Weekly Wrap-up: Fazzled and Fried, But Plodding Creatively On

Life. It keeps this Mama busy...and away from her blog for a few months. That, and I fried the motherboard on my trusty laptop. :sigh:  I'm 'around', doing all those everyday oh-so-important activities that keep kids happy, healthy and learning, a home running (almost) smoothly, and a Mama (ME!) sane and grounded.

Despite ushering in 2014 with an icky "belly bug", my hope is that 2014 will be a year of strengthened family connections, new adventures and friends, and lots of silliness. Because silliness IS really, really important. I know I'm a little behind on New Year's resolutions, but there you go.

We're back at school, very much easing into the last half of our year. Some mornings are pretty darn rough getting up! Fortunately, at least for my homeschoolers, fuzzy PJs are acceptable school uniforms. For Mama, too!

Unfortunately Jake must still get dressed and head off to school (which means I have to tumble out of bed and get him to the bus stop even if I'm still in those PJs), but it continues to be so worth it for him!

Snippets from his Quarter Thus Far:

• made a speaker with a piece of metal taped over a paper cup• 
• made a battery using a zinc- and copper-covered nails and a lemon 
• made a lever to lift 9oz of water with 3oz of water using mechanical advantage 
• started exploring Trigonometry 
• started looking at different telescopes for Astronomy 
• learned the constellations and zodiac 
• explored electricity principles

Cati has finished her Life Science for the year! Go, C! She's 30 or so lessons from completing Math, but she's hit the part in the text that is more challenging and has slowed down. And there's her Easy Grammar, Spelling Power, Poetry unit, and American History that she's still plugging away at. What's wonderful is that her attitude towards school is much improved this year! I just wish it would rub off on her younger brother...

...as he's prodding through his short, "core only" days with a chip on his shoulder. :sigh: Isn't there always one? (or is it just in my homeschool?)

Snippets from Homeschooling

Cati 

• read The Hobbit and watched the movie
• had Jazz and Concert band practice
• wrote a Limerick
• learned to commute equivalent fractions, used a compass, found Pi, completed ratio word problems, found the perimeter of complex shapes, and solved proportion problems
• knitted a scarf

Sam

• started reading the My Weird School series with Ms. Todd is Odd!
• reviewed time, multiple digit addition with regrouping, worked on skip counting 7s and 8s
• learned articles and antonyms and reviewed capitalization, punctuation, sentence combining, verbs, and adjectives
• reviewed address, months and days
• completed a notebook page on food chains, consumers and producers and herbivores, carnivores and omnivores
• built a RC truck from a Lego Technic kit

Have you see those plastic band Rainbow Loom bracelets? The band bracelet CRAZE has descended upon our house! (Shhh! I'll admit it; I made one...or two...OK, 3.) Check out Ashley and Steph's You Tube videos here for good tutorials (especially if you're like us and get TOTALLY lost trying to follow the instructions included in the kit). We've run out of bands, but I've got some waiting on my Amazon cart.

I've been learning something new, too! To knit! My Mom taught me a weave or box-knit pattern and I created my first scarf in "ocean" blues and greens (that Cati and Sam are claiming ownership to). I've started a sparkly white cell pattern scarf for myself. I'll share a photo with you next time, when I have a little more to show. I'm hoping to have it completed by...next winter. ::wink::

Oh, and if you want to see the video How To and make your very own cell pattern scarf, watch this! Trust me - it's for beginners!

All this crafting and schooling doesn't leave much time for cooking. Perhaps next week I'll have a recipe to share with you. Did you create anything amazing in the kitchen this past week?

 As always, special thanks to these weekly wrap-ups: