School: Feb & March 2010

These past few months have been CRAZY over here...more crazy than usual!  We decided that it is time to sell our house and get into something a little bit bigger and a little further from the freeway.  There were so many projects that needed done around here to get ready to put the house on the market.  Every project we did took 4 times longer than we thought it would!  Of course.  But we finally finished and got the house on the market at the end of March.  It is MLS #951928 if you want to look.  Now begins the waiting game and we really are prepared to be very patient.  Houses in our neighborhood have not been moving...at all.  We just figured that if it is going to take 2 years to sell our house, we might as well start now!  School took a back seat to all of the house projects and the kids were HUGE helps during it all.  This is what homeschooling is all about!

Here is what we did do for school:

Devotionals -

• We spent a lot of time talking about the "Armor of God" and all of the pieces
• We started studying out of the new Gospel Principles book.  We are taking it slowly and spent about 3 days going over each lesson, reading the scriptures and singing songs about the topic.

Math - Individual lessons in Saxon; Kaiden - Algebra 1, Nic - 6/5 , Luke - 3, Afton - 1

Mom school - (where I teach them things that I enjoy learning about)

• We did a study on the Olympics and their history and watched them on TV as much as we could. That ended up only being prime time coverage since we don't have cable.  Then we took a field trip to all of the Olympic sites and museums from the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.  It was very cool!
• We finished up our study of WWII 

Words of the week: (We do this to build vocabulary skills for the ACT) ebb, pandemic, intrepid

Family Reading - started reading "On Wings of Faith" by the kids great grandpa, Fredrick W. Babbel and the 4th Fablehaven book "Keys to the Demon Prison" (it is awesome by the way)

Individual Reading -
Dad - "Brisingr" by Christopher Paolini

Mom -

• "Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning" by Oliver and Rachel DeMille 
• "Following the Light of Christ into His Presence" by John M. Pontius
• "From Clutter to Clarity: Simplifying Life from the Inside Out" by Nancy Twigg

 Here is what everyone else is currently doing:

Kaiden (Love of Learning phase) -

•    Book of Mormon daily reading
•    Seminary
•    Weekly trips to the Provo temple to do baptisms
•    Duty to God
•    Piano lessons and daily practice
•    Origami

Nicolas (Love of Learning phase) -

•    Book of Mormon daily reading
•    Faith in God
•    11 year old scouts, working on his First Class
•    Reading: The Ranger's Apprentice series...I'm not sure where he is exactly, he reads a lot and he reads fast!

Luke (Core phase) -

•    Book of Mormon daily reading
•    Faith in God
•    Working on his Bear badge in Cub Scouts

Afton (Core phase) -

•    Book of Mormon daily reading
•    Learning about being a princess

Makensi (Core phase) - 

•    Learning about being "fancy"

Garrett - 

• drawing all over the walls right after we paint them