March, come and gone

How about a quick run-down of the month of March, which came and went with a speed so determined that it left us all wondering where the fire was. In fact, I'm not sure I noticed that March was gone before the first days of May had arrived. What, then, happened to fair April? Part of my confusion might be the odd weather of this year that is delivering April showers at the beginning of May. Part of it was our run-in with tag team illnesses—flu here, flu there, a cold, Strep Throat. But the biggest part of March's sneaking right by was a schedule that just wouldn't let up.

We celebrated a birthday

We kept up with school

We took a salsa class with our homeschool group

We braved the still cold and snowy weather to spend a delightful day in town

We played a lot of games, and tried to encourage spring to begin.

Sick days

The warmest room in our house is the southeast facing master bedroom. In the morning the rising sun streams through its windows and wakes us gently with a rosy orange light. Many a morning I lay in bed, basking in that benevolent glow and gathering my thoughts for the day, charging up my reserves of patience and well being. Even later, after the sun follows its daily path to the other side of the house and the light in the room becomes softer and more diffuse, the warmth there remains.

In the summer, when the air in the house is hot and stagnant and the dogs are positioning themselves wherever they can find a cool breeze, we draw our shades and wish for cloudy days and big drops of rain. In the summer we use adjectives like airy and billowing. In the summer we spend as much time as possible outside in the yard or out back on the deck. The winter, of course, is different. In the winter, especially this winter of the bitterly cold polar vortex, we throw our shades open to welcome in all the warmth the sun can muster and go in search of adjectives like cozy and enveloping. In the winter, our favorite place to be is the warmest room in the house and we spend as much time as possible wrapped in the cocoon of the bedroom.

I have been asked many times this year what we, as homeschoolers, do on snow days. It’s a valid question, usually sparked by nothing more sinister than the curiosity of parents who have struggled to entertain kids kept home from school day after day thanks to this winter’s wild weather. My answer is usually a slightly self deprecating “I think we’ve actually ‘gone to school’ more than the contemporary schoolers this year!” We don’t take days off due to snow fall or polar temperatures. On the coldest days, though, we have been known to pack our whole operation off to the warmth of the bedroom where we set up camp on the cozy bed, warming our bodies with sunlight and our minds with contemplation.

This is also where we spend sick days. Even though contagion is not an issue for our little school of two, when runny noses and nagging headaches come calling we remove ourselves again to the bedroom, that satellite classroom of our homsechool campus. There we spend our under-the-weather days reading, coloring, and playing games that keep us from suffering mental stagnation without taxing our diminished ability to focus.

These are our homeschool sick days, and, excepting the headaches and congestion, I'm rather fond of them with their slowed pace and air of indulgence.

How to teach your dog to play chess

Family game night reinstated

What did we even DO this week?

Calvin finished reading Charlotte's Web, started and finished reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and then started two more books, Mitt the Michigan Mouse, and The Waterhorse. This has me wondering whether I need to encourage him to delve into one book at a time, but he seems to be comfortable this way, so I'm going to sit back and observe for a while yet. In the meantime, I finished two books to review for Booklist, one that I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys esoteric counter-culture fiction (Herself, When She's Missing comes out in late May), and one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

We started reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane as a bedtime book.

The week was mostly cold and questionable, so we played chess, we played Mammoth Hunt, we played with Legos, with tangrams, with Pattern Play. I hear that this is the first time on record that the month of March was warmer than the month of April in the Northeast, but we did make it to the park twice.

My favorite moment of the week was Calvin and Jon discussing phone lines and the Hubble Space Telescope.

We researched a lot of ancient Egypt. We read about it, we drew about it, we acted it out. We played with iPad apps (Encyclopedia Britannica for Kids), we watched videos (Building Pharaoh's Ship, and Egypt's Golden Empire), we almost finished our mummy project. That's turning out to be a four week project!

Lots of time playing Totally Tut kicked us into the world of multiplication. Calvin started the Gamma book of Math-U-See a couple of weeks ago, so he's already got a head start. On Friday at HAA (our homeschoolers gathering), another mom suggested a some iPad math games, two of which we are happily trying out: Math Bingo, and Hungry Fish.

We were home-bodies on Monday and Tuesday, went to swimming and the store on Wednesday, sorted books at the library on Thursday, had HAA with play practice and art on Friday, and were home-bodies again on Saturday.

And that's a wrap.

One of my favorite things about homeschooling? It's so age intergenerational.