Okay, I'm not so slow.

So I clocked my run again and it was actually 5.3 miles. So I clocked it twice more and it is still 5.3 miles. I'm running slower than I had been, but not by much.

However, it is crazy hot!

You know your hot when you hope the cars that are passing will not go around you so far that they are in the other lane cause you want them to make a breeze as they zoom by. I had to tell my self that is dangerous. 

Don't wish for that...

It is HOT here!

92 degrees + humidity. Running is so great. It is like everything is already loose and I feel like I could keep on going forever. So I got home after 60 minutes of running and was sure that I must have gone 7 miles.

Um, no.

Apparently though I feel great and strong and awesome, I am S....L....O....W. 

Very, very slow. In 60 minutes I only went 4 and 8 tenths of a mile. Yeah. Well, it feels good anyway!

So we went on a plane ride....

So we went on an airplane ride....

And it was so exciting!

New things to see:

And explore:

 YoungSon3 had never seen an escalator or moving walk way. After a night of no sleep (I learned that I don't actually sleep on an airplane), with 5 hrs and nothing to do, we made laps. UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN. Round and Round and Round the moving stairs and walkway.

The younger two boys took me very seriously when I warned them of pant legs getting tangled, and how scary that can be. The older one nearly gave his sleepy mamma a heart attack several times.

 

Until we discovered the monorail. Now that was a grand adventure. I think we made 4 laps of the airport before I began feeling motion sick.

Finally, while an epic battle was waged between the North and the South (the South won this one, even against the help of the motorized policeman - did you know there were motorcycles during the civil war?),

YoungSon1 and I got some sleep. It wasn't real sleep of course, with one hand on each child and a leg over the third and my head on my computer and my awareness on all of them. But it was good for us.

And then there was one plane ride left.

And we arrived.

Jam Jam Jam !

With a pile of rhubarb, last year's raspberries and some cinnamon sticks...

Crazy amounts of sugar...

Some helpful children....

Time to sit and mix and become thoroughly mingled...

And some time to cook...

You get...

Jam Jam Jam !

Lost in the planning pile....

A very wise woman said to me this morning, as I was feeling lost in my piles of curricula and trying to plan next years lessons,

"Go through your list of goals for this last year. With an objective eye, and with out judging yourself or your child, make a list of what you were not able to cover. Then decide from that list what cannot be left out and add it to a new list of goals for this year to come."

At least I feel as though I have a place to start now.

YoungSon1:

It is hard with YoungSon1. We spent half his year in an all consuming remedial reading program. It was important and his reading skills went from measuring at about half way through Kindergarten (at the age of 10) to testing at around the beginning of 3rd grade. That is a huge improvement. I say "testing" because he has never been a great tester, especially of standardized tests with little bubbles. He may be thinking "fill in bubble a." but then color in bubble c. It becomes REALLY confusing if he is offered choices a - d. because b and d look so alike. Any way... off subject....

The point of the above ramble was that for YoungSon1, we didn't cover A LOT. Does he need to have an Ancient India block? Ancient Mesopotamia? My answer is no, I do not need to go back and cover those. It feels important to cover fractions. I am glad that we are finishing Botany II now. I would like to finish the 12 Labors of Hercules mostly because it is started and unfinished. The one I am struggling with is US Geography. Does he need that? Will he slowly pick up the states and their regions? It feels important to me, but then it all feels important to me!

In summary, this is as far as I have gotten for YoungSon1:
~We will complete Botany II next week.
~We have 6 lessons left of The 12 Labors and will complete them in two weeks of three lessons each week.
~We will cover Fractions in the 6th grade.
~I will set US Geography on the maybe plate and begin making a list of the blocks I feel need to be covered in 6th grade with an estimated time it will take to cover them.

YoungSon2:

I went to last summer's list of academic goals for YoungSon2 and found:
~Complete Explode the Code 1
~Know his letters in the "quick access" way, not have to sift through  and say "what sound does g make again?"
~Complete the number story (value of numbers block)
~Introduce the Four Processes
~Fairy Tails to spelling and reading
~Begin reading simple stories
~The act of working on something until it is fully done IS the lesson and one of the main academic goals for 1st grade.

Well then, I can confidently check everything off my list. (He had already had the letter story in Kindergarten)

Nice.

We even covered more than what was on our list. We did:
~The King Of Ireland's Son and I plan to do a whole post on the goals and gains of this block.
~Introduced even and odd, greater than less than, fact families, and place value

The next step for YoungSon2 is to sit down and decide for each subject what it is I want to cover, which curricula I want to use to cover it and how long many lessons (how long) I think it will take.

YoungSon3:

This little guy has always just been along for the ride.

He has not had a formal letter story and so far had not been interested in one. He desperately wants to write and read, but when I try to teach him a letter with a story, he gets lost. He may do better with a book like LMNOP and I found a book called Working with LMNOP (and All the Letters)

I will also do a value of numbers block with him.

After the more beautiful introduction, I'm thinking to let him work through
 Explode the Code
Kumon Workboks
and some of the work books from The Critical Thinking Company.

I have to be careful with this little guy. It is so easy to let him slip past because the main lessons of the older two feel so important. But YoungSon3 is making it very clear to me that he is ready for lessons and WANTS to do them with us.

What a great little guy.

Long story short, I finally have a plan to make a plan. 

Thanks wise woman.

Now I have to get off the computer and follow through with today's lesson. 

But oh how I would rather plan for tomorrow's lesson than do today's!

Eeeeuuww. Yuck.

What a lovely surprise. A dead mosquito full of blood on my ice cube.

eew. yuck.

I love spontaneous good talks...

YoungSon1's iris and onion.

This post was borrowed from the botany page. To see the entire lesson, click here.

While painting we had an interesting discussion. We had no plan to have this conversation, it just came up as we were painting yellow and blue. I began by remembering winter solstice and the week of minerals. I said something along the lines of "a stone has a body..." and YoungSon1 was quick to finish for me by adding "but it isn't alive." What about a plant? YoungSon1 was right there. "A plant has a body and is alive, but it doesn't have a spirit unless a fairy fills it and borrows its body, but that would be a fairy spirit in a plant, not a plant spirit." Well okay then. Somehow this was covered - or it just makes so much sense to him, he has thought it out on his own. I asked what it meant to be alive. YoungSon1 answered that to be alive, you need to breath in and out, eat, drink (and move "juice" through your body in a pattern), and be warm. (I was so tempted to talk cold vs. warm blooded, but I thought is answer was quite good, and didn't want to complicate things.) So I summarized for him saying it sounded like to be alive you needed to exist with all four elements. He agreed. I would like to review his Man and Animal main lesson book as the beginning of our next lesson and continue the conversation a little more. Wouldn't it be great if we had done geology by Advent and each week we could review geology, botany, then man and animal? After 7th grade we could add in anatomy main lesson review. Oh I am totally doing this!