January Homeschool

Anyone else tired of living through a pandemic? Also, I'm not a fan of armed insurrections. January was a long month. I did notice that most of the Trump signs in people's yards were taken down after the vote was certified by Congress, which I will take as a good sign that people still have some trust in the election process. The vaccines are out and slowly getting into the communities where they are most needed. There are new variants of coronavirus that are more contagious, which are probably already circulating widely in this country. The death rates continue to be in the thousands per day range. You can't fix problems if you don't acknowledge them, and the most frustrating thing for me is listening to people downplay the current situation, like frogs slowly boiling to death. We just need to get back to normal! Everything is fine! 

It is truly not. 

Life must carry on nonetheless, though, so for homeschool, I tried to be organized. I wrote out all of our Brave Writer activities on the calendar and also added other little things that we had to do on a certain date....Girl Scout hikes or birthday celebrations. We continued on with Spectrum workbooks instead of Khan for math, although the kids do refer to the Khan videos if they are confused about something. They check their answers against the answer key. If they miss any, they go back and redo them and also write a sentence about what mistake they made. I used this strategy when I taught high school math and it really does help.

We made good progress with copywork, dictation, studying the literary device of "story within a story" and listening to an audio version of the Greenglass House. 

We kept up with current events by discussing the Capitol violence and comparing the current voter suppression efforts by the republican party to those that have happened throughout the history of our country. Voter suppression is a particularly relevant issue in Pennsylvania so we'll be following this closely over the next year as it plays out in our local elections and legislation. We also watched some of the inauguration speeches and read all of the poems from past inaugurations. I thought the flag display on the Mall was really cool, plus the new Mississippi flag has a neat design. 

We failed to complete the writing project of the month. It was supposed to be a simple research exercise + essay construction on a topic you enjoy, but the kids hated it for some reason and balked at every step. I signed up for the Brave Writer parent class to try and figure out some of this writing stuff. We'll give it another go next month!

We made another art project from Art with Mrs. Filmore. This time we did 3D mugs that had little bits of polyfill sticking out the top for steam. They are currently on display in M's office. I love her website! The projects are very easy to follow and she talks about the elements of art and design in all of them.

We started using a geocaching app and this helped us to get outside in the less pleasant weather. If you want to get outside in the winter, make sure you have clothing that keeps you warm and dry and is easy to move around in. Also, bring snacks. Girl Scout candy and fig bars are the go-tos for us right now. 

On Saturday, Laurel and I went out on a hike with our Girl Scout troop. When we were gathering, my co-leader pulled me aside and whispered that she found a dog wandering around the parking lot. The dog had fairly recently given birth as she was visibly engorged...and there were no puppies around. As it was only about 20 degrees outside it was a pretty critical situation for this dog and worse for the puppies. Luckily we had an extra volunteer with us so we took the girls on the hike, while my co-leader was able to get some help, get the dog warmed up in her car and give her some water and food. Afterward Laurel and her friend searched for the puppies again, but we couldn't find any signs of them. We think somebody may have sold the puppies and dumped the mother dog. It was nice to see my co-leader spring into action to help a creature in need, though. Girl Scouts are always ready to lend a hand!

For February I'm challenging myself to write every day about our days. No links, no photos, no editing. Just a quick summary of what we did and my thoughts on it.