December Rolls Along

Plastic Canvas Needle-Point Santa - my mother began this project over 20 years ago, and I have finally assembled him into this finished holiday wall decor

Here are the original pieces...

...and here he is up on the wall, front-and-center when you walk in through the front door!

Our library haul...

I apologize for the fuzzy pictures. It seems that the memory card to my camera has gone AWOL, so I've had to use my laptop camera to take pictures with... and I will not be able to get a new memory card until Thursday, which will be AFTER we will be returning these books to the library.

The read-aloud book that we have started is Where The Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin.

I am not going to link this book to any particular source for you. I realize that some bloggers earn a little money (or shopping credits or other benefits) by using affiliate links. While I appreciate that they would like to earn some money from their blog, I prefer to believe that information should be free. Learning should be as free as possible, and when that's not possible, it should be as reasonably-priced as possible.

We got this book from the library (strange concept, I know! Libraries are those buildings where books are kept (*sarcasm here against society in general, not my readership - of course!*), and you can typically order in books that they do not currently have in stock...it usually only takes a few days to a week to get a book that you've requested).  Free reading is our favorite kind, even though I do admit to that quiver of excitement that I get when I see our small home library growing on our shelf.

The minimalist in me chides myself and tries to keep accumulations in check, and so we plan to be very selective about what comes into our house, and very ruthless about moving things along that are not being treasured and played with. 

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Homeschooling, as a whole, is going along very well. We are still kind of getting our bearings right now. Firstly, I wanted to give DS9 some space to decompress a bit from his time in school.  I am saving my true Waldorf lessons for after the holidays (which also gives me more time to get them ready, as I was only about halfway through the planning process when we got word that it would be expedient to return to the US sooner rather than later, at which time we were in Go Mode to pack up and be ready to move everything we have (and ourselves) back to the US in less than 30 days...now THAT was a challenging month!)

We've been sticking fairly close to the basics: a couple of pages from his Everyday Math book, a page from the Morning Work package (as detailed in another post, these pages have snippets/short lessons from 3 different subjects each day), 30 minutes of reading (he can sometimes finish a book sooner than that, especially graphic novels like the ones shown above), work in his cursive writing workbook once or twice a week, and different computer activities sprinkled in. 

The computer time has been very unstructured for now, so he's been enjoying time playing Minecraft, Roblox and other games.  After the holidays, he'll get back into doing TurtleDiary lessons as well as working on Prodigy Math, watching Bill Nye The Science Guy episodes, among other online learning tools.

I plan to have him start a Main Lesson Book to go along with his return to Waldorf lessons, so that will cover writing and art as well as the academic subjects that can be associated with the lessons (often math, social studies/history, grammar, science, etc).

As for DD7, she is doing very well with the workload she is being given from the school. The only things I add to her workload are books from the library for reading time, educational videos and games on the computer, read-aloud time, and the occasional quick individual lesson that may apply to whatever is going on that day. For example, when we came back from grocery shopping, I had her figure out how many cans of corn I would have left to put in the cupboard if I stored half of them in the basement.

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DS9 is still attending dance class (and loving it!), his choral group (he's basically only "meh" about this, but we're going to stick with it for now), homeschool meet-up at the library once a week (which he's enjoying) and homeschool open gym meet-up every 2 weeks (which he totally LOVED!!! I did, too, by the way...the other moms I met were SO GREAT. This is the first time EVER that I actually feel SUPPORTED and made to feel as though I belong, that people are interested in me, etc in my entire homeschooling/parenting journey.)

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I have my holiday cards in the mail and have been busy winterizing the house. Apparently that is quite a task in a 2,400 square foot home with vaulted ceilings and leaky windows and doors. Next year we will put in a wood stove and start replacing some of these windows. This year: bubble wrap, shrink wrap plastic, and 4ml plastic over everything, then a final covering of a blanket. Yes, it looks as shanty-town as it sounds, but after a bill of $240 worth of propane for the last month, we definitely need to step things up now that the temps have turned more bitterly cold. A few $10 blankets from Goodwill will definitely pay off when we can reuse them later...and hopefully save much more than that in propane use this winter. Stay tuned/