Flowschooling

We had really good school this week. My main goal in our homeschool is for the kids to learn how to access their flow state and really immerse themselves in learning and creating. We had a lot of that this week!

Timmy has been struggling with reading for a long time, but we've just started a new program, and this week he absolutely exploded into writing. He spent all week making a book of different kinds of dragons and maps of their worlds (the kids are all really into the Wings of Fire series right now). He wrote all the names and facts about the dragons by sounding out the words and writing the letters that represented the sounds. It was so exciting to see him focusing on this for hours and hours! He's never written like this before, so it was extra special.

Sara decided to mimic one of Rea's projects from last year and read a book and decorate a cake to teach us about it. She just finished reading "Stellaria's Big Find," the first book in the Herb Fairies series, in night school (Rea and Sara get to stay up late and do school after the other kids are in bed). She decided to make a cake to teach us about chickweed, so she baked it and decorated it with symbols of different things chickweed heals. She had to flip through the book to find the parts of the story where it talked about healing, write them down, and make plans of how to represent them with icing, so it was great note-taking and report-composing practice. She really enjoyed it, too.

Rea has been crafting a lot, making tiny houses and furniture and other cool things. She is very good at working with her hands.

Our logic and creativity course, Mindfinity, introduced music this week, and I got out the glockenspiel and the Moveable Do disc. (I am a huge fan of moveable do, if you're looking into musical theory.) We had so much fun making up tunes and transposing them, and everyone spent lots of time on music this week.

Our little keyboard has been working less and less well, and since we got our tax return this week, we decided to spend a little of the money getting a good digital piano before investing the rest. We ended up with an 88 key (full piano size) electric keyboard with a pedal (yay!). It's so exciting to be able to play actual piano songs again! Our old 61 key keyboard was too small to play anything more interesting than hymns. Rea has been practicing a lot.

Alison hasn't had a chance to play it yet, because she spent eight hours Saturday working on organizing all the receipts for the My Tech High reimbursements. It's a big chunk of time - it is possible to do it as you go along, but one intense day works better for me - but they reimburse almost $5000 worth of school purchases between our five kids, so it's worth it. We have some money left over - figuring that out was the point of doing the math this week - so Alison is deciding how to spend it. 

Now that I think about it, we should have two budget categories, one for reimbursable educational expenses and one for non-reimbursable ones. That would be very useful for next year. I'll ask Mike to set that up.

Anyway, other than really good school, we haven't done much that's exciting. So that's our week in a nutshell.