St. Valentine Chalkboard

This week, in keeping with the Waldorf grade 2 theme of saints and heroes, we are studying about St. Valentine. 

We've been super busy lately!!!  A big part of our lives has been spent outside shoveling the bazillion inches of snow we've had in the last few weeks. The rest of the time, we've been entertaining our last Australian visitor before our move, and trying to sneak in homeschooling in between all of that. Due to our busy schedule, there has been far less structured activities, and far more child-led learning. I know some people get a little sensitive if someone uses the term "unschooling", as though it is an all-or-nothing proposition, so that's why I'll stick with "child-led" and "natural" learning, which has really been a good bulk of our learning lately with some structured items sprinkled in here and there.

We've been listening to Story of The World (vol 2) a bit and doing some activities to go with each chapter. We're really enjoying this resource!!! There are some who complain that it is not a completely secular resource, but I haven't really noticed anything that couldn't be explained as legend/myth/culture.  The same has been true for Life of Fred (Apples). We're really enjoying this book, and when used in combination with a gr. 2 math workbook, I'm finding my son is getting plenty of math. He also plays on prodigy math (free online game) and is still doing Minecraft Homeschool classes.

I do have to update the latter, however. I think we are probably going to be done with Minecraft Homeschool classes for a while. Although we really love the lessons, I'm finding my son isn't as interested in the builds that are part of the curriculum. He prefers to work on his private server, which of course is free. Now that we've done several sessions, I'm familiar with the set-up. I can take their lesson style and adapt it to create my own science/history lessons that include videos (their lessons are often a combination of text and video).  So, for the foreseeable future, we'll just have him work on his private Minecraft server and we'll do our own thing for science. 

Perhaps next year we'll revisit the idea of the online classes and see if his interest returns.

We've been so busy lately, that we haven't really had time for working in our main lesson book. That always seems to take a backseat to everything else for some reason. Now that our visitor is gone, hopefully our schedule and rhythm can get back to a more "normal" flow so that we can again incorporate main lesson book time into each week. 

I think that's all that is fit to print for the moment. Just wanted to check in, post a pic of my latest chalkboard, give a brief homeschooling update, and say hello!