It was another interesting week of trying to balance schoolwork with the work of getting Schnickelfritz's grandparents moved into their new house. On Wednesday the moving van arrived. I mentioned last week about Fritz want to help, but only on his terms. Well, this week he was all excited about moving boxes and investigating the truck. Thank you so much to moving men Josh and Earl for saving the light loads for an eager eight-year-old boy thrilled to help. After dropping a load in the house he would race them back to the truck and Earl graciously lost every time.
The flimsy blinds were broken in several places and most likely covered with cat hair so we tossed them out. Until we located the box with new sheers and hardware we improvised with packing paper held up with blue painter's tape for the bedroom and bathroom windows. Once, when Fritz had been too absent and quiet for too long I found him studying my taping job in the bedroom. "You know if you tilt your head to the side this piece of tape looks like the state of Ohio?" he said to me. "And here's one that could be Georgia." In my head I thought that only a homeschooled kid would be making a geography lesson out of randomly torn pieces of tape.
On to our regular school work: We completed Lesson 13 of Math U See Delta so we've learned all the division facts and how to find the area of a trapezoid. We have been studying the Family Canidae in science but over the weekend we discovered spider webs covered in dew all over our lawn. They've probably been there a long time but the dry weather prevented us from noticing them. Each sheet of webbing had a funnel leading down to the lair of a waiting grass spider. We had to fast forward in our science text to learn about arachnids. Fortunately, I also had a publication by the Missouri Dept. of Conservation on common spiders of the state. Two lessons here: never pass up a teachable moment and take advantage of the free materials offered by your state. We've moved on to lesson three in Excellence in Writing and now have two dress-ups for our sentences--the who/which clause and -ly words. In Missouri history we've reached Marquette and Joliet's journey down the Mississippi river. We'll be pausing here for a while so we can read the Landmark book The Exploration of Pere Marquette. Fritz is always asking for more geography so we'll be mapping their progress as we read.
Our extra-curricular activities are also swinging into high gear. Fritz managed to earn his Matthew Bible merit and his Ropecraft merit in Royal Rangers. These along with a prior Joel Bible Merit earned Fritz his White Falcon advancement patch. Sometime this month he'll have an award ceremony for his Gold Trail Award from Ranger Kids. We also enrolled Fritz in 4-H where he hopes to participate in the woodworking and bicycle programs.
The Toolman and I are back to school in a way. We started attending Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University at our church. We learned some amazing and alarming statistics about how many families are living paycheck to paycheck, that the United States has a negative savings rate, and how much consumer debt has increased over the last two decades. The first video contained a lot of humor to keep our interest, but there was clearly a lot of truth being spoken about the need to take control of our personal finances.
No comments:
Post a Comment