Our Last Few Weeks

I haven't had the opportunity to write as much as I would have liked over the course of the last few weeks as things have been pretty hectic here in our household.  It's seemed like one of those situations where life hit the fast forward button and we've been flying through and hanging on for the ride and doing school when possible.

First, our AC went out completely. Not a good thing when the temperatures outside are hitting triple digits and our living room faces the sun at the hottest part of the day. Luckily for us, we live on a military instillation and maintenance is covered by housing.  However, it was a trying time as the temperatures inside climbed to close to 90 making everyone miserable. In the course of a week, we had the repairmen here 5 time trying to fix it before they finally decided to just switch the entire unit both inside and out. In some ways, this was a good thing for us as we are about to have to start paying for our own electricity on base and obviously our old unit was not very energy efficient. Having a new unit that cools the home much more efficiently and runs less will help us in the long run but when we were sweating it out, that was furthest from our minds.  We did try to get school accomplished for a few days but we were honestly all too miserable to get much done.

Add to this, our credit card information was stolen.  We're not sure exactly which establishment it happened at as my husband used the card at three places within 24 hours of it happening but at one of them, they obviously skimmed the card and then made a physical duplicate card from the information.  We were extremely lucky that my husband has an alert notification setup on our account for any charges over 100 dollars made on the card so we were able to catch it fairly quickly, but not before someone took the "new" card and had a really nice 300 dollar dinner at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co in San Francisco as well as a few transactions at a Mexican grocery. They had charged over 500 dollars by the time we were able to call the bank and stop the card, but this left us without our debit card for a few days. Really put a damper on our own plans as we were planning on going out that day but without our card we weren't able to get gas or pay for meals (our physical bank is in Texas, we're in California so we couldn't just go to the bank).  Thankfully, the money was put back into our account quickly but being without a card for a few days really sucked.. I just hope that whomever it was at Bubba Gumps left the waiter/waitress a  nice tip, considering the total cost of the bill.

Whether due to the swings in temperatures or because of something going around on base, several of us got sick, which meant that once again, school got put on the back burner.  I guess that's one of the great things about homeschooling - we can take a sick day(s) and then play catch up afterwards.  Between these two events, we ended up having to play a lot of catch up and while the kids balked at the idea, we actually got it done.

On a good note, my husband, being the wonderful man that he is, replaced my older laptop with a much nicer one.  My poor laptop was on its last leg with the fan having gone out and the screen having a pinched wire making it very positional.  I now own a very nice Toshiba that has enough processing power to allow me to play Sims 4 as well as all my blogging and homeschooling needs.

So, what have we been doing in school?

Our typical school day starts with our literature studies, followed by drills, Mathematics and English studies.  Depending on the day of the week, we also do either Art studies and Science or we do Foreign Language along with history.  Each Monday, I print out all the work for the week and staple them together in a packet for the kids to go along with their workbooks and each day we work our way through our classwork. Pretty typical arrangement to be honest.

We added a new Grammar study to our lessons to our day.  I didn't have a clue how to begin actually teaching grammar to the kids so after a bit of research we selected English 2 Writing and Grammar by BJU Press. We've gotten through 4 lessons so far and while I'm finding it to be a nice inclusion to our lesssons, the kids are less than thrilled about it LOL..  It means more writing for them and that is never good as far as they are concerned.

Our literature selection for now is a book about John Smith from Youth With A Mission.  (A review of this book will be posted soon.)  We're reading a chapter of the book each day and then doing comprehension questions that are from the Study Unit that can be purchased to accompany the book.  The kids are really enjoying this selection and I've been pretty happy with the content of the book.  Once we're finished with the book, we will be moving on to Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner.  This was a selection we had already planned for our next literature unit and we were very happy to be put on a review for a unit study to accompany this book as well.

Review material seems to be pretty heavy in our studies at the moment, actually...

In addition to the YWAM materials on John Smith and the Unit study for Stone Fox, we're also currently reviewing French (K-3) from Middlebury Interactive Languages as well as Reading Kingdom Online.    Reviews for these will be posted next month. :)

So, that's what we're up to.  Now that the dust has settled from our whirlwind few weeks, I'll post more :)