Conqueror

Today I tackled the library and came out victorious!

Cal is one month old today and I celebrated by deciding to attempt taking all six hooligans to a public place – by myself – for the first time. I figured the library during an off-time was a fairly low-risk environment for this social experiment.

Veni Vidi Vici, and I gained a small amount of confidence in myself.  It was a baby step, 45 minutes max; but still, it’s nice to know I’m not going to be trapped in my house forever.

Also, it might have helped that as I was walking out (and the children were being SO well-behaved and opening doors for me and cheerfully holding hands with younger siblings) a women walking out next to us said, “Wow, are these all your kids? Five kids, you just look so young to have five.” I smiled and said, “Six actually, and yes, I’ll claim them all today.” She replied, “Wow. You are a superwoman. How old is your oldest?” I told her, and we went to the car.

Don’t worry, this is not a typical experience. That’s why it was noteworthy. Usually people give the crazy lady and her three-ring circus a pretty wide birth and a lot of dirty looks. :)

Would you like to know something curious about the library? This happens to me just about every time we go. I was at the library for 45 solid minutes this morning, but the second we walk through the door of our house, I get an email saying my holds are in. Every. Single. Time. My holds never come in while I’m AT the library, oh no. I have to figure out when (in the next three days or my hold expires) I can go AGAIN. Oi.

Enough about the library, let’s talk about school.

Right now our school is very fluid. Some days are excellent and we get to the things I want to get to and the kids are cooperative. And some days all I do is nurse the baby and the kids run around like wild heathens. I’m trying to be patient in our fluidity.🙂
Speaking of wild heathens…



We finished our Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe writing unit. The literary element for the unit was “breaking the fourth wall”, which in a nutshell is when the narrator of a book addresses the reader directly. C. S. Lewis does this a lot. Rudyard Kipling does it even more. Another place you find a lot of this element is in comic strips. So we got to spend a morning going through Calvin and Hobbes to find examples. My kids were ecstatic. :)

Then Lincoln and Ivan got to create their own comic strips that contained an instance where one of their characters “broke the fourth wall.” I love that Ivan used his pet rat as the hero in his comic. And I love that Lincoln’s comic is soooo “Lincoln-esk”.





We also started our writing unit for The One and Only Ivan, a cute book about a gorilla named Ivan and a baby elephant named Ruby.🙂 One of the themes this book covers is names, what they are, what they mean, etc. I feel like this goes right along with our recent study of descriptive writing. How do you describe yourself? When someone says your name, how does that identify you? What comes to mind? So we did a writing project to describe ourselves. You could call them word art, I suppose. Or poems.

Biker, Playful, Happy, Swimmer, Friendly, Silly, Curious, Hiker, Energetic, Smart, Lover, Adventurous, Scientific. I am Lincoln

Eel, Doubler, Smart, Fast, Playful, Artist, Diver, Lover, Curious, Glad, Adventurous, Happy. I am Ivan.

Happy, Playful, Loving, Sparkley, Fancy, Curious, Creative, Outdoorsy, Dancer, Acrobatic, Nice, Fun. I am Adelia Mae.

Go-with-the-flow, Painter, Good Boy, Quiet, Calm, Eater, Runner, Sweet Tooth, Helper, Kind, Shy, Hiker, Biker. I am Oliver.

I finally got around to opening the box of curriculum I ordered from Canyon Grove that Esther brought down to me the weekend I had Cal. The kids are loving their Chromebooks and I am loving being able to have all three of them do their computer work at the same time, so that the main computer doesn’t have to be in use all the live-long-day.

Adelia started Reading Eggs, which is great because it reinforces the phonics she’s learning, but is something she can read on her own without my help.

Ivan begged and begged and begged me to let him start learning a language this year, and I caved and let him. (I wasn’t planning on having him start until third grade.) He picked Russian. And I have him learning it for free right now on a site called  Duo Lingo. It’s going well, and if it continues to go well this school year, then I’ll purchase the Rosetta Stone Russian program for him next year. I like Rosetta Stone better, because I feel like it has more speaking and more listening than Duo Lingo.

Linc is continuing his German this year, and it’s going well. it’s fun to hear him learning things I learned back in my days of Jr. High and college German classes.🙂 He says after he learns German he wants to learn Chinese. More power to him, I say. I always thought it would be cool to speak four or five languages.  He’s also been REALLY into computer programming using Scratch and code.org lately. He asks to go back and do more of those during his free time.

Something I have been LOVING is our new math curriculum, Teaching Textbooks. Linc is doing level 5 and Ivan level 4. It has taken all the pressure of teaching math off of my shoulders. The program comes with all the lectures for each lesson on a cd rom. Then they use pencil and paper to do the assigned problems out of a workbook. (Which I REALLY like. I felt like they were missing the pencil and paper aspect of math by doing Khan Academy.) Once they are done with their problems, they type their answers into the computer, and it tells them whether they got it right or wrong. If they got it wrong, they have a second chance to rework the problem. If they get it right, then it counts as right. If they get it wrong then there is a video clip showing the right way to work the problem. The program keeps track of their scores on each lesson and their overall grade, so as a parent it’s really easy for me to go in and see how they are doing. (Something I also thought was really hard to do on Khan Academy.) So basically my kids are teaching themselves math, through this program, and I am just there to answer questions and make sure they understand what they’re being taught. It’s such a relief. And it’s going well!



I got a package in the mail of school related books that I finally got around to ordering. Can you tell that I go extra heavy on the language arts end of things? Ha!

So this is me the last few weeks:



And you know what? We’re memorizing Shakespeare, who’d a thunk! For starters we are memorizing a short passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We’ve learned about half of it. We’re having fun, and I’m pretty impressed that all three of my older kids and myself (which is probably most impressive of all, haha!) have memorized what we’ve studied so far.



The kids have finished up their first unit at Canyon Grove, so this weekend we got to attend the first Celebration event. It was up at the Pleasant Grove school and was combined with all the Distance Education campuses. That worked out awesome because Aaron’s brother Kelly’s son Asher is doing Distance Ed Kindergarten at the PG location. So we got to party with family! Aaron’s parents came up as well. Esther and Kelly ran a craft booth where the kids could make dream catchers. There were several other crafts, face painting, food to sample and to buy, Native American dancing, and an area where kids could sell or trade for items they had made. Lincoln made a bunch of rubber band bracelets and made about $8 selling them. Not bad.



Afterwards we went to Kelly and Esther’s for pizza. We had a great time. The kids played in the yard and watched a movie, the men worked on helping Kelly get the new floor in, and the women and infants found a quiet corner and chatted the night away. I’m grateful to be able to do fun things with our family and that my kids have the opportunity to create relationships with their cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents.