His Treasure Seekers

 Whew!  What a crazy five days we had last week!  I really needed the weekend to recover.  Several of the kids’ activities started up, and it may take us a while to feel settled with the schedule for this fall:

• Writing class
• Music classes (choir, handchimes, composer study, and more)
• Wrestling twice a week for the older boys
• Ballet/tap for Arianna
• Trail Life USA for the older boys
• the last few weeks of swimming lessons

Add to that a beach day (turned park day) with homeschool friends, and it’s amazing we got anything done at all over the course of the week!  For the last few years I’ve been very deliberate about keeping our schedule light, but we’re testing the waters this fall to see how we do with so much going on.

This week in our Preschool

It seems like many schools have gotten so focused on academics these days, that they’re neglecting classic early childhood activities.  No such problems here!  Arianna and Elijah spent HOURS this past week playing with blocks.  I was amazed at some of the structures Elijah built.  (You’d think I’d have a nice picture here to show off my future engineer’s genius, wouldn’t you?  There goes that Mom of the week award.)

Science

In Our Weather & Water (our first term’s book in God’s Design for Heaven and Earth) we read about tsunamis.  I remember as a kid having a mental picture of tsunamis that must have come from Hollywood, so I wanted my children to have a more realistic idea of what a tsunami looked like and how much damage it could cause even if it didn’t look like the movies.  We watched a couple YouTube videos of actual tsunamis, which really made an impression.  (Then we watched one of those crazy fictional accounts, talking about how different it was.)

Crazily enough, we had a beach day planned with our homeschool friends on Thursday, and we had to cancel it because of a tsunami advisory for our part of the California coast following a major earthquake in Chile.  It really brought our lesson home!  I think the disappointment my kids would normally have felt was actually lessened by the cool factor of the possibility of an actual tsunami.  Thankfully there was little to report after the day had come and gone, but it helped make science an exciting subject for the week.

A few final thoughts

I’m so thankful for the weeks we spent earlier in the summer trying to establish routines for the boys to work through their lessons independently.  That was the only reason they were able to get through 99% of their scheduled work for the week.

I’m also really thankful for the chance to get the boys involved in wrestling.  It’s a great sport for our family because their smaller size doesn’t put them at an automatic disadvantage, and it gives them a positive outlet for all that “boy energy” that threatens to drive this mama crazy at times.  They absolutely love it, and it was wonderful to see the gleam in their eyes as they set about trying to get the best of their opponents.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:

• Wonky and Tapple (two games from USAopoly)
• 2nd semester of Elementary (K-2) Spanish from Middlebury Interactive Languages
• The Nutcracker from Maestro Classics