Well we made in through the Thanksgiving weekend. Yay! :o) We have had a very busy week this week, and things are just going to get more hectic and crazy as Christmas approaches. We always enjoy the holiday season though, so that’s good. :o)

I know I have stated in the past that the last couple of years we take Thanksgiving through New Years off, and work longer in the summer to make up for it. I am pleased to announce that Bailey has been logging on to T4L almost (yes almost…lol) every day with no complaints. We are still struggling with the resource worksheets, but that is s l o w l y getting a little better. :o) It is a wonderful feeling to know that as a family we can accomplish everything we want to accomplish during the holidays, without making school take a backseat until later in the year. It’s really great! :o)

When Bailey logged on this morning, he proudly announced that he was almost done with Language Arts. My husband said “you just logged in, how can you be almost done with it?” Bailey said “no..with all of the language arts lessons.” This prompted a “wha huh?!” look between my husband and myself. After looking at it, sure enough he is almost done with the LA lessons, but he still has the LA extensions to do.

I do have a question if anyone can chime in…did we do things incorrectly? I mean…should he have been doing the extensions at the same time as he did the regular lessons, or is it ok that he is going to complete the lessons then go and do all of the extensions?

Thanks for any input and I hope you all are having a fantastic start to the Christmas and Holiday season! :o)

We are on sort of a working vacation in Florida.  My mom and I are installing a tile floor in my grandparents Florida home.  My dad got a new laptop and I brought it with me so that I could do some work, keep up on whats going on and for the boys to do their school work. 

A very nice thing about on-line school is that as long as there is some type of online service (dial FTW… lol) the boys can just sign on and do work…

Things are going well..  The boys each did a few lessons today with out any major complaining.  I snapped a few shots while I was taking a break from grouting. 

Of course when I went back to working on the floor the boys started taking photos and Z got one of Q “Sleeping” while doing work……

Our house is run like most home schooling families where I do most of the actual teaching.  The boys tell their dad what they are doing through out the day but it is not the same as him doing things with them.  I decided a couple years ago to make my husband their “science teacher”.  Science is a “fun” lesson and a lot of neat things can be done while throwing in the learnin’ !

The boys have done several science projects with their dad but this one that they found on the T4L site has been the best so far.  To compound the fun of the science lesson, the boys had Kati’s son over for a sleep over and my boys cousin stopped in to say hello.  All the “boys” have been waiting for this experiment to work and it was great fun to watch them!

Just a note to see what everyone is doing lesson wise for Thanksgiving?  We are new to homeschooling and I did not realize just how much info there is out there for virtually everything….aaahhhh…where do we start.  Luckily we have T4L!!!  I think it is so cool that we can access multiple grade levels that way we can sort of search for the topic that we are covering and utilize all resources.

My family is visiting this week and I have a cousin that teaches in California.  I can not wait to share time 4 learning with her.  She has a BA in education, but there you have to have a masters to teach….so she runs an after-school program for k-8.  Hopefully there will be some kids there that this program would help.  I know that she has all different degrees of learning abilities in the program….and all different degrees of parental involvement. 

I am also a little selfish….my parents are skeptical about this homeschooling thing, so maybe if she looks at the program and gives it a thumbs up they will get more ”into it.”  Don’t get me wrong…they are supportive…but ….  How do you other homeschool mom’s deal with that? 

The kids and I were talking about what we were thankful for….. I am thankful for the privlidge to teach my children, for guidance from the Lord, and for great curriculum like T4L!!!    

My boys are involved in a fine arts program called Master’s Academy of Fine Arts.  They have fine arts classes every Thursday an hour from our home and I drop them off and my husband picks them up; bringing them home.  This past Thursday he pulled me aside and told me that on the way home the boys were messing around in the back seat and one of them said “Oh, it’s Time4Learning now!”….  We talked about how nice it was that it is always in their heads and they use it as “catch phrases” during normal time.  I enjoy when he has alone time with the boys and hears for himself how much they talk about Time4Learning.

But my most favorite part is when they are done with a lesson and are so excited about something that they do research to find out more.  It usually happens in science and social studies but sometime something is mentioned in other parts of lessons that they want to know more about.  In the past I have encouraged them to “research” something when they have had a question but now they do it just because they want to.

Having both boys about at the same level encourages scholastic interaction between them and usually one will begin to research something and the other one migrates his way to see what is going on.  Discussions begin and it is neat to sit back and watch the interaction.   I enjoy seeing them brainstorm, research, and discuss things that they have questions about and it usually leads to more in-depth conversations.  This is only the beginning for them and is setting the groundwork for down the road when I begin to assign actual research projects and they know how to get information, come up with ideas of their own or build off lessons that they are studying.

It will be nice, a year from now to go back and see how nice the year has been; we are almost half way through and I can’t get over how nice it has been for our whole family.