We’re here!  Holidays… for real!  But, much to the kids’ chagrine, it’s not going to be all fun and games.  No way.

I prepared long and hard so that we would have interesting things to do, that made for fun, clever ways to achieve some academic outcomes without feeling like we’re actually achieving academic outcomes.  Lapbooking.  It’s a joy.  Despite this being but our first very day at it… a joy!
Like I said… I worked long and hard.  I put together pages upon pages of resource material so that we could thoroughly cover, to first and fourth/fifth grade proportions, Mayan Civilization and Oceans.  Did I say long and hard?  So, I have this organized box full of the kids stuff- prepared items to cut out/colour/fill-in/glue/whatever to add to their lapbooks.

I also have a folder of wonderful activities outlining various aspects of these larger topics.  Things to do.  Ideas for lessons. Terrific information to keep me in a flow of learning… so that I wouldn’t be staring at my shoes, wondering what to do next.

I think it’s on my dining room table.  2500 miles away.  Let’s just say, it looks like I’m gonna get to know my shoes.

Today is the last day home before taking off tomorrow.  There will be no structured school today… OK, there was little to none yesterday too- so, sue me…. I am too busy cruising the blogosphere putting together my little bitty community newspaper before we leave.  In theory this little rag should actually write itself, in that, my friends, neighbors and community compatriots are clamouring to submit their respective bits and pieces of individual community perspective… but, um… no. I will write it.  From largely my own individual community perspective.  In truth, I have a few very generous contributors, for whom I have grown to owe my life to depend on, providing a voice other than my own.

But, back to my point about no school today…. newspaper day for mom means:  don’t ask me for food… don’t ask me for drinks… don’t ask me to turn on the t.v… and certainly don’t ask me to log in to Webkinz because you’ve lost your password.  Please, just leave me be.  I am squeezing out creativity in the form of community news… and believe me that takes some creativity!  And so I sit… blogging.  Ignoring children and their needs… blogging.

Rather than neglecting my offspring, consider it a stirring of the creative juices.  And you can also consider it a valuable exercise in independence for my children….

I have spent the past many, many days preparing for two lapbooking units for my two boys.  This is my first real effort in creating study units.  We are going to be gone for a month and I figured what better- and less cumbersome- way to take on these units than through lapbooking.

In my quest for information I have found some amazing stuff.  People are doing great things in lapbook and thankfully recording their efforts in the form of blogs and flickr.  Which I too shall do so as to assist others new to lapbooking in the process… because, surely, if I can do it… anyone can.

There are printing pages for animals…. There are free map pages, outlined maps specifically, also for printing…. and places to spruce up the lapbook itself with all kinds of creative little book ideas of all shapes, sizes and complexity!

The tough part for me was finding free stuff.  Sure I could go and drop $20 bucks a pop on ideas and templates, but really, people, it’s all out there free for the searching!!  Fellow homeschoolers as well as other organizations and institutions, education advocates all, are tremendously generous in what they provide.

We are taking Mayan Civilazation and Oceans on the road with us.  We are going to our beach shack- truly a shack, I assure you- in the Yucatan… so these are particularly relevant to our experience there. We may also do up smaller versions on the impending federal elections- Canada and U.S.
We’ll catch up with B.C. Explorers when we get back.

Oh, and make sure you head on over to BlogNosh Magazine to get a taste of some straight talk with Straight Shooter!  A great post of hers… hand-picked by yours truly… will be re-published in its entirety over there Tuesday morning- that’s tomorrow, folks.  Believe me, she gives good laugh!

So, despite the best of intentions a whole lotta nuttin’ happened on the academic front while we were away. However, the kids got great cousin-time, grammy-time and endless pizza-time.  Not to mention the abundance of beach-time… that is, when the freakin’ weather decided to cooperate.  We smiled smugly to ourselves as we left the dropping temperatures of our Rocky Mountain Valley in happy anticipation at another kick at the summer can, heading south to Virginia and then on to the sunny Atlantic coast of Delaware.  Wouldn’t ya know it, they too get to enjoy unseasonally cool temperatures… the second day we arrive.  And last the entire week.

A perfect lesson in irony for maniacs.

But we’re back in the saddle, so to speak.  We’re home.  I’ve been organizing like a fiend, trying to get some kind of system in place that not only takes care of our homeschooling schedule here at home but on the road, as well.  I am tired of feeling guilty with our lack of structure.  Despite being fairly ‘relaxed’ in our approach…  however, there’s relaxed… and then there’s just so pitifully ill-prepared and disorganized that nothing is getting done.

So, a big thank-you to cousin homeschooling nine kids who has shown me a few fundamental strategies for reigning in this circus… and alleviating what is fast becoming a perpetual case of the homeschool guilts!

There isn’t much time left. Time’s a-wastin’!

Check out Kids Know Stuff for a great give-away!!

Yes, you!  Go, now!

Today is the last day of July.  It has been a couple of days short of a month since my last post.

That could simply be all, given that we haven’t yet even cracked a module or math workbook since our last meeting with Boss-lady.  But, y’know.  To this, I say, so what?  It is summertime after all.

And it’s been pretty lazy, hazy, dazy.  But now it’s time to strap on… the bootstraps….?!?  Ooops!  I might familiarize myself a little better with the idioms.  I mean, it’s time to pull up those old bootstraps and get a little learnin’ goin’ on.  We’ve kind of allowed little minds, in the true spirit of lazy, hazy, dazy summer days, turn a little mushy.  Oh, we’ve enjoyed the sun and fun… the boat and camping have been a blast.  But now, thanks to the downright flakiness of Dear Old Mother Nature and the inconsistency of summer in these here Canadian Rockies, the dog days of summer have turned into the early days of fall (yes, it’s only July and we are reaching tremendous highs of only bloody well 20C- almost 70F to my American counterparts!), and so what better time to take a little more structured approach?

We also have a good deal of travelling scheduled for the next several months- each location presenting us with innumerable opportunities for learning.

So, dear chickadees.  School is back in session.  Did somebody say, lunch?

Oh Hell. I dunno. It just kind of characterizes our homeschool experience so far….
I really do let my own highschool baggage get in the way sometimes.

Our meeting with our homeschool boss-lady last Friday went, in fact, completely without incident, without frustration and without namecalling judgement. Boss-lady (for whom she shall from this point forward be affectionately named) was very cool about what we’ve been doing- reading, gardening, camping, triathloning- and pretty non-chalant about what we haven’t been doing- modules.

We left the meeting with a whole new set of materials, which included two more modules, despite sheepishly admitting we’d not yet actually completed the last. While I’ve not officially announced it at any of these assessment meetings, I do think (given her extensive experience overseeing homeschoolers) she’s caught on to the fact that we’re of something along the unschooling variety of homeschoolers.

I’m happy she’s so perceptive. It saves me actually stating it out loud. Because stating it out loud, whether to Boss-lady, my family, my friends or my neighbors, then means I have to rationalize, justify, just plain old, explain, what the hell that means and therefore just what the hell we’re actually doing. Not that I couldn’t if you gave me a few days enough time, it’s just something I’m still playing with and trying to make work.

In the meantime, as we play with unschooling and flirt with our ‘modules’, oh… and diddle a little with old Charlotte- Mason, that is- we are sitting happily on the fence… finding our way. A way that works best. And I think, after these past six months, we’re getting there.

I just don’t wanna have to try to explain it to anybody!

We meet with our Distance Education Liason with the School District tomorrow. Our last check-in/assessment/evaluation before the summer break.

We have not completed this last ‘module’. We will have merely the first of I don’t know how many math workbooks completed, just, to present to her. She will ask Beasley what he’s been working on and he will say, in typical nine-year-old-can’t-remember-past-this-morning’s-breakfast kind of way, “ummmm….. Nothing.” Helpful.

Despite the fact the child is learning to use my big ol’ digital SLR. He is loving taking pictures. He bakes muffins. He is at this very moment dismantling my kitchen making Smoothies. He will, in fact, reassemble and clean-up said kitchen. We have been camping. He has been diligently caring for his new veggies that are growing, while planting with great care new seeds as well as the plants he has been nurturing, like his very own new babies, these past couple of months. He participated in his first Triathlon. He reads all the time. He is LOVING reading… oh God, just writing it makes me all, like… VERKLEMPT! He LOVES reading. His own words. Oh, no… I knew it. Eyes. Dewey.

If I’d asked him if he enjoyed reading four months ago he would have screwed up his pretty little face and stated emphatically, out of squishied-up mouth, ‘NO!’

But, alas, he will say ‘we do nothing’. The insights of a nine-year-old.

And in her mind, he will likely be right. Because in two months we’ve not managed to complete an 18 day long ‘module’.

I’m having highschool flashbacks. Sorry. Homework. Not. Done.

Yesterday marked the launch of BlogNosh Magazine…

an online magazine featuring the best archived content from primarily personal blogs, spotlighting a cross-section of topics and perspectives. New posts daily.

As an Editor in the Education Channel, I am so excited about this! It offers any number of opportunities to find new blogs and new posts covering a variety of aspects of education and in particular, homeschooling. I look forward to finding the best in homeschooling posts to profile because as a parent new to the whole homeschooling gig, I know I need any bit of information I can find… and if I can help someone else find their way a little better through this homeschool journey in the process, well shucks, then that’s just that much better!

Things have been a little free and easy here in our Rocky Mountain Homeschool. The gardening has taken a fair bit of work, but other than his voracious reading of one graphic novel after another, not a whole lotta academics is going on. Oops. Other than twice daily TutorVista sessions- for these periods when structured academics with mum hits the pooper.

However the _ _ it hits the fan this week- literally- as we have mounds of manure to mix into the soil to get the LAST of the garden in.

Also, our P.E. assignment of the spring was this past weekend’s Wasa Lake Triathlon. Beasley participated in the TriKids event on the Saturday. He finished it. After a good swim and then 8km on a piddly little one speed, he was pretty much sapped for the run. Tank. Empty.

An exercise in perserverence, one foot in front of the other, just keep swimming, and all that. He did it. It nearly killed the little bugger, but he did it. And he was smiling at the end.

And he is certain he wants to do it again next year. On a different bike.

Yup. Ditto for mum, little man!