Our First Week of School

Whew. It was awesome; it was challenging; it was fun. We actually did two "real" school days - Thursday and Friday - and everyone survived. Grace is NOT happy about not being the center of someone's attention at all times, but we managed to get through all of our material and actually enjoy ourselves for about 90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the time, someone was screaming, crying, whining, or hitting someone else, but that's about average during any given activity. My favorite part of what we're doing are the lesson plans. I don't have to figure out what to do when or how to integrate everything; it's all done for me! We did a couple of projects that (I think) actually served to enhance the lessons (rather than just frustrate me and confuse the kids, which is what I had feared). One of them involved drawing a globe (a very, very crude globe) on an orange and then peeling it, which illustrates how putting a round earth on a flat map creates distortions.
See?

Of course, no one ate their orange slices (me included), but it was a great teaching tool.