The temperatures are hovering in the 60’s (almost freezing overnight), the apples in the orchards are a ripened red, and the traffic has dramatically increased in this multi-college town. All the signs of back-to-school-time are present, and we even got an early start this year. This blog post is about two months late, but our school year did start fairly early ~ mid-August, I believe.
I think I already mentioned that there were chocolate waffles for the back-to-school breakfast. Everyone also got a few new school supplies on their plate. Kayla and I spent a few days prior cleaning up the school shelves and drawers from the last couple of years, and I learned that two years is too long to let that go! I spent about three days choosing what books needed to go to the attic and which ones needed to stay. There was artwork to sort into each kid’s container, markers to test for dryness, pencils to toss or sharpen, and lots of paper to recycle. These were the before and during shots…
We also found a few homeschool “antiques” , which means that some items had been on the shelf or in the drawers for MUCH longer than two years! Does anyone still have bags or containers holding 100 pennies as Saxon Math directed for their 1st or 2nd grade curriculum? Or the dollar and quarters and other change that was used in the daily “coin cup” in the early years? Yep, we had them all, so now I’m about $7.32 richer.
(Starbucks, anyone?)
What about stacks of those pastel math flash cards from the same years? And not just math flash cards, but we found millions of Latin flash cards as well!
These are Kory’s old Latina Christiana I & II and Henle Latin flash cards. As heartbreaking as it was (look at ALL of that work!) I recycled every one of them, since they are in his not-super-legible handwriting (he’s better at cursive), and because the younger two are using different Latin curricula.
We also discovered that the glue bottles and big scissors had all found spouses and had gotten busy having babies. Good thing! Now I don’t have to go out and buy any more. We found these families lovely homes in our freshly cleaned out school drawers.
Oh, it felt so good to get this project done. Now our school year is in full swing ~we’re about 7 weeks in. Stay tuned for what the kids are doing this year, especially my high school boys. I get lots of questions about homeschooling in upper grade those years.
So far, so good!