The Honeymoon is over!

Last week I blogged about how blessed I felt (granted, I am still blessed!) and REALITY gave me a swift kick this week!  :-)  This week is the first time I've seriously considered sending a child to public school!  :-)  It was a rough week for Mama and the 6 y/o.  Everyday I was told he hates school and that it's BORING.  After a really rough start to the morning one day this week (it was only 8:45am!) I had a talk with said 6 y/o.  We came to the conclusion that he would not like ANY school, even if it wasn't homeschool.  Basically, he doesn't like to be told what to do!  If he had it his way he'd play all day long!  I came to the conclusion this week that Fall is a difficult time for Rylan.  Every fall I get to the point where I don't know how to handle him.  I think if I just hold tight this too shall pass.  I swear though, if a yellow bus had come by that morning I would have put him on it!

Jayden had some trouble this week too.  Math Mammoth is proving to be challenging for him in the area of geometry.  He didn't have any of this in MUS so all this is brand new.  He figured out this week he's NOT a geometry kind of guy.  Give him a stack of numbers and he loves it... hand him a protractor and he'll put himself on the yellow bus!  ;-)  He spent 45 min. on one problem (not to my knowledge at the time) and had a complete breakdown afterward.  I told him (yet again) he can skip problems that are too hard and ASK FOR HELP!!!!  I think finally that may have sunk in this week as a couple days later he did ask for help on another assignment and he was able to figure things out quickly after that.  I told him to be greatful for one thing... at least he got his dad's math brain (Greg didn't like geometry either).  If he got my math brain he wouldn't like ANY of it!  :-)

In the midst of this we had some celebrations this week too.  Bryson started reading Frog and Toad and he's doing great with it!  Mama (and Daddy) were pretty surprised what he can read!  It's so fun to see those huge jumps happen seemingly overnight.  Also, Rylan asked to actually write his own narration in WWE this week!  He wrote both days narrations!  Unheard of, Rylan asking to write something!  Go figure... can't figure that child out.... at least he couldn't say that was boring.

We had a great week in history learning about Russia and Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Great.  Jayden wrote an excellent 1 page plus narration on Ivan the Great.  I've decided to start some timeline memorization in history next week.  I'm half wishing we had a Classical Conversations group here, however I'm thinking it would fit us better to just focus on some extra memorization at home.  I'm hoping by the end of the year we can recite 160 world events from creation to modern age!  This is good for Mommy too!

We are really enjoying our new theme in science... the solar system.  We learned about the sun this week and watched a video on the planets.  It had an evolutionary spin to it so I told the kids such and we talked through it.  Rylan could NOT figure out why we would watch it if it taught evolution!  He was quite put out.  I explained to him that we need to be aware what some people believe so when we run across this view we can help them to see Truth.  That helped him somewhat, but my little "black and white" boy still was not real happy about it.  We were amazed at how special our Earth is and how God created this planet just for us.  It is perfectly placed... not too close to the sun, not too far away.  What an amazing Creator we have!

All our "basics" were done each day for 4 days.  We took Friday off to visit with our dear friends who were in town for the day.

Rylan wrote his own narration!

Jayden has his first JOB!  He's mowing

a friend's lawn who just moved in a couple

blocks up the street from us.  He's LOVING this!

We made paper!  We learned last week that the Chinese were

the first to make paper.  We finally made some this week.  Here

the kids are tearing the paper and putting it in the blender.

Filling the blender with water.

We couldn't find the top to the blender so Kylie and I

had to hold down a plastic lid.

The kids thought the "pulp" looked like carrot juice!

Spreading the pulp over the screen.  Rylan wanted NOTHING

to do with this.  He's got some sensory issues so this goop

was just too much for him! 

Rolling it was okay though, once it was covered by the

paper towel... notice how far he is back from the

counter!

The finished product.  The kids LOVED this!

Using a prism to see all the colors in "sunlight".  Since

we had no real sunlight this day we had to use a flashlight.

Silly prism glasses.  The kids loved looking at each other's

eyes through the prism... they looked like they had 4 eyes!

The beginning of our solar system chart.  We put the sun

on this week.

I am starting to do geography "The Core" way.  We started

this week by drawing the 5 great circles.  I'm so excited for this!

Imagine your child able to construct a world map in his head!  This

is our long term goal.