Journey to Excellence

We are in our last two weeks of the 2015-2016 school year, and it has been a great one! Really, I don't think I can think of one thing I would have changed about this school year. That makes planning for the next one super simple because we will just continue doing what we are doing. We will shift our literature, history, and science focus to our new topics and move up a level in math. Otherwise, we will stay the course which is very exciting and a huge relief! Since we completed our WWII curriculum from the World War II for Kids book a couple of weeks ago, we are just concentrating on wrapping up a few things. We finished The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne M. Frank and the kids were faced with the realization that Anne and the majority of her family and others hiding with them did not, in fact, make it through the holocaust alive. It was actually devastating for them to learn. Brynne, in particular, had become very close to Anne, and it took her a couple of days to deal with...

Spring Clean! What do you do to prepare for the new Season? What a timely post after the weekend we just had. Almost four years ago, when we moved to Missouri, we absolutely did not have the energy to sort through all of the boxes we had in storage at our house there before we moved to our house here. Those boxes have been sitting in our garage since our move. Our garage is detached and leaky. It's had neighborhood cats taking up residency there so it stinks. So to say that we have been putting off purging and cleaning out the garage would be an extreme understatement. Our small town has a city-wide clean up week twice per year where you can haul pretty much anything to provided dumpsters. We decided it was time to tackle the garage so we can utilize this free service. We made it through half the garage this past weekend resulting in about 10 boxes/tubs of items to donate to the Historical Society garage sale and a huge pile of garbage bags of trash for the dump day. We...

It's been a while, huh? That's because Journey Homeschool hit the road a couple of weeks ago for some learning, fun, and relaxation. We put in a full week before we left primarily wrapping up some World War II studies in anticipation of our trip. We had books to read and videos to watch to get us ready. In addition to that we put in one final week of reading, english, and math. So where have we been? We hit 9 states in 9 days with our Oklahoma friends Megan, Paige, and Maggie. First we travelled to Atlanta. We spent the first evening enjoying dinner at the Gladys Knight and Ron Winan's Chicken and Waffle Restaurant indulging in some authentic chicken and waffles and then enjoying the water show and blooming azaleas at Centennial Olympic Park. The next day the  dreams of my kids came true ... they got to meet Carl Azuz from CNN Student News on the CNN Student News tour. It was such a great opportunity! Carl is exactly the same in person as he is on his daily b...