Projects: School and Porch!

Today was a day for accomplishing projects at the Thompson house! I cleaned out and reorganized all the school stuff for the next school year starting in July! We officially finished our 180 days, though Katie still has a few math things to do during her "break" (probably get that done next week). Here are the newly organized shelves and my favorite portable cart in our bedroom....

We finally replaced our ink cartridges so I got busy on the printing bandwagon today as well. I cleaned out and stored all our 2009/10 grades and records, and made my nice new shiny notebook for this next year....


I have heard of and browsed the Donna Young website in the past, but I actually went through and printed several forms to use this year for the first time..including a very nice grading record sheet. I have two students to keep grades on this year, so I gotta get ahead of the game on organizing the info.


Some up close shots of the shelves...because I am a dork and I am so proud of the work I got done today! ha ha.

Top left shelf has my organizer and our Bible/character ed. materials. I kind of slacked on the character ed. this year and I could tell a difference. We will just pick and choose from this shelf daily (that's the plan anyway). The box that has the Beginner Bible pictures actually has a bunch of cards inside. Each one has a Bible symbol or word with info about it and some of them have stories as well.

Middle left has our Reading, Language, Spelling, and Handwriting stuff. I have each of their sets of readers in the magazine holders, and a bin in the middle for games and activities. It's all Abeka for these subjects.

This shelf has our Math stuff on it. Math-U-See has been awesome so far! I have Alpha and Beta, and if Katie finishes Beta before the end of the year we can go ahead and order the next level. Right now we have about five more lessons to finish for her in Alpha and Noah is about a third of the way through Alpha. That tissue box actually has oversized coins that we use for practicing our money counting.


Middle right shelf: Art. We kind of slacked off on art throughout this year so we still have stuff to use this year also. I will put our music on this shelf too. We are going to start the Alfred's Basic Piano Course. The Music for Little Mozarts set I bought for last year turned out to be way too "preschool-y" for them.

Last but not least: Science and Social Studies, bottom right shelf. I have our Homeschool Science Adventures curriculum, and a new History reader from Abeka... We will be doing science units on birds, astronomy, and magnets. I plan on doing some independent Social Studies/History by getting books from the library. The top right shelf has my office supplies and index cards. We use a lot of index cards around here!

Next on my planning agenda: finish up Katie's last few math lessons and get the lesson plan form ready to go. Since I am so far ahead I may end up writing the first few weeks of lessons as well!

While I was busy at work in the bedroom/schoolroom, Corey was busy outdoors! We got our settlement check from the insurance company but we are hoping to get everything done for much less by doing it mostly ourselves....

The unpainted rail is a teeny bit lopsided which can be easily fixed, but Corey was starving and ready to come in...he can fix that when we paint. I think he did a great job on it!! A lot of the previous pieces were reused...a great way to save money! The plan is to pressure wash and paint next weekend. The siding is a whole other can of worms...ugh....

I can't remember the last time we got so much done on a Saturday! Staying home on the weekend really pays off!