Day in the Life of Waterview Homeschool

This week, the final week, on iHomeschool Network's Annual Back to School Blog Hop is a "Day in the Life of" post. I love doing these. I haven't done one in forever though!

8am - alarm goes off. I am NOT a morning person and even 8am is way too early for me. Thankfully, Lee works nights and is home before Joshua wakes up, or, if I'm extra lucky, Joshua will wake me up at like 6am *grumble* I poked Olivia, who is not surprisingly in my bed. She doesn't even flinch. I come down stairs to find that Brianna's alarm has been going off for the last half an hour. I need an earthquake bed for her or something. Pour coffee and head outside to my porch to smoke and coffee in silence. My mom, Grandma, has already left for work.

8:30am - I come inside, Brianna's alarm is not still going but she's not up here. Olivia is also not out of bed. I send Lee upstairs to wake Olivia and head to the basement to drag Brianna out of bed. She fakes being dead. Dude, there is not enough coffee flowing through me yet to think that's funny.

8:50am - Breakfast is finally happening for the girls. Joshua on the other hand has been awake 2 hours and is happily "cooking" his sippy on the stove (placing it on the cold burner and calling it hot).

9:05am - Joshua's sippy might be "hot" but his toes are like icecubes and I refuse to turn on the furnace this early in the fall. Operation find-everyone's-slippers begins.

9:15am - veg fest before school. Since it's Monday, Lee didn't work last night (he works tonight though), so the little kids pile on Daddy in the living room. Brianna and I hang out on the porch, being kitten perches and discuss what's on the agenda for the day and I fill in chore lists for the week in their agendas.

9:45am - meltdown begins over the fact that it's not snack time yet. Cue Joshua's most pitiful look. He is temporarily soothed by a blanket fort to watch Brianna play her game.

10am - let the schoolwork commence! Nope, wait... let the hang out in the bathroom for long periods of time commence....

10:25am - school actually starts. Thomas starts on Netflix for Joshua. Lee hides in our bedroom to watch non-preschooler tv.

10:40 am - I cover Brianna's eyes to enter her laptop password while she's on her phone doing DuoLingo. "She chocolate eats" is now the French phrase of the day. Olivia is excited to see seasonal (fall) worksheets in her pile.

11:30 - Laundry on the line! Joshua loves to help Brianna with the clothes pins.

11:50am - Olivia is done her paper schoolwork. Since it's almost lunch break, she just breaks early. She is loving her newly allowed privilege of cutting with a steak knife, so cut up Joshua some strawberries for lunch

12pm - lunch break! Also, mail call! Brianna got a card from the local organizer of the Terry Fox Run with this year's pin.

12:30pm - back to work. Brianna starts with a load of dishes, Olivia starts with her Reading Eggs and I get to work with Joshua's schoolwork.

1:10 pm - Joshua's (and Lee's lol) nap time means my work time. While the girls work on schoolwork and chores, I head up to my office to sew zippers and necklines into car seat ponchos. Right now is my bust season in general but also the only time of year I really sell car seat ponchos. So add prepping for Christmas sales and shows to roughly 40-50 ponchos means I'm pretty busy!

2:50pm - read aloud time. Today we are reading from our biology unit on respiration and our novel "The Family Under The Bridge".

3:20pm - reading is done so I go to wake up Joshua. I find him napping under the bed, silly boy. Under-bed napping apparently makes a grumpy boy. Brianna tried to cheer him up some by making a train track for him.

3:40pm - Olivia and I finished her apple experiment. It was her first long term science experiment so she was excited for it to finally be done.

4pm - school work and most chores are done. Electronics time for the girls. Olivia hides in a blanket for to play Minecraft and Brianna plays a bunch of games for Joshua (who wasn't terribly impressed with Brianna's track building skills and went back to being grumpy). I do some tidying up so I can get some freezer cooking done. When Joshua is finally less cranky, Brianna joins me to make Sausage Breakfast Muffins.

6pm - Brianna got ready for Pathfinders and then researched how to tie her scarf properly. She was so proud to have figured it out! She noticed that the videos she found on youtube were using the older style scarf (uniforms changed recently), so once she perfects it, she plans to make a youtube video with the current uniform.

6:30pm - Brianna is dropped off at Pathfinders. I come home and finish making the gazillion muffins (and ate about 348765 of them!). I manage to get Olivia to consume something of nutrients other than cereal (extreme picky issues here) - homemade apple honey oatmeal!

8pm - Lee and I went to Brianna's Pathfinders meeting for parent planning. They announced the current planned international trip - ENGLAND! Mommy is massively jealous. In 2019, Brianna will be able to go to England for approximately a week with the Pathfinders and Rangers to the Pax Lodge. Brianna is insanely nervous as she hates sleeping away from home, but in the next 3 years she will have a zillion opportunities to sleep away with Guides.

8:50pm - back home. Joshua and Lee have gone to snuggle to bed. Olivia cleans the living room and Brianna started her garbage and dishes chores.

8:55pm - for some reason, Brianna's alarm started randomly sounding. Why on earth it would be set for this time, who knows....

9:30pm - bedtime! I tuck Olivia in, Joshua's still awake so I snuggle with him for a few. I send Brianna downstairs to write in her Pathfinders Journal and park my butt on the computer to veg out on facebook.

10pm - Tell Brianna it's lights out.

10:10pm - kick Lee off to work and hang out on my porch with the neighbour, talking about Brianna's England trip.

10:40pm - I packed all the sausage muffins into freezer bags and found room for them in the freezer. That's a lot of freaking muffins!

10:50pm - I feel sorry for my American friends after reading the aftermath of the Presidential Debate.

11pm - I work on some online stuff for work, talking to customers, organizing coop buys.

11:30pm - Well past my bedtime...

Thanks for reading our newest Day in the Life post. I can't wait to read everyone else's on iHomeschool!

Weekly Wrap Up - 9/16/16

Monday was a day off for Daddy's birthday. We always take off family birthdays, but learning often still happens!

Brianna is loving getting back into CNN Student News. It teaches her current events and brings her around the world. It has serious stuff, and fun stuff (like Tuesday's llama jumping segment).

The beginning of fall has some great weather. Not too hot, not too cool and most of the humidity is gone. The girls took Poetry Tea Time onto the porch this week.

Brianna spend a lot of time this week busting her butt to hit her $500 fundraising goal for The Terry Fox Foundation. In the last 5 years she has raised almost $2000!

We have an outdoor cat who had kittens 5 weeks ago. Olivia is SUPER protective of them. She is a giant worry wart as they get bigger and more into exploring. Thankfully they love her and happy put up with her smothering.

I love freezer cooking. Brianna's helped me a few times, but it's always been "get me this" or "get me that". This time, I had her HELP. Figuring out what to make, what spices we needed, mixing (hamburger, by hand), forming hamburgers and meatballs. The whole shebang. She loved it! We made hamburgers, chili, meatloaf, sloppy joes, tator tot casserole, cheeseburger rice, sausage breakfast muffins and chocolate chip cookies.

In more "schooly" news, we finished up the Nervous System portion of our Biology course. Brianna chose to write about amnesia for her writing assignment. Olivia spent a lot of time poking and pinching herself to "send signals to her brain" so clearly that portion was well learned lol

Brianna had a bit of a meltdown over her French writing. She is a terrible speller, even in English, and Rosetta Stone won't mark the activity as complete unless you score 80% or more, which means in the writing portion, she has to spell at least 80% of the words correctly. I'm not sure how we will proceed in the next 4 years of the course. I WANT her to be completely fluent, including writing, but I don't want to make her hate it because she's a naturally poor speller.

See what Joshua did this week in my tot school post.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

Reading in 2016/2017

I recently posted our Current Curriculum but left out read alouds and individual reading. Why? A mix of "I forgot" and the fact that it changes so often.

Some things we read just cause we feel like it. Some things we read because I read them as a kid and thought they were fantastic and/or important books. Some thing we read because it ties with current interests.

Our reading plans for this year, in no particular order are:
-The Hunger Games series
-Little House on the Prairie series
-Black Beauty
-The Trumpet of the Swan
-The Family Under the Bridge
-Tracker
-Hatchet (and all the "Brian" books that go with it)
-Dear Austin
-The Incredible Journey
-Jim Ugly
-Little Women
-Alice in Wonderland
-The Sky is Falling

We are starting with The Family Under the Bridge for no other reason than we haven't done read alouds (other than science and history) in a while and it's a shorter book.

Weekly Wrap Up - April 29th

So I decided to go back to my usual "story mode" of my weekly wrap up. Some weeks we don't cover all subjects and then I get anxious that I missed something. I know our eclectic homeschooling works for us and the kids learn all they need to, so stressing myself out about unnecessary stuff seems counter-productive.

Saturday was the Great Cloth Diaper Change. Joshua took part (probably his last year unless I can squeeze him into a cloth trainer next year) with his twin friends.

Joshua in Magic School Bus

Brianna has been reading a lot with Olivia. Olivia really likes it (cause I guess if it's not reading with mommy, it's not "school" lol). Joshua loves all things books so he's joining them often too. Olivia has also been enjoying learning to spell words with ASL. I figured she's learning both the sign language alphabet AND general spelling. BONUS!

The girls have been helping my niece, Tanya, build a lean-to. Brianna spent Sunday helping another homeschooling family trim trees and doing general yard work.

Joshua decided he wants some preschool. He has started his own cutting practice whether anyone wants to do school with him or not.

On Thursday, the girls took part in Cornwall's City Clean Up Week.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

World War II and The Holocaust

Brianna got a gift card to the local book store for Christmas. She's been enjoying these Dear Canada books so got another one, Pieces of the Past, for her collection. The book is about a little girl who immigrated to Canada during the 2nd World War. It talks about her struggles with her new life and about the event of recent past that lead her to where she is now.

Once she was done reading it, not surprisingly, Brianna had a lot of questions about the Holocaust. As we do not censor real life from our kids, I answered her questions as best as I could. As usual, my answers weren't enough. She wanted more. So I found her a bunch of documentaries and based-on-fact movies (since she's a great visual learner).

A couple of favorites:
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It's a fiction film based on historical fact about a young boy who's family moves as his father is commandant of a concentration camp. The boy, exploring, meets a young Jewish boy on the other side of the concentration camp's fence. A very moving story that shows a child's side of the Holocaust.

Schindler's List. Another fiction film, based on fact. This one is a little mature for most kids as it is more graphic than most. It is about a German business man who essentially turns his factory into a refugee camp for Jewish people to save them from Auschwitz. Brianna came up with lots of great questions with this one.

Auschwatz: The Nazis and The Final Solution. This one was a surprising like. I thought after a different one that she watched, she would be bored with this one also, but nope! She was full of questions and wanting to rewind to show me various clips. This one is fairly self explanatory as being about Auschwitz and The Final Solution (which Brianna was thoroughly disgusted with).

Weekly Wrap Up - April 22nd

Sunday and Thursday went up to a glorious 22C (72F) and we spent the days outside. The kids examined all the new growth of our perennials and Joshua dug in the dirt and everyone got thoroughly dirty.

We had a very laid back quiet week (read: mom didn't feel like school). Spring Break? Yes! That's what it was, Spring Break! The kids certainly didn't object. We all learned a bunch of new sign language thanks to friends and family helping out with getting Joshua's Signing Time back ofter Netflix cancelled it.

Learning still happened

I got a bunch of sewing done

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Weekly Wrap Up - April 1st

Math: Olivia got quite frustrated with needing to learn to hold a ruler and use it correctly for drawing shapes. "It keeps moving!!"

English: Olivia completed her Phonics book. Now we will again start 1+1+1=1's You Can Read! program.

Science: This week we started our big Human Body/Biology unit. In order to give Brianna a sneak peek at the high school level courses, her side of it will be quite intensive. This week we covered the Immune System, Skin, the Endocrine System and started on Cells.

History/Geography: Closer and closer to the end of Mystery Class! Only 2 weeks left and Brianna gets to turn in her guesses.

French: Brianna has completed the first half of Year 1 in Rosetta Stone French.

Phys Ed.: Brianna ran twice this week.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Olivia's Word Folder

As our dining room doubles as our school room, we don't have a lot of wall space for large projects like word walls. I love word walls. Not having space for one makes me sad. Enter the word folder. While it doesn't have the out and open, large feel of a word wall, it's basically a portable word wall.

I took a simple file folder and some alphabet stickers I had floating around and created a folder for review. Olivia thinks it's great to add new words to it. When she struggles with a word, it's nice to be able to say "but it's in your folder, you KNOW this!".

Linking up with Hip Hop Homeschooler

Weekly Wrap Up - Mar 18th

Joshua is progressing in his speech therapy. He's now up to 36 signs and will use the ooooo and ppp sounds unprompted to "say" open. He has also learned bbbb, eeeee, hhhhaaa and tttt.

Making the eeee sound to ask for a toy key

Math: Brianna's continuing with her math assessment. I introduced fractions to Olivia today with Lego. She thought it was fantastic to include toys with schoolwork! Brianna made a city skyline of the Pi numbers for Pi Day.

English: I've started Olivia on Reading Eggs as ABC Mouse was getting waaaay too easy for her. She needs something that will help her read/spell words instead of with sounds letters make (something she's mastered). Joshua loves watching her work on her schoolwork and it's helping him too as he sometimes attempts to make the sounds to go with the words.

Science: I am working on planning a Human Body/Biology class right now, so formal science is on hiatus. The girls did some bird watching now that our yard is starting to fill with spring birds again. They spotted a Robin too, which is traditionally the first sign of spring around here.

Geography/History: This week was a busy week for Mystery Class. Because of being sick last week we had catch up, but also, we had to figure out roughly how many degrees longitude each Mystery Class location was from Greenwich, England, on the prime meridian.

French: Still continuing with Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo.

Health/Phys Ed.: After a sick week last week, we took it slow this week.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Weekly Wrap Up - Feb 5th

On Monday, Brianna organized and ran her first homeschool coop meeting. Our usual coordinator is out of the country so our family has taken over for the time being. Brianna's great with crafty stuff, so she found this cute Pompom Popper craft to do.

On Tuesday, we ran our No Technology Experiment. Check out the results here!

We've started our 3rd round of Mystery Class. I'll have a post about that soon!

Olivia had a rough week with her attitude. She was refusing to do schoolwork, generally not listening and being hateful. Friday was a MUCH better day.

We started reading an Our Canadian Girl series for Black History month. This series is on Rachel, a girl trying to come to Canada to escape slavery. Olivia will be taking part in this read aloud, her first longer-than-10-minutes read aloud, so hopefully it goes well


Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Loooong Awaited Update

So since I only blogged a whole *2* times last year, there's kinda been a lot missed. The somewhat condensed version...

Dylan: 19, lives with his mother. Dylan graduated high school. He took an intense 8 week course for heavy equipment operator. He is now working at his first full time job, which he loves!

Isaac: 16, lives with his grandmother. Isaac got his drivers license over the summer (which he is super proud of). He got Honours on his most current report card. He is still very geek/computer driven.

Brianna: 13, at home. Brianna had a slow start to the year. We did minimal core subjects and otherwise unschooled. My brain just wasn't having it. While this helped heal my brain, it didn't do much for Brianna. She does great unschooled learning for self taught or guided learning but anything that is required, but she doesn't particularly want to do, she NEEDS to be "sat on" to do it. Thus, she did poorly to failing miserably at several things. After a summer of normal summer schedule, we got back to business for school. She is doing great in all areas other than math. Don't get me wrong, she is actually good at math! She just doesn't like it, so she slacks off.

In November she again took part in NaNoWriMo. Last year she wrote nearly 10,000 words. This year she more than doubled it to 20,000+ words by the end of November and isn't even done her story! She took a couple month break from it and starting next month will be working on finishing it and editing it. She story is Minecraft fan fiction.

Brianna started working for our neighbour, being a regular babysitter and also doing random jobs around their house. She saved half her money all year and did really well with what she kept. She even took on a couple other babysitting jobs and is building herself a good reputation.

She finally started Rosetta Stone French and is excelling in it. The program doesn't "pass" you unless you have set grade (I believe 75 or 80%), but for most lessons this is easy as pie for her. She is struggling with the writing portion as she's a horrendous speller, even in English. And she has some issues with the grammar portion but French grammar is hard.

Brianna really didn't do all that well in her training or races last year. It's a goal she's working on for this year and thus far she's doing pretty good!

Brianna took part in a science fair with our homeschool group. She put together a project on Earth Sciences, focusing on various rocks. She did really well with the project and even did a presentation in front of the group! She is very stage fright and didn't want to do the presentation portion (not required anyway), so I was super proud of her when she chose to.

Brianna got an undercut and then a short bob in the battle of her amazingly thick and heavy hair. The undercut did a lot over the summer for heat control but the knots she was getting in the remaining length was still a lot to take care of. Once we chopped her hair to jaw level AND kept the undercut, she is both cool and able to take care of it better.

We've started looking into high school and college requirements for the course she wants to take (Environmental Technician). I am not looking forward to high level math. Or writing transcripts. Or high school in general *sigh*

Olivia: 6, at home. Olivia has been working hard at learning to read. She's got a list of 22 words she can fluently read and is excellent with sounding out phonetic words. She is confused over a lot of the English rules, but they ARE confusing.

Olivia took, and failed, swimming lessons last spring. I am very glad she failed as she didn't do well enough to pass. She practised hard over the summer though and I have no worries that she will easily pass this spring.

Olivia joined soccer last year and just loved it! Her favorite position is defence and even got a Player of the Game award for her defensive skills. She can't wait to join again this summer.

She is still excelling in math. She is flying through her Gr. 1 work and will easily be into Gr. 2 work before the school year is done. She loves doing Khan Academy like Brianna.

We chopped off all her hair last year from being almost to her butt. She wanted it "short like Daddy". We convinced her to get a cute bob with bangs. Not good enough, she still wanted it shorter. She now has a short pixie cut, which she loves.

Olivia has started learning French. Brianna's Rosetta Stone requires fluent reading so for now, we'll just be working on the basics. Brianna is doing a lot of the teaching. Olivia can't wait to use Rosetta Stone too!

While Brianna was doing her NaNoWriMo, Olivia decided to write a book as well. She drew pictures then dictated to me what to write. She's not quite done yet but she's done really well so far!

She also lost her first tooth (and now 2nd)! It had been wiggly for a while and the adult tooth was even growing in behind it, but she was very worried about pulling it out. Finally when it was barely hanging on by a thread, she let me pull it out.

Joshua: 2.5, at home. Joshua is not doing tot school yet (though he probably could!). He is mute. No particular reason for it. He checks out medically, has perfect hearing and is at average or is advanced for normal toddler development. Except in speech. Because of this, we are holding off potty training and schooling until we can get some better communication, which is our current focus.

He is excelling in sign language. He consistently uses 22 signs on his own and is learning many more. The girls are also using/learning sign language with him. We (Lee and I) are currently in a parent to child class and after that we'll be doing further speech therapy with Joshua.

Eventually we'll care about school for him. Right now, him being able to communicate is our number 1 priority. He's only 2, we're not worried about the rest.

Lee and I: As we're fairly open about, you may know that Lee has Generalized Anxiety Disorder. On average, it's well controlled. Sometimes he has bad days, some times he has really bad days. Last spring he had several bad months. He was actually so bad he was off work for 5 months. It was hard for everyone, most of all him. He was raised in a "man-up" generation and has always had a hard time dealing with feeling out of control or depressed. With a LOT of support, he made it through. He's back to work, though his first month was really rough, but now is going great.

Towards the end of his time off, we went on our long planned cross-Canada road trip for his best friend's wedding, in which he was the Best Man. It was so awesome to get away, just the 2 of us. We missed the kids like crazy, but thankfully Skype kept us in touch. I'll have a big blog post about this trip later.

I have been busy with my business. I've been trying out new fabrics and techniques in me sewing to try to get past that "beginner-novice" title. It's been surprisingly easy in some areas, and really tough in others.

My grandma died just before Christmas. She'd been struggling with various health problems for years and open heart surgery (which completely fixed her heart!) seems to have sped up some other issues. The girls, Olivia in particular, took it really hard. It makes me sad that Joshua will never really know her. It makes me sad that we don't get to see her any more. But I'm glad that she's not struggling with her health any more.

Summer Curriculum

Here's a look at our plans over the summer in regards to school.

Because we homeschool I, of course, plan to lock the kids in closets all summer and beat them with books. We can't have them socializing, now can we?! Ok, so maybe I've heard the S word too often lately lol Here's what's really going on.

Brianna has a zillion activities as usual! She's doing a science camp next week and a sewing camp in August. Brianna also goes swimming at a local outdoor pool with friends most afternoons. Olivia would have joined soccer this year, but the only group that allowed 4 year olds was almost an hour away, so we'll wait til next year.

Brianna also does a Park Leaders program at the neighbourhood park Tues-Fri mornings. Olivia even gets to join her this year! Unfortunately this is officially Brianna's last year, but I'm hoping since our park has a small group that she can be allowed to go with Olivia for a couple more years, even if it's only as a "helper".

Brianna and Olivia both joined the Read to Ride program with the library. In exchange for giving weekly oral book reports to the librarians, they get a sticker on their library cards that allows them on the city buses free (with an adult for Olivia!). Brianna loves it because she can go to the library any time without worrying about the heat and humidity (the library is quite a hike away) and Olivia just loves the bus!

Both girls ran a fun run today (which also happens to be Brianna's birthday!). Olivia is over the moon, thrilled for another race! It's all she talked about all week. Brianna has her 4th triathlon next month. She really needs to step up the pace in her training if she wants to beat her time from last year. She has great plans to do training and then forgets them quickly lol We're working on figuring out some kind of schedule for her to follow that works around the heat but still gets her running at least a few times a week.

As for actual school:

Brianna and I are doing a joint writing project. Each day we add to a story. Just 10 minutes of writing for each of us. Brianna thinks it's great both because it's something we're doing together, but also because it only requires 10 minutes of writing (she has a lot of issues putting thoughts to paper so "hates" writing). We've only been at it a few days, but it's fun so far. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to write after Brianna's sometimes scrambled line of thought, but by reading what I write, she's also (without realizing it) learning proper writing style, grammar, punctuation, ect...

I'm also throwing spelling review at her once a week or so. Which, while I find it tedious, appears to be working as he spelling has *greatly* improved over the last couple of months. What ever works, eh?

Normally we'd slow down drastically in the math department, but Brianna wants to "catch up" her math as she's a year "behind". So we're working our way through Math Mammoth's Gr. 6 curriculum over the summer. I certainly don't expect her to finish it in 2 mths, but by doing a regular amount of pages rather than our summer amount of pages, she'll get a great head start.

We are still doing our country studies but we'll spread it over 2-3 weeks instead of cramming everything into 1 week. I had considered stopping them for the summer but as soon as we were winding down with Iceland, Brianna was harassing me about what our next country was. So we'll continue.

Olivia is in Kindergarten so already has quite the watered down schedule. To be honest, I do school with her whenever she asks for it or I think to ask her if she wants to do some. This works out to be, on average, 1-3 times a week. As she's still technically "ahead" if she was in public school, I'm not worried.

Over the summer, we're working on telling time, calendars, drawing shapes and convincing her to write her name more often. We'll also be working on making sure she's got all of her letters down, capital and lowercase and start working more on letter sounds.

Weekly Wrap Up

This was a slow week as we dealt with upset tummies and more drama with Lee's chemical burns from work (a blog post all on it's own!).

Brianna's Brain Pop videos were:
- Penguins
- Fish (Brain Pop Jr)
- Basketball

We started on our new country study, this week on France. We'll finish it next week.

Brianna did ratios in math and, again, couldn't believe how easy they were. I'm glad that's she's found the last few units easy after the struggles she had previously. Now that she's done her English curriculum, we'll be doubling up on math until we drop to our lighter summer schedule. (After a mixture of not understanding {but refusing to ask for help} and some very shoddy work ethic, she repeated her entire Gr. 5 math curriculum. She's almost done now, but will finish that up and work on Gr. 6 over the summer)

I finally got Brianna reading age appropriate books. She has a very high reading level but kept choosing to read books in the Gr. 1-3 range. We finally found some young adult books that still covered the interests that she kept gravitating to in the lower level books. I also showed her that the library had a large selection of Lurlene McDaniel books (she found some of mine from when I was a teen and loves them! The ones that the library and I have are all about teens with cancer and such, so they are a little morbid, but they're well written).

We're going back to writing weekly book reports, but in a different manner than before. Previously, Brianna did a form style fill-in-the-blanks book report. She could have easily gotten the information by skimming the book quickly, which she started doing. Now, we're going to do more classic review style book reports. Since she has a lot of issues with putting her thoughts to paper, we'll be doing it dictation style with me typing on the computer while she speaks. This week she chose The Wide-Awake Princess by E.D. Baker.

My own homeschooling for the week was learning how to sew a ring sling and travel pouch with this great fabric!

Olivia mostly played on ABC Mouse this week and did a few things in her You Can Read program

Testing out our new M&D stamp set

Doing her puzzle words with her rice cakes

These ones were more difficult but she got them!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.