Week of 8/31 and the next one too ;)

Noah & Nick at Dr

This last week has been nothing like I expected it to be. I decided earlier this year to school 6 weeks on and 1 off. This week was our first week off. I had planned on letting the kids enjoy their time and spend time with free reading after visiting the library :) On Thursday we were suppose to leave for Georgia and visit some of what we had been studding in history previously.
   The first part of the week went pretty well. I cleaned and got things moving in the right direction. Monday 4 of the kids had dentist appointments which went well :) NO cavities!!!

just before surgery

   Tuesday was more Dr appointments :) Noah had his check up and all was well there too. After the doctors, Brie and Noah had TKD and we came home to a sick daddy :( This is where our nice-fun weekend turned a tad ;). Wednesday night we thought Big Tony had a stomach but, but by the morning we realized something was really wrong. He had pain in his lower abdomen that just continued to grow. By Thursday morning his mom took him to the ER. Since his pain was in the lower part of his abdomen I thought it may be his appendix, and it was. That evening he was headed to surgery to get it removed.  Thankfully, he already had Thursday-Monday off for vacation because we were suppose to leave on the following day. Unfortunately, after all the planning he did, he didn't get to go :(
   Thankfully the surgery went well and he is recovering nicely :)

Amber!!!

    Since our family "vacation" actually had a purpose to it, (Mimi had to go to French embassy in Atlanta, GA) we still had to leave. That was probably one of the hardest things I have done, leaving my dh behind, but my parents took care of him and he got some great quiet time. Also, my friend Amber was able to come with us so that was nice having a little extra help ;0)


   So, since we went to Atlanta, we had a great time ;) It was also my mother-in-law's b-day during the trip ;) Since it was a quick trip I took the kids to a park downtown while she was out then we went to Lego Land!! The kids had a blast here. There was a great big play area for babies/toddlers that the little ones enjoyed, a 4-D movie theater, rides, and all the legos you could play with :) It was a great adventure. Thankfully we are home now. Tony is doing better. We did unfortunately have a stomach bug go through our house the following week, but plan on having a nice and normal school week this coming up week and Tony should (fingers crossed) be going back to work :) I have loved having him home, but ready for some normalcy to return to this household :)

The week of 8/23

    So we have had an eventful week this week.

Kayla giving me the stinkeye

1. We finished up our first 6 weeks of school!!! Last week I wrote a post about how we were going to try schooling 6 weeks on then 1 off. I was going to wait for the bigger kids to finish up 6 weeks, but I started Brie 6 weeks ago and this mama could use a little break :)
 I also decided to break up Noah and Kayla from doing school together. Kayla, who is in 3rd grade, hasn't been getting too much out of school, so I am starting Sonlight Core 1 with her and that has been going great so far. I am trying to make a list of links to give her some extras because she loves hands on activities. If you have any suggestions please share :)

2. We had TaeKwonDo testing this week for both Noah & Brie. Noah has been taking lessons for the last 4 years and tested for his recomended black belt. In about 6 months he will be testing for his 1st Degree Black Belt!!! So proud of my little man.  Brianna tested for her yellow belt. She started taking lessons about 2 months ago since she is finally 5 :) She has been tagging along to classes since she was about 9 months old so she is happy to be doing this now. Her joy in this is now she can spar...watch out!!!

Noah drawing Fred

 3. Noah is almost done with Teaching Textbooks 5 and I am letting him try out Life of Fred Fractions. He loves Fred and so do I. If anything they are fun to read :) Here he is drawing Fred.


4. Nicholas is working on how many pacifiers he can put in his mouth at one time. I think his record is 3 :)

5. We have a new addition to the family. We have been talking about getting chickens for a long time and hopefully we will eventually, but as we were driving around we thought we would stop by the pound and look at puppies :) They didn't have any smaller dogs so we stopped by a pet store to look and fell in love. So, here is the newest member of the Stefko Crew, her name is Daisy-Mae and she was born on 6/23/15, 2 days before Nicholas turned 1. She's a beautiful dachshund.  We couldn't resist ;) We are calling her my early birthday present.

How we take breaks during the school year

Family first year homeschooling

     For the past few years I have tried different methods with taking breaks for school. My first year homeschooling I was biting at the chomp and started my oldest in January before his official kindergarten school year. My reasoning behind this was I wanted to test the waters and see if I would be able to handle homeschooling :) At the time I was very pregnant with #3 and had a very energetic newly 3 year old. I think I was so excited to be homeschooling that we had a great year and I don't think we took much time off that summer either. So truthfully I ended up teaching almost 1 1/2 years straight and may have overdone it.

Noah 5, Kayla 3

My next year I winged it a little more and gave myself a little more freedom  with when to take breaks. We didn't have many public school kids around so we did what we wanted when we wanted but I wasn't intentional in breaks.
     When Kayla joined us in school I eventually went on the public school calendar for the most part besides the fact we only schooled 4 days a week. DH at that time was working Tuesday-Saturday so I would take Monday off for family day and just started a few weeks earlier in the year to give us a little extra wiggle room.
   I think we did the 4 day a week schedule for about 2 years and then DH transferred to a Mon-Friday position within the same company so we ended up going back to Monday-Friday.

Now there are 4
Noah7, Kayla 5, Brie 2, TJ a few months

 We were still sticking to the public school schedule because some of the kids friends would stop by on their breaks and it became harder to do school when other kids were wanting to play.

And Nicholas make 5 :)

     Recently some of the kids frequent fliers moved so this year we are going to attempt Sabbath Breaks. I had heard about doing school 6 weeks on and 1 off. Truthfully, I remember the report card periods were broken into 6 week periods from public school so I just figured that is where the idea came from, but recently I saw this Blog on Sabbath Break. It is a real interesting read. The main idea is that God created the world in 6 days and rested for 1. No, God is not commanding us to school for 6 weeks then rest one, but this article really resonated with my spirit. Usually about 5 or 6 weeks into a school year I need a little break. Sometimes I will give these to myself and we will just spend time picking out what we want to read from the library and explore separate from our curriculum. I love these times, but I need more structure and can't do this type of learning all the time :) Some unschoolers are great at this, but I need more structure.

The 7 of us at Christmas

  This year we are going to try something a little differently with out schedules. We are going to attempt 6 weeks on and 1 off. It also never fails there are Dr. appointments and dentist appointments sprinkled throughout each month, so these weeks will allow us time to plan them there so we don't have to take time out of our regular schedule. Mamma will also get her break and the kids can maybe pick up some books they are interested in and get to some fun science experiments without the worry of doing the unfun stuff that will have to be done. The house will also be given a little extra attention too :) Gosh, after all of this I may need to take 2 weeks off :)
    So since this is new, so I will have to check back in and see how everything is going. We are just starting week 3 of school with the big ones, so once they are done with week 6 we will attempt our first week off. Something to look forward to!!!

Play Dough

     I confess I had never heard about making play-dough yourself until I started Noah in his K year of school. Part way through the year it suggested you make salt-dough. This was okay, but texture wise was gritty and messy so I thought maybe I could make play dough, and yes you can :) Okay, so many of you already know this and have done this, but for you who haven't done this yet here is the quick and easy way.The only ingredient you may not have on hand is cream of tartar which is said to be optional, but I haven't tried it without so I can't tell you how that will turn out. 

     First grab all your ingredient

• 2 c all purpose flour
• 1 c salt
• 2 c water
• 1 Tbs cream of tartar
• 2 Tbs vegetable oil
• optional coloring (we used Kool-aid)

    Once you have all your stuff together mix it up over the stove on a lower setting like this...

It will eventually harden up and turn into a blob of play-dough like this. Just plot it out on your counter to cool for a few minutes. If you didn't add in the coloring while you were cooking just divide up your play-dough and make a bunch of different colored balls by folding in food coloring. We try to avoid synthetic food colors so I used a Kool-aid mix that didn't have those. 

    Once you make it, it is hard to go back and buy the it:) My tots love this stuff!!

Interview by Susan Wise Bauer

   So I was recently introduced to a new blog, Amongst lovely things. There are some great resources on this site. One that recently came up was an interview with Susan Wise Bauer. I love listening to her speak and this one was about reading aloud to kids and a few on classical education. So, if you haven't caught this interview check it out, but give yourself a little time because it is almost an hour long. I listened sipping my coffee and folding laundry. Love to multitask ;)

Check it out!!!

Week of August 10th

Brie's art project

   This week was our first week in full swing. Brie has been doing her school for 4 weeks completely, but I have eased into the older 2 joining in. Last week my 5th and 3rd grader just did CLE LA, Reading, and Teaching Textbooks(math). That was not too bad :) This week we have added in Bible, history, science and some music/art.  I have really missed doing these fun subjects with the kids. We have learned a lot this week and had a bunch of fun.

MFW books with book basket

    Truthfully the MFW cycle we are doing is for 2nd-8th grades, but my K student loves joining in on a lot. We were working on week 8 and learned about Reptiles, Amphibians, King Louis XIV, and a bunch of other things. We actually didn't have a ton of books for our book basket this week but next week is loaded!!!
    For the big kids we were learning about the life cycle of a frog. The kids have known this for a while, but now we get to watch it, if the tadpoles don't die ;)

fishing out the swimmers

can you find the tadpoles?

   I confess to have neglected our pool for a week or maybe 2. In light of this a frog or 2 or a dozen had decided to lay their eggs in our pool. I know this happens so I try to stay up on the pool, but to my surprise we probably had 100+ tadpoles swimming around the sides of the pool!! I knew if I didn't let the kids rescue some of the tadpoles they wold be heartbroken so they dug up an old fish tank we had and filled it with a dozen or so little swimmers :)   The one little neat thing about this lesson is that the day we caught out tadpoles I didn't know we would be studying the lifecycle of frogs or that keeping some tadpoles would be suggested, so that worked out nicely :)

look at them go :)

Tony and Nick

 And of course the little kids weren't too interested in looking at the tadpoles because they were busy digging in dirt!!!

 Finally, the kids had a great time working on art. I am not a crafty type of person, I leave that up to Mimi  or my mom, but art time is good for them. This lesson they were paining angels. Anytime I pull out paint they come running so this was a nice lesson that eventually my K student decided to join in on. That is always nice when you can have an activity where they all decide to be calm, of course this was during nap time too which contributed to the quiet :)

   And finally we had 2 great moments this last week. Super Brie here lost her first tooth and my cat Kiki which we had assumed was long gone finally came home after being gone for almost 3 weeks. We had neighbors move and were afraid she might had gone with them, but thankfully she made her way back :)

Ahhh....

Getting out some of the bigger kids school stuff. Feeling like the race is about to begin ;)