my blessed life

I think I need a t-shirt that says " I Survived This School Year ".  :) Don't get me wrong, I love homeschooling.  It's not that.  It's just that this year has presented challenges in other ways and we've had to meet them head on.  But those challenges meant that we had some tough days, so this summer break is much needed.   So ...yea!!!  It's summer break!!! The kids hit the pool just as soon as they wrapped up their school work yesterday.  They're braver than I am.  The water is still too cold for me.  I'm a wimp like that ;)   This morning we had our big end of the year finale with our homeschool group: Field Day!!  It's always so much fun, filled with teams and relays, medals and encouraging each other in being good sports.  I love our homeschool group!! And that's a wrap!  Happy Summer, y'all! This post is linked to the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers .  ...

Whoo hoo!!  We are down to just one week left in our '14-'15 school year!!  I.am.so.ready!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It has been so very hard these past few weeks to stay focused until the end of the year.  We are all ready for that summer break.  I have to say the kids have done a great job this week of hunkering down and just getting the job done though.  Proud of them! Last week we had a friend in town for a couple of days so we took Monday off from book work and headed to the Land Between the Lakes to hang out for a while.  It's always fun there!  We walked around Hematite Lake and then visited The Homeplace for a while--where my son nearly wore out the ducks and chickens chasing them around:)  LBL is one of our fave recreation areas! We are still in the middle of our human anatomy study for this year.  It's taken longer than I planned but that's okay.  We'll just pick back up in the fall.  We are currently studying a...

We are quickly counting down the days till the end of our school year.  I.am.so.ready.  This mama needs a summer break. Not that I don't have some "summer schoolin' " planned, but it's not the same as the rest of the year.  More on that soon! We have had a busy past few weeks though and our school year is quickly winding down.  Besides our regular "book" work, here's some of what we've been up to lately. We attended the Lego Kid Fest in Nashville.  I can't believe I haven't had a chance to sit down and tell you all about it yet!  I promise to do that this week and share TONS of pics.  This was an amazing event!  If this show is coming anywhere near you I highly recommend going! We took a (very) short spring break trip to Myrtle Beach.  To be honest, it wasn't even close to one of our better trips.  The weather was cooler than we would have liked and ...Mr. B was not having a good travel week (travel isn...

I don't know about you, but I think spring fever has hit our house.  It has been a struggle to focus around here!  I can remember when I was in school and the weather began to warm up, it was SO hard to think about my lessons.  And when you're at home I can only imagine how much harder it is for my kids to focus on these warm and sunny spring days when they're just dying to get out and play.  So I'm trying to be much more flexible these days and remind myself that it just as important as their studies some days. In fact, I feel as though I am in a process of relearning how to teach my children.  Their learning styles are growing and developing and I am learning so much more about how they learn--especially my son.  Since discovering some of his learning struggles I am having to rethink how I do things with him.  Even small changes can make big differences and get much better results!  I have to say that this past week and a half have been SO...

So I just realized how badly I have slacked this year on the weekly wrap-ups :/  Kind of feel bad about that.  Okay.  I'm over it.   This just hasn't been the year of the weekly wrap-up, I guess. But there's always now and I thought I'd jump back in there. Part of the reason I haven't been motivated to post our weekly wraps has been that so many of our weeks have been really hard this year.  You may remember my post last fall about how our 9-yr-old son, Mr. B, has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  We are still learning how that is effecting us as a family, how we can better help him succeed, and how to handle the daily challenges.  And there are many daily challenges.  Often in the evenings I am just emotionally wrung out (this explains my lack of blogging in recent months).   I am very hopeful that we are learning new and better ways to help our son learn and grow in areas where he really struggles...

Well, the first quarter of our school year is almost over!  Yea!! This has been one of those weeks where we were all a little tired, there was some sickness, and there wasn't a lot of exciting stuff on the calendar ...but we stayed the course and got a lot done.  Love that feeling of accomplishment! On our "Fun Friday" we had our devotional time, did some Life of Fred, played some American trivia, worked on stories with our Story Cubes, and then wrapped up with some leaf painting.   We had seen these cute illustrations in the current issue of Family Fun magazine and thought this would be a fun project to try--and they were!  I even did one :)   Just find some pretty autumn leaves around your yard or on a nature walk, grab some tempera paints and fine-tipped brushes, and paint some fun woodland creatures on your leaves!   Can you see the animals on these leaves? Then we ended our day with a family movie ( Soul Surf...

Yea!!  It's Saturday and we got to sleep in (well, with the exception of my hubby, bless his heart)!!  And we sure did need it--it's been so busy around here this week that we are all dragging a bit in our tracks.  A slow, lazy Saturday morning was definitely in order. These past couple of weeks have been full, full, full.  But that's what keeps life interesting and exciting, right? Here are our highlights from this past week: On Tuesday night we were extremely blessed by a friend (whose family could not go) who shared free tickets to a Nashville Predators hockey game with us.  We were SO excited!  It was our very first hockey game ever--I've been wanting to go for a while now.  We had an absolute blast cheering on the Preds and enjoying the game.  And even though "our" team didn't win, it was a very exciting game.  It went into overtime and then sudden death.   On Thursday we attended a science show with o...

One month of school in the books!!  Yea!!  Despite the inevitable bumps-in-the-road, this year is off to a good start and I'm really happy with how things are going. Our homeschool routine has hit a fairly good groove and I'm glad.  Getting into a good routine is important--at least to me and my kiddos.  My son especially does so much better with a regular routine. This was our first week of school with no co-op classes, so Friday was a bit different than it has been so far.  We had intended to go on a field trip, but it was cancelled due to rain.  That was okay though because it gave me the chance to try out my new " Fun Fridays " plan. Here's my Fun Fridays plan :  on Fridays that we are not going to co-op classes or going on a field trip we will still have school, but our learning will be through books and activities other than our regular school books and lessons. We'll do math using Life of Fred (instead of our usual Teaching Textbooks)...

Where in the world are these weeks going?!  Somebody tell me, please!!  They are flying by way too quickly!   The highlight of our week was celebrating International Homeschool Spirit Week with our local homeschool group.  So much fun!   We celebrated with: PJ Day on Monday Crazy Hair Day on Tuesday Volunteer Day on Wednesday (our kiddos worked at our church) School Away From Home Day on Thursday (we visited the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site) Super Hero Day on Friday (my kids were "Flame Boy" and "Super Cozy") And just so you don't think it was all rainbows and butterflies this week, it got off to a pretty bumpy start on Monday with some terrible, horrible, awful bad attitudes.  So ...I loaded up the kids and made them run drills on a local soccer field.   Things improved after that.  ;) We also wrapped up our fall co-op session on Friday.  I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching 'Exploring Great Artists'...