New Year's Day......New school year and fresh starts and hopeful hopes

Thursday
10 September 2015

(Disclaimer:SO last year I sucked bigtime at running the blog...mea culpa....I sucked at holding most of the year together last school year as it turned out. There are, ummm, many opportunities for stress and dysfunction abounding here in my present homelife, shall we say to be honest but discreet....don't ask, really....there;s enough drama in the world right now....going over it again accomplishes little....let's just say that I was steamrollered by it a lot last year despite best efforts not to be dragged down it. 

This year I hope I can keep a better grip. I found out I have subclinical hypothryoidism, derived from two summers of close confinement with a "situation" and the year inbetween....I am now on med for it, and hoping that it will aid me in reclaiming the person I used to be some many years ago before the "situation" began and worsened. 

Enough of the disclaimer...on with Life.) 


Twirly is officially a 5th grader!!!! Wait...What??? How'd the years go by so fast when the days can crawl? Another mystery of the universe. But here we are in 5th grade.
Technically, the first day of 5th grade was August 31 when she began on her first day of Classical Conversations Masters class (her age level grouping...she's in the first year of it...6th will be her culminating year of CC Foundations...whether we move on to Challenge remains to be decided...but that's for a later time to choose anyway.)

Today, however, is the her brother's first day of 7th grade in his special needs classroom so we are back to just us grrls again. It will be a mini-school day today,
owing to extreme heat in these parts (91 in the shade!!!) and that we have a bit of Phonics Museum to finish from last year....we were missing one of the books as it turned out...had to wait for it to come and then summer had its own activities so finishing got put off till now. 

Well, that is where I am leaving this for now.  I don't tend to post many pics or videas here....more of that goes on at our school's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AcornCottageSchoolHouse.

I hope you enjoy!

If you're a fellow homeschooling mom, may God bless you richly this year too!

Something I Don't Usually Do

that is to say, I don't usually share from other blogs, often just cus I am not a huge blogger myself....Life,My Life, is so unpredictable and stressful, a situation I am hopeful will be remedied by big changes sometime in the next year...

But this blog has so helped me keep my sanity while homeschooling through insanities that I was asked to share so here I am doing so:

http://www.halfahundredacrewood.com/2014/11/best-educational-games-books-resources.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Half-a-hundredAcreWood+%28Half-a-Hundred+Acre+Wood%29


Check them out here,if you haven't before (unlikely as it's soooo popular).

Hugs till my next post, which I am hoping will be soon.

Ciao!!

Encore une fois!

Take overs? Do overs? Whatever the saying....the fact I have had no post since the opener sorta tells you how things have been...a whole lot of confusions and delays....Praise God for CC cus at least that's been in place properly....we've been enjoying the Essentials class too...not that much work for it has been accomplished...lol

I am getting back in the groove this week...and I am kinda glad cus it's been revealed how I need to change what I thought I/we wanted.....we are going back to having Library Tuesdays cus Twirly likes being able to hear the stories (so long as she no longer "has to sit with the little kids"), and she loves picking books for reading at home...and then playing a bit at the park after before going home for lunch....and I like that too...esp as the 4th Tuesdays are booked for Homeschool Class at Madrona Marsh and having 3 Tuesdays slotted for studies and then one off tosses me off.

So we chatted and she's agreed to a slightly more academically-packed Thurs in trade for a Library Tuesday. Right now it will involve picking books being read to as well as ones she'll read to me, and some copywork. She'll also be doing the CC follow-up each afternoon too. 

The other bonus to this is hoping we'll be able to ride our bikes to and from the library/park as well. She is getting better and better at her two-wheeler, and I have a three-wheeler to practice on, too! Whoo-hoo! Being able to load up the baskets with books and off we'll go! Maybe even pack lunch for the park too?!

That's all for now, if I want to be on time today!

Curioser and Curioser...looking to the next phase on the rabbit trail....

Let me begin rather where I left off at the conclusion of the previous school year, Twirly-Whirly's 3rd grade year:

Now .... 10 guideposts for wholehearted living .. what to cultivate and what to let go of ...

  1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think
  2. Cultivating Self-compassion: Letting go of perfection 
  3. Cultivating a Resilient Spirit: Letting go of Numbing and Powerlessness.
 4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark.
 5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith; Letting go of the Need for certainty.
 6. Cultivating Creativity; Letting go of comparison
 7. Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a self worth
  8. Cultivating Calm and Stillness: Letting go of Anxiety as a lifestyle         
 9. Cultivating Meaningful work: Letting go of self-doubt and "supposed to"
 10.Cultivating Laughter, Song and Dance: Letting go of being cool and always in control.  


I need to remind myself of that as we are poised on the brink of her 4th grade year, transitioning from Primary School to Grammar School. What is the difference in my mind, you may wonder (or not)?

Well, let's recap:

Once upon a time, we really began our homeschooling journey TW turned 3 and aged out of the place I called her PlaySchool, Exceptional Children's Foundation, where her special needs brother had gone for a year prior till he too moved on at age 3. The autumn following her 3rd birthday saw the creation of the beginning level of Acorn Cottage: School~House*, A Flower Fairy Garden PreSchool. (Flower Fairy after Cecily Barker's creations and the creation of our own fairy garden). Here she "schooled" (I use the term very loosely) for two years. (Some day I will get that hard drive material recovered and reload those years' pics in the FB page!) 

Come  2010, I decided to keep the name and she moved on to A Flower Fairy Kindergarten.... we added more to the plate, such as Classical Conversations, but we still remained a softer school.....learning ABCs with the Flower Fairies and The Alphabet Path and continuing activities we had begun years earlier like ballet at the community center and nature storytime classes at Madrona Marsh.

When she began First Grade (oh boy! "official" school!) I had intended to phase over to Acorn Cottage School~House* as the name of that level of school. But she was still so Twirly Whirly!!! Still my sweet butterfly girl!!! So I adapted the name again...we used the Flower Fairies and Beatrix Potter stories to recap the ABCs (I prefer a delayed academics approach ala Waldorf), and we added some math via Gnomes and Gnumbers (keeping with fairy land etc)...we had other books too, of course, but we also kept the activities (ballet, storytimes at the library and the Marsh)....we dropped CC that year for reasons that ended up moot.....(I admit I liked having Mondays to ourselves but we did miss our friends there)....

By the time we got to Second Grade, I admitted to myself that not only was she still in the fairy phase, but I really loved the feel of a fairyish and whimsical title (A Flower Fairy Garden Primary School)....I loved "teaching" her through stories and fun activities...we also rejoined CC, which I was glad for....my TW is a very social butterfly! We also began some bookwork with Phonics Museum and Prima Latina and Hey Andrew Teach Me Some Greek.....we were doing fine till the holidays hit....it was about then that I hit a wall due to some issues upon which I will refrain from exposition.....let's just say how happy I was that we had been with CC....the previous bookwork plans got so behind that I threw in the towel and we did just CC and some Brainquest books (preK through 1st) over that following summer.

When I got to 3rd grade, I had big plans to "Catch Up" and get back on target...by really pushing it....which would have been very unpleasant for her as I looked back later and was glad I hadn't.....as life goes, the same issues that created havoc in 2nd grade, raised their ugly heads again even before the holidays so that by the time I got to January 2011, I was ready to bang my head on the wall....at this point God, whom I count as true Principal of our wee school, showed up big time: a friend we had made from CC back when we began mentioned how she had a co-op started with a diff friend who had suddenly bailed on her! I thought how fun that would be and offered to run some of the Latin and Greek and art I had been planning to use with TW with all the  kids! My friend was happy with that as she had put a lot of work into things herself and really wanted to see the fruit!

So we began our little co-op in the park and it was a huge success! Meanwhile at home, TW and I went through the Kinder Phonics Museum among other things and having learned the value of Festina Lente (make haste slowly) from my friend and her homeschool "idol" Dr Perrin, which also reminded me of my own school's adages: "When the fruit is ripe, it falls off the tree" and  "Nature does not hurry and yet everything is accomplished", along with reminders from CC creator Leigh Bortins that "you can never go over the basics often enough" and "stick in the sand" philosophies,  I opted to save PM 1 and such for the 4th grade year...because basically it had all come together even though it was not in ways I had foreseen. Joining the co-op had proven wonderful for both our families as mine was able to get in alignment with goals I had had and somewhat lost sight of in the midst of the distraction of conflicts elsewhere in my life, and her kids enjoyed doing with TW the work they were finding a chore to at home. We are looking forward to this next school year....

which leads me to where we are now....despite all the havoc, chaos, and what-not (way more than I have mentioned here), we did cover all that was needed in our Primary School...this year as she has turned 9, that famous Steiner 9 year change is taking place in front of my eyes....she is on the road to tweenager (with pierced ears and trainer cell phone in hand)....that magical middle ground of middle childhood....time to step things up...somewhat....

so here we are at A Flower Fairy Wonderland: Grammar School~House wherein we will travel 4th through 6th grades. Here we are still with CC but tackling more than the Foundations level;we add the Essentials now (google it for more explanations). We continue with the co-op though what we do together may shift some. We will be doing Veritas Press's Phonics Museum 1, and depending on how easily she moves through it (when the brain is ready, learning moves more swiftly..the advantage of delayed academics), we may begin Spell to Write and Read later in the year, too. We are continuing with Memoria Press's Latina Christiana 1 and adding its Greek materials to accompany Hey Andrew level 2.

We will be resuming ballet after having taken the summer off for things like Jr Naturalist Camp at Madrona Marsh and VBS and Got Friends Day Camp (pics and what not of summer happened strictly at Facebook...look us up....and friend me too cus I don't like folks following the homeschool page without knowing them). Madrona Marsh changed the age range of its homeschool class from 6-8 to 7-9 so we get one more year of Ms Cindy (we have been doing this with her since Twirly was 3 and Cindy was at the South Coast Botanical Gardens!).

There's more in my head to do too, naturally...I have my calendar portion of my organizer done so I hope to get these other things down on paper tomorrow, once my special little guy goes back to school (special needs room in a public school). 
It's 2pm here and I am understanding that it can wait till I have a little more P&Q here to get it done. Today includes some repair stitching and what-not as I wait for the new screen door to arrive...my son is enjoying a very Smurfy last day of summer vacation.

So there it is...The Twirly Whirly Squirrly Grrly and I have traveled 
from A Flower Fairy Garden PreSchool 
to A Flower Fairy Kindergarden
to A Flower Fairy Primary School. Now we are crossing over into the new land of 
A Flower Fairy Wonderland: Grammar School, 
where we will continue to visit with the fae but go deeper into the rabbit holes of learning and understanding....

{when TW hits middle school we will become Acorn Cottage Intermediate....for then we will be focusing on the development of the 'acorn' the fairies have tended...leading one day to Oak Hall High, where the tiny acorn will blossom into a mighty oak.}

[The issues aforementioned have only gotten worse so plans may not play out the way I put them to paper, but looking back at this blog post I know one thing for certain...Jesus is still King of Kings and Lord of Lords even of the faefolk! and God has got this too...}

* in case you wondered: I love Autumn...my home is decorated with a Forever Autumn theme (yes...adore the song)...which includes acorns and oak leaves....hence I call anywhere I live "Acorn Cottage" (cus it sounds so much nicer than "nut house" yes?)...
so....our homeschool is a sweet little cottage school...and house....so:
Acorn Cottage: School~House. ;)