Yes, hellpigs101 got locked last night/this morning. Apparently the ol' blog had to be read by a Blogger employee and deemed not-spam after their computers flagged my content and links for being too random. Welcome to my brain.
On the school front, we are still in the finding-out stage. Figuring out what will work, what won't work, and what turns me into a muttering, swirly-eyed mess of a mom.
For example, we thought we had our schedule for swimming figured out, but ten minutes earlier than expected Judd the Red Chicken started climbing out of the pool, promptly followed by the dripping and distracted instructor (his aunt). As The Sister was hustling towards her towel, I realized that the lifeguards had just switched, and the new one was an attractive young lad... Fine. We have to adjust pool-time if I want the swim coach to feel focused and confident.
We're also figuring out which things should be broken into smaller chunks so they are available to fill in gaps, and which things can be put into bigger chunks so we can pack up supplies and work somewhere other than the apartment. It's all a learning process; there is more than one right way to do all this; there are a lot of options and resources.
Today I was volunteering for our church -- something I do twice a month -- so The Sister managed some things:
1. Classifying/organizing information... On Tuesday we rode the carousel at Bryant Park and on Wednesday during a play date we rode the carousel in Central Park. We aren't usually so carousel-oriented, but it was ready-made material for Venn diagramming (note: an interesting observation: some of the carousel animals at Bryant Park wear clothes... or "close" -- we are starting spelling soon... despite the fact that one of my charming children screamed at me yesterday that I'm not "respectful of the fact that" he has his "own way of spelling things").
2. Getting them thinking about Spanish... They watched a Scooby-Doo episode in espanol and then created little scenes and labeled the nouns. They then looked up the nouns on Google translate, listened to the pronunciation, and added the Spanish labels.
3. They stopped by the NYCHEA not-back-to-school picnic and came home with some awesome books from the swap (we didn't actually swap... we just snatched). NYCHEA is a deep and wide resource. You pay $36/year and every morning you get an email compilation of classes, social opportunities, book suggestions, etc. from other families that are home schooling. The families that participate appear to be dedicated and smart and into sharing -- it's quite inspiring (if you're into that whole humans-should-be-cool thing). What I've been most impressed with is how roomy the group is. Seems to be ample space for different perspectives/philosophies. Because again -- there are so many ways to do this.
