Family News

Well, I was feeling twinges of guilt about packing up (nearly) all the children’s toys, but no more.
I sat next to Melody for a huge chunk of time yesterday afternoon while she made up an entire fantasy with…
(…wait for it…..)
…A cribbage board.
And its little colored pegs.
And we’re talking epic fantasy here.  At one point she [...]

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written here.
A lot’s been going on, but I’ve waited because none of it “stable” enough for me to write about it; to set in stone as “reality.”
But now I figure if I wait till it’s all at that level I might not remember enough to record a bunch [...]

We are dropping grammar and spelling for now.
I’ve decided it’s too soon to really push those for Natasha, and I expect regular copy work to open those topics in a more complete and natural way than I’ve yet come up with on my own.
Math continues to be insanely easy for Natasha, but has just begun [...]

At home our current issues are self-control and deciding whether my not-planning-enough-ahead absolves certain poor behaviors, and, if so, how much.
~
We’ve started school now, and the kids love it so far.  The challenging thing there is figuring out the right amount of stuff to fill each slot, and denying myself (so completely) to stay on-track [...]

Now I’m using my new laptop.
Just now I’m actually using in the children’s room, with the illuminated keyboard (*yes* it’s everything I hoped!).
Starting to input my library, starting with the books I want to pack away– so that I can reclaim the playroom as a tangible mark of my progress.
I’m going soon to have to [...]

Untangling Elementary School
For Elisha we call it Untangling Preschool.
I’d been trying to decide on a name for our homeschool that both wasn’t cliché and that Jay could agree with.
I wanted to have something I could put on a little ID card for each of the girls, and to back up my request for a teacher’s [...]

We’ve just about finished ordering everything for school this fall.
The girls are very excited.  They’ve asked if we can start early.
Elisha has no clue, and I’m cool with that.  I’ve found a pre-school workbook (50-cents) that we’ll save for him for next year when, as a 4-year-old, he’ll actually be able to do something with [...]

I can nearly recite all of Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child, except for the bit about his journey to the Limpopo.
My favorite bit is, The next day, when there was nothing left of the equinoxes (for the procession had proceeded according to precedent)…
I had the entertainment of reciting long chucks of it to my kids while [...]

Natasha received a delightful word-toy that allows kids to build their own sentences out of phrases (parts of speech color-coded, for the most part).
What I now need to figure out is how to teach the difference between sentances that are nonsense because of content, and sentances that have no sense because they don’t contain a [...]

I have this game I bought a couple years ago to use for the storytelling class I was developing at the time.
Looking for something new to do with the girls (I’m experimenting with letting Melody skip naps) I pulled it out and tried on the fly to see if I could adapt it to their [...]