School and life updates

This is the first year in a while that I do not have my tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I have decorated outside and most of the inside - but no tree yet.  Part of this reason is that we have been going back and forth on whether to get a real tree or artificial.  We both grew up with artificial and said that we wanted real trees.  I still love the real trees, especially when we go and cut one down.  Recent years has seen us at Home Depot for our trees.  It has gotten to be a chore though, at least putting the lights on.  However, I believe that we have decided to keep it real again this year.  Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

School updates:

I am very happy with both of the boys' progress in Math and English.  Austin just finished writing a persuasive letter.  Granted it was not that "deep" and we discussed it as he was writing it, but I think overall it was pretty good.  Matthew is coming right along as well, not much writing this year (other than copy work) but he is getting the basics pretty well.

Science: we will soon be finishing anatomy and heading into astronomy.  I strayed from some of the projects and ended up with a lot of videos to cover our various "systems".  We also ended up putting a child-size skeleton on the wall (thanks Kathleen ).  We had traced the boys' outline to label and post with projects we were doing, but they did not fit well.  For instance, we did an eye project in which the eye was as large as the entire head.  So, we are posting those along the side of the body and labeling the bones and general body areas.

History: I admit, we have strayed from MFW.  I am still using it as a guide, but am mostly using Story of the World.  They appear to be similar, yet this appeals to me more.  We are supposed to build our castle this week sometime.  I will post pictures.

I really enjoy our homeschool co-op.  Our regular weekly classes ended the week before Thanksgiving.  We had a great Mom's Night Out that same week.  This week we went to the Nutcracker ballet, granted it was a toned down school version but it was still tolerable enjoyable.  I do not think the boys could have stood the entire version, but a little culture is good for them.  Then Tuesday some of the ladies set up a program called Art from the Heart in which the children spent one hour making Christmas gifts for family and/or friends and the other hour watching Charlie Brown Christmas and having snacks.  What more could you want as a kid?

I guess I can not let history pass without mentioning Austin's antics recently.  He knows Christmas is coming up, and then realized that a certain little girl has her birthday this month also.  So he bought her a present (a reindeer webkinz) and gave it to her.  It was really cute to watch this transpire.  He was very gung-ho in the beginning, he even bought a tiny (4 pieces) box of chocolate for her.  However, the closer he got to giving it to her the more nervous he got.  In the end he decided the chocolate might be too much, his words "that is for when you are older, like teens".  Then he gave it to her at co-op in front of their friends.  He survived his first...gift giving experience.  In our discussion I said, "why are you nervous, you take on giants on the football field" - his reply was, "THIS IS A GIRL, MOM".  Like I said, it was very cute to watch.  Thankfully I do not have to re-live those years.