Getting Back into the Swing of Things

We’re almost at the end of week 3 of the New Year. With Jesse already well into his second week of schoolwork, Misha also started his schoolwork this week.

We have decided on starting him off slowly on getting used to the Switched on Schoolhouse system. He’ll be doing English Language Arts and Health Quest to get used to how the program works.

Next week he starts his group lessons with Brenda again. For most part he’ll remain pretty much unschooled for the time being. I still need to look at field trip venues for the year, but  between Co-op, Education Support Science lessons, hands-on Maths and his 2 SOS subjects, he should be fairly occupied. I still need to look into drum and horse riding lessons for him as well.

The whiteboards we got on special at Makro have been coming in very handy these days. I’ve managed to find him a set of 10 different coloured whiteboard markers so he can use the smaller board for drawing. Here he’s planning how we can add a pool to the back yard so we can survive the heat.

I slipped up a bit on my year planning this week. Forgot to check the starting dates for Honey Badger club & ice skating so we missed the  January sessions.  Fortunately I had arranged for Misha to play with Damian and Suzanne for the day so he was none the wiser that he was meant to have been at the zoo. I asked Jesse to check what's on some re-writable DVD we got side-tracked with memory lane 2003... Priceless memories...

Misha spent much of the week in his favourite camping chairs with the pets as well as doing his SOS subjects. These have been met with much less resistance this year. It seems laying off the curriculum for the last year and a bit is now paying off. He’s showing more interest as well as willingness to do schoolwork.

I have also noticed a vast improvement in his speech and vocabulary. His reading and spelling have also shown great improvement even though we haven’t been doing much of that lately.

This year we decided the boys would each have one day a week to make supper for the family. Misha be learning how to make easier meals like toasted chees sandwiches and Jesse started off learning to cook his favourite “Spaghetti Bolognaise”. Even boys need to know how to cook. I don’t want them to end up leaving home one day not knowing how to take care of themselves where meals are concerned.

Today Misha had Damian and Suzanne over to play again. He had insisted mommy must have a birthday cake for tomorrow so I baked it this afternoon and the kids decorated.

Since we missed last Friday’s homeschooler’s ice skating, we’ll be spending some time at the ice rink tomorrow before they have their first Junior Engineering session in the afternoon. This term Misha will be doing Mechanical Systems 2 and Jesse’s going to do Mechanical Engineering.

We will be closing off our week with supper at the Spur with some family and friends.