Our first week of school

We finished our first week of school...today.  It's been a crazy week!  My plan was to have school in the mornings, Monday through Thursday.  This is what we've done in the past and it has worked well.  Monday I had trouble waking up...so we did school in the afternoon.  Tuesday went great...just like I wanted.  Wednesday I got the news that the nodule (sort of like a tumor) I had removed from my thyroid came back cancerous.  We didn't have school that day.  I wasn't up for it.  Thursday was an awesome day.  We all slept in, but we had school in the morning and that afternoon and everyone did great.  Since we skipped Wednesday, I thought we could do some school on Friday.  Well...didn't happen.  Today my Isaac was sick so the hubby took him to the dr this morning.  I got up when Sophie did and while the guys were gone we did some school.  I plan to complete the school day with making some muffins for "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" book.  It wasn't quite how I envisioned....but that's life, right?!  It's not always pretty and packaged...sometimes you have to ride some waves and go with the flow.  But we did do some fun things this week!  : )

Here's my Sophie painting an "M" picture.  She knows her letters, but I thought it would still be fun for her to do some of these activities with Isaac.  I put masking tape on some cardstock and let them paint.  When it dried we peeled the tape off.  They turned out really cute!

 Isaac loves to paint!

 This is the inside of the little booklets I printed out for the kids.  The front says "M is for..." then you can fill in the blank.  I put "moose, muffin, mouse, and milk" from our books this week.  Then I printed these inserts with the big square and the lines underneath.  It's also got a place at the top to write the date.  I saw this idea on Pinterest for the handprint monkey (they have a pin that shows a different handprint animal for each letter of the alphabet).  I think it's going to be neat to have a booklet for each letter of the alphabet and a handprint for each letter.  I can increase the difficulty for Sophie by letting her draw a picture and write something on the other page.  Isaac can do something on his level on the other page, too.

 Thursday I cut out some pictures from a magazine of things that started with letter m.  I let them glue the pictures into their journals.  Using glue of any kind is always fun for kids. I opted for the glue sticks for this activity...much less of a mess!

 Sophie enjoyed the glue, too : ).

I'm trying to learn to be flexible and adaptable in this new homeschool year.  I know it's not going to be just like it was last year.  I'm still loving it, though.  I've already started getting things together for next week.  We're going to do the book, "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom", which is a great way to talk about the alphabet.  There's a great video on Youtube that reads the book to a fun beat.  I've also bought a coconut for us to break open and I've gotten some craft ideas from Pinterest.  I think it'll be another fun week!

As for me personally, I also appreciate your prayers.  I will be having another surgery on October 10th to remove all of my thyroid.  I'm not real excited about it, but the good news is that this type of cancer is basically "cured" by removing the thyroid.  I do think that I need to make some healthy changes, though.  It's a wake-up call for me and there's several things I know we need to change to have a healthier lifestyle.  As the mom of the house, I feel like I have a lot of responsibility in this...because I'm here with the children most of the time, I plan most of the grocery shopping, I do the cooking, etc.  I have some ideas but I need to still do some recuperating before I begin implementing.  Prayers, advice, and encouragement are always welcome!

God bless!

Stacey