Update

With the move to our new house, the holidays (and all the craziness involved), it has been a little more difficult to update my blogs.

But I thought I'd take just a minute to update.

First of all I want to say how much I treasure the opportunity to home educate my children. To me, it is worth every minute of the time it takes. I treasure the time I have with my boys.

Even on the most trying days, I feel that those are opportunities for character development and relationship building.

Michael is doing a daily Character study with the family at lunch-time every day. It has been such a joy to sit back and watch him teach and lead our family!

The boys are still learning Scripture memory from the book of Proverbs.

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Justin is working with double digit divisors and long division, fractions, simple algebra, and converting English measures. In Language Arts, he just moved from learning about comma placement to possesive nouns.

Jonathan is focusing on improving his addition skills by going through Twin Sisters Addition workbook & CD. He is doing well; I just felt that it would help him move through his ABeka math more quickly if he can master addition. There is a CD with the workbook that is great for reviewing at bedtime.
In Language Arts, he is separating syllables and recognizing special phonics sounds.

Ryan is learning to read. We take it slowly and patiently. The patience is paying off because he is really starting to blend the sounds together. I don't want to rush through this. I want him to get it without regretting speeding through it.
He is not "there" yet, but he is getting there. I am so thankful that I have the opportunity to teach Ryan to read. I would not trade these memories we are making together!
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For Science, we are learning everything from insects to Creation Science (Debunking Darwinism).

The boys read history separately to themselves and then we also do unit studies. In our unit study, we just talked about the Indian mounds (burial grounds). One interesting mound that we talked about today was the "Serpent Mound". The picture in the book we are using is much better than this one:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/serpent.html


I had forgotten, but studying that reminded me of the place in Alabama called Moundville (near Tuscaloosa) that we visited on field trips when I was in school. We may just have to go there for a field trip sometime ourselves. There are surely a lot of Indian themed historical places around here as well. I am looking forward to finding them!

We haven't done many messy Science projects lately because of the holiday stuff. We are still meeting with Stacie and Anna weekly.
Sometimes we play board games. Other times we do easy crafts. Another week I had several children over. They ran around in the fields, got muddy, and then came inside and baked cookies. I plan on having more children over soon to do some Christmas cookies. I am also hoping to get back into regularly visiting the nursing homes. We have several from our church in the same nursing home (as well as Nana), so I am hoping that we can make that a more regular activity again.

Well that's it for now. I hope I can do better updating from now on.