywrited, so sorry, but it's only for us.

We started with the creation and made creation collages. We had light, grass, waters and everything that's in the creation story.

We also talked about the Fall. I didn't realize that my kids didn't know that the Fall meant the Adam and Eve story. So glad to straighten that out. We made leaf clothing to celebrate.

And of course my kids have their own interests on top of all the crazy plans that I have for them. Maxwell has been working on these rocks for weeks. He put them in the rock tumbler his grandma gave them. He made the beautiful rocks into jewelry for girls in his life.

And even with all that we've been doing extra, yes, I did do normal school. I left my broken iPad in Vanuatu, so we've taken a brake from Barton and done more reading (Minecraft Choose-your-own-adventure is what my boys read to me lately) and math.

Abraham is now school age. He's FIVE. My baby is a kindergartener! I honestly am putting him on the back burner, but he wants to do school so bad. He wants that one-on-one time with me.

He's come up to me many times this last two weeks saying "I want to learn how to read!" I thought to myself "You know, there's a chance he's like Dustin and I, and is a stealth dyslexic and learns by whole reading" so I've decided to read Dick and Jane with him in addition to his phonics. Why not.

I only got to doing all of his school once in these two weeks. He did awesome and was so excited. He's a lefty just like his Mumma.

So happy to be in Canada with all these resources. My kids come home from church reminding me that we need to do Come Follow Me. (Yeah, that would have never happened in Bislama-Filled Vanuatu.)

I get so much help emotionally. I went to our first Mom's night at Ambers, and this year Westwind put on a Parents retreat to start out the year!

There were about 6 amazing presenters and the best lunch ever (made by Heather Burton.) One of those presenters was.....ME!

Heather asked me to talk about how to help the reluctant learner. Hahaha. I'm such a hypocrite. I don't have it figured out. I talked about how the main reasons are 1-Attachment issues 2-Apathy and 3-Anxiety. See how they all start with "A?" Yeah, I'm cool like that.

I talked about Hold onto Your Kids, and things Conrad Beome taught, and I didn't have any time to talk about all the memory hook things that I've done to help those with content anxiety, but whatever. I hope I wasn't too opinionated. Homeschooling is a lot like motherhood, and if you say one way is right or wrong, people get defensive.

One of the presenters was a guest speaker who was a math guru that taught teachers how to teach math and was apparently well known. Everything she said came out of Rightstart. It validated our math for me.

Of course real life math is validating Rightstart for me too. Maxwell and I are going through the math portion of the ACT tests and we've almost gone though the whole thing, and he understands it all so far. (we had to review Trigonometry for awhile.)

My kids love all the crazy busyness that we're into. Mostly because of the friends. It's good to be surrounded by good people.

Back Home for the End of Summer

It has been busy, crazy, sad, worrying, but oh so wonderful this month as we've come home to Canada.

I actually did get quite a bit of teaching squished into this summer. But we were busy. We finally got the house listed to sell. Behold:

I know you want to buy it now, but good news! You can!!!

I was even able to do a little science (honestly, without a club it is so hard to get the mojo up enough to do science. I feel bad we didn't do all of the physics I wanted to.)

We learned about Newton's laws of motion. We played tug of war and other fun things to show how motion works.

We also learned about centripetal force. We did a lot of spinning for this! Spinning pennies inside balloons and spinning cups of water. The inertia broke through the bottom of the cup in this photo!

But we knew it couldn't all be school. We needed to get away and have some fun before we left. We decided to go to Pele island and go camping. It was just what we all needed. Nothing but white sand, a bon fire, and playing the Ukulele.

One of the hardest things about leaving was leaving the school that I teach at. It's been such an education for me to teach them, and I hope I made a difference for them.

We at least went out with a bang. It was independence week when we left, so we were there for Children's Day. I helped quite a bit with it, including making a banner for them, but the best part of it all was Hyrum and Daniel dressing up like clowns and giving all the kids balloon swords and hats.

They even threw me a going away celebration and gave Daniel and I tons of leis and cards. I will miss them so much, and I am so grateful for such an amazing privilege to teach in this incredible school.

Thankfully, THANKFULLY this amazing family from Utah moved in a couple of weeks before we left. I can not begin to explain what a blessing it is that they moved in as we moved out. I felt like I wasn't abandoning everything. The husband is a paediatrician, and the wife is a teacher. If all goes well, this little school will become a school for an American-based ESL program that is organized all over the world. Wouldn't that be incredible!?!

That family even took our dog Tanna and gave her a good home.

Leaving our animals was a really hard part of leaving Vanuatu. I never thought I would say that. Rudy has be our guard dog. She was our peace of mind and our friend. I wouldn't want to live in Vanuatu without her.

Elsa was the best cat in the world. I love that cat, and I never love cats.

She didn't bother Denise who's normally allergic to cats, she lets the kids abuse her without retaliation, and she ALWAYS goes in her litter box, and she didn't hurt our nice furniture.

Of course we have friends that we will miss more than our animals. Specifically our neighbours, those who have helped the Salmon kids, Branch members, Mayline, the Masos, and most of all the Gaydens. I don't think I would have stayed sane without them. We really needed them.

But obviously, those that we are missing the most are those that I feel like are my family. My little Tahitian family is on my mind and in my heart constantly. There are so many worries and doubts, but most of all a desire for true happiness for them.

The branch put on a get together as we left, and Lacil had her daughter make us these cute outfits. I will miss my Vanuatu life, but we will be back!

We realized that the cheapest way home was a layover in New Zealand, but if you can have two hours, why not two DAYS? Yep, we stopped in NewZealand for a little hello.

I decided that we needed to go to Rotorua for our day there, and we spent the first half of the day at Whakarewarewa a Maori village on top of an active geothermal zone!!! They actually cook their food with the thermal heat, and have bathing spas, and there's geysers right outside their front doors. It was crazy! Crazy and amazing!

They also performed a haka and poi ball dance for us. I wish you could have been there Danette! (If you still read my blogs that is)

We then asked the boys an important question: Would they want to go to the movie set of The Lord of The Rings, or go down a mountain Luge ride. We only had time and money for one.

They chose the Luge.

Going on that Luge ride was very nostalgic for me. When I went to New Zealand as a teenager, I remember that exact Luge ride. It was really trippy for me to realize that I was on the other side of the world AGAIN but this time with a family of seven all enjoying the same thing I did when I was 17.

I was a little sad we didn't go to the LOTR movie set. I even made them all watch the first half of the first movie. (Maxwell has seen all the Hobbit ones...I think.) But after that, Abraham had nightmares and that was the first time any of my kids have had nightmares from movies, so LOTR was done. However, we did drive past the place where the Hobbiton Farm was and we played the movie soundtrack in our van, and it was almost as good as paying $500 bucks to see the round doors in those hills.


When we got to North America, we landed in LA and stayed in California. It saved us a ton of money, but also, we had our nephew's wedding to go to!!

We had come a couple days early, and my old friend Tom Barlow was an excellent host and let us stay with him. We went to science centres, had reunions with family, and I had my nails done with the bride to be.

I love the Okanagan Science Pass we have. Get's us in everywhere. My boys were especially drawn to the Legos since they haven't been able to play with them for a year. The museum let you display your creations.

WALMART people! We went to Walmart. We are not in Vanuatu any more! Crazy. We also already started buying things on Amazon. We're back!!!

How fun to see everyone for the wedding. I sure love Dailin. He was one of the first little people I ever taught homeschool to, and he will always be that little boy in my heart.

Then it was off to Arizona. That was so special. I was so happy to see Dustin's brother's family. My boys were too. I actually love AZ in the summer. I know that sounds weird, but there's AC and then the swimming pools are all so warm, and it's hot even after the sun goes down, which is kind of magical.

Hyrum is old enough to go to the temple and we did a bit of family history work in Vanuatu, and the temple he chose to go to was the Gilbert temple specifically because he wanted to go with his Arizona cousins. Ahhh...

Then we spent one day in St. George Utah visiting Nate and his family:

And then we saw my MOM AND DAD. Oh how I love them. They took my kids to the store and told them to pick out a present as a late birthday/Christmas present from them and that of course delighted my boys.

And then we also went to the Curiosity museum. My boys took amazing rocks from St George to the Rock exchange at this museum, and the lady working there said she had never had kids who knew more about the rocks they brought then my kids, specifically Maxwell who had basically written an essay about gypsum.

When we got back to Cardston our house was perfectly clean and the table was set, dinner was ready, candy was hidden throughout the house, everything was so welcoming and perfect thanks to the Smiths. What a blessing they are.

And soon, it was William's birthday:

And we were overwhelmed with seeing all our wonderful friends and family (seriously, Hyrum had a hard transition, he was way too excited to handle all of his emotions!)

We got some end-of the-year history in. We talked about the American Civil War. We brought out cotton as we discussed the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. I was so happy to let Daniel make actual yarn from real cotton balls, because when we were reading a book about Mr Luther King Jr earlier in the year, he had so many questions about how that was possible.

By the way, it's supper hard to get just cotton out of a cotton ball plant.

We also learned quite a bit about Abraham Lincoln and Clara Barton. Abraham is soooo dang cute as Abraham Lincoln !!! "I'm Abraham Lincoln. I'm not lying!"  AHAHAHHahhahaha

And for whatever reason they made these "ninja turtle" stress balls as I was teaching them one day...HUGE mess.

And we talked about Sherman's march, and how devastated the South was, and a bit about the reconstruction of the South. We even made out own Southern city that we destroyed....yeah, that sounds weird.

My kids have been doing their own kind of crafts too. like Daniel who insisted on making Lego jello molds.

And Hyrum's had fun making movies:

One of the great thins about the timing of our homecoming was that Maxwell and Hyrum were able to go to Lyber Retreat. This is a highlight of the year for Maxwell. I was so happy that they had that chance. In our journeys we listened to "Secret Garden" and "Little Britches" in preparation.

They also had to read an essay that was about not seeing your self as a victim and not having any excuses to get what you want. It was good, but it had this in it "“One of the epidemics of our time is the fad of “learning disabilities.” If a child is labeled with some disorder, then everyone – the teacher, the parent and even the child – is absolved of personal responsibility.” 

That was sooooo not okay with me, and I wrote a long letter to the camp telling them what I thought about that. They were really sweet and said they were already going to debate that with the kids about what was right and what wasn't in the article.

ANYWAYS.......WE'RE BACK

Home in Canada (for now ;P )