Busy, Busy!

I finished cleaning out Isaac's room. Holy a lot of garbage!!! I still have to sort through the assorted toys, you know, the ones that don't belong to a certain set, ect... But all the sets, books, and craft supplies are sorted and organized. 

I still wish I had paint for the toy room. I have paint for Isaac's room, but want to do the toy room first while it's still relatively empty. All that's in there is the book shelves, the desk and the vacuum. Easy to move around and put back. Where as Isaac's room has the mattresses, all the toys, most of Brianna's story books, all the craft stuff and several pieces of furniture. Waaaay easier to do the toy room first. However, I don't have paint for that.

Brianna's almost done the last of her workbooks from our part time homeschooling. She just has the last of her Gr. 2/3 math book to do and has been working on it all day. She has only about a dozen pages or so left so it'll be no problem to finish them before we start full time homeschooling in 2 weeks. 2 Weeks!!! So excited!!!

On Monday I have a meeting with her principal to discuss homeschooling and pulling her. I have his copy of my letter of intent ready. I'm kinda nervous about it since he's a great principal and I don't want him to think I'm insulting him or his school. I've also got to send out my letter of intent to the school board.

An Organized Day

Very productive day! I got Brianna's desk moved out of Isaac's dark-ish room to the nice and well lit old toy room. It now sits in front of a large southern facing window (with a black out blind so it can lowered to shade her eyes but still light up her work). Also found that the old hamster/mouse shelf is a great bookshelf for her larger books and text-style books. They didn't fit on her regular bookshelf (which doesn't have adjustable shelves) so I was lost where to put them.

Next, move to Isaac's room. Oh boy! On the stripping of the possessions day (extreme, repeated bad behaviour made her lose everything but her bed and clothes), I just kinda tossed everything in there. WOW! But now, it's an organized mess. All I have left to go through is her assorted toys (ya know, the random ones that don't come in a set or anything). I also have to figure out what we're gonna do with her hidey chair and the 2nd slingback chair. They're just kinda stuffed in there right now.

Now I really wanna re-paint. The walls in the old toy room and Isaac's room are horrible due to Brianna's drawing on them. They just look gross now. I have the paint for Isaac's room but just can't seem to find the time to do it. Maybe I'll get Lee to occupy the kids on the weekend and get started. I just wish I had paint for the old toy room instead of Isaac's room (I use colored paint) since Isaac's room is shut up right now and the toy room is out in the open (essentially an oversized hallway between the bedrooms). Wonder how much of what colors I have in the basement......

On a Positive Note:

Brianna started her curling class today. She fell a lot but thankfully there was a lot of 1st year students so she was far from the only one falling. She also discovered that she needs to wear gloves. I guess she didn't put together that playing on ice would mean that the arena was cold lol

Arrrrgh!

So I'm still reading that local history book... There was a whole chapter on the building of the St. Laurence Seaway. Great! I know lots of stuff about that, I'll be able to get some new info! Yeah, not! Again... most of the chapter was about how the influx of Seaway workers changed the religious areas of the town. NOTHING about the flooding of the Seaway, nothing about how they dried up the Long Sault Rapids, nothing about exploding the dam to flood, nothing about the moving of the towns where the flooding was gonna occur.... NOTHING!!!!! I am so pissed at this book! The title is "From Great Wilderness to Seaway Towns. A Comparative History of Cornwall, Ontario and Massena, New York, 1784-2001. WHERE in that does it say that 80% of the book is going to compare the religions and almost only the religions of Cornwall and Massena?!?!? *sigh*

Local History

I need to find some better sources! Currently I have an I'm-unhappy-with book. But it appears to be the only one I can find that goes back 200+ yrs. Our town is one of the oldest towns in Upper Canada and Canada itself so I really want to cover that at some point. I mean I don't plan on diving into it in 3 weeks so it's not like there's a hurry, but it's frustrating that I'm having problems researching our great history! We have sooooo many historical things around town, you'd think I'd be able to find scads of great books about it! I'm thinking a lot of our unit on the towns history is gonna be field trips. Nothing wrong with that, but even minus the homeschooling front, I love history so *I* want to read more about it!

Official Virus/Spyware

So my computer is officially dead :( Thankfully I'm now able to use mom's laptop. It's not ideal cause it's old and has issues, but it's better than being offline! I gotta figure out how to hook up my printer to it too. And of course I don't have all my awesome HSing bookmarks cause they're on the dead computer, but that's ok, I have some sites I wanted to check out written in my notebook.

I sooooo can't wait til we start HSing!!! Brianna got kicked by one of her bullies this week. Left a good sized bruise too. Did I hear about the incident from the school? Nope, found out about it from Brianna hours after she got home from school. So done with PS!


We're working on finishing up her old workbooks now so we can start on fresh ones with the beginning of homeschooling. Her father picked me up a Gr. 3 English book so now we're set to start up. There's still several workbooks I *want* to pick up, but nothing we'll be even opening til the new year so no hurry to buy them yet.

GRRRRRRR!

OMG My computer/printer are pissing me off!!!!

I've got some virus or something causing pop ups all over the place. It's slow as crap. My printer hates me and freezes anytime I want it to print something with more than 2 pages. And since my printer prints backwards I keep getting the end of printing projects and not the beginning of them. I have several sites I want to print worksheets from and I can't!

And with this virus or whatever I'm having a heck of a time getting to certain pages. For example, I wanted to make a new blog post with some of my favorite free HSing links and every time I tried to get to blogger it would "re-direct" me to a page that's never found. So instead I'm blogging about this hunk of junk. I sooooo need a new computer. Unfortunately that means $$$

And to top it off, the baby is molar teething hard core, so I'm sleeping like crap and it's not making my mood towards my computer any friendlier!

Rant over. 

On a positive note, tomorrow (or today, depending on if you insist on pointing out that it's after midnight) is homeschool soccer. Hopefully we'll be able to play! I know nothing about indoor soccer domes, but I'm assuming that it wouldn't take 2 weeks to fix it after the collapse.

Slacker!!!

So much for me keeping up on this lol In my defense, my computer was having issues the last few days and I havn't been able to get to my blog to even view it, let alone post! Thankfully after some deep cleaning, it seems to be better.

So I've decided to revamp our schedule til the end of the year. Both to allow a little de-schooling (but not completely no work since she *is* used to homeschooling, just not on a full time basis) and to stretch out the plans I currently have and have time for the awesome Christmas unit I have planned (if that isn't a drug out sentence I don't know what is LOL!).


Now I have us doing some basic review (so I know where she is) and some set up for the stuff we'll be doing daily (weather tracking, ect...) for the first couple weeks. Then for December, we'll do the Christmas unit and a little of this, a little of that.

Confirmation

Well I got confirmation of my decision to homeschool last night. Brianna told me about 2 boys in her class that are calling her a retard and a bitch. Hello!?! We're talking 3rd grade here! I'm going into the school to talk to her teachers today. I heard the words I'd been hoping to hear... "I can't wait to start homeschooling!"

So I'm pretty far behind on my blogging *bad mommy* I've been alternating between not even touching my curriculum books to planning units and lesson plans from the moment I get up until I fall asleep! 

I've now got math, science and English done to the end of the year (and even some into January). I'm getting the books to start my next history unit (the history of Christmas) and need to find some local maps and books for our next geography unit (our town and area). Thankfully Lee will be a help here since he was born and raised in the area.

I also found that the local Early Years center provides Scholastic catalogs. Even though the program is typically from 0-6 yrs, they do carry the catalogs for the older age groups! They also carry the science and math catalog and the click (computer/tech stuff) catalog, which the schools almost never hand out.