Teaching. Sorting. Digging. Finding. Harvesting. Magic Schoolbusing. Not Finding.

Uffda!  So far this week for school for Sophie and Clara, I've been filling in with busy work: reading and dictation, and grammar by identifying parts of speech in their dictation; some unused pages ripped from Elsie and Jeremy's Thinking Skills books from way back when; penmanship, again unused pages from other used books;. and some math and geography lessons I had at one point printed up from on-line sources that were never used.

But today!  Today.  This afternoon, after the girls had worked on the above sorts of things for an adequate amount of time, so we got to some chores that needed to be done.

We had found all Jeremy's old Magic School Bus computer games that he had gotten for Christmas from Uncle Mark and Aunt Lisa.  Wow that was a long time ago.  Just a little context for how old these are, ... we had to change the setting on my Windows 7 computer to work at a Windows 95 level.  So Inge was able to travel through time to learn about dinosaurs while the rest of us worked.

Clara surprised me by harvesting the ripened tomatoes that I had been trying to get to.  She also picked the bushel or so of apples that our most mature but still young tree produced this year.  It's so fun to finally be getting fruit from it after all these years. 

While Clara was doing that Sophie and I dug through about 20 boxes of books that had been boxed up in the store room since we converted the school room to Louisa's bedroom.   Ooh, for mildew smell on the bottom layer.  Made me want to cry. 

But the good news is that we've found almost all we need for a successful school year. 

But we found unused spelling books and penmanship books. 

I found many science ideas.  I'll just have to decide which to use.  I have many of the TOPS science books, a very fun hands-on approach to science that I think the girls could do on their own.  This would be things like Electricity and magnetism, Light and color, studying life science with things like grains and beans, and I don't remember what all I have down there.

And they could also choose The Human Body (or introductory anatomy), for which I have many resources.  My favorite of these is Daryl Vriesenga's Human Body workbook that has basic and detailed fill-in worksheets for all the body parts and systems, plus a cut and glue model of the human body, layered from drawings of all the various body systems. 

I also have Apologia General Science, but I think that would be better a few years from now if I want both girls to be able to work together.  It's a little advanced for Sophie to reap the full benefits.  And I think Clara is probably still just borderline ready for it when I remember the homeschool necessity of independent work.

I had asked the girls whether they wanted World History, American history, or an in-depth study of a smaller period like Renaissance/Reformation/Enlightenment, or Medieval History, etc.  They both agreed they'd prefer World History so that makes it easy.  I found the Level 6 and 7 Sonlight boxes and the box that had all the teacher's guides and reproducibles.  Those will have all we need for grammar, writing, reading, and World History I and II.  We'll have to see how far we get.  

Clara is interested in learning Spanish, and I have many, many resources for that.  I think the one most appropriate to her age is the Elementary Powerglide program.  We also have a Standard Deviants Spanish DVD; and an Instant Immersion Spanish set of discs, that I think we got with our first HP computer.  And we have many, many Spanish picture books, including the Adventures with Nicholas books from Berlitz.

Sophie wants to study Latin, so I had to order that.  I decided upon Getting Started with Latin, which is designed for independent homeschool learners whose teachers are entirely unfamiliar with Latin. Sounds like just the thing for us. 

I didn't find the aBeka Pre-algebra book that I know I saved.  Jeremy had used only the first handful of pages and then went into 8th grade in Oklee.  I can't imagine I sold it.  But where?  Where would I have stored it?  I hope I don't have to order another of those, since they're kind of expensive.  But I also don't want to wait much longer before ordering...  What to do, what to do.

And I'll also order some Singapore Math workbooks for Sophie.  We have the text books, but no workbooks that are unused. 

It feels good to be ready.  And it's nice we have so many things we don't need to purchase.