Simplicity

This was dinner tonight. Tortilla pizzas with whatever toppings the kids wanted. Mine had feta cheese, tomatoes, garlic, mushrooms and sausage. A delicious quick meal since Morgan has soccer practice tonight.

Too bad the steam coming off of this pizza didn't photograph.

Last night I made roast chicken. These were really small so I had to do two of them. Best of all I paid $1.00 each for them using the grocery store coupons.



Our small group ministry at church this month is talking about Simplicity. That's been my goal for many months and organizing is part of that simplifying. So is homeschool. Trying to keep track of what 3 kids are learning can be overwhelming and I did what I vowed I would never do...I bought a planner for homeschool. I was getting confused in what the kids had read and what they have done and ended up repeating a lot of stuff. I still collaborate with the kids on the work they are going to do. Rather than do lesson plans and stress myself out, I use this for recording what they have done. Kind of a backward lesson plan. But it's working really well. And while our schedules are very full-I've found that being highly organized is the key to keeping my sanity. At least it works most days.


The other organizing thing I did was whittle our homeschool down to one subject a day. It's also been really great because now we can focus our efforts on one area instead of flip flopping around. It doesn't work everyday -especially when we have field trips and doctor appointments. But we can work around that and if we have to double up one day that's fine to. My goal is to always have a plan but be flexible enough to change it.


So for now the schedule is:
Monday-Math and Art Class
Tuesday-Literature and Language Arts
Wednesday-Science and Soccer Practice
Thursday-Sign Language and Homeschool Coop
Friday-History, Geography, Civics and Home Economics.
Saturday-Soccer games
Sunday-Church (Patrick does his Neighboring Faith program which I consider a part of homeschool) Morgan and Tae have their Sunday school class.




Morgan made a whole map of the United States today and then colored it in. Great Job.

Patrick was learning about Land and Water Distribution on the Earth and made this fabulous map.

Tae...my camera ham worked on letters, numbers and matching on the computer.

We made a list to hang on the wall for Tae. He's really recognizing a lot of words. After I hung this up he added some more words and wrote them himself. He added: on, no, off, yes and Pete (our Boxer). He was so proud of himself.

He loves these little color books. Today he did Red. He colored, cut out and stapled them all by himself.

I have a lot of Tae's work. He's my camera man and loves to show off his work. My two oldest are always hiding from Mommy's obsession with capturing everything on the camera. This picture, well um... "the ambulance is leaving with the dead guy because there was a fire." In case you can't see on the back of the ambulance is a dead guy on a stretcher.

Oh but wait. Then there is this one. We have multiple things going on here. Tae wrote, "Dad's Hearing dog." The goldish stickers in the middle are all dogs and he drew a nice rug for them to sit on. See-all very innocent. But notice the Dad's Hearing Dog sign on fire. And the theme of ambulance at the bottom. Then if you look at the top, deadman makes another appearance but this time he is so dead he needs 2 guys to carry him. Uh huh. Should I be worried about him?

Yesterday we went to a play at the library called Sophie's socks. It was put on by a bunch of homeschoolers in our area. The did a fabulous job and many of our Meetinghouse kids were part of the show. Tae, Patrick and Morgan wait patiently for the play to begin. They had a great time and best of all it was free.

Tae and Morgan sit on the floor watching the play.

Tomorrow is our Sign Language class and our coop group meets here in the afternoon. Busy days.