Big Universe, Small World... ©2013-2020

We finished Anne Frank tonight. We are reading the afterward tonight and tomorrow. This marks the 6th novel study completed for the year. :)   Yeah for literature!  I love reading with my child. And, he loves reading so much more now, too! He begins Latin I for high school credit in the next week or so...probably after Thanksgiving break. Or we may just wait until after CHRIST mas. The holidays means a lot of gathering and going as it is. We will see and take it in stride. It is odd to think of my child in grade terms anymore. When I realize in a matter of weeks, he will be taking his first high school credit class, while in 7th grade...the thought is overwhelming. Within a matter of months, he will be in full swing of 4 high school credits, while completing 7th grade language arts and electives. Essentially, our subject matter of study will stretch across three grade levels. This boggles my mind when I stop to dwell on it.  One thing that I had forg...

We have talked about doing this several times. Tonight we had mac-n-cheese for dinner...and we used all the butter. I am not talking about the vegetable oil fake stuff...real butter!  The child agreed enthusiastically he wanted to make some, but looked rather skeptical. Below is the end result...the child's last request from this project is for us to have buttermilk pancakes or waffles for breakfast in the morning using the remaining buttermilk and some preserved blueberries from this summer's picking. the main ingredient is the heavy whipping cream. This is the first stage of whipping the heavy cream. Like making whipped topped - just have to be careful not to go too far if you want whipped topping, because once the cream starts to get grainy, you have gone too far. This is where the mixer is making more of whipped cream, than it is butter. It will soon change. I decided to stop briefly here to gather it all back together in the bowl's center. This is ri...

I taught the child over the past week how to create his own form of a sterno can for camping and make shift cooking heat. The creation has been finished now and been successfully tested. He compared these to his sterno cans. I do not know the burn time on our creation, but it was quite hot, quite quickly...the burn time will be tested in full on the next camping trip.

...week in review for the facebook point of view... Last Friday posts: picture from zoo field trip!! Posts from Sunday: post from Tuesday: you know you are a homeschool mommy when you trap the scorpion you see in the bathroom at the chiro's office and save it in tp and a baggy for your child to view up close later on (maybe in a few days after i know it is good and dead)! love sitting here on the couch with my son as he translates the first book of genesis from latin to english while reading it aloud to me...not the greatest translation, but interpretable nonetheless child is explaining to me how shuffling cards or hustling for card sharks is like braiding hair...one over the other - alternating outside pieces over the previous one - never thought of it like that, but pretty good observation - def not a connection i would have made Post from Thursday: http://www.mauinews.com/page/content.detail/id/555122/Spare-tire-slows-down-Skywalker--rodeo-bull.html?nav=10#.Try...

Look what was delivered to our house today:  The child cut opened the box for me!! I am so excited to have this to review. We will be starting this in the next few days for a review to come in the near future!! I am giddy...yes, over curriculum!! People have asked about some of the things we were growing back when up until now and have emailed about what the chickens look like now that they are older...here are the updates...  parsley is growing well... heirloom carrots are growing well...  little pear trees starting to grow  one lonely little apple seedling starting to grow...  cabbage...yum yum yum chicky!!  chickies eating dinner!! louella is the chicky on the far left side!!  this is flo...the fat and fluffy chicken...  this is matilda - known as 'tilly' for short...she is the medium chicken.  our 'yeggs!!'  love this part the most!  store bought eggs have nothing on fresh!!

This past week: 1.  John Hanson was the first President of the United States, not George Washington. 2.  The moon this past week, at the beginning of the week, looked more like a gorget than a moon. 3.  The word Hosanna is not an expression of gratitude or direct praise. It literally means Save me! or Save us! 4.  Reading Anne Frank is not as interesting as it was when she is constantly talking about falling, being in love. 5.  Multi-step, binomial expression complex fraction equations that also require use of the distributive property can be difficult, even for a child considered by all academic measures given thus far to be mathematically gifted. 6.  History is fun to learn about. 7. We are grateful to have completed one content subject for the academic year to be able to focus more solidly on the other subject at hand. 8. The child has no clue what an outline is, claims to never have seen one, and so now I must teach him what it is and ...

The pA problem this afternoon was 5(b-2)=3(b+6).  The child gets to 5b-10=3b+18 in the problem. He gets ready to combine the like terms and asks if the correct answer will be 2b on the left. I state: '2b or not 2b, that is the question.'  He looks at me perplexed and I state it is a line from Hamlet. He states: 'Oh, yeah...the pig from Toy Story.'    I have to tell him that Hamlet is a play by Shakespeare. I go to tell the hubby the funny of the moment, and tell the child: 'I will be back!"  He states that is from The Terminator .  When I later return, he has still completed only combining the b variable terms of the math problem from where we left off, and asks if Shakespeare was Hamlet?  I have to reply that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. He tells me that if I were to ever watch the television show Everyone Hates Chris, that the saying would have been 'I'll be black'    This is why it takes us SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO long...

Recently I was provided an opportunity to review Visual Latin. Name of Product: Visual Latin Price: Latin I (lessons 1-30 DVD Single/Family)$80.00 Age Range: 9 years and up Okay, so here is the honest nitty gritty from me...We decided to homeschool my child (7th grader) in or around March. One of his first formal homeschooling curriculum requests was to learn Latin. I cannot pretend I was so happy about this request at first, as I took French in middle and high school and college. I did believe it would assist him tremendously in his phonemic awareness and root word knowledge, if he was successful with the skills. My biggest fear was how my dyslexic child with learning disabilities in multiple areas would master this dead language. The child expressed reasons much different from my thought processes about why he wanted to learn this language...which made much sense...so I agreed to pursue it. (in the back of my mind, I still wondered why he wanted to pursue this fo...

 dirty sweet potatoes - like 10 or 11 in all  clean sweet potatoes  weirdly shaped potatoes  looked fine when we cut it open  avocado pit set to root little tomatoes  :)

My head is swirling. I wonder at times if I am losing it and I wonder at the same time if things are just becoming known. Sometimes I feel like I am not cut out to teach my own child, yet I know I am most qualified to do so. I am watching my youngest child mature and grow before my eyes. Today we watched the baby the next door for awhile. I received my baby fix. I mourn for the one we don't have. I watched him with this child...as he was so good with her. Tonight out of the blue it seems, he is at the end of his 'handle it pile' and I watch him slowly melt. He has such a good heart and watched that baby like all get out tonight. She was all over the yard and in the play area. He did so well with her. She has a fascination with the chickens...in and out of that pen...over and over again. She wanted to pet them. So, the child would take the baby - time and time again - into the chicken pen to catch a chicken to hold it still so the baby could pet it. She would giggle, leave...