What is keeping us busy and School plans for the year.

Well.... I am coaching soccer yet again. This means I have two practices to run each week. But the U12 age is pretty great to coach. They are a fun group of kids! Henry doesn't seem to mind that I am his coach again either.  Molly is also playing soccer but I am not her coach. I still have to get her to two practices each week. Too bad her practice wasn't at the same time as Henry's. Ian too has practices every week but he is playing Flag Football instead. His practices are at the same time as Molly's but at different places so I go back and forth dropping off and picking up kids on those days.  Then every Saturday from Sept. through the end of Oct. We will have two soccer games and a Flag Football game to attend.

This, of course, is on top of school. Homeschool keeps me busy even though the older three do a lot of it online.

Sophie is a Sophomore this year and attending Williamsburg Academy for most of her classes. She is doing American Lit, US History and Biology through them. She is taking a BYU independent Study Spanish class and doing Geometry with me.  We throw in a little P.E. and of course Piano lessons and her schedule is rather busy. That American Lit class alone had some really intense reading. I thought I would try to keep up with her readings for that class but couldn't,  mainly because I have to try to keep up with the other three kids and their classes as well.

Ian made a cell model out of breakfast cereal and fruit.

The boys were assigned to make a Greek meal so they made Lemon Chicken Soup and some Spanakopita.

The soup was tasty but a little too Lemony. The spanakopia was very good!

Ian and Henry are doing Williamsburg Academy classes also. Ian is 7th grade and Henry is 6th. Lucky for me the 6th and 7th grades are combined so essentially they are taking the same class. This is good since that is one less schedule I have to keep track of.  They are doing Humanities, STEM and Writing through Williamsburg.  I still do math with each of them.

Molly is where most of my focus is spent each day (other than just keeping the others on task and helping where there is questions).  Molly is now a 2nd grader and getting pretty good at reading. She still prefers me to read most of the books we use but she is getting quite proficient.  She is doing Singapore Math 2A at the moment.  Working through Spelling Workout and Writing with Ease and for fun doing a page or two of a Marvelous Me Journal.

We are taking a break from Story of the World this year and just doing World Cultures.  We are currently studying Africa. I have checked out just about every picture book, fiction and non fiction that our library has about Africa and we are just reading through them. We have a map of Africa that we color in as we come across a new country in Africa.  We have done a few Notebook pages about something we read that day and that is about it. We also watched "The Gods Must be Crazy" and "African Cats" as well as a bunch of youtube videos about Africa. So far this has been fun. We will pick a new continent in October and work our way through the world this year. I haven't done anything official for Science but with all the animals and biomes we have studied while learning about Africa I figure we have done a bit of science as well.

All four kids are still doing piano lessons.  I challenged the older three to learn a Hymn this summer and they were proud to play them for their piano teacher when we started lessons again this past week.