School Daze

We are still amazed at how much we are enjoying school this year. I believe it’s the grace of God. We don’t have a lot of outside friends and activities yet, and so we are enjoying a season to become acquainted with our newest member and to school.

I love the “connections” the kids make all on their own with the subjects we are studying. One day last week, after noting that Nolan and Zander had been quiet for an extended length of time I went to investigate. I discovered them in their room playing with a Solar System puzzle. This week we studied Jupiter. We made a Hurricane to see how stormy it was on the planet. (No pictures because the camera is on the fritz). We are enjoying these Apologia Elementary texts so well that we are going to need to order another book in the series. This text should have taken us the rest of the year but the kids are doing in 1 week what I expected to take 3 weeks. We voted to let Jared choose the next textbook because this will be last “elementary science” he does before doing Apologia’s “set”. He chose to do Zoology. Expect a lot of bird studies in the next few months. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is the time of the year to study birds. I’ll have to look over the book and if it looks like we won’t be able to do many of the projects we may have to order botany yet.

Nolan finished “Off We Go”, the first book in his phonics program. This means he has learned the alphabet and all the consonant and short vowel sounds. It’s a huge step. We’d been told it would be wise to hold off on phonics and focus on speech therapy. We were fairly confident he’d complete the kindergarten program quickly this year – and he has. We are still waiting to hear from the school district about getting him speech therapy here. If I don’t hear back by the end of this week I will call the base again and ask them to refer us to private therapy in a local rehab center.

Jared has conquered a big math block he’s had for years. He’s finally able to read the lesson, understand what it means, and score well on his work. He’s made 80 – 92% all week on his work. YaHOO!

Arielle is on step 27 in the Raceway Book. She is reading up a storm. Her new favorites are the Boxcar Children. She loves the fact that her big sister’s left behind their childhood series for her and Stacia.

In History we are all studying James Madison’s Presidency and the War of 1812. We have found a lot to admire in James and Dolly Madison.

The younger ones and I took a side jaunt and researched Francis Scott Key and the Star Spangled Banner. This led to a study on flags in general and the US flag specifically. Arielle and Nolan painted a huge flag on Friday – complete with 13 stripes and 50 stars.

Zander helped.

That quickly summarizes the week.

WHERE'S THE WATER????

*Can't get pictures to upload - will try later

We’ve fallen into a routine of spending the “early” Saturday morning hours cleaning (De’Etta) and working on the “House Repair List” (Mike). We then spend the afternoon doing something “fun”. During the week the sky light cover had fallen out in the big boys’ room. Mike and Josiah are seen peering out of the ceiling…wouldn’t that be a scary sight to awake to? They spent the a.m. discovering that we need to add insulation to the ceiling and rewire some things. UGH.

Saturday, 22 October, we continued our search for water. Earlier in the year, we had driven to the Reservoir with great hopes of finding water. There is a lovely state park that we found on the internet with sites right along the water. Imagine our surprise when we finally made the time to go exploring and discovered that there is very, very little water in the Reservoir. I’m not sure what happened. I’ve heard a couple theories. The most credible is that they had planned to build the dam and so built the state park and homes right where the water was to be….but for some reason the water didn’t arrive. Now we have great camp sites along big canyons but no water in sight. The state park did have some nice hiking trails, buffalos, and a playground. Unfortunately, I saw a rattle snake over 8 feet long crawling across the asphalt and that sort of squelched the excitement of finding the hiking trails. We’ve still not tried them.

We decided, on this Saturday, to go south of town and investigate the other Reservoir on the map. We debated long about taking the canoes. We decided this would be a scouting trip and left them behind. This turned out to be a good decision. It was incredibly disappointing. Here we see a boat ramp but obviously no WATER for your boat to slide into.

We did find some great ATV trails in the basin of the Reservoir and discovered that the new van is not made for 4 wheeling. Yes, the picture is staged. Mike continues to drive our vans through any terrain that takes his fancy and we’ve yet to be stuck. I, however, got stuck quite often trying to get out of our DRIVEWAY in Alaska.

We had been watching fields for the past few months. They had some green plant. To tall for lettuce we thought in July…and as the year went on…YES to tall. Maybe pepper…..but where were the peppers? Finally, this Saturday we saw the fields were “blooming”. We stopped the van so that those who were curious could get out and explore. We found the plants to be drying out but to be full of fluffy, white COTTON! We had studied the Industrial Revolution in September. Being able to see, touch and feel the cotton plants brought home the study of the Cotton Gin like nothing else could. The kids also were able to understand more about how hard it would be to spend hours picking cotton in the hot southern sun. This will be a good connection for them to make later in our studies.

After giving it out best shot we had to admit that we were not finding water. We headed to the base’s Rec Camp on the Lake. We’ve always found water THERE! Mike and the older boys played tennis. Arielle thought it was too hot to play so she, Zander, Nolan, Stacia and I walked through the campgrounds and met people. We plotted a future camping trip. We threw rocks in the lake and we played on the playground. It turned out to be a fun day… not what we’d set out to find….but a fun day nonetheless.