Trying something new...

So I’ve had this Mac for about a year and just now realized that I have this cool application called iWeb that I can use to create blog pages and stuff without having to be online. Do you know what this means? It MEANS that I don’t have to wait for pages to load or save changes or any of that stupid stuff....I can create it all in iWeb and upload it and be done! (It also means that I can do this blog thing a little more often than once a quarter...) I’m a little slow but I eventually catch the bus.....and that was NOT a commercial.

In other news, I’ve decided to homeschool Stephen and Haley this year because the school they WOULD be going to is horrible. It works for some kids...but I’m not going to wait and see if it works for mine. (I’m not over protective...I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!)

So far, it’s been an interesting process. I am working through a charter school in the area so I do the teaching but THEY do the buying. (This is a good thing.) All the supplies I need, right down to pencils and paper if I want....they pay for. (A little secret about me...if someone else is willing to buy me stuff AND let me choose what I want, I’m all about it!)

It’s been difficult in some areas and easy in others and I’m finding that I’m addicted to things like office supplies, fonts for the computer, printing things, websites that have free stuff to print and pretending to be organized. That’s the fun sort of stuff. Plus, Since have a bunch of money per year per kid (and I haven’t spent it all yet) I keep thinking of things I might want or things I “need” or stuff I want to do. (Another secret about me....money has a tendency to burn a hole in my pocket. In order to save my pants, I must spend the money. It’s not such a good habit...I’m working on it. Right now...I’m working on it with someone else’s money...probably not the best way to do this.)

The harder stuff is not actually the teaching. It’s the practicing patience while I teach. There are things that they do that would never fly in a “real” classroom that seem to occur at home.

But we also get to have lots of fun. The first week we did a review of the parts of speech, just for fun (and to get them used to the idea of doing what I ask) but we used “Jabberwocky” from Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass.

We read it and tried to figure out what the nonsense words were, i.e. noun, adjective, verb. Then we replaced the nonsense words with our own words. Here are the results: