7 Weeks in the Basket, 29 to Go

What a great week!

I am convinced that my continuing practice of doing "morning pages" is making a huge difference in how my days go. (In Julia Cameron's words: : The morning pages are three pages of stream-of-consciousness longhand morning writing. You should think of them not as "art" but as an active form of meditation for Westerners. In the morning pages we declare to the world—and ourselves—what we like, what we dislike, what we wish, what we hope, what we regret, and what we plan.) Getting all the cobwebs out of my brain first thing in the morning seems to be making me much more able to be creative and energetic all day long.

Friday is always my big homeschool day because every other day is interrupted at least once by some appointment.

I think the highlight of the week was two-fold. First, an emphasis on seeing God as loving, and fitting everything else into that understanding (or not fitting it, but having that understanding). Second, an ongoing discussion about love which expanded into several things, including a persuasive essay activity where the kids created dialogues between two people who held differing viewpoints on what they were trying to be persuasive about. These two kids so love to be creative. They got behind closed doors and worked and worked on their dialogues. Then they both crammed into one desk chair and typed up the dialogues. Finally, they performed them for me, and later for Greg. Don't tell anyone, but I was actually persuaded!

Had some GREAT discussions that arose from several books we are reading, and we were lucky enough to have Joel in the room while we read the very biased history book, which is pretty strong on talking about how bad the European explorers were, and minimizing any bad things that the Native Americans did. Joel was pretty amazed at how much the book left out. So, he gave us a little history lesson, too.

Still love the curriculum. Love teaching the kids. Best year ever homeschooling.

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