Our friends left today.
Thursday:
While Kevin and I drove to TAC to pick up the 3 prospective college students on Thursday, our middle boys stayed with their friends and watched a couple more hours of Liberty. WE got back pretty late — got to see Liam and the 3 young people talked us through their whole visit almost all the way home in the car. It sounds like it was an inspiring, fun time for them.
My friend is a scrapbooker, so I got to look at her work and ask all sorts of questions, and we checked out a couple of books from the library to look at and discuss.
Friday:
My friend and I did a lot of brainstorming and processing for our upcoming high school students. It is so nice to be able to talk through these things with someone “in real life” — though cyber-discussions definitely have their advantages too. I have consolidated some tentative big-picture ideas for Sean, and Clare and I have been discussing how she will spend her remaining year and a half of high school. We’ve mapped out a tentative strategy for her to meet her college goals. I will try to write this out sometime either on this blog or the other one.
Meanwhile the older kids had a very packed and specific plan for Friday when they would all be together. Clare made a list of all that they wanted to do, including a picnic and a belated ST Patrick’s Day dance. The boys seemed to spend half the day in buccaneer costume and making swords out of old fenceposts. It was cute to see Clare’s list get more and more crossed out as the day progressed. Our friend suggested she should keep it as a memento for a future scrapbook.
Sean did one more lesson of math on Wednesday; Kieron took the week off as far as academics went. So — lots of life learning.
This is quite scattered and vague but I know that if I don’t write down SOMETHING, I will completely forget the details.
Clare plans to work hard on her violin and she is planning some summer intensive courses for herself to get up to speed on her less-preferred areas — science and math, where we seem to have trouble avoiding the deadening effect of textbooks, but don’t quite feel comfortable designing our own course of studies.
During the car trips I got a chance to read two library books: Myth of Laziness and Time Management from the Inside OUt. I wanted to read Organizing from the Inside Out but Aidan who was sitting next to me in the car was inspired by the way the book’s chapter headings had an arrow and dotted lines surrounding the text. He got the impression that it was a reader or handwriting text, I think, so he would take over the book, solemnly pronounce the chapter number and then trace along the dotted line in the direction of the arrow. Then he would say the letters of the heading or sometimes try to sound them out. There has to be some way to follow up on that.
