It is F-I-N-I-S-H-E-D! : Half a Hundred Acre Wood

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Although little has happened with schoolwork this week, a whole lot of other stuff has happened.

This is what did not change much (except for new gutters and a new roof, and the part where the roof of the house meets the roof of the garage).

We added two porches and a whole lotta wiggle room.

Two new bedrooms (& a playroom) upstairs, a family room, (a mud room,) and a loft with liveable space! (The slanted feature on the far wall of the loft is where the roof used to be.)

The back of our home – before, during and after construction

The interior of our house during construction. Unfortunately, I don’t have photos of the loft. I probably didn’t want to remember that part….

Stephen’s reaction to our new addition:

I love it! It’s so roomy! Our house was like America, and the addition is like the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of our home. Or, you can think of it like this: It was like the 13 colonies, and the addition is like the British Cession after that Paris treaty between America and England!

I went back through his work to find this in his Adventure Tales of America Activity Book. My heart leaps for joy when he makes connections like this!

Surprisingly, I became very discouraged earlier this week, (even though we’ve been waiting for this moment since we moved here almost two years ago!). And let me preface this by saying I am ever grateful that we’ve been able to build on to our home three years before we originally planned!

But we have struggled through this semester battling all the noise & distraction, trying to have some semblance of academics in our household. This week finally arrived – the grand finale – and I lacked motivation to teach at all. It was very difficult to get the boys to focus when they now had this new home to discover. It was very difficult to get ME to focus when I now had this new home to discover! And I had a lot of moving of furniture, and, well, I was just at a point of burn-out and needed a break. Yes, it was a short-lived season of our lives, as the whole thing from start to finish took just over 12 weeks. (Would you believe that Gary was home for only 3 weeks of that?! I cannot WAIT for him to get home!)

I have to continue to remind myself we are not working on a checklist of how many things we can do every week (even though I love the “fun” activities). This helps me to realize we are working towards long-term goals of a quality education, and if we don’t get around to doing absolutely everything this week, it is OKAY. If we just do our memory work this week, that is enough for us at this stage. And we took some extra time to enjoy nature this week, which was wonderful!

What we did this week

For Civil War history, the boys started working on a very simple free lapbook on the Civil War. I originally was not going to try to do this one, but when I discovered that all of the answers were included, Stephen couldn’t resist.

You mean, it’s a lapbook where I don’t have to WRITE anything?!

Unfortunately, we have no photos, but we’re piecing it together with free templates from:

Dynamic2Mom’s Civil War Lapbook
Homeschoolshare Civil War Lapbook

We will continue working on this lapbook, reading American History Stories Volume 4 (and the other read-alouds we haven’t quite finished yet). We will also peruse the links from our Resources Page as time permits – especially the ones dealing with the Civil War. (I mentioned most of them in my here.) AND because we live in the great state of Tennessee, we will be traveling along some Civil War driving trails and visiting other historical places of the time period.

For math warm-ups, we’re using the great Mystery Math Pictures from Superteacherworksheets. I just discovered that the same pictures are available as multiplication facts AND addition facts, so David and Stephen are working on the same Mystery Math Picture but practicing what is relevant to them right now!

For Language Arts practice this week, we used random sentences like this one we found at the playground:

First, we did our mechanics check. (Add an end mark to the sentence and add -ly to safe because it’s modifying play.) Stephen thought that someone must have scraped off the -ly.

Then, I asked Stephen to do question confirmation:

Who or what play? Understood (You). Subject Pronoun.

What is being said about the understood (you)? Play. Verb.

Understood (You) play what? No answer, so it’s Verb Intransitive.

Modifiers: Safely tells how to play. Adverb.

Structure = Simple

Pattern = S|Vi

Purpose = Imperative

But… what is “Please”? It seems like a helping verb, but it can’t be a helping verb! It’s not on our memorized list of helping verbs! So, maybe it’s an adverb? Or an interjection? I didn’t have a way to look it up, so I couldn’t answer the question at the time. Even after looking it up now I still don’t have a definite answer. It looks like it can be either one! (Anyone care to help us out here?)

Because I didn’t have the answer to that, we didn’t diagram it using a “stick in the sand” (literally). But I love doing this sort of thing with Stephen. Randomly selecting sentences while we’re out and about is a fun way to practice our English Grammar.

And for science, we enjoyed the great outdoors. In the coming weeks, we hope to do some of the fun activities and games we’ve had planned for other weeks. I’m so glad we have a break to “catch up” on our memory work.

Hiking our big backyard.

We had read how Harriet Tubman would tell the slaves that North was indicated by which side the moss grew on the trees, in case the North Star was not visible.

That sort of wraps up this round of what-we’re-doing-at-home posts. Like I said, we have a ton of catching up to do! Before you know it, it will be proofing time in Hartsville, TN! (And I’m endeavoring to become a Memory Master this year, too, but I’m not so sure I’ll make it. Timeline is still causing me trouble, and, what’s more, Stephen will be proofing me! Have I ever mentioned how much he likes to correct me when I’m trying to recite our memory work?)

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. Be sure to check out Scholastic’s First Thanksgiving!