Month: March 2017

Rejoice: I made it to the Y a couple of mornings, and I had my quiet moment most mornings.

Relate: The boys played outside a lot.

Remember:  We started in on reviewing in earnest for Memory Master. I have a love/hate relationship with the project. I think Charlotte Mason would hate it, but it is a way to determine mastery of Cycle 2. We require our kids to participate the last time they will cover a cycle. It shouldn’t be hard for these boys who have been hearing this information from the time they were 3 and 4.

Reason: Very little math was done here. Now both Micah and Gideon will be working longer than they would like to. I think Josiah will revel in the fact that just doing his work was a good idea.

Read: Micah read for Debate and for his research paper. Josiah worked on The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft Mods Programming. Gideon is halfway through The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase. Together, we continued on in Robinson Crusoe and The Good Master. I have a crazy amount of books going, and I need to read Gene Stratton Porter’s Keeper of the Bees by next Monday evening.

Record: I didn’t write, though I have a couple of posts in the queue. Josiah and Gideon did their IEW assignment. Micah worked on a comparison paper.

Restore: I hung out with Jon after we put the boys to bed, watching TV and reading and being together. It was a good week for us.

Margin Report: This was a bad week for Margin. I was running from one thing to another nearly every day. That wears me out. This week doesn’t promise to be much better.

This was a week on which we originally planned to do no schoolwork at all – Spring Break. We were going to lay around and read and play with friends and have a few adventures. But then no work was done during Show Week, and most of the boys had the flu the next week, and we got behind. This is one thing that I don’t like about having our Classical Conversations Community day driving our curriculum. We need to go at the same pace as our classmates, so if life happens, we must play catch-up. Most of our fun week got postponed until May. We went on a few little adventures, but mostly, it was a work week.

A few people have told me that I sound too perfect when I write here.  I want to be clear to anyone reading – I make a lot of mistakes, and I am fairly open about them. However, I am writing these entries to celebrate the little victories that I forget so easily. They aren’t for anyone else as much as they are for me… because I get bogged down in not being enough for this job. There things that we don’t get to and the things that I laid aside because I didn’t have the energy for them and the days that chronic pain left me stuck on the couch when I wanted to take the boys to the park. This is a journal of successes. I’ve made a billion mistakes, and through those mistakes, I came to the methods and systems that are working in my house at the moment. One thing that does work is jotting down the successes so that they aren’t lost in my sea of failures.

Rejoice: I made it to the Y a couple of mornings, and I did most of my Bible study for the week, but I also slept in a little several times. The boys were still resting up and recovering from the flu the first part of the week, so I still had a little morning quiet with my coffee.

Relate: We did go on a few adventures – one to a favorite used bookstore and one to the newly remodeled Central Library. Both involved coffee and books (which make me very happy), but in both places Josiah and Gideon found things they enjoyed. We joined a group of friends to see Hidden Figures, and we also saw friends at science class. The boys played outside a lot.

Remember:  We sang memory work twice this week, and the memory master review month has started.

Reason: Very little math was done here. I actually excused Micah from several algebra assignments so that he could catch up in other subjects. He will have to finish Saxon Algebra 1 after the school year ends.

Read: I did a lot of reading this week. Some girls that I tutor are obsessed with a new series that I hadn’t heard of. It wasn’t good. I don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I will be able to discuss it with them. Micah finished The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Josiah finished The Hobbit and started on The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft Mods Programming . Gideon finished Men of Iron and a pile of picture books. Together, we continued on in Robinson Crusoe and The Good Master.

Record: I didn’t write. Gideon didn’t write. Josiah did his IEW assignment. Micah finished a LTW essay about Born Again and outlined a comparison paper.

Restore: I hung out with Jon after we put the boys to bed, watching TV and reading and being together. It was a good week for us. We went on a date this evening and enjoyed the beautiful Oklahoma last day of winter while we ate on the patio of a restaurant we hadn’t been to before. (It was 85 degrees and sunny and breezy.)

Margin Report: This was a good week for fitting in some reading and writing and piano that I missed the last few weeks.

It wasn’t the week that I planned, but it ended very well. About the time I hit publish on last week’s post about Lion King, both Micah and Gideon woke up from their necessary naps with fevers. They joined the ranks of their friends with the Post-Show-Week flu. It lasted five days.

We missed our community day on Monday. (I left them here napping and watching a movie and ran over to teach a little Latin, but that was it.)  On Tuesday, they watched another movie while I went to Costco to buy produce and chicken. I came back and made an Instant pot of chicken broth, which became much appreciated chicken and noodles. On Wednesday, I left long enough to host the National Latin Exam (which Micah missed, but he wasn’t too disappointed.) On Thursday, we all laid around and rested and read. On Friday, they were back to normal, so we saw some of our people at debate prep. We had missed them.

Saturday was our campus’s Protocol Event (Where I caught Micah and his buddies dressed in suits and looking so grown up. We took the Challenge 1 and 2 students to dinner at a local restaurant, and then we went to hear the Tulsa Signature Symphony perform Mozart’s Requiem in D minor. It was a beautiful piece. We looked up the lyrics online and followed along with the Latin. Even the students who are behind the pace of their Challenge guide had no trouble understanding the lyrics because Mr. Henle includes a good bit of church vocabulary a long with the never-ending slaughtering of the Gauls.

Rejoice: I had a major goal this week of staying well, so I gave up my morning hour and slept a little longer. I didn’t go to the Y at all. But since the boys were low-energy, I still had a little Bible study and reading time with my coffee.

Relate: I did a lot of reading aloud and some movie watching, made many small amounts of comforting foods, and conquered the kitchen chores and the laundry. I yelled at one boy for not putting his Kleenexes in the trash can. That started a giggle fest because the trash can was literally right next to him, and he was still piling them on the couch.

Remember: We did no singing this week, and therefore we did no memory work. We did still listen to stories at meals, and the younger boys did some Foundations memory work with the app on their iPads.

Reason: We did no math or Latin or English Grammar this week. Unfortunately, that means that our sick week became our Spring Break. That’s a bummer.

Read: I think I did more reading than anyone, but I didn’t actually finish anything. We did start reading Kate Seredy’s The Good Master (aff. link) as a read aloud, thanks to a suggest from Dawn. The younger boys read a stack of picture books while they were lounging around under blankets. Micah listened to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and to a module of Exploring Creation through Physical Science thanks to Audible.

Record: I recorded a little in my journal and Bible, but that was about it.

Restore: We are thrilled that only two of us got really sick and that all of us are healthy again. But our spring break is gone. We’ll see if we can finish up things in time to have a little one next weekend.

 

Last week, the boys participated in Courtyard Theater’s version of Disney’s Lion King, Jr. It was excellently done. As much as possible, the work of the production was done by students. Make-up, masks, props, lighting, sound, costuming… they did it all with guidance and hard work.  Micah worked on lighting, and Gideon was a wildebeest. It was a fantastic week.

We were completely out of our routine, and all that happened last week was the production and some reading. We finished King of the Wind, which was a fabulous read. No one did any math or Foundations or Essentials or Challenge work. We’ll be working this week and next, though I am canceling some assignments because we also have a few projects to do that require a spring break.

I’m working on the next six weeks of Morning Meeting posts. I don’t know if they help any other families get a good variety in their morning, but those posts guarantee that I get the things done that I want for my family easily.