Author: Christa

Josiah and Gideon finished their project of becoming Cycle 2 Memory Masters and spent two days hanging out with Gramma.  Micah and I went on a very enjoyable adventure to Austin with some friends. Not as much work was completed in the van as I had hoped because of some poor planning that led to technology problems. But other lessons were learned (like “Preparation is the key to success.”)

Yesterday was Week 14 for the Challenge students at our campus, so this begins the last week of work and preparation for Blue Book Exams. I like Blue Books because they tend to focus on the whole breadth of knowledge a student has acquired instead of nit-picking the little details. They allow a student to tell back what they have internalized from their curriculum. As a Challenge 1 Director, I liked to ask them to write an essay defining Freedom (using characters from course literature as examples) and explain how personal liberty effects our government and our economy. I am not the Challenge 1 Director this year, and I am grateful for that. I don’t know what my friend, who is my son’s tutor, will put on his exam, but we will make sure to have that discussion.

 As you saw if you follow @educatingoaks on Instagram, we did not at all have the week that I planned. Instead, we celebrated my mother-in-law’s life, and we began a new shadowy period of grief. We did some shopping, as Mimi would have appreciated seeing her little men in suits and ties. We learned the names of some flowers that we hadn’t noticed before. We talked about Jesus and heaven and death and eternal life. We learned some new-to-us family stories about Mimi. We spent time with family. We processed.

Part of educating these boys is walking them through life circumstances. They need to know how to meet new people, but they also need to know how to say good-bye (for now) to those they love. They need to know how to love well, but great love can lead to great grief, and they have to know how to grieve well also. So, they went to say good-bye to Mimi, and since she was unconscious, they knew they went for them and not for her. There were questions and tears, and there will be more in the coming days. We sang a few hymns for her and for our own spirits. The younger boys went to Gramma’s, and Micah, Jon, and I stayed with our family until Mimi was with Jesus, waiting and praying, singing and being.

This next week, the plans don’t look different than usual, but life does. We’ll be adjusting to life without Mimi and walking through Holy Week. Next Sunday is a celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, and it will be our first holiday without our family’s primary hostess and party-planner. But we will celebrate because Jesus conquered death in order to bring us life, and because of that, Mimi is probably planning a party in heaven.

Rejoice: I made it to the Y a couple of mornings, and I had my quiet moment most mornings.

Relate: The boys played outside a lot.

Remember:  We started in on reviewing in earnest for Memory Master. I have a love/hate relationship with the project. I think Charlotte Mason would hate it, but it is a way to determine mastery of Cycle 2. We require our kids to participate the last time they will cover a cycle. It shouldn’t be hard for these boys who have been hearing this information from the time they were 3 and 4.

Reason: Very little math was done here. Now both Micah and Gideon will be working longer than they would like to. I think Josiah will revel in the fact that just doing his work was a good idea.

Read: Micah read for Debate and for his research paper. Josiah worked on The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft Mods Programming. Gideon is halfway through The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase. Together, we continued on in Robinson Crusoe and The Good Master. I have a crazy amount of books going, and I need to read Gene Stratton Porter’s Keeper of the Bees by next Monday evening.

Record: I didn’t write, though I have a couple of posts in the queue. Josiah and Gideon did their IEW assignment. Micah worked on a comparison paper.

Restore: I hung out with Jon after we put the boys to bed, watching TV and reading and being together. It was a good week for us.

Margin Report: This was a bad week for Margin. I was running from one thing to another nearly every day. That wears me out. This week doesn’t promise to be much better.

This was a week on which we originally planned to do no schoolwork at all – Spring Break. We were going to lay around and read and play with friends and have a few adventures. But then no work was done during Show Week, and most of the boys had the flu the next week, and we got behind. This is one thing that I don’t like about having our Classical Conversations Community day driving our curriculum. We need to go at the same pace as our classmates, so if life happens, we must play catch-up. Most of our fun week got postponed until May. We went on a few little adventures, but mostly, it was a work week.

A few people have told me that I sound too perfect when I write here.  I want to be clear to anyone reading – I make a lot of mistakes, and I am fairly open about them. However, I am writing these entries to celebrate the little victories that I forget so easily. They aren’t for anyone else as much as they are for me… because I get bogged down in not being enough for this job. There things that we don’t get to and the things that I laid aside because I didn’t have the energy for them and the days that chronic pain left me stuck on the couch when I wanted to take the boys to the park. This is a journal of successes. I’ve made a billion mistakes, and through those mistakes, I came to the methods and systems that are working in my house at the moment. One thing that does work is jotting down the successes so that they aren’t lost in my sea of failures.

Rejoice: I made it to the Y a couple of mornings, and I did most of my Bible study for the week, but I also slept in a little several times. The boys were still resting up and recovering from the flu the first part of the week, so I still had a little morning quiet with my coffee.

Relate: We did go on a few adventures – one to a favorite used bookstore and one to the newly remodeled Central Library. Both involved coffee and books (which make me very happy), but in both places Josiah and Gideon found things they enjoyed. We joined a group of friends to see Hidden Figures, and we also saw friends at science class. The boys played outside a lot.

Remember:  We sang memory work twice this week, and the memory master review month has started.

Reason: Very little math was done here. I actually excused Micah from several algebra assignments so that he could catch up in other subjects. He will have to finish Saxon Algebra 1 after the school year ends.

Read: I did a lot of reading this week. Some girls that I tutor are obsessed with a new series that I hadn’t heard of. It wasn’t good. I don’t recommend it, but I’m glad I will be able to discuss it with them. Micah finished The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Josiah finished The Hobbit and started on The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft Mods Programming . Gideon finished Men of Iron and a pile of picture books. Together, we continued on in Robinson Crusoe and The Good Master.

Record: I didn’t write. Gideon didn’t write. Josiah did his IEW assignment. Micah finished a LTW essay about Born Again and outlined a comparison paper.

Restore: I hung out with Jon after we put the boys to bed, watching TV and reading and being together. It was a good week for us. We went on a date this evening and enjoyed the beautiful Oklahoma last day of winter while we ate on the patio of a restaurant we hadn’t been to before. (It was 85 degrees and sunny and breezy.)

Margin Report: This was a good week for fitting in some reading and writing and piano that I missed the last few weeks.