Sugar Bend Farm

House cleaning time

Well, no more putting off what needs to be done.  I have been working along all week preparing the house for company.  My parents are coming to visit.  They will be here this evening sometime, depending upon when they get off this morning.  My dad tends to drag around and takes forever to get ready to go somewhere.  Anyway, I have some last minute cleaning that I have to do before they come. 

1. Get the bedroom ready and bed linens back on bed
2. mop the floors
3. vac the carpets
4. clean up the sunroom and steam clean the carpet in sunroom (it has indoor/outdoor carpet, and with the wet weather we have been having, the dogs have made a mess in there)
5. Clean and prepare the bath (for those of you who read my post Help! Mold, Mildew and other Mysteries, you will know what I mean)

So I have my work cut out for me today.  My parents live in Louisiana, about a six hour drive from here.  They haven't been up here, nor have we been down there since October last year when I had my surgery.  So they are anxious to see the kids.  I am the only living child they have; ( I plan to post more on that on March 19th), and my kids are their only grandchildren, so they hate being so far away from us.  However, this is the closest we have been to them since 2000.  From 1993-2000 we lived in Louisiana and from 1996-2000, we lived next door to them on the same family property. 

Well, in other news, I have made the decision to unschool Megan.  I have been toying with the idea for quite some time.  And I feel that this will be the best approach.  I have tried it in one area of her education and proved that it worked.  Megan went to public school in kindergarten and has homeschooled ever since except for half of the year of her 5th grade year.  Noah was due in September '05 and I decided to send her to our church school.  At mid term I realized that it wasn't the right decision for her.  She had been use to doing school at her pace and wasn't use to the fast pace of traditional school.  It was a little overwhelming for her.  She didn't like spelling and hated spelling tests.  We would study and she would know most of the words well, but come test time, she just panicked.  She started feeling bad about her self and her ability to learn.  She began to lose self esteem and doubted herself.  I couldn't sit by and allow that to happen.  She is very smart and has no problems learning.  So I took her out and began to homeschool again.  I decided to drop spelling from her curriculum altogether and let her learn in life how to spell.  At this point, she discovered homeschoolblogger and homesteadblogger and started blogging.  She loved it.  We had the farm then and she would blog about our farm life and the animals.  She wanted her blogs to look nice and she would ask how to spell this or that.  After a while, she learned to spell.  Now she rarely asked how to spell a word and she can spell fine.  She learned to spell because she wanted to and because she was ready.  No pressure, just for fun.  So I proved to myself that the idea of unschooling would work with her.  She is naturally a very curious child and can grasp concepts well.  Once she understands a concept, there is no need to have repetition that traditional school has.  That is where the frustration starts for her.  If she understands the process, then she wants to move on to other things.  Which is great, as far as I am concerned. 

So I have been doing a lot of reading about unschooling and made the decision to do it.  She is thrilled with the idea and we made a trip to the library yesterday and she loaded up with books that she wants to read.  Now that the pressure is off to "do" school everyday, she is more interested in reading.  She has been reading other unschooling blogs and learning about unschooling on her own.  We are planning our first unschooling event next Friday.  We are having a Pi party.  It is National Pi day--3.14.  So we came up with ideas for our Pi day party.  We are going to cook two pies one round and one square.  The square one is for fun and we are going to decorate it with (is there no Pi symbol on the keyboard?) Anyway, we will put the pi symbol and R2(r square) on the square pi.  We are going to make a pi necklace some banners, and charts to find the circumference and radius of different size circles.  We are also going to read the book Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi.  And we will be making pizza pies for supper.  So we wanted to just make a fun day of it.  And learning something at the same time.  I will post photos of the days events.

Well, I need to drag myself away from this computer and start on the house work.  Hope everyone has a wonderful day.  I will leave you with this quote:

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.~ Henry David Thoreau

Untitled Comment

7:43 AM, 2008-Mar-6 .. Posted by countrylivin

I hope you get your to do list done today! :) I read on your daughters blog about the pi party. That is such a neat idea! Glad your homeschooling is going well!