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Thowback Tuesday: Heading Back to a More Traditional Homeschooling Approach

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 *Originally posted March 25, 2013 when my boys were 5, 7, & 8     We are going back to a more traditional way of homeschooling rather than using the unschooling method, for now anyway.  I'm sure it could change at any point! My oldest has been complaining that it's boring "just playing" all day and has been wanting me to plan lessons again or as he put it "when are you going to start teaching us stuff again?"  So, I spent part of my day yesterday writing up a rough outline of what I'd like to accomplish this week. A huge part of why we jumped into unschooling was that the boys didn't appear to like anything I planned and I just couldn't take the complaining anymore.  However, after almost a month of unschooling they are complaining that they are bored all the time.       Today the older boys did a lesson in McRuffy for math.  Ian was a bit stumped at first, mostly because he didn't trust himself to remember how to do ...

Talking About it Tuesday #113

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What is that saying? "Man plans, God Laughs"? We did not get to eat a corned beef dinner last week... by noon on Tuesday we had lost power (mid-way through boiling up my corned beef) along with the over 30,000 other customers in our state that were without power. We had gotten tons of rain and high winds Monday into Tuesday but I thought we were in the clear as far as power goes when the day dawned bright and sunny and we still had ours. But alas it was not to be. As of 3 o'clock in the afternoon our outage map looked like this:   Each of those dots represents an area and the number inside represents the different repair jobs needed; not the total number of customers. Trees and wires were down everywhere and lots of roads were closed. I think the poor trees just could not hold up to the wind with the ground being so saturated. Our lakes and rivers are at capacity between the rain and all the snow melt. Luckily our power was restored late Wednesday night. But not having po...

Favorite Bands, Singers, and Songs from the 80's and 90's

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I have always had a pretty wide variety of taste when it comes to music. I think part of it was growing up in the 80's and early 90's we listened to the radio the most. I mean yes I bought albums, cassettes, CD's (when they came on the scene) and would spend hours in Strawberries music stores scouring the shelves for the perfect single or album to buy. But most of the time when we were out in the yard, at the beach (on our boom box), or driving around we listened to the music on the radio.  I lived for Casey Kasem's weekly top 40 and Shadoe Steven's American Top 40 where those most popular songs were counted down each week; the ones played at school dances, roller skating rinks, the arcade, etc.  I have so many memories associated with these songs of my childhood.  In no particular order they include: Def Leppard-- "Pour Some Sugar on Me," "Animal," "Love Bites"- - I have fond memories of roller skating at our local rink to these! Bon ...