Friday, December 18, 2009

Officially on Christmas Break

Well, yesterday, we finally finished all our planned school work for this semester. (WOOHOO)  Even with our move and all the madness that goes along with moving we were still able to stay on track with most of our school subjects.  Our main goals were to complete our entire math book and Bible study book before the end of the calendar year.

On Monday the boys took their Final Book Exam for Math and they both got 100% on them.  I am so proud of them! They did a great job with the entire math book.  The book we used was Math U See, Epsilon, which is a full course lesson on fractions.  The next book that we will do (in the series) will be on decimals.  I love the Math U See approach to teaching math skills. After a certain level and understanding the basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division rules the curriculum teaches on full "topics", such as the one we just completed, Fractions, and the next one we will be doing, which is Decimals.  Also, at the end of each topical lesson they are learning a little bit of Geometry and Algebra as well.  It was really cool to see them doing algebra and they didn't even realize it.

The other Lesson Book that we completed was our Bible Study book.  We are using books that are an Inductive Bible Study series for kids.  They are written by Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt.  I love these books.  The inductive part of it really teaches the kids to use their Bibles and look up a lot of scripture.  They get to see how scripture supports scripture. The book that we just completed was "Abraham - God's Brave Explorer", from Genesis 11-25.  The boys really enjoyed learning about Abraham and how he is an example to us, even today. The next book that we will work through is called "Extreme Adventures with God", learning about Isaac, Jacob and Esau.  We are excited to see what God has to show us about these three men and what we can learn from them.

There was much more work that we completed through our first semester together.  We are working through a US History and Science book that we hope to have completed by the end of the school year. We will be starting a new Writing curriculum in January and in the midst of it all we are ALWAYS reading!

I assume that today is also the day for most people to finally be all done for the year and you too can relax and enjoy your Christmas break.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Monday, December 7, 2009

New Place for the Holidays

Let's see...since my last update on the house situation we were waiting on our close date (on the house we were selling) and actively looking for a new place to call "home".  Our close date was December 1st and all went smoothly. After a lot drama we finally found a rent house and started the moving process right away. We only moved 1 mile from where we were so we thought that we could handle things all on our own and move ourselves. We did handle it all on our own but it was a lot of work and we were exhausted at the end of each day. It took us a total of 11 days to do it.  All the days included packing and cleaning, too.  We had cleaning at both houses.  The rental we found was very dirty. It took me 3 whole days to clean it before we could begin moving anything in.    

We are now, finally, all moved into our new, temporary home. It feels so good to have it all behind us.  It all seems so weird though.  I guess everything just happened so fast that we really didn't have time to process the fact that we would no longer be calling that house "home".

Where to go from here? Well, we are settling in to enjoy the Christmas holiday and relax a little.  All the while, we are actively looking for our new place to call "home".