Rocket vs Mr. Clean

This week Alison started official school in our homeschool. The kids were not particularly excited by this fact, but we're making progress: 

• Gideon had a baseline assessment for the beginning of first grade and did very well. 
• Sara is in the middle of an assessment of the math she learned last year, to see if she can keep doing her current math schedule or needs to spend more time on math. (She and Alison are disagreeing about this, so the assessment is supposed to settle the question.) 
• Timmy did a full reading lesson this week (a full lesson takes 2-4 hours), and his reading was very impressive! He is making a lot of progress, and we're hoping that he'll be reading independently by the end of this school year.
  
• Rea had her first week of doing all the assignments for her Challenge class. Alison was a little nervous about how it would all fit in our schedule, but Rea is very motivated and got it all done with no problem. Her tutor was very impressed with her on Thursday, especially by her ability to draw a map of Canada from memory.
• Sara, Timmy, and Gideon are learning to code Minecraft mods. In order to do that, they all need computers, so we shuffled computers between people, fixed Gideon's hand-me-down from Papa Mike, and got a new hand-me-down from Papa Mike so that everyone has their own computer (Elizabeth's is our old chromebook, but the rest are real computers that can program). Mike spent a lot of Saturday organizing that. Everything seems to be working now!
  

There was a lot of fighting and arguing, though. On Wednesday, Alison was excited to start off a new science unit, but the kids had such a bad attitude that she didn't want to let it mess up the whole unit. Instead, they went back to the zoo (even though they'd gone there the day before to say goodbye to the elephants) and made each kid observe an animal and write an essay about it. It got them outdoors, moving, and mostly not whining.

We had the same problem on Sunday; Alison got home from choir to three people telling her how much fighting had been happening between everyone in the family. She decided that the only solution was to take everyone up Millcreek Canyon to build a campfire and roast hot dogs and marshmallows and hike and play in the water. It worked pretty well - people whined at first, but when we got there pretty much everyone had a good time and there wasn't any fighting the whole time. Timmy discovered that he likes chopping wood and wants to set up a woodchopping area for himself as an option when he's feeling frustrated.

The grandparents invited our kids and the Plastows over for a back to school party on Friday. They had tons of fun with a waffle bar with all the toppings and new Madagascar movies. We went to their house two other days this week, to pick blackberries and tomatoes and to mow their lawn. They've been sick, but were feeling better by Friday. 

So were we, by the way - Timmy was still a little under the weather Monday, but by Wednesday we were all back to normal. That was nice, since all three big kids had activities. Rea's was playing lawn games, and it started to rain, and she slipped and bruised herself pretty bad - she still had fun, but sitting through CC the next day was hard. But on the way home she saw a double rainbow, so it was a good day.

We also tried to pick mulberries this week, but the tree we used to pick had been trimmed, so we got hardly any. Too bad. We need to find a new source of mulberries.

On Saturday, Mike and Timmy and Gideon worked very hard to put insulation and walls on the play shed. They're not quite done, but pretty close. Another day of work will probably let them put up all the walls, and then we'll paint and add carpet and the kids can move their toys out there.

At the library this week, Rea found a challenge to visit 6 places in Taylorsville during the month of August to be entered to win a Leatherby's gift card. We really like Leatherby's, so we decided to try and see all of them this week, before the month ends. On Saturday we went to the Centennial Plaza outside the Taylorsville city buildings and looked at the statues they put there for an art exhibit. Most of them were very abstract, so it was interesting to try and figure them out. My favorite was the one with a metal bell you could ring. It was fun and we are excited to find out about the other locations on the list.