It's almost that time...

My girls have both reached that point again where it's just too dreadfully boring to go on existing. Which means...it's nearly BACK TO SCHOOL time! (It also means that I'm going to consider a shorter "summer break" next year. But that's a later post.)

It has been a rather boring summer, actually, with no real vacation to speak of. The girls have been camping twice - once with just their daddy (while I escaped for a much-needed girl's weekend) and once with not only our family, but another family of six as well! Still, those were just weekend ventures, and the rest of the summer has been filled with a dreadful lack of structure and excess of nothing-to-write-home-about.

Rachael did take gymnastics this summer, although we missed about half of the classes thanks to her having the chicken pox, my having a cold, etc.

She went to a four-day Green Thumb Gardening camp at the Spencer-Penn Centre, and she loved every minute of it. She was really looking forward to a creative writing camp last month that was geared toward 5-8 year olds...unfortunately, they didn't have enough people sign up to have the camp. :(

Rachael and I both started piano lessons this summer, and we're both loving it, for the most part. I started several weeks before she did, so I'd know enough to help her out. Let me tell you, after years of playing the saxophone and reading one measly little line of notes at a time, this two-staff both-hands-doing-something-different mess is blowing my mind! But I'm trying. And Rachael is catching on very quickly, as she'll gladly demonstrate to anyone who comes to visit.

And finally, I have to brag on my girl...she ROCKED the summer reading program at our local library! When it first started, she was allowed to choose from two options. One, she could set a goal for how many books she'd read during the program, and if she met that goal, she'd receive a free book. Or two, she could enter the big kid/adult contest, where you received one entry into a drawing for every hundred pages you read. No free book, but a CHANCE to win one of several donated gift cards. Rachael noticed that there was a $25 gift card to Walmart on the list, and that was the end of it - she wanted to win THAT. I explained and explained that there were no guarantees, etc. and she said that she got it. Well. After two months of writing down every single book that she read...after many trips back and forth to the library (because only books checked out of the library counted)...after counting down the days till the contest ended because I was SICK of writing down all those books (!!!), the contest finally ended. Rachael turned in four pages of books, with a total of 7, 126 pages.

That's right. SEVEN THOUSAND PAGES. Granted, a few of those were "Easy" books that she read to Milly and counted on her own list too. But most of those were books on a 3rd, 4th or 5th grade level - American Girl books, children's poetry, lots of novels. Most of the books she read ran around 200 pages, and she knocked them out in no time.

I'm still in awe. Girlfriend topped me by 3,000 pages.

Finally, the day of the drawing rolled around. The drawing box was so saturated with our entries that I knew there was a good chance that one of us would win something (and of course, if *I* had won, I would have passed it off as hers!) Sure enough, the phone rang shortly after the library opened...and Miss Cecil, her favorite librarian, told me that Rachael had won the $25 Walmart gift card. :) Milly got to pick out a free book. I won nada.

So, I guess we've had a little excitement after all.

BUT. I'm ready for some routine, and I think the girls are too. Our Notice of Intent to homeschool for the 2010-11 school year has been filed, and we have about half of our curriculum already. The rest is on the way and should be here any time. Time to start making lesson plans!

I'll tell you all about our curriculum choices soon...and the extracurriculars we have planned for this fall. I still need to sort out something for Milly too, as she's quite insistent that she wants to "do school like Sissy."

Wow, week six already?!

Originally posted on September 22, 2009

I missed two weeks of updates - which included the one month mark of this school year. How did that happen?! Now we're into the sixth week - already! It seems like we just started! I'm taking this as a very, very good sign. If things weren't going well, I would most likely be slashing the days off of the calendar in red marker and keeping a running total in my head...only X more days until my goal is met! But no - we have our routine now and, even though Milly is still irritated sometimes that all the attention isn't focused solely on her, it's mostly a smooth process.

A few things that have happened since my last update...

• We finished Math-U-See Primer (kindergarten). Rachael was terribly excited that we wrapped it up on a Friday afternoon and that the next book in the series hadn't yet arrived. Just as she began rejoicing the fact that she wouldn't have any math to do on the following Monday...the UPS truck arrived with the Alpha book. Them's the breaks, kiddo! (I gave her Monday off from math anyway, just because.) The first few lessons in the new book have been review, but new material (word problems) will commence next week.
• Handwriting is going better - she doesn't mind doing the lessons any more - but we still butt heads on a pretty regular basis. She has apparently decided that she only cares for capital letters, and would be quite happy using nothing but. In what must be a half-hearted attempt to please me, she'll occasionally throw in a lowercase letter or two, so her English workbook is filled with lines such as "THe cAT rAN AWAy FrOM THe DOG." I'm sure most everyone has encountered the teenager who randomly capitalizes things that way online, and how annoying it is. I refuse to let Rachael become one of them! She gets pretty mad at me when I erase the whole thing and demand a re-do, but darnit, lowercase letters are our friends. (Incidentally, we seem to be going through an inordinate number of erasers.)
• Rachael has a spelling test, consisting of eight words, each Friday. She missed one word each on the first three tests, but hasn't missed any on the last two!
• We're still loving our Book of Virtues unit study, although the section on compassion that we just finished up was hard for my soft-hearted girly. It took a good half hour to stop the tears after reading The Little Match Girl. The Gift of the Magi was better received, although Rachael maintains that she's going to grow her hair all the way to the floor and will never cut it all off to buy a gift for any man.  ;)
• Girl Scouts is back in full swing, with the first fundraiser of the 2009-2010 school year starting next week. Expect her to be hitting you up for orders of nuts, toffee popcorn and choclate-covered everything. Thankfully, it's not terribly expensive. We got to sample everything at this week's meeting too, and it's all really, really good.
• Gymnastics is still going well. Rachael flipped over the top bar on the uneven bars this week, without so much as a teacher standing there to spot her. I was so proud!

I asked Rachael what she would like to say on her blog, and here's what I got out of her:
"Homeschool is really cool. The funnest part about homeschool is that Mommy gets to teach me. I like the books that we read for English."

And now, being that it is Tuesday afternoon, we're off to the library for craft time and to re-stock on chapter books. We've begun reading about Kirsten, the pioneer American Girl that Rachael will be for Halloween. She's discovered Cam Jansen books and absolutely loves them, and she's always on the lookout for more, more, more things to read. I have to shove books out of the way to make room for her to sleep at night, but I'm not complaining. If genetics are to be blamed, it's all my fault anyway. :)