Math Revisited, Again

My parents lent us the Great Courses Algebra video and workbook.  I have no answer book for the workbook, and so it was becoming a challenge to grade.  I really don't have the time to go through the videos and do the work myself in order to have an answer for all of his work.  I feel horrible about this.  With that in mind, however, we did go ahead and make the switch to Teaching Textbooks.  G said that the problems in there were easy peasy compared to what he had been doing, so I'm tempted to have him do the Great Courses while we're staying at houses, just to give him that extra exposure to more complex ideas, by without me grading them.  I need to have a way to keep track of his progress in math, I need to know he's getting the concepts the book is trying to get across to him, and I simply can't do that if I have to do all the work alongside him just to make sure he's got the correct answer.  I've got so much going on, that's just not working for me.  I feel a bit of a failure on this one...

Organizing the Trip

The house is under contract!!!!  We now have a start date of sorts.  We'll be in town until the older boys return from South Dakota on their scout camp.  Knowing we won't be leaving the area until early July gives a sense of security, but also a bit of panic since I put all trip organization and planning on hold while the house was being prepped and on the market.  With the house on the market I was able to start planning again, since that involves little chaos.  Organizing for me, though, involves a TON of chaos.  

This is all our stuff, weighed and recorded.  Ok, it's really only our tent stuff, minus any personal items.  Nine sleeping bags (the older boys each have two), five pads, seven pillows, and a whole bunch of goodies.  I feel like we're missing some stuff from this, but I can't figure out what it would be.  I'll figure it out at some point, I'm sure.   It's amazing how little this looks like.  All but the coolers will fit in our small, 4x4, trailer that we'll sell once we've got our travel trailer.  But this stuff has seen us through quite a few trips.  The coolers are new, because our locks on our old coolers had broken, and we had to stack things on top of them just to keep them closed.  Not so handy.  We've been really happy with our setup to date, so we'll see how we feel after months, not weeks, of camping!      

 

   

This here's our baby trailer.  She's served us well, though she gets a lot of laughs.  Amazingly, we keep very organized and can fit an absolute ton of camp gear in there.  We did need to add the car top carrier, but the two of them combined are a traveling wonder.    

This is our school gear, unfiltered.  I put something like 25 boxes in storage at my parents' house, and whittled our keep pile down to this.  200+ pounds of stuff.  Um....it can't all go. I invested in Life of Fred Pre-Algebra because NS said he loved LoF; that's so five minutes ago.  *grinding teeth* Ok, well, that's fine, I also picked up Prentice Hall's stuff.  On the cheap, thank you used books.  Now I get to spend another couple of days (or weeks, who's to say?) sorting through this stuff and figuring out what we need between now and September.  If I don't need it until after mid-September, I'm good with storing it in plastic tubs at my parents' house, since we'll be back in the area.  There are other things that probably should have been packed away, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.  As I was breaking my back pulling all the heaviest boxes off the top shelf in the garage (?!?!), I realized how stupid putting books into bigger tubs was/is.  That's ok, I'm sure I need the two kids' dictionaries and the two kids' thesauri, and the dictionary of idioms and such.  Holy cow, this is a trip, not a new home we're filling up!  Man, I need to prioritize.  I can't believe (yeah, I actually can) I was thinking packing so many reference materials was a good idea.  Clearly I am an English major and can't let go of my texts, but that ain't gonna work on this trip!  Oh, do I have my work cut out for me!

Learning on the Go

I'm full into planning our next academic year.  I'm the kind of gal who just can't seem to work past Christmas, my enthusiasm just wanes.  So I start our year early.  This year, I'm not entirely sure when our year will begin.  Normally we begin mid-June.  This year we may just start earlier.  We've got Scout camps and such, but other than that, the kids can work on their research skills.  Using the Internet, working on their organizational skills, finding places they want to visit (AND be able to explain WHY they want to visit certain places)....what great lessons!

Every year I start out with Rebecca Rupp's Home Learning Year by Year.  I go through the grade levels and just pull out the information for my kids and put it all in a spreadsheet.  I cannot even go through all my technical woes of late.  Suffice it to say, I'm burying much technology in the coming days, once I get all my stuff backed up.  In order to get all my work done, I've invested in an iPad Air, a hardcore case, I'll get a Bluetooth keyboard in the coming days, I'll be set.

I'm freaking out a little having an 8th grader.  Doesn't at all faze me that my youngest is going into 2nd grade, but having an 8th grader.  That's big time.  We have a variety of math interests in our house, or more specifically, a variety of math program interests.  Life of Fred has been a fave for years.  G enjoyed Teaching Textbooks in 7th grade, but in talking to others, I feel like perhaps I should push him a little more.  So I've ordered Algebra I from Foerster for this year.  I got the three different pre-Algebra books from Life of Fred, but I also feel like I need to get NS a more rigorous program, or at least something where I can make sure he's learning what he needs. K, NB, and J will all be sticking solely with Life of Fred and supplementing with games and such.  Math facts are somewhat lacking in our house, so we'll practice, practice, practice.

Aside from math, I really want to focus on writing.  We're HUGE readers, and I'll curate a list of what I want my older to be introduced to, but I don't need to really push the whole reading thing.  Writing? Yeah, let's get on it.  So I'm getting little pocket journals for everyone to keep in the day packs so they can keep them handy on hikes and such.  One mom told me about Bravewriter, so I need to look into that and see if that can help us.

I also want the kids to think about Big Ideas.  Read some philosophy, discuss important ideas, see how we can fit idealism into realism.

Doing all of this while keeping our book load light, oh, it's a frightening prospect.  But we'll bring along DVDs, books on CD, our stuff from Audible, and our minds.  Oh, what an adventure we'll have!