I am teaching a class at our homeschool co-op this Fall entitled “Discovering Literature with Harry Potter”. I’m still working on it in preparation for our first class on Monday. It should be a lot of fun.

Each kid is on a FIRST LEGO League Team this year (the 5-yr-old is on a Junior team). We are very excited about this. I’ve been going to coaching workshops and the 9-yr-old went to 2 weeks of LEGO Robotics camp this summer. Our first official meetings were yesterday, so we’re officially into the school year now.

What else? Our daughter has gone wheat-free. In addition to her allergies to peanuts, legumes, and tree nuts, we believe she is sensitive to wheat, as well. Since eliminating wheat, her allergic “shiners” have dissipated somewhat, and her asthma cough has practically disappeared. Amazing, in my opinion. Eliminating wheat from a child’s diet is no easy task, so we’ve all been creative in the kitchen for the last 4 months or so trying to find menus that work for everyone in the family. I hope to post more on this topic.

Gulf Coast Youth Choir is back on the schedule for a 3rd year. We love this organization!

We’re gearing up for a 5th year of Girl Scouts. Our 9-yr-old bridged from Brownies to Juniors this past Spring, so we have a whole new uniform, and set of badges and awards to earn!

Chess Club is on the schedule, too, for Dad and kids each week. Unfortunately, it happens at the same time my rehearsals are each week, so I can’t participate in this one any more.

We are still struggling with sports for the kids. Right now, we are considering basketball, fencing, Irish dancing, and possibly Tae Kwon Do. We had to ditch Swim Club at the Y because it was 3 nights a week. We just can’t do that and maintain our family unity. Dinner apart all week makes us all miserable. So, swimming is going to have to happen on our own at the Y. We can swim laps and have periodic private lessons and achieve the same fitness outcome as swim club. I would love the kids to get interested in fencing. I think they’d both be great at it, judging from their constant sword fighting around the house!

We got annual passses for Disney this year. Hopefully, we will be able to build in plenty of play time to offset the hard work!

That’s about it for now.

Viking lapbook cover

Eric the Red, Leif the Lucky, and all of their viking friends have been hanging out at our house over the last week as we’ve been discussing the first Europeans to visit North America. It seemed like a good time for Elizabeth to make her first lapbook.

We got totally sidetracked with the whole lapbook thing (watching videos on YouTube and reading websites.) She just wants to make books now. I’m trying to convince her that making the lapbook is the reward for doing the research. It’s also terribly tricky not getting bogged down in the scrapbookiness of it all. I am not a scrapbooker, so I don’t have a whole system setup that’s already perfect for lapbooking. I’m not even a crafty person, except for knitting.

We did learn a lot about Vikings, but it seems we’re more interested in making another lapbook. I’m on a mission for the lapbooks to be more research-oriented rather than scrapbook-oriented. After watching the YouTube video mentioned above, a sense of dread fell over me as I contemplated how I could help my kids make the lapbooks without my perfectionism problem interfering. Did you see the Ants lapbook in that video? On one hand, I want to jump on that bandwagon and get set for making some seriously fabulous lapbooks. On the other hand, I know that I need to take it nice and slow before going crazy with this. I’ll probably be posting more pics of lapbooks as we create together.

http://www.writingwizard.longcountdown.com/handwriting_practice_worksheet_maker.html