Journey to Excellence

Last year I planted two potted tulips, that were on clearance at Walmart (after Easter) and an Easter Lily, in my favorite little spot in our backyard. Everything I read said that these would not come back up this year! I know you cannot see it well, but hidden in the midst of all those weeds are all three flowers fully sprouting! I almost cried when I saw them! Brynne and I are starting a unit on The Secret Garden today. We are planning to cover this unit until the end of April. I got this idea when I read that our local community theatre was doing auditions for "The Secret Garden", a play that will take place that month. That got my wheels turning! I bought the book on cd, by Classic Starts: The Secret Garden . We are going to listen to it and then do TONS of activities! We will do a plant study, build an earthworm habitat , do balloon botany, do flower poundings, make pretties for our garden, plant lots of things, make stone plant labels, make a twig trellis,...

We had a great week this week! I think we have finally hit our stride. Pretty good considering we are three quarters of the way through our school year, huh? We have tweaked and changed and come up with a schedule that works pretty good. I think we are all happy with it! Our schedule is working great for us. And it's not at all how I set out to do school when we started this journey. It's amazing how much I have changed in this process so far. Dawson ~ 8th Grade Things were seeming a little stale in Dawson's studies of The Middle Ages , so I made sure he had some other activities to do this week. He drew a Cartoon castle . He made garlic chive cream cheese spread and dill veggie dip, using fresh herbs . We studied the Black Plague , and I wanted to demonstrate it to him. I found a simulated game, but tweaked it a bit. I drew a map including five cities our character traveled in Adam of the Road . I then took 50 lima beans and put them in a lunch sack. On 15 ...

We took a week off for Spring Break last week and headed to Pensacola, Florida, to stay at my parents' vacation home. What a fabulous week! We got home Friday night and I didn't even unpack the car until Saturday. Instead I collapsed in bed early since I had driven for 13 1/2 hours straight. On Saturday I made a grocery list, went to the grocery store and started on housework. On Sunday I did more housework. It was around Sunday morning that I realized I had not requested any books Brynne would need for school this week. So instead of starting our unit on Time and our last For the Birds study on The Perfect Nest , I switched gears and decided to do a Spring unit this week instead. So we are doing a unit on Butterflies and Spring Math . I have requested some books from the library that are already local (don't need to be sent through intralibrary loan), that I can pick up today, and we can use them the rest of the week. We are going to do a lapbook and learn about...