Monthly Homeschool Highlights

Life has been traveling far too fast around here lately. I sat down last night and realized that I was a month behind in my homeschool blog. This is a log of our days done and what we've accomplished. I'm desperately trying to get my desk cleared off so I can start enjoying summer. Every day I make a checklist for the boys to use to complete their work and I save those until they are entered. Needless to say I have quite the stack.

Since I'm so far behind, I can't really do a "Weekly Wrap-Up" like I typically do. Consider this a "monthly highlight" instead which means I'll just showcase all the fun stuff.

We went on a field trip to one of our favorite spots - the Maine Wildlife Park and got to meet a live bald eagle. That was really cool and I snapped a bunch of photos. Here's a favorite one:

J7's baseball season has started as well. His first game of the season was the same day as our trip to the Maine Wildlife Park. Talk about a long day! The boys had a great time though.

Just a few days later we headed to a history museum and participated in lots of hands on activities. I love field trips like this as it really seems to give everything relevance and the kids seem to remember it longer. 

We spent the morning learning about daily activities in the 18th Century at Old Fort Western. 

We've done a lot of daily lessons with the focus (at least for me) on getting done for this year. I have ideas percolating in my head for what we'll be doing this upcoming year but nothing is finalized as of yet. I'm still very much drawn to the Charlotte Mason approach and my plan is to incorporate much more of that style of learning in to our school this year. 

The best news at this point? We are over a month ahead of where we were this time next year. At this point we have 158 days done! I'm so excited! We didn't meet that mark until the end of July last year! We are on course to have our 2010-2011 school year completed before the end of June. I will, of course, count any learning that happens in July & August towards our 2011-2012 school year.

I know we'll be doing some fun field trips and outside activities. Aside from that, I will be returning for my third year on the TOS Homeschool Crew. The new Crew year begins in June and we'll have review items due over the summer so a bit of learning will happen. That's okay though, it will give us a jump-start on the new year.

Looking ahead this month the younger boys will be participating in two classes at our favorite natural history museum. They will also be attending two day at the Windsor Fairgrounds for Maine 4-H Days. They have a ton of wonderful enrichment programs. This will be our first year attending but most likely won't be our last. I love all the opportunities 4-H has given to my boys.

I'm finally caught up on my homeschool blog so if you'd like more details on what we've done over the last few months, feel free to head over there and read up.