Road Trip

DrS and myself have to go on a road trip so he can spend the holiday with his paternal family. This involves a lot of driving on my part, a lot of whining on my ex-husband's part, and a lot of data usage on DrS's part.

It feels a lot like this but it's actually much, much worse.

This also means that homeschool is officially/unofficially on holiday break. Except that DrS and I are leaving on Monday and Reo isn't going on break until Wednesday. So, with my oldest son - an eighteen year-old public high school senior - on break for the week and the husband continuing to work from home, I can enlist the help of substitute teachers for two days of valuable learning.

This can be best achieved with more traditional methods so these men can plug 'n play teacher with no difficulty and Reo can complete tasks without much assistance or additional guidance.

In Geography and History, Reo is going to learn the US State capitals as well as the capital cities of Ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, I haven't found any handouts or worksheets that are suitable for learning the Ancient Egyptian capitals and their unique qualities so I've been writing this material this evening. This is not the first time that I've had to structure my own curriculum so I could teach the appropriate information, but this is the first time I've had to create an original and informative hand-out that anyone could read and understand as a solitary lesson.

If I'm in the position to do this more often, especially if Reo responds positively to this format, I will likely create a folder in my Google Drive to share these docs. Time will tell.

Halloween Week

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I'm not a fan of being scared or horror movies or zombies, but I enjoy the process of celebrating the melding of the spiritual world into the physical world, dressing up and trick-or-treating at night, and just having fun with pumpkins and all the imagery of the holiday (except for zombies). I am also divorced from my older children's father and this is a holiday that I do not have to ever share. That's a big part of it, too. So, we celebrate the heck out of this holiday.

The outline for the week is on the dry erase board

Monday was the day of decorations! We cut out pumpkins, bats, and tombstones. Reo decorated them to his pleasing. The first craft of a bat and jack-o-lantern mobile:

I found a great print-out of several different jack-o-lantern faces, and we cut out each pumpkin. We found another print-out with bat shapes and cut those out, as well. Using yarn, we dangled the pumpkins and bats from a frame we made from construction paper. The end result is simple but a fun indoor decoration.

The next craft were colored in pumpkins that Reo decided to adhere to our front window as a decoration. We found a great full-page print-out shape of a pumpkin and Reo went to work designing different pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns.

We also designed bookmarks using orange foam bookmark bases that I already had in the craft box, yarn, markers, and the left-over jack-o-lantern cut-outs from the mobile project. If we'd had the materials for 50 or more bookmarks, we could have added them to the trick-or-treat bags for Thursday.

The last project we did were tombstones. I had intended to have these cardboard tombstones, cut from a basic shipping box, stay as an indoor decoration but Reo had other plans. He enthusiastically planted them on our front lawn so everyone could see his funny and Dr. Who themed epitaphs.

Today, Tuesday, we learned the history of Halloween. To serve this, I wrote a brief book that gave each version of Halloween, from Samhain to its secular version today, its own page and description. I wrote at his reading level but sought to keep it interesting so I kept it short and to the point. Then he answered five questions I'd provided at the end.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, we get to prepare Halloween-themed food, which I plan to include a great fairy cake which is an old recipe that folk lore says will attract fairies and deter them from being mischievous in your home.