Our homeschool notebook: The homeschool mother's journal: Summer olympics

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The homeschool mother's journal: Summer olympics

In my life this week...We watched the opening ceremony of the London Olympics together as a family. The kids really liked it, especially the Mr. Bean part, they thought that was pretty funny. I wasn't planning on letting them stay up real late to watch it, but they didn't want to miss it. I decided to let them just hang out on the couch until they fell asleep. April lasted the longest. She really wanted to see the U.S. come in during the parade of countries, but I don't think she made it past the H countries. I enjoyed that time with my family.

In our homeschool this week...we mostly did a lot of Olympics stuff! I decided to try out the Amanda Bennett unit study. Everything came together pretty good. What worked the best for her study was hooking my laptop up to the TV so we could do it all together. I took that suggestion from another blog that is doing the same study, and it made things so much easier. I don't think we'll do the full 4 weeks because that might be too much for my children, but we made it through the first week! That's pretty good for us. I think we will just do some fun craft projects for the remainder of the olympics.

April really liked checking the medal tables. It was pretty cool to be able to see which countries won medals and how many for each sport. We learned some great things from this.

We also made a t chart for the "sport of the day" in the unit study.

we only kept track of which country earned the most gold medals in each sport over all the years. There are lots of other comparisons to make though. It was fun to see which countries appeared to be better at some of the sports.

We also had notebooks and lapbooks that we worked on each day. Here's Aaron working on his. Aric has his own lapbook, and they each have a 3 ring binder with paper and new worksheets each day.

Helpful homeschool tips or advice to share...listen when your children request to learn or study something even when it's not on the schedule.

I am inspired by...uplifting music. It always seems to get me in the right place. Good music can be very inspiring.

Places we're going, and people we're seeing...we had some fun outings this week. We went to April's end of 4-H picnic today. Friday we had a good time with our homeschool group doing olympic games at the park. Tuesday we went to Silver Falls to visit Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt M., and cousins who were camping there. We all swam in the river, it was cold, but fun! Monday was our library day in Wilsonville.

My favorite thing this week was...Seeing the first egg appear in the chicken coop. We are very excited to finally be getting eggs, and the count is up to 7. Seven eggs in 7 days.

What's working/not working for us...

Questions/thoughts I have...sometimes I wonder who is learning more, me or the kids. Sometimes I'm pretty sure this was all meant to be. For me to learn so much right along with my children.

Things I'm working on...doing things simpler in all areas of my life. I need to simplify in a lot of ways. It's very relieving when I do.

I'm cooking...We picked some raspberries this week at the local berry farm, and I made a berry crisp with the berries. It was pretty tasty.

I'm grateful for...Cheap and free stuff that we got this week for our homeschool. We stopped at a little 2nd hand store, and found a battleship game for $2, and snap circuits for $2.50. We also acquired the whole series of Lemony Snicket's, A series of unfortunate events at our homeschool group day.

I'm praying for...my hubby whose still healing from his back mishap recently.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share...more olympic fun we had this week