Posted in Travel

Okay, I think I've figured out how to do this.  I want to share with all of you some of our favorite memories from our visit to Scotland.

Our first day, we drove up near Inverness to visit Culloden Moor:

On the way back to Edinburgh from there, we stopped at Loch Ness (can you see Nessie in the background?):

We also found a circle of standing stones in the village of Aviemore:

The next day, we spent walking around Edinburgh.  One of our favorite things was trying to find all the cows on the Royal Mile:

We finally reached the end of the Royal Mile at Edinburgh Castle:

At the chapel there, we saw this beautiful stained glass window honoring William Wallace:

Our last day, we drove up to Stirling to visit the castle there and saw this statue of Robert the Bruce:

Hope you enjoy the pictures!!

TTFN!

Posted in General

Summer is just going by so quickly!!  Here's an update on what is new with us:

1.  Bean is entering a Cookie Contest at our base's 4th of July festival on Tuesday.  She came up with this recipe all on her own and did a test run on Friday.  They are AWESOME (and I normally don't like cookies once they are cookies - I'm usually only in it for the dough!)!  I hope she will win!

2.  We had our piano recital this past Friday.  Bean did well for her first time playing in front of a group of strangers.  I, on the other hand, was a complete nervous wreck!  I was completely falling apart when I finally told myself, "Hey!  You know how to play this song, now let's do it!"  Things went much better after that, thank goodness.

3.  We are going to paint inside our church's new building tomorrow.  The kids in Bean's class voted to have their room painted Light Blue.  Did you know that they don't mix paint for you at the stores here in Germany?  They sell you the base paint and the color and you have to mix it yourself.  Yikes!  I'd never be able to get two containers to be exactly the same color.  I think I'll stick with my all-white walls here in this house and paint when we get back to where the nice paint guys at Lowes or Homey-Depot can mix it for me.

Hope everyone has a great 4th of July!

TTFN!

Posted in General

Our summer seems to be slipping away from us!!  I can't believe it's almost July.  Do you think this "time warp" is happening because I didn't want July to get here?  I'M GONNA BE 40 NEXT MONTH!!!  I can't believe it!!  Do I feel 40?  No.  Does it really bother me that I'm turning 40?  It depends on how much sleep I've had/what TOM it is/whether I've had enough Bean hugs that day .   Of course, I never really get enough Bean hugs.

I'd say we are about halfway done with our Famous Men of Rome study.  We are learning a LOT!!  I finally got a chance to sit down and look at our new Time Travelers study from Homeschool in the Woods.  This is going to be SO much fun.  I need to find 5 transparencies though.  I wonder where in the world I'll find those here.  Yet another reason to miss Office Max/Office Depot/Staples. 

I was finally able to get an appointment for the doc to evaluate my shoulder (the day after my b-day).  Hopefully, it isn't anything requiring surgery.  Luckily, we don't use our arms when we Irish Dance!

I still need to get those pics off my camera so I can post some of them on here.  I'll work on that later this week.

TTFN!

Posted in Travel

I didn't realize I hadn't posted on my blog in such a long time!!

The trip to Scotland was everything I could have dreamed!!  We spent our first day driving up toward Inverness.  We visited Culloden Battlefield, Loch Ness (didn't see Nessie, though) and Cairngorm National Park.  Our 2nd day we spent touring the Royal Mile in Edinburgh (lots of shopping!!).

Our 3rd day was consumed by Hubby's running of the Edinburgh Marathon.  While he didn't do as well as he hoped, Bean and I were so proud of him just for finishing!!  It was his very first time running a marathon and we all learned a LOT!  He plans to do another one in October in Frankfurt, Germany.  The great thing about that one is that he'll get to sleep in his own bed the night before and eat his regular pre-run breakfast.  There's also a Mini Marathon of 4.2 km for Bean to run.  This is going to be great!!

The 4th day we drove up to Stirling Castle and looked around there.  That afternoon we visited an American-style mall.  It was almost like being home except everyone spoke with an accent!  LOL

Our last day in Scotland was filled with getting back to Glasgow to get to our flight.  We then got to spend 4 hours in Dublin's Airport (but at least we can say we've been to Ireland!).

I found TONS of the Horrible Histories series books at various sites we visited.  If I had known how few of them would be available on Amazon, I would have loaded up my suitcase with them!!

I'll try to post some pictures after I get them off the camera. 

Posted in Homeschool

Oh, I am so very proud of my Bean!!!  She took her final exam for MUS Epsilon today and scored 100%!!  The only one she even came close to missing was as super easy one from a lesson WAY back at the beginning of the year that she thought was WAY too easy to be on the final.    WAY TO GO, BEAN!!!

We leave tomorrow for Scotland.   I am so excited!  This has been a dream of mine for most of my life and I can't believe it's really happening.  Did I mention that we are getting to do this trip so Hubby can run in his first marathon?  He's so excited about that.  Our guest house includes breakfast every day and they serve haggis as a part of it.  I'm definitely going to try it (I think).   I would feel terrible if I made my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland and didn't even *try* haggis.  I would certainly never order it as my main meal, but if it's on the breakfast buffet, I can at least try a bite, right?

Posted in Homeschool

You can read my answer here. 

Posted in Homeschool

Wow!  I'm not sure what I'm more excited about:  (1) Bean is finishing up MUS Epsilon tomorrow OR (2) we are leaving for Scotland on Thursday!!  Okay, I admit the Scotland thing probably has the upper hand, but I am SO proud of Bean's effort in getting through with Math before we leave on our trip.

I had never realized how much her frustrations in Math were damping down her fire for learning, but suddenly since Math is coming SO easily for her now (using her "Momma Pencil"), she's just completely nuts about learning stuff.  All I had planned to do this summer was to get through Memoria Press' Famous Men of Rome (there was no room in the "regular" school year and I really wanted us to have a strong historical background before we went to Italy next spring).  Now Bean is begging me to let her try her hand at lapbooking.  I was poking around the net the other night and found Homeschool in the Woods new Time Travelers History Series.  Their first one is about Pirates & Explorers.  Well, with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest coming out next month, Bean was all over that.  So, I placed that order today.  I just can't believe she's willing to do "school stuff" over the summer.

Today I also placed our order with Sonlight for Core 5.  I got a nice little reminder email from them telling me my Club membership is about to expire, so I decided I'd better bite the bullet and click that "order" button.  My best buddy, Carla, has already typed up all the reader questions for us, so all I have to do is get the stuff entered into Edu-Track, plug in the timeline and mapping assignments onto the reader question pages and we'll be all set for that.

The next step is to save enough money to get The Easy French.  Bean has been begging me for YEARS to let her learn French and now I think I've finally found the right program for us.  The step after that involves praying that Christian Kids Explore Earth & Space gets printed in time for us to use it this year.  After that, it's just a matter of subscribing to The Boomerang and saving up the money to get IEW.  THEN, I think we'll be all set for a while.  The Easy French and IEW are both multi-year programs, so while their expense is high, it will amortize (oh my goodness, am I using that correctly?  It's been WAY too long since I took accounting in college!) over several years.

Hmmm, looking back over this I think I can see that Bean isn't the only one on fire for homeschooling (and it looks like my checkbook will be the next thing on fire!  LOL)

Posted in General

Hello!!

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend.  It was cold and rainy here, so we didn't get to do anything too fun.  Hubby did grill several times over the course of the weekend (mmmmm, Hubby-burgers) so that was a nice break for me.  We are going to have fajitas tonight -- I've already made the guacamole.  Mmmmm.

BEAN FINISHED STATES OF THE UNION TODAY!!  WOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!  This has been a much more involved project than we anticipated when we started it last August.  But, it is finally finished and she is so proud of her notebook about the 50 states. 

She tested out of Lesson 28 in Epsilon today, so we only have two lessons to go to finish up Math for the year.  That day will be a cupcake-worthy event, for sure.  I wonder if it will be the the swim team or the softball team that benefits from that? 

Not much else going on here.  It is still cold and rainy and I am SO ready for the sun to come back.  It's going to be June tomorrow!!  People in Texas have been wearing shorts for 3 months!!  The high temperature really needs to get out of the 50's here.  Sigh.

TTFN!

Posted in General

Ever since the beginning of our homeschool journey, math has been a struggle for Bean.  Our first year, we made a BAD curriculum choice (in my defense, we did make the decision to homeschool on the fly and I didn't really get a chance to research curriculum before we started).  Their approach was too fast, too abstract for my kinesthetic learner.  Every day there was yelling and screaming and crying about math (and sometimes Bean would get upset too ).  Anyway, by the time we attended our first homeschool bookfair at the end of that school year, I KNEW we had to make a change.  I wandered into the Math-U-See booth with Bean in tow and suddenly we could see the entrance to the tunnel (no light at the end yet!)  Hubby leaned over to me and whispered, "I don't care what it costs, we are getting this one!"

We are almost finished with our 4th year of MUS.  It has been a joy to see Bean master concepts in Math that I didn't even get exposed to until well into junior high school.  BUT, every time she is faced with the most basic concepts (the ones she was first exposed to during that disasterous first year) she freezes up and gets very frustrated.  Since those concepts are addition and subtraction, it has turned math time into an exercise in "adrenaline management".  And, rather than following my suggestion to just "get it done and over with", her approach has been to see "just how long can I drag this out?".  We have tried doing Math first in the day, but that was taking time away from other subjects that needed to get done.  We tried doing Math last in the day, but with our busy schedule, that often meant she didn't finish it at all the day it was assigned.  Then, one day I noticed that her handwriting for the advanced concepts was very clear and her numbers, when faced with adding or subtracting, became illegible.  I began to wonder if it was all related?  Could the fact that she was trying to master making pretty numbers at the same time we were using that "awful" curriculum (for her) be causing some of the stress?

So, I decided to try an experiment.  I told her that I would act as the driver of her pencil during math.  I would be there to offer help if she needed it during exercise days, but during test days I would just be the pencil.  What a difference!!!  Suddenly math is getting done in about 20 minutes (versus 2-3 hours) and she is getting 100% correct on every page.  Add to that the fact that she is mastering concepts at light speed and that is how we have finished two LESSONS in MUS this week!!  It is amazing and, better yet, she is starting to see that she really IS smart in math.  And, finally, instead of always proclaiming, "I HATE Math!!", we have progressed to, "It's okay."  If you ask me, that's the greatest thing ever!!  And, it totally reinforces all the reasons that I love to homeschool.  We were able to fix our problem on our own time-schedule, we had the freedom to experiment to find the solution and we have the option to use our solution until she no longer needs it.

Amen!!

Posted in General

It seems strange to be starting a new blog just as our homeschool year is winding down to an "end".  Bean will finish up her last few "States of the Union" pages by early next week.  Hopefully, we'll wrap up our last 3 lessons in Math-U-See Epsilon by the time we go to Scotland so Hubby can run his first marathon.  :o)

We do have some "enrichment" activities planned for the summer.  We'd like to work our way through Famous Men of Rome for some historical help on next year's National Latin Exam.  Bean has also decided that she'd like to do a notebook on dolphins this summer.  She's almost 11, so I think it's time to set her free on that kind of project and let her decide where it will lead.

We'll be heading to the Eastern Hemisphere next year with Sonlight's Core 5.  It will be our last year with Sonlight, but we are very excited to be going on to Tapestry of Grace the following year.  We plan to use TOG throughout the rest of our homeschool journey.

I guess that's enough for now, so I'll just close with a "Happy Homeschooling, Y'all!"