It's cold outside

An air and a roast

He's playing Danny Boy right now, and an old Welsh air, and we're studying the late middle ages, so that at any given moment the house feels like it's beckoning to our British forebears. I made a roast the other day just to complete the circle, although if you ask the Renaissance Fair people they might have suggested a turkey leg with a wizard as companion instead.

When we first started homeschooling, our focus was on thematic units, usually launched by a deep interest in a book. I fell back on Five in a Row a lot, and, with enough tweaking to fit our unique needs, we both really loved the program. It's a holistic curriculum that spends a full week with one book, exploring the story and connecting it to a full array of subjects. It was our earliest foray into math, history, geography, art...everything. We immersed ourselves in the culture of whatever was the book of the week, consuming it for meals, dressing in it for clothes, celebrating its holidays, its customs, its beliefs.

A part of me misses the all-encompassing nature of those early studies—they certainly made it easy to plan the week's meals—but clearly our later methods were informed by those early days. Even though we don't often plan a week of well rounded, holistic learning, we often find connections between the subjects we're studying. So when we're studying the crusades and reading Robin Hood and suddenly Calvin is playing a Welsh air, we find that connection, and then we make a roast and eat it while watching the best movie of all time—Disney's animated Robin Hood.

2015, Week 1, in pictures

The first week of 2015. The second half at least was bitterly cold, but brilliantly beautiful. Sun glinted off newly fallen snow in single digit temperatures. For all that beauty, though, we spent most of the new year's first week inside. Can you blame us? The birds that visted our feeder with fluffed against the cold, and that pretty layer of snow covered a slick layer of ice that even kept me in on the treadmill for running. Mother nature's winter beauty can be deadly.

Though for the first few days of our new year we were still partying like it was 2014, on Monday we hit the ground running and haven't looked back. I think that after two weeks of people and activity filled days we were ready to jump back into our quiet routine. Atomic motion, solving for unknowns, and Robin Hood and King Richard were waiting for us where we'd left off, and there were plenty of thank you notes and journal entries to write after such a fun festive break.

As promised, we added a new art to our daily routine by taking on the photo-a-day challenge. Last year Calvin had started some photography using my old DSLR, but it was on its last leg when he got it, and it didn't last much longer. So for Christmas this year we got him a point and shoot. And like all kids in our new age, he already knows more about it than I probably ever will. To keep us on track, we are following the Capture Your 365 daily challenge prompts, which I have listed here, but we are mainly using them for suggestions.

Jan 1: Good morning 2015!
by Calvin

Jan 2: Think over
by Cortney

Jan 3: Open Possibilities
by Cortney

Jan 4: A reflection of me
by Calvin

by Cortney


Jan 5: Ensemble
by Cortney

Jan 6: Where I stand
by Calvin

by Cortney

Jan 7: Solitude
by Calvin

by Cortney

Good morning 2015

A new morning, a new year. We were still partaking in Christmas festivities this weekend, so mentally I've kind of been thinking of Monday as the first day of the new year. That's the day we start back to school, and work, and the day I plan to get back on track with chores, etc. Our year starts on the fifth!

I'm not doing resolutions this year. I feel pretty good about where we are right now, why mess with a good thing? We've had an amazing school year so far, but we will be adding a few things. In particular, Calvin has asked to add the 365 photo challenge to our daily activities, since he got a camera for Christmas, and since he also got a book journal, he started mapping out his reading plan for the next month, and beyond. Those things will begin appearing on the blog. And our family has some fun plans for the year as well—a wedding (!), a continuation of traditions, and more.

2015 has all the makings of a fantastic year, so now it's up to us to build it that way, and enjoy it.

Happy new year.

New Years Eve

Zingerman's! The food of the gods, apparently. And lobster, the food of the New Year.