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.
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