Homeschool Highlights (for the past few weeks)

 It's been several weeks since I've been on my blog! I'm sorry for the absence and for not having the homeschool highlights each week. My life has been so busy the past five weeks! I am teaching at our cottage school Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday each week. It's a lot of fun, but it takes lots of planning, energy, and time. I've finally found a pretty good routine and settled into it, which has helped quite a bit.

I have five children plus my three, for a total of eight students. Zeke also comes and stays in the back room with my mom. I let him do a few activities with us, and my mom helps me teach math to the different age levels. Math was the biggest hurdle for me to cross - having such a wide range of grade levels was taking too much time and mental energy. With my mom handling 5th and 6th grade math, it has helped tremendously. 

Thursday and Friday, we do math and language arts at home, which includes Learning Language Arts Through Literature and cursive workbooks. I'm not a big fan of the math we chose this year - MCP Mathematics. I have several complaints, including the small text and impossible word problems. I am seriously considering switching my kids (and possible everyone) to Math Lessons for a Living Education - my favorite math!

We have done some really fun activities at our school, including tie-dying shirts when we learning about Joseph in the Mystery of History, and a Paper Bag Book Report. The other children are starting to get used to using some of my homeschool methods, like notebooking about science and history. We have a read aloud going each day, "Centerburg Tales", and they also like me to read poetry. We are reading some poems from Edgar Allen Poe right now. 

Eli started back at our public school last week. He doesn't like having to wear a mask, but is suffering through it so he can play basketball. They started practice this week and he was so happy to be doing something normal again!

On top of the cottage school, I am teaching the toddlers through Kindergarten ages on Wednesday night at church. We started TeamKid again last night. We had 20 kids come, ages 2-6th grade (which is a lot for our small church.) I had 8 in my class! We had hot dogs and an ice-cream bar, as well as lessons, games, and crafts.

Sunday mornings, Rod and I are now teaching the Young Adult class. Rod's still in Pennsylvania for a few more weeks, so it's all me until he gets back. Sunday nights, I have the toddlers through 3rd graders. So I'm back being super busy at the church, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

Saturday was Mikaela's baby shower! She is due November 7th. Her baby shower theme was "You Are My Sunshine". She had a beautiful shower and got tons of stuff for baby Daniel! We ordered the girls new dressers for their bedroom and they came in last night. We will be busy rearranging things this afternoon.

I also painted the kid's bathroom last week! I haven't painted it or even decorated it since we moved in 2 and 1/2 years ago. I painted it a Sprout green which turned out a little brighter than I envisioned, but it does make it look bigger and cleaner. 

My Etsy shop is still doing well, as is my Instagram account @toddler_school. I sell a good bit of Tot School in a Box kits and have many other products as well. The link to my Etsy shop is in the sidebar if you're interested in taking a look.

You can probably see why I've neglected the blog lately! I do want to get on here more, so I'm going to have to start scheduling blog time! 

What have you been up to? You can link any homeschool posts from the past several weeks!

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