Homeschool Formal

This year some amazing gifted mommas coordinated a formal dinner for the 6-12 grade crowd at our homeschool co-op.

The event took place at our church.  They mingled among candle light and cafe tables filled with hors 'd oeuvres and took turns with the photographer (EH!) capturing memories with each other.

Then they took their assigned seats at elegantly set tables (moms shared their fancy china and tableware) and music played as some helpful fifth-graders served them their meals course by course. The kids got to pick from turkey pesto roulade or herb crusted pork loin, a few veggie choices, and rolls (bless those moms in the kitchen!!). The desserts were so beautiful and impressive! They picked from bananas foster, cherries jubilee, and I know there were more but that's all my memory can recall.

The evening was complete after some board games.

Moms and kids alike raved about the evening. Hopefully an annual tradition has begun.

EH & Agent H on their way out the door to set-up the photo/audio gear.

A place setting. Oh how I love our wedding china!

Agent H

Agent H and one of this best buddies.

I bring you BOOM, or at least boom minus one. 

This self-labeled group has banded together for many hours of Minecraft fun.

And this is a great shot of some stylin' guys!

Seventh Grade with Agent H

Agent H's seventh grade curriculum was a bit of this and that.

We switched him from Teaching Textbooks math to Life of Fred math this year. We liked Teaching Textbooks but I had a hunch Agent H's learning style leaned towards LofF and after a year of it I think I was right. I had him get used to the LofF style by doing an Intermediate level that was a little young for him. Next he did the Fractions and Decimal & Percents books, then he started the Pre-Algebra books.  It was a lot of math.  He hasn't completed it all yet so we'll continue on through the summer months but I feel like it will keep him fresh for starting Algebra in the fall. He self-corrects and for every lesson that he gets less than one wrong on he gets to go to the SunRidge candy jar and dig out a few. I happily have had to refill it quite a few times.

I also used the free allinonehomeschool.com (more about it in this post) for his english, computer, reading material, science, Spanish. I was impressed with all of the assignments, really! They also do a nice job of breaking up the assignments with the occasional "thinking game".

Agent H has really enjoyed the history curriculum with Living Books Curriculum over the years so we decided to stick with them. History is his joy so he happily put his nose in the books and did mostly oral narrations for me.

He had such a busy year and handled it very well. Karate on Monday nights, Assistant Games Director for the Sparks at AWANA on Tuesdays, Middle School Ministry activities on Wednesday, our small group met on Thursdays, more karate on Saturday mornings, random social events. By the Lord's grace only is his introvert mama handling all this running around.

In the picture below I think he's giving me one of those "hammy" if-I-have-to-do-one-more-math-lesson-my-brain-will-burst looks.

He found a neat spot out in the woods behind us to build a little lean-to. He'll head out there with his knife and hatched and tinker around. His heart is leaning towards some type of military or police career. My mama's heart kinda quakes at the thought of the danger involved in those careers. Time to pray some more.

First & Fourth Grade with Agents L & E

We tried out a new curriculum this year. It's called Allinonehomeschool.com. It was created by a missionary mom and it's free.  Their website is set up so that you pick what year/level your student is on for basic subjects (math, language arts, computer, etc) and then you pick what level history/science combination you want to do. I had Agent E and L do their respective grades and then we joined together and did Level One history/science together.

It worked pretty slick. My goal for the year was for the kids to gain another level of independence. I used an application called Evernote to create them daily school to-do lists. The application allowed me cut and paste text from the allinone website directly into their online to-do list. They would simply click on the links in their to-do list and go read about their language art lesson and do an online game that reinforced the concept. I like the concept a lot but ran into enough of problems with Evernote that for next year we're switching to Google Docs.

Along with a lot more computer access came a lot more online security measures. It was a necessary hassle to go look at each new website that a lesson was at and approve them so the kids could have access. Again, it was a free curriculum.  It was worth the hassle.

Agent E still used Teaching Textbooks for math and Agent L used Life of Fred.

Preschool with Shortcake

For preschool we followed along with the free Getting Ready 1 schedule that Allinonehomeschool.com created. We added in some favorite activities from Heart of Dakota and joined her big brothers in some of their activities, but mainly she just did lots of playing and helping mom.

2015-16 School year photos

Oh how this year flew by! This is what everyone looked like when we started our school year: