Journey to Excellence

This past week was Red Ribbon Week at Eli's school. He dressed up various ways: clothes wrongside out, all in black, and crazy hair. Eli has very long, fine hair, so doing something crazy is a tad difficult. This is what we came up with .... Crazy hair or not, this child got STRAIGHT A'S on his report card for first quarter! Absolutely amazing for a little boy who started his little life with so many delays. He is progressing in leaps and bounds this year. SO PROUD OF HIM!

We have had school. It has just taken on some different forms. For instance, Dawson celebrated his 15th birthday and spent the day showing me all the educational aspects of his games on Xbox 360 . I surprised Dawson by picking up his two best friends (one who has moved to a nearby town), and some pizza and cookies, for a weekend of hanging out. Dawson has spent the past couple of weeks concentrating his studies on Lewis and Clark, The Alamo, The California Gold Rush . He has moved along in Algebra, Grammar, Critical Thinking, Typing, and the patterns of cells . He continued working on his IEW writing lesson practicing summarizing references . We finished The Captain's Dog , but didn't enjoy it as much as we had hoped. But we have been pleasantly surprised with the first several chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , that we started this week. I think the most enjoyable part has been me trying to pull off the various dialects. He spent this past week covered in

Eli's librarian e-mailed a note last week asking for families to paint pumpkins in the theme of their favorite storybook characters. I immediately knew what we would do! Eli LOVES the Fly Guy series by Tedd Arnold. Those are the books he brings home from the library every week. They are perfect for him. So, meet Fly Guy [the Pumpkin] vs. the Flyswatter . Eli's librarian was elated and thought it was the perfect character for Eli to choose!! It is now being displayed in the library at his school.

When I think about the past week, I only think two things: Dang, another week has whizzed by and I'm exhausted; and, Fossils . We had kind of a different week this week. It's so great when an opportunity comes up (especially when it's FREE), that is about something we haven't really studied much. Then I can take that thing and work it into a unit. This was an unexpected unit on Fossils because we had the opportunity to tour the Tulsa Geoscience Center on Wednesday. So, Dawson and I took a breather from Cells to study about the relationship between fossils and solar energy (we were going to do more with solar energy, but ran into a glitch when his solar kit we purchased was missing a couple of important parts). And Brynne and I chose not to start our Fall science unit and, instead, to focus on learning about Fossils. We were out of the house all day Wednesday, and then again all day Friday (to go on a field trip to the zoo with Eli). With our short day on Monday, be

My sweet friend Cheryl tagged me in the newest Meme about Homeschooling Resources. Here are my answers. ONE HOMESCHOOL BOOK I HAVE ENJOYED ... My absolute favorite was Pocketful of Pinecones by Karen Andreola. It is the greatest inspiration. I plan to purchase the sequel soon, because our library doesn't have it. ONE RESOURCE I WOULDN'T BE WITHOUT ... My local library. ONE RESOURCE I WISH I'D NEVER BOUGHT ... Apologia Biology. Textbooks are not for us. ONE RESOURCE I ENJOYED LAST YEAR ... Learning Adventures' "A World of Adventure". It was an excellent all-inclusive unit study for a first-time homeschooler, especially for a teenage boy. ONE RESOURCE I WILL BE USING THIS YEAR ... The internet, always. ONE RESOURCE I WOULD LIKE TO BUY ... A microscope. ONE RESOURCE I WISH EXISTED ... A voice-activated assignment record keeper and gradebook. ONE HOMESCHOOL CATALOG I ENJOY READING ... I don't really look at catalogs. But, I have books and resourc

Today is National Fossil Day . A couple of weeks ago we received a notification about a FREE event being held at the Tulsa Geoscience Center . I didn't know this place existed and am now so glad to know that it does! We signed up for an 11:00 a.m. time slot that would allow us to do as many fossil activities as we could in one hour. We met our good friends there, and were pleased to find out that there were only two other children signed up during our time slot with us. They are a new family in our Co-op, so it was nice that they were in our group. The group before us was quite large with lots of little ones. The geologist who led our group was very informative and great with the kids. He allowed them to touch so many fossils. They got to make a cast in plaster. They got to do fossil rubbings. I even had to get in on the action. Fun! They got to make fossil casts in magic clay. They saw how small they were compared to a dinosaur footprint. They got to dig

We took two weeks to study Kansas . The farming aspect of Kansas went so well with our Science unit of Nutrition and The Human Body that we dug in a little deeper than our normal book, coloring page, notebooking page and license plate map. We read the books Kansas from the Rookie Read About Geography series and Farming by Gail Gibbons. We also read Climbing Kansas Mountains by George Shannon. This book was about a little boy and his father who, because there aren't really "mountains" in Kansas, drove to the wheat silos and climbed to the top to view the farming landscapes. We learned, however, that Kansas really does have some cliffs, hills and even a summit at Mount Sunflower which is in excess of 4,000 feet. It's not completely flat farmland like we tend to believe. We studied the topography of the state of Kansas and made a salt dough map to demonstrate it. Brynne painted it primarily yellow to represent the color of wheat, Kansas' greatest crop

Is it just me or are these weeks just flying by?! It seems that I just get one Wrap-up done when it's time for another. I feel like we have accomplished so little in these 7 weeks, yet so much! I'll start this week with a shocker ... We didn't do any art this week . Yep, no art!   We had it scheduled in, but didn't get to it this week. We had a field trip and an unexpected dentist appointment that put us a bit behind. And, our art project was going to be a more complicated one this week, so we decided to put it off to a time when we could devote to it fully. That will be in two weeks, because we will be out of the house three days next week. What the heck did we do this week? Let me think ... oh, yeah ... On Tuesday, the kids and I took a trip to a local missions pumpkin patch . Then on Wednesday we went to the Tulsa State Fair to Oklahoma's Largest Classroom . On Friday, we had our monthly mom's support meeting at Co-op. Dawson provides child care for