All Girls School

It’s been about a month since I have updated here. There have been lots of changes at our house.

I was laid off from my job in late September. It was speculated to be a temporary lay off, but it has since become permanent. So, I have been looking for full time work.

Bubba was enrolled back in the school where she attended kindergarten and where Mimi currently attends. Last week was her first week and she has acclimated well and is enjoying her time with friends there.

It has been a bittersweet but relatively easy transition for us all. Even though the title of the blog will no longer be relevant, I think I’ll keep it going with life updates for the family and friends that read here.

We’re not sure what the future holds for us or if homeschooling will be an option again, but you never know. Right now we’re focusing on how much we enjoyed the year and a half that we had. We are also integrating some of our homeschooling stuff into our everyday play and family time.

I’ll leave you with some photos from over the holiday break.

Bubba was named Homeschooler of the Week over at Homeschool Bliss for this week. (or next week? since it’s Friday?) Anyway, I was sent a questionaire for her to fill out last weekend and she has been asking me every day what it was for and when she would find out. Today, she finally got to see the answer. She was very surprised, not only that she was featured, but that there was a prize involved. Today we’re going to get to work on a lovely thank-you note to send in for the feature and the book. It’s nice that there is this way of being acknowledged as a homeschooler.

Bubba has had two days of sewing projects with our friend, Ms. T. They have been working on a teddy bear, pajama pants and slippers. I have photos of the pajama pants, as the teddy bear still needs a couple of stitches to attach limbs. I can’t wait to share that one, though, as it’s pretty spectacular. Here are the capri pants with button and ribbon embellishments. And who would have guessed that Bubba would choose Hannah Montana fabric? (The bear is HM fleece.)

There is going to be a slumber party with all of the girls that participated in this sewing project. It was such a fun idea and Bubba adores sewing with her friends.

In other schooling, we’ve been exhausting the (x,y) coordinate plane and playing a modified version of Battleship to practice. It was fun for about fifteen minutes until I realized that I should have made the grids smaller. Much much smaller.

We’re finally moving past the human body in science. I had a great video to watch at the end of the unit, but when it came time for it, nobody could find it. Figures. We’re moving on to geology and Bubba is in heaven. She checked out a bunch of books from the library on rocks, gems and minerals. She also got out her rock collection and we’ve been looking at them a lot.

In history we are winding up the ancient Greeks. It was so fun to get to go on a tangent and delve deeply into some of the art history. We looked at tons of images and examples of Greek art and architecture, discussing the different types of columns, the differences between sculpture in the round and relief sculpture, and finding sculptures of the different gods and goddesses that we had learned about.

Last week we found an old book of poems that children often memorized for school a long time ago. We chose one and she copied it out in her best handwriting and had homework over the weekend to memorize it. We’ll see later how that went, as I didn’t see her practice it once. It’s hard for me to assign her homework and then not remind her over the weekend that it needs to get finished. But, I refrained, and it has been left entirely up to her.

We are still reading The Mysterious Benedict Society and are both really into it. It’s been a fun and light read and we have fun stopping to guess what will happen next or try to figure out the clues before the kids in the book do. There have been a couple of frustrating times for Bubba when she’s figured out the current puzzle well before she thought the characters should have, but mostly it’s been fun.

Her guitar lessons are going well. She got some new sheet music the other day. It was Jingle Bells and she is so excited to practice it over and over so she can play it for the family over the holidays. She has also moved up in her book to Yankee Doodle. The incentive to practice is so much stronger when she is practicing songs that she knows.

Soccer ended for the season. We have a sports break now until after the holidays. She wants to take ice skating lessons again. We’ll have to see about that because the logistics of those lessons are a bit of a nightmare. If not ice skating, then she’ll likely want to do indoor soccer. Mimi enjoyed soccer this year and stayed engaged a lot longer than she did last year. As of right now she doesn’t want to play soccer again, but that may change once the indoor league comes along. Or she may want to ice skate, too, if we are able to go that route.

Lastly, here’s a cute pic from this morning when Bubba was helping Baby with her computer time.