Out of Touch

My Bloggy Brain has been sorely out of touch lately. I guess it's been tougher than I anticipated switching from vacation mode back to school mode. But I think we're finally back into the swing of things around here. We have a few projects going on anyway to, you know, at least to give the impression that we're hard at work.

This morning's project is all over the dining room table: a 3 ft. long, 600 piece puzzle of the world. In between lessons, the kids have been hard at work trying to assemble it and hopefully learning more about the geography of this great planet while they're at it. Michael had a grand idea for making it easier:

"Since this puzzle is 600 pieces, if we had 600 kids each kid could have a piece to put in. That would make it so much easier."

Yeah. 600 kids. That would make things so much easier.

Our other project is our plants unit study. If you'll remember, I bought a science textbook this year so there wouldn't be so much work. However, I'm just never satisfied with the curriculum as is. So we went through the Plants unit from the textbook as an intro. Now we're doing lapbooks, experiments, plant studies and dissections, and hopefully a trip to the botanical gardens. No, this ain't just A Beka; I gotta go add all that work on top of it all. But the kids are having fun. We have our lapbooks started, and we have our first science experiment taking over the kitchen: four stalks of celery divided among four glasses of colored water.

One of our other projects was presented last week at our first Book Club. Book Club was actually Alex-inspired. She suggested it back in Kindergarten. We took last year off but picked it up again this year. All four of them gave book reports last week. Yes, I said all four. Even Audrey created a visual for her book called "Ten Little Ducklings." I of course helped her present:

Me: What was your book called?
Audrey: Little Ducklings
Me: How many ducklings?
Audrey: One?
Me: No. How many?
Audrey: Two?
Me: No.
Audrey: Three?

OK, so she enjoyed painting her poster more than she cared about the book. No matter the project, she's all about "doing school."

Even as we're focusing on school, hopefully we won't stay so out of touch as I feel we have the last couple of weeks. And hopefully, my blog brain will rise from incognito, or the rest of my memoirs are destined for this same type of mundane recording of our happenings.