Getting back into the rhythm

We have officially started school as of last week. The fact is we all needed a bit more routine into our days when we were not traveling and school is one of the easiest ways to achieve routine.

Katie has been at her last camp for the summer this week and after this we have a couple of weeks at home before our last trip of the summer. Tomorrow we drive down to the GS camp to pick up Katie. Today, we got a letter from her telling us that she missed us but is having A LOT of fun.

Since we never stopped T4L we have just continued on with where the girls are there. Mary has discovered that she really enjoys working with fractions, seriously. All three girls are working hard and doing very well. Mary has added in the Time4Art component and does one lesson a week. She does the lesson online at the beginning of the week and then turns in her finished assignment at the end of the week. Between her and Emily's art we have been experiencing a shortage of paper around the house.

This week Emily, Robbie and I began working through their first unit study of the year. We chose 'Weather' as the topic because Emily is fascinated by weather and weather forecasts. I am using a Unit Study created by Intellego. We are keeping a daily weather journal and have explored "What Weather Is?" by reading Usborne's Beginner series titled Weather. We also watched BrainPop videos on weather.

Today we built an anemometer to measure wind direction.

(See the nifty haircut she gave herself last week...thus the need for routine in our house)

It was Emily's idea to lift the anemometer up on the two cups. She figured that the reason we couldn't get it to work immediately was because it was too low to the ground (of course it was totally calm most of today). All the pictures she saw of wind gauges showed them high up, so this one needed to be lifted also.

Without Katie here, we decided to wait on starting the Economics Unit Study she and Mary will be doing in August. I spent most of the week pulling material together and making some final lesson plans. I found this awesome Economics education site while searching around for material. I decided to use their 4-part lesson on Money and Banking as the core of this unit study. We are also going to use BrainPop materials to flesh out the study. I like that this focuses on budgeting, saving money and making choices on how to spend money. Later we will do economics studies on supply and demand, taxes, and other more abstract ideas.

I'm trying to get as much planning as I can out of the way now as sports are starting back this weekend. Katie's softball team has already had one practice, with another one on Saturday. Mary has soccer practice tomorrow evening after we get back from picking Katie up. We have not had confirmation yet, but her coach is hoping to start regular practices next week. Their first soccer tournament is in less than a month.

I'm looking forward to fall and some cooler weather so we can get back outside again. The heat is oppressive and nobody wants to be outside for very long if they can avoid it. The children don't even ask me to take them to the park right now. I'm ready to do some hiking!!!

Peace,

Amy