Winter.
That’s how I sum up the last couple of weeks. We got 8 inches of snow last weekend. Then it snowed again this Friday. Thankfully, we are missing out on the big snowstorm that’s hitting the northeast currently.
All this snow affected our schooling because we don’t get snow that often, and the kids want to play in it. Also, since my husband is a public school teacher, he was home both Monday and Friday this past week and went to work 2 hours late the other 3 days. (The only day with students in school last week was Thursday.) I’m not complaining about my husband being home, it just changes the routine. (We didn’t get started as early and we didn’t get as much done.)
The other thing about snow is that lots of things get canceled. Last week we had no church dinner on Friday night, no basketball game on Saturday, no church on Sunday, no 4H on Monday. I was getting pretty stir crazy by Tuesday! Then Friday we had to reschedule a field trip and this weekend they canceled basketball again. One thing that I find interesting is that for the most part I’ve been relieved when the activities got canceled. Sure, I got a little stir crazy, but I think I may have over booked our schedule a bit for my personal preference. I’m still looking for balance in extracurricular activities.
On the school front, we did our basic school subjects. (Meaning, I failed to get to science and history this week….again.) One thing worth mentioning is we finished working through a math activity set by Make It Real Learning on Sets, Probability, and Statistics. My 6th grade son and I worked together on one activity per day for two weeks. We both really enjoyed it! The problems were challenging and required us to discuss how to solve them. My son wanted to go farther and do his own probability experiments similar to the ones in the problem set. Very cool. Now he’s started Life of Fred Pre-Algebra. I’ll let you know how that is.
In our unschooling Nature Studies, we watched a lot of birds this week. With the snow, we’ve had a lot of visits to the feeder. It’s really exciting how my 3 younger children are learning to identify birds. My older son has very little interest, but he did enjoy watching a squirrel with some bread crusts we had thrown out.
Hopefully next week we’ll be back to the Middle Ages and feudalism. I’m hoping for NO MORE SNOW! Hurry spring.
By Kristen H.